Stefania Milan
23 November 2005
interview
The World Summit on the Information Society was important for social movements to help them develop a better understanding of communication issues and it allowed different groups and different struggles to network. Terra Viva asked Sally Burch from the Communication Rights in the Information Society campaign to comment on how the summit helped social movements to mobilise around communications issues.
Was the World Summit in the Information Society important for social movements?
The summit process has been very important for movements and organisations working on communications issues in creating the connection that help to create movements. The CRIS campaign is the obvious example: it was built around the summit but looking beyond the summit and has a focus beyond the summit. World conferences since the 90s have been an opportunity for civil society organisations, especially on new issues, to meet at the global level, and those opportunities do not always come up in other contexts. Those interconnections often move on to other spaces and to other struggles and issues that make it possible to move the agenda forward. Those same interconnections are fundamental to making sure there is real follow-up from governments for the commitments they make.
And what about the WSIS Tunisian phase?
In the WSIS second phase it has been harder. Those interconnections happened more in the first phase on the general level. The 2nd phase has been more of a focus on specific issues, such as the financing issue and internet governance. It has been positive for that perspective. There has been a lot of work from civil society on that, and much less in other issues. Also it has been much harder to have a space for consensus, in part because of the way the Tunisian organisations have intervened in the process without seeming to have much to contribute to the process, but being more concerned with the way their government was treating them.
What about the future?
Some of the connections that have taken place will go to other spaces. Some will go to the internet governance forum, some others to the general follow-up mechanisms, which are not very clear to anybody. Some groups will to go to other spaces such as the World Social Forum, which is also an opportunity to make connections to other social movements not necessarily working on communication rights issues, but are working on similar social struggles, such as the intellectual property rights -- a big issue within the World Trade Organisation.
Was the complexity of the issues an obstacle to peoples engagement in the WSIS?
The issues were certainly difficult to communicate. But if you compare to three years ago, you will probably find much more awareness of the issue of communication within social movements. Because there has been a lot of work on raising awareness on these issues. But this does not mean that everybody understands them. The important thing is that we keep focusing on the important things and avoid getting caught up in the technical aspects. We have to stick to some simple and fundamental rights, such peoples right to freedom of expression and communication, which is relevant to internet governance.
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