[governance] IGF workshop approval criteria

[Vittorio Bertola]

Jeanette Hofmann ha scritto:
> Hi Bill, I agree with Adam here. We both advocated multi-stakeholderism 
> as a selection criteria already last year. The fact that we did not get 
> more applications as available slots for Athens doesn't mean that the 
> selection criteria as such doesn't count.
> The Internet Governance Project co-organized a workshop with UNESCO last 
> year. It is possible to cooperate with IOs even if its not always easy.
> 
> I very much believe in this model of multi-stakeholder cooperation also 
> or even especially on the level of _organizing_ discourse. I would 
> therefore also first drop workshop proposals that are not 
> multi-stakeholder in case there are more than slots available.

Perhaps we can put the discussion in positive terms, rather than in 
negative ones: e.g., rather than discussing about how to drop them, the 
AG should find ways to help incomplete proposals to become complete.

The distinction is not, in my opinion, whether the workshop is 
multistakeholder in terms of sponsorship (a requirement which, I agree, 
disadvantages those of us who do not have extensive connections in 
governmental or business circles, and makes it difficult to deal with 
controversial issues that some stakeholders might not want to see on the 
agenda). It is rather whether the workshop *wants* to be 
multistakeholder, or not.

In the former case, the organizers - even if not a MS group yet - could 
be required to open up and complete the workshop: for example, the 
stakeholder groups that are not represented yet could be asked to 
suggest speakers, or the AG could put out a summarization of which 
workshops still need panelists from a given stakeholder group. Or maybe, 
the AG will receive two non-MS proposals on the same matter by two 
different stakeholder groups, so it'll be enough to merge them; but if 
you reject non-MS proposals out of hand, you'll lose this chance.

It's the latter case that is undesirable, IMHO - e.g. some workshops I 
noticed last year, which were conceived as 85 minutes of showcasing of 
how good was the work by one given organization. That's when the AG 
should reply "either you open it up, or we reject it". (To that extent, 
I hope that the AG takes seriously the suggestions we made in February: 
for example, to require all workshop moderators to allocate at least 
half of the time for open floor discussion.)
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------
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