Common Cause is going international in its work on media reform. We are pleased to serve as a delegate to the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society here this week in Geneva, Switzerland. The summit is a multiple year effort to address information and communication needs worldwide. Back in 1998 the Tunisian government proposed that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have changed the way people think, behave, and communicate and that these emerging technologies warranted UN attention. In 2002, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan established a Summit Organizing Committee to coordinate the efforts of the various United Nations organizations, member nations, the business sector, and civil society groups like Common Cause. This is the last phase of the Summit before it culminates in Tunisia this November. Many of the issues that are being discussed are the same ones we discuss nationally with our colleagues in the Media and Democracy Coalition: access to information and technology, Internet governance, and corporate influence over content and distribution of news and programming.

There is a lot of writing going on here. The actual UN body (191 countries) goes through each framing document paragraph by paragraph, word by word. The civil society community sits in and listens and then organizes their own wordsmithing task forces, rewriting the official documents and making suggestions to the text that comes out of the UN body. The civil society groups then lobby individual governments to get the text included. The text changes that get the most attention deal with follow up and strategy beyond the conference in Tunis in November. I get the sense that countries like Brazil, Chile, and Egypt want to make sure there is language in the UN resolution that provides resources and technical support to expand the telecommunications infrastructure, while countries like Canada and the US seem to favor language that would put the onus of those efforts on the member states themselves. There is a parallel track for the private sector that I will investigate this afternoon. Stay tuned. And yes the view of the Alps is great and the cheese is all that.