[bestbits] A few notes from the NETmundial phone conference

[William Drake]

Hi

Thanks Jeremy for the summary.  Just to flag one immediate issue about the CC: the four categories of participants don’t correspond to the nongovernmental ones used for Sao Paulo and 1NET, and "academia, the technical community and foundations” are tossed together into one basket.  I’m not sure what process can be devised here to get those three distinct groupings to agree on 5 names, inter alia since foundations have not been organized and engaged in IG processes as a stakeholder group.  Unless a coordinated solution can be found (e.g. 2/2/1), one can easily imagine them getting more than 5 nominations, in which case CGI.br, ICANN and WEF will end up having to pick their best guess of a mix those groups will accept.  So making this work as a thoroughly bottom-up process could be a challenge even if CS and business can work out their respective issues.  More differentiated baskets would have saved some headaches.

How to constitute the CC is obviously just one of the questions that will have to be worked through.  How exactly the platform would operate and what the CC’s role and responsibilities would be also are very much TBD.  One could imagine the CC overseeing the design of the platform; serving as as a facilitator of connections when someone proposes a project and solicits partners/support; facilitating the dissemination of progress reports; etc.  But should it do more than this?  It’s not clear that the CC should be deciding which project proposals can be appear on the platform; specifying a framework for their formulation and conduct; overseeing their progress, and so on.  I guess it will be for the CC to figure these things out in consultation with the wider communities.

One thing I’d be reluctant to see it get into is elaborating on the NM Statement's principles.  I believe you raised this possibility at the August meeting at WEF as well, and am not clear what you have in mind.  A priori, I’d think that if the NMI wandered onto this turf, it would raise the stakes and become politicized and potentially divisive.  Better to stick to being an open platform for project facilitation and leave the discussion/negotiation of governance frameworks to other more inclusive forums/processes, no?

Best

Bill

> On Nov 6, 2014, at 7:23 PM, Jeremy Malcolm <jmalcolm at eff.org> wrote:
> 
> 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 <https://eff.org/>
> jmalcolm at eff.org <mailto:jmalcolm at eff.org>
> 
> Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161
> 
> :: Defending Your Rights in the Digital World ::
> 

***********************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
***********************************************

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