Subject: Re: [iucg] [governance] On "ad hominem" and "twisting words"

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 18:35:33 +0200

Dear Founding Fathers,

I am afraid all this "twisting of the ad hominem words" is a
self explanation of the IGC's decline, if there is such a decline (I feel
there is a positive evolution: when people express themselves there can
only be a democratic trend).

Sorry to be long, but the matter calls for it. I will put this on
http://architf.org
when it has been reviewed on the copied political, technical,
architectural and architectonical CS lists.

My observation is that the debate is only becoming distant from reality
("the appearing passivity of my civil society colleagues. Our
proactivity and capacity to resist seemed to have decline so much"
as Daniel says - is that an "ad hominem" too?). This being both
from the digisphere reality - the way one thinks in our numeric new world
- and from its cyberspace reality, the way this world is to be/being
physically built.

There is why, at some not too distant point, someone will have to explore
and document the Communications Theory (how the philia
works) as Shannon did for the information theory (how the data are
exchanged). Dominants lost the information that the Internet was
for us. We need to communicate the idea again.

This mail is a small contribution to the
exploration of such a theory. It is only based on the 2.4 millenaries of
experience in rhetoric, logic, and dialectic that we pour out in our
e-mailing and "mail-combat sport". The need is to clarify, from
IETF experience, some Latin terminology confusion resulting from the
intrinsic fuzziness of the English language when compared with the
clarity of the Greek, the rigor of the Latin, and the accuracy of the
French languages.

What is our personal communications target?

Let us remember that our common, personal target when communicating
is to inform, intercomprehend, and convince others. This usually means in
our daily life to mutually express reasonable points through dialog. The
target is truth or a correct decision. The method is dialectic.

On a mailing list, we are not engaged in a dialog (one side talking with
the other) but rather in a multilogue, everyone to everyone process (the
word “polylogue” technically applies to the parents-kids or non-peer to
peer communication processes). The mode is no longer dialectic and the
debate is no longer logic: we are in a polylectic mode and the debate
becomes agoric, and hence political. This real-time multi-communication
situation was, up to now, reserved to moderated debates of parliaments
and chapters or to international diplomacy. It has become common to
everyone and its rules have to scale (an attempt of “on-lining” the
Robert’s Rules can be found at http://www.rulesonline.com/).

The way an open debate works

This is a rhetoric arena where the target is no longer to be true but
rather to be right in order to win more allies or democratic voters. In
this arena, one is not "asked" for a response, one is
"opposed" arguments. (Unless you are like me, a voice preaching
in Deserto or an unfortunate recruiter for practical help toward
pragmatic actions J) .

To an argument you may either respond to the argument itself (“ad rem”)
in discussing the "rem", or to the one who raised it (“ad
hominem”) in order to defeat him/her on the ground of his/her own logic.
The usual refutation by the opponent is "you are wrong" in the
"ad rem” case and "you twisted my words" in the "ad
hominem" case. With usual continuations, we know well to follow.

How not lose a lost debate?

When one knows that one has lost every other chance to win, the last
trick is, according to “the Art of Being Right” of Schopenhauer, to
switch from discussing ideas (the adversary’s arguments or logic) to the
adversary’s personality (“ad personam”). In the "ad hominem"
hypothesis, this is the equivalent to "bad faith" in the
"ad rem" hypothesis. However, it may be made less visible and
more insidious.

This is a good way to block a winning adversary, but this is also taking
a “make-or-break” choice. The risk is that it may be identified for what
it is: the response of someone who has no answer. Therefore, the target
is to try to make the debate last long enough for Godwin’s law to apply
to the adversary’s detriment.

A very usual proceeding against a person exposing what one would not like
to discuss is to pretend that a fully technically justified “ad hominem”
is actually an unacceptable “ad personam”. This is all the easier in
English in that the confusion between the two phrases already belongs to
the common language.

Correcting this societal communication bug

Let us get real: the trick above is an old long known one. It has
been addressed by the political press in the parliamentary debates or
international relations fields. Our problem today is just that this
solution does not already scale. But that is comming! May be this is the
reason why we claim in Deserto: dominants do not want to lose their word
domainance.

