[governance] WGIG chapter (was: IGF Book)

[Dan Krimm]

At 5:29 PM -0800 12/7/07, Avri Doria wrote:
>hi,
>
>i do not think i know what you mean by this paragraph.  sounds
>somewhat critical, which is cool, but i can't figure it out.
>
>a.
>
>On 7 dec 2007, at 13.53, Dan Krimm wrote:
>
>> I went back and read Avri's chapter in the WGIG book recently,
>> which was
>> helpful to me in understanding the culture clash here, and it seems
>> clear
>> that the techie/politico terms of discourse are still "in flux" in
>> terms of
>> understanding one another.  By way of personal disclosure, while
>> I've been
>> involved with "online services" from an end-user application and
>> content
>> production standpoint since 1981, I'm really (and unapologetically)
>> coming
>> to the realm of IG primarily from a public policy/political
>> stance.  And of
>> course, I am also (and equally unapologetically) an *advocate* in a
>> political sense (as, underneath it all, I believe we all are).


I think maybe we are all too much on edge these days.  I meant this
completely "straight up" and certainly without any criticism of you
personally -- just the opposite, I found your essay clarifying and
illuminating.

I hadn't read your chapter in WGIG book before (just got my hands on it
recently to read another chapter), and it outlined in sharper relief the
challenges you described between two professional communities that
apparently had a good deal of difficulty communicating with each other
("techies" and "politicos" in my shorthand, but derived from the
description in your chapter), so I learned something from it that had not
been at the top of my mind through all of the debates on this list.  This
was genuinely valuable to me, because while I may have had a "subconscious
suspicion" of something like this going on, I was not paying attention to
it explicitly in my own head, and hadn't quite placed my finger on it so
clearly as you did.

I think that underlying some of the debates about jurisdiction and
procedure (in particular at ICANN, but not restricted to that institution)
may be related to persistent conceptual differences in this area -- that
is, even though you made the IG community as a whole aware of these
dynamics two years ago, it may not really have sunk in completely yet.

So, in response to that, I thought it would be useful to place my own
"professional community alliance" on the table in full disclosure, to help
people interpret my own positions and statements, especially when I talk
about the role of politics (i.e., public policy) in IG.  I thought this
might be an example for others to reflect on their own alliances and habits
of thought, so that maybe we could address our collective informal "terms
of reference" among each other as we continue to explore matters of
substance.

Sometimes when people start calling each other names about specific topics,
it's really because they have different fundamental frames of reference.
The topics just lead them to their different values, and rather than
talking about the topics at hand they are really arguing about their
differing values (with the specific topic just serving as a proxy for the
deeper dispute).

This happens all the time in political contexts, and I think it happens a
lot here (and I think so because I think this is a political context -- of
course, this is part of my conceptual framework, and that carries my values
along with it).  I think a lot of people in civil society are explicitly
motivated by similar political concerns, and since IGC has a lot of CS
folks in it, it makes sense that there should be a strong "politico"
component to discussions here.

Bottom line: if we are going to argue about the conceptual framework and
the contrasting values, we should do that explicitly rather than using
specific issues as proxy for that, because when the proxy dynamic gets
involved it greatly confuses the discussion.

Divide (the disputes) and conquer.

Best,
Dan

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