Re: [iucg] [governance] On "ad hominem" and "twisting words"

JFC Morfin <jefsey@jefsey.com> Thu, 15 August 2013 23:07 UTC

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To: governance@lists.igcaucus.org, Bertrand de La Chapelle <bdelachapelle@gmail.com>, "governance@lists.igcaucus.org" <governance@lists.igcaucus.org>, Daniel Pimienta <pimienta@funredes.org>, Norbert Bollow <nb@bollow.ch>, Anriette Esterhuysen <anriette@apc.org>, Garth Graham <garth.graham@telus.net>
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Subject: Re: [iucg] [governance] On "ad hominem" and "twisting words"
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Dear Anriette, Bertrand, Daniel, Norbert, and Garth,

This thread has become very interesting and "pre-fundamental". This mail tries to synthetize our various inputs into a coherent evaluation/proposition. Sorry for it to make a long mail, but this is due to your different valuable contributions and their articulation.


At 12:31 14/08/2013, Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:
Boy, do I like a good controversy: it is the only way to have all sides of an issue, to think deeply, to be forced to reevaluate your own assumptions and prejudices, to potentially reframe a debate (as we are doing here) and move towards a solution. This is what Parliaments were established for: light through debate.

Also for voted upon decisions. And before that, to votes on the way to vote decisions.


The IGC Charter says:
The mission of the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) is to provide a forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of civil society contributions in Internet governance processes. The caucus intends to provide an open and effective forum for civil society to share opinion, policy options and expertise on Internet governance issues, and to provide a mechanism for coordination of advocacy to enhance the utilization and influence of Civil Society (CS) and the IGC in relevant policy processes.
It also says:
The mission of the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) is to provide a forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of civil society contributions in Internet governance processes. The caucus intends to provide an open and effective forum for civil society to share opinion, policy options and expertise on Internet governance issues, and to provide a mechanism for coordination of advocacy to enhance the utilization and influence of Civil Society (CS) and the IGC in relevant policy processes.
From this I understand that people want to talk in a forum about the way to proceed with Enhanced Cooperations, and that the role of the IGC is to provide such a forum, i.e. a mutual help point of entry into the IGF for civil society members in order to enhance the cooperation as regards what it may bring to the Internet utilization process.


ICANN is complex machinery and still a laboratory of multi-stakeholder governance. Issues like the risk of capture(s) by one constituency or another, the tension between a corporate vs. a regulatory role, or how to ensure the defense of the global public interest, just to name a few, are necessary, substantial debates. We need to have them.

ICANN is also a complicated enhanced cooperation machinery prototype, experimenting a practical way to balance the four reference poles of a global governance under the leading influence of a national unballancing tutor. We needed the tutor; we have to get rid of the unballance, but when/how?


Actually, the launch of the new gTLD program will require a deep examination of its impact on the structures and processes of ICANN. Whether we call it ICANN 3.0 or not does not matter. What will be needed is engagement in the discussion that will necessarily take place in the coming years.
 
The vTLD (vanity TLD) program is not coherent with the openness of the naming space that we established in 1978 and globally consensually agreed on in 1984 (RFC 920) by Jon Postel, the IETF documented in RFCs, Vint Cerf confirmed in 2000, and IDNA2008 RFCs, and what ICANN pleads for in its ICP3 policy. We all need the multinational, multilingual, multiledger, multilayer digital name space (ML-DNS) to be stable and well behaved.

This is why we welcome the current technical respite that we currently have, thanks to China/i-DNs' sense of responsibilities and precaution (I am still looking for an appropriate modern word for the greek "philia"). However, I am afraid ICANN is not suitably taking advantage of this period, which could come to a close in the year to come (due to software and architectonic progress and evolutions). This is why I fear that the "discussion that will necessarily take place in the coming years" will turn out to be more of a cyberwar leading to an uncertain eventual negentropy and in the meanwhile to real and possibly economically devastating entropy.


At 14:43 14/08/2013, Daniel Pimienta wrote:
May be we should consider either create a new forum inviting many players who are active in our field (and doing advocacy on their own) or simply revive the existing Virtual WSIS CS Plenary Group Space <plenary@wsis-cs.org> which should have been the appropriate place for that purpose.

