Individuals and organizations (was Re: [WSIS CS-Plenary] format for Tunis Summit)

[Vittorio Bertola]

Il giorno mer, 16-03-2005 alle 18:55 -0500, Rik Panganiban ha scritto:
> Vittorio,
> 
> Sorry to respond to you so late on this.  I do not make up these rules, 
> they are handed over to us from the secretariat,  the government 
> bureau, and past UN conference practice.  We can chose to reject those 
> practices and nominate folks who the secretariat might view as less 
> than "top level".  But I just want people to know what the preparations 
> and assumptions are.

Ok, sounds reasonable, and I understand that they want to get the most
high sounding names from civil society. But I must say that, seen from
the point of view of an active person that has just started to be
involved in the UN processes, it looks like an attempt to preempt our
choices in terms of who will speak for us.

I think that the principle that civil society (as all other
stakeholders) should choose freely its speakers and representatives,
with self-determined processes, is something we should fight for at all
times.

> The coordinator of a caucus does not hold much water beyond our own 
> structures if they are not at the top level of their own organization.  
> The title of "individual internet user" does not mean anything in the 
> UN system.

I understand... and I won't use the standard reply you see everywhere in
the online circles, such as "then why should the UN be allowed to manage
the Internet". The emergence of informal online movements and individual
activism, side by side with traditional NGOs, is IMHO a key change that
has happened in civil society in the last few years. If you take a look
at online campaigns, most of them are made by both individuals and
organizations, rallying around a website or mailing list; they often do
not correspond to any specific organization. For me, this was made much
more evident from our experience at ICANN in the last years, where a
representative structure based only on organizations failed in including
many interested stakeholders.

Bottom line is, we have to find a way to incorporate informal and
individual activism in civil society participation to UN processes,
otherwise you will only create a "conflict of the poor" between older
NGOs and these new forms of aggregation, which will in turn contest both
the validity of processes like the WSIS (that's exactly what happens in
many online circles out of here!) and the representativeness of those
civil society organizations who participate in these processes. All in
all, this is what is already happening on this list!
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...