CIVICUS World Alliance for Citizen Participation

1 October 2010. Johannesburg. Sixty-three countries have sponsored a landmark United Nations-backed human rights resolution on “the Rights of Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association”, drawing to an end a hard-fought campaign by civil society groups, including the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), Article 19, World Movement for Democracy, and CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation.

I have been a member of CIVICUS (http://www.civicus.org) since it was founded in the mid-1990’s. CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is an international alliance of NGOs (Civil Society Organizations in CIVICUS parlance) and partners who work together “to strengthen citizen action and civil society throughout the world”. In its short life CIVICUS has been enormously successful but has also carried the weight of “being many things to many people” in the international NGO world.

CIVICUS - World Alliance for Citizen Participation - has partnered with IPS to create an online database to make civil society worldwide more accessible to the media. I learned about this today in a special mailing (pasted below) from eCivicus. This new database is a great idea and I recommend Kabissa members explore it and sign up. I do wonder, though - this means yet another online profile for CSOs to maintain. How does it add value beyond what is already provided for civil society organizations by services like Kabissa, Idealist and Wiser Earth, not to mention Wikipedia and Facebook Fan pages?