Dear people, below is a text based on my statement on the NETmundial
Initiative (NMI), in the Internet Governance session at ICANN 52.

Your comments would be appreciated.

frt rgds

--c.a.

My view on the NETmundial Initiative (NMI)

Carlos A. Afonso

[Derived from my statement in the workshop on Internet governance, on
Feb.12, 2015, at ICANN 52, Singapore]

As explained in its portal, The NETmundial Initiative is a "bottom-up,
action-focused movement for the global community to organically
operationalize distributed Internet governance, based on the Principles
developed at the NETmundial meeting held in São Paulo, and the
polycentric ecosystem described in President Toomas Ilves’ panel report."

It is a platform (in construction) to provide mechanisms of support to
concrete initiatives, projects, and research, which will advance the
NETmundial principles and roadmap. It is currently facilitated by ICANN
and CGI.br, which provide infrastructural and secretarial support to the
initiative. In the words of the portal's FAQ: "The NETmundial Initiative
provides an online platform to (i) facilitate ‘crowd-sourcing’ of
enablers and solutions from the global community; and (ii) energize
‘crowd-funding’ and multistakeholder partnership to support the further
development and wider application of such enablers and solutions."

In summary, its motivation is to provide an environment for building
upon the principles and roadmap established by NETmundial. ICANN and
CGI.br are its natural initial enablers, as they were among the crucial
instances that enabled NETmundial itself.

The Initiative is not controlled, managed or overseen by the WEF. The
Forum helps in facilitating the project with CGI.br and ICANN, but has
its own Internet initiative, which has recently been announced. [1]

Several organizations of stakeholders are involved in collective
initiatives related in one way or another to Internet governance.
Besides the example of the WEF proposal (mentioned above), there is a
call by a group of some civil society organizations called the Just Net
Coalition (JNC) to implement an Internet Social Forum (ISF). The ISF
promises to follow the principles set by the World Social Forum (WSF)
and is restricted to organizations and individuals that adhere to the
JNC and the WSF principles.

According to JNC, "the ISF will inter alia offer an alternative to the
recently-launched World Economic Forum's 'Net Mundial Initiative' on
global Internet governance. While the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the
'Net Mundial Initiative' convene global elites, the Internet Social
Forum will be a participatory and bottom-up space for all those who
believe that the global Internet must evolve in the public interest; a
direct parallel to the launch of the WSF in 2001 as a counter initiative
to the WEF." [2]

Contrary to the view of the JNC, NMI is not "run by the WEF" and is not
a convener of "global elites". None of the above undertakings
invalidates the NETmundial Initiative. It will not replace or compete
with them. NMI is not a forum -- it was never intended to replace or
compete with the UN's Internet Governance Forum (IGF) or any other forum.

Since January 2015 NMI is run by its inaugural Coordination Council
(CC), constituted after careful consultation with all stakeholders. The
CC is composed of 20 members of civil society, academic/technical
community, business and government, and includes representatives from
ICANN, CGI.br and WEF (as facilitators). As Wolfgang Kleinwächter
explains: "[the Council] started a process to outreach as much as
possible to the broader Internet governance community to stimulate an
open, transparent, inclusive and bottom up discussion process," the
first step of which is to produce the Terms of Reference (ToR) of the
Initiative through a consultative process much similar to the one
carried out by NETmundial to build is final document.[3]

The result of this consultation will be a draft ToR to be submitted to
the community during March. On the basis of this feedback a final
version of the ToR will be discussed in the first face-to-face meeting
of the CC in Costa Rica at the end of March. The adopted ToR will be
essential to define the procedures and criteria for the platform to
gather relevant proposals.

Further, the CC is in charge of negotiating sponsorships and funding
sources to support the relevant proposals gathered by the platform. The
only limitations are that the mission of NMI and the mandate and goals
of the CC are not changed in a way to distort the original idea. This is
certainly relevant for ICANN and CGI.br to continue to provide support
for it.

The NMI, as a supporting platform of projects crafted to advance the
NETmundial principles and roadmap, can be seen as an accelerator, in
which the "start-ups" are initiatives to enhance, better understand
and/or improve on aspects of the Internet governance ecosystem.

In this spirit, a good idea to spark the process of finding those
potential "start-ups" would be to comb through the many workshops of the
9th IGF in Istanbul to catch possible ideas for proposals, which  could
perhaps be a clear demonstration of projects in this nascent phase.
Certainly the João Pessoa IGF will be a good source of ideas as well,
and this could be thought as a permanent interactive mechanism between
the platform and the IGF.

This is of course an idea to be submitted to the CC members, who are in
charge of  in coordinating this process based on the input provided by
the Internet governance community.

A last note, after the Singapore meeting, upon reading the recent public
consultation carried out by the Internet Society. Question 10 of the
questionnaire states:

"10.  Do you think the new “NETmundial Initiative” (NMI) that was
launched by the WEF, Brazil and ICANN is needed for effective Internet
governance?"

This biased question induces the respondent to think that the initiative
is controlled by wEF and the Brazilian government in cahoots with ICANN.
Wrong. NMI has been proposed in a WEF meeting with the initial
participation of ICANN, WEF and CGI.br. As most of you know (but ISOC
seems not to), CGI.br is a multistakeholder commission, the majority of
board members being non-government.

After an intense public scrutiny, the original proposal was
significantly modified, as I hope to have explained above. NMI in
summary is today a multistakeholder process.

I encourage NCSGers to contribute to the CC's public consultation here:

https://www.netmundial.org/community-consultation-terms-reference

Deadline has been extended to Feb.23 and might be further extended to
Feb.27.

I can't help but notice another tricky notion in ISOC's question 10:
what does ISOC consider to be "effective" Internet governance? I have no
idea of what they have in mind, but certainly an international
multistakeholder initiative which seeks to support the advancement of
the principles and roadmap of NETmundial cannot be discarded in the name
of a certain "effective" Internet governance.

Notes:

[1]
http://www.weforum.org/news/world-economic-forum-launches-future-internet-initiative

[2]
https://fsm2015.org/en/article/2015/01/25/global-civil-society-launches-internet-social-forum-call-occupy-internet

[3]
https://www.netmundial.org/blog/secretariat/netmundial-initiative-taking-positive-steps-forward