[governance] Reconstituting MAG (Tech/admin language)

[William Drake]

On 2/20/08 4:53 PM, "Meryem Marzouki" <marzouki at ras.eu.org> wrote:

> Is it that, in the end, you are of the opinion that ICANN and other
> members of the so-called "technical community" are CS organizations,
> and thus should be counted as such in terms of number of members of
> the MAG?
> 
> I'm also asking the same question to Bill and Adam. And Suresh. I

I feel like I'm living in The Godfather, Part II---just when I think I'm
out, you keep pulling me back in.  I don't know why several of us have to
keep pleading to drop this and concentrate on completing concise statements
on more important points; the way it used to work, when people objected to
something, the coordinators and others let it go.  Did you enjoy pulling the
legs off grasshoppers when you were a little kid;-)?

Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the technical
community.  Nor have I ever said that I think that ICANN or other
administrative bodies are properly civil society (although if we are going
just on the public sector/for profit/not for profit conception of things,
they would be).  They are neither fish nor foul, inter alia being (in some
cases) negotiation/policymaking bodies.  But "international organization"
does not encompass all of them, as noted previously.  So one needs some sort
of new "IO-like" category; administrative bodies (Abs, without the confusing
I) is fine.  From a representation standpoint, here we are referring only to
staff and people in leadership positions, presumably.

Two questions follow: 1) are they properly "stakeholders," and if so should
they be "allocated" slots alongside the traditional three on the same basis.
Your position I guess is no, full stop.  Mine is that if you think beyond
ICANN (I know it's hard, but it can be done) to the much broader galaxy of
bodies that do admin things, it's not quite obvious on what basis one could
say that they all don't have stakes in gov decisions, but we do.  They
certainly seem to think they have stakes, especially with regard to public
policy. I am open to persuasion on this point if the discussion can move
from broad strokes political views to real engagement with the empirics.
Would be a nice seminar in Paris;-)  But I haven't seen a compelling
argument yet and don't feel the need to resolve this now or to deal with the
political consequences when there are far more pressing tasks undone, like
deciding preferences on main sessions, format, etc etc etc.

2) Beyond AB staff and leadership there is the vaster galaxy of people who
work in these spaces, identify with them, etc.  You say who cares what they
think or how they self-identify, at the end of the day one has to get paid,
and is either in the public sector/for profit/not for profit.  Fair enough,
fits with the standard conception.  But then if paychecks are the sole
decider, it gets at least more complicated to argue that people working in
non-profit admin bodies are not CS.  Jeanette has underscored the murkiness
which merits more thought than we have time for.

Moreover, one might note that as a practical matter, and as I pointed out
the other night, you are then insisting that a whole lot of people who do
not identify with or agree with us (to the extent we have any common
denominators ourselves) are CS, which presumably means that they should be
allocated "CS seats."  And since there are far far more of them than us, and
they often play direct roles in net matters and have standing with all the
relevant power centers, your reclassification would highlight in technicolor
that IGC members and fellow travelers are a very very small portion of the
CS that has stakes in IG and that the IGF should pay attention to.  To take
one example, ISOC says it has 28,000 individual members in over 90 chapters
around the world, a great many of whom are CS per you.  IGC has like 50
members.  So what principle should the SG follow in deciding among these and
other CS claimants?  Contrary to my back and forth with Parminder the other
day, it would certainly not be up to us to decide which of such people "CS"
can nominate.  We're complaining now that only 5 o 7 of our nominees are on
the mAG.  If you get what you're asking for, the SG would be quite correct
in giving us like 1 and splitting the others among other CS groups.

Whatever, the point is I just don't see why we need to keep going around on
this.  If there are people here who feel strongly about how all the various
people that might be considered for mAG should be classified and want to
insist that there are just three categories, they can say that in the
consultation.  They don't need to do so under the auspices of IGC, and
insisting that everyone should get in line so they can just doesn't work,
sorry.

Bill







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