[governance] Montreux

Sun Feb 27 20:53:51 EST 2011

Hello all,

I am writing to share my impressions on the CSTD IGFWG meeting with you, and
I am glad to see that I focused some on some points that were different from
Izumi's and Wolfgang's.

The first day, dedicated to procedure is better documented below. On the
second day, I found it diffcult to take notes while following the meeting
and intervening at the same time. In any case, the meeting was being
recorded and I asked the Secretariat to make the transcript available as
soon as possible on the website, together with all contributions received in
the past or yet to be received (about the new version of the questionnaire,
see below)

*1 - General impressions*

Multistakeholder participation and equal chance to intervene on this space
seems to be something widely accepted now. India, Iran and others welcomed
the participation of other stakeholders, which was very positive.  Non-gov
actors could speak on equal footing.

The mood was not very good at the beginning of the meeting. The
Secretariat’s lack of responsiveness, the fact that they conevened the
meeting in Montreux during Saturday and the fact that the questions that
would supposedly structure report were not discussed in advance all gave
place to criticism,  which the Chair did not take well. Saying it short, we
are dealing with an unskilled Chair/Secretariat and this is something to
worry, given the huge amount of work ahead and the lack of time.

*2- Structure of the report (jump this topic if you don't want to hear about
procedure)*

The meeting begun with a procedural clarification asked by India and Egypt.
They asked if the questions of the draft structure were the ones that would
guide the writing of the report and asked who would actually take the task
of writing it. Some people argued the draft structure was an agenda for the
WG meeting only, not the actual structure of the report. Personally, I found
this approach a bit nonsense.

The chair said that we would only discuss that at the end of the meeting,
but suggested that maybe an ad hoc group could be created to write the
report.

India made a point that we could not go into substantive matters if we were
not sure that we were actually discussing points that would table the
report. In my opinion, the points made by India were very pertinent, but
unfortunately lead us to be caught in procedural matters again on the first
day.

Suggestions were made about new questions that should be introduced if the
points were going to guide the writing of the report. Ex: the first question
should be an evaluation of the fullfillment of te IGF mandate vis-a-vis the
Tunis Agenda, so we would know and document exactly which are the key-areas
for improvement.

India distributed a proposal that changed a bit the structure from the
questionnaire proposed by the secretariat. The business sector also
presented a proposal. Both proposals were successfully merged during coffee
brake. After new disgreements, the draft structure was approved on the
beginning of day 2,  being called as” key elements for the report”, which
give us room to believe that new issues can be included if the relevant (I
dont think any of the issues can be removed, though).

* *

*3 – Outcomes of the IGF*

As I said, I did not manage to take many notes on day 2, while speaking and
listening, but my impression was that there was general support that the IGF
would have as outcome something that would cover convergence and divergence
on policy matters and be apt to feed into the process of police making
taking place in other relevant bodies. The actual ways to do it were not
consensus, the approach mentioned by Wolfgang (a lot of messages emerged
from workshops) was one of the possibilities on the table, some others were
advanced as well.

*4- Remote participation*

Huge support about it. It was really important to talk about RP in the CSTD
WG environment, since some representatives did not know it in details. RP
was recognized as key element for inclusion, a key innovation from the IGF
that deserved more support and joint efforts to enhancement. Workshops
conducted completely online during the IGF (including from hubs) were
suggestd. Some meetings of the MAG and OC could take place online as well.

*5- How to write the report*

As said before, at the beginning of the meeting, the chair suggested the
creation of a smaller drafting group for the report, that seemed to have
been generally accpeted. Many people spoke for it, no one spoke against it

On the second day a proposal circulated that the drafting group would have
the role to compile the points raised in all consultations and write a first
version of the report, then circulate online for comments. In depth
discussions would take place in the next meeting of the WG. Everybody agreed
and then we discussed the composition during lunch.

The proposal advanced by Brazil was that there should be 1 country per
region (total of 5) plus 1 from the business sector plus 1 from technical
and academic community and 2 from civil society. The reason of the 2 reps
from CS, according to them,  was that CS represented many diferent views
that are difficult to capture. India supported.

