Preparations for the 2007 WSF in Kenya are underway. The Nairobi team have their website up and running (!) and have just initiated an "online consultation" of the "actions, campaigns, and struggles" of the groups who will attend. As usual, it's as overly-complicated as you can expect when dozens of people are involved in the planning process. Here, is a relatively thorough explanation.
The "Methodology Commission" is trying to put an emphasis on the actions of groups rather than the themes they work with. This seems to be in response to critics of the Forum who claim 'nothing comes out of it'.
But have a chew on this explanation:
The proposal is to organize the 7th Forum around those actions, campaigns and struggles, aggregating, on the different Forum spaces, the activities linked to them, as well as the activities that have no direct link with them – to be indicated during the moment of activities registration – but related to the same by their themes.
This will make more visible the concrete actions born on the Forum process or those who gave sequence or more density to others that had been developed before or outside WSF, as well as its effective political results. This will also stimulate the interconnection among organizations in which we are engaged on the struggles for constructing a fair, egalitarian, democratic, participative and sustainable society.
Whoah! You may not need a college degree to understand this, but you do need a diploma in NGO-speak. OK, so what they want is for all the participating organisations to "indicate the actions, campaigns and struggles in which your organization/network/entity is engaged." This would be a good idea if the World Social Forum didn't attract the breadth of organisations that it does. Ask a couple of thousand organisations around the world what their goals are, and you will get a little of everything. What's the point? Attempts to democratise the Forum further are laudible, but a little more practical leadership on structure would be useful.
