| WisdomTaskForce.org | N. Bollow |
| Internet-Draft | 2013 |
| Intended status: Informational | |
| Expires: December 25, 2016 |
Plan to Establish a Wisdom Task Force
draft-bollow-wisdomtaskforce-03
This memo calls for the creation of a new governance forum named "Wisdom Task Force" (WisdomTF). The main purpose of the WisdomTF is to facilitate consensus-seeking strategy-oriented discussions regarding governance actions that may be decided by national parliaments.
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While local and national political challenges remain important, global challenges of humanity are now increasingly recognized as being at least equally important.
These include:
The present proposal provides a practical mechanism that is designed for effectively addressing such global challenges. The fundamental idea is to enhance the existing decision-making processes of democratic parliaments by means of developing relevant information and strategy documents. The mechanism for developing these documents is inspired by how solutions to global technical challenges related to the Internet are developed in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, see http://ietf.org/), and by the practices and philosophy of the Free Software and Open Source movements.
Analogous to the name "Internet Engineering Task Force", but reflecting the different area of subject matter (policy topics as opposed to topics of technical engineering related to the Internet), the name "Wisdom Task Force", or "WisdomTF" for short, can be used by the group of people developing these information and strategy documents.
Naturally, for any policy question there are different ways in which it can be framed. Such different framings correspond to different perspectives on how the question should be addressed, and in many cases people's views on what is a reasonable answer to a question depend very much on this framing. Furthermore, there are always difficult questions in regard to how the interests and unrealized human rights of those who are disadvantaged by the status quo should be balanced relative to the interests and economic and human rights of those who benefit from the status quo. The Wisdom Task Force will not attempt to be the decision-making forum for these questions. Rather, the goal of the Wisdom Task Force is to work out policy options and supporting documentation, in order to empower national parliaments to make good, well-informed decisions on what is a reasonable balance between the various legitimate interests.
As practiced by the Internet Engineering Task Force, everyone is welcome to join the Wisdom Task Force, without any formalities whatsoever. It is a key goal to enable effective participation of all stakeholders, including interested citizens who are not subject matter experts. At the same time, it is also a key goal to structure the deliberative processes so that at least a significant percentage of subject matter consider participation a reasonably good use of their time.
One significant difference to the practices of the Internet Engineering Task Force is that in the Wisdom Task Force, all substantive work is conducted electronically via the Internet. This is important to ensure that all participants, including those who do not have the financial means to travel to in-person meetings, are able to participate fully effectively.
Furthermore, "machine translation" technologies are used to support inter-language inter-comprehension, in order to facilitate the effective participation of people who do not have strong skills in a working-group's primary language, see section Section 4.3.
Like in the Internet Engineering Task Force and in the Free Software and Open Source movements, the key success factor for work in the Wisdom Task Force is to work by means of genuine deliberative processes rather than by means of some kind of power politics.
Such deliberative processes can make use of techniques for strategy development and reasoning in complex systemic contexts by means of logic trees, as described e.g. in [Dettmer].
Even more important is that all working-groups which develop one or more documents needs good chairpersons or coordinators who facilitate the deliberative and consensus (and, where applicable) rough consensus processes. In this context, "consensus" does not mean a requirement for full and absolute agreement of every participant in the working-group. Rather, the definition of consensus which is applicable here is "absence of sustained opposition", where the only kind of opposition that matters is opposition which is sustained by means of valid and legitimate arguments. When necessary, the criteria for accepting text can be further relaxed to "rough consensus".
Similarly to how in the Free Software and Open Source movements, the power of the maintainers of software is balanced by everyone having the right to "fork" (which means to change the name of a copy of the software and then to start publicly maintaining that "forked" version of the software), in the Wisdom Task Force it is allowed and reasonably easy to "fork" a working-group and the documents which it develops.
In this way, it is possible for different substantive viewpoints to lead to competing policy recommendation documents, each of which will be published in the same way by the Wisdom Task Force, provided that a minimal threshold of interest among the so-called "sustaining members" of the Wisdom Task Force is satisfied. This rule about the minimal threshold of interest is designed to minimize the risk of damaging the reputation of the body of documents of the Wisdom Task Force as a whole, which would happen in the absence of a mechanism to prevent the publication of documents of poor quality.
