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<div class="">I attended the NETmundial phone conference this
morning, interested to find out what had changed since the
previous launch in August, which had drawn criticism not only from
civil society but more broadly. <br>
<br>
The NETmundial Initiative is presented as not being a centralised
organisation but rather a platform to support distributed
governance of the Internet. It brings together "Enablers"
(currently CGI.br, ICANN and WEF) and proposed "Solutions". The
solutions can be contributed by anyone in crowdsourcing fashion,
and can invite partnerships or calls for assistance. The focus of
the Initiative is on mapping what already exists, and on
developing solutions where there are gaps.<br>
<br>
There have been some changes since what was presented in August,
mainly to de-emphasise the role of the WEF, which now notionally
has its own separate but parallel Internet initiative. However
WEF will continue to enjoy a permanent seat on the NETmundial
Initiative's Coordination Council, and contrary to previous
indications, the name of the initiative will not be changed to
remove the reference to "NETmundial". This is because the
NETmundial Principles are meant to be the foundation for the
Initiative's work (I questioned whether this meant that those
Principles are set in stone, and received an equivocal response
that the Initiative might work on evolving them if someone
proposed this.)<br>
<br>
The Coordination Council will contain 25 members, 5 of which are
permanent seats for <a href="http://CGI.br" class="">CGI.br</a>,
WEF, ICANN,<br class="">
the I* group, and the IGF MAG. Note: no permanent seat for civil
society, except through CGI.br and the IGF. The other 20 members
will be distributed across four stakeholder groups which are (1)
academia, the technical community and foundations, (2) civil
society, (3) governments and intergovernmental organisations, and
(4) the private sector - and across all geographical regions.<br>
<br>
There was much emphasis on how "bottom up" this initiative is,
which drew skeptical responses in the webconference chat room.
Although they did invite the stakeholder groups to nominate their
own representatives, ultimately ICANN, WEF and CGI.br together
reserved the right to decide between them if too many nominations
were received. (From civil society's point of view, we would aim,
if we are to nominate candidates at all, to do so centrally
through our IG Civil Society Coordination Group (CSCG) in order to
avoid giving WEF that power.)<br class="">
</div>
<br>
Nominations are due within a month, so we really need to decide
within a week whether we intend to participate at all, and if so, to
proceed to a nomination process through the CSCG.<br>
<br>
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<div class="">-- </div>
<div class="">Jeremy Malcolm</div>
<div class="">Senior Global Policy Analyst</div>
<div class="">Electronic Frontier Foundation</div>
<a href="https://eff.org" class="">https://eff.org</a><br
class="">
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:jmalcolm@eff.org">jmalcolm@eff.org</a>
<div class=""><br class="">
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<div class="">Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">:: Defending Your Rights in the Digital World ::</div>
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