What social forum aims at
COMMENTARY
Story by MIKAEL BOOK | Publication Date: 1/20/2007 
www.nationmedia.com
The World Social Forum is the biggest international jamboree, which occurs every second year in Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Nairobi, or any other centre in the South.
The forum is a form of intellectual and political activity resembling that of the educational institutions or libraries. These are supposed to be, and sometimes they actually are "open spaces".
Thus, one of the nine themes chosen for the Nairobi WSF January 20-25 is: "Building a world of peace, justice, ethics and respect for diverse spiritualities." This could also be the explicit goal of a university or a library.
The social forum is going on at the local, national, regional, and "world level". It is a process, but it is not yet an institution. Should the forum strive to establish itself as one of society's lasting institutions?
The answer must be yes. It is aimed at building a global society that could not materialise earlier, because the conditions for its existence were lacking. World social forums are not possible without global communications. The Internet, yet another "open space" at our disposal, is the ultimate proof, but also a prime condition, of the on-going globalisation of human society.
But we are not yet living in a global society. Imperialism and war are still the words of the day, as we can see in Iraq. What should the Nairobi WSF be aiming at? To guarantee the continuity of the form the forum was given is, as Chico Whitaker (one of its founders) has said, perhaps the biggest challenge for the WSF.
Information specialists
The social forum must achieve new mergers with those other "open spaces": educational institutions, libraries and the Internet. A much broader engagement of researchers, librarians and teachers is needed to build a global society. Journalists, too, must become part of the embryonic global society.
An example of what is being done to put this theory into practice is the pilot project of the East African librarians. Since a first three-day "training the trainers" workshop in Nairobi last year, the librarians are preparing for participation in the WSF, both as citizens and as information specialists. They want to start documenting the information that the hundreds of conferences and workshops are producing. They will then repackage and disseminate the information for use by different groups, including the marginalised and the information-poor.
Kenya Library Association has set up a webserver at the Kenya Educational Network (Kenet) to become the database of this pilot project. The participants are invited to write about themselves, their projects, and their daily agendas during the forum. The webserver is found at www.wsflibrary.org.
This information activism can also be understood as mobilisation against the prevailing trends in the world economy and politics, which threaten the public library with extinction. The WSF aims at exposing and burying imperialism and market fundamentalism and to lay the foundations of world public finances for services, including the public library.
Mr Book works in the pilot project on "Documenting of the WSF" by East African librarians