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

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 03/10/12 19:02, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> 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.

A broader multi-stakeholder declaration of principles or affirmation of
commitments (or whatever you want to call it) is definitely an end game
that many of us share, but we don't have a mandate to begin that process
yet.  This is something that we need to advocate for at the IGF first,
and as you say, it will take some time.

Meanwhile, we need to have a civil society position on the table that
can later be an input into such a broader multi-stakeholder document. 
After all, everyone else has their own statements of principles that
they have presented at the IGF (USG, CoE, G8, IBSA, etc) and until now
civil society has been left behind.  I don't think we need to wait for
the multi-stakeholder process to begin first.

-- 

*Dr Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Policy Officer
Consumers International | the global campaigning voice for consumers*
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