 It's been an exciting week at the WSIS Forum, the largest annual gathering of its kind where the ICT for Development Community discussed and exchanged best practice on building an information society. More than 2,000 experts from more than 150 countries came together to discuss subjects as wide-ranging, as bridging the digital divide, cybersecurity and promoting peaceful and inclusive societies. The beauty of the WSIS Forum is that the agenda and the program are built in a true multi-stakeholder format. So civil society, private sector, academia, technical community, governments, UN agencies, we all work together as one. Openness and inclusiveness are the watchwords at WSIS, a forum where high-level policy meets grassroots initiatives. So this year, for the first time, it was an interactive forum. Historically, we've just had people stand at a podium and report whatever it is they came to the group to report. And in this time, what we decided to do was mix it up a little bit and have both governmental and non-governmental people sitting on panels and asking each other's questions and really trying to delve into, oh, so you did that. How did you do it? Or why did you do it? And how did it affect specifically women or how did it affect specifically children? That kind of conversation, we believe, resulted in a much more enjoyable and participatory environment. WSIS is also an opportunity to forge friendships and share experience. So at WSIS this week, I've met a number of stakeholders from across civil society and also from different intergovernmental bodies that are working towards bringing new voices into our conversations, particularly from the global south. In many cases, conversations lead to collaborative long-term partnerships. We try to even partner together to implement some of the ideas that are already implemented and that have been a success, a full story about it. And we did. For example, yesterday we have some ideas with some African people about e-agriculture. They have some solutions which have been implemented and we are going to really partner together and to have a start-up in our country to implement it in e-agriculture, which is one of the things that is really needed. WSIS 2016 is the first forum after the UN General Assembly adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the community is working hard to create linkages. We believe that we will be able to turn these targets which were set in September 2015 at the SDGs summit into the great opportunities and the most important into the partnerships which will lead towards the concrete work on the ground. Much work still needs to be done to connect the unconnected, but at WSIS 2016 there was a resounding commitment to ensure that everyone reaps the benefit of connectivity. I think that we have a very good chance to see the ICT development in the next decade be much faster than in the past and in the end our plan to have a real benefit of these new technologies. The WSIS forum may be over for another year, but ITU will continue to host the forum in Geneva in 2017, when we will be back again to track the progress the world is making in using new technologies for sustainable global development.