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

[Mawaki Chango]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 12:32 PM, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:

>
>  And I
> think that many different groups can be on an equal footing with each
> other at the same time.  For example, we could have a global
> multistakeholder event like the NETmundial were everyone is on equal
> footing.  Yet, when the governments went off amongst themselves to
> discuss things, they were also on an equal footing, as were the CS folk
> when they went off to talk among themselves.


While I understand and would agree to this at a theoretical level, I
contend that in fact governments know much more about being on "equal
footing" when it come to their deliberative procedures than CS among
themselves. Because "equal footing" has long been institutionalized for
governments in multilateral dealings, and they have clear protocols to
achieve that.

In CS we hardly have any institutional basis for that, and things may vary
a lot from one individual to another. For instance, I've seen imbalances
between professional CS folks and the self-volunteering ones with no CSO
job or  affiliation to back up their engagement. Individuals among the
former can sometimes be overbearing in terms of taking things in their
hands (which is not a bad thing in itself) but who only know to listen to
themselves and their direct peers (the ones with CSO affiliation.) Another
gap is more cultural in a sense that people tend to listen more to other
people who either are as vocal as themselves or whom they feel culturally
closer to in the ways they use the language as well as the basic cultural
beliefs they share, etc. All those may seem little things, but they lead to
some people being more quickly dismissed than others. In any case, they are
meaningful to humans (and if you, i.e. anyone out there, don't know it then
you probably are on the commanding side) and they make or brake the spirit
of cooperation.

Mawaki
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