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

Thu Feb 28 02:41:40 EST 2013

Thanks Norbert, much appreciated.

Warm Regards,
Sala

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Salanieta Tamanikaiwaimaro aka Sala
P.O. Box 17862
Suva
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