The final day of the RIo IGF meeting began with a workshop organised by the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus on "Fulfilling the Mandate of the IGF." This was the workshop I had most been looking forward to, since it is by assessing the IGF's achievements against its mandate in the Tunis Agenda that its shortcomings are most apparent.

One of the most provocative panelists was Everton Lucero from the Brazilian government, who saw one of these shortcomings as being the lack of transparency of the preparatory process, contrary to paragraph 33 of the Tunis Agenda. As he pointed out, the Advisory Group has no defined procedures, and acts with very limited transparency. Lucero also felt that the incisive report he wrote recommending reforms to Advisory Group had been ignored. He also noted the irony that a forum organised under the auspices of the United Nations receives no funding from its budget.

The presentations of Matthew Shears of ISOC and Ayesha Hassan of ICC/BASIS, as might be expected, were rather more reactionary. Shears considered it to be important that the IGF's mandate not be too expansively interpreted. In his view there are paragraphs of the mandate that are better implemented by stakeholders on a decentralised basis, or not at all if they do not contribute to outcomes valued by its participants; whilst Hassan made the point that much of its mandate was already unquestionably being addressed.

Quite to the contrary were the observations of Parminder Jeet Singh who noted that the main problem that WSIS addressed in forming the IGF was the need for global public policy principles for the Internet, and the lack of any institution within which for them to be developed. The success of the IGF can therefore quite straigtforwardly be measured by reference to its contribution to global public poilcy development; and presently, it is not even moving in this direction.

During discussion, a number of speakers from the panel and the floor agreed that the value of the thematic panel presentation format for plenary sessions was limited. More useful could be for the plenary meetings to bring in the output of workshops and dynamic coalitions for discussion by the wider community, even if this does not involve formally accepting their recommendations. This would also facilitate these outputs being fed into other institutions at the international and national level.

The workshop set the scene for the next plenary session on "Taking Stock and The Way Forward," which followed an extended reporting back session at which I presented a report of yesterday's Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition meeting. A number of the speakers at this session echoed the conclusions of the workshop as to the utility of the plenary sessions and how they might be reformed ahead of the New Delhi meeting.

For example, panelist Bertrand de la Chapelle recommended that the main sessions be used to present the output of the workshops and dynamic coalitions, whilst the workshops themselves should be streamlined so that there is less duplication and more time for informal networking. Along similar lines, Everton Lucero argued that the reporting back sessions should be integrated into the main sessions next year and that there should be no or fewer workshops held in parallel with main sessions. Jeanette Hofman also suggested that there should be more diversity of opinion amongst panelists, rather than simply diversity of stakeholder groups.

Alun Michael of the UK Parliament also made an interesting suggestion that the Secretariat should establish a space on its Web site for stakeholders to voluntarily make commitments arising out of the meeting; this could be something of a compromise on the issue of the IGF making recommendations. He also made reference to plans for a UK Internet Governance Forum.

In fact in summarising the session, Michael's point was one of three specifically isolated by Nitin Desai; the others being that for future meetings a greater emphasis should be placed on the perspectives of end users rather than the concerns of providers, and that the connection between the main sessions and the workshops and dynamic coalitions will need to be addressed.

The final substantive plenary session of the day was on emerging issues. Amongst the most interesting issues presented by the panel were the use of spectrum released through the move from analogue to digital television, for use in long-range (but lower bandwidth) Internet access in remote regions, the question (raised by Web 2.0 cynic Andrew Keen) about whether anonymity was an appropriate principle for an Internet in which peer production has resulted in a glut of unverifiable and unfactual information (Vint Cert's eloquent assessment was that Andrew was speaking "crap"), and Bob Kahn's musings on how to bootstrap the development of a new Internet architecture, when standards organisations tend to be reluctant to break new ground.

The stakeholders' speeches from the closing ceremony could almost have been interchanged with their speeches from the opening ceremony without anyone noticing. But more importantly, the Chairman's summary of the meeting was presented, with an appropriate blank space for the Emerging Issues session that is to be filled in in due course. It is also already available online.