Workshop 1 - who's on board already (was Re: [governance] Call for Consensus...)

Norbert Bollow nb at bollow.ch
Wed Mar 20 07:59:48 EDT 2013


Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> wrote:

> Do we have consensus within the IGC on what constitutes ms'ism, just
> to start with?

Good question. I'll avoid the risk of potentially making a fool of
myself by avoiding to answer it in public. :-)

Privately: - I think that we don't understand multistakeholderism any
better yet than most people understand time. What I know is that most
people (including everyone who hasn't studied modern physics, including
in particular general relativity and modern conceptions of cosmology,
and the arguments against what is known as the "cosmic censorship
hypothesis") have wrong conceptions about what time is, and after
having spent a good deal of time on that kind of stuff, I'm not sure
that my understanding is that much better. :-)

Nevertheless, the naive conception of time is good enough for most
practical purposes, and I think that the various existing conceptions
of multistakeholderism are also good in that it's possible to have a
worthwhile conversation on accountability and transparency in regard to
"multistakeholder selection processes" with a focus on the kind of
situations that come up with the UN CSTD WG kind of multistakeholderism.

The kind of approach used in what I sometimes call "the real
world" (meaning IETF etc.), where everyone interested can join and
those who don't have what it takes to understand what's going on will
generally leave on their own accord before too long, and get ignored
otherwise, is IMO much better, but effectively interfacing that kind of
model with governments is still an unsolved problem I think. So maybe
there is no real alternative to accepting some kind of "representative
multistakeholderism" for that interface? If so, we need accountability
and transparency in regard to the processes that select those
representatives.

Greetings,
Norbert

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