[bestbits] [governance] A few notes from the NETmundial phone conference

[Ian Peter]

Yes – I agree with Jeremy that we really do need to decide within a week if we are to participate, and if so how. I notice a few people putting names forward on our lists already; if for the next few days we can have discussions here and elsewhere as to whether or not to participate, that would help to refine an approach and a possible call for nominations in a few days.

The NetMundial.org  site is now revised to reflect this new initiative and the call for nominations is outlined at https://www.netmundial.org/coordination-council-nominations. Names of all people nominated are automatically made public immediately -  I think a good feature. 

CSCG is going to have to make a decision on whether to be involved or not, and if so how. To assist this, I think there are many people reading this list who listened in on the call – and in some cases were not able to ask questions – so it would be good to have feedback on their impressions from these people and others.

For me as an individual – I think the concept of a forum to deal with orphan issues is good and needed. However, irrespective of how good the intentions of WEF ICANN and CGI.br are or are not, there is a substantial structural issue if WEF decides who the representatives of civil society are. I think they realise they have a problem there as well, and would welcome some sort of solution. So I think there is room for us to offer a way out of their dilemma. Putting forward nominations may not be the only way of doing this.

Ian Peter





From: Jeremy Malcolm 
Sent: Friday, November 07, 2014 5:23 AM
To: bestbits at lists.bestbits.net ; governance at lists.igcaucus.org 
Subject: [governance] A few notes from the NETmundial phone conference

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, 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

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