[governance] IGC's questions to the IGF

[Ralf Bendrath]

Parminder wrote:
> *_Some Questions from the Internet Governance Civil Society Caucus to 
> the Internet Governance Forum  _*
Thanks a lot, this really helps moving forward.

I don't want to comment on the details the possible fine-tuning, but am 
more concerned with the larger picture. It boils down to one simple 
meta-question:

-> Who is supposed to answer these questions?

A normal reflex would be to look at Markus Kummer, Nitin Desai, or Kofi 
Annan, as they got the task assigned from the WSIS. But they would just 
hand it over to the governments, as the decision came from there. You can 
imagine what their answer would be...

Therefore I think we should answer them ourselves and just act *as if* 
they had been answered in the way we prefer.

One example. A couple of times the list of questions says "what is IGF’s 
plan" or something in this direction, and you hit it directly in question 
2 when you address the "agency" issue. This is the wrong way, as it sounds 
like we delegate the answer to someone else, whoever this may be. But if 
it is supposed to be a multistakeholder forum, we "are" the IGF as much as 
the governments and the other stakeholders are it. So, let's try to answer 
these things for ourselves - and convincingly enough or at least with some 
powerful support to make others even follow us.

Of course, the tough part is then to come up with smart answers that we 
all think are a) feasable and b) legitimate. But this is our job. We very 
much missed out on developing a grand vision for the IGF beforehand that 
would live up to the expectations of the Tunis agenda.

Maybe something to discuss at the IGC meeting?

Pragmatically speaking, I would change the questions into statements. This 
will help facilitating a quick&dirty debate among ourselves on how we want 
to have the IGF develop itself. And it will give us some advantage to most 
of the other stakeholder groups who expect a conference and nothing else.
If we leave it in the form of questions, we should at least be prepared to 
answer them in the debate.

Best, Ralf
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