[governance] Treading Where Angels...

Tue Apr 24 14:32:40 EDT 2007

At the risk of treading where angels etc.etc...

On a personal note, I find myself in this discussion space often sending
out messages to what appears to me to be an empty room... No response,
no engagement, no taking up of threads (the most recent on whose a
"user" being an exception but that was a migration from another list
where the rules of engagement seem rather different...

I've been reflecting on this while thinking at a meta level on the
current "dialogue" going on on this list and coming to the interesting
conclusion that for my part I don't recognize hardly any of the themes
or directions being discussed or proposed for discussion concerning
Internet Governance as being those that I understand. In fact I don't
have any intuitive recognition as to their significance--short, medium
or long term. And from experience it appears that the denizens of this
list feel the same about the issues that I think are important and that
I've tried to introduce into the discussions.

Reflecting further on those two "facts" I've come to an interesting
observation.  It seems to me that what we have on/in "Internet
Governance" at the moment are two sets of actors--those with a technical
background/interest/orientation who are concerned with Internet
Governance as the means to make sure that Internet things work.

On the other hand we have those with a primarily policy
background/interest/orientation who are concerned with Internet
Governance from the perspective of designing the mechanics of the
Internet oriented decision making processes that ensure that those
decision processes work.

What seems notable by their absence are those I would call
"informaticians" ie. those who are concerned with what it is that we
want to do with the Internet once we have it working the way we want it
to work--and in this latter group I would include equally the folks who
are concerned with making the Internet work for commerce as those who
are concerned with making it work for social change or for community
development.

This latter group, where I would personally feel myself to be located,
sees the technical issues concerning Internet Governance as transitional
impediments to be gotten over in pursuit of applications (results).
Equally, it sees issues of the mechanics of policy as being "technical"
in the sense that how those issues are fixed doesn't really have much
impact on what it is you are trying to do as long as it doesn't
interfere. (How ICANN operates or doesn't really doesn't matter as long
as the various domains do what they are supposed to do which is direct
messages from end users to suppliers and from suppliers to end users
etc.etc.)

That, I think, explains why "Internet Governance" is rather far down on
the list of priorities for governments and for most folks who are simply
content to use the Internet and leave the sausage factory to other folks
to worry about.

Now having said this, I want to suggest that in fact informaticians and
particularly the informatics perspective should be seen as crucially
important in the area of Internet Governance not because of what they/we
do but because of how they/we do it.

Informatics folks build end to end applications systems/networks that
work--that have real goals and real desired outcomes--social,
educational, commercial, political--in terms of how people live their
lives. Some of them are Internet based, others aren't but that doesn't
matter...what does matter and crucially is that the process of designing
the system/network and how it is deployed and implemented is  how you
come to design your business or application itself--that is your
business is a function of the shape of the network rather more than the
opposite. (and its been this way for at least the last decade in
business and increasingly in the range of other informatics applications
as well)

People joke that Walmart is an end to end logistics management system
with a user interface that happens to be a bunch of retail stores--but
that isn't a joke, that is the reality!  Walmsrt is what it is, because
of how its network is constructed (and dare I say that how it is
constructed is to a considerable degree both a function of and a
determinant of how it is "governed").

Those of you who have stuck with me in this ramble might now see where
I'm going... Internet governance matters to my mind, not because we need
to solve some (transitional?) technical issues or because we need to get
the governance structure right or else...(? or else what, the governance
structure will be wrong?...

Internet govenance matters because the informatics application that we
are working on with and through the Internet is ultimately the degign of
the shape of what society, governance, democracy and so on and so on
will look (is looking) like into the foreseeable future.  If we don't
get it right then getting it wrong will be of rather more and dare I say
much more significance and do much more damage than relatively minor
debates about ICANN transparency or who's your father discussions around
the .xxx domain.

My suggestion here is that we look on Internet Governance from the
perspective of being those who are contributing to the design of a
Walmart Co. that is a globally distributed logistics system that just
happens to have governance/democracy/the public good as its possible
front end/user interface rather than retail stores selling cut rate
merchandise.

Best to all,

MG  

------------------------------------
Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.
Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training
Executive Director gurstein at gmail.com Ste. 2101-989 Nelson St.
Vancouver, BC CANADA v6z 2s1
tel: +1-604-602-0624
fax: +1-604-602-0624
http://www.communityinformatics.net
Skype ID:mgurst
SkypeIn #:+1-604-602-0624
------------------------------------

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