[Mmwg] Mechanism proposition

Mon Jan 16 08:25:31 GMT 2006

Dear Jaeyoun and all,

I am not sure I completely understand the full range of (practical) problems
regarding accreditation and participation, so please make me aware of any
misconceptions I might have, but wouldn't it be a feasible and fair solution
to have a very inclusive 'everybody can speak/participate online discourse
environment' and for the official (physical) forum elect civil society
representatives/delegates?

Regarding the problem of what Luc Faubert called 'fly-by-nighters', I would
propose to look into a technologically facilitated solution creating
evolving reputation/credibility networks (networks of trust). The idea is
most popularly implemented in ebay's rating system, where you can see&assess
quite easily how 'serious & experienced' someone is about participation. In
our case it would be a peer-evaluated competence rating.  Some initiatives
that go into this direction and might be interesting to assess: 

- the open source development community portal
www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html has developed a system where a
collaborators rate the abilities of their peers (trust metrics)

- again the system at www.plastic.com seems a good solution to me (they have
an experience scale and collaborative filtering & editing see my attached
post from the 11/28/05 to the working methods group)

- the Friend of a Friend project (http://rdfweb.org/topic/FAQ) goes into the
direction of what I am talking about

- I am not an expert on this, but Jennifer Golbeck seems to have done some
interesting research (www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/publications.shtml ,
http://trust.mindswap.org/ ) 

Kind regards,
Max 

-----Original Message-----
From: mmwg-bounces at wsis-cs.org [mailto:mmwg-bounces at wsis-cs.org] On Behalf
Of Jaeyoun Kim (Peter)
Sent: lunes, 16 de enero de 2006 5:49
To: 'Luc Faubert'
Cc: mmwg at wsis-cs.org
Subject: RE: [Mmwg] Mechanism proposition

Hello! Luc Faubert.

I intended to make some comments on McTim's reactions, yet I think I do not
need to do it anymore. 

I am fully in favor of your thoughts. 

My only concern is the accreditation process. (As you said, it will be
difficult to define who is a legitimate party.)

I think that the accreditation process is necessary though I am not entirely
convinced that it is a viable solution to the problem you mentioned.

If we cannot eliminate the accreditation process, we have to guarantee that
it shall be simple and reliable to promote more participations in IGF.

Regards,
Jaeyoun Kim (Peter)

> The idea behind the accreditation process was to screen out 
> illegitimate parties. Maybe this is too slippery a path. It 
> could be difficult to define what is a legitimate party in a 
> given forum. However, imagine that Al Quaida wanted to 
> participate in IGF. What should we do? Maybe even the 
> perspective of having Al Quaida officially represented in a 
> forum is worth the simplicity that eliminating the 
> accreditation process alltogether would bring to our 
> mechanism. What do the others think? Eliminating the need for 
> accreditation would also eliminate the need for the boostrap 
> loading mechanism I couldn't come up with (i.e. the issue of 
> accrediting the first parties when none other than 
> governments are yet accreditated).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mmwg-bounces at wsis-cs.org 
> [mailto:mmwg-bounces at wsis-cs.org] On Behalf Of Luc Faubert
> Sent: Monday, January 16, 2006 3:13 AM
> To: mmwg at wsis-cs.org
> Subject: RE: [Mmwg] Mechanism proposition
> 
> Thank you Robert and McTim for your comments. Here are some 
> further thoughts:
> 
> Number of groups
> I don't think the idea of merging all parties in one group 
> would be palatable to governments. While the number of 
> governements allowed to participate in the process would be 
> limited to those officially recognized by the UN, the only 
> upper bound on the number of potential parties in the CS 
> group would be that imposed by accreditation (and I think the 
> principles underlying accreditation should be intended to 
> screen out illegitimate parties rather than limiting the 
> absolute number of CS parties). If the 2 groups are not 
> isolated, the importance of governement votes would diminish 
> proportionally with the increase of CS parties. I do not 
> think we will get approval of governments to go this way.
> 
> Minimal number of members
> The limit of 1000 members could be 100 or 500, or whatever we 
> agree on, but the idea of the limit is twofold: to prevent 
> individuals who speak only for themselves to participate and 
> to ensure a certain "barrier to entry" preventing the 
> spontaneous and artificial creation of parties around one 
> specific forum. If the civil society group is going to have 
> any credibility with governments, it must be formed of 
> legitimate parties. I agree that exactly what defines 
> legitimacy can be the subject of endless discussion, but if 
> civil society is not perceived to be legitimate, its means of 
> action will be limited.
> 
> Accreditation
> The idea behind the accreditation process was to screen out 
> illegitimate parties. Maybe this is too slippery a path. It 
> could be difficult to define what is a legitimate party in a 
> given forum. However, imagine that Al Quaida wanted to 
> participate in IGF. What should we do? Maybe even the 
> perspective of having Al Quaida officially represented in a 
> forum is worth the simplicity that eliminating the 
> accreditation process alltogether would bring to our 
> mechanism. What do the others think? Eliminating the need for 
> accreditation would also eliminate the need for the boostrap 
> loading mechanism I couldn't come up with (i.e. the issue of 
> accrediting the first parties when none other than 
> governments are yet accreditated).
> 
> Consensus
> I think consensus imposes too many limits on the ability of a 
> forum to decide. This is of course dependant on the notion 
> that a forum should accomplish more than just discuss. As I 
> mentioned in my notes, I think the need to reach consensus 
> often dilutes final text to flavorless and useless amenities.
> 
> Seating
> If seating is to be available for all who wish to 
> participate, I fear some plenaries will be impossible to 
> hold. Imagine a forum meeting where 20 parties each come with 
> 500 members wishing to participate. How do you manage this? 
> Our mechanism must ensure "full and equal participation by 
> all stakeholders", thus my proposition that all parties of 
> either group (governement or civil society) be allowed to 
> seat an equal number of delegates, limited only by available seating.
> 
> WGIG
> I think we need to come up with a better model than WGIG, 
> because its mechanism did not allow for "full and equal 
> participation by all stakeholders". Although the spirit was 
> undeniably cooperative in WGIG, I don't think we can say that 
> associations and governments worked peer-to-peer.
> 
> 
> - Luc Faubert
> ISOC Québec
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> mmwg at wsis-cs.org
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