I am becoming architectonical again: the fuzzy,
agoric development (everything is fuzzy from words, meanings,
measurements, utterances, concepts and notions, metaphors, analogies,
sorites and chreodes, etc.) and application to semantic facilitation are
a necessity for the Intersem (semantic internet) intercomprehension of
our mutual visions of reality (feeding our mirror neurons)

How far away ?

NSA and Edward have just made a big effort
toward the public awareness of this self-evidence.  We need our
individual X-Keyscore to filter the world's daily spam (information being
used to kill information, like in a brainwashing) and deliver clean
metadata to our personal PRISM, so our intellition-apps may dig into our
reality filtered show to discover the syllodata, the "links between
the lines". Doug Engelbart brought us hyperlinks, we now need
hypermeaning smartlinks digged by our own logics, not merchandized as
semantic web constructs.

It will actually help us a lot when our mails will be “AI-nnotated” by
our personal “Auxillary Intelligence” mail agent  with “AR” (ad
rem), “AH” (ad hominem), or “AP” (ad personam) mentions and indications
like the ones that you can already read, as I said, in the political
press about parliamentary debates or international relations : “the
author lobbies for this or that position, is actually influenced by the
previous mail or decision of Mr./Ms. So-and-so, is an employee of this
Group, a member of that Ministry or a Trustee of these NGOs, his/her
national interests on the matter are … etc. plus a link to his/her
[bio-meta-banking] BMB data”.

How far are we from this? I used "world spam" for the
information clutter. Because we all use for years now bayesian
probabilities to filter spam based on the text content. What we are
discussing is filtering and annotating based on the meaning. X-Keyscore
is just a prototype.

Daniel's dogs or JEDI's ?

At 17:10 10/08/2013, Daniel
Pimienta wrote:

Imagine a long road heading to a big tower of dollars, not so far away in
the perspective. Imagine a caravan named ICANN. Imagine a bunch of dogs
marked IGF which are barking between them and around the caravan. Imagine
the caravan does not care at all and keep passing towards the big
money...

We can also use the image with US government in the caravan and PRISM at
the end of the road.

This is metaphore is good and exact. However, I still prefer this
"ad personam":

At 16:00 01/12/2009, Andrew
Sullivan wrote:

Nobody is trying to make domain name labels into language (well, maybe
Jefsey's disciples are, but leave that aside), but we have to be
realistic and understand that

This "that" (the "Jefsey's disciples" in this odd
sentence of the Chair of the DNS WG), proudly kept the name as
"JEDIs" and eventually won the day for linguistic diversity,
made subsidiarity an digital architectonic principle (RFC 5895 for
IDNA2008) and got the IUCG@IETF mailing list created. No need to bark,
just disregard those who do not care about us. Let not forget that they
need us.

Nobody governs the internet, except those who want it.

jfc

At 16:24 10/08/2013, David Allen wrote:

There is a saying from the
Christian Bible, in its Old Testament:

"Don't worry about the mote in my eye, until you have dealt with the
timber in yours."

[direction of the original reversed and then rendered in current argot,
but with some King James version vocabulary ...]

First of all:  I too am aghast at the relative decline / demise, of
the IGC list.  What a waste, and a great shame.

I lend my voice, most pointedly, to see a turnaround.

But.

To imagine that the problem is with one person (the mote), is to ignore
massively the the timber also there.

Oh my goodness.

To be clear:  Just what is 'ad hominem'?  In my too-extended,
if personal and individual, travels and travails with 'discussion
spaces':  Ad hominem is entirely straightforward, not requiring
detailed enumeration.

Ad hominem - the prohibition against it - can be put most simply:
_Never_ discuss the persons discussing; never inject those persons into
the argumentation.  Always, and only, discuss ideas, their logic,
and supporting or dissenting evidence.

Ad hominem is the introduction of talk _about the people talking_.
That is proscribed.  Period.  ... and your mileage may
vary.

(Yes, sometimes it is necessary to talk about bad behavior.  Indeed,
as we are doing here.  That is a 'reserved case.'  Then space
is set aside specifically for the purpose.  Ideas are not the
subject, rather the behavior being questioned is the subject.)

