[governance] Internet Social Forum

[Norbert Bollow]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015 01:05:13 -0500
Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote:

> PS.  I feel pretty much the same about NMI & ISF.  I'm curious to see
> what they end up becoming.  I worry about their effect on the IGF, but
> otherwise, the more people working on the hard problems of IG
> constructively, the better.

Thank you. In regard to the ISF, I can certainly assure you that there
is no intention of having a negative effect on the IGF, and in my
opinion there is no significant risk of that happening either. IGF has
been established as a broad everyone-is-welcome multistakeholder forum.
ISF is proposed as a forum for the part of civil society that takes an
interest in Internet matters (or can be convinced to take an interest
in Internet matters) and that agrees with the WSF's principles. So ISF
does not in any way intend to be in competition or in conflict with the
IGF.

It is certainly my goal and intention in relation to the ISF that it
must become a forum and movement that inspires a lot of people to work
constructively on at least some of what you appropriately call "the hard
problems of IG". In the ISF context, people will be free to engage in
discussions aimed towards finding solutions for these problems in an
environment where statements that involve some degree of
anti-neoliberal or anti-imperialistic rhetorics do not cause disruptive
conflict that effectively prevents any constructive progress in regard
to the substantive matters under discussion.

I am well aware that a lot of the people here on the list find any
anti-neoliberal or anti-imperialistic rhetorics so offensive that they
certainly have no desire to be part of the kind of ISF that we are
proposing. I certainly don't have any objections whatsoever when those
who are not comfortable with what we propose for the ISF continue to
discuss the same problems in any other fora of their choosing. Some of
those discussions might involve rhetorics which I find as objectionable
as how they view anti-neoliberal or anti-imperialistic rhetorics as
objectionable. For example, while I am all in favor of multistakeholder
processes as long as they are conducted within what I would accept as a
clear and reasonable democratic framework, I find any rhetorics highly
objectionable which I understand as elevating multistakeholderism to a
role of a fundamental principle and thereby lowering the relative status
of the principle of democratic governance.

If for a given Internet governance challenge, both flavors of
discussions happen and they both lead to a constructive result in the
form of a concrete proposal, it will IMO be very interesting to compare
the resulting proposals. I expect that in regard to some of the hard
problems of IG, the outcomes of such separate discourses will differ
very significantly depending on the interests and resulting
perspectives of the participants, while I won't be surprised if in
regard to some other problems the resulting proposals turn out to be
very similar.

Greetings,
Norbert

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