Dan Krimm wrote:
> Personally, I would vote in favor of transparency over rough consensus, and
> I would not stop advocating for transparency across the board even if
> consensus were to go against it formally.  Can we really go anywhere
> "consensus" demands?  I think there are limits to that stance, and this is
> an example of such limits.
> 
> Even if no other bodies within ICANN choose to comply with the transparency
> principle, and even if it leaves us at a tactical disadvantage (they get to
> "spy" on us while preventing us from "spying" on them), I think we would do
> well to choose to adhere to our own principle of transparency, regardless.
> 
> Even if all other ICANN bodies view this as an "error" we can at least
> agree to disagree on that matter.  And we shouldn't ever let the matter
> rest if it has not reached consensus to favor institutional transparency.
> Without transparency, any policy-formulation process is utterly lost to
> being broadly representational, which seems the highest mission of a
> multi-stakeholder (MS) process.
> 
> Of course, not all participants in a MS process are committed to the MS
> process per se -- they may just be participating in whatever process
> presents itself to try to gain as much narrow advantage as possible in any
> way they can, and they would use whatever influence they have within the
> process to shape the procedural details to their narrow advantage, whether
> this fits the overall mission and principles of MS process or not.
> 
> My personal opinion is that any entity that opposes the practice of
> transparency is not truly dedicated to MS process in principle, and should
> be viewed as being amenable to potentially undermining MS process if it
> gets in the way of their proprietary outcomes.  In short, lack of
> transparency undermines broad collective trust, and without trust the MS
> process has a difficult time succeeding in practice, at least on its own
> conceptual terms.

Dan, while I agree with you that we should be both promoting and enacting 
transparency in NCSG, I think you have a logical error in your argument 
above. Unless there isa rough consensus specifically AGAINST transparency, 
i.e. a rough consensus FOR opacity (of process), then there is no 
inconsistency here. NCSG can argue that transparency is the way all SGs (and 
many other elements of ICANN) should operate and as a thought-leader on that 
may implement transparency internally. A rough consensus view that 
transparency should not be mandated, however, is not the same as a rough 
consensus view that opacity should be mandated. Such a rough consensus could 
come about because most of the other groups feel that within some groups the 
benefits of opacity outweigh the benefits of transparency, while for others 
it may be the other way around and so the rough consensus is not to mandate 
or even recommend anything either way. This, I think, also answwers Avri's 
point if it is on principle grounds: 1. NCSG internally has consensus or 
rough consensus on transparency, and thus we operate in a transparent manner. 
At this point, though, the current mandate for transparency from SGs may be 
illegitimate (as a mandate) because it was imposed from above without 
reference to the suitable MS process. So, as has often happened before, we 
can say that we actually agree with an idea, but oppose its current 
implementation because of the manner in which it was promulgated. We should 
therefore work to persuade the other SGs that they should reach a rough 
consensus FOR transparency, with a fallback position of arguing strongly 
against any declarations FOR opacity.



-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      [log in to unmask]
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/