User:Sean Heron/Archive

Page I´ve collected links to work with (background info and such).

First week almost over!

Wow, yes, I´ve been here for a week now, but it doesn´t seem it! There tonnes of stuff going on, and its not easy to choose where to go and what to do: Monday and Tuesday there were two plenary sessions running in parallel most of the time, then there is a room that press conferences are being held more or less non stop by various organizations and nations, and lastly there are commonly four to six so called "side events" going on in a neighbouring hotel, which are usually informative presentations (one of the last I saw was on how deforestation and degredation can be measured by various satellite imaging methods). At the same time your making friendly and business connections with people here, astonishingly easy as well.. And in between all that I try to get to do some of the stuff I originally came here for, which is writing news :D. Under these conditions it easily turns 4 in the morning before you get home. On one occasion, noting that there was a market just opening, me and a befriended journalist from Canada (Toby Heaps) popped in between the dead chickens and piles of vegetables to grab some tuck, as he hadn´t eaten that evening.

But back to the event: I was very amazed at how accesable everything is, its in stark contrast to the way things were in Heiligendamm: At least this first week before the ministers arrived you could walk around the plenary while the sessions were being held, just approach the delegates in breaks, get up on stage after a Press Conference and ask Yvo de Boer this and that, basicly do more or less anything you please. The limits are the closed sessions, though I know some people that have slipped in those as well...

So all very open, but the flip side of the coin is that what your told informally is generally considered off the record. That means although I may be plenty in the know, there is nothing I can source that information to. So why have I done no interviews you ask? Well, no easy answer to that, I guess it comes down to me having set my priorities differently. One problem still is that, as I haven´t planned things out, the day rushes by, which one event racing after the next, hardly leaving a breather to think about what I could be doing instead of listening to the Umbrella group and the G77+ China argue about whether or not technology transfer is on the agenda or not for a good two hours. I must also admit that I´ve been contacting some enviromental NGO´s asking them if I can give them a hand in any way. I didn´t have much any luck with that at first, but I yesterday met with a German organisation, and might help them with a presentation and the entailing press release. I hope I don´t offend my colleagues here when I say that lending my support to these organisations is more important to me personally than doing reporting :/ .

Well, its been very interesting so far, and I want to thank those of you at home who have given me a hand with the articles, that was definitely much appreciated :D , as well as the feedback I´ve recieved. I reckon you might not be hearing from me here before the end of the conference, so till then I suppose.

P.S. for any German speakers: I´ve been blogged elsewhere. Oh, and you can see me asking a question at minute 19 + 30 secs here (can you say vanity :D ?).

Over

Yes, its over. After a day of limbo (at least thats how I felt) the Climate conference (finally) ended yesterday. And how crazy was that last day. Some of you might have seen comments I was making on Wikinews, and I just have to say again that I was really relieved when the US so unexpectedly agreed to the amended text (I was up there on the press gallery giving them standing ovations together with the rest of the plenary :D). I really saw everything coming apart beforehand, and from the worried expressions of fellow journalists, I saw that others were thinking the same (those that I spoke only confirmed this). I was glad I didn't see the guys from Germanwatch I did the translation for till after it was over though, cause their policy guy (who does the lobby work), told me that he had also been afraid it might fail at the last minute, and I would have given quite something on his opinion! But I guess this might all be a bit of detail overload (I reckon it shows you were my heart is).

So what happened/what have I been doing in the second week here on Bali? One quite nice thing that springs to mind was being invited by the Canadian Journalist I'm sharing a bungalow with (Toby Heaps) to have Dinner with some guys from TV. Afraid I can't recall their names, but these two, both based in Beijing had some real interesting stories to tell, from the US base in Kabul till how to get around paying Bagshish (bribe, have absolutely no idea how its usually spelt) when travelling in Indonesia or elsewhere.

Oh right, I did the aforementioned translation for the German NGO Germanwatch. They released their climate risk index on Monday or Tuesday, and I translated the press release into english (that being one of a number of things that kept me up till late during that week, SVTCobra :D).

Otherwise I've been connecting up to some young people from Europe with a view to the next two conferences on Monday and Tuesday (when there wasn't too much happening to be reported on, as all the action was behind closed doors in small groups then; hmm, not that this changed too much towards later really...). But I guess I should stay more focused on the news side of things :).

The high level segment was a blessing for me: there were no parallel events and the speeches weren't contributing to the ongoing negotiations in any meaningful manner, so I actually haven't seen one of them :D. I was guessing that as this (to me) non event went on there were sure to be some delegates available to interview, so I sent out some requests. Unfortunately most remained unreplied, the only ones to really get back to me were the Brazilians, but he told me something I hadn't fully realized previously: That everybody was pretty engaged in negotiations within smaller groups, and that he therefore did not believe that I'd be able to get to talk with anyone (which is what happened).

