What kind of drafting work on "IG Principles"? (was Re: Two-question...)

[Norbert Bollow]

Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:
> On 02/10/12 22:46, William Drake wrote:
> > Although I didn't quite take Norbert's point about the principles
> > declaration not needing to be finished.  Again, we will be talking
> > about principles in the Taking Stock main session.  We will be
> > reviewing the various principles initiatives undertaken by IGOs etc.
> > and linking these to the IGF and its future role. Trying to line up
> > good government participants to draw their peers' attention.   I
> > would have thought that a freshly produced statement from
> > stakeholders would have provided a usefully complementary input,
> > and way to bring the whole BB enterprise to wider attendees'
> > attention.
> 
> Totally agree, but I think Norbert may have just meant that we have a
> hard deadline for the ITU statement, since the public submissions will
> close that very day.  For the IGF statement, we at least have a couple
> more days up our sleeve if we need them.

Well my thoughts regarding the drafting work on "IG Principles" were
that we might take steps forward in the wordsmithing towards creating a
good text that could eventually evolve into a "Universal Declaration of
Internet Governance Principles" with broad multistakeholder support and
perhaps a UNGA resolution endorsing it. That wouldn't be something to
finalize in Baku. Rather we'd make as much progress as we can to create
a draft text which is as good as we can make it, and then appoint a team
to lead the work of taking things forward from there. 

But I also see the value of what Bill suggests, to create a "freshly
produced statement from stakeholders". In my view, that kind of thing
should definitely be finalized by Monday evening at the latest. That
doesn't give a lot of extra time, but at least it gives one day which
civil society organizations can use to consider whether they want to
endorse the statement, and if it should turn out during that phase that
some part of the wording is really unfortunate and should be changed,
we'd have a chance to have an extra meeting on Monday evening to decide
such a change. 

The realities of the scarcity of time and bandwidth of human
thinking and communication capacity being what they are, I'm pretty
sure that we can't realize both of these ideas in the context of this
year's Best Bits gathering. We need to choose either of them. Either
approach is ok in my opinion.

> This doesn't mean we won't have a press conference, but it makes sense
> to move this to the course of the IGF itself.  The press will already
> be there, and there will be a daily official press conference into
> which we may be able to wrap our own (I'll enquire).  This will give
> our outputs a lot more visibility, and will also provide a few days'
> breathing room for finessing of the text - gathering signatures,
> proof-reading, printing copies, etc.

Sounds like a good plan IMO.

Greetings,
Norbert