[governance] Possible CS text on forum

[Vittorio Bertola]

Jeanette Hofmann ha scritto:
>> I'm not sure whether that's the best possible idea, however I am much
>> more afraid of a process that does *not* have a clearly defined
>> executive group, with guarantees of inclusiveness and
>> "multistakeholderness". 
> 
> You mean, it would be the job of the executive group to guarantee such 
> things as inclusiveness? Please, Vittorio, this sounds like ALAC's ideas 
> in its formative stages. We don't need to repeat that, do we?

No, I mean that the executive group should be inclusive and balanced, 
and this would ensure inclusiveness. Without it, whenever some 
controversial discussion happens the Secretariat or Chair will possibly 
give a private call to the most influential governmental delegations and 
decide according to their opinion, basically ignoring all the others, 
including ourselves.

>> - everyone talks and then the Secretariat decides what the consensus is;
> 
> Your executive body wouldn't have the authority either to "decide what 
> consensus is". In my view, the forum is not primarily a decision making 
> body. If we really want to make it open and inclusive, the focus will be
> rather on coordination than decision making.

Let's make it practical.

Let's say that, as we do, we complain that there are no global policies 
to ensure privacy. Maybe let's even focus on a specific case: let's say 
that we want to develop a global policy to ensure privacy protection in 
the usage of Web cookies (independently from whether that policy would 
be binding, non binding, suggested, recommended, voluntarily adopted, a 
collection of best practices, or whatever else).

First of all, the Forum will have to decide whether such point is 
actually added to the agenda, or not; whether there will be a 4 hour 
session in the morning, or a 5 minutes discussion when everyone already 
left; whether there will be, say, an online consultation or working 
group; who would coordinate such working group (and you know how 
influential a Chair can be on results); etc.

Then the discussion happens, everyone states the views, and if things go 
well, all points are discussed and agreed in the room; but what if there 
is no agreement? While I don't think that there should be votes 
(consensus should be the guiding principle), how would you determine if 
the final document is at least acceptable to all? What if the Chair or 
the Secretariat sneak some text in that we really don't like, and then 
say "oh, that was consensus"?

I think that having clearly defined decision-making procedures is a must 
to defend the weakest and least influential participants in the process, 
that means us.

By the way, even the IETF (I think we can take the IETF as our sample of 
Internet-age consensus making processes that we love, right?) has clear 
procedures and a steering group. The W3C has clear procedures and voting 
rules to manage consensus(*). I'm not saying that the executive group is 
the only idea or the best possible one, and actually I would imagine 
that consensus is decided inside each individual working group, while 
the EG only acts as process manager, "check and balance" and final 
verification of the working group results (like the IESG). I 
particularly share your point about not letting everyone else feel like 
seated in the backseat. But in any case, you can't skip the issue of how 
to take decisions.

(*) http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#Consensus

By the way:

> The forum cannot make binding decisions anyway.

Are you sure? I agree that it should not, but we don't know yet what 
will be agreed in Tunis. Just imagine, for example, if they agree on 
building the Forum as a continuation of the series of PrepComs.

Ciao,
-- 
vb.             [Vittorio Bertola - v.bertola [a] bertola.eu.org]<-----
http://bertola.eu.org/  <- Prima o poi...
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