[governance] Interent community, internet users, and the people

[Guru@ITfC]

Dear Avri

"i think there are many communities of interest and trying to abstract them
all into one Internet Community is not necessarily helpful" ... I think this
is a very interesting statement and agree with you .... Sharing some
thoughts that this line triggered.

It is well theorised that in many cases the 'community' in question can be a
heteregenous one with tenous common interests/links. (Read "Community
Participation and Literacy Beyond Semantics" by Sadhna Saxena
http://www.sagepub.com/booksProdTOC.nav?prodId=Book226090). I agree with you
that the 'internet community' is a loose organization of many communities,
some with closer internal links than as 'internet' community.

This is very much the case with the 'village community' a new space that
Indian Development policies created in the mid fifties. The village in
India, was never one single interest unit, it usually had caste, class and
religious communities within, who had stronger bonding. However, for
socio-economic development, a village had advantages in being visualised as
a community, least from a delivery of development services. In hindsight, it
became clear that in most cases, the traditional elite of the 'village
community', the village headman and upper caste men, picked up the
leadership of the 'village community' as well, and the traditionally
marginalized sections within the village continued to be 'invisible' in the
village community also. And the marginalized who should have been the
special focus of development, continued to remain marginalized. Hence, in
many subsequent programs, it has been recognised that in such 'loose'
communities, the traditional marginalized should be specially focussed on /
sought after. (For e.g. the Mahila Samakhya program, a womens empowerment
program in India, focuses on 'dalit' (lower caste) women). 

As I mentioned in my mail to Jeremy, equity is the cornerstone of
goveranance in democracy. Democracy has no meaning if marginalized sections
are not enabled to participate. 

Hence while the interests of different communities within 'internet
community' may vary in nature and extent, these need to be negotiated
amongst the groups and not assumed. Specially, in 'loose' communities such
as the internet community, the interests of the 'traditionally' marginalized
(who we can see, continue to be the digitally disadvantaged as well) need to
get focus and protection. In this sense, Parminders point about internet
community and internet users is compelling .... That the small group of
internet users, and ICANN cannot really be making decisions on internet
governance, excluding the vast majority, who while not logging onto the
internet, are affected by it. 

Regards,
Guru
	

-----Original Message-----
From: Avri Doria [mailto:avri at psg.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2007 11:22 PM
To: Governance Caucus
Subject: Re: [governance] Interent community, internet users, and the people

Hi,

On 23 apr 2007, at 12.24, Parminder wrote:


... stuff deleted to keep message shorter for the sake of those who pay too
much for their bytes.
>
>
> Though I have some problems with this division of internet policy
stakeholdership, even if we provosionally go by it, I have atleast  
> two questions.
>
>
>
> (1)In public policy determination does Internet community get any special
rights over and above those of internet users.

special rights?  no.

are there different things that one group may have a stronger role  
in, i expect yes.  e.g. the internet community has a greater  
knowledge of what is possible and what currently is the case.  the  
user community and the emerging user community has a greater  
knowledge of what is needed.

when it comes to policy, they should, in my opinion have an equal  
voice from their different perspectives, and should, again in my  
opinion, honor each other's special vantage point.
> (2) where and how are non-users represented, for instance in ICANN.

currently, that is one of the flaws, again from my perspective, in  
ICANN that needs to be remedied.  there is an effort to include their  
interests in the recruitment by the nomcom of outsiders to sit on the  
board, the supporting organizations and the ALAC, but i don't think  
it goes far enough in terms of making them stakeholders with  
constituency representation.  and while things are beginning to open  
up somewhat, it is going very slowly and in an ad hoc manner and has  
not yet reached a point of anything close to parity with the business  
interests or even the government interests.
>
>
> Both these questions have great relevance on the issue of whether  
> ICANN should or should not be discussed at IGF.

personally, i think anything related to IG should be within the  
purview of the IGF. i think, again personally, that if something is a  
problem from any perspective, then it can be discussed and can be the  
object of a dynamic coalition.

a.


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