[WSIS CS-Plenary] PROPOSAL to PLENARY

[karen banks]

** would people appreciate my using babelfish to translate this **

** les gens apprécieraient-ils une traduction de babelfish de ce message ? **

** ¿la gente apreciaría una traducción del babelfish de este mensaje? **

dear all

The updated version of the caucuses/working group webpage is online at: 
http://www.wsis-cs.org/caucuses.html

I have made several changes, but i know that there are still inaccuracies. 
I leave it to all caucus/working group focal points to alert me if there 
are corrections still to be made. Please do keep sending information about 
WSIS resources (websites, blogs and wikis etc)

Some of the messages indicated that people find it very difficult to follow 
Civil Society work in WSIS on the plenary list. This is very true and i'm 
sure not a suprise. It is particularly difficult if you are relying soley 
on the WSIS lists to understand what is happening, you don't attend face to 
face meetings, and you don't speak english.

To this end, i would like to request that the working methods group draft 
some simple guidelines for how we use the CT and Plenary spaces. They don't 
have to be complex, but if we all agree to them, it will make life a lot 
easier for many.

This is fairly standard procedure for the use of any online lists - 
particularly in the absence of facilitation.

It might be interesting to take a snapshot of the use of plenary in 2005.

subscribers
- the list has about 500 subscribers

messages and authors
- 968 messages were posted in Jan/Feb of 2005
[306 of these were posted during the 2 weeks of prepcom]
- 150 different authors posted to plenary
-  80 different authors posted only 1 message
-  70 different authors posted between 2 (lowest) and 65 (Highest) messages
- 350 subscribers didn't post at all (obviously - if my maths still works)

language
- about 95% of those posts are in english
- about 5 authors post in french
- the occasional bulletin is posted in 3 languages (eng/fr/sp)

content
- a large number of messages are cross-posted to at least 3 WSIS lists, 
somtimes up to 5 lists (we are using up a lot of bandwidth ;)
- many postings are not directly related to WSIS
- many of us are a bit lazy when replying to messages and ** don't remove 
unnecessary text **

Size
- almost 1/3 of the messages are over 3 screens
- about 1/5 are as many as 5 screens
- many messages are formatted, or in HTML - making them unnecessarily large

subject lines
- are not too bad - but we could try to implement some guidelines on 
ensuring our messages have clear subject lines, This makes following 
particular threads (especially historically) much easier.
---->

Dealing with some of the above could be very simple, and make life a lot 
easier for the majority of plenary subscribers who are silently following, 
or too put off by the noise and volume to parricipate.

Dealing with other issues is not so simple - the question of language of 
course being the most pressing. But even there, we developed some good 
methodologies during phase I and we could try to re-implement them.

I am happy to spend some time in the working methods group on the above if 
there is interest.

karen