Last week, representatives of all the entities engaged in advancing research on communication policy and regulation met in Sevilla, Spain, at the invitation of Euro CPR, as part of the annual Euro CPR conference. This was a follow up to the initiative taken by CPRsouth in December 2008 in Beijing, when it invited representatives of its peer organizations, TPRC in the US and Euro CPR, for a public discussion.

For the Sevilla meeting, in addition to CPRsouth (represented by Rohan Samarajiva), ACORN-Redecom (represented by Raul Katz) and the inchoate CPR africa (represented by Alison Gillwald) were invited separately, signifying rapid growth in the South in the past few months. Of course, both Alison and a representative of DIRSI, which is a key constituent of ACORN-Redecom, were present in Beijing as well.

Each of the representatives shared their views on how they set about their missions. More important than the formal discussion were the preceding substantive presentations made by those from outside Europe, which highlighted the value of cross-fertilization of ideas. Each agreed that it would be a good idea to keep the cross-fertilization going and committed to come up with workable plans on how to operationalize it.