Rio+10 has APC casting our minds back to 1992 and how we connected NGOs around the world electronically for the first time
The news that United Nations General Assembly on Rio+10 has reached agreement on some vital starting points for the organization of Rio+10, has been greeted with nostalgia by some of APC's oldest members.
Source : APC
Montevideo, URUGUAY -- The news that United Nations General Assembly on Rio+10 has reached agreement on some vital starting points for the organization of Rio+10, has been greeted with nostalgia by some of APC's oldest members.
The original Rio conference, the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, was an historic event, because it brought together the largest number of heads of state, as well as the single largest gathering of NGOs and citizen activists to date. It was also the first time that electronic communications were provided to facilitate activists' participation in a UN summit, and APC was the innovator of that service.
The Earth Summit was the first UN-sponsored forum in which NGOs were given official status to make presentations, thanks in a significant measure to APC's facilitating role in the conference preparations. Two years earlier, the UN had begun working with APC to disseminate official summit information to NGOs. Background documents on the issues to be debated, policy drafts, country briefings, and logistical bulletins were posted by the UN to a set of computer conferences shared internationally on all APC networks. This allowed several thousand civil society groups around the world to be kept informed at very little cost to the UN.
Then in 1992, during the 10 days of the Summit, APC technicians and support staff from member organizations around the world set up two official communications centres, one providing service at the official UN site, the other at the NGO Global Forum, the 'alternative summit', across town. APC made its services, including promotion, training and information facilitation, available at no charge to the participants. NGO representatives from all over the world used these to contact their colleagues back home, often daily, making it much easier to evaluate official governmental declarations and to create and air alternative views. This resulted in modifications to resolutions on the basis of contributions from concerned activists from around the world who were not physically present at the conference.
All this took place at a time when computer communications technology was only just beginning to be used internationally, yet thousands of NGOs attending this summit and others (until 1995 when the Internet as we know it had really taken off) used APC computer networks to keep themselves informed of UN summit-related issues and logistics.
The APC was the primary provider of online services later for:
1993 United Nations Conference on Human Rights (UNCHR) in Vienna, Austria
1994 International Conference on Population and Development (UNCPD) in Cairo, Egypt
1995 World Summit on Social Development (WSSD) in Copenhagen, Denmark
1995 Fourth World Conference on Women (WCW) in Beijing, China
This article was based directly on "The Association for Progressive Communications and the Networking of Global Civil Society: APC at the 1992 Earth Summit" by Rory O'Brien and Andrew Clement
http://www.apc.org/english/about/history/rio_92.htm (in English)
Originator: --- (APC)
Date: 12/15/2000
Location: Montevideo, URUGUAY
Contact: webeditor@apc.org
Category: Building Information Communities
Source: Rory O'Brien and Andrew Clement
2000 / -1 / 2-
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