[governance] charter 1.5

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

On 22 jul 2006, at 12.17, Parminder wrote:

> >in my understanding of the notion of intentionality, only people  
> can have intentions.  if an abstract entity like a caucus has an  
> intention it is only because its >membership has one.
>
>
>
> I think, organizations have intentions as well, which is more than  
> or different from the sum of (independent) intentions of its  
> constituents. I think this is very basic to definition, theory etc  
> of organizations. We can of course speak of organizations seeking  
> to, having the intention, working towards etc etc without having to  
> speak of its members having the intention etc….. In fact, often my  
> own independent intentions may not be exactly the same as that of  
> the organization that I may constitute, IGC, in this case.

True, but in the sense of a charter, we are agreeing on a statement  
that the members specifically intend.
>
>
>
> I saw the ‘membership’ clause in the draft closely, and I agreed  
> with this clause as it stand, though I, and some others who have  
> argued on this list, do have views about how groups/ organizations/  
> interest groups based stakeholder-ship (going beyond a strict  
> construction implied in ‘membership’) of IGC should be emphasized.  
> And it is emphasized in the mission of the present draft, and in  
> some parts of the tasks.
>
>
>
> And it also flows from the history of the caucus. For example, the  
> webpage for the IGC list serve mentions that
>
>
>      This list is for a) public discussion of Internet governance  
> issues, and b) coordination of the
> Internet Governance Caucus (IGC).  The IGC comprises individual and  
> organizational civil society
> actors (emphasis added) that came together in the context of the  
> World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to
> promote global public interest objectives in Internet governance  
> policy making.

yes, that is the historical page for the IGC as a WSIS CS committee.   
I have looked at that and avoided changing it until after the charter  
is approved.
>
> However, I also understand that for many process related issues,  
> some kind of strict definition of membership aspects is necessary.  
> And that the membership portion of the draft charter deals with  
> this issue. And that perhaps it will be too complicated to get into  
> organizational memberships in this respect. And to that extent, and  
> for that strict purpose of fixing some necessary processes, it may  
> be necessary to describe “the members of the IGC are individuals,  
> acting in personal capacity”.
>
> So the issue of speaking about membership in relation to fixing  
> some important IGC processes, is not the same as laying out IGC’s  
> wider scope, domain, general constitution, stakeholdership,  
> representative-ness etc, which I understand it is the intention of  
> all of us to be a inclusive of what can go in the name of civil  
> society as possible. It is in this sense that I have problems with  
> mentioning ‘membership’ in the mission statement.

I understand.  And I realize that my objection may be more pedantic  
than political.  so am willing to to go back to  the previous usage,  
though for correctness sake, as far as i can tell from  the various  
dictionary descriptions of usage i have consulted during this  
conversation,  caucus, as committee,  takes a plural form of the  
verb.  So it would be:

           The caucus intend ....

I still would like to hear other opinions.


thanks
a.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20060722/6a628fef/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: message-footer.txt
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20060722/6a628fef/attachment.txt>