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Transcription of the Keynote Speech by Mr. George Soros
INET'94/JENC5, Prague, Wednesday, June 15, 1994

I am very pleased that you have asked me to address you and I am very
pleased to be here.

I think this conference is very important and that's why I came.

I would like to tell you how important, I think, the Internet is and will
be for this part of the world.

As you just heard I have sent out a letter to all foundations to promote
the concept of an open society, also to this part of the world which has
been dominated by Communist Dogma and was in fact a closed society.

I don't normally define what I mean by an open society, because I think it
is a concept that in itself is better if it is not very exactly defined.

People who have lived in a closed society or had acquaintance with it,
understand generally what the concept means. It is really democracy but in
a deeper and more comprehensive sense. It is because democracy can easily
become actually a dictatorship of the majority. It is carried through the
extremes, through ethnic cleansing and can actually be an instrument for
creating a closed society.

But an open society recognizes that nobody has a monopoly of the truth and
nobody has the final answer to all the questions. And therefore you need a
society which recognizes this fact, you need a government that is not
dominated by a party. A society that is not dominated by the state. You
need a rule of law and you need respect and institutions that protect
minority interests and minority opinions.

So, I think that in some ways the Internet is a prototype of an open
society. This is the way I see it, because it is largely self-organising;
it is dominated by users; it is not confined by orders and it is really
open in every way.

The foundation network that I established actually is also meant to be a
prototype of an open society. And it has many of the same characteristics
of Internet or Networking, I don't even know how they call it, I don't know
what the correct terminology for it is, because we have foundations in each
of the countries which are more or less autonomous. People there decide
what the priorities are and nobody including me knows exactly what is going
on. And I think that is a very important aspect of an open society, that
there are lots of activities that are spontaneous, self-generating, and
there is no central control.

So, I think that the Internet and communications are a tremendously
important tool for creating an open society in this region which has not
been an open society and has just opened up. I think it makes you a little
bit more adjusted to it because of the collapse of the Soviet system which
has been a revolution accelerated and it ended with a big bang in '89, here
in Prague and in other Central and East European countries then '91 in
Russia. But this revolution is really not complete because the closed
society of communism has collapsed and the communist dogma is rather truly
dead and I am sure it is not going to come back.

But a newer review, a new form of social organisation, a new idea of how
society should be organised has not really emerged. When you look at the
important revolutions in history it was always the collapse of a one party
regime and the birth of a new idea for a new conception. And in this case
it has been difficult, I think a large part of the fault is actually in the
open societies, the rest of the world, who did not demonstrate any great
belief in themselves, in open societies; a full organisation that is
desirable and that ought to be propagated and for which you are willing to
make some sacrifices, or in which governments invest.

So there is relatively little support for the transition from the communist
system to a new democratic open society. And the great lesson, I think, of
this incomplete revolution is that the open society which does not have
very much of a structure or people living in an open society that don't
even recognise that they are living in an open society. Actually it is a
more sophisticated, a more advanced, overall organisation than a closed
society, where there is a group of rulers who are imposing their wealth on
society without a structure.

And so to make the transition is a step up, which cannot be accomplished in
a very short period, because you need to develop institutions and you need
to develop people who belief in those institutions. And because of the lack
of support for the idea of an open society, both inside the former
communist community and from outside. Actually things are unfortunately
going in the very wrong direction in this part of the world. I am not
talking about the Czech Republic but I am talking about the region in which
my foundations are active.

Because instead of making transitions to an open society, the closed
society, the universal closed dogma of communism will disappear. But
instead of that the region is breaking up or breaking down into smaller
ares. And in so far there is an organizing principal emerging, it is the
principal of national and ethnic identity. And if you want to mobilise
society behind that idea - and currently we have created a situation where
the nation has to be in danger of nationalism - the right of nationalism
leads to conflict and we do not have to look very far for this.

Let us look at Yugoslavia, you can see what it has come to. So
unfortunately the main event of the moment is in the wrong direction. So
there is an awful lot to be done to strengthen the idea of an open society
and I think that actually computer networking can provide a very important
tool and infrastructure, but in many ways it is also an instrument towards
that direction. That is why I consider it very important and regarding that
one of the primary objectives of the foundation members is to make computer
communications freely and broadly available in the region.

