[bestbits] Final IGF contribution for endorsement

Fri Oct 24 13:16:25 EDT 2014

Following on from the previous thread (15 and 10 October) in which I
posted a draft contribution to the upcoming IGF open consultation
meeting, which takes stock of the Istanbul meeting and looks forward to
the future, the statement is now ready for endorsement.

There was not any discussion on-list or any amendments on the pad (many
people are preoccupied with the ITU), but I did receive some comments
off-list.  In any case, since it is consistent with our previous
statements (which it references) and since the deadline for submission
is Monday, now is the time to take the statement online.

Please read and, if you agree, endorse here:

http://bestbits.net/igf-2014-taking-stock/

Also, the final text is found below:

*Introduction*

There is broad support within civil society for the continuation of a
reformed and strengthened IGF.[0] At the same time, it is undeniable
that the almost decade-long evolution of the IGF has been very slow and
cautious, in comparison to other fora and events such as NETmundial.[1]
This may have spurred the development of a number of other meetings and
initiatives which, on some level, compete with the IGF.

Whilst this diversity of initiatives can be positive, there is also the
risk that too many of them may sap energy and attention from the IGF
itself, which has a particular impact on civil society whose resources
to participate in multiple initiatives is the most constrained. This
effect could be minimised if the IGF would be more responsive to
suggestions that stakeholders have made, often repeatedly,[1] to address
observed deficits in the IGF's structure and format.

One of the difficulties is that there is really no "IGF" to effectively
evaluate and implement these suggestions; there is a Secretariat, with
limited resources and a narrow self-assessed mandate to effect
structural changes to the IGF, and there is a MAG which, overall,
considers itself a programme committee only and is similarly reluctant
to depart from established structures and formats.

The IGF would benefit from the appointment of a new, charismatic and
visionary Executive Coordinator, with multi-stakeholder support, to
personally evangelise for and drive the necessary changes.  But in the
interim, it would also be possible for the periodic open consultation
meetings to be facilitated -- perhaps by an independent professional --
in a way that is more open to blue-sky thinking, rather than being
limited to a narrow analysis of the annual meeting themes and the like.

Even the present consultation, which is limited to "format", "schedule"
and "themes", reveals a certain narrowness of thinking in this regard. 
It does not lend itself very well to suggestions about the structural
evolution of the IGF that might allow it to more fully execute its
mandate, such as significant changes to its management structure,[1] the
execution of a coordinating function,[2] or the establishment of
issue-specific multistakeholder working groups[2].

*Format*

Perhaps the most significant departure from previous practice at the
Istanbul meeting was the new Best Practice Forum mechanism. This was
effectively a compromise between the call by many for outputs from the
IGF, and the reluctance of others for the IGF to adopt processes that
could produce such outputs by consensus. A result of this compromise is
that since the outcome documents (once they are released) do not
represent a consensus, they may not be regarded as particularly
persuasive or useful by external governance bodies.

More effective use could have been made of the academic community to
contribute towards the development of the draft best practice
recommendations, rather than expecting a self-selected multi-stakeholder
group (and in practice, only a few individuals within the group) to
develop these. The most distinctive contribution of a multi-stakeholder
group is not its technical expertise in developing policy options, but
rather the legitimacy that it provides by bringing multiple perspectives
to bear on the task of deciding between those options.

Another relatively new practice, first adopted for the Bali meeting and
repeated at the Istanbul meeting, was the call to the community for
suggestions of policy questions to be addressed at the meeting.  All of
these -- 49 in Bali and 31 in Istanbul -- were simply collected and
passed on to session organisers.  This was not effective in practice and
should not be repeated.  Instead, a more collaborative process of
developing a smaller list of pressing policy problems (like the five
selected for the Best Practice Forums) should be used.

