Internet Governance Forum details…

I’ve just spoken to Markus [tag]Kummer[/tag], the man in day-to-day charge of the upcoming [tag]Internet[/tag] Governance [tag]Forum[/tag] in Athens in October, and have got an understanding of how the international meeting of governments, business and civil and private society is going to work.

I’ll do a piece for The Register on it (now up here), hopefully get the word out, but I thought I’d do a quick blog post on the [tag]IGF[/tag].

The basic outline is this: a large room filled with those interested in Net governance issues. Those issues will be split into four broad issues of: openness, security, diversity and access. The room can hold 800 people with desks, 1,200 people without. The estimated attendees is coming out around 800, so it may be the usual UN meeting style of things, with desks and little placards showing the country or organisation.

The meetings will be available in the UN languages which are: English, French, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic, if I remember correctly. Since the UN system and the translators tend to work on three-hour shifts, the sessions will be three hours each, two each day. I understand from talking to others that there was some argument over whether this marathon session should be split into more consumable chunks but the government majority in the room seems to have stuck with the status quo.

Encouraging chat

The meetings will be as fluid as possible. There will be a panel of people and a moderator on stage and the pannelists will be encouraged not to have pre-prepared statements but in fact just discuss and debate. Helpers will scour the main floor encouraging people to chip in with their comments. Comments from those unable to attend in person will occasionally will be read out. The idea is to thrash matters out and discuss the issues and what possible solutions there are.

Organised around these main sessions will be workshops. There are currently 35 workshops that have been put forward. This is too many but I understand that the meeting recently was unable to decide which should be approved (and thereby which dropped) so now the stress is on trying to get the people running the workshops to merge their efforts on areas where they coincide. Formal statements from governments will be pre-recorded and made available on screen in the venue. There will also be a plaza with the usual conference stalls covering anyone that wants to be there.

What else? The main concern is getting good people there. Because the IGF has a very small budget, it can’t afford to pay people to fly over to Athens so there are efforts underway to get a few Internet old hands and few rising Net stars to the conference in order to encourage people to either go to Athens or to follow events online. Since the IGF is supposed to be a big learning experience, the more people listening in, the better.

The developing country issue

Another concern of the developing countries is that the whole issue of access, availability and cost of the Net is being lost. This happens every time, and the reason is simple – there is no money in it, and developing countries have fewer resources and so suffer from having less people in the room when decisions are made. As a result, conversation naturally turns to the things that people in the room know most about, and this is usually the rich and Western view of the Net.

But Nitin Desai – who is the overall man in charge – is certainly determined to make sure that the IGF lives up to its promise on the developing country side, so there may be a rare balance at the IGF this time around.

I am hoping that as wide and varied a range of views of possible get across in the room – that way everyone will feel as if they were a part of it, and so are more likely to listen to everyone else. I particularly think that the start of the sessions should see a few of the great and good explaining how the whole multi-stakeholder model has been useful for them personally. Because that is the whole big thing – multi-stakeholder. A United Nations meeting where people other than governments are given an almost-equal say in matters. If you could get a Western government official and an African diplomat at the very beginning of the session explaining how talking to business and talking to civil society had made his job easier, it would set a great startpoint for the meeting. That’s my view anyway.

The end result?

What will be the likely outcome? It all depends. I think it will be interesting. There should be some good tales and stories. Hopefully people will do their utmost to avoid talking about ICANN, because it will go nowhere. I’d personally like to see the issue of Internet filtering discussed openly. There is a big pretence that it is only countries like China and Saudi Arabia that are filtering the Internet, but it simply isn’t true – every country is filtering the Net to some degree – so why not discuss it? If people are relaxed and respectful of others’ views, the common threads would be found to the benefit of all.

I’d also like to see the IP lawyers and the Creative Commons people thrash it out – just debate with one another – that would be fascinating. The same goes for open-source and proprietary software.

Another huge success would be if government officials got over their intrinsic fear of Net sharing tools – collaborative tools, blogs and the like. If they could catch the bug, and realise that far from putting them into a dangerously far-moving environment, it actually helps people to thrash out the issues and build consensus in a far faster and more effective way than traditional methods – well, then that would be the icing on the cake for the IGF.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling. The IGF site is at www.intgovforum.org and the official Athens meeting website is at www.igfgreece2006.gr. I hope to you see all there.