[governance] IGF Financing (and structuring)

[Lee McKnight]

Milton, Meryem, everyone,

If I may agree and disagree - yes in early years we are not talking
about huge sums, and yes a reasonable contribution from civil society
may be a few hundred k$.  

But in domestic US politics - and in other nations as well as in world
trade - the word quota generally has negative connotations these days.
So just like 'bureau,'  I suggest we stop using that word here or we set
ourselves up for easy caricature and misrepresentation.

I prefer 'contribution' or 'cost-sharing' - as in 'if civil society
contributes and shares in the costs of the IGF, along with private
sector and governmental/intergovernmental contributions, the cost of
maintaining IGF as a lightweight, flexible instition for....is not
burdensome.'

So one year the cs contribution may be greater, the next smaller. As in
everything else I am afraid the IGF is fated to have a 'flexible' or
should we say agile - budget.

Lee

Prof. Lee W. McKnight
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
+1-315-443-6891office
+1-315-278-4392 mobile

>>> Mueller at syr.edu 6/15/2007 11:05 AM >>>
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?


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