[CS Bureau] e-science action line meeting & UNESCO

[Dr. Francis MUGUET]

Dear friends

Happy May first, the day of "the Lilly of the Valley".

The e-science action line meeting is going to
finally occur in Geneva, on 21 May afternoon
  after long and protracted negotiations, with UNESCO,
both at the content level
as the WSIS-SI WG coordinator and at
the procedural level, as a CSB interface.

Last year, this meeting occured in Beijing,
after a decision taken at the highest level at UNESCO,
( ie above the Science4D division )
at the suggestion of very powerfull lobbies.
The Beijing meeting to which I attended at great costs
and inconveniences turned to be a disaster for
the lobbies due to unexpected circumstances.
( Fate or grace of God :-) ! ).

This year, the full control of this action line
meeting has returned to the Science4D division
The CERN has proven also of a great assistance.
The director of CERN is going to be an official
speaker at the openning of the CSTD session, and this
going to help.
The CSB existence at the procedural level has proven
to be absolutely essential to maintain this action
line meeting open and inclusive, have been
crucial in order to defeat the lobbies of the publishing industry that
are against Open Access, and against the implementation
of the WSIS recommandations that are clearly in
favor of it.  	

The registration for this action line
http://www.itu.int/cgi-bin/htsh/edrs/ITU-SG/edrs15/edrs.registration.form
is not yet available.
When it will be, I will make an annoucement to the plenary list.

Now that the date of the last action line where UNESCO is involved,
has been fixed, then in the name of the CSB ( with c/c the exec. secret.
and liasons officers, as I did last year in Paris ),
I am going to reiterate that we need invitation letters from UNESCO to 
the action lines meetings to enable participants
to ensure their financial capacity and/or, visa and/or administrative 
agreements to attend those meetings.

I attented recently at UNESCO part of the
   176th session of the Executive Board  ( 10-26 April 2007 )
The procedural situation for Civil Society is not very good.
There are no Civil Society observers allowed ( even
but you may sneak in ) and more importantly they cannot
make any statement.
The highlight of this session was the discussion about
the Peter Smith scandal
( see report http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001501/150139e.pdf )
Statements from Civil Society observers about the current lack of ethics 
at UNESCO would have been welcome.

One point that is very worrying is the absence of transparency
concerning of the unduly delayed recruitment process of the director
of the Information Society division that has been vacant
since October 2006
http://www.wsis-si.org/UNESCO/CI335.html.
This position is crucial for the WSIS follow-up process.

Extremely valuable candidates among them Ph.D holding women,
have not been selected in the short list ( not public )
of people that have being recently interviewed in person.

Many people among the UNESCO staff and delegations
  are very worried.
The recent scandal seems to have speed up
the nomination process, but not in the direction of increased
transparency.
We may fear the worst choice.

Best

Francis


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Francis F. MUGUET  Ph.D
World Tour of the Information Society (WTIS)
muguet at wtis.org

UNMSP project : http://www.unmsp.org

World Summit On the Information Society (WSIS)
Civil Society Working Groups
Scientific Information :  http://www.wsis-si.org  chair
Patents & Copyrights   :  http://www.wsis-pct.org co-chair
Financing Mechanismns  :  http://www.wsis-finance.org web

Director
Scientific Information Developement Laboratory :
Knowledge Networks and Information Society
ENSTA
32 Blvd Victor 75739 PARIS cedex FRANCE
Phone: (33)1 45 52 60 19  Fax: (33)1 45 52 52 82
muguet at ensta.fr   http://www.ensta.fr/~muguet

MDPI Foundation Open Access Journals
Associate Publisher
http://www.mdpi.org   http://www.mdpi.net
muguet at mdpi.org       muguet at mdpi.net

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