1. Introduction
We, the 300 women and men from 83 countries and seven continents gathered together at the Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, August 22 - 26 1998, represent the global community of information specialists, librarians, archivists, academics, politicians and activists in the field of women's information.

The mission of the Know How Conference is to improve the visibility and accessibility of women's information, on the global and local level. This includes information for and by all women, including Indigenous women, migrant and refugee women and lesbian women.

The goal is to develop a strategy whereby women involved in information work could promote the empowerment of women at the local and global level.

We convened this conference for the purpose of establishing global and local networks among workers in women's information centres, archives and services throughout the world.

2. Context

Reaffirming the Platform for Action of the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women, notably:
• "Generate and disseminate gender disaggregated data and information for planning and evaluation" (Strategic Objective H.3)
• "Increase the participation and access of women to expression and decision-making in and through the media and new technologies of communication" (Strategic Objective J.1)
• "Promote research and disseminate information on women's health" (Strategic Objective C.4)

Reaffirming the information statement by "Women, Information and the Future" international conference held in Cambridge, Ma., USA in 1994, notably:
• Noting that technology can facilitate the creation of information systems that enable women to build and maintain networks, and that collection of information for, about and by women also should proceed in communities which do not have access to modern technology;
• Considering that without documents women have no history, and without history women will be accorded little respect in the present or the future, therefore collections of archives, family papers, oral histories, and artefacts should be preserved to document and to honour the contributions of women, and information about women should include statistics, directories of women's organisations, and bibliographies of research on women;
• We encourage the participants of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing to urge their governments
  • To make women's access to information and to the means of dissemination priority of public policy;
  • To expand their collection, dissemination, and preservation of data and documents on women;
  • To take advantage of new technologies and assure women's equitable access to them;
  • To utilize the skills of women in creating and maintaining networks;
• We urge all governments to expand people's knowledge of the past and understanding of the present, and to develop policies that will empower women to achieve equal human rights in the future as the world moves toward sustainable human development.

Taking into consideration the NGO Communications Strategy Proposal, Beijing, September 1995 proposed as a follow-up to the Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women and the NGO Forum, designed to support the dissemination and implementation of the resolutions of these events and to increase women's access to communication and media. This strategy, which should address the communication needs of the community as a whole, women's networks and grassroots organizations, contemplates the following aspects:
1. Promote and strengthen women's alternative media
2. Access to information
3. Access to the means of expression, particularly in the mainstream media
4. Networking for coordination and information exchange.

Actions to be taken are:
• Increase women's community radio and television programming, adapted to local needs and languages, in both urban and rural areas
• Produce visual printed materials in comprehensible language that share information on issues that affect women's' daily lives
• Make documentation sources available relating to the decisions and progress of the Platform for Action and other related issues, via printed and electronic mail
• Consistently monitor the portrayal and employment of women in the media to ensure greater gender equality and non-sexist portrayal. This media monitoring should be coordinated globally and regionally
• Employ diverse communications media for women's networking, incorporating traditional community circuits, alternative media, computer networks and others
• Seek to develop relations and liaise between women's organizations and media with the aim of broadening and deepening media coverage of women's issues
• Encourage and support the development of media literacy programs at all educational levels in order to develop among citizens critical analysis and monitoring skills
• Develop gender-sensitive training programs for women trainers in communication practice, policy and new technologies.

Taking into consideration the People's Communication Charter, a world-wide citizen's demand for the protection of the quality of communication services and the provision of information that is affordable, user-friendly and accessible, reliable and pluralist. The PCC was developed in the course of the 1990's and is still being developed.

3. Statement of Principle

Information technology capacitates, mobilises and organizes people to influence policy. While recognizing that the media contributes to women's marginalisation on a daily basis, women must use the same media to challenge the male status quo.

Women of all nations should work together to share information and support each other's work to document the world's women.

We need to create a new space for women on-line, a new vocabulary and new ways of naming terms we are dealing with on an everyday basis.