We had many problems, but before I continue to give you my view of what you
need to do, I have to make a confession, a personal confession. That
I, personally, am a computer illiterate, actually I do not know how to use a
computer. When we first bought a very powerful data general mini computer
in the office, I wanted to show it to my five year old son, I did not know
how to switch it on. You may ask how I can exist, a total computer
illiterate, in this day and age. I can only answer you by telling you an
old childhood joke, a Jewish joke that comes to mind.

That is a man who applies for a job, a Sjamish which is the assistant to
the Rabbi in Katovitc. I don't know where that is but anyhow he applies for
the job but he fails for the job because he doesn't know how to read and
write. And he starts to deliver newspapers, and one thing leads to another,
and he becomes a very rich man and he has a big company. And then the
banker comes to him and says to him: "you really ought to go public with
your company and issue shares". And he says: "I don't how to that". "I
prepared everything, all you have to do is sign the document". And he said:
"Unfortunately I don't know how to write". So the man says: "You, a
successful man like that, you don't know how to write? Just imagine what
you would have accomplished if you knew how to write". And he said: "I
would be a Sjamish in Katovitc".

So don't expect me to understand actually what we are trying to do in the
field of Internet. But as I see it there are basically five elements of
what we need to do. And that is:
-provide international connectivity (and internal connectivity)
-nodes of terminal users
-equipment for users
-training for the users
-and contents for the latter, the educational contents of access to
databases or whatever.

And I think of a sixth which just came up in discussion. And that's the
legal element to make sure that actually computer communications do remain
free, because there is nothing irreversable about the freedom of
communication that is currently being enjoyed. So we should exert ourselves
for a legal base for it.

But these are the five area's and our concentration is on training and
providing equipment. The two have to go hand in hand, because I still think
training without equipment is not very useful and vice-versa. And than the
contents to the extent which fits in certainly with the general purposes of
the foundation that are mainly educational and cultural. And we must also
occupy ourselves with connectivity, because without this it doesn't work.
But I hope that we can collaborate with other people in providing that
connectivity with funders and of course the local authorities.

Our most ambitious program is in the former Soviet Union and is connected
with the international science foundation, which you may or may not know,
it is the main instrument at the moment keeping fundamental science alive
in that part of the world. I think that our involvement is twofold. One is
we really need to use networking in our own foundations, networking, cause
we really need that type of communication and we have to use that ability
force rather than one to one communications either by telephone, fax or
folio.

And we are very close to having connected most of our participants. And our
next step is to establish an infrastructure.

And particular for the science foundation we want to administer the grounds
through computers. But we also want to make computers generally available
and we have what we call a many-sides project which extends beyond science
and will make computers available - computer communications networking
available - to the entire community; schools, universities, museums,
libraries, the media and so on.

And we are pretty good in establishing 36 major nodes of operations in
major population centres and the whole training and mobilizing in the city
centres which we will make available in a selected date site in Yaroslav in
Russia and we will start there. And we hope that we will get co-operation
from other founders. We are looking to the US government for instance,
where the vice-president, Al Gore, has shown great interest in opening up
of computer communications and hopefully the European Union to move up
their assets high.

Of course we are collaborating with the government and we are in process of
building a backbone in Moscow; that is already advanced. In other countries
we have done quite a bit. Estonia is the one where we moved first by
providing an education network that connected Estonia to Stockholm. I
believe that Estonia is quite advanced now in networking.
And in Romania for instance we provided (contents) actually in the school,
where we have found five to six schools that have access to computers.
So the intent has already started.

We have this comprehensive program we like you to have the opportunity to
participate in through the Networking for Technologically Emerging
countries workshop and hope you'll have many more trust both
internationally and locally and I want you to know how important I consider
the outcome of the workshop.
It is not purely a technical matter.
If there ever is a better content in having an organisation that in itself
is a prototype of an open society

Thank you
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