The Coordination Council (CC) of NETmundial Initiative (NMI), of which I am a member, had the draft Terms of Reference (ToR) under consideration after the initial consultation for it in February.
While the original plan was the inaugural meeting to finalize the ToR would be held on March 31st, many CC members thought the community consideration and consultation period for the ToR would be too short.
One option was to cancel March 31st meeting. The CC, after an active discussion, decided to have it as a working meeting to consider ToR and other issues, and to share the views among the members. With Stanford University selected as the venue, most CC members got together there.
The working meeting at Stanford was a full-day packed with fruitful discussion, producing two documents which were immediately released:
- NETmundial Initiative Stanford Communiqué
- The draft ToR is especially released for community consideration and comments, with the deadline of the input on May 1st, 2015
It is remarkable that the Stanford Communiqué is the CC’s very first statement, which represents the CC’s position, instead of the initial thoughts by its Organizing Partners, CGI.br, ICANN and World EconomicForum (WEF). It was articulated that NMI would carry forward the cooperative spirit of NETmundial Conference, crafting a platform to catalyze the activities among all stakeholders.
You can have a look at a prototype of NETmundial Solutions Map, which is proposed as a project to NMI, but it will give you a concrete image how NMI will potentially work for advancing the Internet Governance.
I, as a CC member, do hope these will bring you a clear idea what NMI will be all about and help you to give us much clearer thoughts on how NMI should be.
The CC will work on the operational procedures, outreach and engagement, as well as the ToR with the input from the community. The inaugural meeting is now being planned in June, which will make a Grand Opening of NMI with the adopted ToR.
I’d like to encourage you to have a closer look at the document, reiterating “Why not add your voice?”
Maemura Akinori is currently the General Manager of the Internet Development Department at the Japan Network Information Center (JPNIC). He is the Chair of the APNIC Executive Council, and a member since 2000.
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