 I'm here at the ITU in Geneva and I'm very pleased to be joined by Malcolm Johnson who is director of the Telecommunications Standardisation Bureau for ITU. Malcolm, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. It's a pleasure, Max, pleasure. I'd like to start talking to you about WTSA, the World Telecommunications Standardisation Assembly, which is happening in Dubai this year. I wanted to find out about WTSA's and their relevance to ITU. The WTSA is the World Conference for our sector of the ITU, the standardisation sector. We have this assembly every four years. So it's an opportunity for the full membership of ITU-T to come together and express its views on how we're performing, looking at ways that we can improve our work, looking at the priorities we're working on, and what the future direction should be for the next four years. We had the previous assembly in Johannesburg in 2008, and that was a very significant assembly because it changed the structure of the sector for the first time for many years, and it also gave us a lot of new work to do in some very important areas that we've taken forward in the four years since. So this assembly in Dubai will be looking at how well we've responded to the direction that was given to us in Johannesburg, in particular five main areas. We've done a lot of work since then on climate change issues. We established a new study group on climate change and the environment. We've done a lot of work on accessibility to make sure that our standards can be used by persons with disabilities and for aged people. Also, we've started a new programme on conformity and interoperability. This is to make sure that products and services that produce two-hour standards do interoperate, which is because one of our major strategic missions is to ensure interoperability of international communications. We've taken that programme forward over the last four years. It's been difficult. It's still to be fully implemented, and we're looking forward to some views from the membership on how we're doing in that very important area. Also, on bridging the standardisation gap, this is the objective of including the full membership of ITU in our standards work and especially encouraging the developing countries to come along to make sure that their specific requirements are included in our standards. So we've, I think, got a good message to give in Dubai on that. We've been very successful in encouraging increasing participation in our sector. In fact, we've had over 40 countries participating since then that have never participated before in the sector of the ITU. 16 just last year, in fact. The fifth thing is that in Johannesburg it initiated the idea of a new category of membership for academia. This is very important for the standardisation work because innovation comes out of academia, and we need to look into the future to make sure that we keep up to date with our standards work. So we're very pleased that we've had nearly 50 universities join ITU since then. And what particular preparations have you been making for Dubai? There's been a lot of preparation over the last 12 months because in ITU we have regional organisations. We have six regional organisations that prepare common proposals from the regions. This is essential otherwise it would be very difficult to handle individual proposals coming from individual members. We have 193 Government members of ITU. We have nearly 700 private sectors. So it's very important that we get some regional consolidation of these proposals so that we can then reach conclusion based on the input from these six regions. Each of the regions has had preparatory meetings, more than one. We've been participating and then we've organised some of them ourselves from the ITU secretary working with the regional organisations. And also we had a special meeting of our advisory group in July to prepare specifically for the assembly. So I think we've got very good preparation and we have some very good contributions to the assembly. I believe we're well placed for a successful assembly. I was going to ask you, are there any particular events that you'd like to highlight that are happening at W2SA 12 in Dubai? Yes. In Johannesburg we started the process of having a global standards symposium the day before the W2SA starts. This is where high level industry representatives, heads of other standards bodies, ministers, regulators can come together and consider some crucial policy issues related to standardisation. It was very successful four years ago so we're doing the same thing again this time. And it'll look at how the ICT sector can interface with the vertical sectors that ICT is now in health, transportation, smart buildings, smart grids. So this is going to be a very interesting day. Also we started having side events in Johannesburg. So this time we have another three side events but on different topics. So we have a side event on e-health specifically where WHO is working with us on that event to see how we can have standards which ensure interoperability of e-health equipment. Then we have a side event on innovations, looking at what innovations are being incubated especially in developing countries and how we can bring them into the standardisation process. And the third event is to look at the resilience of networks to natural disasters. As you know the great East Japan earthquake caused havoc with the telecommunications network in Japan. A lot of lessons were learnt there and these can be disseminated to the ITU membership to be better prepared for these sort of events in the future. And of course we have an event for academia, our new academia members specifically for them. And they will be participating in the assembly for the very first time in an ITU conference. And finally in terms of outcomes, very briefly what do you hope will be the outcome of WTSA 12? Well the outcome first of all we have to appoint all the chairman and vice chairman of our study groups and our advisory group. So the leadership to take us forward for the next four years. We have to agree the work programme, identify the priorities and we need to look at the resolutions which are adopted in Johannesburg and any new ones that have been proposed to give us a direction on where we are going and what we should emphasise. So these resolutions really give us the policy to take forward for the next four years. Well I wish you the very best with it Malcolm and thank you very much indeed for being with us today. Well it's a pleasure to have this opportunity and we're really looking forward to a very successful event in Dubai. Thank you very much Max.