[governance] enhanced consultations - further inputs

[Roland Perry]

In message <14539058.449075.1291630282354.JavaMail.www at wwinf1k30>, at 
10:11:25 on Mon, 6 Dec 2010, Jean-Louis FULLSACK <jlfullsack at orange.fr> 
writes
>Roland Perry wrote :
>
> > There are improvements to transparency which could be made, but
>there
>> are also funding issues. But mindful that it's a membership
>> organisation, and everyone has a government close at hand which is a
>> member, we are all quite close to the process if we want to be.
>
>May be You too, dear Roland, should be mindful that ITU is in charge of
>WSIS Follow-up process, which is (a) a multistakeholder-based one, and
>(b) focused on society (human, sociological, relational,
>communicational, economical, political, etc...) issues.

We should be careful not to confuse the meetings of the ITU itself, and 
those "external" meetings which the ITU organises. As a straw poll, I 
was accepted as a delegate to the recent WSIS Forum meeting in Geneva, 
in my private capacity. I'm sure others will have a similar experience.

>But, at the same time ITU has two kinds of members : member states and
>"sector members" i.e. private sector members.

Indeed so, and over the last two years I have attended the ITU's 
meetings as a staffer of a Sector Member, but also as an "invited 
expert". (You can get into lots of meetings of various otherwise closed 
organisations that way).

>CS may be present as "associated members" provided that they pay a 
>couple of thousand swiss francs fees and that they work as bit players 
>because they don't have the rights the secteor members benefit from !

An Associate Member is pretty much indistinguishable from a Sector 
Member, except for the one proviso that they have to nominate just one 
Study Group to attend, rather than all of them. There may be some other 
subtleties, because one of the long (felt like an hour) wrangles at WTDC 
Hyderbad this year was whether a particular resolution should refer to 
'members' or 'Members', which meant deciding what was the difference 
between the two (associates don't have a Big-M apparently).

But I didn't mention the ITU to spark a debate about membership fees - 
it was simply to highlight the size of organisation and number (and 
length) of meetings that result, when you have many decisions on 
multiple topics to bring to a large audience.

>Conclusion (a) :
>multistakeholder partnership is completely absent in this UN agency.

It's not as simple as that. Agreed, there may currently be little civil 
society input into things they govern (like satellite slots), but 
there's a lot of partnership when involved in external activities like 
WSIS followup.

>Moreover, ITU is a technological agency dealing with telecoms worldwide
>standardization, development and -partially only- regulation. Take a
>look to its Constitution and Convention. Conclusion (b) : ITU doesn't
>have any knowledge and even any ability in society issues !

In the same sense that Civil Society has no ability in telecoms 
standardisation and development issues? If so, why would CS want to 
participate in ITU core issues... The reality is that there's more 
overlap of knowledge and ability between different stakeholder groups 
than is commonly acknowledged.

>Unless it really opens itself to the CS which could -under certain
>conditions- contribute to "adapt" the ITU technological approach into
>an info society one. That was -and still is- the position of CSDPTT
>during the whole WSIS and since its very beginning. Therefore we asked
>the intergovernmemntal plenary to reform ITU as to be able to open
>itself to the CS and CSDPTT statement (presented at least three times
>from 2002 to 2005 ans since then regularly at the May meetings) was
>supported by a handful of CS orgs ...
>It'd be interesting to get the opinion of the list on this point.

Of course - that's what the list is for.
-- 
Roland Perry
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