7-9:30 PM Monday, November 13th ***Free
Tiki Room at the Jamaica Bay Inn 4175 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey, Los Angeles California ***Food will be provided from 6:30 PM
Session 1 "Internet Democracy and Global Civil Society" (19:00-20:30 pm)
Speakers:Duncan Pruett, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, (ICFTU), Toshi Ogura, JCA-Net, Japan, Christopher Chiu, American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU) Session 2: "The Future of CSIF" (20:30-21:30 pm)
Speakers: Wolfgang Kleinwaechter (University of Aarhus, Denmark), Hans Klein (CPSR, US), Myungkoo Kang (Korea Internet Forum, Korea)
Civil Society Internet Forum (CSIF) was set up following the highly successful Civil Society Forum meeting at the Yokohama ICANN. Its main aim is to defend and extend use of the Internet as an area for developing global civil society beyond national boundaries. Working for democratisation of Internet governance and to ensure strong civil society representation on bodies setting Internet standards is a vital aspect of achieving this aim.
The ICANN At-Large elections provided a good opportunity for electing Directors to the ICANN Board that could counter its present domination by corporate interests. CSIF is strongly in favour of widening this election process that, for the first time, allowed Internet users the democratic right to elect representatives onto Internet governance bodies. We want to see elections take place as soon as possible for the remaining four Directors that were to be elected by the At-Large membership.
But democracy is not just about the right to vote. It is also about the right to organise. In any healthy democracy, voters are not just individuals, but members of civil society, able to come together to debate and to campaign and vote for candidates that reflect their views on social issues. Although the ICANN Board is a technical body, its decisions have important and far reaching social consequences internationally. We believe civil society organisations, such as those concerned with peace, the environment, women's rights, labour, etc, must organise together to make their voices heard in the ICANN At-Large election process if voters are to have a real choice of candidates. This was shown to be particularly necessary in countering the nationalism that dominated the Asia/Pacific ICANN elections. CSIF is proud of the role it played there in opposing nationalism with a crossborder campaign to select and support a nonnationalist civil society candidate. It came very close to getting her onto the ballot.
The social issues involved in the Domain Name System have been shown most clearly on the trademark issue, where corporate interests are trying to use trademark copyright to dominate over civil society interests. This seems to be particularly coming to a head over corporate opposition to the possibility of www.trademark.union.The first part of our meeting will discuss the key issues involved for civil society on Internet governance and has a range of speakers that are all well qualified to do so. In the second half of the meeting we want to perspectives for building CSIF as an international forum to represent civil society interests on Internet governance questions. --
-------------------------------------- John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com, johnk at firstlook.com