[Ecommerce] IGF: Jamie Love's intervention during the Chair's Summing Up

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

http://www.intgovforum.org/IGF-SummingUp2-021106am.txt

 Internet Governance Forum Thursday 2 November 2006

 Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the
 The Inaugural Meeting of the IGF, in Athens. Although it is
 largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to
 inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to
 understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an
 authoritative record.

 This file contains the 'Summing up Session' of the previous days events and also
 the  Chairs Summing Up , 'Taking Stock & The Way Forward Session'.




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<SNIP>

CHAIRMAN DESAI:  I think that's a very useful thought.  We should keep that
 in our mind that the advisory group has generally met with -- in open
 consultations in Geneva, but I take you to mean that basically these
 consultations should also reach out at the regional level. And we have to
 figure out how we can do that better.  And maybe we can give a little thought
 to this, as to how this could be done.  Maybe we could have -- maybe the
 relevant regional members from that region can do more concentration. That's a
 good thought and let's see how we can work it in. May I now turn to Jamie Love.
  After that, I have Peter Hellmonds, Steve Ballinger and Vassilev from Russia.

 >>JAMIE LOVE:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Markus and the Secretariat. I would
 like to echo the positive sentiments that other members of this audience have
 offered about this event. I think that this -- this format has worked well.  I
 think that one thing that is on the mind of many people is the connection
 between the conversations in the room and the activity in the room and
 outcomes.

And I think that the -- our understanding is that the early approach
 in the Internet Governance Forum is one where the emphasis is on the
 self-organized dynamic coalitions to focus on things such as best practice or
 areas of consensus or information sharing as opposed to sort of focusing on a
 sort of top-level norm setting activity. I think that that's a different
 approach for a lot of people that are familiar with the U.N. system, but it has
 a certainly amount of value in the context of the Internet and the way a lot of
 things -- the Internet has developed. And I think it's early, but I think if
 that is the process by which people coming here affect things on the outside
 then it's worth spending some time on how these bottom-up, self-organized
 dynamic coalitions work, how they fit into the IGF.  It was very welcome to
 hear from the Secretariat that there be an effort to integrate within the
 Secretariat Web page the activities, the dynamic coalition site.

I think the conversations from France about the privacy dynamic coalition I think are very
 interesting. I think that there may be some learning process about the sort of
 best practices of dynamic coalitions in some of these issues.  I think some
 people are not quite sure what the limits are. I think many people would be
 comfortable with thinking forward, maybe toward Rio, a little more structure on
 this process. But I must say the idea you had of starting with almost no
 structure at this meeting has its value, because we have a lot of diversity and
 experimentation, and I think that's going to be very useful to everyone. So I'm
 trying to be as positive as possible about what you are doing now in the
 meeting because I feel very good about it. I'm involved in the organizing of
 the access to knowledge dynamic coalition, which I should be at right
 now. And the open standards dynamic coalition. The approach in both of these, I
 think, is to be inclusive in terms of membership, maybe requiring some
 transparency of people who join the coalition to -- as sort of a hurdle, which
 I think is a reasonable obligation. And then to create a space so that the
 group will seek to reach consensus and best practices in these areas of their
 interest, which will be as concrete as possible in terms of things governments
 could do, corporate sector could do, and private individuals could do. But then
 in areas where there's no agreement, to work toward permitting groups that have
 different points of view to also express multiple views within the same dynamic
 coalition so that there could be a -- identified with the sort of the endorsers
 or the people that more or less approach one approach versus another approach.

It's an inclusive approach. The value is if you get more consensus. But
 sometimes forcing consensus can come at the expense of detail and richness of
 proposals. So I think if they are going to try and strike a balance between
 encouraging as much consensus as possible, but not to the point where they
 don't allow different models to be presented and put forward. And also to work
 concretely on some of the information sharing in the areas between what
 practices are before we get to state practice.

So I think that this forum suits this purpose very well.  And we look forward to participating. And I'm sure
 that the number of people participating in the next forum will be greater than
 this forum, because I think many people were skeptical of the value of this
 forum, because they didn't understand it. They were told by many people it
 would be all talk and no action, that there was this sort of negative talk that
 people said. And I think that what's emerged in this meeting, I think, and the
 feedback you'll have outside the room will be very positive, that people see
 this as sort of the right thing to do at the right time with the Internet, to
 sort of start very inclusive, to start discussions, to start in sort of
 relatively soft norm setting. And that's really sort of a confidence-building
 step and building the institution. So my thanks for the opportunity to
 participate.