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?