By IPS Correspondents
GENEVA, Aug 12 2003 (IPS)

The first ever World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva this December is attracting a wide cross-section of civil society. But do these organisations know what they want?

Views on what the summit can do are as diverse as the civil society groups taking part. It depends who you ask. There are people who want to look at this through a human rights perspective; others look at this through the very practical aspect of how they can improve life in an isolated village.

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) has lofty aims on who it wants to include in the summit process. The aim is to give a voice to just about everyone, and to many through civil society.

More than 2,000 civil society organisations have registered already. With the first half of the events taking place in Geneva in December 2003 followed by the second part in Tunis in 2005, the summit is already breaking new ground in terms of its organisation and structure. The long span is intended to encourage long-term participation.

The organisers are pulling out all the stops to bill this as something more than just another governmental talking shop. They want the summit to be seen as a place where government, business and representatives of civil society can come together for a meaningful exchange of ideas and plans.

This "new dialogue" began life as an initiative of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 1998 when it recognized that the gap between information ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ was increasing. Also seeing the need for the summit, the United Nations (UN) then asked the ITU to take the lead role in its preparation.

The so-called "digital divide" between rich and poor is continuing to widen. According to the United Nations Human Development Report, industrialised countries with only 15 per cent of the world’s population are home to 88 per cent of all Internet users. Less than 1 per cent of people in South Asia are online even though it is home to one-fifth of the world’s population.

The situation is worse in Africa. There are only 14 million phone lines for 739 million people. That is fewer than the number of phones in Manhattan or Tokyo. Eighty per cent of those lines exist in only six African countries. There are only a million Internet users on the entire continent compared with 10.5 million in the UK.

Even if telecommunications systems were in place, most of the world’s poor would still be excluded from the information revolution because of illiteracy and a lack of basic computer skills. In Benin, for example, more than 60 per cent of the population is illiterate. Add to this the fact that four-fifths of websites are in English, a language understood by only one in 10 people on the planet.

Canadian Wayne Lord, a member of the United Nations sponsored Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, feels strongly that despite concerns about some negative aspects of globalisation, indigenous peoples must get on the right side of the so-called digital divide.

"Indigenous people in particular missed the industrial revolution, so it is so much more important that they don’t miss what’s coming up with the new information society," says Lord.

The diverse nature of the civil society groups preparing to take part in the summit could lead to a lack of clarity in agreeing an agenda for an information society, some organisers have said. But Claude-Alain Danthe from the World Alliance of YMCAs says the diversity of the groups is also a welcome resource. "It’s true there’s a problem but there is also a richness because you have a lot of diverse interests," Danthe says.

Organisers are concerned also whether civil society groups will prepare themselves in time for meaningful participation. "This is the first stage of the World Summit in Geneva, so what’s critical in this plan of action is to get indigenous peoples through the door and at the table," says Lord. "You have to be hopeful, there’s no point being negative about it. So we have to look at what is the potential of a world summit with its own plan of action."

With so many forces at play, the issues surrounding the information society take on a dimension that go beyond governments, business and civil society. Already there is the question whether or not the UN can make an impact.

Many of the civil society groups taking part see the nature of this new-style UN sponsored summit as recognition that the UN is not the only driver on this one. But it remains one of the main objectives of this summit to sensitise the whole UN system to take into account the information society.

*Brian Thomson is also correspondent for the InfoSud News Agency.

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