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

Fri Mar 18 13:54:19 GMT 2005

Dear Vittorio and others,

if you discuss the role of speakers, you should include not only who represents whom but to whom a speaker speaks. A speaker has first of all to serve the audience and with regard to speakers from civil society it should be the greater public. The main question should be who can serve this function best. 

But let me add some more ideas. Your discussion has to be seen against a broader background. It is certainly true that the Internet infrastructure has enabled the emergence new constituencies which do not fit in the scheme of legally recognized organisations of the industrial age. The UN is an organisation of the industral age and WSIS, at least in my eyes, is something like a laboratory for the UN system to investigate where a bridge could be build to reach the information age. Insofar we are in the early days of a far reaching global transformation process where we all are becoming neighbors, one click away.  

What we witness as "technological revolution" takes place as "social and economic evolution". We have to understand that the new factors to not substitute the old factos but are complementary. The "new"  is not really new but more an additional layer which brings more complexity, choices, opportunities and controversies to the real life. If civil society wants to play a role in this process, it needs both the understanding of the "old principles" and the creativity for the "new principles". 

In the early days of ICANN, the corporation was sometimes labeled as the "United Nations of the Information Age". This was totally wrong. What ICANN could become is the "United Constituencies of the Internet Age". Like the concept of "nations" emerged after the Westphalian Peace of 1648 and the first wave of the industrial revolution, the concept of "constituencies" is emerging after the end of the cold war and the "information revolution" with the Internet at its center. Members of a constituency are not treated primarily according to the citizenship or the territory where they operate (like members of a nation), but they do also speak - like members of a nation - very often the same (technical) language, have common interests, share a common history etc. ICANN could never be a substitute for the UN like the present intergovernmental UN should not be allowed to be the representative of the "United Constituencies". What we need is a new co-regulatory model, where nations and constituencies, that is different stakeholders, can interact in a way that human rights and cultural diversity, economic growth and social development is promoted on a global level. For this an new innovative governance model is needed sooner or later. 

This is not so totally new. In the early days of the industrial revolution we had a similar problem, where the "old system" - the king - was confrotned with a new system - the parliament. The co-regulatory compromise at this time was the "constitutional monarchy" which paved the way - at least in the North - to the "social welfare system" later. 

While we need to manage the day to day challenges, we should have a greater vision also in our minds and should adjust  individual issues (and ambitions) according to this broader criteria.

best

wolfgang

________________________________

Von: plenary-admin at wsis-cs.org im Auftrag von Vittorio Bertola
Gesendet: Fr 18.03.2005 11:22
An: WSIS Plenary
Cc: bureau at wsis-cs.org; ct at wsis-cs.org
Betreff: Individuals and organizations (was Re: [WSIS CS-Plenary] format for Tunis Summit)

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...

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