[bestbits] Draft joint letter on deliberative democratic processes for the Brazil meeting

[Jeremy Malcolm]

For those who are not on the "summit" list, I started a thread there
with suggestions on online/offline deliberation processes for the Brazil
meeting.  Adam Peake (one of the civil society representatives on the
Executive Multistakeholder Committee of the meeting) replied and
cross-posted his reply here, but in case the context wasn't clear, I'm
reposting in a new thread, with amendments based on suggestions from the
original thread (marked in italics).

Whilst it isn't necessary in order to get the message across to the
Brazil committees, there is value in allowing people to endorse this as
a sign-on statement, so that's what I'm proposing we do.  (After a
drought of months, we will have three new sign-on statements going up at
around the same time!)  Please let us know of any further suggestions
for changes within the next few days:

    To: Executive Multistakeholder Committee, cc: Logistics and
    Organizational Committee

    When the Brazil meeting was officially announced, it was stated that
    "The purpose of that meeting is to pursue consensus about
    universally accepted governance principles and to improve their
    institutional framework."  This objective will not be achieved
    without adopting specific procedures that can facilitate both the
    development of such consensus, and its accurate measurement.

    /The Brazil meeting's organisers are free to experiment with such
    procedures, to a greater extent than the IGF which operates within
    some of the constraints of the UN system. Indeed, Brazil has an
    admirable track record in this regard, having proposed innovative
    online collaboration mechanisms such as edemocracia.camara.gov.br
    and culturadigital.br.///

    In this spirit, we wish to offer some suggestions on the procedures
    to be adopted by the meeting that can facilitate purposeful
    deliberation and help to narrow down the meeting's conclusions on
    both governance principles and on changes to the institutional
    framework.  In general these suggestions are examples of mechanisms
    of deliberative democracy, which is a field dedicated to producing
    decisions that reflect the informed deliberations of a diverse group
    of affected stakeholders.  Rather than just consultation, we could
    call this "participation 2.0".

    Whatever mechanisms are used to facilitate this should work online
    and offline, or at least the online and offline mechanisms should be
    mutually supportive and well integrated.

    For online deliberation, the edemocracia.camara.gov.br
    <http://edemocracia.camara.gov.br> portal could be adapted for use
    in a multi-lingual version, that would allow proposals to be opened
    for comment so that they could be refined and improved in advance of
    the Brazil meeting.  Alternatively, there are other online tools
    that offer even more flexibility in turning discussions into
    well-informed consensus outcomes, such as AthenaBridge
    (athenabridge.com <http://athenabridge.com>).  This would be far
    more useful and a better use of resources than merely allowing the
    upload of /static text/.

    Similarly for the meeting in São Paulo, there should not simply be a
    parade of speeches/such as we are used to hearing at IGF plenary
    sessions/, but rather a very actively facilitated process that is
    designed to distill the ideas of those present into a manageable set
    of proposals, to expose those proposals to reasoned deliberation,
    and to assess their acceptability to a diverse group of
    stakeholders.  Just one of the techniques that can be used to
    accomplish this is called Dotmocracy (dotmocracy.org
    <http://dotmocracy.org>).

    /Whilst some have e//xpressed doubt that the //Brazil meeting will
    be able to  provide solutions rather than merely //offering an
    opportunity for discussion///, we believe that this assumption
    should be challenged.  In fact there is much evidence from large
    scale deliberative democratic processes already carried out around
    the world, that even a large meeting such as that planned for Brazil
    can produce useful outcomes that reflect a broad and well-informed
    consensus.

    Such successful outcomes will require proper facilitation /and the
    use of tools and techniques that although successfully used
    elsewhere, have not yet entered wide use in Internet governance./ We
    therefore encourage you to make these tools and techniques a central
    feature of the Brazil meeting and its preparatory processes.
     Experts in deliberative democratic theory and practice, in both
    online and offline modes, could also be consulted as necessary where
    gaps in the committee's own expertise may exist.



-- 

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