The World Social Forum is certainly an innovative and impressive “festival of the Left” as a Guatemalan activist described it to me. The Forum gathers an incredible mix of activists and organizations from around the world, agitating for their various causes, in dozens of different languages. For many groups, it is clearly an opportunity for…
World Social Forum Day 4: A Carnivore’s and UN Activist’s Paradise
I went to several interesting meetings yesterday, the fourth day of the World Social Forum, including a high-level discussion of the Global Call for Action against Poverty and a debate on UN reform. As stimulating as the conferences were, and as interesting as the people I met, I have to say that the best part…
World Social Forum Day 3: UN Reform for Beginners
I am back in the shopping mall near the World Social Forum, being true to my California culture. I see lots of the participants like me with their WSF name badges shamelessly window shopping, using the nice toilet facilities (instead of the WSF porta-potties), and chowing down to processed food in the food court. I…
World Social Forum Day 2: Wonderful Chaos
Day Two of the World Social Forum was a difficult one, with meetings cancelled, interpretation not working, and the sometimes intense heat. Still, in the midst of it, I am finding things that give me hope. Where else can you find so many people who want to do good in the world? [9:30am] Lots of…
Day 1: World Social Forum
The World Social Forum 2005 started off with a loud boom — lots of really loud booms, actually, coming from the seemingly hundreds of drummers everywhere leading the hundred thousand or so marchers through the streets of Porto Alegre toward the main outdoor amphitheater for the opening ceremony of the Forum. It’s only day one…
The ODS and UN capacity
The ODS exemplifies how UN staff are often caught between idealistic expectations and meager resources. A couple of days ago I got a very informative and frank email from someone in the United Nations’ IT department regarding the UN’s Official Document System. On the practical front, he informed me that the IT staff had modified…
Uncivil Society
How do civil society networks deal with the inenvitable conflicts and competition among their own members while also maintaining a united front within international policy-making negotiations? I have been looking for reports and analysis of NGO organizational structures and conflict-resolution from other UN processes all day. So far I have been mostly unsuccessful. I did…
Civil Society’s Millennium Report Card: Will the Governments Pass or Fail?
[From CONGO Connections, Vol 6, No 2, January 2005] Five years after the Millennium Summit in 2000, governments will be gathering in New York to assess what progress has been achieved in realizing the Millennium Development Goals and the rest of the Millennium Declaration. The formal assessment will begin in March, when the Secretary General…
First reactions to the public ODS
The UN Official Document System went online publically recently. Here are my initial reactions to the new public interface. Back in the mid-1990s, when the web was in its infancy, I was working with WFM to try and get “publically released” UN documents out on the internet. UN officials were stubbornly resistant to the idea,…
Civil Society still outsiders at the General Assembly
After raising the slimmest of hopes, the GA keeps civil society out in the cold. For those of us who have been active at the United Nations on the role of civil society in the institution, we were hopeful that the report of the High Level Panel on UN-Civil Society Relations would open the possibility…