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"You have talked enough. Get a move on now and do something."
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12/12/2008
The quote from Ghandi, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win," may have become a cliché, but it seems apposite to describe Nitin Desai's about-face on the capacity of the IGF to seek consensus on policy recommendations. By the time of the taking stock session at Hyderabad, it had become clear that even Desai could not continue to resist the tide of opinion that the IGF should move beyond mere discussion to policy development. Summarising the clearly expressed views of speakers such as Alun Michael from the UK, Everton Lucero from Brazil, Parminder Singh from IT for Change and Bertrand de la Chapelle from France, he asked,
Conclusions on Hyderabad IGF
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8/12/2008
The third meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad was notable for having introduced a few, mostly long-awaited, innovations that inch the forum further towards the model of an effective multi-stakeholder policy development institution described in the Tunis Agenda. However in each case the limitations or flaws of these innovations have detracted from their potential. Consider the following:
Day 4 of Hyderabad IGF - controversy and departure
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6/12/2008
I have to confess I attended no other sessions today than The Role and Mandate of the IGF, due to work commitments and an early departure. This session was chaired by Lee McKnight of the Internet Governance Project, who had earlier caused scandal by taking a vote (shock, horror!) at the workshop on The Future of ICANN: After the JPA, What?. So this was bound to be a controversial session - and my paper the most of all, at least according to my spies in the audience. But is anything that I said really that controversial? Read below and judge for yourself.
Day 3 of Hyderabad IGF - books, covert meetings and vanishing fliers
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6/12/2008
Today's highlight was the panel discussion of Arrangements for Internet governance - global and national/regional. At first it seemed that the purpose of the discussion was to reinforce a revisionist understanding of the meaning of "enhanced cooperation" that was coined in the Tunis Agenda. According to the UN's Haiyan Qian, this term refers simply to any formal or informal multi-stakeholder process within an Internet governance institution, which set the scene for Richard Beaird from the US State Department to claim with a straight face that this included the ITU's work on next generation networks and cybersecurity.
Day 2 of Hyderabad IGF - drop-outs and mounds of food
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5/12/2008
The meeting has been plagued with wireless Internet drop-outs. During the opening ceremony yesterday, apparently this was a side-effect of the organisers' covert use of mobile phone blocking technology as a security measure. Today, when the Internet was unavailable for the entire morning at least in the upstairs rooms, it can only be put down to poor planning. This seems to be a recurrent problem for the IGF.
Day 1 of Hyderabad IGF - soldiers, cancellations and remote participation blunders
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3/12/2008
Despite my deep-seated differences with Nitin Desai, he is an incisive man and certainly not as naive as he often presents himself to be when uncritically extolling the IGF's virtues. At the opening ceremony today he surprised me by admitting that "essentially, this is a dialogue between two groups of people ... and we must face up to that reality.
Day 0 of Hyderabad IGF - blackouts, lunches and missing fliers
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2/12/2008
- 2 Replies
The day preceding the IGF's opening has become best known for the GigaNet academic symposium, which ran today to a slightly less than capacity audience, due to the disruption of the terrible events in Mumbai. In fact, there were a few presenters missing too - so that the poster presenters such as myself were invited to fill the missing time by briefly introducing our papers.
Some events of Internet in Hyderabad
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23/11/2008
Here are some events I'll be involved with at the Hyderabad IGF, which I think others may also find interesting. The links go to the date and time of the event on the calendar at igf-online.net (which you may comment on with your feedback or information about the event).
What has changed for Hyderbad?
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22/11/2008
Despite the paucity of commentary here for a couple of months, of course preparations for Hyderabad have been proceeding apace. First, the MAG met again in September to act upon the input given at the preceding day's open consultation meeting. As expected, the reactionary voices of the private sector as described in the previous post were treated as controlling by the IGF's timorous advisory group. When the meeting schedule was released later in the month, lo and behold there were no longer any sessions for "debate", nor even "dialogue and debate", but merely "open dialogue". Supposedly this was to "better reflect their nature" rather than because the IGF is terminally afraid of upsetting anyone's apple cart.
Debate at the IGF debated - and why is ICC/BASIS so scared?
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20/9/2008
Those who have been following the IGF for a couple of years may remember that the agenda for the 2007 meeting in Rio de Janeiro once included what were called speed dialogues - essentially the governance equivalent of speed dating, in which participants intensively debate a particular issue around a table, before rotating to a new table with a new issue to consider.
