[governance] Interent community, internet users, and the people (was RE: [NA-Discuss] ALAC and NCUC)

Tue Apr 24 08:12:00 EDT 2007

Just in addition to Jeremy's comments.

1) the respective roles and weights of stakeholders are likely to vary with
:
- the issues : according to the respective weights of the technical, social,
economic and political dimensions of them
- the venue where they are addressed, at least at first : IG will still use
different legacy structures and some are more governmental, private sector,
technical, CS oriented etc...: clear application with ICANN, ITU, IGF, and
others, even if they are supposed to progressively converge towards some
sort of comparable multi-stakeholder format;
- and the stage of the discussion : maybe more open in the agenda-setting
and decision-shaping phases than in the decision-taking ones.

2) Separating stakeholders into distinct and fixed constituencies is
bringing back the notion of "estates" in a different way. It has huge
separation and boundary effects. I would argue that it is one of the
major problems ICANN is facing, with what I have often described as the
"silo" effect that prevents all facets of an issue to be examined early
on. This simply prevents the formation of consensus.

The stakeholder constituencies also remind me of the "families" approach in
the Civil Society during WSIS that was used to create the "CS Bureau". No
doubt the Caucuses worked much better.

 The notion of stakeholdership allows networks of stakeholders to form -
even temporarily - on an issue by issue basis. This is a much more flexible
way, actually probably the only one that is scalable.

WSIS has not superseded the notion of separate categories of actors with the
common term of stakeholders for us to envisage the future solution to be the
reintroduction of different, separate categories in an infinite
regression. But that does not of course prevent actors to gather by
affinities to prepare their contributions, exchange wiews and plan.

3) What is said above is mostly applicable to decision-shaping,
consensus-driven policy development processes. The question of the final
decision-taking is a different one.

When consensus is achieved (including rough conssensus), there is no problem
: decision-taking is a mere rubber-stamping. Likewise for proposed standards
: decision-taking is individual and the standard takes off if htere is a
sufficient critical mass of actors endorsing it.

The delicate situation is when rough consensus is not achieved (ie : some
actors still strongly oppose) and decision still has to be taken because of
external factors. That is the kind of situation where representation may
kick back in.

But then, this raises the question of how to create multi-stakeholder
decision-making structures that are trusted and diverse enough to make
decisions when they apply in general. This is a problem that will have to be
addressed. But let's keep in mind that the normal procedure is
consensus-building. For that you need facilitators and not boards, issue
networks and not separate constituencies, iterative consultation processes
and not voting.

A fundamental principle of deliberative or participative democracy (whatever
that is) coould be "one person, one voice" rather than "one person, one
vote" as in representatibve democracy.

(Side note : we have here the inverse problem between english and french as
we encounter in the free software issue. In french, "one persone, one vote"
is translated as "une personne, une voix", which happens to be the same as
"one person, one voice". Whereas with free software, we can say "gratuit"
(as in free beer) or libre (as in free speech). Interesting multi-lingual
issues; like the remark on the difference between fourth estate and fourth
branch for the press.

Best

Bertrand

On 4/24/07, Jeremy Malcolm <Jeremy at malcolm.id.au> wrote:
>
> Guru at ITfC wrote:
> > In this sense it is difficult to not think of the people of the world as
> the
> > constitutency for IG. All are equally stakeholders to the possibilities
> of
> > the information society that we "are building". The current 'users' who
> are
> > still in a minority (microscopic minority in many countries) represent
> the
> > most previleged section of humanity on many considerations and can at
> best
> > be 'trustees' for the rest and cannot abrogate any special previleges to
> > themselves. I would interpret "However in many, perhaps most issue
> areas,
> > existing Internet users will be the most directly affected and thus have
> the
> > strongest claim to be heard" in this light.
>
> I don't dissent from the thrust of what you and Parminder have said in
> your responses.  All I am saying, and I apologise if I didn't say it
> clearly, is that in the discussion of any IG issue, all impacted
> stakeholders should be empowered to collaborate in policy development,
> but that exactly *which* stakeholders are so impacted will vary from one
> issue to another, and therefore the weight that should legitimately be
> accorded to their input will vary accordingly.
>
> The question of what weight should be accorded to those potentially
> affected *in the future* is not an uncommon one.  In environmental law,
> in particular, consideration is given to the interests of future
> generations.  This is closely analogous to the approach to be taken in
> IG in respect of non-users.  However, should non-users be consulted on
> all IG issues, including those that are never likely to affect them and
> about which they and those who speak for them have no knowledge or
> experience?
>
> Whilst Parminder may have taken issue with my example of participation
> in the IETF, standards development is just as much a part of IG as
> technical coordination and public policy development.  I agree that
> standards development is a sphere of governance that concerns him, and
> his constituents, and probably us all, less than other spheres that more
> often and directly engage public policy issues.  But this does mean that
> *in general*, the IETF can legitimately give less weight to the input of
> non-users, by failing to specifically provide for the solicitation of
> their views in its processes (with some exceptions, eg. multilingualism).
>
> Which leads on the two basic approaches that an IG organisation can take
> in dealing with the fact that some people are more directly and more
> often engaged by the issues within its remit than others.  The first
> approach is to make a rough guess as to who is and is not engaged by the
> issues that you are discussing, divide them into stakeholder groups, and
> institutionalise their representation within the organisation in the way
> that ICANN has (or by holding meetings in locations, or using
> technologies, that exclude stakeholders with no legitimate interest).
> The problems with this approach are:
>
> (a) You might be wrong; how do you know who will be impacted by the
>     issues you are considering?  And Karl's concern: how can you
>     legitimately box people into stakeholder groups?
>
> (b) The process by which the decision is made may not be open,
>     transparent, or subject to input by all those potentially affected.
>     (Hello, ICANN!)
>
> (c) It is inflexible, in that novel issues may arise that impact upon
>     new stakeholders, and the organisation has no way in which their
>     input may be formally received without restructuring itself.
>
> The second way of dealing with the fact that some people have more at
> stake than others in particular IG issue areas is by making the
> organisation completely open to all stakeholders who wish to
> participate, but by determining the weight that their contributions are
> to be accorded by subjecting their views to a process of reasoned public
> deliberation.  This is my (forlorn) vision for the IGF.
>
> Since writing the above I've just read Bertrand's latest post, and it
> would be superfluous for me to cover the same ground here, but I think
> the above analysis adds to it slightly by illustrating the distinction
> between *representative* democracy (the first case given above) and
> *deliberative* democracy (the second case, about which I write a lot
> more in my thesis).
>
> --
> 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}'
> ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>     governance at lists.cpsr.org
> To be removed from the list, send any message to:
>     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org
>
> For all list information and functions, see:
>     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
>

-- 
____________________
Bertrand de La Chapelle

Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint
Exupéry
("there is no better mission for humans than uniting humans")
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20070424/bca65e37/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: message-footer.txt
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20070424/bca65e37/attachment.txt>