[ncdnhc-discuss] Draft Agenda for Shanghai NCDNHC Meeting

[J-F C. (Jefsey) Morfin]

At 11:20 19/10/02, YJ Park wrote:
>The first two issues are related with administration issues
>which nobody in the constituency cares and have responsibility for.
...
>If you have any further idea on this, it would be great.

There is a general administrative and legal need for the Internet 
"constituencies" (the word is ambiguous enough in American, English, 
French, so we may keep it to qualify the Internet groups such as NCDNHC, 
GA, @large, etc.). They need to incorporate and to be administered.

France has a long tradition/experience in "association law". Minitel for 
reasons equivalent to the "good Samaritan" amendment obliged Minitel 
services to be specified in Articles. This lead many Minitel services to be 
supported by an ad-hoc non-profit association, even for large business groups.

The same law and (non Minitel but) societal experience is shared with 
Switzerland and Belgium, partly with other European countries. I have 
started lobbying, starting from that e-associations seed experience [I 
created probably more than 50 of them when developping Minitel services], 
to adapt the French law (probably the most flexible) to the support of 
e-constituencies.

A practical target would be an on-line registration service permitting to 
incorporate an e-constituency as its own secretariat [puting no obligation 
on the list-members, the BoD o the association being only our AdCom], to 
get a banking account, to publish articles and bylaws .. (the French system 
permits to be totally tax-free and accepts any Member and officer 
citizenship). I suppose that once one country develops it, others will copy 
over the years and probably compete with new advantages.

An important result would be to make such e-constituencies an identified 
market for specific products (DNS management, e-zine, constituency 
administration and votes, decision management, GPL and commercial 
softwares, insurances, ID control, etc. ).

The NCDNHC and @large are the Constituencies for such e-constituencies, a 
place to collect experience and run experiments. I think it would be 
possible to organize an international meeting on the matter 12/15 months 
from now. This could be organized by an association which already organized 
many international meetings on political, economical, societal top issues. 
If I was coming with a good enough study and international candidates for a 
preparation committee, they are interested. They identify the need as 
equivalent to the need which lead to the current law 100 years ago, but at 
International level. They also are interested this could happen within the 
WSIS time frame and benefit from a good media coverage and governmental 
support.

I would be interested in any comment, suggestion.
jfc