Meeting notice: The 00.01.18 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at 
the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the 
corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't 
recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably know where we are. 

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Proposed topic: NT, NGOs, and Democracy


As Seattle illustrated anew, one of the more far-reaching  
political developments of our lifetime has been the wholesale 
assumption/devolution of power from national governments to non- 
governmental organizations, by which I mean everybody from the 
Sierra Club to Linux to Bell Atlantic to the Internet Engineering 
Task Force.

While NGOs themselves are not new, their numbers (International 
nonprofits, groups with operations in more than one country, have 
more than quadrupled over the last ten years, to 26,000.) and 
influence seem to be growing rapidly.  Specifically, they have 
assumed control over many of the issues that define social 
goverance and that at one time were the exclusive business of 
governments.  Increasingly NGOs identify, articulate, and 
research issues and lobby for or against them in the media, the 
market,  legislatures, and the courts.  The role of the national 
political government has evolved steadily in the direction of 
sitting on the sidelines, waiting until a winner has emerged, and 
then ratifying that victory with legislation, rather like
that of a judge at a trial.  For instance, our access 
to the fruits of genetic engineering will have a lot more to do 
with the interaction of environmentalist and industrial 
organizations than any initiative likely to originate with the 
FDA. 

NT will be both affected by this interplay and contribute to it.  
One needs no Negroponte to posit that NGOs hostile to NT will 
arise and attempt to seize control of the regulatory environment 
and public opinion.  If NT does not have its own squad of 
organizations to play defense, its development will suffer.  

Paradoxically, NT will also add to the power of these 
organizations.  In general this transition probably reflects the 
declining cost of communications (and therefore of organizing and 
managing an organization, especially over national borders), and 
a general increase in per capita wealth, which pays for the 
resources required to support these organizations and their 
staffs.  (To put the same point another way, national governments 
arose at a time when governing was so expensive, relative to 
income, that the citizenry needed to pool its cost.) For better 
or worse, NT and the years leading up to NT will likely accelerate 
both factors.  

Such a shift raises difficult questions about democratic content.   
NGOs are not classically democratic institutions in that their 
elections, when they have them at all, are closed affairs with a 
limited constituency.  Even assuming they had the desire to 
expand their franchise, the practical details of doing so seem 
overwhelming given the number of these organizations and the 
difficulty of limiting an appropriate constituency.

This lack of democratic legitimacy is not a purely theoretical
matter.  NGOs frequently assail each other for being "unelected" 
(typically nonprofits on profits) or "self-selected" (profits on 
nonprofits).  This specific issue cast a huge shadow in the debate 
over who was to control domain names.  It is at present entirely 
unresolved and constitutes a fault line in the transition to an N
GO-dominated model of governance.

On the other hand, many NGOs, both profits and nonprofits, are 
highly senstive to ambient influences, not that this is 
necessarily the same thing as being democratic.  Companies are 
influenced by investors (stock prices), the dynamics of their 
market, and the state of their public relations.   Nonprofits are 
vulnerable to fluctuations in membership and donation income.  

Do these sensitivities qualify as a new form of "non-electoral 
democracy"?  Answering this question means coming up with a 
non-electoral definition of democracy.  What might that be?  Possessing 
a sensitivity to cultural opinions that scales directly with the 
population expressing those opinions?  Is that what we want?



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