[governance] ECTF - initial draft proposal online

[Norbert Bollow]

Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:
> By coincidence, read what I wrote in 2004 in my PhD thesis proposal,
> which I only just rediscovered:
> 
> > The thesis may in fact decide that the IETF's RFC process should be
> > used or adapted for the development of consensus-based model legal norms
> > for the Internet. The recommendations of the thesis, which are expected
> > to propose a collaborative style of Internet governance as a model for
> > nation states to use in the drafting and passage of their own Internet
> > legal legislation, may themselves form the subject of the first such
> > RFC.

Wow! :-)

> Convincing governments, of course, will also be hard.  I note that your
> proposal deviates from the thoughts that I had shared with you in this
> respect:
> 
> > The Committee shall attempt to make decisions by rough consensus.  If
> > this fails, a meeting at which decision making by majority vote is
> > allowed may be convened no earlier than 16 hours after the rough
> > consensus process has failed.

In the current revised draft I've so far left it unchanged that the
Committee can make decisions regarding the Secreatiat by majority vote.
(The Committee also as a new role in making decision about sanctioning
abusive individuals; those decisions are by rough consensus only.)

My thinking is that the Committee's role in making decisions about the
Secretariat is so critical in keeping ECTF functioning that I wouldn't
want to increase the risk of a deadlock by absoluetly requiring rough
consensus or "rough consensus with additional multistakeholder hurdles"
decisions.

The current draft foresees four categories of sustaining members which
can each delegate five members of the Committee. If it comes to voting,
the potential weight of the votes from people with a "government
stakeholder" perspective is 50% since governments and international
organizations are two separate categories. Therefore I think it should
be possible to assure governments that the "government stakeholder"
perspective is already given significant extra weight.

> Whereas my contention is that there should be a rough consensus not only
> within the Committee, but also within each stakeholder group that
> comprises the Committee.  Although that raises the prospect of deadlock
> enormously, and will make the job of facilitation of consensus more
> difficult (and more important), I feel that it is the only way that
> governments will deign to participate in a forum that could issue
> recommendations that a majority of them might disagree with (the same is
> true of the private sector and technical community, probably - whereas
> civil society are a trusting load of mugs and would be game to try
> overall rough consensus!).

It seems to me that there is some kind of misunderstanding here.

In my understanding, if a majority of any of the big stakeholder
categories disagrees with something, the decision condition of
"overall rough consensus" definitely isn't satisfied. If this isn't
clear enough maybe I should add a clarification to this
effect. (Suggestions of wording are more than welcome!) 

The design of the current ECTF proposal is to make just about all
decisions by rough consensus but with some guidance in the form of the
"ECTF Values" and with a relatively narrow exception for operational
issues regarding the Secretariat (where I can imagine situations where
it's simply necessary to make decisions reasonably quickly even if
rough consensus cannot be reached quickly enough.) 

But feel free to suggest an alternative design.

Greetings,
Norbert

-------------- 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