[governance] #IGCaucus improvements - towards a forum for #advocacy

[Norbert Bollow]

[with IGC coordinator hat on]

The IGC Charter contains the following mission statement:

    The mission of the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) is to provide a 
    forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of
    civil society contributions in Internet governance processes. The
    caucus intends to provide an open and effective forum for civil
    society to share opinion, policy options and expertise on Internet
    governance issues, and to provide a mechanism for coordination of
    advocacy to enhance the utilization and influence of Civil Society
    (CS) and the IGC in relevant policy processes.

The “forum for discussion” aspect of the IGC has always been strong,
even the situation had deteriorated over time with hostility against
certain viewpoints etc. In my view, there has been a good trend of
improvement recently in this regard. (I'm not so optimistic to assume
that there won't be any further relapses, but IMO overall the situation
has been improving.)

The next focus area for IGC improvement should be in regard to providing
a viable forum for advocacy and action. Besides the benefits of this in
itself, this will also improve GC's ability to be taken serious in
regard to “representation of civil society contributions in Internet
governance processes”.

In the understanding of Sala and myself, the term “forum for advocacy
and action” is not limited to the (relatively rare) situations where,
despite the great diversity among Caucus members, consensus is reached
on a substantive issue.

Without giving up on the goal of trying to reach consensus or at least
rough consensus whenever possible, we wish to enhance IGC's role as a
forum for sharing and developing advocacy statements aimed at promoting
global public interest objectives in Internet governance policy making.

In particular, the aspect of IGC's mission of providing a “forum for
advocacy and action” needs to support these activities also in
situations where there is lack of full agreement on what constitutes the
relevant global public interest objectives.


We think that in order for allowing IGC to fulfill this aspect of its
mission statement, some improvements to the technical infrastructure
are needed.

In particular, we think that it would be good to have an automated or
semi-automated way (requiring only minimal or no specific coordinator
intervention for setting things up) in which any IGC member can set up
a workspace for developing a statement (the current idea is to offer
a choice of two options, etherpad and MediaWiki - actually etherpad is
available on http://igcaucus.org:9001 already, we haven't been using it
much yet though) and a dedicated mailing list for any statement
development project.

This could be used as follows: When any IGC member wishes to take the
initiative towards the development of an advocacy statements, the
first step might be to post on the IGC list expressing the general
viewpoint and content of the desired statement. Such postings which are
intended to lead to the development of a statement may be marked in the
Subject: line with "{S}". Likely other IGC members will quickly express
agreement or disagreement, and it will probably be clear soon whether
the proposal has a chance to reach consensus or rough consensus in IGC.
The proponent could then establish an workspace (etherpad or MediaWiki)
for informal initial editing, and (depending on his or her own
assessment of the chances of consensus or rough consensus in IGC) either
a mailing list specific to that statement project, or the main IGC list
could be used for discussing that statement project. If a dedicated
mailing list is created, it would be restricted to postings that move
that particular statement project forward.

Of course, statements that have not successfully gone through the IGC
consensus process or rough concensus process are not “IGC statements”.
On the IGC website, we'd have two categories of statements. Formal
IGC statements would be listed first, followed by “Other civil society
statements”. The list of links to statements under the “Other civil
society statements” heading could include links to statements developed
elsewhere, e.g. by the BestBits group, along with statements that were
developed using the infrastructure provided by IGC.

For all statements developed and published on the IGC website, we think
that it would be good to provide automated "Sign on to this statement"
functionality.


There are two major issues with this kind of plan:

a) Critical mass of subscribers on per-project mailing lists. This can
be addressed by having a group of people who generally volunteer to
participate constructively in statement-drafting processes, and who will
always be added automatically to every new per-project mailing list
that is created.

b) Inviting civil society persons with particular expertise and/or
interest in regard to any of the statement projects. It is very
important to establish processes through which civil society people are
informed about statement drafting processes in their areas of interest
before those statements are finalized, and invited to participate if
they wish to do so. This cannot be automated, it will need a conscious
effort of many Caucus members including the coordinators to do a good
job at this. This is work. According to the Charter we as a Caucus (this
is not just a task for the coordinators) should be doing this work
anyway, though - see the list of “Objectives and Tasks” immediately
after the mission statement in the IGC Charter.


Here are some further ideas for technical improvements:

* Set up a dedicated announcements mailing list where announcements
  about draftement drafting projects will be posted.

* Besides statements, also provide IGC members with a way to get other
  “actions” (aimed at promoting global public interest objectives in 
  regard to the Internet), for example FOSS development projects that
  are aimed at achieving policy objectives, linked from the igcacus.org
  homepage.

* Fix the LDAP problem which currently prevents some users from
  resetting their passwords and accessing their IGC account. (This is
  not currently a big issue, since currently most people never have any
  need to accessing their IGC account, but with the above-mentioned plan
  it will be important to fix this.)

* Provide each Caucus participant with a bit of personal wikispace.

* Fix the mailing list archives, removing the hindering "I am not a
  spammer" confirmation so that: 1) specific posts can be linked
  so that the link works directly, i.e. without the page-back-and-
  reload trick; 2) the archives can be index by search engines.
  For protection of email addresses from spammer's bots, the email
  addresses will be replaced by links to the participant's personal
  wiki homepage, which will by default contain some kind of “I am not
  a spammer” confirmation protecting the email address. (Benefit to
  “link popularity” conscious IGC participants: When good postings on
  the mailing list get linked to, that will increase the link popularity
  rating of the personal IGC wiki homepage, which in turn can be used by
  means adding links on that wikipage to whatever webpage(s) that you
  want to advertise.)

* Automatically include the archive URI for each mailing list posting
  already in the posting that is sent out. This will make it easy to
  twitter about interesting postings. (Suggested hash tag for the IGC:
  #IGCaucus - #IGC is already being used by others.) 

* Index those postings in the mailing list achives that have significant
  substantive content according to discussion topics. Integrate this
  with the igcaucus.org Map of Internet Governance by linking from the
  topic pages on the Map of Internet Governance to the relevant archived
  IGC mailing list postings, and conversely also link from the archive
  pages to the corresponding topic page.

* Database of Internet governance acronyms and technical terms, and use
  that to automatically append acronym expansions / brief explanations
  (with more in-depth links to the Map of Internet Governance) for each
  acronym or technical term that is used in the posting, to all postings
  on the governance mailing list.

* Automated generation of a graph showing the number of unique IP
  addresses visiting the igcaucus.org homepage on any given
  day. (Hopefully there will be an upwards trend soon, which would
  indicate am increase in that the number of people who consider the
  igcaucus.org homepage to be a useful resource.)

* Fix the bug in our Drupal setup which caused the recent problem with
  visibility of the link to the pdf attachment containing the press
  release.


What is the advice of the IGC members in regard to all the above ideas?


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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