[governance] Re: IGC statement/questionnaire Q3

[Sivasubramanian Muthusamy]

Hello All,

The following is a provisional draft in repsonse to Q3. On this response to
the questions that Ginger has raised as also other inputs are to be
incorporated

The Internet Governance Forum, irrespective of its direct impact on the
policy making process of Governments, is changing the way Government's
perceive Civil Society participation in the policy making process. During
the preparatory phase as also during the last three IGFs, Governments had an
opportunity to experience the mutli-stakholder participatory process of the
IGF and are becoming comfortable with the process of consultation. This
'roundtable' equality is largely an IGF achievement. (The IGF process
promotes faith in the functionality of the particiaptory governance process
and could inspire National Governments to emulate the particiaptory process)

As for the direct impact, it has been minimal. IGF does not have powers to
decide, not have the powers to recommend. This is a "design" aspect of the
IGF which may be largely preserved. At the same time it is observed that due
to this status of the IGF, the policy making process of National Governments
and Regional Governments have not sufficiently paid attention to the
deliberations at the IGF. The IGF brings together participants with
different expertise from various staekholder groups from various geographic
regions around the world, who deliberate on Internet Governance issues to
contribute to the actual policy making process .IGF could devise a system by
which Session/Topic Reports could be generated to summarize the positions of
stakeholder groups on issues deliberated during the IGF. Though this may not
constitute to be a "recommendation" or a "formal statement" from the IGF,
such Session/Topic Reports that could be released under different topic
headings and could become Reference Documents that could contribute to the
National / Regional policy making process.

Governments could adopt it as a convention to draw resources from the IGF
Referece Papers on the relevant issues/topics while framing proposals for a
new policy / change of an existing policy related to Internet. The proposed
Reference documents could be on broad topics such as Security or Freedom of
Expression to outline the overall IGF position with sub-sections on
stakeholder positions, and also on sub-topics such as a topic on Cloud
Computing or Social Networking. Such Documents would enable the National /
Regional Policy making process to compreshnsively and readily understand the
"mood" of the IGF on a topic on which legislations are to be enacted. At
present decisions are taken by governments and by business corporations
largely in isolation of the IGF deliberations so the decision taken often do
not take into consideration the concerns of the IGF, nor the solutions
proposed by the IGF.

The Internet Governance Caucus proposes that the IGF Secretariat considers
this as an action item and introduce a mechanism to throughly record all
sessions by text transcripts and collated audio visual records as source
records, as also assign neutral personnel to prepare consensus/ stakeholder
position reports on issues/sessions. The IGF Secreatriat may also
proactively reach out to Governments to uge them to adopt it as a convention
to call for IGF Position papers and related documents to be used as inputs
in their policy making process.,

Sivasubramanian Muthusamy

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Ginger Paque <gpaque at gmail.com> wrote:

> Shiva is actively working on Q3.
>
> I would like to see some recognition of the improvement in the level of
> discussion between stakeholders since the WSIS process in the impact. I
> think there is much more collaboration (in general) than during WSIS, and
> far less confrontation. In the 2009 workshop proposals in particular, due to
> the request by the IGF Secretariat to merge proposals, there are panels that
> include business, government, academia and civil society working together.
>
> We might also look at Ian's response to the questionnaire for ideas as
> well:
>
> *3. What has the impact of the IGF been in direct or indirect terms? Has it
> impacted you or your stakeholder group/institution/government? Has it acted
> as a catalyst for change?*
> You will probably have to probe a lot deeper to discover impact, and a lot
> of this would be at a personal level, which is not directly covered by the
> way that question is posed. Where individuals are impacted or have learnt,
> eventually that will flow though to stakeholder groups. But to get
> meaningful feedback on impact, you may have to ask a few questions along the
> lines of “has you involvement in IGF increased your knowledge of internet
> governance? “ “has your involvement led to meaningful contact with other
> peers that has assisted your work” , “has multistakeholder involvement
> changed or affected your perspective on any particular governance issues”
> etc. These sort of questions would assist in getting a fuller understanding
> of what the impact might have been.
>
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