The afternoon began with "Multi-stakeholder Policy Development: lessons from actors engaged in existing institutional processes," moderated by French WSIS representative, Bertrand de La Chapelle. This workshop, highly pertinent to my doctoral studies, covered the early stages of multi-stakeholder policy development.

The format of the panel presentation was a comparatively refreshing recitation of personal experiences illustrating best practices in multi-stakeholder policy development, from various ICT-related settings such as WSIS, the IETF and DNS management, followed by the contextualisation of this discussion by the moderator in terms of the process workflow for the development of a new regime.

Bertrand de la Chapelle described this as a cycle which starts with process initiation, then moves on to drafting, adoption, implementation and enforcement. The panel only addressed the first phase, of initiation. This first phase in turn can be broken into agenda setting, issue-scoping and framing, the formation of working groups, and the documentation of such processes in a charter.

For example, in the W3C, process initiation begins with filling in an HTML template and the reception of comments from stakeholders. The translation of this concept to an intergovernmental context is of course less than straightforward! Also as de la Chapelle stated, stakeholders in this context does not necessarily refer as at the IGF to governmental, private sector and civil society groups, but may well vary from one issue area or regime to another.

Contributions from the floor to this workshop were also unusually productive and thoughtful, including a good point made by Slavka Antonova about the tendency of governments to conflate public consultation with true multi-stakeholderism. Karen Banks of APC also noted that there are distributed mechanisms of soft policy development (such as voluntary industry conduct) that do not so often conform to the process cycle outlined by Bertrand, yet can be equally important. What is needed is for the promulgation of best practices for multi-stakeholder policy development at a variety of levels.

The next event was the meeting of the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition, of which I am the de facto Chair. I was afraid that few would turn up or show interest in the session (and, certainly, the room was less than packed), but I was delighted that the meeting went very well and that there was a great deal of interest and participation from those present. In the end our allotted time ended before we had finished our discussions, but I left with some new names and email addresses of people to draw upon

Since I networked a little after my session I entered the Security plenary session a little late, to hear Mr H Chengquing from the Internet Society of China explaining that "the view that government should keep the hands off the Internet is wrong"; a sure indication, if you didn't know already, that that body is not actually a chapter of the Internet Society, as its name suggests.

From the floor, amongst the notable comments were, from Izumi Aito, that whereas there are 1.2 million people killed in road accidents every year, there are (probably) none killed by the Internet - so why is such energy devoted to Internet security? Marco Gercke replied that the estimate of losses caused by Internet crimes are 60% of those caused by off-line offences. Furthermore, those who order bogus medicine on the Internet can actually die from their on-line activities. Ralf Brendrath however denied that this was an example of cybercrime, but simply a case of the existence of a black market for medicine - and for a similar reason, that child pornography cannot accurately be considered as cybercrime either.

(I also learned from this session that an IGF regional meeting had been held in Tokyo this year. I make this point not because it is interesting in its own right, but to remind myself to find out more about it and make note of it in my PhD thesis.)

The final session of the day, for me, was the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC) organised workshop on Public Policy on the Internet, the panel of which was stacked with members of that Caucus. One of the basic questions of this forum was what the globally applicable public policy principles applicable to the Internet are, and who should be responsible for developing them.

Milton Mueller spoke on the GAC, which has been accommodated more favourably within ICANN's structure than the ALAC as a trade-off against the use of governmental power against ICANN. The problem is that the GAC is not a democratically accountable body, even to the same extent that most regular intergovernmental organisations are.

Bertrand de la Chapelle said that global public policy should reflect the global public interest. However the public interest is only one of the four dimensions that usually apply to any Internet governance issue - technical, economic, social and public policy. Furthermore, the global public interest may conflict with the national public interest in many cases.

Parminder Jeet Singh reminded us that there is no clear distinction between technical and political or public policy issues. If any technical issue is contested by different groups of people, then that makes it a political or policy issue. Claming the political from the technical is the first hurdle of marginalised peoples in particular. The multi-stakeholder principle can enable this by deregulating participation in goverance.

My main bugbear in the Tunis Agenda, the statement that public policy authority is the sovereign right of states, was addressed by Miriam Sapiro. As she pointed out, this text was negotiated by governments alone. She also stated that this was a political commitment that is not legally binding and does not necessarily have legally precise language.

I had to leave this interesting workshop before question time was over in order to catch the coach back to our hotel, but will be back early tomorrow morning for another IGC-sponsored seminar.