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

[JFC Morfin]

>On 16:45 30/11/2013, Jeremy Malcolm said:
>many would say the IETF is not multi-stakeholder all, since it does 
>not recognise stakeholder groups.

Jeremy,

The IETF acknowledges stakeholders groups. I am facilitating the 
IUCG at IETF non-WG (i.e. permanent) mailing list for the civil society 
techies and an help for them to relate within the IETF. This is not 
the fault of the IETF if the civil stakeholders are not interested in 
participating in the IETF work.

There are definitely many problems for civil society members when 
interacting with the IETF. One of them is the English language (as in 
other CS lists). One of the missions of the IUCG is to permit people 
to contribute in their own language and permit other participants to 
translate the concerns of a linguistic community members. This has 
worked very well in the case of French contributors and IDNA2008 
where their influence on the documentation of the Internet support of 
diversity was decisive. It resulted in the final consensus that could 
not have been proposed and reached otherwise due to the seemingly 
irreducible positions of English speaking techies and French speaking 
civil society linguists (actually also defending the cultural 
exception for everyone and as such supported by various linguistic 
communities' engineers).

Anyone with a sensible project can come and ask the IETF Chair to 
create an IETF non-WG mailing list, propose and make its charter 
accepted, gather contributors, and introduce I_Ds as I did.

There is certainly a cultural and sponsoring gap between average 
civil society and average IETF participants, but the diversity on 
both side is very wide. RFC 3774 documents some "IETF Problems" 
(partly corrected), RFC 3869 describes the risks we fear of a private 
sector over influence, that RFC 6852 has now accepted and not really 
counter-ballanced (my pending appeal in spite of/or due to the 
efforts engaged by ISOC that we progressively discover) .

The only thing I see as an important difference is that the IETF 
calls for real top level professionnal thinking, toward practical 
immediate decisions, and is not for political protests or idealistic 
suggestions even well construed. The IETF has and assumes its 
responsibilities; until now, I have only seen Civil Society people 
avoiding the setting-up of enhanced cooperation initiatives where 
they would be actually responsible for something.

jfc