[governance] Completely Ignored [was East Africa IGF - day 2, discussion of ITRs]

Fri Jul 20 03:51:07 EDT 2012

Hi Parminder.

Greetings from the APrIGF in Tokyo where we are into the closing sessions.

I'm mixed about writing this longish email to this list but after mulling
it over, I have decided to craft and send it.

It's taken some time to draft a reply and I have to wrap up as well so I
will just address the issues you
raised and the extent to which I had ignored you.

>I think Peng Hwa must clarify this issue at this stage, on how
>consistently we have raised the same issues and how consistently have
>they been completely ignored, even when promises were made that they
>would be addressed.

I will clarify each of the issues.

1. Completely Ignoring You/IT4Change
I am surprised that this issue has been resurrected at this time. You had
raised the issue of the legitimacy of the APrIGF after Edmon and I had
started to organize it. I gave you my responses (below) and thought I had
resolved it with you when I spoke to you personally in HK. We continued
that conversation online. And then we spoke again in Vilnius. At that time
in Vilnius, you appeared to understand where I was coming from and so I
left it at that.

When I organized the meeting in Singapore, you did not raise any objection.

Meanwhile, I had set in motion ways to institutionalise/legitimise the
APrIGF and I can report that this has been done. More on this below.

2. Legitimacy of the APrIGF
(Pardon me if if I come across as projecting myself as a key player in
this but it is only for the purpose of explaining the beginning. It's not
my style to boast as I believe good works would speak for themselves.)

The purpose of the first APrIGF was to give feedback to the IGF in the 5th
year of its expiry in Vilnius. As a member of WGIG, I was keen to see the
IGF continue and not just one lone voice but the Asia Pacific's. At
Sharm-el-Sheik, to my surprise, I learnt that other regions had held their
regional IGF meetings. It was Asia that was missing such a meeting. I
spoke to Markus Kummer about it and he said that there should be one. When
I asked him and others around as to who might organize it, the fingers
were pointed at APNIC,Edmon Chung CEO of dotAsia and me.

Edmon agreed in principle at Sharm-el-Sheikh. He happened to meet the HK
GCIO on transit on the way back to Hong Kong and the GCIO immediately
agreed to
support the event. Edmon pulled together a strong programme that added a
Hongkong IGF with Vint Cerf and a high-level government official as
keynote speakers as well as a Youth IGF camp.

(Yours was among the names that came up as possible members of the
programme committee. There were several  weekly conference calls and the
minutes of the meetings were recorded by dotAsia; if you were on any of
them, there should be a record.)

It was somewhere while the forum was being organized that you emailed me
questioning the legitimacy of the APrIGF. As I recall, you wanted an open
call and a bottom-up effort and also some kind of official permission from
the IGF. (Pardon me if my recollection fails on precisely what you ask. Be
assured there is no intention: I'm going to get a shelling from my wife
when I get home
because I've booked an evening meeting on our wedding anniversary.)

My responses were: it's too late for an open call. And it was important to
give feedback to the IGF. Plus, we have an able and willing organizer that
is a non-profit that spends its surpluses to organize just such events.

I then said that Edmon and I would be deemed civil society members. I
added
that if you question the legitimacy of what we were doing, it would be
tantamount to questioning the legitimacy of civil society itself because
if civil society needed some entity to give it blessings, then civil
society per se is not legitimate. I remember saying that this was a point
difficult to explain over email and that I will elaborate when we meet up,
which I did when you were in HK.

We did discuss the issue further in Vilnius and I had assured that I was
working on the issue of legitimacy you had raised.

In Singapore, you did not raise any objections. And I thought that's where
the issue stood.

3. Legitmising the APrIGF
Of all the persons in the AP community, Izumi has been the one pointing
out issues and giving solutions to make the APrIGF organizing effort more
transparent, more bottom-up and thereby more legitimate.

As you know, in the Asia-Pacific region, we have the AP* (pronounced AP
star) consortium that is an umbrella organization for the various
organizations serving the AP region. At an AP* (pronounced AP-star)
retreat meeting at the Asia-Pac Regional Internet Conference on Operating
Technologies (APRICOT) in February 2012 in Delhi this year, the group
accepted the bid from Japan to host the APrIGF and appointed me as chair
of the programme committee.

(Taking on board the recommendation of you, Izumi and others, we have also
had an open call and we are running parallel sessions.)

Now, here one can ask, what is the legitimacy of the AP*?

The answer is: the community. Yes, AP* has a website
http://www.apstar.org/. But it is a loose consortium.

Summary
I do think you pose some good if difficult questions. But I also think you
need
to give time for something like the APrIGF to work out its legitimacy.
This is especially challenging for what I consider to be a civil society
effort.

Perhaps to answer some questions and to blunt future criticisms,
Chengetai has apparently drafted a set of guidelines that groups
purporting to organize IGFs should abide by in order to claim they are
running an IGF. I have not seen it but I am told it's a basic set of
guidelines with rather low barriers to encourage more IGFs.

Hope this answers the issues.

And as not everyone knows me on this mailing list, I have included my full
contact details below.

Regards,
Peng Hwa ANG
ANG Peng Hwa (Professor) | Director, Singapore Internet Research Centre |
Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information | Nanyang
Technological University | WKWSCI 02-17, 31 Nanyang Link, Singapore 639798
Tel: (65) 67906109 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6792-7526 | Web:
www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/sirc <http://www.ntu.edu.sg/sci/sirc>

On 20/7/12 2:05 AM, "McTim" <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 12:11 PM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net>
>wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thursday 19 July 2012 07:03 PM, Izumi AIZU wrote:
>>
>> (snip)
>>
>>
>>
>> Sorry, Parminder, I would say APrIGF is not in the ideal state of
>> transparency and openess, but to me the way I like to see is of mutual
>> constructive engagement and dialogue. And you have not responded to
>>some of
>> my replies such as why you did not send us the reminder. izumi
>>
>>
>> Let me get the sensitivity issue sorted first, becuase I have many more
>> probing questions to ask from the organisers of this event.
>>
>> Izumi,
>>
>> I think you should give up this defensiveness and blaming me for not
>>being
>> constructive and friendly, and simply address the issues at hand. One,
>>as I
>> have said I have been raising the same issues for three years now, and
>>while
>> IT for Change is a significant player in IG civil society space from
>>Asia,
>> we have refused to participate in this supposedly regional IGF even
>>against
>> funded invitations, and every time we have made our concerns and
>> reservations clear, and done so in detail. What other constructiveness
>>do
>> you want from us.
>
>
>
>You could have raised the funds from non-biz sources, thus removing the
>need to ask the biz community for funding.
>
>
>>
>> I think Peng Hwa must clarify this issue at this stage, on how
>>consistently
>> we have raised the same issues and how consistently have they been
>> completely ignored, even when promises were made that they would be
>> addressed.
>>
>> We are into IG work professionally, on behalf of the interests of
>>certain
>> constituencies. Do you expect us to just sit quite so that some
>>feathers are
>> not ruffled, and people's sensitivities not touched. In Baku, one of the
>> organisers of what is being called as the regional AP IGF is going to
>> solemnly get up and read some stuff as expressing what has come
>>bottom-up
>> from the Asia Pacific region. To that extent that person would be
>>purporting
>> to represent me/us among others.
>
>S/He would be purporting to represent the views of the folk who did take
>part.
>
>--
>Cheers,
>
>McTim
>"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
>route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel

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