Jennifer Corriero view complete profile

Nick Moraitis view complete profile

Six months later the dream is less vivid, and it’s important to remind ourselves of all that was achieved through the WSIS - for our part, at TakingITGlobal, playing a leading role in the establishment and support of the Youth Caucus in Phase 1. We facilitated the participation of younger ICT practitioners in a whirlwind of international meetings, and coordinated (in both phases) national level outreach and activities across the globe - and much more. We’re proud of the paragraphs in the WSIS documents on youth, of the many new projects established, and of the Youth Caucus’ vital role bringing WSIS to grassroots communities.

In Tunis, we completed three years of work on the WSIS process, but also perhaps more importantly celebrated five years of TakingITGlobal. Since the early days – including a presentation on the early idea at the GKII Forum in 2000 – we’ve grown the world’s largest and most dynamic internationally-oriented online community for young people. In Tunis, the takingitglobal.org membership passed 100,000 from every country in the world – young people chatting, writing blogs, posting discussions, collaborating on projects, and sharing news about global issues. And during WSIS, we launched our seventh language version, Chinese (other languages include Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English).

And while both initiatives – TIG and the WSIS Youth Caucus – have many separate focuses, constituencies and supporters, it’s fair to say we’ve grown up together. Many of TakingITGlobal’s key partnerships, including with GKP, IISD, School Net Africa, the Digital Divide Network, telecentre. org and others, have been developed through the WSIS process. The Youth Caucus has often been the first to request, and then test, many of our online community and collaboration tools as well as demonstrating an effective strategy for youth participation in decision-making processes. And we’ve actively learnt from and replicated the models developed within WSIS to enable youth participation in other global decisionmaking processes – be it around the Millennium Development Goals, or the upcoming International AIDS Conference and the World Urban Forum. WSIS has also been an important platform for TIG to showcase our work to a broader audience beyond our youthful user-base - gaining trust, advice, respect and support from mainstream allies we could never have found alone.

The “WSIS years” have not been easy. They’ve been a lot of work, and far too little sleep. One of the challenges to youth participation is that it is difficult to secure funds to ensure that participation is possible. We’ve navigated the burst of the dot.com bubble, and the inherent challenges faced by many youthful endeavors. We’ve also watched on as many other knowledge and network based initiatives have come and gone.

In many ways, beyond Tunis, WSIS is becoming “less dream, more reality” at TakingITGlobal. We’re looking to find ways to ensure young people in our network find it even easier to take local action once they are inspired to make a difference. We’ve started a major new ICTs in Education program in the USA, and are planning to launch new local projects to support our heavily Southern-based community as well as to increase multilingualism online. It will continue to be important to monitor WSIS follow-up – like many other processes – to ensure young people are taken seriously and given space and support to contribute. And in our new roles, maintaining the online platforms for telecentre.org and the Digital Divide Network, we’ve begun to support an ICT practitioner base far beyond ‘young people’. If there is one thing that is fairly certain in an uncertain world, it’s that technology will continue to progress. The need for global attention on how technologies can be regulated and used for social good, development and peace, will only grow in importance. We also look forward to a future where the current generation of youth are in leadership positions as adults, ensuring that opportunities for future generations are shared and that sustainable development is achieved.