The principal goal of Information Habitat: Where Information Lives is the application of information and communication technology in support of broad-based participation in decision-making, action and access to information in relation to international, national and local processes relating to sustainability, human rights and peace.

Over the past six years, this work has involved a leadership role in supporting the use of electronic communications by non-governmental organizations in the series of major United Nations conferences that began with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and will culminate in the June 1996 Habitat II conference in Istanbul. At present, the main focus of Information Habitat's work is on a comprehensive approach to the use of electronic communications in support of preparations for Habitat II.

Underlying the work of Information Habitat is the premise that we are in the midst of an information revolution -- with implications on the order of magnitude of the industrial revolution. In the course of this revolution, information and communication technology are providing the basis for profound transformations in the infrastructure and processes that support economic, social, cultural and political realms.

The ability to share and to access information will be a critical determinant of personal and political power in a context in which information and communication technology offers the paradox of simultaneously enabling unprecedented concentration of power with ever greater gaps between the information rich and the information poor, between ever more powerful transnational corporations along with equally unprecedented opportunities for decentralization and for broad-based participation in decision-making in a global civil society.

A vital aspect of the emerging information and communication infrastructure is the evolution of what can be considered as "information habitats" or "information ecosystems" that enable unprecedented opportunities for new forms of integration of information that has heretofore been separate, and that also enable profound changes in the ways that individuals and organizations relate both to information and to each other.

While information technology is capable of being developed to support information habitats that support the full richness and diversity of the cultures and traditions of humanity, there are both technical and political factors that could result in relatively sterile information monocultures. The dominance in the computer world of a character set - ASCII, American Standard Character Information Interchange - that is essentially limited to unaccented characters from the Roman alphabet has created a dangerous bias in favor of what has been described as the "cultural imperialism of ASCII" and against the on-line use of languages that depend either on accented characters or on entirely different character sets - for example, Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and Japanese.

The timely adoption of a standard such as UNICODE that permits the consistent and unbiased treatment of character sets of all known languages may be an essential step towards the creation and development of information habitats that can support the essential diversity of cultures and traditions in the emerging cyberspace.

The Internet is perhaps the most remarkable example of such an information habitat. In particular, the most rapidly growing area of the Internet, the World Wide Web, provides not only major new breakthoughs in the presentation and integration of information, but is a rapidly growing global commons that offers new frontiers for cooperation among people and organizations.

However, in an emerging context in which the marginal cost of access to, and dissemination of, information is approaching zero, intellectual property rights will become the increasingly dominant factor in determining the price, and thus the extent of accessibility, of information. If the World Wide Web is to continue to serve as a new global commons, and if the potential of information and communication technology to provide virtually unlimited access to information are to be fulfilled, it will be essential to develop and establish intellectual property rights regimes that support the continued viability of this global commons and that prevent the expropriation of information and knowledge that have historically been in the public domain - as well as to develop and implement policies that ensure the broadest possible access to the evolving global information infrastructure.

While the World Wide Web offers many unsurpassed characteristics as an information ecosystem, effective and affordable access to it and to the ever-growing range of features that it can provide is still principally the privilege of people living in developed countries, and particularly in the U.S.A. In the language of ecosystems or habitat, that shortcoming can be described in terms of the inadequacy of its integration with the broader human ecosystem and human habitat.

A strategy for the development and utilization of information habitats that enable the broadest-based participation and access, while taking optimal advantage of the opportunities that are offered by the emerging information and communication technologies must strike a balance between using the most powerful features available and enabling the broadest access and participation - especially by people and organizations in developing countries.

This means that in the development of inclusive information ecosystems, there is a need for the use of parallel processes for gathering and disseminating information. Thus, for example, the use of the World Wide Web needs to be combined with the parallel use of less sophisticated tools such as the Internet gopher, the "listserv", and electronic conference systems such as are used by the Association for Progressive Communications networks and that provide relatively inexpensive access to electronic communications, the use of diskette-based compilation and dissemination of information, and last but not least the use of print, paper and pencil and voice communication so as not to exclude access and participation of those do not have the benefits of full, fast and affordable connectivity to the Internet.

Information Habitat: Where Information Lives is a project of the Communications Coordinating Committee for the United Nations, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, and is a non-governmental organization in Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. For additional information, contact:

Information Habitat: Where Information Lives
E-mail: infohabitat@igc.apc.org
World Wide Web: http://www.igc.org/habitat