In the multi-stakeholder game (nothing pejorative in that word, I use it in the mathematical sense of game theory) the other groups (governments and private sector) have their own mechanism of coordination outside where we are not present and this is perfectly fair. Civil society also needs to be better coordinated in the inner circle and at this time we lack such mechanism. In game theory the winner is the one which strategy is unknown to the other players: we have implicitly accepted to discuss publically our strategy here and this is not good for our chance of pushing our consensuated visions.

My proposition and action is based on the same analysis and on the observation of the three other groups.

1. International organizations are proceeding on the language plane. Norbert reported it for the "Cloud", but this is true in other domains. Their role is a global concordance for compatibility, interoperations, and interintelligibility. The problem raised by the lack of civil society cooperation in their normative effort is that their vocabulary and its underlying concepts will result in a biased by solutions pact to the detriment of use.

2. Governments are proceeding through the ITU normative forum and the global treaty on telecommunications. With a well-organized debate, meeting, and concluding pact.

3. The private sector also reached a paradigmatically normative pact and an organization (named "OpenStand" - http://open-stand.org) embodied through RFC 6852 that associates the private stakeholders around ISOC (network engineering), W3C (business proposition) and IEEE (computer engineering).

4. For the time being, ICANN stays in between Governments due to its de facto affiliation with the US Government and intergovernmental philia, and its self-sustenance protection policy. This teaches us a lot, but we cannot copy this model at this stage by lack of budgetary sources or in the fear to unsettle the cyberspace.

Civil society must organize itself in taking advantage from these experiments. This means that we must take control of a key something that we can master with a heterarchic and fuzzy management through truly enhanced cooperation where we will propose Govs, Intl.orgs, and Corps to join us.

- Governments have sovereignty and power - they use treaties.
- Private sector has standards and money - they have named their pact  “OpenStand”.
- Intl.orgs have documentation and ties - they call these “norms”.
- We have information and use - I call our capability in that are “OpenUse” when dealing with OpenStand chairs. This is for this OpenUse approach (http://openuse.org/" rel="nofollow"> http://openuse.org) that  I call for help after having established an OpenUse technical liaison with the IETF through IUCG@IETF.


At 15:22 14/08/2013, Norbert Bollow wrote:
this would be a joint NomCom of civil society as a whole: Members of all the various civil society organizations and networks would be invited to volunteer for the NomCom, and a reasonably sized group from among these volunteers would be randomly selected to form the NomCom. The NomCom would constitute itself (it particular the NomCom chair would be elected by the randomly selected members of the NomCom). For each selection task within the remit of the NomCom, the NomCom would publish a call for expressions of interest and then selecting a good civil society representative or group of representatives (the NomCom members themselves being not eligible).

+1. A CSnomcom is just a common service that is provided to the organization of a group. If several organizations wish - for efficiency sake - to be represented by a unique person, this is their choice. If this choice turns out to be beneficial, next time others will join.


Obviously all of the steering groups etc. of these networks must be invited to participate in the discussions around creating a Joint Civil Society NomCom mechanism, or other credible mechanism that could serve the same purpose.

I however don't think that it is appropriate to restrict these discussions only to people who are on some steering group. Therefore I'd like to broadly circulate a call for expressions of interest for participation in these discussions, in which everyone who is
(1) experienced as a civil society participant in Internet governance debates, and is
(2) clearly primarily participating as a civil society person, with reasonable independence from industry and government interests is invited to also participate in these discussions on the basis of a simple expression of interest.

+1. Just a remark: the term "dynamic coalition" has been coined not to be specific to any form of coalition and organization by individuals or groups. This should be respected as there are also other forms of articulated relational spaces than the common steered networks formula.


Acknowledgement: This initiative is significantly inspired by Thomas Lowenhaupt's suggestion of a while back to create a Joint Board for selection tasks.

The process might be as touchy as the MAG selection process... But it could start small and grow by positive reputation.


