Re: [atlarge-discuss] comments welcome [Joey breaks his silence] - Part 1

[Joey Borda **star*walker** <starwalker@gay.com>]

Jefsey (et al):

I have had to purposely delay my response to your post. I have also stopped 
reading any further posts on your subject to the list till after I have 
formulated mine own response. I have wished not to be influenced by anyone 
else's responses before doing so.

[I have also had to deal with my computer going down and having to be 
repaired. That was timely, wasn't it?! ;-)]

Even with my delay, which was intended to give me some "distance" in my 
perspective to your post, mere words still cannot express the degree to 
which I am so very impressed with it. The best that I can say -- intending 
to honor you -- is Merci !

While it is true the best early Americans were inventive, creative and 
steadfast at inventing democracy "American style," the French as well 
quickly followed suit giving it their unique branding. And in your post, I 
see that the tradition continues.

In my experience there is nothing so difficult as to see things in new 
ways, to engage in the struggle to see them, and then to hold one's own 
fears of the "unknown" at bay in order to try something new and untried in 
the service of a larger vision which is nearly universally beyond the sight 
of one's contemporaries. I typically refer to this phenomenon as "thinking 
outside the box."

Jefsey, I feel us very much being kindred spirits. I have from my earliest 
entry into politics (6th grade in elementary school) always looked to the 
universal expansion of practical, practiced democracy for all. Till now, 
New England Town Meetings have been my model. You are helping me to see a 
similar, newer model, it's workability, and it's worldwide practicality and 
applicability. Again -- Merci.

Now to specific comments I may have, if any.

At 09:21 PM 8/19/2002 +0200, J-F C. (Jefsey)  Morfin wrote:

> Dear Folks,
> YJ Park has proposed a conference call among the Panel members. I plan not 
> to participate into this conference call and I wish to get the comments of 
> the Members on my reasons.
>
> I wish to underline first this is ABSOLUTELY NOT an opposition within the 
> panel, and I fully support thetarget of YJ. This is a fundamental decision 
> of mine we have discussed with YJ (as you may note she quotes a mail of 
> mine about our prooed working organization).
I applaud your independence, courage and integrity in taking and holding to 
your position. It is in the very spirit that has brought us so successfully 
this far, and must be consistently asserted by every one of us.

Principled opposition is as VITAL to all we do as is principled agreement.

> My rationale is based on personal principal of transparency and 
> efficiency, on a vision of our action and on a pragmatic approach of our 
> real world.
>
> 1/ I have experienced many times the way a conference call is easily 
> manipulated (I did it and I was manipulated). It mostly serves to endorse 
> predecided positions. You cannot make people who do not know each other, 
> who speak different languages, with different ages, training, visions to 
> understand, analyse and decide what they cannot understand, analyse and 
> decide by mail in ten days. I have experienced the way Marilyn Cade and 
> Philip Sheppard use CCs, and I think it is one of the main manipulation 
> tool of ICANN.
My experience has been similar to yours. Worse yet, my experiences in 
public board meetings, as a member of a board and simply as a citizen 
witness, have been the same!

> This is why I was a candidate to the BoD to stop that practice and to "go 
> Estonian", ie to develop an email based decision making system transparent 
> to all and benefitting from everyones inputs (like th Gov of Estonia does 
> for the Cabinet Minister meetings). Why would I support here a principle I 
> fought there?
But of course, you are doing the "right" thing, the "righteous" thing.

> We all know the mechanic: the one who has to contribute needs time, cannot 
> be understood one shot and therefore is made to stop permitting the others 
> to adopt what was prepared. YJ suffered this enough at the NC. This is the 
> main reason of the inability of the NC to produce anything as Danny, 
> Joanna, Eric and many here shown it at the WG-Review chaired by YJ.
Yes, one is always subjected to the bogus "pressures of time" assertion, as 
though what weighed in the balance was the commutation of a death sentence 
to life imprisonment at just one minute before the scheduled execution.

> Conference Calls are centralized network oriented. They are efficient in a 
> hierachy or a two people meeting (two hierarchies) with their staff 
> (discussing a contract). I tend to think that we can only be efficient in 
> an Internet world in using appropriate Internet tools.
Intuitively this makes SENSE. The Internet is what our genesis and 
immediate tasks are about! If it is NOT more efficient then we are all 
truly misguided.

If it IS then we are obliged to every idea and effort to make it work. 
Otherwise what is to be the practical consequence, application and end 
product of all we do here?!

> I therefore proposed Vittorio - who has PHP skills - to develop a voting 
> panel where each question could be displayed, discussed and where 
> panelists would have a place to vote. In public. To document this kind of 
> approach I set-up a wiki for our organization you will find at 
> http://icannatlarge.org
This "wiki" approach is, as our U.K. members and friends would say, BRILLIANT!

I am wondering how "wiki" is related to the word "wikium," which is a 
Native American word, at the least, meaning dwelling, and possibly meeting 
place?

> 2/ This kind of Conference Call and agenda (that YJ made pretty 
> well)  looks to me too much as an NC annouced agenda not to get see that 
> it corresponds to this centralized organization I do not approve. That I 
> oppose in the case of the Internet crowd support.
I have insufficient experience, information and understanding to comment here.

> I created france@large one year and half ago. I have a mailing list there. 
> And I know how tough it is to try to motivate people on governance 
> matters. The idea of the meetup came: we are the leading city and may be 
> the first meet-up next week.  This is a unique case. This is also a unique 
> experience and I try to build on it.
Indeed it is hard to motivate people regarding governance matters in 
general, not just related specific issues.

Even related to specific issues of short or occasional duration it is my 
experience that I am always competing with people's never-ending thirst for 
entertainment and penchant "thoughtlessness" or desire for 
non-contemplative "empty-headedness!"

In very misguided conviction they are entirely happy not to be responsible 
for their "place" in the world, from the micro to the macro, the largest 
part of that happy distraction marketed and provided to and for them by the 
oligarchy pulling their and our strings in this alleged "democracy."

I found I was always competing with whatever the popular TV hits of the day 
were for people's attention and care, not to mention the rather natural and 
understandable "I'm home now from work, and nobody or no thing is going to 
drag me out of it for anything!" inertia that most of us suffer with.

That reduced so many of my efforts to "putting on a show" to gain entry to 
people's "entertainment" considerations.

It seems to Jefsey (et al) that the ideas you discuss here in your post 
would amount to a major assault on this complacency, with real chance for 
succeeding in waking ordinary people up, however slowly, to what is going 
on in their worlds, and allowing them to say, "Hey, wait a minute, I have 
something to say about this (or that or another thing)!"

It is in this very same way that what we have been doing so far is a major 
assault on the very gates of oligarchic power and puts us and our efforts 
at "risk."

The best "insurance" of our eventual success is the approach you are 
documenting in your post, as far as I see it, "radicalizing" people 
everywhere to become interested once again in what they ought to be able to 
see are their own interests, their own CITIZENSHIP!

They have got to wake up from their hypnotically induced sleep to realize 
and appreciate the folly in letting corporations and rich pirates 
underwrite and control "their" elections, "their" representatives in 
government and the rest of government apparatus. They have to appreciate 
that in fact they ARE paying for all those things anyway, at premium 
prices, through their tax money being paid as benefit to those very same 
corporations and rich pirates through the Global Corporate Welfare system.

[Continued in Part 2]


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For an understanding of my name change see
http://www.starwalker.org/My_Story.htm]
/s/ Joey :)
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