[governance] Should the IGF be reformed?

[Daniel Pimienta]

>The IGF's biggest problem with remote participation is not the flaky 
>streaming software (which I can attest to), or the lack of 
>consideration given to timezones (which I can also attest to; this 
>week's MAG meetings were from 2am - 10am my local time), but the 
>fact that asynchronous participation (ie. participation that doesn't 
>require you to be online at the same time as everyone else) is given 
>such a low priority.
I agree again with that statement (as I have argued few times here in 
the past in favor of asynchronous participation and offering the same 
following reference without catching much interest).

The MISTICA virtual community (a community of less than 500 people on 
the theme of Social Impact of ICT in Latin  America) had experimented 
with success between 1999 and 2004 with asynchronous distance 
participation during 4 meetings (of less than 70 people).  The 
context was obviously much more simple for the lower numbers and also 
as the meetings had no parallel session (although we did add 
translation beetween 4 languages as a more complex factor in those exchanges).

The website is still in operation http://funredes.org/mistica (but 
maybe for no much longer) although the obsolescence of software has 
started provoking loss of data (specially data bases) and 
unfortunaltely this may have affected this component.

Basically the principle was to establish synthesis at the end of each 
session which were sent to the discussion list with a header PAD-OUT 
and there were a time left (2 hours if I remember well) for the 
distance participants to react by email PAD-IN. The reaction where 
put in synthesis and a time slot was inserted in the agenda for 
reading the PAD-IN of the previous session and comment/react.

There is a human cost (writing synthesis), no technological cost at 
all, and a wonderful by-product as a bottom-line: the face to face 
participants were put in acute consciousness that they were just a 
lucky subset of a larger group (which had not the chance to be 
invited in the face to face) and that the center of gravity of the 
community was not in the face to face meeting but in the virtual 
world. Many people complained though on the rigidity of the method 
(the time left and the time slot) which was probably unavoidable.

A funny fractal effect of the method was the use of the distance 
participation method by some face to face participants provoking some 
interesting  situations/considerations.

It have to be extremely clear that such approach only make sense for 
a virtual community which production is principally made on a day to 
day basis at distance, through the discussion list and other 
mechanisms and where the meetings are just side elements of the 
central architecture, not the aim of the project.

The existence of the method (although the distance participation was 
not dense) allowed that the outcomes of the face to face meetings 
where receiving ownership and appropiation by the whole community 
which was quite a challenge solved.

To be noted that I used again that method with success during the 
Members General Asembly of the MAAYA  (World Network of 
Linguistic  Diversity - http://maaya.org ) three years ago, again in 
a quite simplest context (we were only 5 persons in the face to face 
meeting and the members were 100 and I played both the role of face 
to face meeting coordination and writer of the synthesis, relaying 
the PADIN and PADOUT - in that case the PADIN received no synthesis 
and were treated one by one).

This is not the first time I report on this method.

But again, maybe behind the question of distance participation the 
real issue for the IGF could be to decide if the project should be 
"meeting once a year oriented" (as the majority of traditional 
communities)  or rather "day to day production oriented " which could 
be an interesting challenge which does not seem to have been 
consciously taken as an objective.

The perception of the IGF from the many people who has no the budget 
to attend the yearly meetings would certainly be different in a 
scenario where the real production would be made on a day to day 
basis in the discussion list...

In my personal opinion distance collaboration should have been the 
innovative focus of the IGF (and not the traditional yearly meeting) 
and this is why I am deeply deceived to see fundamental issues not 
discussed in the "discussion list".

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