By collecting oral histories we can recognize the power of speech in passing on knowledge and our cultural heritage. In the process of collecting and disseminating information, oral histories additionally include illiterate women who use non-written languages in many parts of the world, and rural women.

Concerning more specifically Indigenous Peoples, information is written from the perspective of colonizers, anthropologists, academics, and international corporations or from the perspective of those in the government. Indigenous peoples should be able to collect their own information. What they collect is not just data, but carries with it their worldview and also involves their oral tradition that has been sustained through time. A living library that will preserve their cultural values is a must for Indigenous Peoples.

We hereby commit ourselves as women's information services to promote the following resolutions, ensuring that a gender perspective is reflected in all government, NGO, media, education, research policies and programs.

We urge the United Nations system, regional and international financial institutions, other relevant regional and international institutions and all women and men as well as non governmental organizations, with full respect for their autonomy, and all sectors of civil society, in cooperation with governments to fully commit themselves and contribute to the implementation of these resolutions.

4. Priority Areas of Concern

Among the issues which were most discussed at this conference were:
• peace and conflict
• women's poverty
• sexual health and rights
• communication and networking
• decision making and economic autonomy
• women's human rights
• women moving into governance and public arena's
• Indigenous women and the rights of Indigenous Peoples
• information communication technology and how to make information on these important matters accessible to all women.

Collecting and disseminating information on these issues is central to the work of women's information services. In order to improve the availability and accessibility of this information the following regional and international strategic developments must take place:
• Developing the profession of women's information services
  1. at the workplace
     1. A system of partnerships and exchanges between the staff of women's information centers needs to occur, as a way of sharing concrete, practical experience.
     2. Cataloguing should be recognized as an important instrument in improving the accessibility of the increasing amounts of material on women in mainstream libraries.
     3. Classification schemes and thesauri should be widely shared in order for potential users to study and compare and to judge their usefulness to their own organizations.
     4. Publication on the net should be multi-lingual.
     5. The Internet technology is an urban-based phenomena, as such the access to is is limited to educated elites. More resources should be put into diversification of access and the availability of the technology to poor, rural, indigenous and other marginalized members of societies.
  2. in the global context
     1. Information and communication exchange must take place between regional centers. Local information services will have to work together to build their services and to strategize. Networks at regional and national levels as well as international level must continue to develop.
     2. The Know How Conference listserv could and should be used as a place to post guidelines, share ideas, and hold discussions on establishing and running women's information services around the world.
     3. Local discussion groups must be created - acting locally while thinking globally.
  3. proficiency training for the constituency
     1. Women's information services must train women to use information and to create content that is useful to women, carefully incorporating traditional information into technology, thereby empowering women.
     2. Women's awareness of Information Communication Technology usage should be encouraged and training programmes should be developed, in order to break technophobia and other social barriers. This training is to be provided in a non-hostile environment.
     3. Distance education courses should be made available on the net as well as alternative and traditional methods of delivery.
     4. We decry the growing distance between the information possessed by the "haves" and that of the "have-nots" and encourage women's centres, archives and documentation centres in the Western world to use their resources to narrow this gap.
  4. building the collections
     1. Even within the women's community, lesbian women are invisible. The Lesbian Herstory Archive web site will be used as a focus for international work among lesbian archives, to share information on research and help each other, especially new groups. A conference on lesbian archives is needed, perhaps as a pre-conference as part of the next international conference on women's information.
     2. Women's centres, archives and documentation centres should assist Indigenous Peoples on their own terms to collect information by and about themselves, to utilize this information as they wish, to empower them and enable them to lobby, monitor policy, learn, collaborate, mobilize, call for solidarity, campaign and react.
     3. Attention should be paid to other than electronic forms of information gathering and disseminating, including radio, audiotapes, records, discussions, songs, theatres.
     4. Oral history should be emphasized as a primary source of women's lives and experiences; the individual's privacy should be protected and their consent obtained.
     5. Women's centers, archives and documentation centers' collections should reflect the diversity of women in their population. They should also recognize that many common issues to women know no political boundaries and that therefore information generated in another political state is often important to women and decision-makers in the local context. Common problems that cut across boundaries must be identified.
• Women's information as an instrument for policy making
  1. Governments must consider the impact of their decisions for women, men and children.
  2. Countries must be held accountable for decisions made at Beijing '95 regarding information.
  3. The "Mapping the World of Women's Information Services" project, a database, web site and book documenting which women's information service provides what information and how, must be continued and expanded. This project was initiated by the Know How Conference.
• Funding and personnel
  
