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

[Mawaki Chango]

McTim,

Thanks for the clarification. See below.

On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 12:03 PM, McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mawaki,
>
> There are multiple flaws in Geneva based IG processes.  I will
> enumerate just a few.
>
> 1. They are not actually IG, they are what I call meta-IG or shadow IG.
>
> 2. The SGs are artificial and unnecessary except to silo people and
> perpetuate the power of governments.


Yes. Even national states (or nation-states) are artificial, save the
continuity (in most cases) of a geographical substratum. I guess one may
wish to see states and national borders erased from the earth, but instead
people get their identity defined by the tag of a nation-state and the ID
documents that come with it. Believe me, swap your passport with that of an
obscure small nation state and the world might make you feel you're almost
a different person altogether (at least when you often need to travel
around.)

>
> 3. The silos are self-perpetuating and carry over into things like
> IGFs and Net Mundial.  The notion of representation inherent in those
> silos takes us further away from the original notion of individuals
> speaking for themselves in shaping Internet policy.
>

Yes, then the question is how do we scale up? Individuals directly speaking
for themselves can only work well in settings up to certain size. I believe
it is the challenge of scaling up (say, to hundreds of millions of
individual stakeholders, the population size of multiple nation-states)
that makes it inevitable that entities such as governments, as traditional
representatives of nation-states, would find relevant and want to step in.
Otherwise how many corporeal entities in existence today can claim well
established history and capacity (institutional mechanisms) for
representing or counting for 1 million people as well as 500 million people
and more?

IMHO, the fact that the social artifact of nation-state is universal and
has (not perfect but) proven mechanisms for scaling up representation of
the public across a wide range of population sizes, thus enabling the
scaling up of other mechanisms that need to rely on such representation, is
part of the reason why the nation-states (and their
governments/representatives) are inevitable partners to reckon with at this
scale of MSism we need to deal with now (not just the type of MSism that
built and developed the Internet of the earlier couple of decades.) IOW,
we're being challenged to be no more no less than institutional
entrepreneurs and to come up with an alternate and matching solution that
could achieve the same (or maybe do it even better) while bypassing
national states or have them sit now in the backseat ---"the same" being
including and accounting for such sizes of populations of stakeholders,
beyond the much smaller internet protocol epistemic communities and with
different levels of knowledge, awareness, commitments and engagement.


> ICANN on the other hand is divided by Supporting Organizations, by
> functional area if you will.  These are then sometimes divided by
> Various constituencies and SGs, sometimes not.
>
> the cases where they are not are the most BUTOCy I find, and prefer
> them to the others.  YMMV.
>

It is a good thing to know your or anyone's preferred "use case" of MSism.
That helps identify the different flavors of MSism (different qualified
MSisms) and their best use or application. I think that is a good approach
as every version of MSism has its applicability as well as its limits (and
flaws if it gets applied to the wrong context), and it is a better approach
than concerning ourselves with who is wrong in their version of MSism
(after all, at this point in history no one can reasonably expect
governments and intergovernmental entities to put forward a version of
MSism that wouldn't have governments playing a prominent role... but at
least WSIS was a good start; at a minimum we just need to avoid setbacks
while improving on the practice and consolidating the notion.)

I realize I've gone a little too much in detail to explain my take and
response to your views on (a particular kind of) MSism, McTim, but I hope
everyone realizes that this is not meant as a discussion to be concluded by
who's right and who's wrong. In fact, my last paragraph above sums up what
I was getting at, and in that sense I agree with those us who already
stated here that to be useful any form of MSism need to be qualified, to be
defined within specific boundaries.

Cheers,

Mawaki



>
>
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Mawaki Chango <kichango at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Correction:
> >
> >  ...qualifying the need for distinction between stakeholder groups
> *[erase
> > --> which are regularly raised] when faced with nominating
> > representatives/delegates as a flaw (...) and then *faulting the
> Geneva-WSIS
> > type of MSism for it...
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Cheers,
>
> McTim
> "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
> route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.igcaucus.org/pipermail/governance/attachments/20140731/e0137e68/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t