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The Culture of Peace News Network | By David Adams December 2005 |
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Sources Early History of Culture of Peace Civil Society Report on Culture of Peace UN Declaration and Programme of Action UNESCO Website for Culture of Peace Internet Information Board for Decade Report Internet Information Board for Strategy Discussion Internet Information Board to Monitor Media Original draft of UN Declaration and Programme of Action Recent General Assembly Debate UNESCO Debate on Human Right to Peace UNESCO Brochure for Seville Statement Sintra Plan of Action for Education El Salvador National Programme
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Responding to the importance of consciousness about a culture of peace and the failure of the commercial mass media to contribute positively, the Culture of Peace News Network (CPNN) has been developed with the goal of providing an alternative source of news. The criterion for a contribution to CPNN is that it should promote at least one of the basic principles of a culture of peace and should not contradict any of them. As it says on the home page of CPNN-USA, CPNN is a : a global network of interactive Internet sites in many languages where readers exchange information about events, experiences, books, music, and web news that promote a culture of peace. It is a project of the United Nations International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World. You, the reader, are invited to contribute. When I launched CPNN as a UNESCO project in 1998, the intention was to establish an international network of CPNN websites that would exchange their stories and hence achieve a world news service for the culture of peace. One member of my staff worked full time for two years on this project and she and other team members undertook missions to establish CPNN sites in China, Jordan, Brazil, El Salvador, Australia, the United States and Russia. Additional contracts were made with organizations in Greece, Macedonia and France. Over the years, the CPNN sites in a number of countries were not maintained, and at the present time there are only two that have lasted for more than a year, CPNN-USA and CPNN-Japan, and their readership is small (e.g. about 20,000 a year for CPNN-USA). Recently, CPNN-Canada also has been established. CPNN continues to be supported by the UN Resolutions on a culture of peace. Once I retired from UNESCO in 2001, I put my energies into developing CPNN-USA as a technical model which could be adapted for use in other countries. Through the use of the PERL programming language, I was able to provide a discussion section on one side of the web page opposite the story itself, and to allow readers to contribute directly on-line to the discussion, with their contribution appearing immediately on the web page. This provides a kind of check on the truth of the story, since readers are able to write in immediately and question or confirm its contents. The stories come from readers rather than from the organizers of the website or a staff or reporters, but they go through a moderating process first. We have automated the moderating process so that it does not pose a burder on either the webmaster/coordinator or on the moderators themselves, since moderators only receive one e-mail a week asking them if they wish to moderate a story.
As this is written, we now have 262 stories on line at CPNN-USA, as well as 201 discussion topics and 359 discussion replies on the CPNN discussionboard. If this could be multiplied by many different countries and languages around the world, we would have a true world system of news for the culture of peace.
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Issues National Programmes for a Culture of Peace Definition of Culture of Peace UN Declaration and Programme of Action International Year and Manifesto 2000 Main Actors for a Culture of Peace 6. Understanding, Tolerance and Solidarity 7. Free Flow of Information and Knowledge 8. International Peace and Security
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