[WSIS CS-Plenary] recommendations for WGIG

[Vittorio Bertola]

Martin,

(disclaimer: I am one of the people who were actually selected by the
NomCom, so you are free to think that this is the reason behind this
message, though it is not.)

Il gio, 2004-10-07 alle 10:09, Martin Olivera ha scritto:
> This was reflected in nomminations as a kind of LAC Caucus "split" with
> nommintions of Carlos Afonso and Raul Echebarria by one side and Enrique
> Chaparro and Mario Teza by the other. So if selection would like to be
> democrtic and you would like to select two people from LAC, best option
> should be one nominee from each "spplited LAC sides". 

I don't agree with this; this would indeed have been the *easiest*
option, but not the *best* option. 

The idea was never to select "one person per each group", but rather to
identify the most suitable and knowledgeable people to work in WGIG for
the global interest of all civil society groups. So the NomCom thought
that Carlos and Raul were the most suited persons among all those
proposed by the different LAC groups.

Thus if your argument is, "Enrique and Mario would be better WGIG
members than Carlos and Raul", then there could be a discussion on that.
But if it is "whoever forms a caucus has the right to have one member of
the WGIG", then I don't agree, and I suggest you to read again the
message that Bertrand sent today (the one with subject "Re: there's a
problem").

> I am continuosly seeing that WSIS process is very non-democratic, and
> decisions are based more in previous knowledge between people than in
> public elections and participation, specially in the "Civil Society"
> participation.

I am sorry to shock you, but civil society doesn't do elections.
Governments do elections. We do advocacy. These are two very different
things.

To have elections, you need to have things such as a way to ascertain
the identity of voters, criteria to determine who has the right to vote,
a secure voting system, adequate information and discussion among
candidates and between candidates and voters, and so on. The civil
society plenary does not have anything like this at the moment, so there
was no practical way that we could have elections on this issue. And if
someone had said "whoever is subscribed to the plenary list gets to vote
for WGIG nominees", I guess that we would have had a rush of last minute
subscriptions by friends of the friends just to create "vote packets" in
favour of this or that candidate. 

Believe me, we had a long experience in online democracy at ICANN, and
it's not as easy or effective as it looks. This doesn't mean that it
cannot be an objective for the future - and this is a discussion we
should have at next PrepComs and events such as the UN ICT TF meeting in
Berlin - but it needs to be done with extreme care.
-- 
.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo vb.
Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu.org
(((f1tt3r h4pp1er))) @ http://bertola.eu.org/