[WSIS CS-Plenary] recommendations for WGIG

[AIZU]

Milton, Vittorio, and all,

At 10:44 04/10/07 -0400, Milton Mueller wrote:

> >>> vb at bertola.eu.org 10/7/2004 9:56:35 AM >>>
> >I am sorry to shock you, but civil society doesn't do elections.
> >Governments do elections. We do advocacy. These are two very
> >different things.

I do not agree with "no election for civil society".
Depending on who "civil society" is, and depending on the context,
it is ok for civil society to do elections, elect their officers or reps or
whatever. We tried that at first round of ICANN AtLarge, then that
global election was denied. I still think it is a mistake, but I am living
with the outcome.

But I agree with you that elections and advocacy are two different
things. Better not mix them up.


To Milton,

>As long as CS "doesn't do elections" its results will have
>legitimacy problems, and as long as that is true it will
>have trouble fully participating in international governance
>decisions. You cannot ask for governmental forms of power
>without accepting similar forms of procedural formality and
>accountability. This is a deep problem. You may be in
>denial about it. I know that some of the other key members
>of IGC are.

To be a bit problematic ;-), I would say "election" per se
does not guarantee legitimacy either. Good election process
will increase legitimacy, but bad one really makes things awful.
And it is quite often that the rules of election is quite
different in different cultures and societies. There is no
standard election in the civil society, I think.

>The IGC's method of selecting candidates was not a thing
>of beauty. Let's face the facts about that. It was rushed,
>disorganized, improvised, not transparent and in the end
>based far too much on personal connections and reflective
>of personal agendas.

I quite agree and accept that, being a member of NomCom,
the process and the work we did was far from the level we wanted to be.

Yes, rushed, disorganized, improvised... but I may not agree that the
result was reflective of personal agendas, at least I tried
not to do so and I can say others tried not, too, but it is very difficult to
prove that without clear agreed upon procedures before
starting the process which is not really the case this time.

My rationale or reason why I accepted to be NomCom member, and made a
comment "I am ready to be blamed" in the governance list was
that something with rushed, hasty process would still be better
than nothing, and if we could not produce any list then the
overall outcome is much worse than it could have been. A risky approach
I took.

It is easy to criticize the process afterwards, or done by others,
but I truely hope then that these came earlier, before we start the process
in time with such wisdom so that they can be effectively utilized
and produce much better result. But somehow, I have not seen
anyone proposed convincing methodology and selection method
better than final rushed ones humbly proposed by co-coordinators
of Internet Governance caucus, and with their request I decided
to help them/us finish the job in time. Sorry if I overlooked all
the good suggestions made earlier.

>Given our institutional limitations it could not have
>been done much better. But let's not
>rationalize our failings, let's accept them as a
>basis for building better structures going forward.

I have very similar spirit. Thanks Milton for your honest,
constructive and critical views.

>The caucus's process gave everyone involved
>some voice in the outcome. Let's hold our noses and
>accept the results and think more pro-actively about
>how to do it better next time. I would urge the critics
>of the results to also reflect on what is accomplished
>by picking at individual names at this juncture. Probably
>very little - the names have been transmitted and any
>attempt to change them raises more problems than it
>solves. We had our process, now let's live with it.

I am aware there are certain frustrations remaining, but
I could not see any other way to minimize the frustration
of one or the other than the current one.

I guess Mr. Kofi Anan will face greater challenge, he deserves for.

What if his final selection is not close to our recommendations?
Should we claim that we are the sole representative of the Civil Society
at large in the world? Honestly, I do not think so. We are just ad hoc
bunch of groups who have similar interest in WSIS, and then Internet
Governance, with limited resources, expertise, and shared experience,
but we need to organize ourselves as much as we can to meet the
deadline.

Criticism is a good sign of healthy interaction I welcome, but I hope
they remain constructive, especially using non-native language
such as English for me.

izumi