Sasha Costanza-Chock

This article briefly discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the CRIS campaign, describes the ways in which CRIS has mobilized to achieve various kinds of outcomes, and examines the structure of the campaign with a critical eye. It ends with an emphasis on the need for CRIS, and for civil society groups more broadly, to develop a firm stance on the minimum criteria for continued civil society engagement with the WSIS process.

• Social movement scholar Suzanne Staggenborg (1995) has examined the strategies used by various feminist organizations and the results they achieved, differentiating between cultural, mobilization, and policy outcomes. Of course, these categories overlap, but they can be used to carefully consider what is meant by movement success. In the case of the CRIS campaign, cultural outcomes would refer to the degree to which CRIS is able to bring ideas about communication rights into play, develop discourse, and frame issues in the media or in other public forums. Mobilization outcomes would refer to whether CRIS is successful at bringing together networks of individuals, organizations, and other movements to take action on communication rights issues. Policy outcomes would refer to CRIS success at influencing language in declarations, laws, and action plans, either within WSIS or in other policymaking arenas.
• The CRIS campaign has worked towards all three kinds of outcomes, though it is now focused primarily on achieving policy outcomes within the WSIS.

• Cultural outcomes
• One of the main CRIS activities has been the development of a series of '2 pager' documents useful for cultural outcomes in the sense that they summarize various complicated issues around communication rights in a format meant to be broadly accessible. However, Aliza Dichter (of www.mediachannel.org and member of the CRIS outreach working group) has criticized these documents, ostensibly designed to simplify communication rights issues for the broader public, as too difficult for people outside of academic or media policy circles to really engage with. She encourages communication rights activists to tell more stories, making abstract communication rights concrete with examples and personal narrative. There is no space to explore this further here; I will instead move to a sketch of the structure of the CRIS campaign. (The issues papers are reproduced in this journal and are available online, at www.comunica.org/cris/documents/issues.htm)

• Mobilization Outcomes
• The CRIS campaign is a decentralized network, with some highly active nodes (both individuals and organizations) and others that are relatively quiescent, which in some ways makes it difficult to discuss how issues of gender, class, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and other power inequalities cut through the campaign structure itself. We might take the membership of the various CRIS working groups (cris.comunica.org/home/workgroups.htm) as a kind of index.
• These working groups do have individual and organizational members from all continents, but the majority of members active on working group email lists (the primary means of coordination, another issue we will return to) so far have been those from Europe and, to a lesser degree, Latin America. The CRIS network is multilingual, with activities by campaign members in the various local languages and with campaign documents translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, and Italian. Still, global campaign coordination takes place almost entirely in English, with Spanish the most active second language.
• In addition, so far the primary actors within CRIS have been mostly (though not exclusively) white, of balanced gender, of the intellectual class that moves through the NGO and academic worlds, with steady internet access and user skills. The broader CRIS network that extends beyond the working group members is so far also mostly (but not exclusively) based in NGO and academic circles, with some degree of ties to independent media networks and media activists. While CRIS has made a few approaches to the Communications Workers Union in the UK, Communications Workers of America, and some other unions, the campaign generally has put little effort into (and has had little success in) engaging organized labour in either communication rights activity or the WSIS process. The campaign also lacks strong ties to poor people’s organizations either in the North or South, and has only peripheral links to groups that focus on either conventional mass street mobilizations, media-oriented protest activity, or direct action tactics.
• If the campaign hopes to bring communication rights into the WSIS process, a concerted effort needs to be made not only to craft language within the WSIS official documents (see below), but also to mobilize currently excluded segments of civil society. Dee Dee Halleck of Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Satellite Network put it this way: “The main activity of CRIS should be to get thousands of people and groups to register for the WSIS! Literally thousands - let's flood the ITU with accreditation requests.” One way to make issues of communication rights impossible for governments and the private sector to ignore would be to fill the WSIS meetings and plenaries with bodies, and the ITU email boxes and web forms with inputs.
• However, it's (relatively) easy to tell people about the WSIS and help them register, but individuals and groups already short on funds don't want to waste scarce resources sending delegates to yet another UN conference. The question of why they would want to do so only grows louder since the corporate invasion at WSSD Johannesburg. What's more, for a campaign that talks so much about ICT access, CRIS doesn't seem to have any systematic mechanisms in place for working with 'offline' groups. If CRIS is serious about bringing in the viewpoints of people 'left behind' by the so-called information society, it will have to learn how to truly incorporate their input and participation. Still, despite these criticisms, it remains true that the wide and growing, decentralized, network nature of CRIS is open. The successful attraction and incorporation of groups that are currently missing may later be key to the campaign’s current primary effort - the push towards WSIS policy outcomes.

