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

[Garth Graham]

If Bertrand de La Chapelle and Daniel Pimienta are willing to dip their toes back into the sea of despondency that the IGC list has become, then I feel I should follow their example.
 
Daniel suggested that:
 
> ….. 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 conditioned by multistakeholderism.
>  
> Maybe 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.
 
I want to respond to his suggestion with a little historical perspective.  Both Bertrand de La Chapelle and Daniel Pimienta will remember (since they were present at the creation) that we had such an active and appropriate forum at the global level well before WSIS.  It was called the Global Community Networks Partnership (GCNP).  It met four times before “civil society” abandoned it – twice in Barcelona (chaired by Artur Sera), and then in Buenos Aires and Montreal.
 
In the early stages of its formation, the WSIS civil society secretariat used the Buenos Aires and Montreal meetings of GCNP to explore how civil society participation in WSIS might work.  After all, at that time where else could they have held such a discussion?  But there were two polarities inherent in GCNP that never reconciled.  On the one hand, the stewards of the uses of ICTs for community development recognized that WSIS would (as it did) fail to grasp the nature of how societies and their technologies co-evolve.  They stayed away from WSIS.  On the other hand, the agencies that saw community networking as a means to the end of human rights, rather than an end in itself, trampled the stewards of community use into the dust as they stampeded towards the WSIS trough of resources.  In large part, WSIS killed GCNP.
 
It is my understanding that the early history of ICANN’s institutionalization contains a similar history.  In its transition to a corporation, ICANN severed the connections to the community of users that had actively participated in its early growth.  The creation of the At Large Advisory Committee and the structures of the Regional At Large Organizations were meant to suture up that wound.  But it has taken many years to put those structures in place, and the exploration of their utility appears to me to be at a very early stage.
 
I believe the nature of digital economy and society is revealed most strongly through the emergent patterns of community online and daily life online.  That means the best way to evolve the Internet Governance Ecosystem remains local, not global.  It means the conscious neglect of the experience of the stewards of the uses of ICTs for community development inherent in those two examples was a mistake.
 
Those stewards have not gone away.  Every increase in bandwidth, every decrease in bandwidth cost, every effort to locate control of Internet access in the hands of community, increases their interstitial strength and numbers.  They are the early adopters of the phase change in governance we are now experiencing, away from closed systems of control and towards open complex adaptive systems that learn.  Some nation states, particularly those that recognize the importance of digital inclusion, acknowledge their existence better than others.  But they are clearly not “players who are active in our field,” if that field or “space” is defined as civil society.
 
I believe that there has been a total breakdown of public trust in the structural capacity of a triumvirate of government, business and civil society to sustain a social contract.  That’s true whether the governance structures are democracies, autocracies, plutocracies, theocracies or kleptocracies.  Edward Snowden’s whistle blowing of National Security Agency activities is merely a symptom of that breakdown.  There is no difference between King Canute standing in the waves telling the tide to go back and the NSA standing in the flow of “big data” saying “We control this!”
 
Daniel, which is better?  To mobilize a forum within the existing frame of a concept of civil society that is in transition to something else?  Or to change the frame towards what is emerging and to bet on setting free the indigenous knowledge inherent in community and community online?  I still believe we should support the autonomy to local communities to self-organize responses to the complex situations they face (as Internet Protocol does).  Changing the concept of organization to self-organization will scale fractally towards planetary responses that are sensible to anyone at any level, without the need for the creation of monolithic and therefore very dangerous global institutions.

Garth Graham
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