[WSIS CS-Plenary] Re: [WSIS-CT] John Gagain's note: Does Civil Society Plenary not exist?

[veni markovski]

>1/ There was no formal call for such a meeting, so that any interested 
>party would have been able to attend. As far as I'm concerned, it happened 
>that I was in this room before the meeting... since there was an internet 
>connexion available there !
>2/ less than 10 persons were in the room, among them people who are 
>representing neither European, nor North American families, since we were 
>informally discussing the issue

Meryem,
I have to disagree.
There were several formal calls in Geneva, made by me. In writing at the 
bulleting board, and to a number of plenaries.
Each day at a certain time, we would try to get together in that same room 
where at the end we were founded as EU/NA family.
Since all of us seem to have been involved in a number of other 
constituencies, it's no wonder that the EU/NA family was not well 
self-organized, but at the end, if there are 10 or 20 people interested in 
that, why would we want to have ALL 80 or 100 people from the other 
families join?
After all, that's not my  understanding of democracy. The people that want, 
they unite and form groups of interest, and do work. If they don't want 
that, it's still fine; there's no such a thing as 100 % participation, 
except for communism.
All families have been elected by CS members, not by government, nor the 
secretariat. And they are representative as much as the plenary itself. Or 
we can easily switch to another discussion: is the CS representative at 
all? And thus we'll end up as easy victums of governments that don't want 
CS participation. I don't understand why we are taking that road.

veni