[governance] 2013 Preparations for MAG

[Koven Ronald]

Dear Bill and All --


It would be really nice if y'all stopped speaking in acronyms, as if this were exclusively a discussion in jargon for the initiate. Bill even invents private new head scratcher acronyms, like MS (I assume for Main Session, not for some medical condition).


Why not a common-sensical ease for comprehension standard that names of things be spelled out the first time they appear in a message, followed by the acronym in parentheses ?


Bests, Rony Koven



-----Original Message-----
From: William Drake <william.drake at uzh.ch>
To: governance <governance at lists.igcaucus.org>; Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net>
Cc: Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa at gmail.com>; Salanieta T. Tamanikaiwaimaro <salanieta.tamanikaiwaimaro at gmail.com>
Sent: Sun, Nov 25, 2012 11:36 am
Subject: Re: [governance] 2013 Preparations for MAG


Hi


Replies in line, sorry for the length, there's a lot to talk about.



On Nov 25, 2012, at 6:02 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:


Let me add some below, in line with Fouad, tagged [srs]

These are entirely my opinion, from being on the management committee (till 2009) and fellowship committee (till now) of an asiapac wide network operators conference (APRICOT) for several years.

On 25-Nov-2012, at 9:58, Fouad Bajwa <fouadbajwa at gmail.com> wrote:


To throw in some starters:



1. Should the IGF continue to hold meetings in countries with

authoritative regimes and repressed political environments? People

from certain neighboring countries were not able to participate while

the fear factor of participating in an IGF where the host country was

authoritarian was high.




[srs] Should the IGF hold meetings in comparatively remote locations compared to major airline hubs with liberal visa regimes and excellent conference facilities?  The point here is that such locations are more expensive to fly to than other locations on the same continent that are major airline hubs, with direct flights from more places around the world.   They may, in most cases, have more suitable conference venues so we'd get far less issues with remote participation, wifi based collaboration in the venue, acoustics in the auditorium …




As long as IGF's linked to the UN system, you get what you get.  It's not like ICANN's site selection process.  If a government stands up and says we'd like to host (either out of commitment to the process or to make use of a new convention center, fill hotels, tell locals that IGF is a UN seal of approval for its policies, etc) it's politically pretty difficult to say no, not to mention that hosting costs money that's in short supply and the line of suitors doesn't stretch down the block.  On a separate note, one could debate whether holding meetings in such countries doesn't do some trickle down good; I tend to think it's a net plus, but others may calculate differently.  That said, wherever we go, one would certainly like nicer venues with better amenities that are easier to get to.





2. IGF should put out a call for hosts country expression of interest

instead of expecting someone will bid with clearly laid out principles

and process for selection.




[srs] Fully concur.  Something on the lines of an RFP with clearly defined requirements for the host country, in terms of logistics as well as based on an evaluation of free speech rights in the country.




I strongly agree that conditions and requirements need to be laid down and there has to be a means to deal in real time and afterwards with nonconformance, or it's just paper.  But depending on the circumstance, making that work might require more than sotto voce discussions with the secretariat, e.g. interventions from supportive governments and stakeholders.  Could be dicey, merits thought.


Either way, I think there is interest among some in the MAG in setting out such requirements, and it'd help them to sell it to peers if there were good stakeholder inputs on the point.  So it would be useful if the IGC and others would take a crack at setting something out.



3. When do the MAG improvements actually happen with reference to the

CSTD IGF improvements and when will they be reflected i.e. in future

IGFs?


[srs] In other words, can we have some metrics on improvements already suggested and/or future improvements that are actually implemented, and make the leap from powerpoint / pdf to "ground realities"?




The UN process has to work its way through, but in the meanwhile people in the MAG are definitely expressing interest in getting more proactive. 



4. Logistical support interms of visa acquisition to attend open

consultations or observe MAG meetings remains a challenge for people

from developing countries and attention to detail is needed from the

IGF secretariat. People from developed regions do have considerable

advantage over this issue but do not represent the views and insights

of developing country issues and inputs to the IGF.




[srs] In the first (Athens) IGF, as I recall, the visa process was very smooth, even expedited, so that a Schengen visa was issued with far less paperwork than I have experienced on business or vacation travel to other Schengen countries.   For the rest, please see my response to point 1 above.  A location like Hong Kong, that requires prior visas from I think three countries in the entire world and extends a free visa on arrival to all other countries, and moreover has direct flights from most regions of the world, would be much more suitable than either Athens, Hyderabad or Baku, to pick a few past venues.




