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Partnership, Informatics and Participation
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The Partnership, Informatics and Participation project - PIP - involves the design and development of informatic processes to support local, national and international initiatives in follow-up, or related, to the agreements, declarations and programmes of action from the recent series of global conferences - from the 1990 Children's Summit in New York through the 1996 Habitat II Conference in Istanbul, and including the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna and the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing.
The PIP project has at its foundation three elements:
- Partnership - the magnitude and nature of the local and global challenges that we face calls for a partnership among those who are involved and who are affected. The links between different issues are such that partnership is essential between and among those working in different areas.
- Informatics - the combination of increasing computational power and data storage and ease of communications with a growing convergence between forms of digital communications, broadcasting and information management - is accelerating the transition to an "information age", while providing unprecedented opportunities for connecting local and global processes, and for integrating information from many different fields.
- Participation - Broad-based participation in planning, in contributing to decision-making, and in monitoring and implementing decisions and actions is essential in order that all perspectives of an issue need to be heard if intelligent, sound and fair decisions are to be made and corresponding actions to be taken.
Key elements of the design of the online process include:
- the development of an extensive network of partnerships, within and between communities, within areas of interest, among schools, colleges and universities and with local governments, that would explore ways of building on the inherent qualities of information and communications technologies that allow and encourage partnership and participation
- the development or use of an integrated geographical database web server model, within which would be the agreements from these and other global conferences and the opportunity to register initiatives in response to the agreements - whether from a community-based local level to national and global networks - with systematically developed links to related online resources and processes. The online framework needs to provide for a variety of forms of integration with local in-person processes with widely varying degrees of access to information technology and communications, and to connect with the use of a local mapping process based on the Green Map System - http://www.greenmap.com
- design and development of online meeting and gathering spaces, in ways that: enable easy access to any information or documentation related to the meetings, including information concerning the participant; provide clear understandings as to the conditions of the meeting, e.g. where the meeting is on a continuum between public and private, and; address the issue of participation of those whose access to the online environment is either limited or non-existent
- the effective use and management of electronic mailing lists - listservs - facilitated by user-defined profiles of interests and needs, and combined with web sites and online meeting processes - and with provisions for reaching out to and including people, organizations and communities without online access
In a broader context, PIP is being developed as an initiative to respond to the need for clear, effective online structures for public participation in the process of governance - enabling broad-based involvement in discussion, deliberations, decision-making, planning, observation and direct participation in a broad range of issues of public concern - including the preservation of the natural world, its people, and their fundamental human rights.
In particular, the project will explore ways of supporting a People's Millennium Assembly and a Non-Governmental Millennium Forum that are being considered in response to an invitation from the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.
PIP has grown directly from a "Partnership Plan of Action" proposal that was developed during the preparations for the 1996 Habitat II conference in Istanbul on the "Right to Shelter" and "Sustainable Cities". Central to the project is support of a partnership framework for broad-based participation in monitoring and implementing the provisions of the Habitat Agenda, and linking that with Local Agenda 21 and/or grassroots sustainable community initiatives.
PIP incorporates an information ecology framework, that treats information systems as ecosytems, and that takes into account both the internal dynamics of information ecosystems and addresses the relationships of information ecosystems with social, institutional and natural ecosystems.
Partnership, Informatics and Participation is a project under development by a Working Group of the NGO Committee on Human Settlements, which in turn is a committee of the Conference of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations. For additional information, contact:
Updated: 1998.03.23