In Bangkok a couple of weeks ago to attend the Asian Civil Society Forum http://www.acsf.info. Spoke about Internet governance and the WSIS task force on financing mechanisms. Powerpoint (use view notes page) here ascfajp.ppt. Intended as an introduction to to issues. Unfortunately, confusion over the session start time (interesting when you expect a 9AM start and the audience turns up at 9:30 after an extended plenary session) meant we dropped the financing discussion.
Foundation for Media Alternatives organized two session on "WSIS and Beyond" as a Communications Rights track at ACSF. FMA have summarized both sessions http://mail.fma.ph/pipermail/commrights-asia/2004-December/000237.html and http://mail.fma.ph/pipermail/commrights-asia/2004-December/000238.html
Later in the day, Markus Kummer and Nintin Desai, a few members of the WGIG (Ang Peng Hwa and Avri Dori) and some old friends (Izumi Aizu and Bertrand de La Chapelle) joined us by video conference from Geneva. Kind of them to get up early so we we could chat for an hour.
Most interesting for me was to hear that some governments argued that they be allowed to sit in on the "closed" session of the WGIG. I think it's a bad idea. Civil Society worked hard to get good people on the working group, we succeed and my personal opinion is they are there because we trust them to do a good job. That was the point of pushing to get them on in the first place. I think these semi-open sessions will make it very hard for governments (and perhaps others?) on the WGIG to speak openly. Observers are allowed to ICANN board meetings, they are a show, not place for discussion. I would like to see WGIG hold it's meetings as a mix of private sessions and public consultations.
I summarized the discussion we had in Bangkok for the Geneva side as:
1/ Appropriate content. Raised by someone from a Youth organization. Basically protecting kids against porn. Speaker also talked about obsolete content in their educational materials. Think the issue of content will come up again and again, and could be an issue we hear often from Youth.
2/ Access. Comment was that it all begins with access, without the rest is moot. Essentially an ICT4D issue, but in the WG I think implies issues around interconnection and settlements (ICAIS came from the AP region.)
3/ Spam. Mentioned as a central concern.
4/ IPR and TRIPS. Patents (particularly on drugs) and commoditisation of knowledge. Lack of transparency of the processes.
5/ Multilingualism and localisation, character sets and domain names (IDN)
There are some minority languages where work still needed on character sets. Localization important for the region. And IDNs. Internationalised content and IDN as the main issues for non-English speaking groups.
6/ Issues of sovereignty important. Not discussed in depth but understood to be important: "next to sovereignty is language."
7/ Indigenous people raised, from point of view of minority languages and also need to protect cultural heritage.
[and I forgot to mention
8/ People with disabilities (not mentioned to Markus or in the meeting, but this is one of the issues Thailand pushed during WSIS. And there are governance issues.)]