Global Information Society Watch 2008
The Association for Progressive Communication (APC), the Third World Institute (ITeM), and Dutch development organisation Hivos, launched the watchdog report Global Information Society Watch (GISW 2008) at the Third Internet Governance Forum in India. It is the second edition of this landmark report and focused on “access to infrastructure”.
Click here to go to the GISW 2008 report.
One of the characteristics of the ‘Information Society” is the abundance of information. The key is finding ways to navigate, to sort the wheat from the chaff. And so it is with information about the Information Society. That is why the arrival of GIS Watch is so welcome. No other publication, to my knowledge, is dedicated to monitoring the ongoing evolution of the Information Society from the perspective of civil society, and particularly the growing movements for people’s empowerment rooted in the global South.
Marc Raboy – Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications at McGill University (Canada)
GIS Watch fills a major void in our collective knowledge base about the politics of the global information society. While international organizations and research institutions regularly churn out reports that are packed with data about the diffusion of information and communication technologies and offer mainstream assessments of policy trends, they generally devote little attention to what all this means for the global public interest. GIS Watch is different. The report gives center stage to public interest issues, and emphasizes in particular the perspectives of civil society actors and the concerns of the global South. It includes both provocative analytical essays and a series of illuminating case studies of policy developments in twenty two countries and five international institutions. Taken together, these materials connect the dots between national and global-level trends and give readers a “big picture” understanding of where we are heading and the risks and opportunities that entails. The Association for Progressive Communications and the Third World Institute are to be commended for performing an important public service, and I look forward to reading future editions of the report in the years to come.
Dr. William J. Drake – Director, Project on the Information Revolution and Global Governance/PSIO, Graduate Institute for International Studies, Geneva, Switzerland
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