The first substantive session, on "Multistakeholder Policy Dialogue: Setting the Scene" was a moderated panel discussion. As can be imagined with 15 panelists, the issues covered ranged far and wide, but since my focus is on process issues, I will restrict my comments here to a few of those.

Paul Twomey must have read my thesis, in view of his pertinent comments about the blurring of the boundaries of the nation state and the diminution of its sovereign power, as not only large but also small corporations become truly multinational and technologies allowing individuals to participate globally become mainstream. He sees ICANN in some respects as a reflection of a new form of international coordination for this age. It recognises that governments are important, but that the technical and business communities, as well as citizens and users, are also. It tries, imperfectly, to build a structure which reflects each of those influences in practical terms. He suggests that there are other areas of international coordination that can learn from the approach that ICANN is developing.

Lynn St Amour of ISOC on the other hand is clearly an IGF cynic. She claimed (probably correctly, to her credit) that it is "not as participatory as it needs to be", and that she would rather focus on models, such as openness, transparency and inclusiveness, which could be applied not only within the IGF but also within the existing local and national institutions that already act in Internet governance.

The moderator responded by asking, assuming we are in agreement on those principles, what pragmatic efforts would be needed to take this forward? Although the respondents failed to provide an answer, I raised it again later, observing that there had been little said on how the IGF could go beyond discussion and fulfil its mandate in the Tunis Agenda, which includes the need to make recommendations. How can it do that, I asked; do we need to develop recommendations within smaller working groups and then adopt them by consensus within the IGF as a whole?

Lynn said that multi-stakeholder models are all well and good, but that the IGF seeks to embed today's political models into a context where it doesn't naturally fit. For her, the IGF is about dialogue, but is not a place for decisions or even recommendations, because the process it not inclusive enough, and does not provide a space for considered recommendations to be developed within a four day conference.

Karen Banks disagreed, saying that although discussion is important, if this forum is to have an impact, then it has to be a process. Although its output can indeed return to the local and national level, even that won't happen without effort and work. She believes that the IGF must add value by addressing issues that aren't addressed adequately elsewhere, and the meeting conclude with some sense of working forward around concrete activities.

Karen asked how the IGF proposes to influence other spaces in which the same issues are addressed. For example, is this a place where we can move recommendations on say cross-border content regulation to a space that is a empowered to make decisions on it? What are we going to do with the output of our workshops this week - feed them into multilateral activities? As a forum surely we can move forward certain of these intractable issues ourselves.

Responding to this point was a government representative, Jean-Jacques Massima Landji from Gambon, who predictably expressed the view that no such recommendations could be made here, but that an intergovernmental forum such as UNESCO could do so.

So in this first session, did the dialogue between the panelists (and the audience) really achieve anything? Not that I could detect; it seems that they simply reiterated and perhaps entrenched the positions that they brought to into the discussion. That is why the development of deliberative structures for the IGF is so imperative.

But for what the session was, it was well organised. The instantaneous translation service, projected onto a large screen and via audio headsets, was extremely impressive. And on a procedural level, the panel discussions worked fairly well too, although the moderator sometimes failed to sufficiently pin panelists down when they missed or evaded the point.

None of that is the problem, though: the problem is that dialogue alone is not going to solve any of the issues of Internet governance that are currently unaddressed in any other forum. As Karen Banks noted, there is an important and unique place for the IGF, and its present structure does not allow it to fulfil it.