[WSIS CS-Plenary] Meeting of civil society and EU

[steve at commedia.org.uk]

The meeting with the EU was a missed opportunity in terms of pushing for a 
stronger development orientation at WSIS. The European CS group really must put 
development priorities at the top of the agenda, alongside its human rights 
principles. I left the meeting deeply frustrated, not for being bounced off the 
agenda by unscheduled CS interventions but at the lack of any critique of 
European government support for a technocratic information society. The absence 
of the european development ministries (with a few notable exceptions) is 
creating a problem in discourse which CS has a responsibility to counter.

Steve Buckley


Quoting "Georg C. F. Greve" <greve at fsfeurope.org>:

> Hi all,
> 
> thanks to the good preparation last night, the meeting of the civil
> society with the European Union was quite successful. 
> 
> Having previously discussed the issues, their order and the speakers
> that should bring them to the attention of the European Union, the
> meeting was received as highly professional, well-coordinated and is
> certainly something we can and will build upon.
> 
> All of us have very important issues that need to be addressed.
> 
> But given that it can be very destructive to our goals and future
> options of being given the chance to speak with the European Union
> member states in such a high-level setting, we definitely need to
> keep avoiding uncoordinated grabbing of the microphone and the chaos
> it would create.
> 
> So we should keep this kind of procedure for future meetings.
> 
> Further coordination of this will be done on the special mailing list
> created specifically for this purpose, so if you are interested in
> participating in this process, please subscribe to
> 
>  wsis-euc at fsfeurope.org
> 
> at
> 
>  http://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/wsis-euc
> 
> Regards,
> Georg
> 
> -- 
> Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
> Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
> GNU Business Network                        (http://mailman.gnubiz.org)
> Brave GNU World	                           (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
> 


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           steve at commedia.org.uk
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