[governance] Effective participation ....

[Jeremy Malcolm]

Gurstein, Michael wrote:
> My 
> own feeling is that what should be of most direct concern at the IGF is 
> to identify what does not fall under the purview of "Internet 
> Governance" as currently being presented (and to identify where 
> elsewhere those other issues will be discussed). 
>  
> Once it is determined what is not on the table (everything other than 
> the hopefully fairly narrow and largely technical issues that are on the 
> table) then the matter of who should participate in what forums and in 
> what manner should flow quite easily and sensibly.
>  
> If everything is on the table, as seems to be implied by several of the 
> contributors to this discussion and elsewhere, then indeed we have a 
> very very serious problem of participation (and representation, 
> legitimacy, transparency etc.etc.

I would say that, on the contrary, it is the "narrow and largely 
technical" issues that are *not* on the table, and the wide-ranging 
public policy issues that are.

For example paragraph 77 of the Tunis Agenda specifies that the IGF will 
"not replace existing arrangements, mechanisms, institutions or 
organizations" (ie. ICANN, ISOC, IAB, IETF) and in paragraph 69 that is 
is not to be involved in "day-to-day technical and operational matters, 
that do not impact on international public policy issues", but rather 
according to paragraph 60 in "cross-cutting international public policy 
issues that require attention and are not adequately addressed by the 
current mechanisms".

So I don't see that the issues can or will be narrowed in such a way 
that participation, transparency, etc will become lesser problems.

I have quite a lot to say about this, and about a whole lot of other 
things, in the PhD thesis that I'm writing, which at this juncture I 
probably ought to mention on this list for those who don't already know 
about it.

It's titled "Civil Society's Role in the Collaborative Development of 
Transnational Law Within the Internet Governance Forum", and it's being 
published progressively as a wiki at http://www.malcolm.id.au/thesis 
(from where a PDF version is also available).  Currently it is over 
half-finished, with the last section completed being 4.2 
("Authoritarian" in Chapter 4... if you reach 4.3 "Democratic" then 
you've gone too far).

If wading through a PhD thesis is too much, then I'll be talking about 
some of the main themes at GigaNet, and for a sneak preview the slides 
from that presentation are linked from IGFWatch.org.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3256 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20061016/dcf1eb27/attachment.bin>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: message-footer.txt
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20061016/dcf1eb27/attachment.txt>