Opportunities to participate in and to reform institutions dealing with information society issues

You should all be very familiar by now with the first two areas on
which Consumers International has focused in its work to advance the
interests of consumers in the digital age.  These are of course
access to knowledge (A2K), and broadband; these making up the "A"
and "B" of the areas A, B and C into which our programme website A2Knetwork.org is divided.

But the third area, "C", which not as many of you may recall, is
perhaps even more important.  It stands for "Consumer rights and
representation in the information society", and concerns the need
for consumers' voices to be heard and respected in policy-making
institutions that affect modern technology and communications. 
There are three ways in which you will be able to contribute to this
work during 2012, and they are each outlined below.

Many of you participated in an online survey on this theme during
2011.  A report on that survey will be presented by our expert
consultant Norbert Bollow at the March meeting, "Consumers in the
Information Society", and it is also attached to this email in
draft.  Drawing on the survey, the paper highlights a number of
institutions at which consumers are under-represented, either due to
our own capacity and resource limitations or because those
institutions' structure and processes are designed, wittingly or
otherwise, to exclude the perspectives of consumers.  Please
consider now whether you would like to participate at one of these
institutions, and then attend our March meeting to find out
how you can apply for support from CI to do so.

We will also be fortunate to hear from two other experts on these
topics at the meeting: Ang Peng Hwa of Wee Kim Wee School of
Communication and Information, Singapore, and Alan Finlay of the
Association for Progressive Communications.  Alan will be tracking
the progress of the project and writing a follow-up report, and
would particularly like to meet with those who responded to the
online survey in 2011, to conduct short interviews face to face.  If
you are available to participate in such an interview with Alan
(7 March would be the ideal date), please let me know now.

Supplementing the report about our 2011 online survey on consumer
representation in the information society, Norbert has been also
been working hard on the development of a dynamically generated
textual map of Internet governance issues and institutions. We
invite you all to contribute to this Internet governance map. 
You can do so by browsing the draft map at http://idgovmap.org/map_html/
and finding issues or institutions that are of interest to you, then
contributing new or missing information, by clicking the "Edit
source" link or by following the link to the Internet governance
mapping mailing list at the bottom of each page.

--
Dr
Jeremy Malcolm
Project Coordinator
Consumers
International
Kuala Lumpur Office for
Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 7726 1599
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