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COMPUTING

United Nations set to tackle Y2K issue

December 11, 1998
Web posted at: 10:00 AM EST

by Marc Ferranti

From...

(IDG) -- Some 120 United Nations member countries are set to meet today for the organization's first international conference on the year-2000 problem.

On the agenda are discussions of how U.N. countries can work together on issues of compliance, monitoring, contingency planning, and crisis management, according to U.N. officials.

"The consequences of unpreparedness in any one country can rapidly spill over to other parts of the world, " said Ambassador Ahmad Kamal of Pakistan. Kamal organized the meeting Friday and is the chairman of the U.N. Economic and Social Council's working group on informatics.
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"Many countries have barely begun to consider national responses, and there is as yet no reliable overview of worldwide preparedness," Kamal said, speaking Thursday at a meeting of countries organizing the conference.

The purpose of the meeting is mainly to organize a way of sharing information on the year-2000 efforts of U.N. member countries. Crisis management -- what to do if major disruptions of critical international services occur -- is likely to be a hot topic, officials acknowledged.

Some of the working groups will address the possibility of creating an emergency response system, according to officials here.

"The free market system may not be the best way to allocate resources in an emergency," said John Koskinen, President Bill Clinton's year-2000 czar, who will represent the United States on Friday.

Marc Ferranti is the New York bureau chief for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.

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