Jeanette Hofmann wrote:

Civil Society, I think, cannot fairly be described as a "Euro/academic construct". It has played a major role throughout the WSIS process and is now an emportant element in the Internet Governance Forum or the preparation of the OECD Ministerial on the Future of the Internet.

I led a 22-person accredited delegation that attended WSIS in Geneva's dreary Palexpo. I can attest that any activity by civil society there that genuinely represented the needs and interests of the At-Large public (to use the ICANN context) was purely accidental. At least that's how it was from our point of view(1). (We ultimately chose not to attend phase 2 in Tunis -- we determined the process to be pointless and irrelevant. The civil society presence that we encountered did not strike me as serving the interests of any public interest that mattered to us at the time.) Civil society plays an important role in ICT policymaking -- however, it just isn't at all the same as OUR role as At-Large. In At-Large, ICANN has taken the bold step of soliciting a point of view that has been traditionally (and in my opinion deliberately) ignored by governments, business and indeed civil society too. It's up to us to live up to that vision. - Evan (1) -- see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wsis/Leibovitch.html