[Chapter-delegates] ISOC Elections result

[Marcin Cieslak]

Hi Alejandro,

> thanks for this frank, open statement. As the candidate who did fail to 
> respond to questions of yours, for which I apologize, I am reminded to 
> be more attentive to your needs. In my partial discharge, I do point you 
> to my very extensive responses to the Election Committee questions in 
> the candidates' blog, which encompass in principle part of your line of 
> questionning. This does not detract from having to be more responsive.

Please do not take this personally. I just wanted to answer Franck's 
question. It's not that we don't care.

> I hope and assume that you are also watching the Board's agenda for the 
> past and coming meetings. Are there any points there that cause you 
> particular concern? Are some large-scale strategic issues missing there?

How can we tackle large-scale strategic issues if we cannot agree on 
action on some incidents in real life?

I would like to propose  that we take a more bottom-top approach: let's 
have a  look at some real-life issues and see how the ISOC community can 
get involved. I think the `Sphere' project might be currently the best 
working group to discuss this.

For example, one of our chapters was involved in a very specific case of 
Internet censorship that have been raised by some communities out there. 
Is this case important to us? Or not? I am not saying what they've done 
is right or wrong, the question is are we going is this something that 
ISOC should work on? This actual case may be important to the ISOC image 
globally.

There are plenty of people out there (both technical and user 
communities) that deal with everyday policy issues on the net. And they 
are facing real issues. Take a look at what Chaos Computer Club or 
Aktion Vorratsdatenspeicherung are doing in Germany. What issues folks 
at NANOG is discussing. What are the hottest political topics at the 
IETF. I don't see it happening here with us.

To give you an example: Bob Briscoe asked on the IETF Transport Working
Group "What body is qualified to decide on Internet fairness?". This
question was going far beyond the group's charter but this issue could 
be picked up by the ISOC community.

One of the role of the Internet Society could be to tackle those issues 
and put them on a global agenda. And the reverse, we can communicate
a strategic solution back to those communities. I believe that there is
a tremendous potential in translating the tech talk to the language of 
politics (and back).

Small things we (ISOC Poland) have achieved at the local field this way:
- we are recognized as a partner in every major IT discussion, both 
coming from industry or from the government;
- we maintain strong links with all major IT organizations in the country;
- we have a strong relationship with IT companies like IBM, Sun and 
Novell forming so-called Coalition for Open Standards;
- our statements on issues like digital signature law and e-voting are 
discussed widely. In March alone we've had few interviews to nationwide 
TV and radio news channels. Sometimes even journalists are consulting 
with us questions on Internet/e-governance issues before talking to
the politicians.

And all of this is done by a really small core group working for free, 
with almost no budgetary spending. I know this is way not _that_ easy to 
do on a global level, but most of our strength is that we have a CLEARLY 
defined and focused agenda. And we have fun doing this!

If we do not monitor development of the reality out there we risk being 
irrelevant and eventually obsolete.

-- 
               << Marcin Cieslak // saper at saper.info >>


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