[NCUC-DISCUSS] NCUC involvement ICANN /Internet Governance Initiatives (4): The Cross Community Working Group on Internet Governance

[William Drake]

Hi

A fourth initiative worth following and engaging is ICANN's Cross Community Working Group on Internet Governance.  In Buenos Aires, Fadi called an early morning meeting to discuss all this stuff and encourage creation of a CCWGIG to serve as a vehicle for community wide dialogue and development of positions for Sao Paulo and perhaps ICANN’s role in IG more broadly.  NCSG and ALAC held a joint meeting in BA and agreed to boot up the effort, and Rafik and Olivier have been serving as co-convenors in this initial phase.  We’ve been meeting online/phone every week, and an effort is underway to agree a charter for the group so we can get started.  Things have been dragging a bit, in no small part due to the, shall we say, reluctant orientation of some of business colleagues, and the general ICANN tendency to drown all good ideas in process at the outset.  But hopefully as the March 1 deadline for submission for Sao Paulo looms there will be a flurry of efforts to do something, at least come up with a joint statement supporting multistakeholderism vs. intergovernmentalism etc.

Anyway, NCUCers can participate in several ways.  First, you can just follow the process by checking out the documents and transcripts etc at the workspace (Confluence accounts recommended, available by writing to Glen of the GNSO staff).

https://community.icann.org/display/CPMMB/ICANN+Community+Preparation+for+the+Multistakeholder+Meeting+in+Brazil+Home 

Second, you can join the listserv which is open to all https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/ccwg-internet-governance

Third, you can join the weekly calls, but I guess if you’re not a designated “rep” nominally you can only listen in.  I’d think the meeting chair has discretion here.

Fourth, the somewhat uneven launch process produced an rather inequitable structure in which SOs ACs and GNSO constituencies all laid claims based more on their intra-silo dynamics than any clear CCWG agreement.  In consequence, as you can see at the above URL, the Business Constituency has five reps, the Intellectual Property Constituency has 8 reps, the ISP constituency has 4, NPOC has two and NCUC has two—me, and Avri, who is listed as GNSO.   Rafik’s the co-co.  And the imbalances are not just within the Noncontracted House…Anyway, some of us suggested a limit of 4 reps per grouping but the biz folks had to have more, so we’re vastly outnumbered.  Avri thinks maybe this can be fixed in the WG charter process, so that each SG gets an equal 4, but I’m skeptical, and in any event that’s not where we are now.  So until there’s an agreement on a fixed number, there’s no reason NCUC can’t have two more reps, if anyone feels well suited to the task.  Some understanding of CCWGs and the other players would be helpful...

Irrespective of the final seating chart, NCUC can also provide written inputs that can be circulated, posted to the group’s wiki, etc.  Again, if groups of members or the constituency per se (via a custom built interest group, a rebooted Policy Committee, or whatever) wants to put ideas down in print, these can be circulated into the intra-ICANN discussion just as well as into the Brazil meeting, the HLP, our Singapore conference, or anything else.  We also have budget for print materials, so any outputs could be disseminated not just in digital form, but also as nice sleek paper artifacts, like the NCUC Brochure.

Best

Bill

***********************************************
William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
william.drake at uzh.ch (direct), wjdrake at gmail.com (lists),
  www.williamdrake.org
***********************************************

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