The next plenary session focused on civil society’s work in the WSIS process in terms of generating content for official WSIS documents and activities. Renate Bloem opened the session noting that during the first prepcom meeting of the first round of WSIS, civil society was “totally excluded.” Complaints about this eventually led to the establishment of an official WSIS civil society bureau that would have a legitimate seat at the table, and would be able to submit input on various relevant topics by civil society organizations. During the second prepcom, civil society representatives divided themselves into various working groups on themes such as human rights, gender, Internet governance, etc, but this was limited to those people who were physically represented at the meeting, meaning that some potential topics might have fallen through the cracks.
“The idea of establishing a civil society bureau was a very, very good one, but we must make sure the process is as democratic and legitimate as possible,” she said. Over the next day, civil society groups will have to decide who amongst them will want to speak during two 15-minute time slots in the plenaries this Friday and Saturday morning.
Next, a representative from the civil society content and themes group offered more details on the process. These self-selected working groups were based upon various common interests and geographic regions. The groups would then develop positions on relevant Internet issues and submit them to the content and themes group, whose task it would be to develop the ideas into a unified position document representing all of civil society participating in WSIS. During the first round of WSIS, he said, civil society groups felt that their ideas weren’t being taken seriously, though almost half of the ideas suggested by civil society ended up making it into the official documents. Still, he said, this needs improvement, and we should push to re-open the issue so more of the positions of civil society get accepted by the participating governments.
Governments, he said, clearly have unfinished business to do regarding Internet governance and the financing of digital divide initiatives, but that should not stop us from advocating our ideas and trying to get them included in the final WSIS documents. The WSIS plan of action, he said, needs more specifics. Civil society should also hold governments accountable to what they’ve promised to do throught this process. Last, civil society must make sure that governments take human rights seriously; in particular, he cited the Tunisian government’s evolving policies as an important barometer for seeing if governments address the issue in ways that are satisfactory to civil society.
The final speaker was Bertrand de la Chapelle, who gave a demonstration of the website www.wsis-online.net. A community platform for civil society activists, the website is intended to be used by groups so they can coordinate their WSIS-related activities. The site allows users to create event listings, working groups, organizational and personal profiles, etc, all sorted by particular civil society interests. The website’s database then allows users to sort people and organizations based on these interests so they can identify each other and hopefully partner with each other to meet civil society goals.