The interactive nature of internet has opened up the possibilities of enabling public participation in global policy-making processes, hitherto confined to few selected government, private and civil society sector representatives.
Various local, regional and international policy consultations, preceded by online discussions through out the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), demonstrate that even a global policy dialogue such as this can be inclusive and participatory in nature. Since the early stages, civil society organisations organised thematic and regional online consultations to elicit local and regional views for formulating their inputs for the Summit.
Numerous civil society actors across the globe network are engaged into policy discussions on WSIS process, using variety of online collaborative tools and applications, ranging from bulletin boards to text chats, from videoconferencing to virtual workspaces. OneWorld, a network of thousands of partners engaged in promoting human rights and fighting poverty worldwide using ICTs, has successfully captured Southern reflections on information society issues and concerns as emerged in web-based discussion forum Information Society: Voices from the South for presenting in the Geneva Phase of the Summit.
Periodic online discussions hosted by World Bank attract large number of participants, especially from the countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Recently, the Bank attracted more than 1300 young people in an online discussion and subsequently organized a series of videoconferences allowing the young people to share their perspectives on poverty, as a precursor of its Sanghai Conference on scaling up poverty reduction in May 2004.
Realising internets role in democratisation and good governance, developed nations, especially countries in Europe and North America have been exploiting this media to enable their citizens participate in governance and policy-making processes. The recent proposal of setting up a Global Alliance for ICT Policy and Development, as the successor of the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies task Force (UN ICT TF) can be seen as the corollary of such approaches adopted at various regional and national levels. The idea of the Alliance was first conceived in the Seventh Task Force meeting in Berlin during November 2004..
A outline of the proposed Global Alliance by the Internet Governance Project delineates basic modalities of the nature and functions of the Alliance, quite akin to existing global alliance mechanisms in HIV/AIDS, science and engineering, TB drug development, workers and communities. Though internet-mediated knowledge flow has strengthened civil society participation in UN coordinated intergovernmental political negotiations recently, high level political meetings hosted by United Nations and other international and regional entities use print media and face-to-face communication, limiting the scope of participation only to few accredited representatives. Advent of internet provides the opportunity to relevant stakeholders participate in such proceedings. The vision of Global Alliance is to materialise the concept of virtual collaborative decision-making processes using tools such as mailing lists, bulletin boards, discussion forums, text chats, video conferencing and other emerging options.
While the Global Alliance will build on the existing UN ICT TF mechanism, mandated to operate till the end of this year only, it will broaden the nature and scope of the latters work, catalysing the multi-sectoral efforts in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Institutionalising the UN ICT TF mechanism started in March 2001, to provide UNs global leadership to the multitude of efforts undertaken by various actors to bridge the digital divide. In a meeting convened by the UN in April 2000, independent experts from industry, academia, civil society and government deliberated on the modalities of operations of the Task Force. It is observed, ICT has been extremely beneficial to those nations that have used it with determination and enthusiasm as part of their national development strategies to accelerate development
While benefits from ICT investment may not be immediately perceptible in all cases (several years passed before such evdence became available in the United States following investments in ICT in the 1980s), panelists urged nations that had not yet launched national ICT initiatives to catch the Internet Express without further delay. (United Nations. Economic and Social Council. Report of the high-level panel of experts on information and communication technology. 2000. p. 5)
It is also noted that participation of private sector and civil society in decision-making is imperative for successful implementation of ICT for meeting the development goals. Further, the Meeting delineated the key roles for the United Nations in promoting the ICT for development, especially in the following areas:
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Meeting development goals for ensuring human rights and promoting sustainable development warrants concerted global action.
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Inequalities in access to ICTs and bridging the digital divide calls for a global response.
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UN can foster the use of ICTs in development and play a role of an arbitrator in legal and policy issues.
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UN can assist the Member States in developing their understanding the use of ICT in development, thus potentially helping them overcoming prevailing socio-cultural barriers in ICT adoption.
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Creation of decision-making tools such as ICT-related projects inventory can also be undertaken.
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UN system can act as the knowledge bank in identifying, reviewing and disseminating best practices in ICT for development.
This was also reiterated in a Ministerial Declaration issued by the UN Economic and Social Council (UN ECOSOC) held in July 2000 and also in the Millennium Declaration emerged from the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000, both endorsing UNs commitment in harmonising international efforts to bridge the digital divide. In its first inaugural meeting in November 2001, the Task Force adopted its Plan of Action and proposed establishment of six thematic Working Groups. Four Working Groups, however, have attracted several experts from developed and developing regions in the areas of ICT Policy and Governance, Enabling Environment, Human Resource Development and Capacity Building and ICT Indicators and MDG Mapping.
While the multi-stakeholder mechanism incubated at the Task Force has helped the creation of a new approach to provide global leadership to international efforts to fight against digital divide, it also suffers from constrained posed especially by limitation of resources and diverse institutional framework in various societies. Task Force has played a role in WSIS and the efforts need to be sustained much beyond the Tunisia process.
Global Alliance can function as the common platform for ICT-led development efforts as outlined in two global policy discourses MDGs and WSIS. Discussions are already underway as to see how the Alliance proposal can further be institutionalised in the upcoming MDG +5 Summit in September and WSIS II in November.
Commending the Global Alliance idea as it adopts more open and collaborative modalities, Rik Panganiban, Communications Coordinator of Conference of NGOs in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations (CONGO), raised questions on the governance structure of the Alliance. During the Open Consultation on the Alliance to discuss the modus operandi, membership, governance and funding of the Alliance, held on 21 February in Geneva, he said, the mission of the Alliance could be to create a stable platform for the existing actors in government, the private sector and civil society who are already deeply involved in ICT policy making to interact and collaborate on an ongoing basis. This would serve the important objectives of policy coherence and resource sharing. He further noted that engaging stakeholders not already involved in the policy making process whose views are nonetheless critical for the formation of effective and widely-supported ICT policy should also be the Alliances objective.
Michael Gurstein sought to explore a bottom-up approach for forming this global coalition by working up from the current activities, interests and networking processes of actual grass roots/community users towards an inter-linking of and by them and then towards an aggregation of such networks towards a point where the broader regional and global issues might be addressed.
Sarbuland Khan, Director of the UN Division for ECOSOC Support and Coordination and head of the UN ICT Task Force, noted that the purpose of the Global Alliance would be to "integrate ICTs into the overall UN development agenda." So the alliance will bring together the WSIS implementation efforts with the Millennium Development Goals and the broader UN development agenda, as encompassed in the UN Millennium Declaration and the various UN conferences on women, sustainable development, population, social development, etc.
While the Alliance can successfully be built upon the existing institutional framework of the UN ICT Task Force, it is imperative to assess the possibility of integration and exploitation of different internet-based collaboration platforms to devise the mechanism. Civil society plays a significant role in translating the ideals of the Alliance into action,
globally and locally, along with the government and private sector players.
A roundtable will be held in New York on 13 September on the Global Alliance and then it will be launched formally at the WSIS in November in Tunis.
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