[bestbits] Re: [governance] Breaking my silence on Netmundial related concerns raised by colleagues from India

[Norbert Bollow]

Parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

> What was surprising is that, when practically all civil society
> groups in India, who are engaged with IG work - and have extensive
> work relationships with all other global actors, often stronger than
> they have among themselves - came out to present the facts on the
> ground about the inappropriateness of Subi's selections, practically
> no one from the global civil society expressed real support. (Yes, a
> good quote from my email to be used by Subi.) I see this as primarily
> the fault of the civil society leadership. They cannot be doing this
> with their national CS partners, especially of a country with one
> seventh of world's population and whose general maturity of civil
> society processes cannot easily be questioned. But the fact that this
> did happen points to serious structural flaws in the form and role of
> civil society, especially its leadership, in MSist spaces. No, it is
> not the civil society groups from India who lost here - it is the
> global MSist civil society that has lost, and it may need to
> introspect deeply about it, if it ever will...

My perspective here is different in that I wasn't surprised, having
quite recently experienced similarly lackluster and even hostile
reactions when I called for transparency in a context where I think
that fundamentally the same conflict also manifested itself. For
example I was accused of wanting to line up people against a wall and
shoot them, and the posting which contained that absolutely
over-the-top statement got a remarkable degree of support. 

I definitely agree with the strong words about global civil society in
Internet governance as a whole.

We absolutely need to introspect deeply about what civil society is
supposed to stand for, and then re-organize accordingly.

Greetings,
Norbert