[bestbits] Final IGF contribution for endorsement

[William Drake]

Hi Jeremy

Very sorry not to have replied earlier, but it’s a busy time.  As you know I too have been banging on since before the beginning about strengthening the IGF, doing intersessional working groups, having at least one day of the annuals devoted to NETmundial-style collective debates of an issue or two, etc.  I think there’s a bit of new openness to at least considering steps in this direction, in particular because the Brazilians have expressed interest in it for João Pessoa, and Janis has come around a bit (had a long talk with him in LA on this), as evidenced a little by the chair’s report on Istanbul.  The Dec. 1-3 open consultations and MAG meetings in Geneva may be the single best opportunity we’ve ever had to press the case for the sorts of steps the IGC and others have advocated since 2005, so hopefully we can muster a coalition of strategically oriented and collaborative participants there.

Since you’ve already posted the doc for endorsement it’s too late to take this into account, but a couple small thoughts for our continuing dialogues:

snipping

> On Oct 24, 2014, at 7:16 PM, Jeremy Malcolm <jmalcolm at eff.org> wrote:

Personally, I’d have preferred a shorter and more narrowly focused letter that lays out a model, rather than an expository grazing over multiple issues and historical background. For ex, what I tried to suggest in the Istanbul main session that was nominally supposed to discuss the IGF’s role (I was in a different room and the RM garbled the reading of my typed text) was that we could 
*Pick one or two issues that are pressing and mature enough for fruitful discussion and set up working groups for each that’d collaborate online and also and meet face to face alongside the open consultations  
*Establish open online platforms for inputs 
*Ask the MAG and its chair, with the assistance of the secretariat, to conduct active outreach to encourage participation from developing country governments
*The groups produce draft discussion documents by two months before the regular meeting, followed by another round of public input and a final revision taking on board the views expressed
*The documents could then be discussed on a single day of the programme dedicated to this task to see if either recommendations or at least a statement reflecting main contending viewpoints could be agreed, and then circulated to other relevant organisations.  

Or something like that….in any event, a concrete proposal that people could debate in December would be useful.
> 
> Introduction
> 
>  there is a Secretariat, with limited resources and a narrow self-assessed mandate to effect structural changes to the IGF
> 
I’m not entirely sure what you mean here. Where/when was Chengetai and his merry band of volunteers and part-time workers/consultants mandated to effect structural change on behalf of the global community?
> , and there is a MAG which, overall, considers itself a programme committee only and is similarly reluctant to depart from established structures and formats.
> 
I think it’s somewhat difficult to ascribe collective intentionality to the MAG because there’s been very little self-reflective discussion of its role, the membership evolves, and a good chunk of the group is fairly disengaged. But there certainly have been members who’d not be accurately portrayed as above.
> 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. 
> 
Apparently DESA is again considering an EC.
> 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].
> 
Agree, and people should push for a broadened focus in December and in the run up.
> Format
> 
> Perhaps the most significant departure from previous practice at the Istanbul meeting was the new Best Practice Forum mechanism. 
> 
Agree but would add there were a few other bits to build on, such as the human rights roundtable forwarding recs to the HRC; the launch of the Internet Governance Forum Support Association; the effort by a few folks lead by Jeanette and Stephanie to draft a proposal on mandate extension, which is still live on the IGF site; the use of the platform to announce other initiatives like the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms; the chair’s call for inputs on actions taken by stakeholders as a result of participation at the IGF (inadequate responses, alas); the endorsement by many of continuing the NN discussion in Brazil, which is sort of new; and the chair’s somewhat sotto voce call to the MAG, in consultation with the entire community, to consider issues that could be taken forward through inter-sessional work leading up to Brazil, with development held up as a thematic organizer.   
> 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.
> 
Good idea
> 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
> 
Unfortunately (for the statement), this is not true.  At least in the three years I did it, this was never a criteria for scoring. The criteria for workshop evaluation that was posted (which I dare you to now find on the IGF website) were these:

In evaluating workshop proposals, each MAG member will grade the proposal on a scale from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest) based upon the following considerations:

·      Proposal is well thought-through and complete,
·      Relevance of proposal to 2014 IGF themes, (please see the link)
·      List of proposed speakers, and whether the speakers have been contacted by the proposer or confirmed,
·      Is this the first time this individual or organization has made a proposal?”,
·      New workshop topic/innovative format (the “wow factor”),
·      Developing country participation,
·      Specificity in the problem/question/challenged to be addressed,
·      Remote participation plans.
·      Diversity of participants (gender, geography, stakeholder group, perspective),

I don’t know if you’d be willing to delete this paragraph before seeking further endorsements, but it makes it difficult to sign as is.

> Themes
> 
> 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]
> 
> 
There was discussion in Istanbul about the need to better link and flow between national regional and global IGFs.  One of the various problems is that it is rather difficult to do this when the national and regionals are independently organized with no standard model or need for approval/endorsement (non-binding criteria they should meet are at http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/igf-initiatives <http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/igf-initiatives> but are thin and lack any implementation/review mechanism).
> We propose that the overall theme of the 2015 IGF meeting should be “Internet governance for sustainable development and promotion of human rights”. 
> 
Need to say this in December and convince the new MAG.   

Basta.  Thanks for doing this.

Best

Bill


***********************************************
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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