[governance] Themes for the coming IGFs

[Stuart Hamilton]

Hello everyone

I've been lurking on this last for the past few months but it now seems
I have been outed by Daniel's spot-on email :)

I represent IFLA (The International Federation of Library Associations)
and I am pleased to say that we have finally started engaging with the
IGF. Until recently we did not have the capacity at IFLA HQ for regular
representation at all global forums of interest to librarians, and we
had concentrated our efforts on the action lines of the WSIS follow-up
process. Happily, we have recently increased capacity and this year we
were able to represent in Hyderabad where we had a team of seven
librarians covering the meeting. I represented IFLA on two panels, on
Access to Knowledge (organised by IP Justice) and also on the
well-attended panel on Filtering and Censorship organised by UNESCO.
Ardi Prassad, an Indian librarian, represented IFLA on the panel about
Access to Public Held Information from a Development Perspective. I
would like to agree with Daniel's comment that the times where
librarians were slow to understand the impact of the Net are over now :)

More seriously, I'd like to agree with him that the topic of information
literacy, or digital literacy, should be of great importance at the IGF.
We find that our activities in this area (please see:
http://www.infolitglobal.info/) are ravenously consumed by librarians
and library users, and we would be very pleased to work with anyone who
wishes to see this topic represented at IGF 2009.

Kind regards,

Stuart


Stuart Hamilton
Senior Policy Advisor
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
P.O. Box 95312
2509 CH The Hague
Netherlands

00 31 70 314 0884
http://blogs.prodigio.nl/stuart/ 


-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Pimienta [mailto:pimienta at funredes.org] 
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 2:44 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] Themes for the coming IGFs

Saludos todas y todos,

First of all, sorry I had to cancel last minute my participation in 
Hyderabad's IGF Diversity session
for a health situation which is over now.

This is my first contribution to the list which I joined last March, 
but it was not
easy to catch up with the permanent and intense flow :-).

I did read carefully all the contributions in the "themes for the 
coming IGFs" thread
and I would like to share with you my concern for a theme which is too
often
underlooked and was not mentionned in spite of the numerous
contributions.

I am refering to "digital and information literacy" ...
which directly refers to "info-ethics" and indirectly to "diversity".

What use of the Internet would make the next billion connected users 
if they are not Internauts
(in the ethymological sense of the term, a person who is in capacity to
make a
meaninfgul use of the Net)?

How to improve the level of ethics of netusers  (which we all witness 
is in the drop
with important consequences for the Internaut communities) without 
appropriate education?

If we want people to get ownership and empowered by the Internet,
shall not we make provision and organize digital literacy for them?

We were told by Aymarta Sen that Human Development, which is what I 
suppose we aim at
by connecting people, requires capacities. It is not enough to 
connect hardware and software,
we need to "connect the brains" for people being in real capacity to 
transform information into
knowledge and contribute to the public domain of knowledge.

I don't mean to be long, so I will refer to a paper which tries to 
demonstrate the link
between digital divide and digital literacy and where my arguments 
for considering
digital literacy a still deeper challenge than access are organized
(by the way the argument that literacy is included in access is 
barely acceptable to me
as it feeds the dangerous confusion beetween real literacy, a complex 
and long task,
and simple training  in Windows plus Office Suite a perverse approach 
as it does not
open the way!).
"Digital Divide, Socisal Divide, Paradigmatic Divide":
http://funredes.org/mistica/english/cyberlibrary/thematic/Paradigmatic_D
ivide.pdf

As far as I know there is a group of profesionals who generally 
shares with Funredes this
vision that digital and information literacy is a top priority issue 
for the Information
Societies to emerge: the librarians.

I am not myself a librarian and I wonder if this group is well enough 
represented in IGF:
I am convinced that librarians are the oldest skilled information 
profesionals in history
and shall take a more active stand in IGF (I also think that times 
where librarians were slow to
understand the impact of the Net are over now).

FUNREDES will come back within few weeks with a worldwide campaign 
linking digital
literacy, info-ethics ... and Global Warming (!) and will share it in 
this forum.

Cordialmente,
Daniel

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