17-28 February: WSIS PrepCom2

From 17 to 28 February, the second preparatory conference (PrepCom2) for the
WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) took place in Geneva. The WSIS
is one of those UN summits which involves - at least theoretically - not only
government delegations but also business and "civil society". The WSIS summit
will take place 10-12 December in Geneva.

The idea for the PrepCom was to finalise a draft declaration and an action
plan, but as governments were not able to agree to issues and work according to
time schedule, the outcome was just a set of "working papers" which hardly
contain any concrete points. In terms of content, there are a few ugly things -
especially on liberalisation/privatisation and
on "cybercrime"/"cyberterrorism" - but even those have not been detailed in any
way. The basic mood at the PrepCom was one of complete boredom: Most government
delegates have neither the knowledge, nor the motivation to make this summit
into something meaningful. On the other hand, outside official government
negotiations, a lot of interesting networking, drafting and exchange took place
amongst "civil society" organisations.

Now what does that mean for us? Protests against the December summit don't seem
to make much sense at the present stage, as there's hardly anything concrete to
protest against. However, the general boredom offers a perfect opportunity for
grassroots media and communication groups to do their own thing and to make
clear and visible who are the people who really have something to say regarding
information-/communication-societies. If the message at the December summit
will be that the governments are totally unable and incompetent, and that
instead the truly interesting things are happening elsewhere (namely: with us),
then I think we would have achieved quite a lot.

Here are 3 proposals (or rather 1 main and 2 additional proposals) on what
people could get involved with.... (in slightly more detail than what I sent
round before)...

1. Communication Village / Media Lab / Hub: People from Switzerland, Italy and
Germany have had the idea to create a laboratory for grassroots
media/communication experiments during (but distinctly outside) the WSIS. This
could become a convergence space for many interesting people and initiatives
working on these issues. The aim would be to get a clearer idea about the
issues of the WSIS, maybe develop a few radical demands, but more importantly
to create our own version of a communication society, to contrast
the "information" of the WSIS with our own horizontal communication, to
experiment with the technology, and to make sure that our communication village
is a much more relevant space than the official government conference.

2. Communications Rights Summit: The CRIS network (which includes several
really cool NGOs, alternative ISPs and community/alternative media) is planning
to have a one-day conference parallel to the WSIS on issues which are neglected
at the official summit: open source, media concentration, interactive
communication, etc. They won't call it counter-summit, rather an additional
side-summit in close proximity of the official conference, which is to attract
not only people from outside but also disappointed and critical people from
inside the WSIS. Parts of the conference could be coordinated with the
communication village.

3. Community/alt.media working group: A small ad-hoc working group has formed
at the PrepCom and has developed a short paper on the importance of community
and alternative media. This paper was a contribution to the civil society
statement for the WSIS. That statement has so far been used heavily for
lobbying, but in the future the focus will shift towards developing an own
civil society position which will be presented as a clear and distinct
alternative to the government declaration in December. The working group was
composed of just a very few people, especially from AMARC, the World
Association of Community Radios. For those of us who would be interested in
content-related work it could be an idea to continue working with this group.