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

[Mawaki Chango]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 9:33 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:

> On Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:52:06 +0000
> Mawaki Chango <kichango at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Would that have made more sense had I said that in this following way?
> > If one adopts the perspective of MSism as in "the original notion of
> > individuals
> > speaking for themselves in shaping Internet policy," then a scaling
> > problem arises at some point within that perspective? Because that
> > was my starting point. In a different perspective, that problem may
> > go away, indeed may not even exist.
>
> That perspective is largely about what I referred to as 'a', and you
> will find my answer there.


Well, the fact is that the world is not full of "thinkers" and policy
analysts. And there might even be a whole lot of people in between your 'a'
and 'b'. 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.)


> As case in point, consider how it has come
> about that the increase of the number of participants has not caused the
> IETF to stop functioning.
>

I realize your "a/b" seem to be a sort of partitioning of the types of
audience/participants there are in MSism? And the IETF type where
individuals speak for themselves, in your view, is completely separate from
the other where the main/only challenge would be to make sure there are
enough variety of inputs to cover all concerns on the ground. The only
problem I have with that is that it looks like you were not responding to
me (contrary to what your quoting me in that email suggests) as much as you
were offering a different take (your own) about multistakeholder
participation. For my part, I was responding to McTim who appears to
consider the IETF type (he didn't explicitly label it IETF though in that
particular message of his) where individuals would speak for themselves and
their ideas be evaluated on merits as the model for MSism, any MSism (which
would mean that the same assumptions that make that breed of MSism work
should be carried over to any other instance of MSism.) To that I was
simply responding that that breed of MSism may be good for epistemic
communities of practice (or communities of your "thinkers" and analysts)
but it and its assumptions are not scalable to addressing global policy
issues with adequate inclusiveness. It looks like what you did is to put
'a' and 'b' into silos and then claim there's no scaling problem since by
making them into silos you have removed the possibility for a need to scale
from a-type to b-type.

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.) 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.

Mawaki


>
> > However, I note that while saying scaling is not at all a problem in
> > case 'b', you're still considering the number of people behind a
> > solution path ("getting enough people")
>
> There my "enough" was not about numbers though, but about getting enough
> input about the various relevant grass-roots perspectives. No kind of
> information processing system can generate good outputs in the absence
> of sufficient information in the inputs.
>
> > Even a seemingly simple
> > equation such as "one person, one vote" is not always easy to
> > implement in a transnational, global online context.
>
> In fact already in a national context what I'm talking about is not at
> all easy to implement properly. I'm after all talking not just about
> holding elections, but about creating real accountability. In regard to
> the standard of democracy which I'm positing, for example the US has
> very clearly and demonstrably become a failed state.
>
> Nota bene I'm not advocating for implementing a "one person, one vote"
> system at the global level. I think that implementing a good system of
> that kind at the national level in each country is not only hard
> enough, but also sufficient, together with something like what I'm
> proposing at http://WisdomTaskForce.org .
>
> Greetings,
> Norbert
>
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