Last week I wrote up a report on WSIS - primarily aimed at Canadian civil society. By the time I finished it, though, we realized it might be an interesting overview for other groups as well. It is now posted online as the IISD Commentary, "WSIS Unfolds: Finding the right way to Tunis".

Enjoy!

So... here we are... the closing plenary. Hard to believe.

The discussion started off with an exploration of the "operational modalities" for the Tunis Summit. It sounds like they are trying to keep things as identical to the Geneva Summit as possible in terms of the agenda, "overpasses" (special passes given to governments and civil society for what they know will be events that everyone wants to go to, but with only 3000 seats in the hall, there will not be space for) to the opening plenaries, etc. The only big differences are that they are going to try to find a way to make the official roundtables a bit more exciting and that civil society will have two chances each afternoon to present, instead of one.

Shifting to discussions on moving the texts ahead, the President of the PrepCom has come out with some suggestions. Basically, he put forward that there NOT be an intersessional (hooray!!!! Too expensive). Instead, the Political Chapeau and Chapter 2 of the Operational Plan (Financing) will be forwarded to PrepCom 3 for the next reading and discussion. The Group of the Friends of the Chair will keep working on Chapters One (Implementation Mechanisms) and Chapter Four (The Way Ahead) of the Operational Part and bring a next round of documents forward to PrepCom 3. Chapter 3 on Internet Governance will take a bit more work. Around July 18, the WGIG will release its report and all stakeholders can submit comments and drafting proposals for the text of Chapter 3 by August 12. There was a ton of debate as to what happens next, with some countries all for the Bureau and WGIG starting work on drafting Chapter 3 in August and others saying nothing should happen until PrepCom3. The President fought hard to find a way to say "We'll keep talking about a way to reconcile those irreconcilable positions between now and PrepCom3." Now they've suspended the plenary to go duke it out behind closed doors.

On the surface, though, it all sounds terribly civilized. It all sounds terribly civilized. They are now looking for a "minimal common denominator of our joint vision."

Maybe it's the fever, but I'm finding this all highly amusing late on a Friday. Nevertheless, I think this is my signal to head out and call it a night. I'm supposed to take IISD's Geneva based interns out for dinner in two hours and it would be mighty nice to go back to the hotel and get rid of my paper-filled backpack first.

So... that's all from me for the PrepCom. Hope you've all enjoyed the coverage. I'll post a summary report on Monday accessible from http://events.takingitglobal.org/wsis2prepcom2/attending

Hmmm.... walking into the closing plenary, I happened to grab a copy of the "Proposal of the Swiss Delegation for a Paper on the Implementation of the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action." From the 1.5 page document, it sounds like this proposal is the Swiss attempt to break some deadlocks around Chapter One of the Operational Part (Implementation Mechanism). If you look at the most recent Compilation of Comments on Chapter One, it's obvious that many countries and civil society are trying to insert real content into that Chapter regarding the types of initiatives that should be implemented. The problem is that this document wasn't really meant to do that. That was what the Plan of Action in Phase I was for.

So the Swiss are suggesting that the ITU and WSIS Secretariat work together on a paper regarding the implementation of the Geneva Declaraion and Plan of Action. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable recommendation.

My only concern is that the ITU doesn't seem to recognize that civil society exists. Before this PrepCom started, the ITU issued a "Preliminary stocktaking report" about activities that are going on around the world. When I read this document, it was obvious that a) either civil society hasn't been entering data in the WSIS stocktaking site; or b) that the ITU didn't think the civil society initiatives were important since they weren't as big or flashy as the initiatives started by the governments or UN agencies. Either way, it ends up looking like the only people doing any work are governments and the UN. It's frustrating since at the end of the day, there is a whole host of CSOs doing the implementation of these government and UN projects because they have greater on-the-ground capacity to deliver the programmes. But, they don't get any recognition in the UN documents.

So... I'm all for a nice paper to break the deadlock on Chapter One, but could we have the SDC and the GKP watching over their shoulder to make sure that the role of civil society in implementation is acknowledged properly???

After the Youth Caucus meeting this morning, Andy Carvin abducted a group of us for a podcast interview which he has posted on his blog page.

I've had a series of very interesting conversations today regarding "What has happened to civil society in WSIS Phase II?" On the one hand, there's good news - the youth caucus is not the only civil society family struggling to be effective. On the other hand, there's bad news - the youth caucus is not the only civil society family struggling to be effective. As one Canadian put it, "Why does it seem like we've be moving away from a real multi-stakeholder process?" (Side note: I think Canadians have been genetically modified to revere the concepts of "multi-stakeholder" and "process"... there's no other way to explain the national passion for these issues).

So why has civil society crumbled, particularly at PrepCom 2? At PrepCom 1, everyone liked to blame the fact that the meeting was in Tunisia for the problem. But, now we're starting to see that relocating to Geneva hasn't made much of a difference.

After a lot of brainstorming (and coffee), we're starting to understand that there are a lot of reasons for civil society implosion:

* The structure/format of the prepcom has not been very civil society firendly. Most of the work was quickly referred into sub-committees rather than dealt with in plenaries. According to UN/WSIS rules, civil society can have speaking slots in plenaries... but in sub-committees, they only have observer status. So, we have to work through governments, which is fine, but it's very hard with the difficulty in accessing the newest versions of the texts and accurate compilations of inteventions by various governments. We end up reacting to texts instead of being proactive in terms of stating what we really want.

* There has also been a lot of turnover in terms of people within families. For example, sometime around Tuesday we realized that of all of the youth caucus members present, only Titi and Nick had been involved in prepcoms in Phase I. Everyone else had only been able to participate in the Summit. We assumed everyone had experience in the issues and in the negotiating/lobbying process and skipped doing any capacity-building at the beginning of the prepcom. That was a mistake. Unfortunately, I think it's one that has been made by many groups.

* A corollary is that whenever there are new people involved in a process, there is a tendency to rehash discussions which have been had previously and to reinvent the wheel. While completely understandable, it makes it hard to move forward onto new topics until everyone feels they have had their say on the fundamentals.

* The WSIS leadership and governments have been very strict in terms of what issues they consider being "on the table". These are Internet governance, financing, and follow-up mechanisms to WSIS. For civil society, these are hardly ringing calls to action. We tend to identify with words like education, human rights, environment, peace, and health... which are seen as completed in Phase I.

* Civil society is not structured correctly to deal bring cross-cutting development issues forward into the topics which are being discussed. The family structure, based on stakeholder groups (women, youth, people with disabilities, etc) worked ok in Phase I when groups were fighting to see how many times they could get there group mentioned in the text. Now though, it's getting in the way of dealing with cross-cutting substantive issues which the groups have in common interest. What we need is some form of civil society leadership that can look at the issues each family has been raising for far, identify the areas of common concern and create working groups based on THOSE issues.

* And last, but VERY far from least, is that people need to feel like they are working for something. In phase I, a lot of civil society believed that their participation would result in new funded partnerships and/or recognition through the media, etc. That didn't happen. There was no new $ for 99% of the new civil society partnerships and ideas and the media ignored the Summit nearly entirely. So, there's no intrinsic motivation to be here and to work hard. No one believes there will be a personal or organizational payoff. So you have to REALLY care about the texts and principles to spend 12 hours a day slogging through words and phrases.

But the real question is, what can we do to turn these factors around before PrepCom 3 and any potential intersessional?