  1. For information to be made accessible and widely available, human and financial infrastructure is needed. Finances must be made available to support the work of women's centres, archives and documentation centers.
  2. Funds must be raised to enable organisations to pay for connectivity to Internet.
• Women's information in the political context
  
  1. Information is a human right and therefore a women's right.
  2. The Internet technology should be used for globalizing solidarity and struggle for justice rather than becoming a tool of capital consumption.
  3. Nations should make positive efforts and provide the necessary support to document the history of women. NGOs and feminist organizations should make an effort to complement these efforts.
  4. The need for information and technical training should be a concern for national and local governments in their nations.
  5. Strategies should be devised to change the treatment or absence of women's issues in the media.
  6. Feminist networks must come up with alternative usage of the Internet technology, which contribute to solidarity of the women's movements.
  7. More concerted effort should be made by women's networks to make the hidden forms of violence, poverty and state repression appear on information networks.

5. Institutional Arrangements

Every participant and every women's information centre should promote the Declaration of the Know How Conference. Additionally, an international non-governmental organization must be financially supported to continue the process of cooperation between women's libraries, archives & documentation services throughout the world and to promote the Declaration of the Know How Conference. We recognize the effort the IIAV has given to creating the Know How Conference. We recommend that the IIAV should house this international organization.

The task of this organization will be to facilitate the development of cooperation among women's information services. This development will take place in the spirit of reciprocity and respect developed throughout the process leading up to the Know How Conference. The development began with the international conference of women's information services held in Istanbul, Turkey in 1991, and was followed by the international conference entitled Women, Information and the Future held in Cambridge, USA in 1994. The 4th World Conference on Women convened by the United Nations in 1995 and the NGO Forum held at the same time in Beijing preceded the Know How Conference held in Amsterdam in 1998. All these conferences supported the development of standards for generating, disseminating and exchanging gender specific information.

Representatives of the following regions have stated their willingness to host the next conference
1. Asia - Pacific
2. Africa, both Francophone and Anglophone
3. Italy - Bologna
4. Caribbean and Latin America

The participants of the Know How Conference mandate a drafting committee to formulate the resolutions based on the minutes of the workshops and the results of the caucus meetings and the Indigenous Women's pre-conference.

The participants of the Know How Conference mandate a permanent committee to undertake the steps necessary to continue and develop cooperation among women's information services throughout the world.

Members of the Resolutions Committee (Permanent Committee) of the Know How Conference:
• Rhona Bautista, Philippines
• Muthoni Muriu, Senegal
• Montse Argente Jiménez, Cataluna
• Uma Kali-Shakti, Australia
• Marta Terry, Cuba
• Irene Chaverri Polini, Costa Rica
• Joan Challinor, USA
• Anju Vyas, India
• Natalia Babich, Russia
• Joke Blom and Lin Pugh, The Netherlands
• Lydia Ruprecht, UNESCO
• Gerda de Bruijn, Surinam/The Netherlands

Indigenous Statement

We, Indigenous Women from diverse indigenous peoples attended the pre-Conference of the Know How Conference on 22-23 August 1998.
The aims of the pre-Conference were:
• to make us visible in the Know How conference to be able to integrate the indigenous women's struggle in the global women's struggle and
• to get political space in the decision-making and actions of women.

