Subject: Re: [isdf] 1. New Report: "Understanding WSIS" (Hans Klein)

From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: 11 Dec 2003 15:32:37 +1200

We have been talking about all that on [email-masked]

ISOC should play a fundamental role here.

But let's face it:
They cannot operate a mailing list
They cannot operate a membership management system
They cannot fix Internet technical issues to their local sites
INET is a very low key conference that does not bring any world media
coverage
same for IETF meetings
It has very low membership 10000 people out for 200 millions Internet
users (?)

On their favor, they are lacking money to have proper staffing and they
are doing a good job with their resources.

So how do we move from that to ISOC driving the Internet Governance
part?
ISDF is somehow a loose collection of people that never stop to argue
and do not produce much as a collective. IETF is nearly the same, except
individuals came make contribution that will get peer reviewed... and
they are motivated to do that...

So does ISOC needs to add a staff on its payroll who will be dedicated
in reviewing governance documents and issues and publish RFCg (RFC on
governance)? Like ISOC is paying for the IETF RFC writing Secretariat...

My quick answer is YES, and they must do it fast, real fast...

Hint: They can use some of the .org money for that...

Cheers

On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 14:37, Alejandro Pisanty wrote:

> Ian,
> 
> many of us are wondering about the lack of debate in ISOC fora about WSIS 
> and in particular about the "governance" issues.
> 
> Surely ISOC has let go a good opportunity to make itself more visible and 
> relevant, which is quite surprising especially as the organization does 
> have headquarters offices in Geneva.
> 
> A consequence of this may be measured by the fact that, if my information 
> is right, there were only about ten people in attendance at the 
> meeting/presentations ISOC convened in Geneva.
> 
> Coming to the substance of your comments, many of us in ICANN have been 
> striving for a transfer of responsibilities to ICANN. This could be well 
> under way under the present contract (MoU) with the US Government, which 
> will last for three years. It is unfortunate that the impact of local US 
> politics has been detrimental to faster evolution on this front. Comments 
> like the one on this list, that the USG is a better counterpart, may or 
> may not be shared in other countries.
> 
> I am afraid that many, as it seems even in this list, do not perceive the 
> challenge to the whole Internet community that is being faced in WSIS.
> 
> Alejandro Pisanty
> 
> 
> .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
>      Dr. Alejandro Pisanty 
> Director General de Servicios de Computo Academico
> UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
> Av. Universidad 3000, 04510 Mexico DF Mexico
> Tel. (+52-55) 5622-8541, 5622-8542 Fax 5622-8540
> http://www.dgsca.unam.mx
> *
> ---->> Unete a ISOC Mexico, www.isoc.org
>  Participa en ICANN, www.icann.org
> .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2003, [email-masked] wrote:
> 
> > Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 08:15:26 +1100
> > From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
> > To: [email-masked]
> > Subject: [isdf] 1. New Report: "Understanding WSIS" (Hans Klein)
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks for posting that Hans - I was wondering when WSIS might be discussed within an open ISOC forum.
> > 
> > In particular I am surprised there is no discussion on governance. I saw your comments in media somewhere today as regards the governance debate, particularly the concerns of many countries that US government can impose its interests on things. 
> > 
> > Whether it has chosen to or not in the past is irrelevant to this widely held perception, but those who want to promote the current ICANN model with multiple stakeholders might need to consider whether the anachronistic US government contract with ICANN should be substituted for some more contemporary measure. Certainly an ICANN without the US Government link is likely to receive far wider support.
> > 
> > In any case I think it should be clear that there are probably a significant number of ISOC members who want the ICANN model without the single governmental tick. If a neutrally worded policy survey was conducted on this among members I am fairly sure what the membership would think.
> > 
> > Ian Peter
> > 
> >                                                                       
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Isdf mailing list
> > [email-masked]
> > http://www.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/isdf
> > 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Isdf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://www.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/isdf

