Deirdre Williams

I was born in England but have spent most of my life in Saint Lucia in the Eastern Caribbean. In the 1980s I was beguiled by computers. In the 1990s, while I was studying at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), MOSAIC was launched, and with it the beginning of a “user-friendly” internet. Since then I have been interested in the potential contribution of the Internet to human development in the Caribbean and beyond. For two years I was one of the two co-coordinators of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus (IGC), and was selected as the civil society representative to speak at the Opening Ceremony of the 2014 Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul. Since 2016 I have been the civil society member of the Caribbean ICT Collaboration Committee (CICC) which brings together government, regulators, telecommunications operators and civil society to address ICT related regional policy. I believe very deeply in the internet as a shared resource, and agree with Vint Cerf that “the internet of people is more important than the internet of things”.