To imagine that the problem, of introducing discussion of those
discussing, is the province of one person, of Parminder - to imagine that
is utterly not supported by the record.  Found hereon, in the
archives.  Massively, and most sadly.

Quite regularly, there is innuendo and outright slander.
Then.  Some / a few / one, find it necessary to respond to very many
of the list posts - seemingly to virtually all the threads.  (Though
probably that is an overstatement, borne of weariness, on seeing it
...)  The brew, of personal nastiness together with overflowing
intervention on the airwaves, creates - predictably - a toxic discussion
space.  Useful only to those spewing.  And damning the IGC
name.  Not to mention the ability to get anything done.

A 'new day' is required, to see any prospect or future.  But '_all
sides_' have to adopt that new day, with faithful adherence to the
proscription against discussing the people discussing.  That is the
only prospect for a resurrection.

To imagine that Parminder is somehow the root of this is risible.
(And disrespectful of the rest of us, who have eyes and can
see.)

Only if all the folks responsible are noted and join a new day is there
any prospect.  Even then, it would take some time for a new culture
to be trusted.

To move from the proscribed, to the prescribed - to the positive, over
the negative:  So, what is the main thrust of a quality, productive
discussion space?  It is even-handedness, in a word.  A certain
'neutrality' with respect to judgment.  So that all sides,
regardless of position, may be heard and taken account.

What is the point, in my text here?  Evenhandedness, in assessment
of the facts, of the history.

Only if there is honest and complete description of the problem - and
those who have been part of it - is there even the beginning of prospect
for a better day.

David

On Aug 9, 2013, at 9:16 AM, Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:

Parminder,

I have stopped posting on this list for a quite some time now for exactly
the reasons that Avri has mentioned. And as one of the people who were at
the origin of the creation of this very list and caucus to empower civil
society, I am extremely saddened by the way it is currently evolving and
indeed becoming irrelevant.

I nonetheless feel compelled to react to the most recent exchange. You
wrote: "Ad hominem is when one says something like "you tend
to twist people's words in order to score political
points"".

I would like to differ. "You tend to twist people's words in
order to score political points" is NOT an ad hominem attack
(see Wikipedia) because it does not use your behavior to weaken a
specific argument of yours. It is rather a judgement about your behavior,
about whether you display (or not) the necessary fairness in representing
somebody else's position.

To illustrate the point: An ad hominem attack, would be for instance:
"This person is usually lying, hence, when they (really) say A, this
must not be true". However, if someone says A and another person
says: "this person said B and therefore this person is wrong and
should be condemned", this IS twisting people's words.  In this
case, you are basically saying: Anriette did not explicitly denounce
something, therefore she supports it. This is putting words in somebody
else's mouth.

To be frank, I understand the tactic of discarding as
an ad hominem attack a judgment about your behavior to avoid having to
respond to it or ask yourself whether it is true. But it would be more
credible if you did not yourself frequently attribute ulterior motives to
other people's comments just because of their alleged political
preferences, ties to certain types of actors (for instance business),
geographical origin, lack of civil society purity, etc...

This behavior is harming the civility of discourse on this list and
actually weakening its influence in the global debate.

I always respect your expressing positions, even when I disagree
with them and engage in debates with you. But I resent
your becoming one of the main sources of ad hominem attack on this list.
There are moments when one must call a spade a spade. I wish the
co-coordinators of this list had called your attitude to accountability
earlier, for the sake of a sound debate.

This is below you. You have more to contribute.

Respectfully still.

Bertrand

On Sun, Aug 4, 2013 at 8:37 AM, parminder
<
[email-masked]> wrote:

On Friday 02 August 2013 02:39 PM, Avri Doria wrote:

On 31 Jul 2013, at 09:33, parminder wrote:

ad hominem comment

(to misquote an old IETF adage - comments made wearing asbestos -

i tried to ignore this the first time hoping it would just go away
and we could all get back to rational calm conversations)

an ad hominem attack would be an attack that: because someone is a
bully, their views are illegitimate/irrelevant.

It does not include the content of calling a bully a bully.

I am not sure I have ever heard an ad hominem attack on this
list.