I have the impression I'm not really in storyteller mode at the moment, so thats all for now, and I hope it wasn't too boring. I hope to add a bit more over the next few days!

Regards Sean Heron 13:25, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Bits and pieces

Well, in my last post I had promised I'd fill in some gaps later, and though the conference is now more than a week over, and the memories are naturally fading, I still wanted to do so. When I was thinking about what might be interesting and I hadn't mentioned yet, what sprung to mind was how the media and the NGOs/Governmental representatives work like two cogs with one another when it goes to conveying news.

I guess I should start of by some broader context: Everybody at the conference got a badge/card for entry checks (barcoded even). These had your name and organisation on them, which of course is quite helpful. Most importantly though (in everyday social contacts) they had a colour and text designating them either "NGO", "Media", or "Party" (the delegates) [There were others but thats not relevant]. Now the interesting thing was, and I didn't realize this until a few days in, that carrying a "Media" card round with you, got all sorts of people to peddle information to you (not quite as intrusively as you get peddled pretty much anything as a foreigner here in Bali, but with equally keen interest :D). "I have a real story for you, mate", "... I think I might have some more information for you later, could you give me your number?" were some of the best I heard.

This leads me back to the "media machine" and its "feeding". As in Heiligendamm, the writing press got a big working area to itself. So you have a nice collection of journalists there, and plenty of organisations giving press briefings used this circumstance to do some "canvasing" for themselves. From the US State Department, to the NGO I had some contact with, Germanwatch, you'd have people going around placing sheets stating where, when and what their press conference is going to be (about).

And with the amount of stuff going on, people (icluding me) would follow these invites (its not as if the information weren't easy at hand either: there were "daily programmes" lying about in stacks that did include a timetable of all press briefings). I know because I gave a hand doing some canvasing myself for a youth delegation doing a "stunt", as it is called (they dressed up as sleazy corporate bosses, they were doling out monopoly money to any delegates they found), and there were quite a few people I was pressing the advertisement into the hands of, that said: "oh right, I wanted to go there, where is it happening?" or "no time, but I'll give my colleague a call".

On the press briefings themselves: You might remember me saying that there was one room where press briefings were held more or less non stop. Well, at least on the last days, there were also journalists that were their more or less all the time. How do you know, you ask. You must have been there all the time as well then! Well I guess I have to admit that yes, I was there most of the time as well, and there was not much else you could do on Friday, so I guess the case I'm making isn't a strong one. Still, it did get me thinking, at least at times, we were entirely dependent of the information we were being given in the briefings. Still, I guess its nevertheless worlds apart from Heiligendamm, were the best you got was press briefings... over TV. And a number of limited Photo opportunities.

Speaking of which what I hadn't anticipated was how various NGOs had a good number of "stunts" set up (one I already mentioned). The fossil awards, which were handed out daily to the countries the Climate action network (CAN) viewed as the most obstructive that day, even advertised: "good photo opportunities" on their flyers. I never did get round to watching one, but apparently they didn't just name which nations and why got the awards, no, they always had someone from the appropriate nation stand in to "recieve" the reward, and made quite a show of it :). And this was not just anybody handing them out, but a network of the greater part of the environmental NGOs present (see also http://www.climatenetwork.org/).

So yes, a lot of what the NGOs were doing was centred around getting press coverage, and I had the impression that the press on the other hand, often had a hard time understanding what was going on, or getting something good to cover, if it wasn't fed us bite size (see for example my "scientists urge action on climate change" article, based entirely on the information I was given). So yes, I find the image of two cog wheels running in one another quite adequate.

What else have I missed until now ? Maybe just how accesable the delegates were. I myself didn't actually talk in much with any one of them, but tagging along with Toby Heaps on one day (a Canadian journalist I was sharing a Bungalow with), we were at a restaurant at the Canadian Delegations Hotel, and they had just finished eating together with a bunch of Canadian Press people when we got there. Toby (who later released a paper on Carbon taxing he had coauthored) took up the opportunity and presented some of the thoughts of the paper to one of the delegates.

And this didn't seem too uncommon. One of the young Europeans I met up with, a woman from Norway, said they (the members of their/the Norwegian NGO(s), not sure) had regular meetings with the delegates, where they would of course lobby for their position. A young woman from Belgium had actually been invited onto the delegation, and was thus even more involved in the whole process (she once bemoaned that it was difficult to lobby if your government was already getting things pretty right. She stated that the Belgians position inside the EU was a progressive one, but that they had to tone it down outwards, as the EU was presenting one common position).

I was of course previously aware that lobby work happened, but I guess I had never thought about how it worked in detail, and so it was quite interesting and somewhat surprising for me to see and hear about the process. Anything else? Their's certainly still plenty I could tell, but to sum it up I'll just say that I realized time and again that all those attending, NGOs, press, security or delegates, are just humans in the end and, of course, act that way as well and not just in the roles they have been given.