[WSIS CS-Plenary] Re: [governance] Internet governance :roles of plenary and governance lists

[Vittorio Bertola]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 23:11:36 +0900, Adam Peake <ajp at glocom.ac.jp> wrote:

>With respect, I think you are being naive, and civil society is 
>likely being disadvantaged.

I agree with your considerations, but I also think we have to agree on a
realistic plan.

On one hand, you can't credibly go to an ITU internal meeting and try to
revert their internal working rules; if the only way we have to participate
in this event at this stage is to be invited as individuals, well, let's
take it. And by the way, I'm not even sure whether all civil society people
will be participating thanks to an invitation as individual expert, rather
than, for example, as accredited person from some governmental delegation,
as happened during the summit. Also, you can't force people who were invited
as individuals to go there and say something different from their individual
thought.

But on the other hand, we do have to coordinate so that our message is
effective, that the positions on which there is general agreement among us
are exposed loudly and repeated again and again, and that it is made clear
that those positions have the support of the civil society individuals and
organizations which participate in WSIS. This is the only way not to
disperse our strength.

I think that some of these agreeable positions might be easy to find: for
example, I think we should stress that the UN working group on Internet
Governance, as part of the WSIS process, should be equally composed by civil
society, private sector and government representatives; that Internet
Governance needs the full involvement of civil society organizations and
individual Internet users, as recognized by the Declaration of Principles;
that ITU itself, if willing to organize future events on this matter, should
ensure better and more open ways for participation by civil society, and
that, more generally, ITU should offer a viable way for NGOs to participate
in its activities; and that the Internet Governance caucus, as a subgroup of
the WSIS civil society plenary, is the right place to coordinate civil
society participation in the process.

So what we should propose to all those who were invited as "individual civil
society experts" is to go there, say what they want to say, and then add the
above message.
-- 
vb.               [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<------
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