The thesis is divided into three parts: The first part critically describes the state of scientific research on themes like information society, civil society and information and communication technologies (ICTs) and strategies. Besides recent theoretical models of the information society, it analyzes the research on civil society, which then is put into a larger framework focusing on national and international ICT strategies. A special focus is placed on the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

The thesis’ second part is a case study on the international youth organization TakingITGlobal. TakingITGlobal acted as the representative of the youth in the WSIS process, which with very successful lobbying managed to get a special “youth” paragraph into the official summit declaration.

In the third part, the thesis describes a roadmap for successful participation in UN summits. Developed solely for non-governmental organizations, it describes and explains the important steps for making your interests heard in a global forum.

Download of the whole thesis (pdf, english)

The thesis is licensed under creative commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Austria).

The Author
Thomas Biebl has studied communications and psychology at the University of Salzburg in Austria. There, he wrote the diploma (graduation) thesis "The Impact of Civil Society on the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society. A Case Study of Successful Engagement within UN Bodies”, which was submitted at the “Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Information and Communication Technologies & Society“ of the University of Salzburg in May 2004.

Since October 2004, Thomas Biebl has been working fort the World Summit Award, a global initiative that aims at selecting and awarding the best e-content projects worldwide. Part of task this is raising public awareness for high-class e-content from developed and underdeveloped countries. More info on this is available at http://www.wsis-award.org/.

Contact: <thomasbiebl(at)hotmail.com>