[governance] preparing for IGF 2008

[Jeremy Malcolm]

I am replying late to this again because I am travelling at the  
moment with only intermittent Internet access; I have just found a  
hot spot to use in Laramie, Wyoming, which is a town that doesn't  
even support GSM mobile phones.  Talk about the digital divide. ;-)

On 27/11/2007, at 5:00 AM, Adam Peake wrote:

> When secretary general renewed the AG on August 20 he asked the  
> group to suggest means for rotating its membership ("based on  
> recommendations from the various interested groups"). Thoughts?

Rotating its membership won't be sufficient to cure the ills of this  
dysfunctional and ineffectual body.  Legitimising it through greater  
accountability (through the direct selection of its members by the  
stakeholder groups) and transparency (see below), and empowering it  
to make decisions rather simply to advise the Secretariat (which  
currently often acts without reference to the Advisory Group, eg. in  
the introduction of discussants), are the first necessary steps  
towards its reform.

> We should also be considering means to enhance transparency and  
> flow of information.  AG's immediate reaction to the secretary  
> general's request was to publish notes of its closed meeting.  Was  
> this adequate?

No.  It included such unenlightening accounts as, "The group had a  
first exchange of views of its own role and function and its  
renewal".  Plainly, the Advisory Group mailing list should be made  
public and the physical meetings should be opened, recorded and  
archived.  In fact, while the Secretariat makes important decisions  
about the IGF's structure and processes privately without reference  
to the Advisory Group, even this level of transparency may not be  
sufficient.  But certainly, we can have no faith that anything less  
will be.

> Observers are another possibility, but there are costs/problems.   
> My main concern with observers is the AG already works too slowly,  
> I think it would do less in a larger setting. And it makes Chatham  
> house rule essentially meaningless (like it or not, Chatham house  
> rule is important for governments in particular.)

This is not an intergovernmental organisation, it is a multi- 
stakeholder organisation.  Why should its processes be tailored to  
the preferences of governments alone?  Apart from which, since  
Advisory Group members are currently appointed in their personal  
rather than representative capacities anyway, the exclusion of  
observers in order to maintain the confidentiality of speakers'  
identities makes no sense.  Neither is it equitable, given that  
intergovernmental observers are already allowed, while others are  
excluded.

> What worked well in Rio, what worked less well, what went badly?
>
> Badly: funding for participation.

Remote participation, more specifically.  This is an issue for the  
OCDC mailing list more specifically than this one, so I will restrict  
myself very briefly to a quote from an article by Michael Froomkin  
about ICANN that has very striking application to the IGF:

> ICANN’s chief failures have been in institutional design.  It
> is particularly striking how little ICANN, unlike the IETF, uses the
> Internet as a tool for making decisions.  Of course, just because  
> some-
> thing relates to or uses the Internet does not tell us much about its
> ability to generate legitimacy.  ICANN’s decisions are made at quar-
> terly Board meetings held on four different continents.  Decisions of
> the Board and of many of the ICANN-supporting organizations occur
> at the physical meetings.  Very few members of the Board, and even
> fewer of the staff, participate either in the public online fora  
> hosted by
> ICANN or in the unofficial ICANN fora.  In contrast, the IETF rec-
> ognizes that participants cannot attend its equally far-flung  
> meetings,
> and subjects everything discussed in person to ratification in an  
> online
> discussion.

(End Froomkin quote, resume Adam quote.)

> People mentioned the schedule was too crammed with activities, no  
> time to stop and talk.  How can we take open call for workshops  
> etc, and filter the number down (rejecting proposals is a very hard  
> process.)

By not making an uncoordinated open call for workshops in the first  
place.  Decide, through the open consultation process, what workshop  
topics would be consistent with the IGF's mandate, and what criteria  
their organisers ought to satisfy.  Then, for those classes of  
workshop for which there is not an existing dynamic coalition, a  
volunteer from amongst those interested in coordinating a workshop on  
each topic should act as a central point of contact for the others.

> Were the best practise sessions useful?  Were the open sessions  
> useful?

Not particularly, because they were too self-serving.  Taking the  
ICANN session as an example, whereas the IGF's mandate speaks of  
discourse (a bidirectional process), since ICANN has no interest in  
deferring to what the IGF thinks this was reduced to a dry,  
unidirectional trade show presentation.  To be useful, best practice  
sessions and open fora must allow for and encourage the airing of  
critical perspectives, and not only during question time.

> Are the themes right? Should any be dropped, should any be added?  
> Radical reform of the whole agenda will not happen, so incremental  
> changes may work. The caucus workshop on the mandate seems to have  
> been well received. We need to be realistic about what can be  
> changed (in my opinion.)

Despite having been off-line for much of the time since Rio, I have  
read enough of what others have said on this question to say that I  
agree (so I will be brief here).  The IGF is not just about  
recognising Internet-related public policy issues and fatuously  
repeating platitudes about them (openness is good, the digital divide  
is bad); it is about global governance of those issues.  This  
requires the forum to be able to develop policy around those issues.

Although in the longer term this means being able to make  
recommendations, in the shorter term it need only mean that it has  
the capacity to challenge the preconceived views of the decision- 
makers who attend by requiring them to expose those preconceptions to  
reasoned public deliberation.  This does not occur in a moderated  
panel format.

Instead, it will be necessary for the topics for discussion to be  
filtered into a smaller number of discrete issues (which the dynamic  
coalitions and workshops are potentially the best qualified to do),  
and for the plenary body debate those issues in a focussed way with  
the assistance of trained facilitators, preferably beginning in small  
groups.

So I think "openness", "security" et al, if they are to be retained  
at all, should only be regarded as containers for much more specific  
issues on which measurable progress can be made towards the  
development of globally accepted public policy principles.  If that  
occurs, then it will not be necessary to have separate main sessions  
on global public policy development or the role of the IGF, because  
these themes will be pervasive.

> I think there's a feeling the main sessions were generally flat  
> compared to Athens -- very few requests to make comments/ask  
> question, very little remote participation, the main session room  
> half empty while the workshops quite well attended ...

Clearly this is because the main sessions are just talk, whereas the  
dynamic coalitions (or some of them, anyway) are actually achieving  
tangible outcomes.  People aren't going to invest their limited time  
and energy providing input into a forum which is not empowered to  
progress the most important paragraphs of the IGF's mandate.

You may feel that to propose major reforms is not realistic, but an  
IGF that fulfils its mandate as a multi-stakeholder governance  
network would be a revolutionary development that (still) requires  
major reform.  Just as the suffragettes and abolitionists were not  
content with tinkering around the edges of the political system as  
they found it, neither should we be content with similar window- 
dressing of the existing regimes of global governance.

-- 
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}'


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