[governance] About the IGF call for workshop proposals

[Milton L Mueller]

Thanks for this very useful clarification, Bertrand.

I want to take issue with some of the analysis behind it, but in general I agree with the intent of the new approach and appreciate your giving us clear advance notice of it.

The problem with past workshops was NOT that proposers had the ability to propose and execute "fully developed" proposals. Many of the best and most productive workshops followed that partern. The problem was that the Secretariat did not feel as if it was in a position to discriminate between fully-developed proposals that were executed well, and those that were thrown together at the last minute with no coherent theme and/or had unbalanced viewpoints or stakeholder mixes.

The saving grace of this "anything goes" policy was that it allowed a few applicants to put together high-quality Workshops that were unfiltered and had a clear vision of what they were trying to do. It also meant that for every one of those, there were one or two sloppy and unbalanced ones. But people could vote with their feet, and they did. Indeed, all of the IGP Workshops for the last three years have been packed, because they had sharply defined themes, balanced collections of panelists and dealt with real, substantive issues not fluff and self-promotion.

The clear and present danger from what you describe as the new approach is that all proposals have to be run through the political wringer of the MAG. This is a good way to make Workshops become bland and meaningless, or, (worse) ensnare their proposers in months of political negotiations with clueless or hostile partners. I have first-hand knowledge of how this happened last time with the IPv6 main session panel. Making the content of workshops into a collective decision of the entire IGF is a sure-fire way to ensure that the Workshops become as boring and useless as most of the main sessions have been. Your new process seems to put the MAG at the center of grouping proposals and selecting themes, and the whole point of the Workshops was that it offered a free space outside of that.

I hope that when you start grouping "theme" proposers together, you do so with open eyes.

That means: recognize, please, that for every pressing and important topic in Internet governance, there is someone or some group who would prefer that we not talk about it at all.

That means: Do not throw together people who want to undermine or prevent discussion of a topic with the people who really want to discuss the issue, and expect them to work out a good program.

That means: do not throw together people who want to talk about related, but quite different things. (e.g., in the IPv6 panel there were people who wanted simply to promote migration to IPv6, and there were people who wanted to talk about the transitional problems caused by the shortage of IPv4 addresses. Those two ideas were fundamentally incompatible as topics, and we wasted lots of time trying to reconcile them.)

In other words, up to now the Workshops, because they are relatively free, have been the saving grace of the IGF. I hope that doesn't get spoiled with the new approach. It could have disastrous consequences for attendance at the next meeting.

Milton Mueller
Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
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Internet Governance Project:
http://internetgovernance.org<http://internetgovernance.org/>



________________________________
From: Bertrand de La Chapelle [mailto:bdelachapelle at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 1:10 PM
To: WSIS Internet Governance Caucus
Subject: [governance] About the IGF call for workshop proposals

Dear all,

A word of explanation on the call for workshops proposals issued by the IGF secretariat, as it is a slightly different procedure that in the previous years.

During the February consultations and the MAG meeting, it appeared clearly that the traditional method of asking people to propose fully developed workshop proposals (complete with co-sponsors and potential panelists) had two unexpected but damaging consequences :
- several proposals on similar subjects were prepared separately with great efforts and great commitment from proponents,
- it became therefore particularly difficult to encourage them to merge afterwards, as they became naturally strongly committed to their specific approach

The general result was in the first three years the abundance of workshops that everybody recognizes as difficult to handle for the participants.

The process proposed this year is therefore a bit different, taking advantage of the fact that we are starting a little bit earlier. The objective is to encourage people to first submit themes rather than full-fledged proposals, with arguments and reasons why the theme should be addressed. This represents for all IGF participants an opportunity to have an increased influence on the Agenda of the meeting itself (as issues can be proposed by people who do not have the capacity to organize a workshop themselves). It is also a way to facilitate grouping different proposals together and encourage proponents to join forces to co-organize one session instead of several in parallel.

In Hyderabad, the community underscored that different issues have different levels of "maturity" or "ripeness", and the MAG has basically identified three categories that could correspond to different workshop formats (what is below is my own formulation of the three categories) :
- issues where people do not agree yet on the nature of the problem and where a more complete picture needs to be drawn before trying to identify solutions : such issues would benefit from expert panels, laying out the different dimensions,
- issues where people are clearly aware of the different aspects at stake but disagree on the appropriate approach or objectives; these would benefit from very interactive workshops with a lot of participation from the room
- issues where a basic agreement has emerged on what needs to be done and where the challenge is to synergize concerted action among the different concerned stakeholders; this category could benefit from "roundtable formats" gathering the key actors involved in order to help them distribute responsibilities and coordinate action.

As the discussion in the IGC progresses, I felt it was important to describe this new context. Several interesting issues have been raised on the list so far and the IGC can play a very important role in discussing a relatively extensive list of themes, and then seeing how they could be grouped in clusters. This will help the work of the Secretariat and the MAG immensely. .

I hope these background elements will be useful.

Best

Bertrand

--
____________________
Bertrand de La Chapelle
Délégué Spécial pour la Société de l'Information / Special Envoy for the Information Society
Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et Européennes/ French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs
Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint Exupéry
("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting humans")
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