By IPS Correspondents
GENEVA, Dec 12 2003 (IPS)

Civil society groups’ issuance of their own version of a declaration – apart from the official document of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that ended Friday – reflects their disappointment over the meeting’s failure to push for people-centred information and communication societies.

Activists did not have very high expectations in the first place, pointing out even before the Dec. 10-12 summit that there was too much technology in the WSIS and not enough development.

On Friday, 54 governments endorsed the official declaration of principles and plan of action stemming from the WSIS, which drew 10,808 participants from governments, international organisations, the business sector and non-government organisations.

But there is a key difference, activists say, in the civil society declaration that they released on Thursday.

– At the heart of our vision of information and communication societies is the human being,” declared Sally Burch, executive director of the Agencia Latino-Americana de Informacion (ALAI) and a member of the civil society content and themes drafting committee. ôWhile technologies are fundamental means of development, they must not become ends in themselves.”

The declaration comes as a rebuke of what has become, in civil society’s view, ôa techno-centric vision that the official declaration has taken, limiting the issue of the digital divide to a simplistic equation of development expressed in terms of connectivity to the Internet".

‘’We are here to carve our own space and be the voice to tell the stories that governments and the private sector sometimes do not want to hear,” Al Alegre of the Philippines, convenor of Asian civil society organisations for the WSIS, said. He added that the civil society document focuses on key issues like public domain and culture, knowledge and linguistic diversity.

‘’We struggled to climb this summit and we will persevere now that we are here,” he said.

The civil society declaration, called ‘Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs’, is anchored on four main themes- social justice and people-centred sustainable development, the centrality of human rights, culture, knowledge and the public domain, and enabling environment of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

‘’We’re encouraged by the emphasis on the participation of developing countries in building the information society and access to ICTs as a right of everyone, which is not a fundamental right as far as governments are concerned,” Reza Salim of the Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, a non-government groups that supports education projects incorporating ICTs in rural areas, said in an interview.

The document is actually the result of two years of worldwide consultations among civil society organisations from diverse backgrounds and expertise.

ôWhat’s been very important about the WSIS experience is the possibility that was not foreseen at the beginning to have so many different experiences gathering together from different backgrounds and finding a space to dialogue and come up with a common vision, core principles and common positions on issues,” said Claudia Padovani, head of the Italian chapter of the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) campaign.

Unlike the official declaration, the civil society version gives prominence to the reaffirmation of human rights standards, detailing specific rights under the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights as well as those that particularly apply to the information society.

Citing the ôweakness" of the provision on the global commons or the public domain of global knowledge, the declaration also calls for the review of the regime of limited intellectual monopolies of intellectual property rights and defends free software for its benefits to developing countries.

Of the official document, Alegre said: ”There has been too much politics between and among governments that hindered it to be truly visionary document.”

While Burch acknowledged that the spirit and language of civil society’s proposals are somehow articulated in the official declaration, she expressed dismay over provisions concerning information security, the military application of ICTs, and the exclusion of the concept of the community media.

ôWe were not really expecting very much from the declaration. We knew there were pressures for this document to be adopted. In any case, it’s a negotiation and consensus which have been diluted very much. Most of it is very vague on many issues, not to mention a very strong support for the neoliberal dominant trend,” said Padovani.

The just-ended WSIS is the first phase of the summit, to be followed by the second in Tunisia in November 2005, where some of the debates over core issues here are expected to continue.

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