[governance] Stakeholders wrangle over the Brazil Summit on Internet Governance

[William Drake]

Hi Adam

On Oct 31, 2013, at 10:02 AM, Adam Peake <ajp at glocom.ac.jp> wrote:

> Did the MAG discuss the evaluation process and how to score?  I know there were general baskets (diversity, relevance etc) but need consistency in responses. Example: how do you decide relevance, was there an agreed standard, was it discussed?

As I recall there were several stages.  First, after the Feb. consultation, a group of us got together under the baton of Mervi Kultamaa (govt. of Finland) and developed a couple page proposal with detailed criteria for evaluation.  This included such innovations as saying the workshops had to actually be about Internet governance, have multiple perspectives, demographic diversity, etc.  I think there was brief discussion on the MAG list with expressions of support but nothing too probing or sustained.  Second, the secretariat later put up a form for workshop submissions that listed some of what we'd suggested, but not everything (unclear why).  Members then ranked proposals and it turned out (in the view of many) that we were interpreting, applying, and balancing between the listed criteria differently.  So there was a lot of discussion on how to recalibrate, treat different categories,  handle the resulting numerical rankings, deal with organizers who submitted 10-18 separate proposals, etc.  Third, we had a May meeting where the MAG went off into thematic break out groups to review workshops divided up by the main categories, and several of these groups came back to plenary and reported that they had added back in workshops that had fallen below the agreed numerical threshold (i.e. were rejected by the full MAG), for various reasons.  There were multiple expressions of disquiet about this and other aspects of the process, as is reflected in the public transcript. There were also instances of lobbying for proposals, unfortunate.  Under the difficult circumstances of a very compressed schedule, everyone was doing their best to get this right, but we didn't all view what was right in the same way.  The eventual outcome was generally not bad and eventually most people I spoke with in Bali were largely happy with the quality of workshops selected, but of course the process was not pretty and there were some contestable rejections.

Subsequent to the May meeting, Fiona Alexander (govt. of US) offered to spearhead a new effort to sort out clear evaluation criteria, but this was launched pre-Bali when people were preoccupied so it seemed to engender some expressions of support but no broad group discussion.  Hopefully we will return to the matter in January-February when people have more bandwidth and before the next F2F MAG meeting to probe deeper and get a stronger shared understanding of just how we're doing this next time, resulting in clearer than ever guidelines to organizers and evaluators alike.  Hopefully too the "preliminary proposals" experiment will not be repeated.

> 
> BTW, a colleague at his first IGF found the number of tracks perfectly manageable.
> 
> I sat in on most of the main sessions, they were poorly attended.  The surveillance session the last day was OK, even that fewer than you'd expect given the importance of the topic, and civil society participation was surprisingly weak, just a few questions/comments.  

I think there is a real question about what to do with the 'focus' sessions.  Either we find new and enticing formats like debates, or we should consider dumping them.  To the extent they're run like workshops, but peopled by the MAG rather than bottom up workshop organizers, it's not obvious what their distinctive added value is anymore.
> 
> Most of the transcripts are now online <http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/igf-2013-transcripts> and video on YouTube, see IGF channel <http://www.youtube.com/user/igf/videos?shelf_index=0&view=0&sort=dd>  These were uploaded just about immediately after the session had ended, not sure that was well known.

Define most.  I was involved in 7 workshops, 1 of which is online.  Video quality seems a bit variable.  Things to work on.  I assume the secretariat folks are all exhausted so maybe a little patience is merited.

Bill
> 
> Adam 
> 
> 
> On Oct 31, 2013, at 5:10 PM, William Drake wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Oct 30, 2013, at 5:19 PM, Jeanette Hofmann <jeanette at wzb.eu> wrote:
>> 
>>> The MAG in its wisdom rejected at least two IPR related workshops. My workshop proposal addressed IPR enforcement and internet governance.
>> 
>> I was puzzled by this but unable to get real clarity on the rankings done.  It may be that there remains an aversion in some circles to discussing intellectual property issues in the IGF, which would be a pity.
>> 
>> Bill
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**********************************************************
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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