[governance] On "ad hominem" and "twisting words"

[Daniel Pimienta]

Cher Bertrand,

I appreciate your effort to explain the singularity of IGF as a 
multi-stakeholder forum and the implications which make it, by 
design, a place where civil society advocacy is much more controlled 
and geared to neutral that other places more extreme, also by design.
I cannot disagree, yet the question to organized civil society of how 
do we tune our thresholds of acceptance is very difficult to decide.

After fast unloading months of silent disagreements with that mail I 
did think more calmly about this very reality, which is the gordian 
knot of organized civil society behavior in a multistakeholder 
context, and I reached a transitory conclusion: maybe the problem is 
not with civil society in IGF but with the fact that there is no more 
active forum for the post WSIS civil society to coordinate positions 
(within civil society) and have those difficult trade-offs discussed 
and consensuated (at least in some heavy situations). Maybe the 
turmoils which appear from time to time in IGF list could be then 
avoided by upstream discussions in a place which is not conditionned 
by multistakeholderism.

May be we should consider either create a new forum inviting many 
players who are active in our field (and doing advocacy on their own) 
or simply revive the existing Virtual WSIS CS Plenary Group Space 
<plenary at wsis-cs.org> which should have been the appropriate place 
for that purpose.

In the multi-stakeholder game (nothing pejorative in that word, I use 
it in the mathematical sense of game theory) the other groups 
(governments and private sector) have their own mechanism of 
coordination outside where we are not present and this is perfectly 
fair. Civil society also needs to be better coordinated in the inner 
circle and at this time we lack such mechanism. In game theory the 
winner is the one which strategy is unknown to the other players: we 
have implicitely accepted to discuss publically our strategy here and 
this is not good for our chance of pushing our consensuated visions.

In synthesis, most of the menbers of the civil society group have 
been moving away from the WSIS CS plenary group into the IGF forum 
and useful and sometimnes necessary (when the stakes are high) 
discussions we had in the past are not any more realized and 
obviously here is NOT the appropriate place for those discussions 
(including probably this one!).

Daniel


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