mega-post - Lausanne and conference

The previous post was written on my cell on the train, and just after sending it I fell asleep and slept through Lausanne stop, waking up 7 minutes after it, and was stuck there til Geneve. Thankfully I could jump on a train straight back...

I walked up to my accommodation and met Doris Getaz, proprietor of Ada-logements B&B. She was classic...and I wished I could have spoken French to her. She did speak English but I'm sure something was lost. The room was small but very nice, about the best you can get for CHF50 (NZ70) a night in Lausanne. 8 of the 45 television channels had the Tour on, and another had overdubbed McLeod's daughters - surreal! I was so tired I slept through the conference pre-drinks, but never mind.

The next morning I made several convincing bonjours in the breakfast room...enough to convince people a) that i spoke French and b) was tired and didn't want to talk to them in French. The language thing hit me harder than expected - not because it made anything particularly difficult, but simply because of the mixed opportunities for local conversation with the locals. Will have to be tooled up when I visit again...

After a stroll to the Metro in the summer sun (free ticket for all tourists staying in Swiss cities) the Metro sped me to Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EFPL), officially the most
confusingly-laid-out university I've ever visited. All buildings seemed to be 'building C' (the one I needed to be in) yet all I could find were dangerous-looking labs. Eventually I found somebody to direct me upstairs.

I presented in the first session, and though I think I delivered well, the audience was far from electrified. Probably never going to happen at a conference on e-government though. I did however make several useful contacts, including the Director of Standards Srategy and Policy at Oracle UK. Apart from the contacts, most of the content was far out of my field and not much higher standard than one would expect in NZ/AUS.

After resting back at B&B at the end of the day, I woke up late and almost missed the conference dinner. I ran to the station and looked for the metro line to take me to Ouchy (shore district) that was on the map. Sadly it hasn't yet been built and its just a bus for the moment. It got me on the boat 3 minutes before sailing though, so good enough.

The cruise itself was almost painfullly picturesque: just imagine every photo you've seen of Swiss hills and vineyards composited together and that was it, enough to make you cry. Dinner was 1) salad, 2) bread cutlets with soup poured over them (even my french dining companions were confused), 3) sauerkraut and sausage, 4) meringue. Very good, and probably the main reason conference was so expensive...

The boat berthed back at Ouchy at exactly 11 (bless the Swiss), after passing Montreux (jazz festival currently on, and the subject of Deep Purple's 'smoke on the water'), the village of Evian, and standing on the bow watching thunderstorms to the north.

This morning nothing interesting was being presented so I slept in and went to an internet cafe to catch up on ~50 emails. Got back to B&B in time to see Doris' note "check out 11am" on the door. I handed the key back to her at exactly 11 with a sense of swiss satisfaction. Lunch was gaspacho, fish, and fruit salad, again good.

The afternoon session scared me shitless - an expert on electronic voting machines told us just how shoddy the standards, specifications, manufacturing, and independent certification. He predicts a 15% chance that the upcoming US election will be stricken by evoting maching difficulties in at least one crucial state. Floria2000-Ohio2004 anybody?

In general the conference participants were obsessed with the 'e' of e-government, to the point that some view adoption of ICT in government to be simply a technical challenge. Pain pain pained me as a political scientist to see this naievety (sic) from smart people. But I did have some great conversations about why there is e-government for certain thing for which there is actually no need for government - a refreshing dose of skepticism. No point having toys for the sake of toys. It was these people that turned into useful contacts. After attending 3 interdisciplinary conferences now I have serious doubts about their value to me as a political scientist. It just seems that while multiple perspectives are interesting and important, the various contributors don't seem to speak enough of the same academic language to really make headway.

Departing Lausanne involved a hasty back-pack re-arrange and clothes-change before heading down the road to do battle, sans francais, with La Poste. You can't pay with credit card, and there is a ticket-queuing machine, but in the end we worked together and got some of my dead-weight sent forward.

The train to Geneve today was 'slow' and 'old', and after arriving I had a pleasant stroll down Rue de Lausanne in the thunderstorm, before heading out for some dinner and the glamour of backpacker laundry. A few additional remarks to come soon...off to Venezia via Milan tomorrow morning.

Finally on a real computer in geneve for this mega-post