----
Franck Martin
[email-masked]
SOPAC, Fiji
GPG Key fingerprint = 44A4 8AE4 392A 3B92 FDF9  D9C6 BE79 9E60 81D9 1320
"Toute connaissance est une reponse a une question" G.Bachelard

---

From: S Woodside <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 01:52:54 -0500

> They cannot operate a mailing list
<etc/>
> and do not produce much as a collective. IETF is nearly the same, 
> except individuals came make contribution that will get peer 
> reviewed... and they are motivated to do that...
>

Franck, why don't we make like an open source project and do it 
ourselves? We talked before about a process to generate documents. I 
think coming out of that discussion, I think there is clearly a 
situation where a substantial body of work could be built up by people 
on this list under the title of ISDF documents.

And I think that's a good thing. Don't we all write about internet 
societal / policy issues anyway? This would be a good way to build up a 
body of work that has more overall weight to it. Since ISOC obviously 
isn't going to do it for us (they can't even run a mailing list ...) 
why don't we just do it ourselves? Any kind of basic website 
infrastructure we can just set up somewhere for temporary purposes 
until we convince ISOC to adopt it officially.

I propose the following straw man for how to set this up, feel free to 
kick it.

1) Anyone can submit a draft to the Drafts archive
2) The draft author needs to get two Reviews and one SuperReview to 
move the document to the Documents archive

We then establish two panels, a panel of Reviewers and a panel of 
SuperReviewers. Reviewers can have a very wide membership. I would 
suggest that anyone can have Reviewer status with the simple support of 
any other Reviewer or SuperReviewer. SuperReviewers will have a limited 
membership. It might not be a fixed number but I'm thinking about a 
dozen people at most. Potentially SuperReviewers would have an area of 
expertise that they usually handle.

Reviewers are expected to do a basic vet on the document. It's 
well-written, communicates the point clearly, and meets some reasonable 
standard for accuracy.

SuperReviewers delegate most of their work to the Reviewers. They do a 
sanity check and make whatever kind of interventions seem appropriate. 
Any SuperReviewer willing to grant a super-review can allow the draft 
into the document archive.

We would seed the SuperReviewers list with people who have been active 
on ISDF and *want* the job. I nominate myself :-) Reviewers we can be 
permissive and allow anyone for some getting-started period :-)

The overall structure would be permissive. I can see that conflicting 
documents might be in the same archive :-) But that's OK ... the point 
is more to build up an archive of reviewed works than to try to achieve 
some kind of unachievable consensus.

If we get this working, we could add another layer where we actually 
try to achieve consensus and nominate specific documents into RFCg 
status :)

Do people like this idea?

simon

--
99% Devil, 1% Angel
homepage http://www.simonwoodside.com
for the developing world http://www.openict.net
member of http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino

---

From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: 12 Dec 2003 18:29:34 +1200

Sounds all good...

So let's start:

Can someone open up a website with www.tikiwiki.org on it?

I would do it but I'm in the wrong part of this world for bandwidth....

Cheers

On Thu, 2003-12-11 at 18:52, S Woodside wrote:

> societal / policy issues anyway? This would be a good way to build up
> a body of work that has more overall weight to it. Since ISOC
> obviously isn't going to do it for us (they can't even run a mailing
> list ...) why don't we just do it ourselves? Any kind of basic website
> suggest that anyone can have Reviewer status with the simple support
> of any other Reviewer or SuperReviewer. SuperReviewers will have a
> limited membership. It might not be a fixed number but I'm thinking
> about a dozen people at most. Potentially SuperReviewers would have an
> area of expertise that they usually handle. 
> 
> 
> well-written, communicates the point clearly, and meets some
> reasonable standard for accuracy. 
> 
> 
> is more to build up an archive of reviewed works than to try to
> achieve some kind of unachievable consensus. 
> 
> 

----
Franck Martin
[email-masked]
SOPAC, Fiji