6/9/03

These articles originally appeared on we!, our weekly newsletter.

This issue will feature several updates on civil society efforts at the WSIS.

In order to grant requests of people who have been asking for more details of existing regional caucuses and thematic working groups related to the WSIS, the moderators of the civil society plenary mailing list have begun collating these resources. This information has been posted in a list at the following link: http://www.wsis-cs.org/content.htm. So far, only those who are actively involved in the mailing list are included in the tally. The organisers are hoping to complete all the contact details of the ones already listed, and would like to add a one-paragraph "purpose" statement. Those who are involved in these caucuses and thematic groups are encouraged to participate in the mailing list and to give the appropriate information as stated above. Send a mail to to subscribe to the list.

The Content and Themes group has also announced that they will be creating a Drafting Portal to draft a consensus document from Civil Society for the Intercessional meeting in Paris, France after 31 May 2003. Thus, they are continuing to ask for names of people who are interested in working on the drafting process. They have expressed the need for people to help produce translations.

Information about the Content and Themes Listserv can be found at http://mailman.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/ct. The procedures for subscribing are listed in the site.

For those who have asked for guidance as to how to submit the documents and which formats to follow, information about these are now posted at the NGO Gender Strategies Working Group website at http://www.genderit.org.

Examples of information posted are the following:
Should caucuses use the template from Geneva and edit as appropriate?
e.g. Declaration: http://www.genderit.org/wsis/CS-draft-declaration-26-02-2003.doc
Action plan: http://www.genderit.org/wsis/WSIS-CS-ActionPlan.doc

More civil society updates will be posted as soon as they are made available.