Also, working-groups may develop recommendation documents that describe several possible policy choices and the respective advantages and disadvantages.
In any case, it is ultimately the responsibility of parliaments to make the hard decisions that choose between policy options.
What the Wisdom Task Force can provide is:
The Wisdom Task Force is in many ways analogous, though complementary, to how inter-governmental cooperation can also benefit from enhancement through international multistakeholder dialogue, see [ECTF].
While it may appear audacious to attempt a reform of international cooperation by means of a private initiative, this is justified by the urgent need for an effective process to develop solutions for the important global challenges. International treaty-making processes are not only too slow, but they are also not likely to succeed in developing solutions that differ significantly from the status quo of current practice.
This memo requests and recommends actions, but it does not define requirements. The use of the keywords of [RFC2119] describing requirement levels is therefore deliberately avoided.
The participants in the start-up process Section 2 should not consider themselves bound by any of the text in this memo, but rather they should feel free to reconsider and revise all of these recommendations.
The Wisdom Task Force will be initiated by means of a relatively informal process in which the draft rules as described below are tried out and potentially modified before they are formally adopted.
One possible start-up strategy is to start with just two substantive working groups on the topics "limiting greenhouse gas emissions" and "the roles of the Internet in anti-poverty strategies", together with supporting working-groups developing and maintaining the needed standing documents as well as the directives.
WisdomTF's scope of work shall be to empower national parliaments to make good, well-informed decisions on information society issues, and on global issues of any kind.
This section provides a draft set of rules that should be carefully considered and revised during the start-up process, with the goal of creating a good initial Working Directives document for WisdomTF. During the start-up process, the draft working directives are not formally in force, but when they are not not followed, the reasons for acting differently should be carefully documented, and the discrepancy between the draft working directives and actual practice should be resolved as quickly as reasonably possible. In this way, the start-up process provides an initial test of how the draft directives work in practice, and any unreasonably burdensome rules can be recognized and fixed quickly.
The fundamental values of the WisdomTF are the vision for shaping information societies for human needs [WSIS-CS] and that the human rights, as defined in the various international human rights treaties, shall be upheld and implemented in every way possible.
Evidence-based arguments on how these objectives can be best achieved shall be given precedence over more speculative arguments. WisdomTF has a number of Standing Documents providing guidance for the deliberative process; these shall be treated as incorporated by reference into these Directives.
WisdomTF Working-Groups shall seek to provide, by means of the Request For Balance documents that they publish, the best possible information input to the decision-making processes of national parliaments. The Working-Groups shall seek to collect, by means of a balanced multistakeholder process, information about needs, concerns, cause-effect relationships, and available evidence, and to process all this to the extent possible into recommendations. The Working-Groups shall particularly pay attention to any relevant proceedings at existing fora for global policy dialogue, such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for Internet governance topics. At the very least, every Working-Group should be able to reach rough consensus on recommendations of the form "Public policy regarding topic X should take into consideration the following needs and concerns... ." Ideally (but with greater difficulty of reaching rough consensus) specific proposals for laws and others kinds of public policy decisions should be developed in a form that explicitly suggests a choice of options for possible choices of the balance between conflicting legitimate interests, together with information on what is known about the advantages and disadvantages (from the public interest perspective) of the different options.
WisdomTF Working-Groups are generally free to define their own working procedures subject to the constraints that everyone without restriction must be welcome to participate as long as they participate constructively, and that disagreements must be addressed by means of consensus-seeking deliberative processes.
Unless foreseen differently in the Terms of Reference of a Working Group, or the Working-Group decides otherwise, the WisdomTF Secretariat (see Section 4.8) shall use its discretion in setting up electronic communication infrastructure for the Working-Group (see section Section 4.3 below), and in reminding participants, when this may be necessary, of the principles of professionally respectful conduct, or of international human rights law, or of the section on fundamental values in these directives (section Section 4.1), or of the Terms of Reference of the particular Working-Group.
If and only if such reminders prove ineffective, the Secretariat shall request the Committee (see Section 4.8.2) to decide an appropriate sanction which may take the form of barring specific persons from participation in WisdomTF for a specific amount of time. The Committee can decide to impose such sanctions only by consensus or rough consensus but not by majority voting.
