[governance] Rudeness tactics (was Re: Reinstate the Vote)

[Norbert Bollow]

Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:

> On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being really bad and 10 being really good, 
> any proposal or institution for internet governance which fails to 
> incorporate, at a fundamental level, processes for real and meaningful 
> public participation and accountability to the public is a proposal that 
> rank at level 1 (or below), i.e. very egregious.
>
> By comparison, I'd rank the kind of occasional lapse of diplomatic 
> courtesy and use of words that carry a hint of color to be pretty much 
> of middling grade - not particularly good, but then again, neither 
> particularly harmful.

Rudeness harms and prevents discussions, and it harms people who are
repeatedly at the receiving end of rudeness primarily because it
denies them the opportunity to express their viewpoint in a civilized
environment which is conductive to constructive substantive
discussion.

If we want to facilitate discussions that lead to significant
positive changes, we must somehow make sure that neither rudeness nor
censorship of viewpoints nor any other mechanism prevents us from
having discussions in which all relevant viewpoints get freely
expressed.

By the way, the category of "people who are repeatedly at the
receiving end of rudeness" includes not only people who work in an
internet governance organization, but also members of the general
public trying to express a minority viewpoint.

Some minority viewpoints are practically impossible to discuss in
most fora because any attempt at constructive discussion will
immediately get destroyed by the rudeness issue.  An example of
this is the point that I attempted to make recently about the problem
of spam filters interfering with the ability of members of a certain
minority group to have email communication with each other work
reliably.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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