This proposal seems to have disagreed very much the business sector, but
instead of discussing and making a conter-proposal they took a step back and
decided to be against the draft group. They argued that we should leave for
the secretariat to come with a report and our role should be to discuss it.
Developed countries (Finland, US, Portugal) and Russia backed the proposal.
I think it is a pitty and a dangerous political move in face of the faults
commited by the secretariat and the chair. In addition, Brazil raised a good
point about the incoherence to preach that multistakeholders can take issues
and do things collaboratively and then leave this important matter in the
hands of the secretariat.

DESA asked  the WG to also portrait the lessons learned. highlight more in
the report things such as the multistakeholder carachteristic and remote
participation

*6 – Next steps* (please someone correct me if I am wrong, it was mentioned
fast):

- The new structure of the questionnaire will be placed online, comments
will be open until March 15

- The Secretariat will compile older contributions, new contributions and
the points raised in this WG meeting and write a draft report

- The report will be sent to WG members. They can offer comments

- The text will be discussed on 24 and 25 March in Geneva.

*7- Submission of the report*

DESA said they had contacted the office in NY and postponed the delivery of
the report to April 1st.  Still tight!

The report should have 17 pages maximum

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Izumi AIZU <aizu at anr.org> wrote:

> Thank you Wolfgang for your quite precise and concise summary.
>
> Since I had to leave earlier than the meeting's closure, I could not
> capture what was the closing, especially with
> regard to the "drafting group" since several members including USG and
> business were not supporting the
> creation of such drafting group consist of WG members,
> but rather to task it to the secretariat, to me that is not
> the right path.
>
> I would like to underscore what Wolfgang mentioned here
> about the good acceptance and recognition of Civil society
> members and our inputs - compared with December where
> it was very different. I spoke with India, Egypt, and some
> other gov members informally during brakes and they are
> really trying to accommodate us as peer members, and
> valuing our input (and other stakeholders input).
>
> No one questioned the composition of drafting group
> include non-gov stakeholders - yes, we had some difference
> between CS and business for the number of members to the
> drafting group. CS wanted to have more numbers than other
> stakeholders since we are much more diverse than, say business or
> academic/tech community. They disagreed and tried to keep equal
> number.
>
> This does not mean, please, that CS members were supporting G77
> position on outcome. As far as I can tell, no
> CS members took that position per se.
>
> izumi
>
> 2011/2/27 "Kleinwächter, Wolfgang"
> <wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de>:
> > Hi everybody
> >
> > here are some observations from the IGF Improvement meeting in Montreux.
> >
> > 1. The first and most important point is that nobody challenged the
> participation of civil society and other non-governmental stakeholders as
> equals in the discussion and in the future drafting of the final report.
> After the two December meetings of the UNCSTD this was not so obviously
> expected. Even the government of Iran said that it values the contribution
> of non-governmental stakeholders in the process since 2003. There was no
> hostile climate. In contrary, contributions from all five CS reps in the WG
> were taken as very helpful and reasonable input.
> >
> > 2. A lot of time was wasted with the discussion on procedureal issues.
> The discussion on substantial issues circeled for hours around the questions
> of the "linkage" of the IGF. India, Egypt but also Brazil used the languge
> of the UNGA resolution which says that the IGF should be linked to the
> "broader dialogue on Internet Governance". Some pepole in the room had the
> impression that this is not a good language because the broadest dialogue is
> the IGF itself. And there was some mistrust that this could become a formula
> to put the IGF under the "enhanced cooperation" discussion in the UNGA.
> Alternative proposed language was to link the IGF to "other dialogues" but
> India and Egypt insisted in the "accepted language" which, BTW, was
> introduced by the US government during the negotiations in the 2nd Committee
> of the UNGA in New York in November 2010. However both Egypt and India
> accepted an interpretiaton that one of the functions of the IGF is to bring
> information to other dialogues and that this formulation (in the headline of
> Chapter 2 of the forthcoming report) will not include any formal
> sub-ordination of the IGF under "another dialogue". My comment here is that
> it is rather obvious that on the one hand IGF and EC are two different
> processes which are not formally interlinked but there are some trade offs
> on the other hand. The IBSA was not discussed in detail. This will remain an
> open question. Russia proposed again to link the IGF with the WSIS Forum but
> produced protest against any form of "merger". In a second interventon