All substantive discussion and decision-making of the Working-Groups shall be conducted exclusively via the Internet, in order to ensure fairness of participation also of people who do not have funding for international travel.
All WisdomTF Working-Groups shall seek to interact with the broader professional community for the respective governance topics by active participation in the relevant global policy fora, such as the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) for Internet governance topics.
All WG documents and draft documents shall be licensed under a Creative Commons license with a note that a link to http://wisdomtaskforce.org/ suffices as attribution. Textual components which are developed as a joint effort by WisdomTF participants using the consensus-seeking processes of WisdomTF working-groups are licensed under a simple Creative Commons Attribution license, while WisdomTF documents may also include textual components from external sources which are licensed under a more restrictive Creative Commons license. (In that case, the compound document as a whole will also be under the more restrictive Creative Commons license.)
The Secretariat shall provide WisdomTF working-groups with electronic communication infrastructure which provides functionality similar to that of a an email mailing list, but with added functionality to make use of "machine translation" technologies to support inter-language inter-comprehension, in order to facilitate the effective participation of people who do not have strong skills in a working-group's primary language.
This kind of an enhanced variants of an email mailing lists is referred to as an "e-gathering".
With the possible exception of "machine translation" technologies sourced from outside providers, the software for the "e-gathering" electronic communication infrastructure shall be publicly available for download free of charge under a license which makes it Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
All electronic communication infrastructure used in WisdomTF shall fulfill all of the following requirements:
The Secretariat shall process requests for publication of draft documents as Request For Balance documents as follows:
The Working-Group which has made the decision to publish a Request For Balance document may instruct the Secretariat to issue a Consensus Call for Overall Rough Consensus Endorsement by WisdomTF.
In this case the Secretariat shall communicate to all WisdomTF participants a request to review that Request For Balance document and communicate any objections within 90 days.
If any objections are received, the Working-Group shall review the objections and decide whether it wants to revise the Request For Balance document.
If no objections are received, or if the Working-Group otherwise decides not to revise the Request For Balance document, it may ask for a determination whether there is Overall Rough Consensus of WisdomTF. Overall Rough Consensus means that there must be rough consensus among each of the major stakeholder categories: Governments, civil society and industry. The determination of Overall Rough Consensus is made by the Committee of Sustaining Members, see Section 4.8.2 below.
If it is determined that there is overall Overall Rough Consensus, the Secretariat shall add information to this effect to the concerned Request For Balance document. Furthermore, the Secretariat shall in this case issue a press release.
This section outlines the process for the formation of new WisdomTF Working-Groups. The objective of these rules is to make it as easy as reasonably possible to create such Working-Groups as soon as there is sufficient interest, while avoiding the creation of Working-Groups that would violate WisdomTF's fundamental values (see Section 4.1) or that would not attract a sufficient number and variety of participants that output documents of high quality can be achieved.
The WisdomTF Secretariat (see Section 4.8) shall make "e-gathering" electronic communication infrastructure (see Section 4.3) available for the purpose of informal discussion of ideas for new WisdomTF Working-Groups.
The Secretariat shall use its discretion in reminding participants, when this may be necessary, of the values of WisdomTF including the principles of professionally respectful conduct and international human rights law.
If such reminders prove insufficient for achieving a reasonably pleasant working atmosphere, the Secretariat shall request the Committee (see Section 4.8.2) to decide an appropriate sanction which may take the form of barring specific persons from participation in WisdomTF for a specific amount of time. The Committee can decide to impose such sanctions only by consensus or rough consensus but not by majority voting.
After at least one month has elapsed since an idea has been initially proposed for information discussion, a WisdomTF Working-Group can be formed by three or more Sustaining Members endorsing Terms of Reference for the new Working-Group. The Terms of Reference shall specify objectives and guiding principles for the Working-Group.
