[governance] WSIS+10 in Paris: Brief report from days 2 and 3

[Norbert Bollow]

Dear all

Here is my brief report from days 2 and 3 of WSIS+10 review
conference in Paris.

As documented in the conference programme [1], there were a large
number of workshops, giving various groups opportunities to
showcase their activities and successes, but also allowing
various thoughts to be expressed. In a reflection of my personal
interests, what stands out in my mind is the serious of workshops
on principles, and the one Wednesday afternoon on enhanced
cooperation. As always, the informal conversations outside of the
official programme were however the most valuable.
[1] https://www.unesco-ci.org/cmscore/events

Curiously missing from that online programme is an activity that
may in the long run turn out be the most significant aspect of
conference: A consensus process, in which all conference
participants were welcome to participate on an equal footing, for
a non-binding outcome document which has then been adopted at the
closing plenary.

Even though this process has been deeply flawed in that the draft
which served as starting point for the consensus process was not
created in a bottom-up manner, but provided by UNESCO (and this
shows through very strongly in the final result), and not nearly
enough time was spent on changing the initial draft into something
that better reflects the actual discussions at the event (three
hours on Tuesday and 1.5 hours on Wednesday, for a total of only
four and a half hours), I commend the WSIS+10 organizers for their
courage in making this happen. This sets a good and important
precedent.

In this context, I am a bit proud of the bullet point which I
formulated and suggested and which is now included in this
consensus outcome document. It is in the context of what the
conference participants invite all stakeholders to do, and it
reads: “Continue exploring how the practices and philosophy of the
Free Software and Open Source movements can be applied to other
challenges of knowledge societies besides software.” I am not
aware of this specific point having ever before been included in
any international outcome document; I am definitely going to cite
this, for example in the context of my Wisdom Task Force proposal.

Besides the adoption of the outcome document, the closing session
also featured a number of speeches. Notable among these were the
offer of Brazil to host the 2015 IGF and Anita Gurumurthy's very
impressive speech of behalf of civil society. I happened to be
sitting next to a government representative from an African
country, and knowing that I was also from civil society, he
immediately asked me if I could get him a copy of the speech. It
was interesting for me to learn from him how his country's
government participates in such a conference. He is the person at
the embassy in Paris who is (among other repsonsibilities) in
charge of covering the activities at UNESCO that his government
is interested in, and he attended the opening ceremony and the
closing session, skipping everything in between.

In summary, this was not a serious review event, even though high
calibre people capable of doing a true review of information
society developments were present. Instead of the economics
professor who gave the opening keynote via video conference link,
saying things which maybe were exciting ten years ago, UNESCO
could have called e.g. on Anita to do the keynote, followed by
bottom-up deliberation processes to actually discuss the real
problems, and leading up to an outcome document truly worthy of a
review conference. They could still have set aside part of the
time to provide opportunities for workshop organizers, but in a
review conference there should be a credible review process and
it should be center stage. So even though the proverbial glass
has been at least half full for me personally, I agree with
Michael Gurstein's blog post [2] characterizing the event as a
missed opportunity.
[2] http://tinyurl.com/abgd47u

Greetings,
Norbert

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