[governance] IGF Financing (and structuring)

[Milton Mueller]

Meryem et al

>>> marzouki at ras.eu.org 6/13/2007 12:52:38 PM >>>
>the best answer would remain making the IGF structure as  
>light as possible, thus as cheap as possible. 

Yes, indeed, we are in complete agreement here. I am just talking about
funding the Secretariat. Which is less than US$ 1 million/year. So in
that case, the idea of stakeholder quotas is not so crazy. E.g., if the
civil society portion of it is 20% it is not inconceivable that we find
two or three foundations willing to pony up $100-200,000 per year, or
develop some other aggregation of civil society capacity to fundraise.
(Think of MoveOn.org) 

You worry about the PS portion being 30%, which creates some horrible
threat because it's "more than 20%." But it is unlikely that ALL private
sector actors in the world will be unanimous about withdrawing support
for the Forum -- and if they were, if the IGF has Zero support from
anyone in the private sector globally, then it should probably lose 30%
of its budget. 

The govt portion would be funded through taxes, similar to the regular
parts of the UN budget. So what's your problem with that? ;-) 

>Can't we learn from existing examples? e.g. ITU.

It's good to bring up this example, but it's not close to what I had in
mind, as the discussion above makes clear. In particular, I am not
talking about membership fees being a precondition of participation --
which it is in the ITU. 

>[and speaking of learning from existing examples, setting up  
>something new outside of the UN system may well look like 
>ICANN, even leaving aside the US DoC issue. Would anyone 
>(except Veni:)) here argue that ICANN would be the example 

You can't compare ICANN to IGF because ICANN really does authoritative
governance -- it has control of a resource and uses it as leverage to do
economic, technical and behavioral regulation. IGF would do none of
those things.

>Why IGF financing would necessarily require huge amounts of 
>money? 

It doesn't, who said it does?


____________________________________________________________
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