The Secretariat shall verify that the Terms of Reference for the new Working-Group do not violate WisdomTF's fundamental values (see Section 4.1), and that the Terms of Reference uphold these values at least as well as any other Working-Group addressing a very similar topic area for which the required Endorsement has been received earlier or up to two days later. For any Terms of Reference document which fails this test, the corresponding Working-Group shall not be created. The purpose of this rule is to ensure that if different groups of Sustaining Members propose different frameworks to address the same problem, so that one of them is clearly better from a human rights perspective, then precedence is appropriately given to the better framework.
When it has been decided that establishment of the Working-Group is appropriate, the Secretariat shall set up the "e-gathering" communication infrastructure (see Section 4.3) and add the new Working-Group to the list of WisdomTF Working-Groups, with Active status. Furthermore, the Secretariat shall inform about the new Working-Group all registered participants including the sustaining members, as well as the general public, and all known civil society organizations with relevant expertise.
This section outlines the procedures for closing down a Working-Group. These procedures are intended to be used not only when the tasks of a Working-Group have been completed, but also if it becomes clear that progress is only possible by creating a new Working-Group on essentially the same topic but with Terms of Reference that provide more specific guidance which makes it easier to reach rough consensus.
A Working-Group has the power of making the decision to dissolve itself.
Sustaining Members which have endorsed a Working-Group can at any time withdraw their endorsement. If this causes the number of Sustaining Members which endorse a particular Working-Group to drop below three, the status of the Working-Group changes to Inactive; as long as a Working-Group has Inactive status, it cannot decide to publish Request For Balance documents. The status changes to Active again if the number of endorsing Sustaining Members again increases to three or more.
A Working-Group which has Inactive status for a continuous period of six months or more is dissolved.
As outlined in Section 4.8.5, the Secretariat will if necessary take corrective action if a Working-Groups fails to function. In such a situation, a Working-Group may be dissolved if no-one is willing to serve as chairperson.
A Secretariat for the WisdomTF shall be established with seat in Zurich, Switzerland. A host country agreement shall be established with the country of Switzerland which ensures that if the Secretariat should not act fairly and diligently according to its various responsibilities, injunctions to correct the behavior of the Secretariat can be obtained from Swiss courts of law. Any natural or legal person, internationally, without restriction, shall have standing to sue for an injunction for correction of the behavior of the Secretariat.
The WisdomTF Secretariat shall be funded, and decisions of budget and staffing of the WisdomTF Secretariat shall be made by a Committee of Sustaining Members, as described in Section 4.8.2 below. In addition, Sustaining Members have a special role in regard to Working-Group formation (see Section 4.6.2) and dissolution (see Section 4.7.2).
This section defines categories of Sustaining Membership and corresponding eligibility criteria. All Sustaining Members have equal rights in regard to the endorsement of Working-Groups (see Section 4.6.2). The categories differ only in regard to the responsibilities for funding the WisdomTF Secretariat, and in regard to representation on the Committee of Sustaining Members.
Any country which is recognized by the UN as a country may become a Country Member of the WisdomTF.
Any membership organization of which at least three members are recognized by the UN as countries may become an International Organization Member of the WisdomTF. Alternatively, any organ or other subentity of such an international organization may become an International Organization Member of the WisdomTF.
As long as WisdomTF is not funded by Country Members, it is possible that funding may be provided by organizations which thereby become Sustaining Industry Members. This process is described in detail in Section 4.8.3.
There are no Sustaining Industry Members when this mechanism is not used.
Individuals and civil society organizations will upon request be recognized as Sustaining Civil Society Members if they fulfill all of the following three conditions:
The Secretariat checks whether these conditions are satisfied.
Decisions of budget and staffing of the WisdomTF Secretariat shall be made by a Committee of Sustaining Members, as follows: From each of the four categories of Sustaining Members, up to five representatives may be delegated to the Committee, so that in total the committee consists of up to twenty persons.
When in any category of Sustaining Members there are five or less Sustaining Members in the category, they shall each be invited to delegate a person to the Committee.
When in any category of Sustaining Members there are more than five Sustaining Members, they shall attempt to agree among themselves on a way of selecting five representatives (for example by adopting a system of rotation). If they cannot agree and more than five want to be on the Committee, the Secretariat shall randomly choose, for a two-year term, five from among those who want to be on the Committee.
The Committee shall attempt to make decisions by consensus or rough consensus. If this fails, decisions regarding the Secretariat may be taken at a meeting at which decision making by majority vote is allowed, which may be convened no earlier than 16 hours after the rough consensus process has failed.
The Committee shall review any proposed changes to the WisdomTF Working Directives before publication as a Request For Balance document. It shall communicate any concerns to the Working-Group which is proposing changes to the Working Directives.
The Committee is also responsible for the determination of Overall Rough Consensus, see Section 4.5. The decision of determination of Overall Rough Consensus needs to be reached by rough consensus of the Committee; if the Committee fails to reach rough consensus, the Request For Balance document in question shall not be considered to have attained Overall Rough Consensus. This applies also to the Consensus Call in the context of changes to the WisdomTF Working Directives (see Section 4.8.4 the difference being only that that Consensus Call involves only the Sustaining Members.
Organizations which are interested in being Sustaining Industry Members shall make, for a specific number of years, a commitment that they are willing to contribute to funding the costs of the secretariat up to a specific amount.
If this commitment is actually called upon (see below), a maximal set of Sustaining Industry Members is chosen so that the yearly commitment limit of each Sustaining Industry Members is greater or equal than the budget of WisdomTF divided by the number of Sustaining Industry Members.
The Country Members as a group have the right to organize a way of funding WisdomTF which is independent of the mechanism outlined above that involves Sustaining Industry Members. In that case the commitments of the organizations interested Sustaining Industry Members are not called upon.
Unless the Country Members make use of this right, the Secretariat and the Committee shall seek to ensure adequate funding by means of one or more of the following sources of funds: Voluntary contributions, grants from foundations and/or other grant-giving institutions, calling upon the Sustaining Industry Members to each contribute an equal amount.
If there are no Sustaining Industry Members and the operations of the Secretariat have also not been adequately funded otherwise, the Secretariat shall have the authority to suspend some of its operations, according to its sole discretion.
If the Committee intends to increase the budget of the Secretariat, the Committee shall, before making the decision to do so, secure commitments that sufficient funding will be made available. Furthermore, the Committee shall regularly assess the risk of available funding potentially dropping below the level of the current budget, and appropriate contingency plans shall be made.
As long as there is neither funding from Country Members nor from Sustaining Industry Members, the founder of WisdomTF may seek funding from other sources, including from charitable foundations and/or by means of funding from a company which he owns in whole or in part, and which would thereby gain (for the duration of this sponsorship) the exclusive right to advertise on the WisdomTF website this sponsorship, together with the fact that it is the company of the founder of WisdomTF.
If a WisdomTF Working-Group proposes a new version of the Directives, the Secretariat shall organize a Consensus Call among all Sustaining Members. If and only if there is rough consensus among each category of Sustaining Members for adoption of the revised Directives (as determined by the Committee, see Section 4.8.2), the Secretariat shall put them in force by publishing a Request For Balance document that gives the details about how the new version was adopted, and requests the new version of the Directives to be followed from now on.
As ECTF Standing Documents are treated as incorporated by reference into these Directives, see Section 4.1, the same requirement for a Consensus Call among all Sustaining Members applies also any changes to the set of Standing Documents.
Country Members or International Organization Members may propose to make WisdomTF part of the UN or another existing or new treaty-based international organization. Such a proposal needs to be approved in the same way by rough consensus of all sustaining members of WisdomTF, in addition to whatever other steps may be required to create a new umbrella organization for WisdomTF.
The Secretariat shall seek to ensure an official presence at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), for example by means of a booth.
The Secretariat shall provide guidance to WisdomTF Working-Groups on how to self-organize on the basis of the principle of rough consensus decision-making.
If it is brought to the attention of the Secretariat that a WisdomTF Working-Group has, for an continuous period of three or more months, failed to self-organize or otherwise failed to make any substantive progress towards its objectives, the Secretariat shall take the following steps: First the Secretariat shall verify that this is indeed the case. If yes, the Secretariat shall solicit nominations and self-nominations from among the Working-Group members of potential chairpersons who could organize the work of the Working-Group. If at least one person is nominated, the Secretariat shall appoint a chairperson. If no-one is nominated, the Secretariat shall dissolve the Working-Group.
Working-Groups may also by means of a rough consensus decision request and empower the Secretariat to execute this process of chairperson appointment. The Secretariat shall honor such requests.
This section provides draft Terms of Reference statements for some possible WisdomTF Working-Groups (WGs).
This WG shall develop strategy and information documents that empower national parliaments to make decisions which create appropriate global incentives to avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
The WSIS Declaration of Principles, "Building the Information Society - a Global Challenge in the New Millennium" [WSIS-2003], states that "under favorable conditions", ICTs can "be a powerful instrument, increasing productivity, generating economic growth, job creation and employability and improving the quality of life of all." That is especially important in the context of economic development in the sense of empowerment to overcome poverty.
This WG shall develop strategy and information documents addressing the following questions:
This WG shall maintain the standing documents which explain the deliberative processes used in WisdomTF, including in particular logic trees and consensus and rough consensus processes.
This WG shall compare and discuss the various existing statements of Internet rights and principles (see for example the list of links on the website of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus [Links]), and publish, as a Request For Balance document, a consolidated version which provides reasonably detailed guidance on interpretation of human rights in the Internet context and on guiding principles for Internet governance to further human rights.
Rationale: The current situation with so many independently developed statements of Internet rights and principles is not very helpful in practice.
This WG shall follow up on the Workshop on Standards for Sustainable Digital Culture taking place at the 2012 IGF in Baku, see [Culture]. The WG shall publish, in the form of one or more Request For Balance documents, appropriate recommendations regarding government activities aimed at the furtherance of culture.
Rationale: As outlined in the Background Paper for that workshop, see [Bollow], this is important in regard to the human rights of artists and the general public.
This WG shall continually observe the progress of the work of WisdomTF, in particular in view of the need for progress in regard to practical realization of human rights, and discuss any suggestions for changes to the Working Directives. Whenever the WG has rough consensus that a change to the Working Directives may be desirable, the WG shall publish a Request For Balance document with revised Working Directives and an appendix that explains the rationale for the changes. This document shall not be phrased as definitely containing the new Working Directives, but rather as a request to the body of Sustaining Members of WisdomTF to adopt the proposed new Working Directives. (Adoption of such a revised Working Directives document is done by rough consensus among the Sustaining Members of WisdomTF.)
Rationale: Every organization needs to observe its own performance, and to take corrective action when necessary.
Similarly to security considerations for technical systems (see RFC 3552 [RFC3552]), governance fora and processes need to be designed for robustness against attempts of "inappropriate usage" and "denial of service". In addition, the integrity of WisdomTF work with regard to human rights needs to be safeguarded.
Clearly WisdomTF needs rules governing the interaction between participants. In the absence of appropriate rules, participation in WisdomTF cannot be expected to be effective, time-efficient and a pleasant experience.
These rules need to be designed so that bona fide well-intentioned newcomers with reasonably good communication skills will be able to quickly learn how to participate effectively, while on the other hand there need to be effective disincentives that discourage and penalize disruptive and non-constructive behavior.
It is particularly important to avoid vulnerability of WisdomTF and its working-groups to the political equivalent of what is called "denial of service" attacks in the technical realm: It must not be possible for beneficiaries of the status quo (who may fear a potential loss of power) to disrupt discussions that could lead to new forms of enhanced cooperation.
The rules of WisdomTF need to ensure that all recommendations published by its working-groups are designed to uphold the fundamental principles which are internationally recognized as human rights, and to improve as much as possible the practical ability of people everywhere to enjoy their human rights.
This memo includes no request to IANA.
This memo has been inspired significantly by postings on the mailing list of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus [IGC] from various participants, including Bertrand de La Chapelle, Avri Doria, William Drake, Anriette Esterhuysen, Andrea Glorioso, Michael Gurstein, Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, Jeremy Malcolm, Lee W McKnight, Parminder Jeet Singh, and Roland Perry. This acknowledgment of inspiration is not intended to imply that any of the named persons endorse the contents of this memo.
Endorsements will be solicited at a later stage.
Comments and other feedback of any kind regarding this Internet-Draft are requested in the form of postings to the mailing list of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus [IGC] (preferred) or in the form of personal communications to the author.