[bestbits] [governance] Civil society transparency

[Jeremy Malcolm]

On 01/06/2015, at 3:29 AM, Norbert Bollow wrote:

> The Azerbaijan meeting [...] piggybacked on the 7th Internet
> Governance Forum (IGF) in Baku, Azerbaijan 6-9 November 2012. Being
> that the IGF is a UN-led, multi-stakeholder annual meeting,
> established to discuss public policy issues related to the
> Internet, the IFHR program saw it as an opportunity to convene
> with many Internet governance and Internet rights NGOs at once.
> They did so a few days before the start of the IGF, in a large
> gathering called Best Bits.(*)
> ...
> If in spite of all of the above, you still believe that your claim is
> defensible that "there was and is never any such capacity building
> program behind Best Bits", please arrange for disclosure of the true
> facts about the role and activities of the IFHR program in relation to
> Bestbits, which would in that case have been misunderstood by the
> researchers, and explain how that misunderstanding would have come
> about.

I don't know anything about that program, since it is not my programme, and neither was it ever discussed or considered by the Best Bits steering committee.  The organisation that I was working for at the time had its own programme, with its own funders, that intersected with the Best Bits meeting to some extent.  So did many other participants, including Global Partners of course.  If any of them wanted to report *their participation in* the Best Bits meeting to their funders as an outcome or their programme, that's their business.  That is quite different from saying that Best Bits is part of any particular participant organisation's programme, or is associated with any of any of that organisation's funders.

PS. I'm not going to debate this on-list with you any further.

-- 
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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