| De: |
Terri Willard [ Profil ] |
| Sujet: |
GKP Action Plan and G8 DOTForce Experiences
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| Envoyé: |
Nov 7th, 2003 - 08:04:11 |
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Prior to the WSIS, I was involved in helping to coordinate two processes
to provide input to policies and programmes at the international level.
The first time was when the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) contacted
IISD at the end of 1999 to figure out how to get youth input to their
5-year Action Plan that they were developing. Since the GKP was having
their planning meeting in March 2000, we only had 3 months to run the
whole consultation process. We ended up creating a 6-week e-conference
called "Youth: Building Knowledge Societies (YBKS)" using young
volunteer moderators from around the world
(http://www.iisd.org/networks/ybks.asp). Those young people then
received travel fellowships to attend the GKP meeting in Kuala Lumpur
and present the conclusions and recommendations from the e-consultation.
Although I had no real sense of gender and ICTs at the time, my
recollection is that there was excellent participation in the
e-conference from a wide variety of young women w/ reps from Costa Rica,
Colombia, and India on the organizing committee. And the beautiful
wording of the final report was written by Katherine Hay - a young
Canadian former IISD intern. But, we didn't include any specific
sections on the needs of young women in particular.
All in all, the process went very well - we had 350 participants from
nearly 60 countries involved. The conclusions and recommendations were
outstanding. And they were well-received and incorporated in the GKP
Action Plan.
But then, nothing happened. The GKP Secretariat was moved from the US
to Malaysia and it took around 1.5 years for the network to really
coalesce again. So, a lot of the young people who had worked hard on
the recommendations became disappointed and frustrated and drifted off
to other things. When you're 18, 1.5 years feels like a lifetime to
wait to see results.
Based on that experience, I was VERY hesitant to do another big
consultation when the World Bank Institute asked IISD to organize youth
input into the G8 Digital Opportunities Taskforce (aka G8 Dotforce). I
didn't want to run a participatory process and then have people be
disappointed again. Particularly since the contract to organize input
was finalized with only a month or so to gather input before the G8 was
supposed to LAUNCH its report. So, this time, we just had the former
YBKS organizing committee quietly do some research to see what had
happened to the various youth-led projects we had found the year before
and write a short update
(http://www.iisd.org/networks/youthdotforce.asp).
After that experience, an intern working with me wrote a fairly scathing
review on the "Implications of the DOT Force and Genoa G-8 Summit on
Youth Organizations and Networks"
(http://www.iisd.org/pdf/2001/networks_dotforce_imp.pdf). We were more
than a little tired of the "too little, too late" mode of involving
young people in policy-making. Which is when/why we teamed up with the
GKP and TakingITGlobal to figure out how we could do a better job for
the WSIS process... Starting at the beginning of the process and having
two years for consultations and lobbying.
Terri Willard
Project Manager
Knowledge Communications
International Institute for Sustainable Development
http://www.iisd.org/
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