[governance] Remote Participation

[Roland Perry]

In message 
<CALCecM9a5M0kAtC1LF9Ak=BuMhBPdA7nJTFyVqAt345ZtNZEpw at mail.gmail.com>, at 
06:35:00 on Sat, 18 Feb 2012, Ginger Paque <gpaque at gmail.com> writes
>Why have we, as civil society and the IGC, been so ineffective at
>developing and achieving implementation of inclusion and effective
>remote participation? After several years, why is RP not now an
>integral part of all IG and IGF policy processes?

For the inter-sessional planning meetings, because they are still 
primarily institutionalised into the Geneva landscape (which for 
Europeans is at least better than having to go through the same exercise 
in New York).

The only way this can be broken is for such meetings (and indeed similar 
non-UN meetings, this is not a criticism aimed particularly at DESA) to 
grind to a halt whenever there's a glitch in the remote participation, 
and not continue until the remote participation has been fixed.

Of course, that results in an extreme waste of the resources of the 
people who *have* managed to get the funds to travel to the venue, so 
it's not an easy decision.

But until such a rule is applied, then remote participants will always 
have an inherent second class status, and not just because of the 
greater difficulty of following and contributing to a meeting from 5,000 
miles and 12hrs timezone away.

The problem is that the world is largely organised around the idea of 
representative democracy, and this assume your representatives are able 
to get to the meetings.

I've also got something to say about substitutes, for example in the 
MAG. I'm not sure it's very common for elected representatives to send 
substitutes to national Parliaments etc, or in the private sector to 
appoint a proxy who isn't already invited to the meeting.

But in both cases it's entirely possible to arrange for an assistant to 
follow all the proceedings on mailing lists, and to brief the 
representative so that the latter's work is restricted to not much more 
than actually attending the physical meetings.
-- 
Roland Perry

-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/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