Yesterday afternoon at CTCNet, I co-hosted a gathering on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with Amali DaSilva-Mitchell of the Vancouver Community Network. Almost 20 people attended the informal meeting, and we had an engaging discussion over the course of the hour. Amali and I gave an overview of WSIS, and the process created to encourage civil society representatives to participate. There was concern amongst the group over the relative lack of participation by members of the CTC/telecenter community, some of which may be due to lack of awareness or resources. Additionally, because CTCs and telecenters are largely interdisciplinary, providing education services, Internet access, content development, etc, their interests get distributed amongst the many thematic working groups involved in the WSIS process.
Because there seemed to be a lot of interest in mobilizing CTCs to get more involved in WSIS, Amali and I offered to invite the attendees to participate in the North American Civil Society discussion list. Additionally, I'm going to take a crack at writing a brief essay on what WSIS is all about and why CTCs should care about it. Perhaps one of the end results of this will be the development of an interdisciplinary CTC/telecenter working group as part of the WSIS process; we'll have to see if other civil society reps from around the world think it would be productive to do so.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at June 13, 2004 12:53 PM | TrackBack