Marouen Bloggin' his Life

As usual, after enjoying another very nice bloggers meetup organized this time by our friend Karim2k in his native region Zaghouan, and after reading all the others nice reports, I prefer talking about the points they missed.

I said already it was a nice trip. Another one proving to us that we know almost nothing about our beautiful home land. But what Karim missed is to show us the city. I like walking on the main street and see local people, buildings, cars, to hear voices, to guess accents, to eat local food, to have a tea on a typical café. No, I'm not a tourist, but, as Karim will confirm, I like to see my country as it is in reality, not as it want to be shown. And honestly, I prefer meetups like that in real areas rather spaces like Biwa.

I don't want to finish this post before saying that I had a very funny discussions with many bloggers during the trip and I'm very proud to be a members in this community and I hope that we will be more and more active and try to make a difference.

PS: I promised during this meetup to help bloggers to be informed about future meetups. But really we have to write down some rules to avoid troubles and collisions such as what happened recently.

PS: thank you Tom for the picture

Well, I think that the main reason why I'm writing this post is because I promised yesterday to Troubadour that I'll blog more often so I decided to speak about the 11th meetup which took place two days ago on the Latina restaurant in the Berges du Lac.

It was a nice evening as usual full of funny topics and a lot of laughs like in all the meetups I've attended until now. But to avoid repeating what other bloggers said already, I will choose other topics. I'll start by saying that this meetup was the first one to be sponsored by the owner of the restaurant. And it was even his idea when I explained him this phenomenon of bloggers meetups. He was so kind to invite us and offer us the drinks. But honestly, even if he is my friend, I never had the opportunity to visit his nice restaurant and enjoy the music and the free wireless internet access after the night when I organised a dinner for about 140 persons during the WSIS days. I like also the idea of having salsa courses on weekends even if I prefer watching dancers and enjoying the latino music I like so much. Thank you Haythem.

Another point that my friends will miss in their blogs is to thank the great efforts done by the four Musketeers (Subzeroblue, Karim, Tom.Z and me) to insure the success of these important meetups to empower the community and to try "pushing" the bloggers for a more active role in the society. And as I said in the Zaghouan conference, these people (and of course all the community members inside or outside Tunisia) are the best gift I had from joining the Tunisian blogoshere.

Nice to meet you all new and old friends.

Karim, when is the next meetup (or should I say picnic in the mountain )

Details coming soon

I’m sorry for not having reported on time what happened during the 9th meetup I was supposed to organize downtown Tunis (which wasn’t welcomed by all the participants). I feel myself very lazy these days with writing especially with the coming of my new baby at home. Don’t worry, it’s just a new laptop which took all my weekend plus two days to understand some technical issue I’ll explain in a dedicated post later. Anyway, Adib did the great job of compiling some comments of the participants you check here. Thank you man, I’m looking to see your 24/7 webcam !

I’m here alone inside the youth pavilion waiting for anyone to come and allow me to go and buy something to eat. My MP3 battery is over so I opened my new “future” very small laptop to hear some music and I had the great idea to remember my blog and to respect the fact that I’m supposed to blog about the WSIS since my RSS feed is published in some WSIS aggregators like www.wsisblogs.org and www.wsis-wire.net .

Well, I’ve spent most of my time during these last 4 days building the Youth Pavilion and solving the several issues we had. Hopefully many members the tunisian youth caucus team helped me a lot in realizing in reality what we were discussing during several weeks and Ramadan nights. I feel good when I see other Tunisian youngsters understanding the importance of this big space (compared the Youth hub of 2003 not the actual pavilions like Italy or UNDP ones just in front of us) and some of them (Mhamed and Hichem) spent the entire night on the pavilion working on lights positioning and carpet . Yesterday, at the end of the day, even if I was really afraid to reach the limit of 5pm allowed to build stands by the organisers, I had a very good feeling for two reasons. First when I saw the pavilion full of young people (including my father who helped us a lot). The when I noticed that WE’ve prepared about 95% of what we were asked to prepare on the youth pavilion. I was trying to remember all the hundreds of emails I read during these last 3 months concerning the needs of the youth caucus and its partners.

After, I had just the time to go home for a shower and a fast dinner before going to the airport to pickup a dear friend I haven’t met since December 2003, Jarra. I’m not sure he’s becoming younger with years not older like all the people. Hopefully we were able to make in time to make the registration and take the beautiful WSIS bags with some presents inside (but unfortunately missing some important documents like the parallel events listing or the ICT4all exhibition book). I enjoyed the time after we’ve spent after in the airport café remembering old souvenirs while waiting for TIG people (Mike, Jen, Fransizka and Kate). We were both so excited to meet them again and to remake the powerful youth coalition we had in Geneva (starting as usual by TIG members coalition  ). I think that with the equipments they brought to Tunis, with Mike and Jennifer here, they have just to look for an office to rent and TIG may move here.

To be continued ...

There are some quick minutes I took during the 4th annual private sector cooperation meeting in the Arab region organized by the ITU Arabic regional office (Egypt) and the National frequencies Agency (Tunisia) in Tunis from November 30 to December 2nd. I wasn't able to attend all the sessions but I've chosen some where I can find some useful information for the Civil society.

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