[WSIS CS-Plenary] recommendations for WGIG

[Martin Olivera]

El jue, 07-10-2004 a las 15:56, Vittorio Bertola escribió:
> 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.)
I may differ facts that suspicious things, I prefer consider you as
honest.

> 
> 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. 
well, yes and no.
I think that these decision and consultant bodies as WGIG should be
formed by the "bests", but also reflecting diversity (cultural, gender,
geography and ideology). Including some women, some african and some
hispanics you are not really favouring diversity, but it is just some
"politically correct" attitude.

> 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").
Sure I think Enrique and Mario are better candidates than Raul and
Carlos. Not only me, a lot of people in the Caucus agree with me, I know
that because Enrique and Mario were voted in the Caucus. That is why the
LAC caucus proposed them as nominees.

I do not know how Carlos and Raul were elected, I cannot know because
they decided to do that secretly. If I am right, the only latinamerican
people in NomCom is Valeria Betancourt from APC. Carlos Afonso works for
RITS, also APC, so it is easy to understand why Carlos and Raul were
proposed and Enrique and Mario ignored.


> > 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.
civil society includes or not governments?
civil society includes or not companies?
if not, what are then governements and companies? militar societies?

I found the division between Companies, Government and Civil Society as
fictionary. A person who works for a company, participates in political
environment and also collaborates with an NGO... what is?

Companies are democratic or not.
Governements may be democratic or not (I do not know why you are so
cathegoric "governments do elections")
NGOs may be democratic or not also.

But civil society?
if you define civil society as a strange mixture of everything except
governments and companies, there are who do advocay, and who do not, ho
do elections, and who don't. Diversity, diversity, diversity.

May WSIS support diversity? I think not.
Is WSIS-CS process helping to solve this? I think not, YOU (who are
taking WSIS-CS decisions) are working bad for this. It could be do
better with more transparency.


> 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. 
Your arguments could be used perfectly by any terrorist-friend
government in the world to support dictatorships.

"We have no practical way to do things well, so we will do bad as we
can"


> 
> 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.
I do not agree with you

the worst online democracy should be better than the best
aristocracy/tecnocracy/CEOcracy you may build.

-- 
Martín Olivera
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