In practiceBring the system into view
LARUS Foundation — You use the internet. You should be able to question its rules.
LARUS Foundation helps people understand how the internet works and take part in the discussions that shape it. Learning to ask your own questions is where meaningful participation begins.
From the Notes
“Participation should not depend on who can afford flights and hotels.”
An open meeting can still be hard to enter
You rely on the internet to study, work and stay in touch. Yet a discussion about the rules behind it can quickly disappear into unfamiliar acronyms, technical documents and meetings far from home.
An invitation is only a beginning. You also need enough knowledge to follow the argument, a way to attend, and the confidence to ask what a proposal would mean for the people who actually depend on the network.
Make the discussion easier to understand and join
Established in Hong Kong in 2018, LARUS Foundation works on internet education and participation. Its work includes:
- Learning: seminars, workshops and technical education that explain internet infrastructure and how decisions are discussed.
- Taking part: a fellowship programme that supports participation in regional internet registry meetings, with financial support and mentoring through the programme.
- Working with educators: collaborations and opportunities for students and professionals to connect what they learn with real internet questions.
The point is to help people form and express their own views. Taking part should make room for disagreement, including disagreement with the organisation that helped you get there.
Being in the room is not a mandate to rule
This is where the Foundation’s work meets a distinction at the heart of Lu Heng’s Note 73. More people should be able to contribute evidence, challenge assumptions and point out consequences. Their participation matters.
But attending a meeting does not give an institution permission to speak for everyone who is absent. Nor does an open discussion automatically give a registry administrator political authority across countries. A person’s right to contribute and an institution’s power to impose are different things.
Lu Heng’s proposed direction is to keep shared coordination narrow and verifiable, and preserve the ability to choose another administrator. Education helps people examine that argument for themselves; it is not a substitute for changing the structures that concentrate power.
Learn enough to ask the next question
If the rules are understandable only to a familiar circle, even an open process can keep reproducing the same voices. Waiting until a decision affects your network or livelihood is a difficult moment to start learning how it was made.
The next useful step is not simply to find a seat. It is to ask: who is deciding, on whose authority, who bears the consequences, and what choices remain? Those questions lead from participation to the deeper argument in Note 73.