[WSIS CS-Plenary] authors of issue papers [clarification]

[William Drake]

Hello Federico,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plenary-admin at wsis-cs.org [mailto:plenary-admin at wsis-cs.org]On
> Behalf Of Federico Heinz

> On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 13:57 +0100, William Drake wrote:
> > [...] All the messages implying that WGIG is somehow committed to
> > side-stepping the definitional question are misplaced conjecture
>
> Have I missed these messages? I haven't seen any. I have seen (and
> written) some criticism of WGIG for attempting to write papers on
> Internet Governance without defining first what it is, because it seems
> a rather odd order to do things. It's not the intent that some people
> are questioning, but rather the methodology.

I'm sorry, I was typing fast and should have been clearer.  I was responding
to Adam's message suggesting (admittedly, somewhat jokingly) that WGIG was
"palming off the hard work," and my recollection was that there had been
similar statements, notably on the governance caucus list.  So I was just
saying that there had in fact been some discussion of definitional issue in
WGIG and there is clearly the intent to circle back to it now that the
papers are done.

> I've been going through the "cybercrime" document, for instance, and the
> fact that IG is not defined makes it quite difficult to establish
> whether the topic has been approached in a relevant way. The further
> fact that the definition of "cybercrime" itself in the paper is
> questionable makes it even more difficult, of course :-(

 I agree that from a logical standpoint it would have been better to define
the term before working on illustrations of it, an approach that resulted in
some papers that arguably were not on IG and will not get released at this
time.  But I guess the prevailing view was to use the papers to get members
going on writing and collaborating on the supposedly easier task of laying
out the issues and institutions and then build toward the more difficult
definitional piece (I personally don't think it's that difficult, but some
seem wedded to that view).

Best,

Bill