[Chapter-delegates] Application to form a Chapter in Gauteng

[Alan Levin]

Dear Gabriel (and others),

Thanks for your reply.

On 22 Aug 2013, at 2:24 PM, Gabriel Latjor NDow <md at gambian.com> wrote:
> No, if you read my rationale for the support, you will see that I am more concern with the geographic and population size. I argued that if in the USA one can create several ISOC chapters (San Fran, NY, DC, etc...) for better impact, then why not in African countries like SA whose geographic and population size is huge? The same applies to Nigeria and some other countries.


I do recognise that in the USA it was important to have different ISOC chapters. I believe that in South Africa different chapters will end up undermining each other. I believe we do need to have different autonomous geographic working groups and we have had success with this in the past. 

When I started working in the chapter in 1999 I started the Cape Town working group. We have always had active members from Joburg and Cape Town, it's only since we gained competition in telecoms in 2007 that we saw dissipated energy from the active Joburg (and Cape Town) members. 

IMHO our biggest challenge is representing end users in national policy making activities. Whether those are from National Government, the regulator, the cctld manager or others, they all need a considered position from end users. In my experience only ISOC-ZA has managed to do this. We have a mature industry association (or two) but no other (Internet) consumer organisation like ISOC-ZA. I personally believe that one voice from the users of South Africa carries more weight than ISOC-ZA and ISOC-Gauteng, although I do love the energy and I stand to be corrected, maybe competition will result in better quality of responses and more involvement. 

As far as I know there is only one ISOC in China, I have had them here for a visit a couple of years ago, they have a good model and a population bigger than South Africa. I know there are many other countries bigger than Nigeria with one or less chapter, so I'm not sure population has anything to do with splitting the chapter. 

Sincerely


Alan