[bestbits] Right to Information

[Deirdre Williams]

Dear Friends,
Please excuse the deliberate cross-posting.

The Civil Society Coordination Group (CSCG) is just finishing a selection,
working to very tight deadlines, of representatives of civil society as a
whole to attend a Retreat to be held in New York next month on the future
of the Internet Governance Forum.

When the Retreat was first proposed there was considerable debate about the
involvement of civil society, and about whether CSCG should make the
selection. Finally it was agreed that CSCG should go ahead. After that
there was silence.

Currently there is no public knowledge of whether anyone at all in fact
presented themselves to CSCG for selection, nor, if anyone did, do we have
any idea of who they might be.

But those about to be represented, civil society as a whole, have a right
to know the answers to these questions, and to know them BEFORE any
selection is completed.

This is a reminder to all of us, particularly in the context of the review
of the CSCG, of the need to remember to "think communally" if we really
want to change a hierarchical system, to be constantly aware of the
obligation of information as a right, not as a favour, to all participants.

Lack of engagement is a ubiquitous problem of governance. The
"stakeholders" abdicate from participation in part at least because the
"more equal" stakeholders turn to each other rather than to them. In this
there could be one answer to Item 2 of the call for comment on the Retreat
draft agenda which reads:

2)     What measures can be taken to engage those stakeholders who are
currently unengaged, with a view to expand and diversify physical and
virtual participation?


Best wishes

Deirdre




-- 
“The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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