Shuddhabrata Sengupta (India) calls on those promoting ICT development to 'develop a thought of our own obsolescence', just as today's gadgets will be obsolete tomorrow, our self-image as those who already represent a technological future that has yet to arrive elsewhere is mistaken. He also stresses the need to approach collective efforts in a more factual way, beyond the romantic idea of cross-cultural collaboration as an end in itself, and instead focus on the aims, ethics, and protocols of collaboration.

Bernardo Sorj, who is researching telecentres in Brazil, argues to develop an integrated view on the use of Internet in the slums. Digital inclusion is not an aim in itself. It only makes sense in a broader context of social and political If you can't read of type it is cynical to talk about universal access. These days, civil society is facing a crisis of maturity. Global civil society is a nice utopia but doesn't exist. Instead we should talk about national civil society. Resources are in the North and not in the South. We should to make global agendas, this time with good intensions.

Long-time analyst of development regimes, Jan Nederveen Pieterse (USA) summarizes Incommunicado 05 as 'civil society meets development', since commercial parties and governments were not represented at the conference. The current vortex of change, in which corporations try to maintain information monopolies, calls for a new political rendez-vous in which emerging information economies can challenge these monopolies in areas like intellectual property rights.

Tracey Naughton (South Africa) comes up with a few humbling accounts of the fundamental obstacles to (info) developments. She argues to go back to the seventies, a time in which work for and with the poor could be done in a direct and non-bureaucratic manner. According to her we need a more human-centrered globalization, one in which people are in the centre of development concerns and work is done on the ground by people who have a holistic combination of skills.

Monica Narula (Delhi) talks about the 'listening project' she did with Raqs Media Collective. Sometimes you have to listen beyond the words, and an event like Incommunicado 05 means being attentive to one another. At Sarai, Narula works with the broadsheet collective, with which she publishes a broadsheet, a poster/factsheet/newspaper. Narula recognises that the contemporary vision of the world is thoroughly mapped, difficult to break down, and while the north-south metaphor has been useful, it will limit our view if we cling to it.

Drupal as an e-commerce platform is a presentation by Matt Westgate, System support specialist at Iowa State University of Science and Technology at the occasion of the Drupal Conference at FOSDEM 2005 on February 26th in Brussels. Drupal can be a storefront, an auction site, or a subscription management system. These configurations and more are possible with Drupal's e-commerce module. Learn from the module's author how to create stores that are easy to maintain. Case studies will be used to introduce the potential of this important module.

Muthoni Dorcas (Kenya) is the co-founder of LinuxChix Africa, an initiative that facilitates the active participation of African women in the FOSS (free and open source software) movement across this region. She considers free software an affordable way for people to develop software for local markets. Refusing to talk about Africa as 'poor', Dorcas rather thinks of it as a continent under-utilizing its manifold resources.

Thomas Keenan (USA) points out that the human rights movement is very sensitive to the criticism. Critics therefore are often regarded as being in support of the wrong actors, and betraying its ideals. Keenan considers the notion of 'global civil society' to be a very tricky term, since its dynamic is strongly related to global media platforms (satellite tv, internet etc). There is a certain actuality to global civil society that needs to be criticized, acknowledging the danger that it is being enlisted as the front actor of a borderless market world.

Ednah Karamagi (Uganda) stresses the importance of including the rural population in development projects. Otherwise, the divide between the rural and the urban will simply increase. NGOs play an important role in Uganda, because they succeed in reaching out to local grassroots organisations. ICTs should be considered in terms of technologies rather than just machines, including the use of community radio in local languages, or using technologies for music, dance and drama.

ICT consultant Michael Gurstein (Canada) compares the use of civil society in developing and developed countries. He discusses its involvement in the WSIS process and advocates the need to strengthen citizen involvement rather than 'civil society'. Furthermore, Gurstein suggests possible uses of the idea of digital orientalism in the digital divide debate.