It is very essential to us to collect information by, for and about indigenous women. When we share this information, we must do it from the indigenous people's reality and teachings of our ancestors.
Information is power and it was used against us for a long time and still is. Access to information empowers us, enables us to lobby, monitor policy, learn, collaborate, mobilize, call for solidarity, campaign and react.
This manifest synthesizes the experiences and information we shared during these two days of the pre-Conference. We want to present it to the Know How conference as a contribution of indigenous women.

Indigenous Women's Manifest

This document is divided into three parts.
1. Information
2. Challenges
3. Recommendations

Information and Indigenous Women

1. We, Indigenous Women, have our own ways of communicating and sharing knowledge which preserve indigenous identity, culture, heritage and language.
2. Communication at the local level is horizontal and is conscious of transmitting traditional or indigenous values.
3. The cosmovision and knowledge of indigenous peoples is integral to their identity and right to self-determination.
4. Much of the information from outside perpetuates neocolonialism, classism, racism, sexism and elitism. It denies our identity as peoples. It is basically controlled by a small elite group in and out of the country, and control of this is further concentrated in the hands of a few corporations and the infrastructure is found more in the city centers/capitals.
5. The production of technology for information has negative effects on indigenous women.
6. lands are appropriated to establish electronics and microelectronics industries
7. mining companies, which extract and process minerals and metals used in information technology, displace us from our ancestral territories and pollute our land and waters.
8. Indigenous women and other women working in the micro-electronic industry suffer from bad working conditions, are paid low wages, face health harzards e.g. exposure to toxic chemicals
9. Governments are surrendering their right to regulate these companies because they have to abide by decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which pushes for liberalization, privatization and deregulation.
10. Resources in terms of raw materials and indigenous knowledge, which are used for the production of the hardware, e.g. computers, video, come from indigenous peoples' territories but most of these communities do not even have the basic infrastructure for communication.
11. There is a lack of written and audio-visual information about indigenous women and from the available ones, it is unknown.
12. There is a lack of contact and/or communication among indigenous women. We work with each other but we have to develop stronger and effective ways of communication.
13. Information technology contributes to the commercialization of indigenous knowledge and commodification of indugenous culture and indigenous women.

Challenges

It is in this context that we come together to discern how, why and when we should have access and control over information technology without losing our indigenous knowledge, identity, culture, cosmovision and control over our territory and resources, and without surrendering our right to self-determination. Being aware of the dangers and opportunities present in the use of information technology, we affirm the following principles:
1. Information should be made available to indigenous women in their own language and must consider the context and cosmovision of indigenous peoples.
2. Information would be used to make indigenous women aware, help them organize, mobilize for action, promote their rights as women and as indigenous peoples.
3. Information should not be used to undermine the cultures, identity, and rights of indigenous peoples.
4. Information and information technology should not be used to commercialize
   • indigenous knowledge and undermine the spirituality which goes along with this knowledge;
   • the image of indigenous women and indigenous peoples, in general.
5. The method of communication should integrate indigenous ways of communication which are oral, informal and collectively done.
6. Information should be made available for indigenous women so they will have access to decisions made, which have direct impacts on their lives.
7. Spaces, which allow indigenous women to empower themselves, should be faciltated by information and information technology.
8. Therefore, the question is not whether to use or not to use information technology, but to ensure that we have control over the access and use of this technology.

Recommendations

1. All the documents which deal with indigenous peoples should be elaborated and disseminated through appropriate means of communications (radio, paintings, stories) in the languages of our peoples according to the realities and with gender perspective.
2. The existing important information on indigenous women should be disseminated to as many people as possible.
3. Indigenous women must develop the capacity to organizat themselves and to promote and strenthen the appropriate means of communications, to establish networks, centres of communication and information on indigenous women.
4. We should make a concerted effort to influence policies of communication to safeguard the rights of indigenous peoples. They are under threat and may lose their identity, culture and access to resources.
5. We should use the means of communications:
   • to denounce abuses and violations of indigenous peoples' rights and
   • to promote international solidarity in the defense of their rights.

For questions or more information please contact: knowhow@iiav.nl
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