Hi

Further to the message I just sent about NCSG @ Bali….There was a significant flurry of activity at the IGF around the 2014 IG reform meeting in Brazil that Fadi and Dilma Rousseff announced.  This included several meetings of the emergent multistakeholder coalition/platform/whatever intended to work with Brazil and other governments and feed into an organizing committee; meetings within civil society and other SGs, as well as between them and Fadi; extensive debate about what the agenda could entail, and on and on.  Lot of buzz, speculation, prognosticating and all the rest.  All the possibilities on the table—e.g. some sort of agreement on overarching principles of IG, proposals regarding the globalization of the US government roles and of ICANN, establishment of new mechanisms to deal with "orphaned" issues that don't have fixed multilateral/multistakeholder institutional homes, something about surveillance, etc.—are of very direct relevance to us.  

It'd make sense for civil society @ ICANN to be directly involved in this at every step along the way.  We laid the foundations for that through a lot of networking in Bali, but will now need to get organized on a wider and more inclusive scale, and to build on it both independently and within the more IGF-oriented CS coalitions (e.g. Internet Governance Caucus, Best Bits) that include many people not involved in (and/or necessarily well disposed to) ICANN.  For a meeting with governments somewhere in the last week of April/first week of May, inputs will be needed by March and earlier, at the same time we all have a lot else going on—the BA meeting, NCSG and NCUC elections and transitions, NCUC policy conference in Singapore, etc. etc.  

I would suggest that in BA we make time to discuss this on Constituency Day, as well as with At Large.  In parallel, we will need some online conversation and consensus-building among our wider membership.  

So…lots to discuss and do.  

Best,

Bill


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William J. Drake
International Fellow & Lecturer
  Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ
  University of Zurich, Switzerland
Chair, Noncommercial Users Constituency, 
  ICANN, www.ncuc.org
[log in to unmask] (w), [log in to unmask] (h),
  www.williamdrake.org
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