[governance] "technical community fails at multistakeholderism". really?

[John Curran]

On Oct 8, 2013, at 11:50 PM, parminder <parminder at itforchange.net> wrote:

> 
> On Wednesday 09 October 2013 11:22 AM, John Curran wrote:
>> <snip>
>> 
>> Given that the role is oversight, why not make it completely open and transparent?
>> i.e. make the organizations that are doing policy development in this model actually
>> undergo independent third party audits of their compliance to a set of principles and 
>> then have the results posted and discussed publicly?   Is there a need for only a 
>> select community to participate in the oversight? 
> 
> 'Openness' has institutional and practical limits. It can easily be captured by the powerful (incumbents) to mean what they would like it to mean. ICANN can be said to be already subject to such an open scrutiny by global constituencies - its various constitutive processes and so on... Are you saying that is enough. So then ICANN is already globalised and requires no oversight. I cant agree.

Nor can I, that was not my statement - some form of oversight role is definitely necessary.
Do you consider oversight to be inseparable from authority?  I believe that a large number
of institutions that claim to adhere to open and transparent principles of policy development
should be subject to review and oversight, but I'm not certain that such oversight must be
inherently tied to any authorizing body.  In fact, we have the capability with the Internet to 
have institutions be held accountable for their claims of openness and transparency to a
very large number of parties at once, including and all interested governments, civil society
organizations, and other Internet technical coordination groups. 

> We need a body with however limited and circumscribed function to exercise core oversight function. Such division of executive authority (ICANN broad) and oversight role (as governing bodies of NGOS for instance do over the executive staff) is very necessary. No body can work appropriately without such separation of power and responsibilities. And ICANN functions are of two great global importance to leave ICANN board will absolute power to do things as, more or less, it at present has. 

Full agreement.

> Also, this proposed global Board will also exercise the IANA function, which is with the US government at present. This function cannot be exercised by an open participative process. 

"Execise the IANA function"?  Please elaborate what "exercise" means and why it should 
be commingled? 

> BTW, external, third party audits are technical/ professional processes that are ancillary to proper oversight, and can never constitute actual oversight.  All this is well known and discussed in organisational and governance theories, and I would not go into deeper details. We all know, we get the 'third party' auditors that we want to get - and they can in any case only point to some very clearly illegal or extra-legal things - auditors are not there to cast political or even substantive governance judgements. 

Political and "governance judgement" being substituted for actual open and transparent policy
making is exactly my fear, hence the desire that the oversight role be limited to judging ICANN
on its compliance with its declared processes.  

/John

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