Participants at last year´s March 11th Summit (which my foundation, Safe Democracy, organized together with Club de Madrid) have been asking me if we plan to repeat last year´s event. Same has been asked by participants in the very productive Atocha Workshop. We have been debating this issue at Safe Democracy and we have decided that rather than trying to bring 1300 personalities to Madrid this year for March 11th 2006 we will invest in generating an ongoing web based dialogue on how to achieve the goals that have been set by the Madrid Agenda. If you are a participant of last year´s March 11th Summit or if you were not able to join us but do feel that you have relevant content on this subject or on the more broader subject of how to promote democracy around the world do write to Martin Varsavsky I will be pleased to provide you with writing privileges at our web site. We are looking for short articles of around 500 words. As you can see the Safe Democracy website has a google ranking of 7 which means that your article is very likely to appear as one of the top google results when others show interest in the same topic thereby generating a lively debate.

I found a graph on the net that compared the GDP of France to that of the US since 1960. As I look at this curve I wonder how is it that a country in which people work so many less hours per week, so many less days a year as a result of vacation, in which unemployment is considerably higher, in which the amount of years spent working so much lower than in the States and which is frequently paralyzed by strikes manages to stay pretty constant at around 77% GDP level of the US? My only conclusion is that when they work the French must be much more productive than the Americans. Otherwise this graph is a big mistery.

I am spending my holidays in Jose Ignacio, Uruguay. This small village of around 700 homes has become over the last 3 years quite a magnet for sophisticated travellers from Europe and North America. Last night my wife and I were having dinner at Marismo, an extremely original restaurant that is basically a huge bonfire built on a sand dune surrounded by low lying tables where people eat great dishes made out of Uruguayan produce. As we sat down I noticed that most people around us were not native Spanish speakers, a new phenomenom around here. I´ve been coming to Jose Ignacio since 1985 and only recently have foreigners been seen in this town. But as opposed to the typical gringo visiting Mexico demanding that everything be explained in English I was pleased to see that most foreigners managed to make their way through the Spanish menus and order in Spanish. Last week I was in San Francisco at a Japanese restaurant where curiously when you were at the bathroom they would play a tape that taught how to count in Japanese. I loved the idea. An unexpected cultural experience. I think it´s time that we all made serious efforts to understand cultures in their original languages. Being part of Spanish culture myself I am thankful to the Jose Ignacio visitors for making the effort. Maybe the difference between a tourist, a traveller and a visitor relates to their relationship to local culture. A tourist wants to find his own culture everywhere else. A traveller wants to enjoy what´s foreign, a visitor wants to be part of it and in so doing…becomes our guest.

This was a TV interview that they did of me at Les Blogs.

America rules and so those of us leaving outside of the US love to pick on America the same way that those on the net love to pick on Microsoft… and recently Google. On a recent visit to the Valley however I found something that money can´t buy you: decent bandwidth. Allow me to explain, in Spain, or France, two countries in which I have homes, I have 20 megs of bandwidth for 15 euros per month. In America they get 20% of that no matter how much they pay. And not only that, American mobile/cell phone service is pitiful. The ultimate paradox was when I was at the offices of Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins to introduce FON. At two of the most successful and richest venture capital firms in the world cellular coverage went from poor to non existent and the speed of their internet went from poor to pathetic. Many times when using Yahoo outside the States, I had found that their portal, while extremely useful and still my home page, was built to LDC internet speeds compared say to what we did at Ya.com. Now I understand why!

When I enquired about the paradox of bandwidth poverty and awful cell coverage in the Mecca of the Internet the answer was invariably the same. The Bush Administration has sold its soul to the telecom giants: anti trust has been put to sleep. Personally I see a terrific opportunity to combine fiber optic technologies with wireless meshed networks to provide bandwidth services to American consumers who will most likely pay the 89 euros equivalent that people are paying Labs2 in Sweden to get 100 megs both way service.