[Chapter-delegates] Today's Chapters meeting is a great opportunity to bring "multi-stakeholder" to ISOC itself.

[Imran Anwar]

Great points, David, and I second Joly's opinion. 

Happy to discuss in an upcoming chapter call how I can bring my cloud and IoT background to bear on the standards organizations you mention. 

We of course need to ensure royalties do not cripple the price accessibility of devices in the developing world, but it also cannot be an us against them (corporations) approach, since companies spend millions/billions in R&D which drives innovations more than just standards making does. 

Without them feeling they can profit (reasonable ranges of profit of course) they would have less incentive to invest in next generation technologies or going head to head against competition. Chapters like ours and others can surely help bring/maintain that balance.

Keep up the great work, colleagues. 

Regards,

I.

http://imran.pk
http://imran.tv



> On Aug 4, 2016, at 03:31, Dave Burstein <daveb at dslprime.com> wrote:
> 
> All 
> 
> In April, a remarkable board discussion made it clear that top down decisionmaking was not appropriate at ISOC. 
> 
> Board member Walid Al-Saqaf said the Chapters' Committee "will get whatever you need."  Several other board members have said similar, publicly and privately. There was no public disagreement, either at the meeting or afterward on the mailing list. 
> 
> The change to a more bottoms-up, chapter and member approach isn't happening. Of course it's difficult for a staff that's made all the decisions to share power; some of the problem may just be inertia. 
> 
> We seem to have rough consensus on two essentially modest proposals.  We can, and should, resolve any remaining issues and advance them today.  They have both been extensively discussed in April and since. 
> 
> Let's make these happen, ASAP: 
> 
> The first is to allow our chapters to allocate 3% of our $50M budget to local actions, from paying non-profit accounting fees to local events. Reporting and financial control would be required. Even if imperfect, that would be far more effective than the current system, where the budget says, as Joly has pointed out, one-third of the money goes to administration, not program services. 
> 
> The second is to invite our experienced members to bring the Internet Society to the important standards committees where we currently have no presence.  It's great we support the IETF, but the other groups that have an impact on access need a public interest presence even more. 
> 
> We can send as many people to ITU Study Groups as we like as a sector member of ITU. The Secretary-General encouraged Kathy Brown to do that; Hamadoun wanted more involvement so the U.S. would stop beating over the head about closed meetings. (Almost none are.) ISOC could credential all of civil society if we chose and send 100 people. One study group wants to set the rules for IoT - we should be there. 
> 
> The most important group to attend if we want lower access costs is 3GPP, which makes the 3G/4G/5G rules, the most common way people are connecting today. It has no public interest presence and is only corporations. A very hot issue there is the line code choice for 5G. Royalties could be half the cost of a low end smartphone, something which should be as cheap as possible. Qualcomm, Nokia and Huawei, each smelling $B or more in royalties, and trying to win the standard. They will probably come to an agreement so that each collects and phone prices go up. Not good for poor people.
> 
> We also should be strong at the Wi-Fi groups, including IEEE 802.11, which is an open group. I believe that Wi-Fi will be the right access for village. India, Thailand and others are building backbone fiber to tens of thousands of towns. Wi-Fi is the natural local connection. The telcos want to take as much as  half the Wi-Fi spectrum for their LAA service. I care because I want a public interest presence.
> 
> We have a cooperation agreement with CITEL, the policy group of the Americas. We could arrange similar with the African Union telecom body, etc. At minimum, the local chapter members should attend and report back to us. 
> 
> Decisions in standards effect $billions in access costs. We should be attending and making a difference.
> ------------------
> 
> There's another reason ISOC has to rely more on the chapters. We haven't adapted to the reality that 2/3rds and possibly 3/4ths of today's Internet is not America and Western Europe. 
> 
> It's wonderful that the founders of ISOC and the Internet itself, including Bob and Vint, are still active. They've earned extraordinary respect.  But it's time to incorporate people from the global South/BRICS/Group of 77 into policy and other senior positions at ISOC. Virtually every senior policy person and senior manager at ISOC comes from the U.S. and Europe, and that hasn't changed over the last decade. 
> 
> "We have to build bridges," U.S. Ambassador Verveer told me after the the Internet split at the WCIT in Dubai. Our chapters are far more diverse than our management; empowering chapters would be a good way to hear more from the global south. 
> 
>  "The Internet is for everyone" is a great slogan. I think bringing access to everyone should continue as priority, and I think most members would agree. We should put that line back on our home page. 
> 
> Dave Burstein
> 
> -- 
> Editor, Fast Net News, Net Policy News and DSL Prime
> Author with Jennie Bourne  DSL (Wiley) and Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed (Peachpit)
> _______________________________________________
> As an Internet Society Chapter Officer you are automatically subscribed
> to this list, which is regularly synchronized with the Internet Society
> Chapter Portal (AMS): https://portal.isoc.org

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/private/chapter-delegates/attachments/20160804/0a3567dd/attachment.htm>