Choike

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Civil societies in developing countries still face difficulties in accessing information relevant to them, while at the same the information they produce lacks visibility, which in turn both erodes the impact of their work and reduces their motivation to publish, creating a vicious circle. Scarce availability of information in languages other than English is also a problem.

The portal site Choike (http://www.choike.org/), created by the Instituto del Tercer Mundo (ITeM) seeks to improve the capacity of both, users and publishers, to understand and influence national and international decision-making processes that affect local communities.

Choike originated from the will of promoting information and knowledge sharing among Southern civil societies and strengthening citizenship and participation in the design and implementations of local, national, regional and international development policies by promoting the use of ICT for South-South exchange, to strengthen Southern NGO participation in international decision-making and improve visibility of Southern content.

[edit] History

ITeM established its project NGONet in 1991 as an experiment on using the new information and communication technologies (ICT) to assist Southern NGO to participate meaningfully in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, The Earth Summit). In its second phase (1994-1996), in coincidence with the "explosion" of the internet, NGONet contributed to the development of communication tools and the building of capacity in the South to use them. In its third phase (1997-1999) the internet had evolved from an interesting experiment to a major issue in the world economy and politics. NGONet focused its activities in supporting major international NGO campaigns' experimentation of the use of the internet by civil society organizations (around trade/WTO -such as the debate around the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), and the Social Summit).

In 2002, through its collaborative work with other organizations, ITeM perceived the difficulties that Southern civil society organizations faced in accessing information relevant to them, while at the same time the information they produced lacked visibility, which in turn both eroded the impact of their work and reduced their motivation to publish, creating a vicious circle. Scarce availability of information in languages other than English was also perceived as a problem. ITeM decided then, as part of its NGONet project, to develop Choike, a bilingual (English, Spanish) portal site aimed at improving the visibility of Southern civil society organizations on the internet while facilitating their access to electronic resources that were essential for their effective work.

Novib has been the major founder of NGONet/Choike since its beginnings.

Currently, Choike receives support from Hivos and Choike-related projects have received or are receiving support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Mott Foundation.

[edit] Current situation

Choike's main goal is to promote equity through empowerment of local communities and citizens organizations in the South, so that they are better able to negotiate on their own behalf with external agents, by facilitating flows of strategic information.

In line with general tendencies in world economy, the internet's evolution in recent years reveals an intensification of its market-oriented development. This vision ranges over all of internet's aspects: as communications infrastructure, knowledge repository and technological development. In the generation and publication of content, information that was freely available is now restricted, and large media corporations occupy more and more spaces of the web. Access infrastructure is increasingly concentrated in multinational corporations, as well. Moreover, the war on terrorism has made certain governments to push for control of the internet and the information that circulates through it, thus undermining its democratizing potential.

While in many countries of the South there are sectors of civil society that possess the necessary training and will to use the internet as a tool to enforce their rights, there are still real obstacles to the effective realization of this citizenship.

During 2004 and 2005 Choike has started to develop specific projects, along with its stated objective of deeper focusing on some specific topics and events related to ITeM's and Choike's main lines of action. Examples of these projects include:

• "Briefing papers towards WSIS II" (WSIS Papers). This project was aimed at contributing, with a Southern perspective, to the preparatory process for the Tunis phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). This project was motivated by some of the difficulties faced by Southern countries in making their voices heard and their priorities considered during the first phase of the summit, where lack of sufficient resources and information worked as an extra barrier for Southern governments to be able to make informed decisions and negotiate effectively. The project was supported by the IDRC.

• "The missing link: Bridging the gap between Latin America and the global IFIs campaign" (International Financial Institutions Latin American Monitor). The Monitor is an initiative aimed at contributing to the Latin American and global International Financial Institutions (IFIs) campaigns for reform of the Bretton Woods institutions by translating key information, producing and disseminating analysis and providing a point of access to research results, opinions and campaigning activities, thus promoting dialogue and collaboration between key actors. The motivation for this project relies in the feeling that, in a context of greater role of Latin American countries in financial issues and, at the same time, lack of possibilities for information generated in the region to gain the needed outreach, access to information generated in Latin America had to be systematized and improved. This project is supported by the Mott Foundation.

[edit] Methodology

Choike carries on its work by:

• Selecting, organizing and highlighting information useful to Southern NGOs and others who work to empower indigenous peoples', women's and grassroots' organizations by producing and enriching in-depth reports containing news, references and analysis of global trends and forces on issues relevant to NGO campaigns. In-depth reports are a tool both for providing information useful for NGO and giving visibility to content produced by Southern organizations. The reports, as well as other sections in Choike (such as "News" and "Campaigns") most generally link to information published in other organizations' websites.

• Updating and publishing data on Southern NGOs through its publicly searchable directory. The directory database currently includes Southern NGOs that publish information online and is updated on a regular basis. Choike's directory also includes information resources relevant for Southern NGOs' work such as international and regional organizations and international NGOs and networks.

• Providing the "Southern NGO Search" service, that currently indexes and caches the full content of Southern NGO websites. Choike provides a full-text search engine on the content of the NGO websites listed in its directory. These searches can be performed from Choike as well as from other websites that include the "Southern NGO Search" box in their pages. This feature allows any user to perform a full-text search in Southern NGOs sites similarly as would be done in most popular search engines, such as Google, but with much better precision in the answers (since the searches are performed reduced to mostly relevant websites).

• Covering special events. Two models have been used to cover these events: In the case of the World Social Forum (WSF) and meetings in the WSIS and Monterrey Conference follow-up processes, as well as in World Bank-IMF meetings, editors from Choike attended the events and reported from there while, at other events (such as the WTO ministerial meetings, UNCTAD ministerial meetings and Beijing follow-up meetings) editors worked from Uruguay, providing a tool for NGO present at the event to publish immediately their production. Having Choike's editors attending meetings is a good opportunity for networking with "target groups", promote Choike and identify organizations that could contribute to Choike on a regular basis.

• Identifying NGO campaigns and news and highlighting them in its home page and in Choike's different sections, and relating them to associated in-depth reports.

• Publishing newsletters (in all languages covered by Choike). Every fifteen days, highlighted information produced by Southern NGO, as well as news and information about campaigns and other NGOs' activities, are distributed by email among its subscribers. Electronic features on WSIS and the IFIs are also produced and distributed independently by email, as part of each of Choike's sub-projects activities.