Once more in the WSIS process, civil society has had to face frustrations on finding the difficulties in carrying out their work in the exhibition hall where the summit meeting took place (Palexpo). Although the caucuses have a reduced working space (totally inadequate for any type of meeting) of more concern is the lack of an adequate space for the civil society plenary meetings, which met today in a meeting room lent by the International Journalists’ Federation on observing that the space given by the organization had neither chairs nor a microphone. Various civil society representatives have also stated that they have difficulties in carrying out their work, as they do not have facilities to access Internet or even a public phone booth (in the Summit meeting hall there is only one and reaching it is a real challenge).
Furthermore, the excessive deployment of security only makes participants’ mobility more difficult. A group of experts has objected that the security mechanisms implemented are not only inefficient, but are a violation of privacy as they have a chip which makes it possible to continuously track people registered at the summit.
One of the first to suffer the consequences of disproportionate security was the space of Polimedia Lab (We are seized!), a parallel event to the summit organized by the Genevao3 Collective, which had proposed holding workshops with the aim of sharing technical knowledge to promote the production of content by independent media. Yesterday the participants in this event were evicted by the police under the justification of the installation’s lack of security. Following negotiations, the government of Geneva promised new housing to the organizers. However when they got there they found that they could not use the premises either. The organizers of the event have considered what has happened as a form of repression against the proposal of alternative participation fora.
A fairly generalized perception is that the hall where the main events are taking place looks more like a business fair that a United Nations summit meeting. The deployment of stands with tourist information by the countries and devoted to the promotion of computer products by multinational companies no doubt contributes to this perception. The show of computers in the Palexpo hall would seem to have purely advertising purposes as they are not aimed at being used by the participants and those that are operating are doing so with difficulty and are so arranged that there seems to be no practical way of using them (in fact the only way is to remain standing, which clearly discourages any length of use).
