[ga] parallels?
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0407/robb.php3 The practical limitations on the ability of the United States to direct the destiny of other peoples and cultures, and the cost of such ambitions, have been exposed. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt?number=3935 The practical limitations on the ability of the IETF to influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet and the delay of such ambitions to shape the world through the Internet have been exposed. Some similarities are striking: - "The IETF community wants the Internet to succeed because we believe that the existence of the Internet, and its influence on economics, communication, and education, will help us to build a better human society." - "The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of the IETF community. These concepts have little to do with the technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that we choose to create." - "The IETF has to make decisions. And in some cases, people acting on behalf of the IETF have to make decisions without consulting the entire IETF first. There are many reasons for this, including the near-impossibility of getting an informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a community of several thousand people in a short time." "Another step is to choose leaders that we trust to exercise their good judgement and do the right thing. But we're already trying to do that." Simple issues for democracy or concert. Complex ones for selected leaders? I had real difficulties understanding who are the RFC 3935 "we", since the document refers to the IETF at the third person. I therefore started from the author of the RFC 3935 as the only one of them I known for sure, also from his acknowledgment list, and I followed their endeavor to shape the world e-cultural tools (languages, scripts, countries, locales, etc.), information and documentation. I traveled the world of many cross interests, often conflicting with my own user interests: - Openness, fairness? IESG officially wrote to me "the IESG believes that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to the IETF's internal rules" - "Decentralized control, resource sharing"? Nowadays this seems to dramatically contradict with "edge-user empowerment". I long to get back to distributed control. - I never asked my telephone to be democratic, I only expect it to work. I never asked the Internet to resonate with what some may chose as core values, but to be the best technology that's possible to satisfy my edge-user needs. Anyone interested can do the same, with patience, involvement, and determination. And learn what he should do, depending on his own talents, interests and/or ethics, in order to help restoring a true decentralized (user centric) and useful (user oriented) networking for world digital ecosystem. I am interested in sharing serious and documented conclusions because I feel I uncovered a similar pattern, we also find in ICANN and in other so called "global" issues: an outdated but smart delaying reaction to the change of our world, that what we jointly learn at the WSIS and IGF might help to cure. Before only global conflicts can stop the questions, without answering them. 14,000 people died from terrorism in 2005. 20,000 in 2006. If terrorism is a dramatic communication substitute for some, I feel Internet is an emerging action field indeed, where to dramatically reduce that toll. jfc |