[governance] MEASURING the digital space - whose MEASURES apply, and whose do not

[michael gurstein]

Good questions Craig... My use of "we" in the note was firstly refering to
the folks on this elist and secondarily I guess, although that wasn't part
of my thinking, CS as a whole. How the second "we" at least "constitute
themselves as agents" is part, I guess of the thinking that needs to be done
and is most certainly not a trivial question.

Best,

M


-----Original Message-----
From: governance at lists.cpsr.org [mailto:governance at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf
Of Craig Simon
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 2:56 PM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
Subject: Re: [governance] MEASURING the digital space - whose MEASURES
apply, and whose do not


Michael,

The question ultimately hinges on who makes up the "we" in your 
sentence, "my position was that we need to be thinking of global 
governance institutions and thus global measurements/measurement 
strategies..." How do the members of "we" constitute themselves as 
agents capable of voicing grievances and making demands in the first 
place? Who counts? Who gets counted? And so on.

Of course, no practical mechanism exists to coalesce expressions of 
their/our grievances and demands at a massively internetworked level 
(despite my lonely efforts to build one). Consequently, there's lots of 
open ground for individuals to show up in Internet governance fora like 
these claiming they know what "Netizens" (or humans at an expressly 
global level) want, or should want. That's politics, which is fine by 
me. I don't think that we who participate on these discussion lists need 
much reminding that "we" have yet to be heard.

In any case, if the makeup of "we" ever is sorted out, building a 
knowledgebase that draws sober and insightful attention to statistics of 
economic well being will be an important test of institutional 
legitimacy. So I applaud your efforts.

Craig Simon

On 8/31/11 3:56 PM, michael gurstein wrote:
> Very interesting Craig...
>
> I understand you here as linking the question of Internet measurement 
> into the broader question of Internet identity i.e. as reflecting a 
> shift away from "national" statistics to "identity" based statistics 
> but understood in a global rather than a national context (to tie this 
> discussion back into the earlier one--where my position was that we 
> need to be thinking of global governance institutions and thus global 
> measurements/measurement strategies, rather than national ones (such 
> as the SNA/GDP etc.
>
> I'm not exactly sure where this goes from practically but I think 
> conceptually you are suggesting something quite valuable.
>
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