Dear Friends, a wrote some time ago this text. I am thinking
perhaps it could be helpfull in our next meeting in Mexico. I hope
so. All the best, Chico Whitaker
Some reflections about the Com Com questions
Before leaving Porto Alegre, last January, I had some exchanges
with Jason and Monica about the meeting of the Communication
Commission with the Liaison Group. After that conversation I saw more
clearly what could explain the misunderstandings we faced.
1. Jason remembered in our conversation that the Com Com (and all
of us) always considered that the WSF communication is a
responsibility of all IC members.
2. at a moment of our meeting Jason said: if the Com Com do not
receive information about what is being done by the WSF participants
it cannot do its task.
The combination of this two ideas push to the following reasoning:
- the IC members are not ?communicating? as they have to do;
- the Com Com takes then under its responsibility this task;
- but If this Commission needs, to do this task, the information
sent to them by the IC members, it functions in fact as a
communication staff serving the IC;
- this could explain why the Com Com members decided to work
?professionally?.
I would say then that we need to see the Com Com not as technical
staff but with a political role, discussing with the IC members, at
least the following:
1.- what content of communication the WSF is needing, (for instance
what messages we need to diffuse about the objectives of the WSF
process in each moment, when we say that ?another world is possible,
necessary and urgent?);
2.- what the IC members are doing or proposing (new actions and
campaigns, etc);
3.- what happened in the Forums (new actions and campaigns
proposed, etc);
4.- how the IC members can diffuse this information through the
means they have;
5.- how to articulate all this means in a cooperative way, through
eventually common tools and links.
That is to say that the IC members cannot stay, in
the communication responsibility they have, at the very modest level
of sending information to a Com Com acting as ?their? communication
staff? And the Com Com cannot accept this task but deepen the WSF
communication challenge, in a political approach of it.
I would propose to discuss this approach of the problem, instead
of discussing how the Com Com works now or what it is doing, as if it
was a technical IC ?department? to be evaluated.
This approach could be used to all other IC Commissions, to
understand better their political and not technical role, to push the
IC to this political discussion and not to a bureaucratic one, and to
make all the IC members take their responsibilities in the field of
each Commission.
Chico Whitaker, March 2010
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