Multi-Equal Stakeholderism (was Re: [bestbits] Joint civil society endorsements for London meeting of High-Level Panel)

[McTim]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 10:00 PM, Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:

> On 1 Dec 2013, at 7:19 am, McTim <mctimconsulting at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  , since many would say the IETF is not multi-stakeholder all,
>>
>
> I've never met anyone who has ever said that.  Are you actually trying to
> make that claim?
>
>
> Hardly just me, a lot of people were saying so during the last IGF; it was
> a recurring theme that the term "multi-stakeholderism" had become
> meaningless because it was being applied to anything and everything.
>  Although this came through strongly at a number of workshops, i
> particularly recall that it came up at the pre-event "Technical standards
> and metrics for measurable impact of multi-stakeholderism" (
> http://www.internet-science.eu/igf-workshop-2013).  I don't have time
> right now to look for specific references, but I suspect this observation
> may have also been made by CIGI (who were co-organisers of that pre-event)
> in their series of papers at
> http://www.cigionline.org/series/internet-governance.  This is not to say
> that the IETF isn't procedurally open, but it isn't multi-stakeholder in
> any meaningful sense.
>


Except of course that people from all of the artificial WSIS SGs
participate, which is the definition of MSism in the WSIS sense.


>
> Hence the emergence of a range of more specific terms of which multi-equal
> stakeholderism is only one, and not even the ugliest.
>
>  Stakeholder groupings are artificial boundaries imposed on us at WSIS by
> government types.
>
> It is NOT the way Internet policy has been made during the first 3 decades
> of Internet existence.
>
>
> And they never claimed to be multi-stakeholder back then, either.
>
> Though it's still a work in progress, our session at the Best Bits meeting
> in Bali towards defining multi-stakeholderism made the point very clearly
> that it required a balancing of power differences between stakeholder
> groups.  This is vital, otherwise the perspectives of the powerless are
> simply drowned out.
>

If everyone is equal, then no one's voice is drowned out.   The notion of
"power" only comes into play when you buy into intergovernmental
(ITU/OECD/UNCTAD/$IGO) processes.

I've been a WG Chair in a RIR PDP, and the only power is that of the
individual, speaking for themselves about what they think is in the best
interest of the Internet.  Google or the USA has no more power in these
processes than you and I.  I think that BB and CS in general should embrace
this kind of equality, not shun it in favor of intergovernmental processes
where we have to beg for seats at the table in order to talk about the
shape of other tables where actual policy work is being done.

rgds,

McTim
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/bestbits/attachments/20131130/e6a3fe54/attachment.htm>