[governance] IGF Review Question 6 start

[Eric Dierker]

--- On Thu, 7/9/09, Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:
 
Bravo! 
(However I must caution: When building a structure, the foundation must be solid, built with the strongest materials that will hold up walls, doors and layers(floors) that are to be built on top. But it is seldom useful to begin to invite guests in for tea, prior to finishing the structure.)
 
Of course the whole neighborhood and travellers will be welcome and guest rooms and plenty of seats at the table will be fashioned accordingly. But I would suggest moving slower with outreach than with building.

> "6. If the continuation of the Forum is recommended, what improvements would you suggest in terms of its working methods, functioning and processes?"
> 
> Since the value and effectiveness of the IGF are obvious, with near-unanimous response that it should continue, we believe that the review  should focus on addressing the issue of more inclusive participation.   More importantly, the energy not needed in a review of the current process could be spent in the search for ways to foster more active inclusion of rarely heard and developing country voices through, but not limited to, remote participation.
> 
> And here we include for example, Indigenous peoples worldwide, people with disabilities, rural people and particularly those who are the poorest of the poor and often landless or migrants, those concerned with promoting peer to peer and open access governance structures built on an electronic platform, those looking to alternative modes of Internet governance as ways of responding to specific localized opportunities and limitations, and those working as practitioners and activists in implementing the Internet as a primary resource in support of broad based economic and social development.


This requires a willingness to consider the inherent limitations of structures and processes that may have seemed natural or inevitable in 2005, in the wake of a somewhat traditional intergovernmental summit.  For example, it may not be most inclusive and appropriate for the "forum" of the Internet Governance Forum to be conceived as an isolated face-to-face meeting held in a far-flung city.  Rather, perhaps the IGF should take a leaf out of the book of other Internet governance institutions such as the IETF and ICANN, in which most work and engagement takes place between meetings in online and regional fora, and for which global face-to-face meetings are more of a capstone for the work done elsewhere.

Similarly, we must no longer avoid considering the need for new structures and processes for the IGF that would allow it to produce more tangible outputs through a process of reasoned deliberation.  In the past various such innovations have been considered - including speed dialogues, moderated debates, and roundtable discussions - but always the MAG has demurred from going through with these reforms due to the reticence of some stakeholder representatives.  Although it may be palatable to all - change never is - the IGC contends that the IGF as a whole will suffer in the long term it it does not prove its value to the international community by adopting mechanisms for the production of non-binding statements on Internet public policy issues.

--JEREMY MALCOLM
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