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COMMUNICATIONS: Science Has the Word in WSIS Run-Up

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Sep 24 2003 (IPS) - Representatives from the international scientific community finally were able to convince the United Nations to take their contributions into account in the preparatory process for the World Summit on the Information Society, to be held here in December.

The astonishing advances in Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) would have been impossible without science, say experts from the sector.

The scientific perspective must be included when the WSIS defines ways to bridge the "digital divide" between rich and poor in access to these technologies, and when it establishes a model for an information society.

In other words, without scientific research and its advances, "we wouldn’t have the information society," says Roger Cashmore, one of the directors of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the birthplace of the Internet.

But the contribution of science to ICTs was omitted from the original agenda drawn up by the U.N. for defining this model of society, with sights on the first stage of the WSIS, Dec. 10-12 in Geneva. The second stage of the summit is to take place in Tunis in 2005.

In the preparations for the world summit, "there was a big gap," according to Cashmore, and to other institutions, including the International Council for Science (ICSU), Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Through the WSIS, the U.N. aims to reduce the differences separating rich and poor countries in employing new technologies. In December, the delegates are to adopt the principles and guidelines expressed in the summit’s final declaration and plan of action.

Participating in the preparatory process for the WSIS and drawing up these plans are government representatives of U.N. member states, delegates from the private sector and from civil society, including labour unions, community media, educators, and indigenous groups. The final two-week preparatory session ends here Friday.

But there was nobody specifically representing the scientific community in this process.

With great perseverance, however, scientists have convinced the government delegates to incorporate their concerns into the draft texts to be debated at the summit in December.

For example, the documents now include the term "global public good", noted Walther Lichem, head of international organisation affairs at Austria’s foreign ministry.

"In fact, knowledge is a classic example of a global public good," not the Internet itself, but knowledge produced by groups like CERN, he said.

The draft texts state that there should be universal and equal access to scientific knowledge, and equal opportunities for all in the creation, dissemination and use of information.

The scientists, like other groups participating in the WSIS preparations, are pressing for an open software system, in which computer programmes are free of cost or at least are more affordable, instead of "paying Microsoft", the software giant, said Diego Malpede, science and technology director at TWAS.

The digital divide, which includes disparities in access to telephone networks and the Internet, and to computers and electronics, is a symptom of a scientific divide as well, said Malpede.

In spite of technological progress, this gap continues to grow, and is evident, for example, in the rising prices of scientific publications, he added.

The physics department at a provincial university in a developing country, for example, cannot afford to pay 10,000 dollars a year for subscriptions to scientific journals, said the TWAS expert.

According to Lichem, all development of ICTs today should include "the element of knowledge, the element of understanding."

"We are all involved in the process of development and we all have a right to development, in all its dimensions, including the social dimension," said the Austrian official.

To remedy the exclusion of scientific community representatives in the earlier preparations for the summit, the ICSU, CERN, TWAS and UNESCO are convening a conference on "the role of science in the information society", to take place in Geneva Dec. 8-9.

Some 500 scientists and experts involved in the WSIS debates are to participate in the conference.

Among the presenters will be Britain’s Tim Berners-Lee, inventor – in the context of his work at CERN but as an individual – of the programmes that gave rise to the Internet.

Berners-Lee developed Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which allows movement from one site to another on the worldwide web, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), permitting communication among different computers connected to the Internet.

He is also behind the Universal Resource Localizers (URL), a system for assigning unique addresses for every web page, and the first version of the worldwide web itself.

All of these initials are recognised by the millions of Internet users around the world, but most do not know who Berners-Lee is. The inventor not only renounced intellectual property rights over his creations, he has continued to work to ensure that the Internet remains open to everyone and owned by no one.

Giving up these rights in relation to scientific discoveries is a general policy at CERN, said Hans Hoffman, another director of that institution.

The scientific conference to take place in the days preceding the WSIS, in addition to discussing issues directly related to the summit, will hold parallel sessions on education, health, economic development and environment.