From: William Drake [mailto:[log in to unmask]]

The Initiative will seek to complement and support the work of existing Internet governance dialogue and normative processes and institutions, including particularly the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), as well as the technical Internet community. In addition, the Initiative will not be a policy-setting body.

MM: I understand how the “Friends of the IGF” supports the IGF. I understand how I support it when I attend and propose workshops and participate in its processes. I understand how host governments support the IGF when they provide facilities for its events. But I don’t understand how NMI does. It seems to be duplicating many of the functions and multiplying another process that makes it more difficult for many of us to stay on top of it all.

MM: As for complementing, you need to better specify what it is the IGF currently can’t do that NMI does better, how NMI’s structure is better suited to these purposes.

Serve as a neutral clearinghouse for issues, solutions, expertise and resources in Internet governance, and provide a platform on which diverse actors can solicit project partners and establish collaborative relationships.

MM: Seems highly duplicative of what IGF is supposed to do.

Enable open, inclusive, balanced and collaborative communities to share knowledge  and expertise, leading to best practices, suggestions, innovation and solutions to address challenges identified by the community.

MM: This language could be drawn directly from the description of the IGF’s mission

Facilitate participation in the Internet governance ecosystem, particularly in the developing world, and advance multistakeholder processes at the national and regional levels.

MM: Seems highly duplicative of what IGF is doing. Local and regional IGFs, etc.

Promote the application, evaluation, and implementation of the Principles and encourage community reporting efforts.

MM: The link here to the Netmundial principles seems to be distinct to the NMI, agreed. NMI as promotor of the Netmundial principles would be a potentially unique function.

Assist developing-country communities, governments and underserved stakeholders by enabling capacity development efforts and in networking with relevant organizations and processes in order to address gaps in policy development.

MM: In addition to IGF, seems like almost a dozen organizations and government agencies are already trying to do this, ranging from ISOC to HIVOS to US AID. Is your real purpose to promote the Netmundial principles or to be a development agency? Why can’t the capacity of IGF be expanded to do this?

Either way, there's no dastardly plot here to take over the world.

MM: You’ve often accused critics of NMI of not actually reading what NMI says about itself;

A core concern is and always was contributing to capacity building for developing country governments and stakeholders trying to deal with non-ICANN issues.

MM: you always have a problem explaining why ICANN is leading an entity designed to deal with non-ICANN issues.

Either people will decide this can be useful and it will sustain a place as a small facilitating connector in complex institutional ecosystem, or they won’t, and we’ll say ok we tried and it’ll drift off, not the end of the world.

MM: Good to see a scaled-back version of NMI.