NMI’s ToR released on April Fool’s day! I love it!
Yes, and the joke’s on you, Kieren and others who’ve been endlessly fulminating that NMI is somehow a dastardly plot to take over the universe, even though your colleagues who are involved have been saying forever that no it’s not (why would we be involved in it if it were?). What we propose to actually do, if facts matter, is
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.
The NETmundial Initiative will:
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.
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.
Facilitate participation in the Internet governance ecosystem, particularly in the developing world, and advance multistakeholder processes at the national and regional levels.
Promote the application, evaluation, and implementation of the Principles and encourage community reporting efforts.
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.These elements distill both public feedback received on a questionnaire and discussions that have taken place in various spaces, e.g. at the Istanbul IGF, in the Ilves commission process, at ICANN Singapore, and within NMI (reports of the ToR drafting group meetings are at
https://www.netmundial.org/2015-meetings). I would very much encourage people to comment on each of these elements on the website. If you think they can be useful or that there is no need for them, say why.
Either way, there's no dastardly plot here to take over the world. No centralizing decision making about anything behind closed doors in smoke filled rooms filled by the cigars of WEF fat cats (they are barely involved). No taking away anything from the IGF, but rather complementary work (we’ll probably hold an Open Forum in Brazil). No big new organization, it’s three ICANN and
CGI.br staffers who have multiple other responsibilities working very part time alongside a multistakeholder Coordination Council that has five NCUC members and works by consensus. Fadi is one member and has been not so involved either, so Fadi Fever explanations of how things must really work don’t cut it.
NMI is a space for people to say what projects they’re working on (e.g.
https://www.netmundial.org/contributions-list) and seek partners, make connections, share information, etc. A core concern is and always was contributing to capacity building for developing country governments and stakeholders trying 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. Either can happen, especially given all the willful misrepresentations of this that have become part of the zeitgeist. But it’s worth remembering that when some of us started talking in 2004 about the need for a new multistakeholder process for open dialogue and analysis on the broad range of IG issues and institutions, the push back was immediate from the some of same folks that have criticized this—e.g. ISOC and the ICC—and yet eventually they came to see that the IGF was a useful addition to the mix. That could happen here too if people get beyond the original sins of a key protagonist in the initial roll out of the idea. TBD.