Vice-Chairman of PacINET 2010 Planning Committee's Speech at yesterday's fundraising night

A PacINET 2010 Kava Night event was organised yesterday 23rd May 2010, to raise awareness of the PacINET 2010 conference and campaign for sponsorship to run the event. Vice-chairman of the PacINET 2010 planning committee delivered the following speech.

Good evening everyone,

Honorable… etc …Ladies and Gentlemen,

I must thank you for taking the time from you normal schedules to come and join us this evening for this informal get-together. I want say a few words before we continue.

Firstly I would like to introduce you to the special group that organized this evening's gathering. It is a group of ICT volunteers; some here and some not here tonight who represent the ICT community in Vanuatu. We belong to a formal association called the Vanuatu Information Technology Users Society (VITUS) formally formed in 2006 and now has over 200 members who are mainly IT professionals in the country. This group had been involved a lot with the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet society and this year we have won the bid to host the chapter's annual ICT conference called PacINET. In fact the current Chairman of PICISOC is our very own member here in Vanuatu who was elected last year.

PacINET is a big event that is held every year since 2002 around the Pacific Islands. During these conferences, international speakers are normally invited to speak on important topics to boost ICT developments in the region. For instance Vinton Cerf who is known to be the father of internet has attended two conferences, one in Kiribati 2005 and the other in Samoa 2006.

Free hands-on technical trainings are normally offered by technical experts who volunteered for the conference. PacINET has always been the best and biggest ICT conference in the region as both technical and non-technical issues are discussed. Many governments and private institutions in the region have always taken the lead in these conferences, for example, in 2006 the Samoan Prime Minister participated in the conference in Apia, in 2008 the Prime Minister's office took the lead in organizing the conference in Cook Islands, and in 2009 the ICT department in took the lead in sponsoring the event in PNG.

In 2004 Vanuatu hosted the event here in Port Vila but at that time we have a very small group from Vanuatu who actually attended. This year we (this small group) are members of the local organizing committee and we represent both the government of Vanuatu and the private sector. We have been working hard since last year to get things ready for the conference. The dates are 13th – 17th September and our venue is USP Emalus Campus and the conference theme is "Next Generation Internet: Security and Governance". We will the conference and technical hands-on training as well which we believe will benefit our local IT professionals who could not afford these trainings overseas.

I am bringing this event to your attention as leaders of this nation. We need your support especially in financial and logistical support in order for this conference to not only be the best but also to benefit this nation in terms of ICT development. We know the government is serious about ICT that is why we have the e-government project underway. There is a possibility to have an Internet Governance forum run by international experts and would like to see high level government official attend this particular forum.

I want to finish off by saying that we will be coming around knocking on your office door and requesting your support and I believe you will respond positively as you already know the benefits of this conference. I also want ask you in advance to plan to participate in the conference when the time comes.

Thank you very much again for your attention.