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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 08:37:49 +0100

Interesting exchange. As someone who has spent over 20 years in the UN
system, I find the notion that putting Internet governance into the hands of
the UN system will somehow remove it from the reach of the US government
droll (also the idea that the ITU can manage a mailing list better than
ISOC). Rather than throw the new frontier into the hands of those who were
sound asleep when it opened, and who have belatedly lumbered to their feet
to claim it as their territory, more as an organizational reflex than as a
creative act, my vote would be to genuinely internationalise ICANN or
reinforce ISOC for the purpose. 

Chris

PS: I would add the accelerated introduction of IPv6 to Simon's list.

PPS: ISDF is toothless: let's have the ISTF back, with a clear mission and
set of tasks.

Chris Zielinski 
IAIA, Geneva, Switzerland 
Tel: 004122-7914435 or mobile 0044797-1045354 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of S
Woodside
Sent: Thursday, 11 December 2003 07:53
To: Franck Martin
Cc: [email-masked]; Alejandro Pisanty; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [isdf] 1. New Report: "Understanding WSIS" (Hans Klein)

On Wednesday, December 10, 2003, at 10:32 PM, Franck Martin wrote:

But let's face it:
They cannot operate a mailing list

<etc/>

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

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