Then you are not quite right in your understanding of what is ad
hominem. Literally, attack against man, it occurs when, in a discussion,
someone attacks a person's character or personal traits, instead of, and
with a view to undermine, her/ his argument.  You are making a
specious distinction above that  does not hold. In middle of a
discussion, personal attacks are almost always made - certainly in
conditions like of this list, where people otherwise have little or no
offline relationship and thus no particular reason for animosity - with a
view to undermine that person's argument.

On the other hand there is indeed some difference between just an
allegation and an ad hominem attack.

Saying something like , to stick to present case of Anriette's
email to me, 'you are twisting my words' is an allegation. (Allegations
themselves could become quite serious, like you are deceiving, lying,
cheating etc, whereby they may be tending towards ad hominem.)

, Ad hominem is when one says something like "you tend to twist
people's words in order to score political points". That is
attacking someone in terms of ones character and personal traits, and as
in this case, obviously to distract from the argument made - which in
this case what that Anriette seemed to see nothing wrong or new with the
Indonesian document, which I said was problematic to me for a CS rep on
the MAG to say, which is just my view. Nothing personal here.

For example a comment one might hear: X is a terrible bully, but
sometimes, if you can get past the bullying, X makes a lot of sense.

Another comment one might hear: I think I agree with what X is
saying, but X is such a bully I am afraid that if I put my agreement in
the wrong way I will get beat up for it.

One could also say, I agree with a lot of what CX says, but X is just
so mean.

(I have versions of all of these about certain unnamed IGC
participants)

Those you accuse of ad hominem attacks against you, are among the
greatest defenders off-list of some of the positions you represent.

Many of us disagree with you but would never dare say so on the list
for fear of starting a flame war.

Many of the rest of us just try to hunker down and wait for the storm
to pass.

BTW, it is ad hominen whether the attack on one's character is made
directly or rather more subtly. Your above statements themselves tends
towards such an ad hominem attack, and you have very often said such
things about me. And I claim you say it to undermine my arguments rather
than anything else. However, I would give you an opportunity to disprove
my claim. And I hope you will take this challenge. Please point out the
precise language in the current exchange over the last few days that you
find problematic in my emails, that is something other than a critique of
someone's views, that I have a right to make, and rather of the nature of
a personal attack. Please just give even one example. You may even go
back further to earlier emails, becuase from the above it appears you are
a very good record keeping and retrieval methods. Ok, I promise, I will
not argue with the example/ instance you provide, I wont even respond,
I  just want it to out for everyone to see,  rather that your
be subject to your insinuations.

Someone/everyone, please stop the venom.

It has rendered the IGC nearly irrelevant.

I have a different theory of what has rendered IGC irrelevant, which
I am ready to enter a discussion about.

When the IGC is discussed, pretty much the main content is the
outrageousness of a few individuals.

Certainly, I do often express strong feelings on some views - not
people, never - that I feel strongly about. (And the fact is that there
enough degree of difference in views on this list that at times one side
and at other times the other  side will feel strongly about things.)
But, never against any person as such, unlike what I am almost regularly
subjected to. Again, I am open to be given an instance to prove my
statement wrong. As for personal attacks on me, apart from Anriette's
email, even your reference above of not responding to me with the fear of
starting a flame war is such an attack, although a somewhat lighter one,
given the normal standards.

(Another thing - yes, I have a structural critique of the role and
positions of a good part of  civil society involved in IG space -
often dominant in its expression - and its support for certain power
structures, which I do often voice, which I understand may not go well
with some people. But I always voice it in a collective structural manner
and never directed at an individual, or even a set f them. This is the
view I have - and I consider it very important in the current global
circumstances -  and I cannot desist from offering when the occasion
so demands.)

The words of a few serving to delegitimize the efforts of many.

Well, that, who are 'few' and who 'many' itself needs to examined....
That is always the million dollar democratic
question!

parminder

please stop

Note to coordinators.  I would never quit IGC, but sometimes I
beleive being kicked of the list would bring great relief.

I have heard others say similar things.

