Recommended reading: 3 books

During the WSIS Summit a number of new books were presented and discussed
during parallel events. Among these are:

Word Matters, a four language “dictionary” offering multicultural
perspectives on information society concepts, in French,
English, Portuguese and Spanish.

“Technology is never neutral: it carries social, economic and cultural consequences. New information and communication technologies are no exception. The words used in international negotiations or legislation are a poor reflection of such consequences; they propagate perceptions that are rarely subjected to democratic debate, the fundamental requirement for any political decision.

The publication is co-ordinated by Alain Ambrosi (WFCN) and Valérie
Peugeot (Vecam) with the collaboration of Daniel Pimienta (Funredes). The
book is a collective work by some thirty authors from civil societies all
over the world. Sample chapters are available online. The 656 page book
can be ordered for 39 euro through:
http://cfeditions.com/

Human Rights in the Global Information Society; an upcoming publication by MIT press to be published in 2006. The book includes a Preface by Adama Samassekou and contributions by several EDRI-members, and is being published in the MIT Press series “The Information Revolution and Global
Politics”. The introduction by William Drake and book editor/EDRI board
member Rikke Frank Jørgensen is freely available online.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10872

Visions in Process II – Geneva 2003-Tunis 2005 is a publication by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which features civil society assessments of
major controversies regarding the agenda and the process of WSIS. The book
is edited by Olga Drossou and Heike Jensen, and is the sequel of “Visions
in Process”, a previous publication launched right before the Geneva
Summit, in December 2003. The book features 15 contributions from WSIS
civil society actors, all women, and is structured in three parts: “Human
rights”; “Multi-stakeholder processes and civil society”; and “Developing
the information society”. Articles of the book are covered by the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, and can be
downloaded from:
http://www.boell.de/en/nav/275.html