Hope springs eternal - Re: [governance] Innovation

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Danny Younger [mailto:dannyyounger at yahoo.com]
> "To be very honest, I don't see much work ongoing. To
> quote only one example, and referring to discussions I
> had in LA and Rio, I will mention the Euralo case:
> much bandwidth has been used to prepare and hold
> elections for a gigantic board, that has hardly ever
> met. I am still a member of the Euralo mailing list,
> and either I need to trim my mail filters, or not much
> has been going on lately."
> 

While Danny's characterization of the lack of activity on Euralo lists is correct, I hope that this is not interpreted as some kind of attack on the commitment or competence of the people involved. And it must not also be allowed to discredit the idea of public participation. 

The problem is, rather, a perfectly predictable function of the scarcity of people's time and the level of resources they have relative to their stakes in the policy outcome.

The typical civil society person who would be interested and informed enough about Internet governance to participate in European civil society has dozens of other demands on his or her time. What tasks does the Euralo do, what benefits can it generate, that would command enough allegiance and commitment to make people participate on a daily basis?

People have jobs. They have families. They have the duties associated with their own civil society organizations. Now add to that the duties associated with the internal organization and management of the RALO itself. And add to that the numerous committees, task forces and branches of ICANN, which is now issuing reports and asking for public comment about twice a week. And there are other public interest causes to attend to. There is IGF civil society; the OECD has a ministerial and wants CS participation, there are domestic issues and local issues, and oh, there might be driveways full of snow to shovel in the winter (that one's for us Northern North Americans....) 

The fatal flaw of the whole ALAC concept is that it overlooks this simple fact of human nature. It asks people to devote big chunks of their lives to an issue that (for a typical individual) is worth only about .01% of their lives in terms of the overall stakes. 

A common assumption of many of these debates is that if thousands of people aren't clamoring to join and participate in these "bottom up" organizations that there must be something wrong with the organizations, or the people. 

That is not right. What's wrong is our expectations about how much time people can be expected to donate to public policy making and public causes.

People are basically rational in the way they spend their time; they spend more time on things that have bigger payoffs for them and are more enjoyable than on things that are a lot of work and offer little or no payoffs. 

ALAC offers people an opportunity to spend tons of time -- a lot of it purely internal organizational crap with no payoff at all, just overhead -- to achieve very little influence. The mismatch in that equation has been evident from the beginning. 

And that's why I insist on voting. It offers people who care a simple, direct and low-cost way to express and aggregate their preferences. 

People like Kieren who get paid to do this may have a hard time understanding this argument. Businesses with a direct, very large economic stake in policy outcomes will be able to pay professional lobbyists, lawyers and staffers to do this work. True civil society and individual representation, on the other hand, is always going to involve large numbers of people with very small individual stakes in the outcome. They will rarely be able to sustain the level of participation that organizing a RALO requires. If you don't allow them to vote, if you ask them to assume the role of full-time professional lobbyists, you inherently disenfranchise the vast majority of them. 

--MM

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