And now back to hunkering down hoping the storm will pass.

avri

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--

____________________

Bertrand de La Chapelle

Internet & Jurisdiction Project Director, International Diplomatic
Academy
(
www.internetjurisdiction.net)

Member, ICANN Board of Directors

Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32

"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes"
Antoine de Saint Exupéry

("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting
humans")

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---

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:07:13 +0200

Dear Anriette, Bertrand, Daniel, Norbert, and Garth,

This thread has become very interesting and "pre-fundamental".
This mail tries to synthetize our various inputs into a coherent
evaluation/proposition. Sorry for it to make a long mail, but this is due
to your different valuable contributions and their articulation.

At
12:31 14/08/2013, Bertrand de La Chapelle wrote:

Boy, do I like a good controversy: it is the only way to have all
sides of an issue, to think deeply, to be forced to reevaluate your own
assumptions and prejudices, to potentially reframe a debate (as we are
doing here) and move towards a solution. This is what Parliaments were
established for: light through debate.

Also for voted upon decisions. And before that, to votes on the
way to vote decisions.

The IGC
Charter says:

The mission of the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) is to provide a
forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of civil
society contributions in Internet governance processes. The caucus
intends to provide an open and effective forum for civil society to share
opinion, policy options and expertise on Internet governance issues, and
to provide a mechanism for coordination of advocacy to enhance the
utilization and influence of Civil Society (CS) and the IGC in relevant
policy processes.

It also says:

The mission of the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) is to provide a
forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for
representation of civil society contributions in Internet
governance processes. The caucus intends to provide an open and
effective forum for civil society to share opinion, policy options and
expertise on Internet governance issues, and to provide a mechanism
for coordination of advocacy to enhance the utilization and influence of
Civil Society (CS) and the IGC in relevant policy
processes.
From this I understand that people want to talk in a forum about the
way to proceed with Enhanced Cooperations, and that the role of the IGC
is to provide such a forum, i.e. a mutual help point of entry into the
IGF for civil society members in order to enhance the cooperation as
regards what it may bring to the Internet utilization process.

ICANN is
complex machinery and still a laboratory of multi-stakeholder governance.
Issues like the risk of capture(s) by one constituency or another, the
tension between a corporate vs. a regulatory role, or how to ensure the
defense of the global public interest, just to name a few, are necessary,
substantial debates. We need to have
them.

ICANN is also a complicated enhanced cooperation machinery
prototype, experimenting a practical way to balance the four reference
poles of a global governance under the leading influence of a national
unballancing tutor. We needed the tutor; we have to get rid of the
unballance, but when/how?

Actually,
the launch of the new gTLD program will require a deep examination of its
impact on the structures and processes of ICANN. Whether we call it ICANN
3.0 or not does not matter. What will be needed is engagement in the
discussion that will necessarily take place in the coming
years.

The vTLD (vanity TLD) program is not coherent with the openness of
the naming space that we established in 1978 and globally consensually
agreed on in 1984 (RFC 920) by Jon Postel, the IETF documented in RFCs,
Vint Cerf confirmed in 2000, and IDNA2008 RFCs, and what ICANN pleads for
in its ICP3 policy. We all need the multinational, multilingual,
multiledger, multilayer digital name space (ML-DNS) to be stable and well
behaved.

This is why we welcome the current technical respite that we currently
have, thanks to China/i-DNs' sense of responsibilities and precaution (I
am still looking for an appropriate modern word for the greek
"philia"). However, I am afraid ICANN is not suitably taking
advantage of this period, which could come to a close in the year to come
(due to software and architectonic progress and evolutions). This is why
I fear that the "discussion that will necessarily take place in the
coming years" will turn out to be more of a cyberwar leading to an
uncertain eventual negentropy and in the meanwhile to real and possibly
economically devastating entropy.

At
14:43 14/08/2013, Daniel Pimienta wrote:

May be we should consider either create a new forum inviting many
players who are active in our field (and doing advocacy on their own) or
simply revive the existing Virtual WSIS CS Plenary Group Space
<[email-masked]> which should have been the appropriate place
for that purpose.