> Russia clarified that they did not propose "merger" but wanted to use
> "synergies" to avoid the waste of resources. There was no support for a
> closer linkage between the two fora.
> >
> > 3. The debate about outcome did not create any new ideas. There was a
> broad consensus that the IGF should not become a "negotiation body", should
> not produce any "negotiated language" or "binding recommendations", but
> should produce something which people can take home and read within "ten
> minutes" and show their constituencies as "outcome". My impression was that
> more and more stakeholders, including governments, can live with "messages".
>  The proposed procedure to generate the messages was not discussed in detail
> but the proposal to have nominated rapporteurs for each workshop and plenary
> who have to produce one to three "short messages" from the discussion was
> seen as a reasonable approach. This would guaratee that there is a
> distributed system of messages production which would reduce the risk of
> capture of the drafting by one single group. 50 workshops would mean 50 -
> 150 messages from 50 rapporteurs.
> >
> > 4. Another key issues was the role and function of the MAG. The idea to
> have the MAG (or the secretariat) like a bureau was mentioned but got no
> suprport. The majority was in favour of a more open MAG, more open
> consultations and a right mixture between continuation and rotation in the
> membership. A related question was the financing of the secretariat. India
> and Egypt called for a stable public funding (to become independen from
> voluntary contributions) but they did not say where the money should come
> from.
> >
> > 5. The broader involvement of developing countries was discussed at
> length. There was a broad consensus among all participants that the
> participation of developing countries - both governments and
> non-govenrmental stakeholders - has to be broadend. There was an outspoken
> wish to strengthen in particular civil society organisations and small and
> medium enterprises in developing countries and to enable them to participate
> more actively in IGF activities.
> >
> > 6. There was a clear support for a stronger linkage between the global
> IGF and national and regional IGFs. On the other hand, dynamic coalitions
> were not really discussed. There was a proposal to have in between the
> global IGFs also "thematic IGFs" but also here no concrete step was planned.
> >
> > 7. The meeting decided not to go into the details of how to organize
> workshops, plenaries, feeder workshops etc. Some proposals were made how to
> improve the planning and the linkage between the various sessions within an
> IGF, but this has to be further discussed.
> >
> > 8. The only thing (but this is not bad) the group could agree after two
> days is the structure of the planned report to the UNCSTD meeting in May
> 2011. There is now an informal drafting group which will work together with
> the Secretariat to draft the report for the next meeting, scheduled for
> March 24/25, 2011 in Geneva.
> >
> > I want to thank all friends of the IGC and the civil society for their
> input. CS played and active and recognized role and made very valuable
> contributions to the process. At the end Anriette, Parminder and other
> raised even the issue to increase the number of CS people in the various
> forthcoming groups because CS is different from the other non-governmentwl
> stakeholders (broader, more diverse etc.). Nobody really objetced this but
> there was no time left for a discussion, Lets wait and see where we will go
> from here.
> >
> > Best wishes
> >
> > wolfgang
> > ____________________________________________________________
> > You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
> >     governance at lists.cpsr.org
> > To be removed from the list, visit:
> >     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing
> >
> > For all other list information and functions, see:
> >     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
> > To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
> >     http://www.igcaucus.org/
> >
> > Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t
> >
> >
>
>
>
> --
>                         >> Izumi Aizu <<
>
>           Institute for InfoSocionomics, Tama University, Tokyo
>
>            Institute for HyperNetwork Society, Oita,
>                                   Japan
>                                  * * * * *
>            << Writing the Future of the History >>
>                                 www.anr.org
> ____________________________________________________________
> You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
>     governance at lists.cpsr.org
> To be removed from the list, visit:
>     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing
>
> For all other list information and functions, see:
>     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
> To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
>     http://www.igcaucus.org/
>
> Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t
>
>

-- 
Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade
FGV Direito Rio

Center for Technology and Society
Getulio Vargas Foundation
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20110227/fef59e5b/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t