• CRIS policy activity
• To that end, CRIS has had an active presence in several forums that feed directly into the WSIS process, including Bamako, the WSIS PrepCom 1, the 3 day Informal Meeting on Content and Themes, and others. CRIS has also had a presence in a variety of NGO, academic, and social movement gatherings, for example the World Social Forum, the 2002 Leeds Community Media conference, and the 2002 Barcelona conference of the IAMCR (International Association of Media and Communication Researchers), to name a few. At this time of this writing, there are also plans for CRIS to be active in the European Social Forum, the Montreal Global Forum on Community Networking, the 2003 World Social Forum, the European and Latin American regional WSIS meetings, and of course the PrepCom 2.
• The most important function CRIS plays at these forums is to guide less experienced civil society groups through the bureaucratic backwoods of the WSIS process. This was clear during the PrepCom1, where CRIS was able to incorporate many new members and the specific concerns they brought to the table, stepping back when appropriate but still providing some degree of guidance, strategy, and leadership in negotiating with the ITU Civil Society Division secretariat.
• For example, at PrepCom 1 the ITU CSD Secretariat had arranged for civil society delegates to meet in a separate building across the street from the 'real' meeting of national delegates. What’s more, the ITU had set up an academic-style conference agenda for the civil society meeting, which might have been intellectually stimulating but would have provided zero input to the decisions on accreditation, rules and procedure, and agenda that were being made by national delegates. CRIS took the lead in organizing civil society delegates to replace the ITU-appointed chair. This was a necessary step and allowed the reshaping of the planned civil society ‘conference’ into various working groups and caucuses that worked to monitor, respond to, and provide spoken and written input into the meetings of the national delegates.
• CRIS members were also key to arranging a Civil Society press conference at the end of PrepCom1. During a meeting with the ITU press staff, it became clear that they considered civil society voices hostile. ITU press staff not only refused to publicize the CS press conference or make their press list available to the CS press group, they also initially refused to even make a room available for the CS press group to hold their own conference. After a 20-minute deadlock on this point, CRIS members took the initiative and were able to secure a room by threatening to hold a press conference on the street corner, where the main story would become the exclusion of civil society groups from WSIS.
• To be fair, it’s still unclear to what degree the ITU Secretariat is actually friendly to civil society groups but simply incompetent, and to what degree they are purposefully acting to marginalize, sideline, and distract civil society actors from meaningful participation. Regardless, these anecdotes should call to mind Frederick Douglass’ maxim, ‘Power concedes nothing without demand.’ This brings us to the last point I want to make: the CRIS campaign, and civil society groups more broadly, need to determine their own minimal criteria for continued engagement with the WSIS process – and to clearly and publicly threaten withdrawal if those conditions are not met.

• Will CRIS take a stand?
• There’s a danger that CRIS will perpetually avoid the key decision of whether to remain inside trying to shape WSIS language, or pull out. If demands are not met and the decision is to withdraw, then the CRIS campaign must choose how to relate to WSIS from the outside: either ignore it and focus efforts elsewhere, or leverage the mainstream media coverage it will generate in order to push forward communication rights discourse in the mass media and in other arenas at local, national, regional, and global levels. The threat would be made more effective by a promise: to organize a counter-summit, along with other forms of protest, media actions, or disruptions.
• It's possible that the stance will never be taken, the threat never made, and the CRIS campaign will by default continue to focus on careful attempts to influence small clauses within WSIS declarations and action plan language. I don't mean to suggest that this is not one possibly worthwhile activity. This is fine, if it is a strategy that is thought over, agreed upon, and pursued. If it emerges by default, despite continued inhospitable conditions to civil society input, then (to put it bluntly), CRIS may end up banging its head against the wall inside the halls of WSIS to little effect, missing a brief window of opportunity to push communication rights into the media eye and more firmly onto the agenda of the broader global justice movement. WSIS will become just another obscure forum for technocratic infobabble that masks a further shift towards corporate control of the information and communication commons.
• Tactics of counter-summit and protest are no panacea. Deciding to exit the summit might dissipate CRIS momentum, which has up to now been built around and through the WSIS process. But it might also free CRIS up to focus more on broadening its base and to work through other cultural/mobilization arenas like the World Social Forum, or other policy arenas at local, national, regional, or transnational levels.

• Conclusions
• ∑ In terms of cultural outcomes, CRIS should continue to develop materials to serve as accessible starting points for broad-based discussion of communication rights, and also should develop a strong, coherent press strategy;
• ∑ In terms of mobilization outcomes, CRIS needs to approach segments of civil society concerned with communication rights but not currently engaged in the WSIS process, including independent media, organized labor, poor people’s movements, direct action and street mobilization networks, and the broader movement for global justice;
• ∑ In terms of policy outcomes, CRIS has so far been successful at providing a degree of experience and leadership to civil society groups working within the WSIS process. Given the disappointing exclusion of civil society from important parts of that process, coupled with the encroachment of private corporations, CRIS needs to work with other civil society groups to develop a (relatively) unified bloc that presents a firm stance on minimal requirements for continued civil society engagement with WSIS. If these requirements are not met, this bloc should withdraw from WSIS and work from the outside to a) leverage WSIS media coverage to call attention to communications rights issues not on the WSIS agenda, possibly through a counter-summit, and/or b) shift its energy to mobilization in other forums and at other levels that might be more effective.
• Finally, WACC’s decision to fund a full-time CRIS campaign coordinator certainly makes it easier to envision these and other goals moving substantially forward over the coming year.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a graduate student at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and coordinator of the CRIS-Youth Arm. Email him: Esta dirección electrónica esta protegida contra spambots. Es necesario activar Javascript para visualizarla

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