12 Nov 2025 6 questions to reclaim the digital agenda beyond WSIS+20

Digital justice advocates need to get ahead of the technological curve and reclaim the digital agenda for all. This is the conclusion of WACC’s latest Conversation Circle in the wake of WSIS+20, the 20-year review of the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society.

The online discussion “Building momentum: Digital justice advocacy post-WSIS+20” brought together voices from civil society, policy, and technology sectors last week to explore collective action for a people-centred, inclusive, digital transformation.

Setting the context

Photo: ITU, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

The much-anticipated WSIS+20 High-Level Event took place in Geneva this past July. Coming on the heels of other international processes to shape a common future (Summit of the Future, Pact for the Future, Global Digital Compact), the event took stock of progress since the original, two-point WSIS in 2003 (Geneva) and 2005 (Tunis) and considered how this vision and framework could be reimagined for future global digital cooperation.

“Many analysts believed that WSIS+20 offered a not-to-be-missed opportunity to put forward a progressive vision of digital and communication justice for all,” Philip Lee, WACC general secretary explained in his introduction.

But, despite much consultation around WSIS+20, “the scenario remains complicated, convoluted, and controversial.” Now, as the WSIS+20 outcomes document goes before the UN in mid-December, Lee said the real question is what happens in 2026 and beyond.

1. Where are the communities?

Xian Guevara, Computer Professionals’ Union

The main challenge to be addressed is power – who has it and where it is concentrated, said panelist Xian Guevarra from WACC’s project partner Computer Professionals’ Union in the Philippines.

A handful of powerful actors controlling both tech infrastructure and the “narratives that define what is possible” leads to “innovation without inclusion,” he said.

The CPU deputy secretary general observed this firsthand in July while browsing the new tech offerings at the AI for Good Summit and WSIS+20 as a member of the WACC delegation. The contrast to his home context, where many lack basic internet access, was striking. “Where are the communities here?”

But technologies can also be tools for inclusion and empowerment, he said. “We can reclaim them as the digital commons if we embed transparency, rights, community control into how we build and deploy them. We can create a truly democratic digital ecosystem.”

2. Can we recapture the internet revolution?

Nandini Chami, IT for Change

Panelist Nandini Chami, deputy director and fellow of IT for Change in India, echoed these concerns about power.

She named “the corporate capture of the internet revolution” as the biggest challenge of today, one that has resulted in a lack of communication independence and of democratization of media.

This can be seen in corporations controlling what content is found in the information sphere, Chami noted, while social media platforms optimise for virality, thus heightening misinformation and polarisation.

Yet, the ongoing engagement of so many communication rights activists like those at the Conversation Circle offers the chance, at this moment of “civilisational transformation,” for “civil society to resurrect the communication rights agenda and take it forward through calling for the epistemic rights movement,” for governments to guarantee access to information and media literacy for all.

3. How to hold governments accountable?

Christina Dahl Jensen, DanChurchAid

For panelist Christina Dahl Jensen from DanChurchAid in Denmark the greatest challenge today is that “the digital ecosystem has become deeply geopolitically affected and securitized.”

She pointed to the evolution of technology as a key instrument of power. At an increasing pace, the “digital race shapes who controls the narratives, the markets and even the civic freedoms,” intensifying dependency and reinforcing digital colonialism in the process.

In parallel, civic space is shrinking rapidly including on digital platforms, the DCA senior innovation adviser said. Coordinated hate speech, harassment, and intimidation target human rights defenders, impacting women in particular.

However, there are also enormous opportunities, Dahl Jensen said. Global instruments like the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact can be used to hold governments accountable on the processes.

More attention must be given to the intersection of policies on digital and on innovation and the responsibility, she stressed.

“[We have the] responsibility to make sure that the innovation we create is value-based and grounded in human rights and ethics…to keep governments accountable for our role for what goes out into the world.”

4. Can we board the train before it leaves the station?

Douglas Smith, Data Friendly Space

Panelist Douglas Smith, acting CEO of Data Friendly Space in the USA, urged participants to consider challenges and opportunities through the lens of beneficial use of applied technologies such as AI, for example, in humanitarian spaces.

The tech sector goes its own way according to Smith, in part because governments and even justice organizations tend to be reactive.

“Sometimes those of us working in the justice movement are critical to the point of being caught in our own arguments but maybe not always seeing that train has left the station, and that these new technologies are being used and deployed quite rapidly around the world,” he said.

“[These are] conversations about things that are already happening. We should think about how it is that we apply [these technologies].”

New technologies can help break down silos between sectors and contextualize information across data “stovepipes” like human rights or agriculture for a better and fuller humanitarian response, Smith pointed out.

To have a chance of shaping technology through policies and advocacy, civil society – and governments – needs to focus on next-generation technology such as quantum computing “before the genie gets out of the bottle” and to “get ahead of where the industry is heading.”

5. How can we really influence global processes like WSIS+20?

WACC General Secretary Philip Lee highlights communication rights during his intervention at a WSIS+20 Leaders Talkx session. Photo: WACC

Civil society urgently needs to raise awareness of international processes outside of these spaces and link them to the daily life of people on the ground, Guevarra said.

“These policies shape our access, data rights, freedom of expression online. [They] do trickle down, he said.” The problem is that such policymaking feels very distant, he added. In the Philippines, no one has ever heard of WSIS, even tech people.

“We have to learn what people’s problems are, what their ‘gut issue’ is, and link these to digital rights and digital justice.”

It’s important for civil society to take advantage of “wedges for change” as they present themselves in such processes, as these are “all we can hope for as civil society,” Chami said.

She shared how IT for Change was able to deepen a human rights focus in the Global Digital Compact by engaging in the drafting process. Now the Compact extends a rights-based reference throughout the whole digital lifecycle.

Dahl Jensen recommended more efforts to bring impacts of solutions at the community level up into the global but admitted that civil society has not been included in policy-making spaces.

As well as continuing to knock on doors and do silent advocacy, we need to use technology to “lift up communities’ needs,” she said.

How can we collectively act for digital justice?

Refugees at Kakuma camp in Kenya learn digital skills as part of a vocational training program. Photo: Albin Hillert/Life on Earth

The way forward isn’t to quiet our critique, Smith stated, rather “at the same time begin to leverage new tech in a way that benefits the communities we are most interested in.”

We need to talk about what is coming, like the “big train of quantum,” Dahl Jensen said.

“What really gives me hope is that I see the younger generation embracing technology and taking ownership of creating solutions that fit their context. That is really going to shift [things].”

Chami encouraged participants to look to precedents of successful justice advocacy and seize the current moment “to show how the digital is not something in hyperspace, but it has deep, real-life, and material impacts.”

Guevarra is convinced the key to making technology serve the people, not profit or power, is to organize – across movements, across borders, across sectors, with technologists, activists, educators, and communities coming together to reclaim a collective digital future.

“This future of digital justice shouldn’t just start [or] stay in Geneva or in Silicon Valley but in every community that dares to image technology as a tool for liberation.”