[discuss] NETmundial Initiative meeting

William Drake wjdrake at gmail.com
Fri Aug 29 06:23:45 UTC 2014


Hi

I sent this to the NCSG list and notice that there’s been no follow-up traffic on other relevant lists so I thought I might as well pass it along.  Unfortunately, my notes on the project descriptions are terrible and I don’t have time to watch the video in order to fill them out.  If someone else has better notes please correct, amplify, etc.  I assume WEF will post more complete information in the next few days.

Thanks

Bill

Begin forwarded message:

> From: William Drake <wjdrake at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Forum NETmundial Initiative: Food for Thought
> Date: August 29, 2014 at 8:03:41 AM GMT+2
> To: Sam Lanfranco <lanfran at YORKU.CA>
> Cc: NCSG Members <NCSG-DISCUSS at LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
> 
> Hi
> 
> On Aug 28, 2014, at 4:50 PM, Sam Lanfranco <Lanfran at yorku.ca> wrote:
> 
>> 1. There is a high probability of the establishment of a new "dedicated organizational structure" as a significant Internet governance player.
> 
> This will depend on a lot of factors and there’s a long way between now  and then, but there are 4 projects being launched that could end up needing to be institutionalized somewhere, whether extant or new.  They really need to get descriptions of these posted, inter alia because they were introduced in such a rushed fashion yesterday (after 90 minutes of general statements from high level types about the Internet being a good thing we should support) that I strongly suspect most people in the room didn’t fully get the info (I certainly didn’t), much less anyone trying to follow on line.  My quick and scattered notes:
> 
> 1.  An “issue to solution mapping mechanism,” aka a informational clearinghouse geared toward helping developing country governments and others with orphan and other issues (I’d argue for cross-institutional assessments of transparency accountability inclusion etc), about which Lea and I have written a chapter that will be in the PDF ‘book’ released Monday and have organized a workshop. http://sched.co/1mJ0A2M  The GovLab at NYU has been tasked to take the lead on this.
> 
> 2.  An assessment of multistakeholder good practices in other issue-areas, from which IG could potentially learn.  This is being done by academics involved in the Network of Centers.  http://networkofcenters.net  There was an initial workshop in Istanbul in May and there will be a follow up in Turin Oct. 1-2.  We will also do a ‘host country’ workshop at IGF which will touch on this work http://sched.co/1mZwy4X.
> 
> 3.  Something I think on national-level multistakeholderism, we talked about this in the Ilves Panel process and elsewhere as something that could potentially be folded together with the clearinghouse function, but Fadi rushed through it so fast I didn’t quite catch what was being done.  Anriette wrote a chapter touching on this for the PDF book I organized that will be released at our Day 0 event on NETmundial and its implementation http://sched.co/1r7K8s3
> 
> 4.  A open source tool kit for the organization of governance initiatives.  Again, very rushed explanation, I didn’t catch who was doing what.
> 
> In addition, Fadi spontaneously asked Klaus Schwab if we couldn’t have a fifth project in which WEF would help catalyze connecting the next billion users.  Most of us from CS/academia almost fell out of our chairs.  No idea if there will be any real effort to followup on this.
> 
> Obviously, we need to for the projects to be opened up to input etc. rather than managed solely by the groups Fadi picked.  I think the folks involved all recognize the need for an oversight and engagement mechanism.  Virgilio thankfully proposed creating multistakeholder committees to oversee and promote engagement in them.  He also suggested that 1NET could be the vehicle to populate said committees, which would be a way to have MS coordination across groups, but I recognize some folks believe 1NET should be buried and forgotten.  Jeremy Malcolm managed to get Pres. Ilves to recognize him (I spent a half hour waving to no avail, far end of the room) and said CS might prefer to do it through the coordination group that’s been established, on which Robin represents NCSG.  All TBD….
> 
> Fadi also needs to slow down and rethink his impatient “roll it out and get it off my plate” approach, as civil society participants stressed yesterday.  Somehow we seemed to have gone from a six month period with WEF serving as the boot up platform for a broader and more participatory process of working on stuff to six months and then we take decisions.  He wanted to announce decisions at the February meeting of the GSMA in Barcelona, which is a truly bad idea.  A meeting of the mobile industry that nobody else really attends is hardly the right place to do this.  Like everything else about NMI, it’s up in the air now.
> 
>> 2. The tendency will be toward a "leader-level" (top-centric) notion of multistakeholder engagement and a focus on "the transnational nature of the Internet" [Forum wording]
> 
> This is how the forum normally operates but they’ve come to understand it won’t be sufficient in this case.  Again, there will most likely be a multistakeholder committee(s) composed to oversee the projects and mechanisms for virtual engagement.  They don’t have a lot of experience doing that at the level that IG people would expect so they’re going to need a lot of input on how to proceed.
>> 
>> As an opening position for civil society dialogue around this initiative I would suggest that civil society approach the initiative at three levels:
>> 
>> 1. It insists in a full dialogue on what sort of multistakeholder engagement model is being considered if such an organization is to be established.
> 
>> 2. It stresses full transparency and accountability along with a broad definition of who constitute stakeholders and their roles in decision making.
>> 3. At the same time civil society organizations: (a) look inward to increase the transparency and accountability of their own leadership – some of whom are part of the "leader-level" group in this Forum initiative; and (b) turn more of their efforts toward deepening and broadening awareness and engagement of their own constituencies in these deliberations and the core issues at stake.
> 
> The first two have been done but will need elaboration and repeating.  The third is starting, nobody really knew what for sure was going on until the meeting yesterday.  A couple CS participants have blogged about it and there will presumably be much more to come.
> 
> As a first stop, we will be discussing the NMI in Istanbul, first at our Day 0 event http://sched.co/1r7K8s3 and later in various main sessions, especially this one http://sched.co/1n76j1g 
> 
> In the meanwhile, the documents and videos are at http://www.weforum.org/issues/global-internet-governance
> 
> The news release and related are here http://www.weforum.org/news/new-initiative-internet-governance-live-event?news=page
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Bill

***********************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
***********************************************

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