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This chapter focuses on the evolution of civil society participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process and the rise of “multistakeholderism” as a new principle with the potential to inform more of information and communications technology (ICT) global governance. After discussing the role of the WSIS in fostering a new trilateral relationship among governments, private industry, and civil society and in promoting international diplomacy, the chapter looks at the Carlsbad Treaty of 1819, the debate over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the Global Information Infrastructure Initiative, and the Working Group on Internet Governance.

This chapter examines whether the United States has a consensus that differs from the preferences of non-dominant actors, whether the current global governance mechanisms for information and communications technology (ICT) are working well or broken, how the current arrangements on global governance of electronic networks affect non-dominant actors, and what scholars and researchers can do to help practitioners in the field of ICTs. The chapter first considers the so-called barriers to entry in ICT before turning to the priorities of the “rest of the world” (developing countries and transitional economies). It then discusses the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as a site of contestation over global ICT governance, private sector self-governance, and market powers.

In 2000, the Group of Eight (G8) created a multistakeholder group called the Digital Opportunity Task Force to address international questions on information and communications technology (ICT) from a variety of perspectives on the development spectrum. Two years later, it released a report entitled Louder Voices, which examined why developing countries have little participation in international ICT decision making. This chapter examines the main findings of the Louder Voices report and relevance in the light of the World Summit on the Information Society. In particular, it analyzes the domestic and international institutional issues that can limit the effectiveness of developing countries’ participation. It highlights domestic constraints and capacity building as the most pressing problems, and calls for sophisticated leadership to enable developing countries to participate and defend their interests effectively in international negotiations.

Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, which ran from 1983 to 2008 in mostly independent, alternative newspapers as well as online, had an important effect on representing and shaping the LGBTQ, and especially the lesbian, community in the latter decades of the 20^th century and the first decade of the 21^st century, a time of great change for the LGBTQ community. Within the world of the comic strip, information, information behavior, and the exchange of information play a key role in helping build and maintain community among the (mostly lesbian) characters. In turn, the identities of the individual members of that community are shaped by that evolving community. This essay will use Jaeger and Burnett’s theory of information worlds as a framework for examining how information and information behaviors help to form and maintain the information world of the lesbian community depicted in Dykes To Watch Out For. It will demonstrate that, as an insider in a marginalized community, Bechdel framed the information world of that community through her art and exported it to other communities outside of her world, thus helping to shape the information worlds of “real-world” lesbian communities over the quarter century that the strip was published.

This chapter introduces the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet and Ten Internet Rights and Principles (IRP Coalition 2011, 2013). Under the leadership of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition at the UN Internet Governance Forum, the IRPC Charter is the outcome of a cross-sector collaboration between civil society organizations, human rights experts, scholars, and representatives from the (inter-) governmental and private sector to provide an authoritative, human rights-based legal framework for decisions around internet design, access and use. Essential to this project’s success was an early decision to anchor the work in precursor civil society initiatives and international law. The coalition building strategy that underpins the Charter brought a range of actors together, face-to-face and online, in the spirit of web-enabled collabowriting based on “multistakeholder participation”. A commitment to forging alliances and cooperation across diverse sectors in order to ensure human-centered internet policymaking has been a key factor in the success of the IRPC Charter to articulate a viable framework for rights-based agenda-setting in a policymaking terrain dominated by powerful techno-commercial interests and competing political agendas.

This chapter focuses on ‘multi-stakeholderism’ in the international ICT4D arena, and particularly on discussions around Internet governance. It begins by exploring the differing roles of governments, the private sector, and civil society in general, noting that the poor are almost always absent from discussions that concern them. The evolution of so-called multi-stakeholder dialogue with respect to ICTs and telecommunications is then examined in the context of the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 and 2005, and then in the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. The various institutional multi-stakeholder structures adopted by the ITU, ICANN, and the IGF are discussed to highlight the differing interests of governments, the private sector, and civil society.

This chapter focuses on two events that preceded the IWY intergovernmental conference and NGO tribune: a “journalists’ encounter” and a seminar on women in development. The journalists’ encounter was organized by the UN’s information agency, which sponsored Third World media fellows and invited scores of other journalists to discuss media coverage of women, an issue of considerable interest among feminist activists and IWY planners. The development seminar was sponsored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) via the American Association for the Advancement of Science and focused on crafting development strategies that would improve rather than diminish women’s status. Discussions included women’s access to credit, recognition of women’s uncommodified subsistence labors, and greater attention to local priorities and solutions. The chapter explores how these two issues intersected as Third World intellectuals protested against Western domination of media representations, echoing feminist concerns about male-dominated mass communications media.