Despite various proposals made from time to time,[1] the IGF has yet to
experiment with any large-scale, participatory and deliberative session
format aimed towards the development of consensus resolutions on policy
issues, somewhat like the NETmundial process, which was a combination of
online and face-to-face work utilising both small and large
multi-stakeholder groups.  The IGF should draw on the services of a
specialist in participatory event organisation to experiment with this
type of session format.[3]

*Schedule*

The scheduling of the IGF should cover the full year, including
timelines for working groups to develop concrete proposals to be taken
further at the IGF.  This would give it the capacity to sustain a work
programme between meetings. A step towards this can be made very easily
by offering IGF participants, when registering for the meeting or
following it remotely, the opportunity to join an online collaborative
platform for interacting with other participants throughout the year on
issues of shared concern.

Such a reform would add much value for online participants, essentially
providing an online and intersessional equivalent of the annual IGF
meeting. Currently, online participants have little incentive to invest
in the IGF, because they are not granted the same status as those who
attend the face-to-face meetings.[1]

The workshop proposal review process remains flawed.  Workshops are
partly scored based on whether panelists are confirmed to attend, but in
many cases panelists' attendance is contingent on the workshop being
approved, which creates a vicious circle, and also provides an incentive
for workshop organisers to misstate whether panelists are confirmed. 
Workshop proponents are given no feedback on why their workshops were
not approved, and overall the process is not conducted transparently.

The face to face Best Practice Forums in Istanbul were not helped by
being scheduled alongside workshops, with the result that most IGF
participants did not take part in them.  If the IGF is to develop
outputs with the chance of gaining the broadest possible consensus and
input from outside a small group of "usual suspects", as the Best
Practice Forums aimed to do, then there should be some focussed time
allocated for this, free of the distraction of other simultaneous
meetings.[1]

*Themes*

In general, the IGF should address policy questions that are
controversial and/or time-critical, and that currently lack any other
multi-stakeholder mechanism for global coordination. It should avoid
themes that are too broadly framed like "openness" and "security" that
are not grounded in any specific real-life context.  The national IGFs
should feed issues into the regional IGFs which should in turn feed
issues into the Global IGF so that the the issues at the global level in
part reflect the concerns and challenges raised by the national and
regional IGFs -- a reporting in session by IGFs (as is currently the
case) is inadequate.[1]

We propose that the overall theme of the 2015 IGF meeting should be
"Internet governance for sustainable development and promotion of human
rights". We are conscious that some governments do not approve of an
explicit mention of human rights in the IGF's overall theme. As the IGF
is not a conventional multilateral body but a multi-stakeholder one, we
do not believe that a few governments should be able to exercise a veto
in this case. As the NETmundial Principles amply demonstrate, there is
rough consensus around the centrality of human rights to Internet
governance, and this ought to be reflected in the overall theme for the
2015 meeting.

*Conclusion*

The IGF is in a unique position to democratise participation in Internet
governance, by acting as both a coordinating mechanism to connect
stakeholders to external Internet governance processes, and also as a
policy venue in its own right where emerging or orphan issues can be
addressed and consensus-based solutions found and documented. But the
IGF has been hampered in fulfilling its potential by its lack of
structures and processes appropriate to the execution of these tasks.

To change this will require both bold leadership to drive the required
reforms to the IGF (most of which have been well documented by the UN
CSTD Working Group on IGF Improvements as well as in the NETmundial
Statement.[4]), along with a stronger resource base to implement those
reforms. The IGF's present lack of either of these presents it with a
chicken-and-egg dilemma. However as a first step, we strongly encourage
UNDESA to forthwith appoint a new high-level Executive Coordinator to
the IGF who can prioritise the implementation of the necessary reforms.

[0] http://bestbits.net/igf-statement-2014/
[1] http://bestbits.net/igf-2014-submission/
[2] http://bestbits.net/netmundial-roadmap/
[3] http://bestbits.net/igf-opinions/
[4] http://netmundial.br/netmundial-multistakeholder-statement/

-- 
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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