[discuss] What is MSism?

Wed Apr 16 12:56:17 UTC 2014

On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 3:20 AM, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org> wrote:
> Dear Alejandro,
> Thank you for your detailed comment.  My responses are inline.
>
> Alejandro Pisanty <apisanty at gmail.com> [2014-04-15 18:34:14 -0500]:
>
>> the IETF makes no distinction for participation or leadership based on
>> whether participants work in businesses, government-run research
>> laboratories, academic institutions (in turn, private or public.) This has
>> been explained in detail.
>
>
> I just want to note that have known this for years, and understand this
> quite well.  It is not for a want of knowledge that I am harping on this.
>
> I seem not to be making my point well (so let me repeat my previous mails in
> different language): that the IETF, until recently, has never called itself
> "multistakeholder" (while it has referred to ICANN as "multi-stakeholder").
> In the absence of stakeholder groups, the usage of the word
> "multistakeholder" is a bit strange.

How so?  To me it just means that everyone comes together, (no matter
what labels they carry) to discuss and hopefully find consensus on
issues of shared concern.

WSIS gave us these accursed Stakeholder Groupings, they are completely
artificial and arbitrary.

>
> If one traces the history of the word "multi-stakeholder", as I have been in
> the course of my research, it's been used in setting where governmental or
> intergovernmental processes are going beyond the public sector and involving
> the private sector as well.  If you have any citations for the usage of that
> word to refer to open processes like IETF's, that would be much appreciated.
> (I'll provide a special mention in the paper I'm working on, if that's an
> incentive :)
>
>
> Are there many in the Internet "technical community" whose participation is
> funded by the public sector / non-profit sector?  There are from my
> reckoning, but mostly from academia (both publicly-funded and
> privately-funded, as you note).

I would say there are "many" (for some value of that word) who
participate on their own initiative, and not because they are directed
to do so by their employer, corporate or CS.

(ISOC's a non-profit, as is PIR -- ISOC,
> according to Brian Carpenter is a civil society org, not 'technical
> community'.)  Sure there are many who participate in the "technical
> community" only in the spare time, but I'd love to find some actual numbers.
> Has there ever been a survey in this regard?

ISOC has done many surveys...maybe they have asked this type of question?

  In many of the free / open
> source software communities of which I'm part, the participation tends to be
> very mixed, especially in the larger ones.  As is well documented, the Linux
> kernel's development is mostly corporate-funded.
>
>
>> The rest of the
>> sector members are almost exclusively trade associations of the same
>> companies, i.e. they get double dips.
>
>
> How is this not true of the business community and the technical community
> in IG in general, especially if the "technical community" is limited, as S.
> Moonesamy highlights in one of his recent mails, to the community that does
> protocol-and-parameters work, and presumably DNS registries and registrars
> and those who provide tech support for those.

I think this is an very limited view of who is in the Technical community.

  (He seems to exclude OpenSSL
> devs from the technical community, even though some OpenSSL devs take part
> in the IETF process.)
>
>> Individuals are not welcome.
>
>
> Would you say that being open to individuals is a requirement in being
> "multi-stakeholder"?

I would say that any process that excludes individuals isn't truly MS.

Lots of folk (ITU) call themselves MS, but are not.

  (As an aside, the submissions process for IGF does not
> list "individual" as one of the categories in its drop-down box, nor does,
> IIRC, the MAG for the IGF.  Incidentally, it doesn't list
> "multi-stakeholder" either, so folks from ICANN, like Nigel Hickson are
> required to fit themselves into a stakeholder category.)

Again, I blame WSIS.

>
>
>> Many sessions are closed.
>> Documents are not freely available (locked behind "TIES" accounts) so no
>> external accountability is possible. There are a few more details but they
>> don't substantially change this picture.
>
>
> These are excellent points.  So would you argue that the 360 degree reviews
> that are done in ICANN also ought to be public documents?

If they are policy docs, yes.  If they are reviews of staff work, then
no, it's a personnel issue.

 Also, see my
> comment below about RFC 6852.
>
>
>> That is why most people who have followed broad participatory processes
>> consider the claim that the ITU is "multistakeholder" hollow.
>>
>> As far as I understand Reddit and Wikipedia don't make decisions that
>> determine others' conduct or resources in an equivalent way so that part
>> of
>> the argument may be less relevant.
>
>
> I don't understand this point.  Are only processes that have strong
> externalities on other entities' conduct qualified to be seen as
> multistakeholder?  I've never seen this in any definition I've come across,
> so would you have any citations?
>
> Imagine if no one followed IETF's recommendations, it would cease to be a
> multistakeholder body?

I don't believe that A follows from B in this case.

>
>
>> They provide valuable services but are
>> not technical coordination bodies.
>
>
> Similarly, are only technical coordination bodies fit to use the label
> 'multistakeholder'?  Conversely, why don't IETF, IAB, IEEE-SA, W3C, and ISOC
> think 'multistakeholder processes' is an important component of the modern
> paradigm for standards as encapsulated in RFC 6852?  They instead use the
> word "openness".  Are "openness" and "multistakeholder processes"
> equivalent?

I wouldn't say equivalent, but you can't have one without the other, certainly.

>
>
>> Plus, to the best of my knowledge, they
>> also don't make strong distinctions based on this kind of stakeholder
>> classification.
>
>
> Wikipedia's governance seems to embody all aspects of the Open-Stand
> principles, as does the IETF, and both are bottom-up processes.

Do they? I'm not aware.

 Yet we're
> insisting on calling one multi-stakeholder but not the other.

You are the only one doing this.  i don't have enough information to
make a judgement.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel