The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> All sessions are being live streamed and interpreted so you can watch them on the website. So we wait ‑‑ we're waiting for the signal to get started.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Once again, good afternoon. My name is Markus Kummer. I was the co‑facilitator of the coalition session together with Avri Doria who is sitting down there in the second row. Avri was also a member that's taken it on her to observe the Twitter sphere and will report back what she sees on tweets going on about this session. Let me say a few words on the Dynamic Coalition and on these sessions.
They started with the very first IGF meeting in 2006. It was then a kind of compromise between those who didn't want any intersessional activity and those who wanted to start up in working groups that would continue their work throughout the year. So the Dynamic Coalitions are several forms, self appointed and very much in a bottom‑up way.
Now the first nine years or so, they all had their own live in the margins of the IGF. Last year for the first time, we got together and said it would be time to give them center stage and to show the broader community what they had done and achieved and also to get feedback from the broader community. We continue with calls and also preparing some common principles and all coalitions would abide to. That would be open archives and open lists and be open to membership and those that would agree to make opinions public. And this session we thought it would be tedious if we allow each Dynamic Coalition to read out a report. They have prepared a report and all the reports are on the IGF website and I encourage you all to look at them and to read them. There's a lot of substantive work that has gone on. But we thought in order to make it a little bit more dynamic, we would ask a moderator to be a kind of provocateur to engage in the dialogue with the coalitions and also we hope to have a dialogue with an interactive session with all participants.
Before going into this session, I would like to invite our host country chair.
>> I think this is working. I hope so. Anyway, welcome to our little workshop on Civil Society Experiences from the INS transition process. And ‑‑ there are people behind it on the middle. Martin Sylvia and on the right. I hope they get this pre‑fixed. Anyway, we can't wait. Okay.
>> Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. So we're talking about civil societies and the focus is on the CCIG, but the broad topic is the IANA transition. A lot of people have been here and heard people like Larry Strickland telling us the transition was the most successful of the multi‑stakeholder approach we've seen today and I think that's probably true. I can't think of any other. I had a bit fortune to work on the transition about six months before turning over to civil society engagement and witnessed the work that was done and it's extremely impressive. I think the community should be proud of what they're done. It's been interesting that there's been positive comments and very little negativity, which again is something that's a good thing for us. Am I being over enthusiastic? It is a very good example.
The engagement and achievement and there hasn't been a great deal of criticism of the outcome. I think that what we'd like to hear today is both from you about the successes. The work that you did and the work is continuing. That is what I understand the session is going to be about. So we're going to begin. Unfortunately, Robin is not feeling very well today and Robin Gross cannot make the session. We will talk about the key issues of civil society during the transition debates.
And to fill in on the beginning, we'd like to hear some comments on civil society's concerns and positions on issues of transparency and accountability as they were discussed as they appeared in the final recommendations and then ongoing from there. And I wonder if Milton Mueller and Mr. Badii would like to make some comments on set of two issues. Accountability and then transparency.
>> Meetings, everybody. I just learned about five minutes ago that I'm going to do it. But accountability or answerability as some people might say are ‑‑ is one of the major problems with ICANN. It was noticed early on in its history. The issue at the very formation of ICANN is what keeps this organization accountable. Originally the idea was that the board would ‑‑ the organization would have members. Those members like half the board and then the supporting organizations would appoint half the board through their own internal processes. As we all think, the initial board stayed in place for almost three years and there was that they're probably starting around 8 or 9. There was a crisis of accountant as we went into the new detailed program. And the issue was always if we can't go into the U.S. government to complain about ICANN, who can we go to? And there is still a very progressive people to this day who fear the fact that ICANN has been cut loose from this high level form of external accountability. So, the accountability process went through a really interesting and highly legalistic process. So deciding how to replace ICANN at ‑‑ replace the U.S. government oversight. Not to replace ICANN. Nobody wants to do that. So, with respect to the I‑‑ most people were concerned and what became clearer and clearer as we went along in the process was that most people were really concerned about the accountability of the policy making process. Not so much IANA per se. And that is where we got really complicated. We had to work within the framework of California law and typically civil society members were pushing for stronger accountability mechanisms such as membership that could remove board members or spill the entire board.
Eventually we ended up with this hybrid. I don't want to go too much into detail about California law, but we have something called an empowered community, which consists of representatives of the advisory committees and supporting organizations. And if enough of these ACs and SOs decide to do something, then they really have some formal authority under the bilaws to fire the board, reverse a decision, remove board members and so on. Now, in addition to this empowered community accountability, you have two forms of accountability.
One is the independent review process in which you can appeal decisions as being inconsistent with the bilaws and we're still in the process of implementing the IRP and there are some issues with that that I will probably bring up later. And there is the ‑‑ I lost my train of thought. The fact that the board cannot change the bilaws now without approval of the community. Particularly a set of special bilaws called the fundamental bilaws so that in the past, there were instances.
For example, when ICANN lost an independent review appeal, the board quickly changed the rules of what it takes to win a review appeal and that can no longer happen. That's a very important form of reform. So that's a quick overview of the accountability reforms. Do you want me to explain more about how civil society related to other interest groups or is that enough? Is that all you want at this group?
>> I think generally if we can keep it 3 to 4 speakers. But if you want to say more about how civil society was particularly involved, if there was any particular aspect of that that you thought was pertinent to civil societies either interest or even successes in driving something through those recommend anticipations and change.
>> Well, I think civil society was a critical part of the separation of PTI from ICANN. We wanted something a bit more strong in terms of the structural separation, but we did get some form of separation. Civil society had some important role in the transparency procedures, which I think Farzaneh will talk about. We had a big debate within the concept of the empowered community about the role of the GAC, the role of governments in that. I think civil society was concerned about ‑‑ whether GAC had privileged powers and tried very hard to limit those powers. Again, as with PTI, we reached a middle ground which was acceptable, but not particularly wonderful for all parties involved.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: One of the things we'll try and do is leave question and answer for the end. Unless there's is some massively urgent clarifying comment or question as we're going forward, then we'll leave questions and answers for the time 15, or 20 minutes. Alan has one. Yes?
>> ALAN GREENBERG: Not all of civil society was union formed. I have lots parts of civil sort and we didn't agree with everything Milton was saying was a civil society position. So ‑‑
>> MILTON MUELLER: What a surprise.
>> ALAN GREENBERG: Not at all. Just saying.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Farzaneh?
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: So I was involved briefly with a transparency efforts. Accountability working group and the work stream. One there was in this major problem with ICANN document disclosure policy that they had these broad criteria that they could just reject document disclosure requests. So what we tried to do, we tried to look at these criteria and bring reason why these criteria should change and kind of make it more open for the community to ask for certain documents that are not published. So this was a good effort we actually achieved. On work stream, we work on those criteria and those other things to make ICANN more transparent. And also as to the transparency of the ‑‑ for example, for GAC and the board and some of the deliberation of the board, it was pressed upon that at the time of their deliberations should be transparent and open also GAC discussions should also be open and transparent. That's about it.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: So. Thank you. One of the things that are going to be melt. Can I see people familiar with ICANN because they're members of committees and board members and so on and so forth. But a couple of things we will be mentions like work stream 1 and work stream 2.
Work stream one with the accountability mechanisms ‑‑ enhancing it will deem necessary to be in place committed to so that the transition could go ahead. So all of those have been completed or committed to and that is when we're talking about work stream 1. Work stream 2 were the issues that we felt had to be put in place but could be worked upon after the transition.
So work stream 2 issues are ongoing now and we have issues around diversity and ICANN support and then supporting organization and other volunteer participation accountability staff accountable, transparency which Farzaneh just mentioned, human rights issues which we'll discuss, jurisdiction, the ICANN and working on some other bylaw issues. This work that was implemented was part of the transition, but it is work ongoing. It is back to you. The next part of the agenda is to talk about ‑‑ the next part of the agenda is to talk about community and responsibility.
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Yeah. Sure. I'm going to be ever have brief here. Well, there's a lot to say, but we have nine speakers on this panel. So as to the stuff accountable, we have a group that's working on stuff ICANN stuff accountable. And there isn't behind working on stuff accountability because staff is in charge of kind of ‑‑ well, most of the time coming up with the reports and also implementing the recommendations of the community and writing down. For example, that was Robin. Can we just tell her to come here? Yes. And so ‑‑ and for example, if staff can advise the community on the process and that advice is not correct, well, I think staff members should be accountable for such actions. So that's what ‑‑ that's the reason behind it. That's why we have the staff accountability to see how we can actually have staff accountable to the community. And we also worked ‑‑ we are working on recommendation for enhancing supporting organizations and advisory accountable. We discussed this a lot, to whom they're accountable to their stakeholder groups that are designated communities that are indicated in the bilaws. And, ah, for what they are accountable, we are having ‑‑ so it's about representation and so an AC and also NLAC should not be captured. They're capturing mechanisms for preventing capture and these are things that we are now discussing and how to enhance the accountability of. I have to say that these mechanisms already exist in ACs. They just have to be enhanced. Thank you.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. It is trying to apply some of the standards into the organizations that are developing policy. Is that one of the things?
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Not all the criteria. They're diverging. Some argue that we are in the communities and cultures. And the same thing that you do and the ones that are going to get elected. So we cannot have the exact same standards. That's what we're discussing. Yeah.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: We're jumping around the agenda a bit. Not physically, but ‑‑ anyway, the next discussion we're thinking about is we empower and talk about service societies and interest and concerns about the new roles of government that have been brought into place through the accountability ‑‑ through the recommendations and implementation of the new bilaws. Further, I know you began to touch on that in your previous comments, but if you can expand on civil societies views and take into account Alan's point on governments.
>> ALAN GREENBERG: There was a distinctive society and people at large with advisory committee that tended to support more power for advisory committees oddly enough. So, there was a big debate about the GAC. And ICANN status as a non‑governmental form of governance is very unique and many people have always been concerned about governments inserting themselves taking over. Whereas at the same time, governments have given advice that the board didn't always follow. And there have always been tensions caused by the fact that we put governments in a room by themselves at ICANN meetings. They developed their own ideas about what the policy should be. In the mean time, the rest of the community is over here developing policy and at the end, the policy goes to the board from the GNSO and then the GAC gives them advice and you enter into negotiations between the board and the GAC. And there can be a lot of conflict over that process. Now, one of the key issues was the GAC operational rules which means when they give advice, what are the requirements for it to be considered advice formally advice under the bilaws because if it is considered advice, that means that the board has to enter into a negotiation process with the GAC and even though it can ultimately reject that advice, it has to go through a long process and it is pressured by the bilaws to come to a reconciliation with the GAC position. The GAC has a lot ever last minute hold up power over the policy making process. The reform process wanted to make sure the GAC had informal advice if it had complete consensus among its members. No member of the GAC, no state anywhere in the world would object to the advice. As long as there was one objection and the GAC could not be forming that advice. At least a fraction of the GAC didn't like this requirement at all and fought very hard against it. To cut a long story short, there was a bargain at the end where they said in order to overturn GAC advice, it would make a little higher thresh hold. You have one more vote on the board; however, GAC must offer advice through formal consensus making process. Is it a member of the community at all? Or should ask be outside of that community offering advice. They wanted to be a voting member of the empowered community, but they also wanted a special role of offering advice under the bilaws and civil society members at least in the non‑commercial stakeholder group were very much against this and wanted them to make a choice. Either you're just another stakeholder group and your advice has no more authority than anybody else's or you have and advice powers, but you're not a member of the empowered community. The compromise that was reached here is they did become a part of the empower the community. Many of us are still uncomfortable with that. We think that if there is fights over censorship or rights that governments might have trouble supporting the community. ‑‑
>> ROBIN GROSS: Hi. My name is Robin Gross. Some of the reasons why we had to create these accountability reforms. So, a couple of years ago when we heard there was to be ‑‑ there may be a transition, pretty much everyone in the ICANN community joined together and said there can be no IANA transition wait accountability. And right now, ICANN lacks accountability and we need to do some fixes in that department before we can have an IANA transition. Really this was an unprecendented movement because all of the stakeholder groups, everyone from the governments to civil society to business, to the contracted partners, we're pretty much all on the same page. It was diverse stakeholders that agreed that we need accountability reforms before there can be any IANA transition. Any U.S. government seem to agree with the community and said that ICANN had to listen to the community and undertake some of these reforms before there can be the IANA transition.
So some of the problems that led to this feeling routine violations of ICANN's bilaws, robberies with issues top down policies that contradicted and superseded the up developed policies, concern about empire building within the large government space for example here in the IGF, concerns about mission create, very keen on getting ICANN and involved and enforcement and expansion on intellectual property rights. They were not supervising the staff and reconsideration requests for board decisions were routinely denied. So there was a lot of concern about what were some of the problems with respect to ICANN accountability that needed to be fixed before we could have an IANA transition.
So one of the major reforms was the creation of this empowered community which is all these different stakeholders come together and basically are granted new rights over the board and to oversight of the organization. So the empowered community was created basically as a check on the ICANN board and staff. And some of the rights that were granted to the empowered community were things like the right to recall board members, which is pretty typical in a traditional non for profit organization. We had a reason to appoint board members, but we didn't have a right to recall them. So that was one of the major reforms. Another had to do with the empowered community having oversight on the budget and the strategic plan that ICANN put forward. And another important reform was having the independent review panel process or the IRP as it is called being more effective and accessible to the community with respect to non‑compliance of some of these ICANN policies and bilaws. So the empowered community, creation of that concept was a major reform platform and glued a number of these. Of course, one of the major reforms also had to do with increasing transparency at ICANN because the concern was that how can ICANN be accountable to the community if the community doesn't know what is happening, what is going on. We needed more transparency. And so we had reforms. Some of these reforms, particularly the transparency reforms are still in play, they're still being worked out in work stream 2.
So there is still opportunity to get engaged and to join in some of the working groups and work on some of transparency reforms. Reforming the disclosure policy, which is coming to the information act where you can get access to documents and information that led to the decisions that were being made. More transparency with respect to board deliberations really trying to create a culture of transparency at ICANN, turning that around. We need more transparency with respect to discussions with governments and the lobbying that goes on. And we need a more improvements with respect to ICANN's whistle blowing policy. So these are some of the transparency reforms that are currently underway. This work is not at all complete. So there's still a lot of opportunity to get involved in the next couple of months and get engaged with some of these transparency reforms in what we're calling work stream 2 at ICANN. Thank you.
>> Thank you. Hello. We got I think Robin's called for help is particularly important. The thing about work stream two we have a set of discrete issues that people can get involved with. You can see around the room that many people are involved with ICANN, but the issues are complex and there are many. If you're working on some of them, it takes an enormous amount of time and a great range of knowledge. What we're look think at is some of the work stream 2erns that really call for expertise that are quite specific topics. An expert who understands transparency and bringing transparency to organizations and our next speaker at then, Niels is going to talk about human rights. I knowledge that's also a very good example of the type of specific expertise and knowledge that can be brought into this process and calling to people at the IGF to get involved and help people like Niels who is most definitely an expert. So thank you. Continue.
>> NIELS TEN OEVER: Thank you. Before starting monologue issues, I will ask stuff from you, people. So you're going to get active. I would like you all to raise your hands right now. Raise your hands everyone in the audience. You can take your hand down if you do not know the meaning of an acronym. GAC, PTI, CCWG, WS2, NCUC, ALAC, IANA, SO, AC. So everyone who has their hands up is not about you.
[Laughter]
[APPLAUSE]
Who are the people that did not have their hands up. Can they now put their hands up now? So you're the audience.
[Laughter]
>> MARKUS KUMMER: I bet most people don't know what the current definition of PTI is. Only the old one.
>> NIELS TEN OEVER: Let's not dive into the connoisseurs meeting taste. We have ICANN meeting. I think we're here to show people how to engage and especially civil society in this process. ICANN is not only relevant because of the domain name system because actually that's a relatively small part.
But another reason to have a close look at ICANN is that it somehow developed model for the multi‑stakeholder model. So it's also interesting for people from governance or people who are interested in deliberative democracy and things like that. So try also looking at that through that lense. And also try to understand how all these acronyms are prohibiting other people from participation. Right? It is what anthropology call our goal, which is a language that shows who is in and who is out. Right? Soy if we really want to make this a credible instrument and a way of doing governance, ask what is the ‑‑ is that we should make it really accessible for everyone, not only the experts. Because last ICANN meeting I realized it was the first time I did not feel a complete outsider anymore. After two years of participating and that both frightens me and made me happy at the same time. You know? You can understand. So a bit over a year ago, one and a half years ago, we asked the chairman of the board Dr. Steve Crocker what he thought about ICANN and human rights. And he replied that human rights were all fine and good, but he had no idea what it had to do with ICANN. And here we are one and a half years later, we have a commitment to human rights and ICANN's core values. So that is an example of how things ‑‑ when you swim through the sea of everything can get done. Well, can get done a bit. Because the commitment to human rights which manage to get in ICANN's bilaws is kind of a bracketed bilaw or a sleeping bilaw that will only become active once a framework of interpretation has been developed. And that is what we're currently working on in work stream 2.
So again the work streams, work stream 1 was everything that happened up to the transition. Work stream 2 is everything that happens after. And that is actually exactly a risk because there is the risk of work stream 2 becoming the graveyard of the potential of the IANA transition.
So, let's make sure that all the things to be said that we should do during work stream 1 that we would do during work stream 2 that we really get that done.
Now, for the human rights work, we're making some good progress. The first draft of the framework of interpretation, we've reached agreement on that consensus in a sub‑group. And we're now going to discuss it in the plenary of the cross community working group on enhancing ICANN's accountability and then the next part of our work will be how do we go forward? What will a framework of implementation look like? And we have things to look at examples that have been made, how other parts of the internet are doing so, but it is really pioneering work. We still haven't really worked out in detail how non‑state actors and insure they respect human rights, but multi‑steak holders and governance like ICANN are also still very strange beasts for that concept. So, if you want to join, it is a very interesting challenge and you can make a change and you will learn a lot. So, if you want, you can join the traveling circus.
>> I'm not sure what we are in all of this.
>> NIELS TEN OEVER: Lots of plans.
>> Thank you. I think so, Niels, is that a success or a failure of ICANN process so far? That's the next subject really is successes and failures of where we are in civil societies view. It sounds like you're saying that from 18 months ago, there was a major barrier and now we've at least moving ahead, the circus.
>> NIELS TEN OEVER: The circus always continues. That's the thing. Declaring success is something you should leave to historians because we're still so close to where we are, but I think what we have achieved and agreement and a language within the community to make progress. And so I've maybe been a bit disingenuous and I talked about all the language and abbreviations. Maybe this language is exactly what we need to Connect people from very Technical Communities, diplomatic communities, civil society communities. We share different backgrounds, different knowledge and different languages and sometimes to reach agreements, you need to invent new words and new concepts in a negotiation to make a step ahead. So that is exactly what we're doing and whether that actually works remains to be seen. But I'm very hopeful.
>> Thank you because the next part we will have two speakers. Excuse me. Bhavana, who's been one of the organizers of this session, will talk about a point of view as a newcomer. I think you joined into the CCWG work account as someone who is new to ICANN and got very much involved in your organization producing a lot of good work. So that's one point of view and new barriers from a new comers perspective. And we'll talk about expert adviser to the accountability working group barriers, successes, challenges and all of those things. So I think if we can have those two things of points of view with 4 or 5 minutes each, that would be an interesting way to move forward with this.
>> BHAVANA: So we have been following this process especially CCWG accountability process over the last couple of years, you know, with participating as well as the cause in the mailing list. This is very fascinating study of multi‑stakeholder. You tend to read about, but this was very real world case that you were a part of on a day‑to‑day basis. You could understand the way the different stakeholders are coming together presenting the viewless, the differences in opinions, the similarities in opinions across stakeholder groups. So we recently came out of the report where we studied in the stakeholder and IG forum including ICANN, but we plan to extend this accountability as well. This is an extremely interesting example to look at how even see the diversity that existed within a stakeholder group as was mentioned a while ago.
The IANA transition was a huge draw for newcomers. It was something that drew the attention of the world and brought in a lot of new fresh blood to the table. So I would like to take a couple of moments to talk about what it was like as a newcomer to participate in the process. When I joined, I jumped right in the middle of the second public amend process that is going on accountability. So it takes months to be able to camp up to where the discussion is at. And something that I thought could ‑‑ you have to do all the reading and you have to go through the mailing list and the call transcripts, but one thing I thought would help is what some groups do at ICANN is that they have monthly updates of discussions that took place. They have summaries and that is something that definitely could help not just newcomers, but people following the process closely. We tried to do that with block posts that summarize the things, but what is come work scream and one becomes complicated in work stream with many sub‑groups. They have one or two calls a week.
Another barrier is not only does the catch up take a lot of time, but the continue time commitment that is required, which is a huge barrier to anyone wanting to join the process. But I really don't see a way around that. I think that is something worth considering. I think that I noticed was that a lot of discussions tend to evolve around a few people. It is the same few people who are talking about multiple issues.
While that does bring in an element of stability and continuity, it becomes difficult for someone new who is trying to join the process. One thing that does happen that you learn over time is that a way to break into this would be through your stakeholder groups and through your constituencies. So, working through the NCSU to raise your concerns and having that been that CCWG accountability is an example. But that is something that newcomers would take a while. Being on a CCWG call with that and you're between 60 and 100 people and you're trying to raise an intervention or raise a point can be overwhelming for quite a while for the initial few months that you're on it. Overall, that has been an extremely fascinating process and it remains to be (inaudible) which has a lot more extremely important issues that have been discussed. So that's all from me for now. Thank you.
>> ADAM PEAKE: The issue of newcomers you have heard is somebody will make a point and it will generally be ignored and one of the more experienced members will make the same point and everybody responds. That sounds like being a man as well, but there you go. If you see what I mean by that, I'm sorry. So yeah. If you would like to ‑‑ okay.
>> Thanks, Adam. I was indeed ‑‑ I don't know what I was in this process. I think I was called an adviser. I was an adviser in the process, but I think I was called in because I was a researcher on civil society in global governance. And in a sense, I was the same as Artie. I'm making observations of a similar kind to some extent. I was asked by the organizers to emphasize the limits to participation. So I bought this qualified ‑‑ I'm going to follow my orders. But if I wasn't given those orders, I would have done all these marvelous things because I do think it's been an incredible experience and being incredibly creative, but I've been asked to emphasize the lack of complete openness. So we have 5 points along those lines. I think we're using it to mean the non‑commercial users constituency plus ALAC. They have bigger constituencies and bigger associations as opposed to firms themselves as being part of civil society. And technical associations would be part of that. The term civil society I've witnessed in the two years to quite heated debates about whether the civil society some be used in ICANN at all.
So anyway, put that as a background. But on these limitations, I observed civil society in general to be some what on the sidelines when it came to crucial junk turns. Yes on the mailing lists and yes on the meeting hours and all that. But relative to business, technical and government communities, it was relatively second and at the crucial moments, the discussions that were outside the room that were in the corridors that were in the back rooms, I was ‑‑ and at those moments, civil society wasn't there in terms of the things you see. So I think that it is good to be aware of where you weren't as well as where you ‑‑
>> You can identify those moments?
>> Well, a lot of it would be in terms of being ‑‑ one ‑‑ well, let's say there were calls that board and so on would make. Sometimes it came to us as advisers and there was no civil sort involved with the calls that were not public. I don't think I should go into more detail.
Let's just say there were occasions and meetings and calls. No matter how much is on transcripts, a lot of stuff still happens on the phone behind the scenes. I think that's ‑‑ when it gets really crucial and tough. And then deals are done behind the scenes and presented in the open forum and everyone rallies around. This is politics. It's real politics. I wouldn't romanticize the multi‑stakeholder arrangement. There's a lot of exciting things. And the other political process that I've observed, but it is a political process and so people are trying to reach goals and people have diverse power positions and they will use those power positions when it comes down to it. Anyway, I would say maybe a limited scope and a second limit.
The limited scope of civil society. I think by civil society, we're talking about NGO's and research institutes and in particular social movements were not involved in these processes. So civil society is formally organized, professionally staffed. That's the civil society that was in the IANA transition and a wider civil society which would probably regarded characterization of the process as being rather curious. Those social movements at the bottom of society would say it was top down in a curious way. But anyway, people's definition are relative. Depends on where you are looking from. A limitation is mentioned sometimes. Access, resources, it is such high barriers to entry. Archie and I have been fortunate enough to be able to get into this process. Why? Because ‑‑ well, we have to be very quick in learning technicalities and so on and so forth.
Niels said it is after two years you can finally put the sentences together. You need considerable funding. You need a lot of money to be able to do this. And really the remote participation is definitely secondary. Definitely secondary. All those discussions in the corridors, you can never do that when you are remote. You really need high English fluency. The Native speakers don't realize or non‑native speakers are struggling to follow and all the humor and everything else that comes in is quite difficult there. A lot of cultural codes about dress, public speaking, mailing lists, chapters. You have to know how to do it. It's a global tribe that's moving around. You have to know how the global tribe works and most people find that quite difficult.
And then the social capital being recognized as a member of the group. I walked in the first week and who are you. I think there is some match. You become part of the gang and that's great, but it is only then you become to have some part of civil society. Once you are a little bit honest about that, I think it is some bigger structural hierarchies, geo political. You look around those IANA transition discussion rooms and the civil society that was participating too. A little bit from India which Artie is an example. But as a whole in north American and European, very little civil society participation from other parts of the world from no participation from the local areas. Those are big parts there that are not there. You name it. The civil society it reflects and reproduces the structure hierarchies of society at large and there is nothing different. There is nothing different here. I'm not saying it is horrible. You recognize it.
>> What is your ‑‑ so why are you ‑‑ so what are your expectations based on? Are you comparing ICANN to kind of like an international organization or like a government? These expectations are just too high for I think such an organization.
>> They're not expectations. They're observations. The observation would be that you go to a civil forum. You would fine different varieties. The social complexion, the cultural complexion, the range of argumentation would be different than what you find here. I was quite struck. Don't know if it in the opening session someone from IT for Change who made a talk and I'm endorsing the talk, but they talked about the ‑‑ things like the despotism of an identified world and a digital capitalism and it's a consumptive predatory Internet. I'm not saying that I necessarily endorse it, but it really showed where the limits of the discussion of civil society insiders would be. And that kind of discussion would be outside. That's just an observation. It is not an endorsement or otherwise. Sorry. I have gone on too long.
>> Very interesting. We come towards questions and answers and comments, it would be interesting to know if people have answers to these problems. Do we have ways to do it better? But that's not where we're at in the agenda at the moment. We would like Matthew Shears to come in and then we'll run on to some thoughts on strategies for the future and we'll have ‑‑ Matt will talk a little bit to introduce those talks and then we'll have Alan Greenberg will talk about civil society's thoughts for how to go forward in this. Marilia Marciel will do the same thing and at the end of the table, we'll do the same.
What should civil society do as a strategy both within this process, but perhaps thinking about some of the questions. Comments, I know you heard them, but if you have a response to those and then we can perhaps have questions and comments from everybody else. But Matt, over to you, please.
>> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank you for taking it to another level of interesting. That was very good. I will come back to the comments you made in a minute.
So a bit like Niels, I came into this process at the time when the transition was announced working for CDT and doing into that governance. It was decided in the organization that this was probably the most important Internet Governance issue that we would face for this period of time. And therefore, we should be involved. Coming in, I had none of this background or understanding of the stakeholders and things you get from being in ICANN for a period of time. It was an interesting loading experience. What I did have was a general understanding and experience on the Internet governance space as a whole. That was a significant let go when it came to understanding the ICANN environment.
So, if you're already in this space, not necessarily in ICANN, it makes it a whole lot easier. The point that YAN is making about how representative and how much diversity there was in civil society or for that matter across the stakeholders says a whole, I think we have to be very careful about how we look at that because at the end of the day, the ICANN ‑‑ what ICANN does and the space that ICANN sits in and its role and therefore, the stakeholders engage in it and it is necessarily limited. I think we have to be careful about how we look and compares ourselves to. So what did we get out of this?
If you come to this set, I think we're here at this session yesterday evening on ICANN post transition. And there was a whole series of ‑‑ I asked much the same question as do what were the success factors. There were a couple of pages of them and I think that from a civil society perspective, there were some important learnings that people touched upon so far. And I'm going to exaggerate them a little bit.
So for my civil society, colleagues don't jump all over me. I think what the IANA process did is it showed us the absolute value of having a common goal across the stakeholders. We find ourselves that odds as stakeholders within ICANN and having this common goal was imposed from outside of ICANN and then further elaborated on buying our own communities was incredibly valuable. It forced us to be cooperative. It forced us to compromise. It forced us to sit with individuals from other stakeholders groups. And all of those things within the framing of the ICANN work in the IANA process really helped bring another level of awareness to how we can work together on issues constructively. It also encouraged us to be flexible but still firm. YAN might have some of background discussions, but I think we have to be careful that we don't attribute some special magic dust process to multi‑stakeholderism and multi‑stakeholder models and working groups.
At the end of the day, what we're talking about is group dynamics amongst a group of stakeholders that are often at odds with each other and are seeking power of some sort or the other. So to think there wouldn't be back room deals going on is naive. That's just the way the group dynamics work. We have to be careful in that sense in terms of understanding. These things aren't special to ICANN or CCWGs. This is just the way we work at human beings and social entities. So I think the big learnings from my perspective is how important it was to sit down with other stakeholders and how important it was to reach across the aisle and get up at that white board or that flip board during the times when we were doing the stress tests and talk through the various options that work for PTI. We worked from completely different directions.
I came into this discussion with a clear idea I wanted to see a completely separated IANA function. It didn't work out that way, but I think at the end of the day, as soon as we were going to get with the parties in the interests that were around the table. I think that's at the end of the day what prevailed that sense of common purpose. I think unfortunately that sense of common purpose can quickly dissipate and I will come to that in a minute. So a couple of thoughts. What do we need to be careful of or what can we built on going forward? There is things that came out of the IANA transition work that have been touched upon already continue to bedevil civil society. These are issues we need to think about quite strongly and think about the future. We have a participation challenge. We still have a participant challenge and civil society as a whole. But again, we have to balance that against the resources that are available, the space that we're in, which is a small very small detailed defined space that not many people want to operate in the first place. We need a little bit of a real right check there. We also have a core versus periphery.
I think there is always the four people doing all the work. Well, that's absolutely true, but again, that's a group dynamic thing. But that same challenge that we found in ICANN, we find in civil society in ICANN more broadly. Again, we need to think about how we address that going forward. It has not gone away. It is still there. It is more a function of group dynamics and again, something for us to address as we go forward. The learning coming out of the IANA working groups that was we can actually get over that. We can actually co‑chair and Niels has only been in ICANN for two years, but he's co‑chairing. So in many ways, chairing. This can happen. So you can get beyond the three or four people of the core.
The difficulties we face I think are not so much about resources or funding. People will take me to task on this. It's not so much about the language. But it's about the expertise that you can bring to the table because that is where the difficulty lies. There is a huge amount of ICANN in all that goes on across the different policy development processees, across the whole scope of the organization,et. That expertise is something you only get by being in this space for a considerable period of time and that's a reality. So bringing people up to speed is great. There is still a limitation. We have to do with that as a civil society. Couple other things. Accountability.
Accountability is a key issue that we've dealt, vis‑a‑vis ICANN. We're now dealing in work stream 2 vis‑a‑vis supporting the organizations and the advisory committees, but we also need to deal with it ourselves. This is another issue that we can't duck and we need to continue to work at it. And then finally, again I will come back to one thing I think is really important. We work together across stakeholders. The moment and now this is my personal experience. The moment that transition occurred, we have seen a folding back into our stakeholders silos. Interest and concerns that were there before had bubbled to the surface again.
One we're thinking about how do we change the bilaws and the different parts of the community to reflect that ICANN's new bilaws are already seeing these things come back to the surface? So my ‑‑ certainly I would urge this community to think how do we keep that common purpose alive when we're looking at the future? How do we continue to work with stakeholders and work constructively, compromise about we need to, make sure it's across the board compromise and I think we can find ways for it. So I hope that set us up for a next part of the conversation. Thanks.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Matt. Yes. Let's move ahead. Alan, would you like to think about strategies for the future and how we're responding to the accountability development.
>> ALAN GREENBERG: I will talk a little bit about our experience in the process first because the answer to your question directly follows from it. You can see from the little interaction of Milton and I in the beginning, we were not in lockstep with civil society on many of the issues. On many others, we were very much in agreement, but there certainly were some strong differences. We ended up in a position where I think we were pretty well satisfied with most of what we ended up with.
In some cases, it was a hard time getting there, but certainly we're moderately satisfied. How we did it I think is perhaps a lesson in going forward. We had a pretty good commitment of people working on both the CWG Stewardship and the CCWG accountability. Between 5 and 7 people heavily committed to it in terms of either being members or being very active participants. And, you know, despite YONG's comment from all regions, we had a lot of very active participation from Africa, for instance, which was relatively uncommon in the grouping as a whole. We worked as a team. Although, we often disagreed with each other on specific points and if you listen to the various people talking, you'd see that. But overall, those differences were also discussed outside of the actual meetings. We did ‑‑ we had coordination meetings that rival the number of hours that the CCWG and CCNG held. That was not only coordination meetings of the people involved in the group, but a much wider community.
So when we went into a meeting, we could speak with some assurance and we were talking about what at large, not just the person who was speaking felt. Occasionally, there were differences. That prep work, I think, helped a lot because it allowed us to look at the various options and try to understand what we really wanted to achieve and at the same time what we could live with. And in almost every junction point, we outlined both of those. So sure. We will push for this, but we can live with something else. And those changed over the period of time as the things that the particularly the CCWG we're looking at varied and the mods we looked at very heavily over time. We had moving targets on both what we wanted to achieve, what we thought we might be able to sell and what we could live with. And I think going into it with that kind of prep work allowed us to both speak with some what unified voice, occasionally not, but usually. I think that help ‑‑ that's one of the things that helped us move forward. At the same time, we did lots of back room corridor discussions with other people and tried to find common ground both with other parts of civil society, with other parts of the ICANN community overall to make sure that what we were talking about was something that was going to be sellable. There was no we were going to get what we wanted to the exclusion of everything else. And I think that overall methodology that we used then is a good model for moving forward and how do we do it and we're containing that on the work stream to as well. Thank you.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Marilia, would you like to follow up on that.
>> MARILIA MARCIEL: This is Marilia speaking. I was asked to talk about lessons learned and with so many experts in the room, maybe it would be more useful if I try to draw a conclusion to multi‑stakeholder processors. One is IANA transition and the second one is the Net Mundial meeting. It is interesting because I am sure most of you are familiar with it, but it was a meeting organized in 2014 by Brazil. After the Snowdden revelations, the meeting was intense and it turned a very bad environment it was fractured and fragmentation and into something positive. It created the environment for a positive multi‑stakeholder collective response to a challenge. So I think that some lessons can be drawn if we compare the true processes, but the first point is the need for us to document the IANA transition and I say that because after Net Mundial, one of case study was ‑‑ it is not a document you can find on a website. You try to document a process like this and you 93 to go to the drafting and documents and negotiation positions so much valuable material is exchanged through e‑mails, for instance. Not so public and (inaudible) public but you need to know what you're looking forward to find an e‑mail in the pile of e‑mails that get exchanged in this list. So it is very hard for someone who is not deeply involved in the process to be able to document.
So one of the things that I urge is for us to document this process because I am sure that it will be extremely valuable when another one similar to this one comes up and we can talk about the lessons that we learn in a very concrete and vented manner. I think what both process have in common is they show it was possible to produce a concrete multi‑stakeholder outcome. For those of us that are in the Internet Governance, we know that this was (inaudible). Many people said that spaces that are multi‑stakeholder like TIGF are too diverse to produce something that was meaningful. I think that the IANA transition showed it was possible for the community to work together and so did Net Mundial. Going back to a few lessons we extracted and tried to bring them here to the table. The first one is that trust is key to the process to work. Net Mundial helped it to draft the outcome document. It seems that trust was very much placed in the process itself. The multi‑stakeholder dialogue that happened in the transition was very much structured. The parameters for the transition were a very clearly put forth by NTIA. We knew what we had to do for the transition to be approved. We knew which were the red light and this was something very important and there were also key rules of engagement. If you wanted to payment, you knew exactly what to do to be part of one of these committees. Building trust into the process is something very important if you can align thrust into the process and trust into the people and even better.
The second lesson from Net Mundial is the committees were an important way to engage to give this bottom‑up nature to the outcomes that were produced. It's very important to reach out to the grass roots levels of each constituency and the fact that the composition of these groups are reflected and it is very important. In Net Mundial, we had the transition coordination group. We had the CWG accountability. The fact we expressed the diversity of the community into this working groups is a very important as well. The third one would be specialization of tasks and the assistant of assistance of experts. The topics are so diverse that you cannot just expect to understand everything. If you go into accountant discussions, the person that gets very specialized in what is going on in human rights will probably not be the same one that gets specialized on transparency. So we need people that are really digging deep and we need to bring many times external experts to the process. That's what we did in Net Mundial. There were organizations that specialize in human rights.
We have here in the IANA transition organizations Article 19 and others that got involved in the process and when we specialize and put name tags into the boxes that we are discussing, it becomes visible as well that we're talking about human rights. It would not be clear for them what they're going to do in the IANA transition. But because we said there's a human rights discussion, then they show the process and found their box and became evolved. So this specialization is important as well. The importance of on site participation and on line participation is something that ICANN does very well. I do take the point that many times if you don't attend the meetings, you lose the corridor dynamics. Most of the decisions or the outcomes were the final line because people were not seeing each other. They were spread across the globe. The moments in where the discussions moved forward were during the calls. So it helps to leverage the few for those that cannot real attend the meetings face to face and that was a very good thing.
Another thing that I think that we need to document it somehow is that U.S. dynamics after we had the proposal. Other actors from across the globe when the transition started to be an issue in the U.S. congress, we just lost the capacity to participate and I think the organizations in the U.S. did a very good job in following up the discussion in the congress and what they did on the national level is very important to document and to take into consideration as well. So let's document the process while we can and while it is fresh in our memories. Thank you very much.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: A couple of PHD topics. Milton, you can get a few of those together. Study the transition and create a doctor. Klaus, please, if you make some observations.
>> KLAUS STOLL: Let's go back to the circus. The circus took 2 and a half here's and put together the best possible program. We've all proud of it. It's a wonderful program. But yes. We worked together. And it worked. But what about our audience? I think we have to look at in the future if we have to do two things. We have to actually let the world know that I can exist at ‑‑ these processes exist and not be a circus which tip toes, the elephants tip toe into town in the miss of the night and lines have taken a vow of silence. We have to become more vocal in governance and what we're actually doing. So the second part is quite simply I think we forgot one fundament basics is what we are doing and what we are trying to do is secure and stable. This is a product. But I think the value proposal, which is a DNS is over the last so many years is now getting lost more and more to the people who actually are using it. The reasons for that is simple things like social media, but there's also privacy and security and things like that. We have to work on reestablishing the proposal of the DNS.
The second point as you might have noticed, the second thing is that yes. We have in our circus the jugglers. We have the people who train animals. We have people who play the band. And once we constructed our wonderful program we worked together, but now we all come back to doing our own thing and forgot own that our product and our show is ten times better when we actually have an elephant ‑‑ a line riding an elephant and have some music on top of it. We have to do that to learn and get the culture to work together and not just trying to find all the compromise by talking things out, but also to think about and work on learning and incorporating by doing it. I think the outcomes are much better if we're trying to work on the win‑win situations and look at just simply what is the lowest possible common terminated.
The last one I changed this morning because I mentioned it before and, Farzaneh, correct me. We have to free the slaves. One simple society we're really in a situation where you all mentioned it in one way or another. We are ‑‑ all the people we are dealing with are financed in one way or another. Matthew is right when he says you need a long, long time. If you're not age to do that, you need to ‑‑ I can't develop that expertise and knowledge and in depth and equality and widespread of opinions. So what we have to do as a civil society look now also how we actually can get ourselves in a more fair financial footing and get these things going. I think there are models and ways. It's just now the time after the transition to seriously look and say hey, how can we deal with it? So I know this has been said before, but I thought it would be repeating. Hail to the traveling circus. After we once said, the Internet has that curious urge to travel and I think she's a wonderful sentence.
>> ADAM PEAKE: She is right. We do send to travel a lot. Thank you very much. We got two people asking for the floor. So first of all over here and then the gentleman here. I think I stole the mobile mic. So I'll start walking around.
>> Thank you, Adam. Sorry. I was a member of the, some CUC constituency some time ago. That was ‑‑ sorry? We're not active now. I once was active and a representative. I just wanted to get back to the observations made by Yan Aarti. The first question was: What were the expectations and what was he comparing to? And he's right to say those observations, but if you want to frame it in terms of expectations, I will say the words that we use, the words that we use there are expectations embedded in them. When you say we are a civil society and someone shows that there are a lot of serious movements that are not reflected in your civil society, then the sales why not. Why we are observing all those civil society components that are outside and they are not reflected here. So I think it's related to the question to be raised. And I think it was Matthew who at the end said the interpretation we have is the availability of expertise. But yes. That's true.
But the expertise, you (inaudible) that a lot of people are trying to attend these meetings and trying to keep up with the date of work that is going on. But because it is in English, they don't raise the same pace as you. And they won't get that expertise as quickly as you. So that's a problem and it was not that long ago that all the ICANN documents were exclusively produced in English. That was not long ago. And even now, they are producing multi‑languages most of the time if not all the time. Those are the final documents that I translated in those multiple languages.
So there's a lot of work that has ‑‑ that is involved in getting to those final documents. How do you want to get people from different corners of the world speaking not being that comfortable in English as you to contribute expertise. If they're not contributing because they're looking expertise, but is they don't have the language to convey, on their insides and maybe the expert ease they've got ‑‑ expertise they're got. I want to improve those challenges. Thank you.
>> So my name is ‑‑ I am based in the Canada. I will just make a quick comment on the participation issue. It's my first ‑‑ it is by first IGF meeting and I suspect most of the critiques that were made about participation and I haven't seen it in practice, but my gut feeling is they're correct, but I am sympathetic to your question. How do you compare is because the of the multi‑stakeholder forums and I am here instead of the OGP in Paris that was timed at the same time, another big meeting. I think that this one is a lot better that we're having this discussion at all. I was surprised to see that you can register as a newbie and get assistance or whatever. One criticism that has an implicit recommendation, many have ‑‑ there are far too many speakers and time limits which were not enforced leading to the result that there was less than 10 minutes for audience participation and questions, which is not only a pass participatory failure, but an efficiency challenge because I presume there's a lot of expertise around the room that could have engaged better.
In terms of transparency, it is an area which my organization is highly specialized in. Although I haven't been involved in it at all, my colleague Michael Conia, a colus, has been quite engaged in this. I don't know exactly. I am desperately e‑mailing him trying to get the update, but I think there were some working this area. I would point to some headways and end up with one recommendation. Many people have said that this is an odd looking beast. It's not NGO. It's not an IGO. It is a multi‑stakeholder governance entity used to describe it. But I think that's a challenge in terms of looking for mods and the kinds of places you're going to look NGOs and IGOs have very poor track record is on transparency and transparency policies. So please don't look to those constituencies. And the policy comes out and is a robust world leading one that I think there's a real opportunity within this form, within ICANN to set and storm globally. So some head wind, it took us the open community 10 years of sort of heavy battling with the international financial institutions to shift them because they had started out in the wrong way. If you do that, it's going to take 10 years to move from that too. I learned from that experience. There will be a lot of opposition. There will be a lot of players. There always are a lot of players that are resistant to openness especially the kind of radical moves of openness that are now becoming common place at the national level due to technologies and just changing values around information.
And then finally in terms of my recommendation, I think it's probably an area where civil society whatever exactly that is, but quite a few of the stakeholders can probably come together and form a strong lobby. It's an area where we find it is very easy to unite stakeholders who are more outside of the process and governments and power brokers inside of the process are resistant to that. I think bringing together the study really strongly to fight hard for top level transparency is a very important goal.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: You are right about the timing. I apologize for that. We have a remote question. Yes. Thank you. If you can go to that. The remote question and then I have Matt and Farzaneh and the gentleman here. If you read the remote, that would be great.
>> Okay. We have a remote participation from ‑‑ I'm sorry for the pronunciation. Hello, everyone. Apologies for not being there in person. I will start with a big thank you for all the participants and speakers sharing their insights. This is an engaging discussion that's brought out engaging discussions and insights. It is inherit the diverse nature and rather fragmented views are challenges to working any stakeholder model. My question: Where did you experience observe the most during the IANA transition? Examples of substantive issues. I am giving this ‑‑ I'm sorry. I'm giving the continuing opportunity with work stream to how can this challenge be addressed in the future from a procedural perspective? A related point of discussion is consensus of building aligning point of view for civil sort actors. If yes, then how best can we achieve this? My question is open to anyone wishing to share their perspective on this, but I would love to hear professor shut and professor (inaudible) on your thoughts.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: I think we're out of time to answer the question and we have it on record. Can I ask the people who have spoken. There's a gentleman here who hasn't spoken. I don't recognize you. So somebody who might be new to ICANN, if you would like to make a comment, observation or question, then ‑‑
>> Ask the question?
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Yeah. It may be difficult to answer.
>> ALEC: Thank you. My name is Alec. Internet freedom advocate and former member of parliament in Iran. It's vice chair. I have two questions. I understand that previous CEO of ICANN testified in congress about the proposal and later on, I think in September 2016 and the new CEO testified again in congress about this proposal. I would like to get an update from the position of congress because it should be approved there, I think, the proposal.
And the second question, my second question, you know, after the election, U.S. election because this proposal and activity happening around Obama Administration. What is your analysis that will happen later on in the new administration, the position of the new U.S. administration in that regard. Thank you very much.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Just very quickly on that is that the translation has occurred. So the United States government no longer has its previous role. It has stepped back and has ended. So the congress has no particular role as of now. And it would be what happens in the future happens in the future, but there is ‑‑ there are positions on this. So I will probably try to find them and share them with you. Thank you. We have to close the session. Thank you very much. The remote moderator. Thank you to the speakers and everybody else. So you can close. Thank you very much.
Workshop ended at 4:32 p.m. CST.