The UN can't force changes in national immigration policies but the above mentioned conditions and requirement could strongly urge the view that offering to host entails responsibilities etc.



5. The time allocated to Main Session should be significantly reduced

to half and the majority of Main Sessions should be restricted to one

day otherwise this is negatively impacting audience division and the

numbers in Workshop participation.


[srs] I wouldn't go that far   However it makes sense to identify a specified time slot for the plenary / main session events every day, and structure workshops so that they feed into the main sessions.   We also need to structure these main sessions so that not all of them become over-long panels by themselves, and have a significant number of rapporteur driven sessions which provide feedback from the workshops to the broader audience.




I strongly disagree with cutting the time for main sessions and think we should instead make them more useful to more people.  I hope we can finally come to agreement that after seven years we don't have to be bound to the same old tired standardized generic session topics.  MS should be able to vary per year to address truly "hot topics" that are on the tips of tongues everywhere.  I proposed this at the Feb. 2012 meeting in the context of calling for a MS on human rights, and was immediately shot down by the "nothing can be changed" Greek chorus.  But after the rather uneven performance of the MS this time, I sensed in the spontaneous partial MAG meeting at Baku greater openness to tinkering.  Why shouldn't we be able to have a MS on enhanced cooperation and any gaps in the governance ecosystem, patterns of private sector governance, the role of online campaign mobilizations like we've seen around WCIT, the contestable boundary lines between telecom and Internet and their global governance, territoriality and jurisdiction, and so on—even if the "messages" coming out of the sessions were "views differed sharply" that would be ok.  And why not vary the formats, e.g. by having some debates on juicy topics (could even do it with teams and audience show of hands on motions).


If others agree that innovation in the MS would be desirable, an IGC input on this too would be a really helpful for CS participants to bring into the MAG discussion.







6. Workshop planing detail should continue to receive more attention

especially interms of quality and issue. The issue around achieving

gender balance, multistakeholder balance and regional coverage are

really not working. 



I tend toward the seemingly unpopular view that while there was much satisfied feedback on numerous Baku WS, the fact remains there were simply too many (running 11 tracks of 44 WS parallel to the days MS was nuts) and some were clearly less solid, well thought out, and properly personed (in terms of the above criteria, and others).  I found it very frustrating that the MAG went through this whole exercise of ranking WS proposals, which in the first cut resulted in 2/3rd of applications being below the acceptance threshold and needing more work, and yet a great many of these ultimately made their way into the program seemingly irrespective of the extent to which they were revised and improved in accordance with MAG feedback.  If we want a high quality and right sized program, sometimes we have to have the courage to say sorry no please try next year.


We also had the curious phenomenon of people submitting late WS proposals purporting to be open forums.  The OFs are supposed to be a specific thing, organizational show and tell, not a category to be used by late movers to smuggle in WS proposals.  When the divergence between the OF format and the proposals was pointed out in MAG, some anyway got approved somehow as "side sessions," a category for which there are apparently no rules.  We should nip that in the bud.


Of course, the challenge here is that some attendees need to have their own event in order to get funding to come and participate, and obviously we don't want to suppress the numbers.  On the other hand, many individuals and organizations habitually propose a large number of events.  At a minimum, one would think we could adopt a rule that nobody can lead organize more than say two-three workshops.  That ought to be sufficient to deal with any travel funding needs and visibility urges.


In parallel, there seems to be some interest in MAG in the idea that no single person should appear on more than [x] WS and MS panels.  There a cohort of usual suspects who ritualistically speak at 7, 10, 12 events. In part, this is fueled by the difficulty of identifying "new blood" that has committed to attend and would be perfect fits, so when someone's organizing a session and thinks oh I need a person from xyz region or SG the easy default is to turn to known and easily available folks.  So we need to make a proactive effort to entice new and qualified attendees, particularly from the government side, and to tell the usual suspects to please accept only the [3-4] appearances you think most appropriate.  Self regulation can play a role in the latter if the MAG can't manage to establish or enforce a rule.  I know I'll be doing that.





The IGF pre-events have to be revisited and should

receive more attention in terms of planning and projection as  these

are receiving a lot of attention by participants.




I think the explosion in pre-events is indicative of the need for more flexibility in formatting, including the main sessions.  If you want to have a serious in depth discussion of a topic and the MS are all locked down with ye ole SOP etc, what other option is there?  Although even if we reform the MS format some people will still want to do their own things their own ways...  Maybe we should admit this is a feature not a bug and that the IGF really runs five days rather than four, and if there are more bottom up proposals than can be accommodated they should go through the MAG process…?





[srs] Fully agree.


