[governance] Re: [bestbits] Letters from Indian Civil Society organisations to the Chair of NetMundial regarding appointment of civil society co-chair

[Norbert Bollow]

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:

> These seem to be unfounded allegations.  In short a smear campaign
> with zero evidence behind it.

For what it's worth, I was in India in mid-February at a civil society
meeting focused on Internet governance, shortly after the appointment
of Subi Chaturvedi was announced. While it of course doesn't say too
much that a European like myself didn't know who she was, it in my
view says a lot that most of the Indians who were there didn't know who
she was either, and it seemed that the few who had first-hand knowledge
of her were outraged (considering her an "AT&T plant").

In my opinion, the one main benefit of multistakeholder processes is to
allow those perspectives and viewpoints and concerns to be fully and
duly taken into consideration for which this would not happen in other
types of policy processes, because most perspectives and viewpoints and
concerns don't enjoy the support of a powerful lobby.

Nota bene I'm not claiming that this benefit arises automatically in
any kind of multistakeholder process. Quite on the contrary, we need to
carefully design the future of governance in regard to any particular
subject matter area, in order to make sure to achieve this benefit
while at the same time also ensuring that fundamental principles such as
democracy, primacy of human rights, etc, are not violated.

Now in regard to Netmundial, which is aimed at trying to move us a step
forward in figuring out this future of governance, it is in my opinion
absolutely essential that any "civil society" appointment to a key
role, such as "civil society co-chair", must be someone who not only
has ambitions and some claim of being a member of civil society, but
someone with a track record of working to get those perspectives and
viewpoints and concerns which not always heard fully and duly taken into
consideration. This can't be done without becoming reasonably
well-known among other civil society groups as part of that process!!!

Hence my conclusion is that the lack of any obvious track-record of
the kind of work outlined above is pretty damning evidence in itself.

If her appointment to this role at Netmundial is not reconsidered, that
in itself will, in my eyes at least, very seriously undermine any claim
of legitimacy of Netmundial as a whole.

Greetings,
Norbert

P.S. Cc list trimmed, in order to minimize crossposting.

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