At 16:47 14/08/2013, Anriette Esterhuysen wrote:
Response from the Indonesian representative to my question made during the MAG meeting about this high-level ministerial event is as follows:

I note that the proposition was a "high level leaders meeting" and it then becomes a “high level ministerial event”. Therefore, it means it is hosted by governments. However, the terminology has not been adapted to a partly claimed equal footing with business sector and civil society.


- Will start off with statements from each of the ministers present
- This is followed by statements from leaders from business and CS

I think it is time that we introduce a question about what a leader is in the Internet Governance and for us to introduce the concept of "NIL" Meetings. The NILs being the “Network influent level”. Those who are denied to talk, and who can only do and pay.


if we want the IGF to become more outcome oriented.. don't we want ALL outcomes from IGF-linked processes to be reflected.. or should that apply only to events that are formally part of the main IGF? But high-level protocol is a powerful force, and not one that combines easily with interactive dialogue.

If we want interactive dialog among people who are not used to it, it is up to us to organize it and make them participate in becoming the common information media both in documenting their conclusions and in publicly questioning them about the points they purposely or unwittingly ignore, challenging these conclusions with those of other stakeholders, including ours. They talk, we broadcast, archive, document. What realy counts is not their rules, technology, agreements and norms but our intelligent use of them and our best purchases and practices.

This is the OpenUse attitude that I propose we all support .

Now, let me finish with mentioning what you should all keep in mind. As a typical representative of the non-funded civil society members, I see the IGF as split into two: the TLLMand the others. The TLLM are the T&L level members who can be invited (or participate in IETF or ISO meetings). I must acknowledge that I am not very interested in TLLM participation in HLLMs (T&L level members in High-Leader Level Meetings). The cost of the T&L to Bali in order to attend the ethics alibi meeting would permit Free Research and Development High Competence Level Members of civil society to significantly upgrade the cyberspace (may I just remind everyone that today’s Internet cyberspace has some analogy with the deck of the SST(itanic)).


At 00:20 15/08/2013, Garth Graham wrote:
On the one hand, the stewards of the uses of ICTs for community development recognized that WSIS would (as it did) fail to grasp the nature of how societies and their technologies co-evolve.  They stayed away from WSIS. 

On the other hand, the agencies that saw community networking as a means to the end of human rights, rather than an end in itself, trampled the stewards of community use into the dust as they stampeded towards the WSIS trough of resources.  In large part, WSIS killed GCNP.
 
I believe the nature of digital economy and society is revealed most strongly through the emergent patterns of community online and daily life online.  That means the best way to evolve the Internet Governance Ecosystem remains local, not global.  It means the conscious neglect of the experience of the stewards of the uses of ICTs for community development inherent in those two examples was a mistake.
 
Those stewards have not gone away.  Every increase in bandwidth, every decrease in bandwidth cost, every effort to locate control of Internet access in the hands of community, increases their interstitial strength and numbers.  They are the early adopters of the phase change in governance we are now experiencing, away from closed systems of control and towards open complex adaptive systems that learn.  Some nation states, particularly those that recognize the importance of digital inclusion, acknowledge their existence better than others.  But they are clearly not players who are active in our field, if that field or space is defined as civil society.

This analysis sounds perfect to me, except on my one key point: what the French word “concertation” or the old Greek word “philia” imply: may be the portmanteau “coopetition” in English. This is the key of our complex world: we are bound together, so if something is truly good/bad for one it is holistically good/bad for all, all the way to the whole universe (this is what a fractal universe means).

Nothing new under the sun: we know what it implies. “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ” (Aristotle). The 19th century mistake led to our paying for creating the sole financial profit dedicated “Homo economicus”.

This societality also means that our human decision margin in order to influence complexity is slimTherefore, our current time’s job is neither to choose between the tide of the technological innovation and the wind of the societal evolution nor to decide on a route for others, but to provide shipping (States, Corporations, Organizations, and people in a people centered society) with navigational help permitting one to go where one wants – otherwise, we will all sinkin the cybertempest. Among these tools there are the WSIS, IGF, RFCs, best practices, dynamic coalitions, enhanced cooperations, multistakeholderism, e-sovereignty, e-empowerments, Internet architecture, etc.etc.  All of these comprise the digital architectonic area. 