7.  The visa issue despite being well managed by the host country

remained one of them most unclear aspects of the IGF and the IGF

secretariat should give more emphasis on detailing out these issues

with future host countries in the very beginning.




[srs] This goes back to my point about picking venues with liberal visa regimes, and/or venues that promise to expedite visas for bonafide conference delegates.   However, from the host country's standpoint, I can say that there will be a significant threat of misuse of these visas by a small number of people (for example, I have personally seen, in that network operators conference, fellowship applications from what are obviously "advance fee fraud" scam artists looking for a free ticket to the event - if we grant such a fellowship, once in the country they simply "disappear" and overstay their visa, then our local hosts face some heat for this).  So, nothing in this process should compromise on due diligence carried out by the country's visa authorities.


8. The venue planning needs to be carefully done as having venues

outside the cities causes both stress and challenges to accessibility.




[srs] Fully agree, covered above




See 2 above



9. An Internet Connectivity Team should be assembled by the IGF

Secretariat that should work beforehand on the ground to manage

internet connectivity to cover remote participation, connectivity for

over 2000 participants keeping in view that this may mean planning and

connecting 2000 people x 6000 devices (laptops, cell phones, wi-fi

enable cameras, tables etc).




[srs] It actually makes sense to hire and retain a professional vendor of conference networking services, such as Verilan, to provide the same (high, bound by SLA) standard of networking across events.   Funding for this will remain an open question though, with the current model of the IGF.


10. The sudden shift of Open Consultations and MAG meetings from

Geneva to France for February 2013 without open consultation and

comments from the community puts a severe logistical pressure on

participation for those that find it a challenge to already

participate in such meetings. This shift enables only certain


[srs] This might have been true earlier, but Switzerland and France are both Schengen countries.  So if you have already acquired a Swiss Schengen visa, you should certainly be able to use it for your travel to France.

I do agree that if the venue had been shifted from, say, Washington DC to Toronto, I would have fully agreed with you, but in this case, it is moot.


We are having a related debate-lette in the MAG now on May.  At present, the IGF consultation and MAG are scheduled in the same week (13-17 May) as not on only the WSIS Forum, per usual, but also the ITU's World Telecom Policy Forum on global Internet governance.  I think it would be a disaster if stakeholders with an interest in IG were precluded from attending the WTPF by this scheduling.  If the WCIT debates have shown anything, it is that it's really important that ITU member governments not be negotiating documents (even non-binding opinions, which set agendas and create mandates for future organizational action) without civil society, business and the technical community at least being in the room.  The WTPF page http://www.itu.int/en/wtpf-13/Pages/participation.aspx says that participation will be open to the public as observers.  It's not clear yet whether this will be on the same terms and conditions as the 2009 forum in Lisbon, when members of the public had to submit to a staff beauty context and demonstrate their qualifications to attend, and if accepted were unable to speak; this has been asked of ITU but not answered.  But either way, we should be there.  If you look at the preparatory docs and national submissions (all freely accessible on the website) it is clear they will be getting into many of the most contentious issues of interest to us, so there will be a need to mobilize and weigh in somehow.


Accordingly, a few of us have proposed that the IGF meetings be moved to the week before or after the WTPF, or else to the week before or after the CSTD (which, next year is inconveniently scheduled for 3-7 June…which not only means interested parties will have to come to Geneva twice, but conflicts with the EuroDIG too).  The responses on the MAG list have been pretty scattered, with a couple expressions of support for moving, and others saying we should keep it as is in the name of travel cost savings—even if this means IG people can't go to an open ITU event on IG.  One may speculate on the thinking behind the latter.


Bottom line, here too it would be useful for the IGC to weigh in, quickly, if in fact people agree that the WTPF is a priority.


A final point not mentioned so far—the outstanding issue of working groups and ongoing activities on matters of key concern.  From the outset the IGC has maintained that IGF should be able to convene groups that include good government representation that are designed to undertake focused explorations of topics and have their outputs—even if it's some feel this, others feel that messages—feed into the MS.  There's been much discussion of doing something around Enhanced Cooperation in this manner, although some forces have argued for focusing on the CSTD instead, which has inherent limitations with respect to multistakeholderism and governmental representation.  Part of what makes this insoluble is the lack of a clearly laid out model of how WGs convened under the IGF could function.  If the IGC could put forward a concrete proposal, preferably in coordination with business and the TC, that would be very helpful too.


So in short, if IGC and other CS formations give the CS members of the MAG something to work with that we can point to and say our community strongly feels xyz, that could be really useful in moving some balls down field.


Best,


Bill


 
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