Multistakeholder Models: Start with the stakeholders

Considerations when creating new organizations

Taking a chance to start working out some of my ideas in this and a few future entries. It may ramble, and I may come back to fix my flubs.

If someone wanted to create a new multistakeholder organization (for some definition of multistakeholder organization): how could they go about it?

One might first ask: why would anyone want to create a new multistakeholder organization? As part of building a new organization, that would be good question to start with. The reason for wanting to build a multistakeholder organization could influence the type of multistakeholder organization that gets built and what sort of multistakeholder model it adopts. One might even say that it should have such an influence, though there may be cases when this is not necessary.

And then one might ask: why would anyone want to create a new organization that wasn’t a multistakeholder one; especially if one were creating a human centered operation that was meant to bolster a group’s inclusion, diversity, and commitment to democratic values, while pursuing its goals, its mission. My question, in these days of misunderstanding, is shouldn’t every organization be human centered while working toward its particular goals?

While in a zoom conference, I heard the following:

If it comes to the “approach” and the “principles”, it is the same. AI Governance needs a multistakeholder approach. And the IG principles, laid down in the NetMundial Declaration — openness, transparency, accountability, bottom up policy development, human centric etc. — has to be the same for AI Governance. (Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Private communication 30 Oct 23

The conversation over approach and principles is one that every new organization needs to have at an early point in its development; not only those involved in internet or AI/ML governance. In many cases, especially those that affect the lives and well being of people and their enterprises, the appropriate approach and principles will be multistakeholder in nature. There may be differences in the sets of approaches and principles, but they will often be minor, as the approaches and principles will relate to openness, inclusion, diversity, and the other components of a human centered institution. The difference, in most cases will relate more to function and goals; the same approach and principles can motivate many differ multistakeholder models.

The conversations start with the people, the ones who will form themselves into groups who believe they have a concern in the matter. Sometimes these are already gathered in some existing manner. Allowing groups to self organize from the start, can be helpful to understanding what sort of stake people are bringing, and give any organization longer term sustainability.

If there are no preexisting groups of concerned people, and if starting with a blank slate proves difficult, one can borrow one of the premier existing participant models. For example, a new organization can roughly divide itself along the Tunis Agenda grouping of stakeholder: states, business, civil society and sometimes technical community and even academics. In some cases it is a useful model, in others, it does not really work and another existing model can be used as an initial reference. In terms of picking an initial model, what may be most important is maintaining a certain level of flexibility in the evolution of stakeholder groupings. This is something that is worth building in, though reaching a proper balance point between current stability and flexibility for the future is one of those issues that needs to be addressed, and is a periodic concern for all organizations.