Participation in the Forum
The Forum is open to any participants from Parties, other Governments and relevant organizations involved in biosafety capacity-building activities or interested in sharing their views and experiences relevant to the subject matter. Posting of messages is restricted to pre-registered participants but the posted messages are publicly available for reading.
To participate in the Forum, you need to have a BCH user account.
- If you don't have a BCH account, click here to sign up for one and then go to the group discussion pages to post messages.
- If you already have a BCH account, you can go directly to the group discussion pages
Participation in the discussions can done by posting messages directly online through the Biosafety Clearing-House or via e-mail:
cbforum@cbd.int.
Participants must first sign in the Forum website in order to post messages. Once signed in, participants can reply to a message by clicking the ‘reply’ button found under the text of that message. Participants can also click the ‘create a new thread’ button to post a message and begin a new thread of discussion under that theme.
Individuals wishing to participate via e-mail can choose to 'watch' the discussions taking place under the different themes. These individuals will then receive copies of the posted messages by e-mail, may send e-mails to reply to the messages received and their response will be posted to the web page.
The Forum will be conducted in English only.
Contact the Secretariat at
cbforum@cbd.int for any questions about the Online Forum.
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Moderation
Contributions from participants will be posted directly to the discussion groups without moderation. The Secretariat reserves the right to remove contributions or parts thereof that are inconsistent with the objectives, rules and guidelines of the Forum.
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Rules of the Forum
- Contributions of participants will be considered to have been made in their personal capacity unless they explicitly state that their interventions represent the views of their government or organization.
- All participants shall exercise respect and courtesy towards all other participants.
- Participants shall not post abusive, libellous or misleading messages / materials / links.
- Each participant shall be solely responsible for any information, materials, or links to any materials, that he/she posts or disseminates electronically.
- By registering to take part in the Forum, participants have expressly authorised the CBD Secretariat to summarise and disseminate all or part of their postings to the Forum as part of reports or any other document(s) that may be subsequently prepared by the Secretariat.
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General guidelines for posting messages to the Forum
Participants are expected to:
- Briefly introduce themselves when posting their first message, including their name, title, country and institutional affiliation.
- Keep their messages short, concise and focussed. Each message should not exceed 300 words (or no more than a full screen long).
- Ensure that the messages are relevant to the topic/question being discussed.
- Exclude the original text of the previous posting when responding to a posted message in order to allow participants with limited internet connectivity to easily access and download the messages.
- Make the subject header as descriptive as possible about the content of the message so that other participants can easily decide which messages to read and respond to.
- Maintain the original subject-heading when responding to someone else’s posting.
- Make sure they do not link to any files that contain viruses, are corrupted or have any other similar deficiencies.
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