“If you don’t try, you can’t complain,” said Chris Nichol the first time I interviewed him at a preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society in February 2003. Chris was one of the many APC members I engaged with as a WSIS virgin tasked with the job of communicating the process in a web-friendly way for the organization.
For a man of his age, experience and computer expertise, Chris could have been creaming it in for the Bill Gates of this world or retiring in luxury on the profits from the sale of his own dot.com. Yet there he was busily beavering away on an alternative declaration of principles on behalf of Civil Society along with twenty of his equally brilliant colleagues. No lofty UN drafting room for this CRIS crew. Operations took place over the last crumbs of dinner at the kitchen table of a modest self-catering boarding house on the outskirts of Geneva.
For Chris there was more to life than having a job and earning money (though he was probably one of the most hard-working people I’ve met and no doubt his pals at APC & Pangea in Spain will attest to that). Not for him the ‘dominant competitiveness’ of the mainstream world. The reward for Chris was the human warmth, the sharing of skills and a genuine sense of belonging to a group of people “who are actually doing something together to try and change the world a little bit for the better.”
Human dignity was his driver and the Zappatistas of Mexico his inspiration. “People can be very powerless in this world,” he once told me. “Those with lots of money are the dominant force so that ordinary people struggle to have their voices heard. Yet when you work with others, not only do you receive lots of help and the chance for personal development but you can also gradually make an impact. That’s human dignity.”
Like the Zapatistas in their struggle for autonomy from the Mexican government, succeeding for Chris was secondary to the actual process of getting there.
His human dignity was fully to the fore when he returned after a year of illness to Geneva for the WSIS preparatory conference in February 2005. Thinner and just over a course of chemotherapy, his spirit was undaunted. Neither the illness nor the corrosive effect of certain civil society members, cowtowed by their government’s oppressive agendas, could dampen Chris’s conviction that the Civil Society process pioneered at WSIS was setting a precedent for future governmental summits and UN negotiations.
“Delegates are happy, it’s not disruptive or negative. I’d say try it out for yourselves and invite civil society into your working groups. They’ll certainly have something to say and it works,” he advised in one breath whilst in the other he was enticing me to join him and an APC posse for a street carnival in the city centre that evening.
Cradling glasses of mulled wine and dancing and fooling around to a Latino outfit in the freezing temperatures of wintry Geneva, I felt the heart and humility of this great man. Chris Nichol, you’ve made an impact on my world and the worlds of many others. No time for complaints. We’ve got to keep trying in our journey through this life. Blessings on you!
Maud Hand, Ireland, 2006