here is a note I have drafted on the basis of discussion at the
Specialist Groups Forum yesterday which might be represented as the
contrabution of the bcs to the summit...

if there are incomprehesibilities please let me know, and if anyone
has a different take or cut please say so



WSISues

The World Summit on the Information Society, part one, will be held in
Geneva in December 2003.  The second part will be held in Tunis in
2003.  This summit is convened by the ITU (International
Telecommunications Union) with support from UNESCO (United.. do I need
to do this?)

It follows a series of summits including that on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg last year and is intended to set a
framework for a range of policy issues which include bridging the
digital, divide.

The Department for International Development in Britain, (DfID),
prepared a white paper several years ago on Globalisation and
Development in which was proposed support for pro poor policies, for
international public goods, where it was suggested that Britain's
contribution to international development was through knowledge and
research, and where the Minister argued that the enemies of
international development were negativism and cynicism, and that
people of moral conscience had a obligation to oppose these.

The British Computer Society Developing Countries Specialist Group
(BCS DCSG) through the Information for Development Forum (idf) was
involved in the consultation process of producing the White Paper.  We
were also involved in the Global Knowledge Partnership process
initiated by the World Bank, and organised in Britain by the British Council.

When the UK national commission on UNESCO convened a work programme in
preparation for the World Summit, we participated in that, and were
represented in Paris at the initial meeting convened by UNESCO.  When
its strategy paper for the Summit was produced, we argued for, and
gained acceptance, that the interoperability of metadata standards
should be recognised as an international public good.

During the Creating Sparks Millenium Festival organised by the British
Association for the Advancement of Science we organised a meeting of
sixteen core professional societies, chaired by the President of the
BCS at that time, at which we produced a manifesto for the role of
information and communication technologies and the design of
information systems in the development of the information society.

Recognising that the section of the UNESCO strategy paper's
recognition of the role of information literacy was possibly the area
where we had the most to contribute as a professional institution, we
organised a working party on the topic to pull together what we
understood to be the current understanding of the issues on the topic.
The report of that work is available on www.ideography.co.uk/wsis-focus/meeting/21jan2003report.html

One of the issues which has predominated at recent world summits, is
the participation of civil society.  In Seattle and Genoa this took
the form of very large demonstrations outside, on issues of fair
trade, sustainable environments, treatment of third world dept, and
the globalisation and privatisation of intellectual property rights.
The response of the UN system was to set up a mechanism whereby the
representatives of civil society may be involved in the process of
formulation and decision taking, rather than the summit being simply
ministers of governments.  This partnership process was lead in
Britain by the British Council.

As the British Computer Society, the national representative of IFIP
(The Int.. do I need to .. ?)  and as IFIP is the international body
in consultation with UNESCO we also should have a direct role into
UNESCO and into the British Government, as well as participation
through the established channels.

Still the British Government hasn't decided which minister will lead
at the Summit, or who will go, according to the Foreign Office at the
last meeting of preparation of civil society.

It is now certainly too late to influence any further the process of
the Geneva summit.  We must wait for the declaration.

Once we see the declaration we may then decide it fully supports the
policies we have argued for, that it supports in part, or that there
are issues which we feel contravene our obligations to public good
outlined in our Charter.  We will organise a meeting, in collaboration
with the Information for Development Forum to form an opinion, which
will be published on the group list, [log in to unmask]  In
parallel we will organise a meeting in collaboration with the Learning
and Teaching Support Network in Information and Computing Sciences
(LTSN-ICS) on metadata, continuing the work already started,
[log in to unmask] Should it be necessary we will also
reconvene the workshop on information literacy.

On the basis of the results of these meeting we will then decide
whether there is a necessary work programme in preparation for the
summit in Tunis in 2005.

It seems likely that the core issues of the declaration will include
solutions to the digital divide, positions on intellectual property
rights, perhaps including reference to the EU proposed law on computer
patents, and possibly on the liberalisation of telecommunications
markets. All these are likely to be contentious, so it might be that
we are completely wrong and all that emerges is something anodyne with
which no one can disagree.  However the collapse of the Cancun round
of the World Trade Organisation discussion, following Doha, indicates
that international development is in choppy water.

ends