I believe that there has been a total breakdown of public trust in the structural capacity of a triumvirate of government, business and civil society to sustain a social contract.

Correct, in the cyberspace, at the speed we are going, we need a cyber code, radars, adequate charts and referent frames, navigational aids, etc. and mutual respect and civil friendship from others. This is like in a car or on an airplane.


Changing the concept of organization to self-organization will scale fractally towards planetary responses that are sensible to anyone at any level, without the need for the creation of monolithic and therefore very dangerous global institutions

Garth, this is exactly what the WSIS did and what we should do. But we read it first with our old glasses. Like the IETF did, and still partly does with some RFCs. The RFC does not change, nor does the source code, but the architectural or even architectonical perspective adapts.  We want to conduct fractality instead of influencing it. This is the error. We want to rule the internet, instead of reaping the best advantage from it. This cannot work: this is a layer violation. Too many unordered parameters and interlinks. We have to learn.

The problem with self-organization is that if you cannot moderate it through adequate auto-catalysis, it then becomes critical. Self-organization criticality (SOC) means that we humans do not scale to the new level of complexity that we have reached. Then, the world takes over (its automatic pilot is sometimes rude, as we experimented with WWII or how we are currently doing with the global financial crisis). In some cases, however, we can keep control, as seen during the Cold War.

How did we make it? Probably because we learned and were precautious, i.e. we prevented the major conflict ahead of time before having to fight it. This is what is called counterwar.(i.e. to engage preemptive low cost actions now, against further higher cost war – along the principle of precaution). This is (IMHO) the plural attempts to excellence advocated by Daniel. Defusing criticality in advance through intelligent self-organization autocatalytic solutions (trying to adapt Ulanowicz to the digital ecosystem, or an interesting paper of Barry McMullin http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~alife/bmcm9901/html-multi/" rel="nofollow"> http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~alife/bmcm9901/html-multi/)


At 04:00 15/08/2013, Daniel Pimienta wrote:
You ask me which is better. I always have been reluctant to see the development work area in terms of disjunctive alternatives; either you do telecenter or not, either you do community work or not, either you are in open source or not, either you are in the local or not, etc...  I think the plurality and diversity of approaches is valid and the point is to reach excellence in each one. The challenge is how to articulate somehow those different approaches and here the results are often frustrating (one of the reason is the human tendency to consider own approach as the only valid). In spite the WSIS civil society process was not capable to integrate all the required diversity (and you are correct to remind us that), on my experience, it has been quite a successful effort in terms of articulation and my frustration is that we have lost this momentum and I wish we could regain it during times where civil society influence has been decreasing while governments and some big players from private sector decide our cyberfuture in a way I personally do not feel comfortable.

Yes. I suggest we have to consider two things here:

1. the WSIS was correct in identifying 4 poles (Govs, CS, Business, and Intl.orgs). What is wrong is our frequent replacement of Intl.orgs by the Technical and Academic Community in our schemas. For two reasons: (1) there are lead users, searchers, and engineers in each stakeholder category (ARPA to start with is a governmental R&D, and OpenResearch is Civil Society oriented) and (2) this artificially increases the power of Govs instead of reducing it. International organizations are temper sovereignties, sometimes for good and sometimes for the worse.

2. We are discussing the data level at the data level. In other words, we are considering what transports and stores data (Internet, cloud), how it is organized and how it impacts our lives. However, we do not consider the fundamental power which is in metadata (the data on data) and in the metaorganization of these metadata. Where the reality, i.e. the true power, i.e. the syllodata (the data between the data), and the way to support them is through communication. What counts first is the way the real world actually IS, and then we can consider how we want to complement it (architectonic) along prefundemantal considerations, then how we will structure this complement (architecture), then the way we can implement it (engineering), the way we can intelligently organize our use of this complement, and then - and only then - the open and neutral best ways that users can utilize and enjoy the result for their development.

jfc
http://openuse.org/" rel="nofollow"> http://openuse.org