[bestbits] A few notes from the NETmundial phone conference

[Jeremy Malcolm]

I attended the NETmundial phone conference this morning, interested to
find out what had changed since the previous launch in August, which had
drawn criticism not only from civil society but more broadly. 

The NETmundial Initiative is presented as not being a centralised
organisation but rather a platform to support distributed governance of
the Internet.  It brings together "Enablers" (currently CGI.br, ICANN
and WEF) and proposed "Solutions".  The solutions can be contributed by
anyone in crowdsourcing fashion, and can invite partnerships or calls
for assistance. The focus of the Initiative is on mapping what already
exists, and on developing solutions where there are gaps.

There have been some changes since what was presented in August, mainly
to de-emphasise the role of the WEF, which now notionally has its own
separate but parallel Internet initiative.  However WEF will continue to
enjoy a permanent seat on the NETmundial Initiative's Coordination
Council, and contrary to previous indications, the name of the
initiative will not be changed to remove the reference to "NETmundial". 
This is because the NETmundial Principles are meant to be the foundation
for the Initiative's work (I questioned whether this meant that those
Principles are set in stone, and received an equivocal response that the
Initiative might work on evolving them if someone proposed this.)

The Coordination Council will contain 25 members, 5 of which are
permanent seats for CGI.br <http://CGI.br>, WEF, ICANN,
the I* group, and the IGF MAG.  Note: no permanent seat for civil
society, except through CGI.br and the IGF.  The other 20 members will
be distributed across four stakeholder groups which are (1) academia,
the technical community and foundations, (2) civil society, (3)
governments and intergovernmental organisations, and (4) the private
sector - and across all geographical regions.

There was much emphasis on how "bottom up" this initiative is, which
drew skeptical responses in the webconference chat room.  Although they
did invite the stakeholder groups to nominate their own representatives,
ultimately ICANN, WEF and CGI.br together reserved the right to decide
between them if too many nominations were received.  (From civil
society's point of view, we would aim, if we are to nominate candidates
at all, to do so centrally through our IG Civil Society Coordination
Group (CSCG) in order to avoid giving WEF that power.)

Nominations are due within a month, so we really need to decide within a
week whether we intend to participate at all, and if so, to proceed to a
nomination process through the CSCG.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Global Policy Analyst
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://eff.org
jmalcolm at eff.org

Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161

:: Defending Your Rights in the Digital World ::

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