CS consensual statement on MSism WAS Re: [governance] Vint Verf tells us the conclusion of the complex IANA transition process

Fri Aug 1 13:21:02 EDT 2014

See below. Resending with a little fix, my apologies.

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On Fri, Aug 01, 2014 at 9:54 AM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:

On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 23:48:39 +0000
Mawaki Chango <kichango at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, the fact is that the world is not full of "thinkers" and policy
> analysts.

Yes, absolutely - and that is in fact a major part of the point which I
have been trying to make. My category 'a' of "thinkers", in which
category I would include not only you and me and all the other active
participants on this list, but pretty much all of the influential
participants of today's various Internet governance fora (regardless of
"government", "civil society", "private sector" hats), are not in any
way representative of the overall population, or of their views, needs
and concerns. We should not presume to assume that we understand the
views, needs and concerns of the world population well enough even in
the absence of any serious efforts to listen to them.

Agree.

My other main point is that we also should not presume to think that we
"thinkers" would even in the absence of an effective democratic
accountability somehow collectively make decisions that appropriately
take into consideration the needs and concerns of "those who are not
participating directly" even to the (currently probably extremely
limited) extent that we understand their needs and concerns.

Agree.

> And there might even be a whole lot of people in between
> your 'a' and 'b'.

Let's get rid of that problem by defining the category 'b' of
"grass-roots perspectives" as consisting of everyone who is not in
category 'a'.

Ok

> Oh, wait... I shouldn't have previously said a
> scaling problem arises _within_ that perspective but rather (and this
> is what I meant) that perspective faces a scaling challenge when
> comes the need to take into account a greater and greater number of
> people, not all of whom are "thinkers" or policy analysts while they
> may even still be able to speak for themselves. (However I don't
> think this clarification changes anything to your response here which
> has started in and is consistent with your earlier response to my
> message prior.)

Yes and of course I don't deny that scaling issues exist in the sense
that coordination costs (of all kinds) increase when the number of
participants increases. I also don't deny that of course there are
people who are not "thinkers" but who want to still speak just for
themselves and who have no interest in becoming part of an advocacy
organization.

Good!

My point is that so far the overall the participation of
those who are not "thinkers" is so low that we don't have a problem of
dealing with large numbers of them, we have the problem of bringing
their participation up from "totally insignificant" to a better level.

I see. That certainly is a priority.
No problem. It just seems to me that since the a-type is self-selecting,
there's no solid basis to predict till when they will remain at a
manageable size by the current ptocess provisions without some people
giving up their willing to participate or part of their contribution
potential. And you want them NOT to remain at such size indefinitely since
you want more and more participation (which, granted, is the first priority
to occur before the question of scale actually does -- on that I totally
understand your point as a "theoretical prioritization" and I accept its
empirical implications only to the extent that we realize one does not need
to wait for an actual/empirical scaling problem before helping solve it by
designing a priori a system that can cope with it, since the problem is
predictable).

On this latter note I tend to agree with Peter (in a later message) on the
need to keep in mind that it is a qualitative as well as a quantitative
problem.

Of course, in regard to the assertion that I was speaking from my

perspective and in the process putting into words "a different take (my
own) about multistakeholder participation", I must admit that indeed I
am "guilty as charged." :-)

> Anyway, I think there are global public policy issues which the 'a'
> crowd and the 'b' crowd will need to come together and address (at
> least for which they and everybody in between will be legitimate
> stakeholders.) I think whenever that happens, again at global level,
> there is one way or the other a scaling challenge --although I'm not
> saying this cannot be resolved. Even if it's about making sure all
> meaningful issues are covered, it's not the same to make sure they
> are for 20 million people as for 1 billion people, overlaps
> notwithstanding (eg, multiple languages and cultural differences
> remain, to name but a couple of factors.)

Is there really a fundamental difference in how parliamentary democracy
works in India which has well over a billion people, in comparison to
how it works in smaller countries?

In fact I don't know how it works in India. I am from Togo. I can just
guess that the way it works in India has a little something to do with the
way it works in UK, just as the way it works in Togo has a little something
to do with the way it works in France. But I may be totally wrong because
there may be various features of "localization"/acculturation and
historical contingencies.

> You may also note that even
> democratic representation (representative democracy) is also a
> response to a scaling problem (and as you rightly point out, it's
> already complicated enough at national level...). If you still don't
> see it that way, we may agree to disagree on this bit.

I see representative democracy as a formalized and indeed "scaled up"
version --with (in the ideal case at least) well-instituted
accountability-- of a form of specialization which exists already at
the smallest level of a family or a small firm or other small
organization, where also governance issues exist and not all members of
the group deal with them equally. For example, in very many families,
it's the mother who combines the roles of the "thinkers", and the
"parliament", and the "government" all in one person, in regard to the
family's internal matters of governance.

Nota bene this form of specialization can also be "scaled up" in
different ways, resulting in non-democratic forms of government:

Indeed it may, for democracy is not a given and very smart people in
history argued for less individual freedom-friendly forms of political
governance.

Thanks,

Mawaki

>
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