Governance Challenges: First Lessons from the WSIS — An Ethical and Social Perspective

摘要

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), in its Geneva phase (2003) and in its Tunis phase (2005), has surely been an exciting experience, not in terms of the Summit itself, gathering respectively 11,047 participants (representing 1486 entities) and 19,401 (representing 1740 entities): most often the Summits remain events without big surprises — Tunis having perhaps escaped the rule. It has been really exciting in terms of preparation and participation: regional conferences before the Geneva Summit, PrepCom (Preparatory Committees) 1, 2 & 3 before each of the Summit’s phases, organization of different bodies, PrepCom3 resuming just three days before the start of the Tunis Summit, etc. From the time of the first UN Resolution until the post 2005 Summit position of the civil society, thousands of people have been thinking about an age, which seems both still to come, and where we are already living: the Information Age, the Information Society, the knowledge society, the digital society... They have started to think about warnings concerning the social and ethical issues.