MAG meeting summary report -Re: [governance] open consultations

[Jeanette Hofmann]

Hi,

Jeremy Malcolm wrote:
> On 03/03/2009, at 6:21 PM, Parminder wrote:
> 
>> 2) Another very important development is that concerned dynamic 
>> coalition are likely to be associated from the very start with the 
>> development of round tables. This first time gives DCs an (important) 
>> official role in the IGF process. Significantly, this role is in an 
>> area which may soon become the most important and looked-forward-to 
>> part of the IGF.
> 
> 
> History has shown that there is an inevitable 

I don't see anything inevitable in this context. Also, it wasn't because 
ICC that the idea of speed dialogues was dropped, there were more people 
who didn't like this format. I was one of them. Same is true for 
"debates". I wasn't at that meeting but the open consultation's 
transcript shows that preferences for one of the other term run across 
stakeholder groups. You are constructing a "history" here that hasn't 
shown as much as you claim.
jeanette



pulling back from the
> developments apparently made following the annual February open 
> consultation meeting, however.  This time last year it was "debates".  
> The year before that it was "speed dialogues".  So I'm not too confident 
> that the round tables will see the light of day after ICC/BASIS et al 
> begin to sow the seeds of fear at the May consultations.
> 
> If I'm wrong, then yes it would be a positive development - but let's 
> not over-estimate how far it would take us.  The outputs being proposed 
> from these round tables are initiatives to which only those around the 
> table would agree to independently pursue.  They would be, to adopt a 
> phrase that found favour during the open consultations, recommendations 
> *at* the IGF, not recommendations *of* the IGF.
> 
> Certainly, that is valuable in itself and fulfills part of the IGF's 
> mandate - it's what I've called a network-building role, within its 
> larger mandate of coordination of Internet governance activities.  But 
> the normative weight behind an initiative that has been proposed and 
> adopted by a round table group is more limited than that it would would 
> carry if it had been adopted by the IGF as a whole.
> 
> So in my view, that remains the next step: to fill the missing link that 
> inhibits the IGF from collectively adopting an initiative for action, or 
> indeed from developing and collectively adopting a policy 
> recommendation.  The round tables proposal skirts around that problem by 
> limiting itself to cases where a consensus already exists - and is 
> therefore pretty much limited to the single case of child pornography.
> 
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance