Subject: [Internetgovtech] IAB Intergovtech initiative

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 18:24:39 +0200

Dear IUsers,

I wish to call your attention to the IAB initiative:

https://www.iab.org/mailman/listinfo/internetgovtech

Let me try to clarify the situation as it presents itself from an OpenUse
point of view.

1. There is an architectonic issue.

Architectonics is the systematization of all knowledge (Aristotle,
Kant). It concerns a new function in humankind governance.

Why? And what is this new function?

Since the Greeks and the instauration of (back then, very limited)
democracy, this governance has concerned three fundamental planes:
political and social leadership, justice and religious keeping, foreign
and military strategies. This meant the management of general, internal,
and external affairs in the natural and human context. Three archons were
assigned these tasks: the Eponymous, Basileus, and
Polemarch.

A fourth plane has emerged during the 20th century. It results from the
discovery of the digital reality and its capacity to support
artificial extensions of nature (technology), magnitude (affecting every
one of us), globalism (the entire present and future world), and
resulting complexity that we have never met before and do not scale to it
yet (*).

We need expert/responsible architarch societal "archons" (**)
to provide concerted guidance, and a technologically oriented ethic,
toward a project corresponding to a commonly accepted esthetics of our
human life in our digitally extended context. We also need an
architectonic oriented international and intersocietal concordance in
order to prevent (pre)architectural and culturally related conflicts.

2. No one is in charge of dealing with this fourth societal
steering function.

Until recently, there was the fuzzy feeling that IAB was in
charge, in being the Wise men Board of an Internet that one accepted as
the technology epitome. For many reasons the Internet is not the epitome
of technology innovation any longuer. RFC 3869 explained why technology
could not solely be designed under private sector sponsoring and called
for public and non-commercial funding. At the same time, private sponsors
resisted the government influence (e.g. Dubai, Dec/2012) that we see
exposed in the PRISM case. A new equilibrium was found: RFC 6852
OpenStand documents it along with its economic behavior (FRAND).

However, RFC 6852 only considered the Internet private sector internal
(IEEE, ISOC, IAB, IETF, W3C) issues and did not consider any
architectonic point.

- What is the digital esthetic that we are pursuing? Along which ethic of
development?

- Who is/are the referent(s)? How is technological coherence
insured?

- We can understand that OpenStand gathers the industrial stakeholders,
that ITU gathers the public stakeholders, and that the UN gathers all the
international structures, but there is a need for an OpenUse point of
view and, therefore, to reach a global consensus on  its way of
being represented.

3. ISOC’s let users "take responsibility" major step
ahead.

ISOC partly completed OpenStand yesterday in calling for OpenUse to
"Take responsibility" (for their security) so that:

- they use the openness of standards processes like the IETF to challenge
assumptions about security specifications.

- they uphold responsibility in their work, and be mindful of the damage
caused by a loss of trust.

- they secure their services, and are intolerant of insecurity in the
infrastructure on which they depend.

- they ensure that they are well informed about good practice in online
security, and act on that information.

However, this OpenUse must now be inclusively yet efficiently embodied,
accepted by its partners (OpenStand, ITU, UN), and made innovative in
terms of internet intelligent use. This is the purpose of the third level
of my RFC 6852 appeal: to permit ISOC (and its OpenStand cosignatories)
to finalize and show a unified OpenStand standardization process in front
of its other partners (Civil Society, Governments, International
organizations, other digital technologies).

jfc

(*) This scaling is often referred to as the “singularity”: some believe
it will result from an augmentation of human intelligence (Doug
Engelbart, Raymond Kurtzwell) and some others, to who I belong, observe
that it is resulting from a facilitated extension of its access, coverage
and recursion.

(**) Human relational spaces are deeply impacted by the involed changes.
This has been observed at the UN World Summit on the Information Society
and in different major occasions of the last decade. One can theorize
from this (a theory is a comment over an observation) that there is a
multistakeholderist shift from Nation-States to Society-States of the
world context. And probably from democracy (the equal citizens of a
nation) to polycracy (a multilayer network of subsidiary democracies).
This is a reality we may also observe in the Internet technology through
the importance taken by the IDNs.