[governance] Towards a Joint Civil Society NomCom mechanism

[Norbert Bollow]

While at WSIS, there was a high-level mechanism for civil society
groups to jointly nominate candidates for positions etc, the methods
used in recent years were more ad-hoc and less credibly representative
of civil society as a whole.

In my opinion, it is time to remedy this!

As previously discussed, the IGC is organizing, jointly with with the
“focal points” who selected representatives for the three
non-governmental stakeholder groups for the CSTD Working Group on
Enhanced Cooperation, a workshop at the 2013 IGF on the topic “MS
selection processes: accountability and transparency”. I am proposing
to build on the discussions at that workshop and create a credible and
accountable mechanism for selecting civil society representatives.

I propose that we should aim to have such a mechanism in place well in
time for the 2014 IGF.

One possible mechanism that could be used would be similar to the
mechanism that we use in the IGC for various selection tasks, see
http://igcaucus.org/nomcom-process … this would be a joint NomCom of
civl society as a whole: Members of all the various civil society
organizations and networks would be invited to volunteer for the
NomCom, and a reasonably sized group from among these volunteers would
be randomly selected to form the NomCom. The NomCom would constitute
itself (it particular the NomCom chair would be elected by the randomly
selected members of the NomCom). For each selection task within the
remit of the NomCom, the NomCom would publish a call for expressions of
interest and then selecting a good civil society representative or
group of representatives (the NomCom members themselves being not
eligible).

As a first step, I'd like to build a “list of civil society networks in
the area of Internet Governance”, and I've created an Etherpad for this
at

 http://igcaucus.org:9001/p/civil-society-networks

Obviously all of the steering groups etc. of these networks must be
invited to participate in the discussions around creating a Joint Civil
Society NomCom mechanism, or other credible mechanism that could
serve the same purpose.

I however don't think that it is appropriate to restrict these
dicussions only to people who are on some steering group. Therefore I'd
like to broadly circulate a call for expressions of interest for
participation in these discussions, in which everyone who is
(1) experienced as a civil society participant in Internet governance
    debates, and is
(2) clearly primarily participating as a civil society person, with
    reasonable independence from industry and government interests
is invited to also participate in these discussions on the basis of a
simple expression of interest.

In case of any doubts in regard to whether someone expressing interest
fulfills the criteria (1) and (2), I envision decisions about
application of these to be made by the group of people which consists of
all the people from the various steering groups of civil society
networks.

Acknowledgement: This initiative is significantly inspired by Thomas
Lowenhaupt's suggestion of a while back to create a “Joint Board” for
selection tasks.

Greetings,
Norbert

-- 
Recommendations for effective and constructive participation in IGC:
1. Respond to the content of assertions and arguments, not to the person
2. Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept

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