In the multi-stakeholder game (nothing pejorative in that word, I use it
in the mathematical sense of game theory) the other groups (governments
and private sector) have their own mechanism of coordination outside
where we are not present and this is perfectly fair. Civil society also
needs to be better coordinated in the inner circle and at this time we
lack such mechanism. In game theory the winner is the one which strategy
is unknown to the other players: we have implicitly accepted to discuss
publically our strategy here and this is not good for our chance of
pushing our consensuated visions.

My proposition and action is based on the same analysis and on the
observation of the three other groups.

1. International organizations are proceeding on the language plane.
Norbert reported it for the "Cloud", but this is true in other
domains. Their role is a global concordance for compatibility,
interoperations, and interintelligibility. The problem raised by the lack
of civil society cooperation in their normative effort is that their
vocabulary and its underlying concepts will result in a biased by
solutions pact to the detriment of use.

2. Governments are proceeding through the ITU normative forum and the
global treaty on telecommunications. With a well-organized debate,
meeting, and concluding pact.

3. The private sector also reached a paradigmatically normative pact and
an organization (named "OpenStand" -
http://open-stand.org) embodied
through RFC 6852 that associates the private stakeholders around ISOC
(network engineering), W3C (business proposition) and IEEE (computer
engineering).

4. For the time being, ICANN stays in between Governments due to its de
facto affiliation with the US Government and intergovernmental philia,
and its self-sustenance protection policy. This teaches us a lot, but we
cannot copy this model at this stage by lack of budgetary sources or in
the fear to unsettle the cyberspace.

Civil society must organize itself in taking advantage from these
experiments. This means that we must take control of a key something that
we can master with a heterarchic and fuzzy management through truly
enhanced cooperation where we will propose Govs, Intl.orgs, and Corps to
join us.

- Governments have sovereignty and power - they use treaties.

- Private sector has standards and money - they have named their
pact  “OpenStand”.

- Intl.orgs have documentation and ties - they call these “norms”.

- We have information and use - I call our capability in that are
“OpenUse” when dealing with OpenStand chairs. This is for this OpenUse
approach
(
http://openuse.org) that  I call for help after
having established an OpenUse technical liaison with the IETF through
IUCG@IETF.

At
15:22 14/08/2013, Norbert Bollow wrote:

this would be a joint NomCom of civil society as a whole: Members of all
the various civil society organizations and networks would be invited to
volunteer for the NomCom, and a reasonably sized group from among these
volunteers would be randomly selected to form the NomCom. The NomCom
would constitute itself (it particular the NomCom chair would be elected
by the randomly selected members of the NomCom). For each selection task
within the remit of the NomCom, the NomCom would publish a call for
expressions of interest and then selecting a good civil society
representative or group of representatives (the NomCom members themselves
being not eligible).

+1. A CSnomcom is just a common service that is provided to the
organization of a group. If several organizations wish - for efficiency
sake - to be represented by a unique person, this is their choice. If
this choice turns out to be beneficial, next time others will
join.

Obviously
all of the steering groups etc. of these networks must be invited to
participate in the discussions around creating a Joint Civil Society
NomCom mechanism, or other credible mechanism that could serve the same
purpose.

I however don't think that it is appropriate to restrict these
discussions only to people who are on some steering group. Therefore I'd
like to broadly circulate a call for expressions of interest for
participation in these discussions, in which everyone who is

(1) experienced as a civil society participant in Internet governance
debates, and is

(2) clearly primarily participating as a civil society person, with
reasonable independence from industry and government interests is invited
to also participate in these discussions on the basis of a simple
expression of interest.

+1. Just a remark: the term "dynamic coalition" has been
coined not to be specific to any form of coalition and organization by
individuals or groups. This should be respected as there are also other
forms of articulated relational spaces than the common steered networks
formula.

Acknowledgement: This initiative is significantly inspired by Thomas
Lowenhaupt's suggestion of a while back to create a Joint Board for
selection tasks.

The process might be as touchy as the MAG selection process... But
it could start small and grow by positive reputation.

At
16:47 14/08/2013, Anriette Esterhuysen wrote:

Response from the Indonesian representative to my question made during
the MAG meeting about this high-level ministerial event is as
follows:

I note that the proposition was a "high level leaders
meeting" and it then becomes a “high level ministerial event”.
Therefore, it means it is hosted by governments. However, the terminology
has not been adapted to a partly claimed equal footing with business
sector and civil society.

