[governance] Re: CS strategic objectives in Internet governance

William Drake william.drake at uzh.ch
Fri Nov 1 05:58:42 EDT 2013


Hi

Apologies for cross posting but it seems needed.

On Oct 31, 2013, at 7:34 PM, Joana Varon <joana at varonferraz.com> wrote:

> After the meeting, held on Oct, 25th, a closed mailing list (i-coordination at nro.net) has been created for the drafting the concept note and debating the name of the coalition. Besides the four of us, it comprises the following organizations/companies: ICC, Oracle, verizon, cisco, cra, auda, internetnz (2), eurid, lacnic, apnic, afrinic (2), icann (2), arin (2), piuha, google, sidn, isoc.

It would be helpful to know the reasons given for why this listserv has to be closed if the goal is to help organize "An Open dialogue for the Evolution of Internet Governance"? (or as Wolfgang might put it, an ODFEIG).   Who is this intending to keep in the dark and why, what are the strategic and tactical objectives that can only be advanced by locking out interested parties?  You're not planning a military campaign or something.  I'd suggest at least making the archive publicly accessible.  If the group can't bring itself to do that, perhaps there could regular laundered public summaries a la the MAG?

Either way, an entirely close group seems like a rather ill-advised foundation upon which to build a broad based "coalition" or "platform" or whatever we want to call it.  This is how we'll get to the "grass roots" movement Chris said is urgently needed to promote transparent, accountable and MS inclusive global IG?

As for the composition, if I understand correctly, you say there are 21 reps of business and the TC, plus 4 reps of CS, drawn solely from the Best Bits contingent of folks who were able to be in Bali.  While you four are of course all great reps, this is obviously not a good inter-stakeholder group balance, and more people should be drawn in (although obviously not to the point of having a huge and unworkable group).  So I'm happy to see Jeremy say,

On Nov 1, 2013, at 9:40 AM, Jeremy Malcolm <jeremy at ciroap.org> wrote:
> 
> Going forward, everyone (including the existing delegates) are agreed that we need to nominate more people, and to find a way of doing that across broader civil society, not just within Best Bits.  Indeed Norbert raised the same as an agenda item some time ago, and there was discussion of it at the IGC workshop in Bali (that I missed unfortunately).  So I don't think there is any intention for closed groups to be deciding on process and representation.

I think there's a need to reach beyond just the IGF-oriented chunk of CS.  For example, particularly with ICANN and USG issues potentially being on the agenda, one would think there should be adequate representation of CS @ ICANN, which already deals with the TC and business extensively anyway, much more so than CS @ IGF. For example, NCUC has @ 90 organizational members and > 200 individual members, with @ 20 apps pending.  NPOC has 36 organizational members, with @ a dozen apps pending.  NCSG has some individual members not in either constituency.  At Large has five regional organizations, each comprising dozens of user organizations (some are commercially oriented, many are CS).  Yes, CS @ ICANN is broken up into silos, which is nonsense, but the point is there's a whole bunch of actors there who have pretty  direct involvements and stakes and a lot of expertise on ICANN, the issues it actually governs, the relationship with the USG and possibilities for globalization, etc.  Their voices should be at the table. 

It's not clear how to proceed with this; open dialogue is needed.  I can tell you that at the ICANN Buenos Aires meeting in less than two weeks there will be multiple meetings and informal conversations around this process, and CS @ ICANN will be raising such concerns with Fadi and his senior staff.  But I don't think it'd be preferable to grow the CS part of planning group through ad hoc and uncoordinated lobbying of ICANN leaders, or frankly that it should be up to them to pick and choose who from the ICANN communities can represent civil society. Same goes if there's consideration being given to other relevant coalitions, whether issue-based (privacy, IPR, whatever) or org-based (OECD CSISAC etc).  We need to evolve some sort of principled basis for doing this.

It would be helpful to know how those currently behind the wall are thinking about this, and what others outside it think.

Thanks,

Bill



**********************************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (w), wjdrake at gmail.com (h),
  www.williamdrake.org
***********************************************************

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