However, you should be careful about not falling into the trap (and vicious cycle) that is diversity and multistakeholderism merely for the sake of diversity and multistakeholderism.

Building capacity there is more like it. Something like the difference between teaching people to fish, compared to giving them a fishing rod, a plane trip to a river where everybody else is fishing, etc etc on the principle that everybody to do with fishing is going there.

- introduce and follow rotation for all positions of the civil society structures;
- require Statements of Interests (and if financial issues are included – Statement of Conflicts) by the CS participants in the processes;
- cut the bullsh.t, say the things as they are;
- stop challenging people who disagree with you by asking them “in what capacity are you talking”, the important issues is WHAT people say, not WHO says it;
- introduce language diversity – CS people who don’t speak English should not feel excluded from the discussions (that doesn’t mean there will be more than one working language, but surely there should be more translation when possible);
- make a solid differentiation between pure academic activities – such as teaching and research, and academics who have vested interests and who might have (undeclared conflicts of) interests in the discussions
- promote cultural and geographical diversity – there should be representatives from all regions in the discussions, and not primarily by one region.

Anything else?

I am speaking of the knee-jerk reactions posted on the governance list, which you so wisely unsubbed from.

Rgds,

McTim

Anyway, a lot of these IGCS pros would be about as useful as udders on a bull without actual technical knowledge (and several of them have a hazy, at best, knowledge of how the things they demand oversight and governance and control of actually work).

(Disclosure: I am an adviser to the Chair of the IGF)

These civil society actors tend to be one or few issue people, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something wrong with it when then attempt to push their own issues and solutions into a multicultural context, often arguing that their issues are more important than other issues raised by people in other sectors. It represents an attempt to have narrow idealism triumph over pragmatism, and in particular, to the detriment of the growth and ubiquity of the Internet. One commentator above has called this cultural imperialism, which captures well their position. i call some of them free speech fascists. The phrase should be a contradiction in terms, but unfortunately it characterizes well the behavior of some of them.

The issue of conflicts of interest, nicely summarized by McTim above, illustrates a practical naïvété that runs through the culture of this group. Just about everyone in this group has potential conflicts of interest and varying points of view in discussing Internet Governance. If they didn’t have conflicts of interest, from where would they have the experience to participate in the conversation? We all have such conflicts. the important thing is not be pure and devoid of such conflicts but to declare them openly, fin total, and again at appropriate times, and recuse oneself if necessary to avoid an actual conflict. The notion of not permitting people with potential conflicts of interest to participate because of those conflicts is naive.

The discussion McTim refers to is one of many that have raged on the IGF list for years. Probably 10,000-20,000 messages have been exchanged among a limited number of people, and read by them and by a group of lurkers. One might ask whether anything of significant value has come from the entire process.

Civil society representatives, or should i say “self-appointed” civil society representatives, seem to want to position themselves as representing ‘the rest of us,” after the private sector and government are removed from the complexity that is the world. That’s rubbish! None of these people represent me, and some of them I would never want to represent me. I think that Veni did not go far enough: In addition to exposing the class of so-called civil society professionals, he should should have taken on the question what is meant b y civil society in general, and in particular whether the ;so-called civil society group that is visible in the IGF activities is n any way representative of it, or anything else.