- Will
start off with statements from each of the ministers present

- This is followed by statements from leaders from business and
CS

I think it is time that we introduce a question about what a
leader is in the Internet Governance and for us to introduce the concept
of "NIL" Meetings. The NILs being the “Network influent level”.
Those who are denied to talk, and who can only do and pay.

if we want
the IGF to become more outcome oriented.. don't we want ALL outcomes from
IGF-linked processes to be reflected.. or should that apply only to
events that are formally part of the main IGF? But high-level protocol is
a powerful force, and not one that combines easily with interactive
dialogue.

If we want interactive dialog among people who are not used to it,
it is up to us to organize it and make them participate in becoming the
common information media both in documenting their conclusions and in
publicly questioning them about the points they purposely or unwittingly
ignore, challenging these conclusions with those of other stakeholders,
including ours. They talk, we broadcast, archive, document. What realy
counts is not their rules, technology, agreements and norms but our
intelligent use of them and our best purchases and practices.

This is the OpenUse attitude that I propose we all support .

Now, let me finish with mentioning what you should all keep in mind. As a
typical representative of the non-funded civil society members, I see the
IGF as split into two: the TLLMand the others. The TLLM are the T&L
level members who can be invited (or participate in IETF or ISO
meetings). I must acknowledge that I am not very interested in TLLM
participation in HLLMs (T&L level members in High-Leader Level
Meetings). The cost of the T&L to Bali in order to attend the ethics
alibi meeting would permit Free Research and Development High Competence
Level Members of civil society to significantly upgrade the cyberspace
(may I just remind everyone that today’s Internet cyberspace has some
analogy with the deck of the SST(itanic)).

At
00:20 15/08/2013, Garth Graham wrote:

On the one hand, the stewards of the uses of ICTs for community
development recognized that WSIS would (as it did) fail to grasp the
nature of how societies and their technologies co-evolve.  They
stayed away from WSIS.

On the other hand, the agencies that saw community networking as a means
to the end of human rights, rather than an end in itself, trampled the
stewards of community use into the dust as they stampeded towards the
WSIS trough of resources.  In large part, WSIS killed GCNP.

I believe the nature of digital economy and society is revealed most
strongly through the emergent patterns of community online and daily life
online.  That means the best way to evolve the Internet Governance
Ecosystem remains local, not global.  It means the conscious neglect
of the experience of the stewards of the uses of ICTs for community
development inherent in those two examples was a mistake.

Those stewards have not gone away.  Every increase in bandwidth,
every decrease in bandwidth cost, every effort to locate control of
Internet access in the hands of community, increases their interstitial
strength and numbers.  They are the early adopters of the phase
change in governance we are now experiencing, away from closed systems of
control and towards open complex adaptive systems that learn.  Some
nation states, particularly those that recognize the importance of
digital inclusion, acknowledge their existence better than others.
But they are clearly not players who are active in our field, if that
field or space is defined as civil society.

This analysis sounds perfect to me, except on my one key point: what the
French word “concertation” or the old Greek word “philia” imply: may be
the portmanteau “coopetition” in English. This is the key of our
complex world: we are bound together, so if something is truly
good/bad for one it is holistically good/bad for all, all the way to the
whole universe (this is what a fractal universe means).

Nothing new under the sun: we know what it implies. “Man is by nature a
social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not
accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is
something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the
common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore
does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ” (Aristotle).
The 19th century mistake led to our paying for creating the sole
financial profit dedicated “Homo economicus”.

This societality also means that our human decision margin in order to
influence complexity is slim.  Therefore, our
current time’s job is neither to choose between the tide of the
technological innovation and the wind of the societal evolution nor to
decide on a route for others, but to provide shipping (States,
Corporations, Organizations, and people in a people centered society)
with navigational help permitting one to go where one wants – otherwise,
we will all sinkin the cybertempest. Among these tools there are the
WSIS, IGF, RFCs, best practices, dynamic coalitions, enhanced
cooperations, multistakeholderism, e-sovereignty, e-empowerments,
Internet architecture, etc.etc.  All of these comprise the digital
architectonic area.

