[Mmwg] Creating spaces for civil society (and ICT enabledcommunities) (post) WSIS

[Luc Faubert]

1. Scope of MMWG
Interesting opinions by Gurstein and Currie, Jacqueline, but they concern mostly civil society's role in the MSH approach. From what I understand of our charter, our job is to come up with a global mechanism for all relevant parties to participate in IGF and other WSIS-related fora and to make recommendations to the UN secretariat.
 
2. Timeline and deliverables
Our charter mentions the MMWG is created for two years. When are our recommendations due? Wouldn't it be useful to establish a timeline and a clear definition of our deliverables that we all agree on?
 
3. Mechanism
What's a mechanism? To me, it's a way of building things. A grammar and a vocabulary. It may be helpful for us to think of our job as coming up with the rules to build and operate a MSH decisional body rather than try to design the body ourselves. After that the different fora (IGF et al.) could use our mechanism to build and operate the MSH decisional body they require.
 
4. Representation
This brings us to the challenging issue of legitimacy and representation in the MSH process:
a) Who must be represented? (We already have some propositions from the list for this)
b) Who can legitimately represent groups who wish to be represented?
c) Can individuals represent themselves? In the affirmative, what is their relative importance vs. other individuals representing thousands or millions of individuals?
d) Who exactly do governments represent if the very people they are supposed to represent are represented by CS entities?
e) What does "equal participation" mean in the MSH context?
 
5. Post MMWG
What happens after we make our recommendations? Who makes the final decision on the MSH mechanism that will be used in IGF?
 
 
- Luc Faubert
ISOC Québec
 
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