Demand for e-governance related services continues to grow. In the last week or so, we saw requests from Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, BIH, Costa Rica and Ukraine. While the first three can be seen in the light of traditional e-governance support (development of national strategies and implementation of priorities) the last two are relate to e-health and FOSS, and OGP, respectively. A three stop mission might be panning out that will include Kyrgyzstan, BIH and Moldova. Costa Rica is supposed to take place the week of 25 June. Ukraine is still in the works…
Most of our work now seems to be going in the post-2015 direction. This week only we have 4 meetings on th subject. Tuesday afternoon we met with BDP Directorate (OK and MMS included) to discusses the platform and mobilization strategy. While TWs will be providing the backend technology, the issues discussed focused on the branding of the virtual platform and the management of the overall process. On the former, a co-branding model was seen as the best model for the platform. In the end, the idea is to provide a open and impartial site where participants can organize their own discussions, in addition to more more formal and official engagements. On the management, OK decided that I was the best suited candidate for doing this given the e-governance and CSO aspects of the platform. This came as a complete surprise to me. I later learned that I am now supposed to dedicate 50% of my time to post-2015.
On Thursday, UMNC organize a meeting with CSOs most of which where on the phone enduring a noisy and bad communications channel. Actually, many of the participants were speaking from Rio where they are at the moment (as part of the Rio+20) gatherings. While the agenda of the meeting had various themes, including the virtual platform and the big data analytics, the key issue was the wya in which UNMC and perhaps UNDG has been approaching CSOs. CSOs do not need to be “outreach” as has been suggested by the ToRs of the so-called Strategic Outreach Planning Group. Instead, CSOs argued that they need to be active participants from the start in all of the processes related to post-2015, including official (via NGLS) and non-official channels. While there is not yet an official request to the SG on getting CSO consultations as part of the official process (this will require a letter from various UN agencies to the UN SG), CSOs can still contribute to the global dialogue and play a role on national and global consultations.
Let the fun continue for years to come!
Cheers, Raúl