I believe
that there has been a total breakdown of public trust in the structural
capacity of a triumvirate of government, business and civil society to
sustain a social contract.

Correct, in the cyberspace, at the speed we are going, we need a cyber
code, radars, adequate charts and referent frames, navigational aids,
etc. and mutual respect and civil friendship from others. This is like in
a car or on an airplane.

Changing
the concept of organization to self-organization will scale fractally
towards planetary responses that are sensible to anyone at any level,
without the need for the creation of monolithic and therefore very
dangerous global institutions

Garth, this is exactly what the WSIS did and what we should do. But we
read it first with our old glasses. Like the IETF did, and still partly
does with some RFCs. The RFC does not change, nor does the source code,
but the architectural or even architectonical perspective adapts.
We want to conduct fractality instead of influencing it. This is the
error. We want to rule the internet, instead of reaping the best
advantage from it. This cannot work: this is a layer violation. Too many
unordered parameters and interlinks. We have to learn.

The problem with self-organization is that if you cannot moderate it
through adequate auto-catalysis, it then becomes critical.
Self-organization criticality (SOC) means that we humans do not scale to
the new level of complexity that we have reached. Then, the world takes
over (its automatic pilot is sometimes rude, as we experimented with WWII
or how we are currently doing with the global financial crisis). In some
cases, however, we can keep control, as seen during the Cold War.

How did we make it? Probably because we learned and were precautious,
i.e. we prevented the major conflict ahead of time before having to fight
it. This is what is called counterwar.(i.e. to engage preemptive low cost
actions now, against further higher cost war – along the principle of
precaution). This is (IMHO) the plural attempts to excellence advocated
by Daniel. Defusing criticality in advance through intelligent
self-organization autocatalytic solutions (trying to adapt Ulanowicz to
the digital ecosystem, or an interesting paper of Barry McMullin

http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~alife/bmcm9901/html-multi/)

At
04:00 15/08/2013, Daniel Pimienta wrote:

You ask me which is better. I always have been reluctant to see the
development work area in terms of disjunctive alternatives; either you do
telecenter or not, either you do community work or not, either you are in
open source or not, either you are in the local or not, etc...  I
think the plurality and diversity of approaches is valid and the point is
to reach excellence in each one. The challenge is how to articulate
somehow those different approaches and here the results are often
frustrating (one of the reason is the human tendency to consider own
approach as the only valid). In spite the WSIS civil society process was
not capable to integrate all the required diversity (and you are correct
to remind us that), on my experience, it has been quite a successful
effort in terms of articulation and my frustration is that we have lost
this momentum and I wish we could regain it during times where civil
society influence has been decreasing while governments and some big
players from private sector decide our cyberfuture in a way I personally
do not feel comfortable.

Yes. I suggest we have to consider two things here:

1. the WSIS was correct in identifying 4 poles (Govs, CS, Business, and
Intl.orgs). What is wrong is our frequent replacement of Intl.orgs by the
Technical and Academic Community in our schemas. For two reasons: (1)
there are lead users, searchers, and engineers in each stakeholder
category (ARPA to start with is a governmental R&D, and OpenResearch
is Civil Society oriented) and (2) this artificially increases the power
of Govs instead of reducing it. International organizations are temper
sovereignties, sometimes for good and sometimes for the worse.

2. We are discussing the data level at the data
level. In other words, we are considering what transports and stores data
(Internet, cloud), how it is organized and how it impacts our lives.
However, we do not consider the fundamental power which is in metadata
(the data on data) and in the metaorganization of these metadata. Where
the reality, i.e. the true power, i.e. the syllodata (the data between
the data), and the way to support them is through communication. What
counts first is the way the real world actually IS, and then we can
consider how we want to complement it (architectonic) along
prefundemantal considerations, then how we will structure this complement
(architecture), then the way we can implement it (engineering), the way
we can intelligently organize our use of this complement, and then - and
only then - the open and neutral best ways that users can utilize and
enjoy the result for their development.

jfc

http://openuse.org