At this year’s WSIS Forum, which is co-organized by UNESCO, ITU, UNCTAD and UNDP in ITU’s HQs, Geneva, UNESCO’s Director of the Knowledge Societies Division, Dr Indrajit Banerjee, will welcome participants in the Official Opening Ceremony. He will also moderate a High-Level Policy Session and a UNESCO organized High-Level Dialogue, United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS) and Action Line meetings. UNESCO is exploring new grounds in terms of the format, by breaking down traditional silos and exploring how, in practical terms different traditional Action Lines can contribute to meeting the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The first High-Level Dialogue session will therefore be fully dedicated to SDG 16 and to: “Promoting Peaceful and Inclusive [Knowledge] Societies”. While the SDG 16 aims to promote peaceful and inclusive societies, this session will explore how technologies used from different Action Line perspectives can both advance and slow down the achievement of this goal. Future Knowledge Societies will need to cope with considerable socio-economic and cultural transformations coming from the uses of ‘new technologies’, such as the Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, robots, ubiquitous connectivity, new social media, digital identities and platforms, and undecipherable algorithms.  These technologies will transform many aspects of our lives. The concept of inclusive knowledge societies offers, however, key elements to meet some of the SDG 16 targets and to address socio-cultural challenges and aspirations emerging from the new technologies. This session has been jointly prepared by WSIS Action Line Facilitators covering media, cultural diversity and ethics (AL C8,9,10), addressing jointly from their different perspectives key SDG 16 challenges and targets. It will include a roundtable on Fighting youth radicalization and preventing violent extremism on the Internet, a debate on key enablers of peaceful and inclusive knowledge societies and how to protect fundamental freedoms and promote diversity of cultural expressions. And it will include a new Match-making session, where several concrete projects will be presented and opportunities for joint action will be explored. The UNESCO-facilitated

• Action Lines on Access to information and knowledge (C3) and e-science (C7) also joined hands in a session titled: Access to Scientific Knowledge (A2SK): Lessons Learned and the Way Forward for the SDGs.

In addition, UNESCO will facilitate the  

• Action Line C9 (Media) on the theme:  Promoting Media Freedom and Internet Universality at the Heart of Achieving SDG Target 16.10 
• Action Line C7 (e-learning) on the theme - Ensuring Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promoting Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All

Joining online:

For those unable to participate in this year’s WSIS Forum in person, the event can be easily accessed remotely by choosing the desired session on the WSIS Forum Agenda online and selecting the preferred type of remote participation (Webcast or Adobe Connect). Remote participants will be required to fill in a real-time registration form in order to access the session. Each session will have 10 to 15 minutes dedicated to the questions from remote participants, so please try it out and join at a distance.