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Introduction

[Statement of meeting organizer to open up these considerations. It is expected that this statement - perhaps a bit contentious - might itself be the object of comment, clarification and doubtless considerable correction through the WebBoard and the process briefly outlined below. - Eric Britton]

We have come "here" to put our heads together on these issues because we have faith that carefully considered concrete responses and actions might come out of the process that is the meeting itself. Thus, whenever a substantial group of skilled and concerned people get together to trade and develop ideas and information on matters as important as those which have brought us all here, a considerable opportunity presents itself. It is our hope that something useful can be made to come out of this opportunity, and this is the staging ground for such follow-up if any.

The organizers of most if not all conferences and physical meetings have quite a different basic agenda. Often as not they come to see the event itself, the actual collection of a set of people in a given place over a set period with a defined area of concern, as the primary objective of the whole exercise. That once done, the papers read, the speeches said, the drinks drunk and the odds bits of give and take which the heavily loaded meeting program may have permitted -- their duty has been accomplished and the meeting simply breaks up and everybody heads back on home, probably more or less unscathed by what took place as a result of their time together. If they are academics they go back to their book writing and the ardors of publication and hanging on to or getting tenure. If public servants, back into the fold of all the good reasons why change cannot or should not be imposed and why the inertial forces must be left to work things our for themselves. The organizers themselves may find it necessary months or years later to get out some sort of "book" which somehow freezes some odd bits of what transpired for future reference (but by whom?), but by and large that's it. Duty done!

For the record, we would recall that the main alternative to the 'get back home as quickly as possible' way of concluding most physical meetings, is that of getting up some sort of manifesto or 'statement of the meeting'. It is my experience that these too are almost always highly unsatisfactory affairs. They almost never actually represent what they claim to be - an informed statement of principles or points on which all those in attendance are in profound agreement. There are several reasons for this. In most cases, the constraint is above all that the medium - i.e., the conference hall, the time pressure, the varieties of opinion and agenda, personal and institutional, and the very static communications 'systems' that constitute the main channels of contact within the meeting - simply does not lend itself to the task. In addition, we often see that what is presented as a collective process is in fact little more than a stage-managed affair, wherein a certain number of people and interest that happen to be on the inside track get together to ensure that their agenda and preferences are put out as those of the meeting as a whole.

What we propose in this context is a bit different. Since all of those who are participating are doing it in the comfort of their own preferred surroundings, they will not have the usual itch to get out of the meeting hall and get back home as fast as possible. We have a radically different working environment here, and with it a different cadence of potential communications, interaction and reflectiveness. As a result we are thus freer to think about what indeed we might eventually want or be able to do ourselves - or even better get together with others to do in a more extended collaboration - to advance the bottom line agenda of our meeting in some concrete ways.. which of course is the nitty gritty of sustainable development.

It will be in this final section of the conference that we will see what the participants and moderators decide to do in this respect. As with the preceding session on Findings and Conclusions, this will be engaged as an iterative process - with ideas and proposals to be posted on these pages as they come in from the meeting, and then discussion invited on the WebBoard, subsequent to which more ideas, refined corrected and expressions of what has already been posted will be place here for all to see and comment on.

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