[WSIS CS-Plenary] Civil Society Meeting - 18 October 2006

[Dr. Francis MUGUET]

Hello / Bonjour

Sorry to post this report in the afternoon.
Yesterday evening I was exhausted, and
this morning, I had work to do elsewhere.

Of course, it would better to post also
a report of what has been going on in the
session itself to better understand.
I will try to write a report, but I cannot
give a date, since I will be abroad until the IGF.

Sorry also, mes amis, je n'ai pas eu le temps
de faire une version en Français, ce
sera la priorité.

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Civil Society Meeting
18 October 2006
Concise report


While Civil Society was allocated a meeting place,
1/ there is not translation ( English / French ),
2/ no cybercafé at UNESCO, just WiFi access
3/ Only web browsing and ssh are allowed.
The port 25 ( with a smtp server )
and the port 110 ( pop) and port 995 ( pop3s ) should be opened.
It was approved that a request shall be sent to UNESCO computing 
services through the channel of the CSB.

It was the general opinion that the procedure followed today, for the 
e-learning action line, in the afternoon, was not satisfactory, because 
the chair ( Cyril ) wanted too much to impose to all stakeholders, CS 
and governments alike his selection of themes.

There were some suggestions during the session that some Civil Society 
entities shall be co-moderators alongside UNESCO, the designated lead 
moderator, but an obstacle is that in the Draft Terms of Reference for 
functioning of the Multi-stakeholders Team A 6 , it is mentioned that :
The Facilitator should be able to provide sufficient resources to cover 
the costs of its own activities, and/or to contribute to overall 
coordination of Action Line
Therefore, it was the feeling that, except for well financed 
organization like APC or CONGO, it would be difficult to be accepted as 
a action line co- moderator. CONGO is already burdened with the task of 
the executive secretariat.
While the possibility should be considered that several NGOs could form 
together alliance with enough means and credibility to be accepted as a 
civil society moderator, yet another procedural strategy has been 
suggested so that the process becomes more inclusive.
Since the actions lines has been broken into basic themes, along with 
cross-cutting themes, it has been suggested that moderators could also 
be designated at the level of each interest group related to each theme.
This would amount a fine-grained organization at theme levels.
At the theme level, the condition enunciated in the item A6 of the Draft 
Terms of Reference for functioning of the Multi-stakeholders Team should 
not apply, and the Draft Terms of Reference should be modified to 
acknowledge the existence of interest groups at the theme level with a 
team of moderators. Fi
request at action lines.
During the WSIS process, the important role of Civil Society groupings, 
such as families, caucuses and thematic groups, has been acknowledged, 
while a NGO made a contribution on behalf of a certain WSIS Civil 
Society grouping.
Therefore, building on the spirit of the WSIS practice, it is suggested 
that, at the theme level, WSIS civil society should be allowed as such 
to act as co-moderator of a theme, despite having no formal legal structure.
This positive proposal has been approved, by consensus, by all the 
attendees of the CS meeting, and is going to proposed tomorrow ( ie 
Thursday ).

Another interesting proposal was text of the Geneva and Tunis Civil 
Society declarations relevant to each specific action line, should be 
included in the annex of the document entitled “Working methods of the 
multi-stakeholder team”.
This proposal was also approved by consensus.

A participant stressed the difficulty of the communication between the 
governance-minded and advocacy-minded civil society and the technical 
communities. In that respect UNESCO and all moderators should make a 
serious effort.

As UNESCO has just proposed today ( 18 October) to enlarge the use of 
their collaborative tool Sharepoint, concerns have been raised that 
Sharepoint, a Microsoft product, might not be interoperable enough, and 
might put people using a different operating systems, and/or different 
word processor at a disadvantage. The statement by Axel Plathe that 
Civil Society could propose yet another collaborative tool has been 
noted and appreciated.
Furthermore, it could useful that theme co-moderators could also set up 
collaborative tool servers, and therefore, the choice of the 
collaborative tool should also take into account this need.


All the best

Francis


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Francis F. MUGUET Ph.D 

MDPI Foundation Open Access Journals
Associate Publisher
http://www.mdpi.org   http://www.mdpi.net
muguet at mdpi.org       muguet at mdpi.net

ENSTA   Paris, France
KNIS lab.  Director 
"Knowledge Networks & Information Society" (KNIS)
muguet at ensta.fr   http://www.ensta.fr/~muguet

World Summit On the Information Society (WSIS)
Civil Society Working Groups
Scientific Information :  http://www.wsis-si.org  chair
Patents & Copyrights   :  http://www.wsis-pct.org co-chair
Financing Mechanismns  :  http://www.wsis-finance.org web

UNMSP project : http://www.unmsp.org
WTIS initiative: http://www.wtis.org
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