By Chris Buckridge.
This post probably won’t age well.
That’s the risk in commenting on a document so unambiguously labelled a “Zero Draft” – the push and pull of multilateral negotiations will significantly alter the document before any final agreement is reached, relegating this draft (and this blog post!) to the status of historical artefact.
But for those who’ve been swept along in the process to develop a United Nations Global Digital Compact (GDC), the recent publication of a Zero Draft feels like a major milestone, and a first sense of what such a compact might look like. Moreover, it provides important insight into how that process has gone thus far – what impact can we see from the stakeholder consultations and Member State inputs? – and where we might expect it to go from here. For the incurable optimists among us, it’s a moment to hope that we might help steer the coming negotiations in a positive direction and fulfil the ambition laid out by the Secretary-General in his original vision.
Continue reading “Baby Steps Towards a Global Digital Compact: Reflections on the Zero Draft”