TUNIS, Tunisia  Declaring that the free flow of information and ideas can greatly strengthen social and economic development, governments at the World Summit on the Information Society here approved a global agenda for making information and communications technologies more open, accessible, and available.
“We recognize that freedom of expression and the free flow of information, ideas, and knowledge, are essential for the Information Society and beneficial to development,â€? said world leaders in one of the Summit ‘s two main outcome documents.
Held in this North African capital on 16-18 November 2005, the Tunis Summit was the second part of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and its focus was on acting to ensure access and openness in information and communications technologies, or ICTs.
The Summit ‘s first part was held 10-12 December 2003 in Geneva , Switzerland . It focused on making a declaration of principles and plan of action to guide humanity’s progress towards a global “information society,â€? which many people see as an inevitable outcome of the revolution that comes with new technologies like the personal computer and the Internet.
In that context, both sessions of the WSIS as a whole had a huge symbolic value, in that it brought into the international mainstream the idea that new information and communications technologies have a huge potential for development.
“The WSIS reflects a dawning recognition by the world community that information technology is an integral part of social and economic development  and that it can in fact speed up and make more efficient such development,â€? said Laina Raveendran Greene, who represented the Bahá’àInternational Community at the Tunis Summit.