organizational orientation Re: [governance] Simple and basic

[William Drake]

Hi

Quoting Avri Doria <avri at psg.com>:

> while i agree that the IGF is one of the most visible IG foci for this
> caucus at the moment, i wonder whether it is the primary one.  and
> whether it should be.   (as should be obvious, i personally think the
> IGF is a wonderful entity to focus on.  if only i had more hours in
> the day.)
>
> certainly a lot gets said about ICANN, and since much of the concern
> with IGF seems ICANN related, one could argue that ICANN figures into
> the category of things the IGC is concerned with and could organize
> itself around.  remember mid 2009 is not all that far away.

It's natural that a caucus formed to address IG in WSIS would focus on the main
IG outcome of WSIS.  And it's not surprising that within that context, ICANN
issues predominate, since that's a leading interest of many of the folks that
have opted in.  Nevertheless, it's worth recalling that there is a lot of IG
stuff going on not only in other technical/admin bodies/processes (IETF, RIRs,
etc) but also in various intergovernmental and private sector organizations.
Moreover, in some of these cases there are quite active and effective CS
coalitions involved that seem to spend more time on effective advocacy than on
fratricide. The crowd that's pushed access to knowledge and the development
agenda in WIPO
provides one obvious example, some of the coalitions around digital
trade/e-commerce, privacy, etc. offer others.  It would be interesting to do a
comparison and contrast of these experiences, identify lessons learned and
best/worst practices, etc.

One current example in which I really wish the caucus had gotten engaged
concerns the upcoming OECD ministerial meeting in Seoul on the future of the
Internet economy.  The OECD---which does not generally include CS per se in its
ICT work, just invites individual 'experts' to certain meetings---decided,
post-WSIS, to make a big effort to hold a multistakeholder meeting. They've
invited business, the technical community (recognized as such, organized by
ISOC), and civil society (mixed uncomfortably with organized labor) each to
hold day-long public forums, provide input documents to the main meeting,
provide a few speakers for the main meeting, etc.  The Korean government is
paying travel and accommodation for CS forum speakers and some attendees.  The
CS coalition that came together for this purpose is hosted electronically by
EPIC's Public Voice platform, and forum programming etc was done by a small
group that included some IGC people.  But a real bridge between IGC and the
people on the PV list (couple hundred subscribers I believe) was never formed,
and global IG
issues and institutions seem to be off the radar of many of the latter (perhaps
in part reflecting a heavy presence of North American NGOs that skipped WSIS and
IGF etc).

Hence, when Wolfgang rather innocuously suggested that the CS statement might
note that multistakeholderism a la IGF is a good thing governments should
support, a big debate broke out with some undertones that this UN thingy might
not be so great.  It was in this context that Veni unleashed his hypocritical
and incoherent diatribe against CS (which baffled PV readers not steeped in
WSIS/IGF/ICANN screaming matches and troll behavior).  In the end, the best we
could manage in the
statement was a very meek and indirect reference to the IGF, even after the
OECD staffer facilitating the coalition pointed out that the ministerial
declaration already said the OECD should work on a multistakeholder basis to
reinforce cooperative relationships with the Internet technical community, the
private sector and civil society within fora such as the Internet Governance
Forum. In fact, when she noted this, Veni challenged her right to speak---great
PR for ICANN staff to be pissy to OECD staff on an OECD-facilitated list, but
whatever.

More generally, the OECD meeting and declaration address a number of IG issues
but primarily at the national level, rather than in the context of
international or transnational principles, norms, rules, etc.  Hence it would
have been good to have global IG aspects emphasized more at least by the CS
inputs.  We'll do a little GigaNet side event to try to inject some of that.

As Avri notes, there are questions about institutional capacity etc that bear on
the IGC's ability to do more than IGF and fights over ICANN, but it's a pity to
let slip by ripe opportunities for cross-institutional/cross-issue advocacy and
bridge building with other CS coalitions.

Best,

Bill

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