[NA-Discuss] Group Dynamics and Real Content

Ron Baione ron.baione at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 5 15:15:51 UTC 2015


All too often, Internet Governance and Grants are about collectig, sorting and distributing data via the media or internally within an organization, but without any real content to speak about, the IG space tends to devolve into a "what can we do with data that is collected about how many apps collect data", like a discussion about discussions rather than having something to talk about such as solving actual problems within an organization or within a space. Also too often, people are afraid yo raise their pen and ask, "What are we trying to solve here? We spend all our time organizing tools to solve problems, but no one ever identifies an actual thing to solve!". 

Group Dynamics as understood via the lens of Stanley Milgram's 65/35 ratio of participants in the experiment of an authority, teaches that real progress is made not by those within the ratio, but those outside of the ratio, who are more keen to identifying problems than "assumed authorities", interested only in maintaining power (and therefore never resolved to solving or identifying the neccessary tasks).

ICANN, IGF and the Internet Society have conferences, meetings and work groups, where anyone can read through the minutes. Ask yourself while reading through the minutes, how much time was spent identifying an actual task, problem or issue, and how much time was wasted talking about what "could or should be done to be able to make the process more efficient in the future".

More often than not, time is spent on refining the process but never using the process to solve an actual task or issu for civil society, leading to an overall group atmosphere of boring "collation". The main challenges facing the world today are oligarchy and poverty, and until intellectual challenges are made to the process by leaders in the internet space, the lack of actual problem solving will persist in that space, ironically while those tasked and paid to perform a civic duty hold all the refined and re-refined tools necessary to solve and distribute their solutions, except the most important tool of all...the courage to challenge the system that exploits the poor via ownership and manipulation of the very media internet-space leaders claim to have expertise in.

Join the Discussion:

https://www.intgovforum.org/cms/community/groups/viewdiscussion/20-group-dynamics-and-real-content?groupid=30

Ronald Baione-Doda
NY-USA
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