It seems that not many submissions - at least, not many positive ones - were put towards the draft synthesis paper for the September open consultations, so the Secretariat has decided to disregard those that were submitted, and instead to summarise the substantive contributions that were separately submitted for the Rio meeting.

How many submissions have been lost? Well, perhaps only one; mine, as I don't know whether there were any others. Although submitted on 21 August, well prior to the deadline for submissions for the September consultations, it strangely hasn't been uploaded to the IGF's Web site, isn't mentioned in the schedule of the synthesis paper, and hasn't been summarised there. (It was about speed dialogues, if you're interested.)

It is impossible to be sure about exactly what the synthesis paper is purporting to summarise, firstly since much of it is couched in such unhelpful generalities as "it was generally recognized that" or "there was a general view that", without backing this assertion up with references, let alone any kind of statistical analysis.

Secondly, for no evident reason, all of the views attributed to stakeholders in the synthesis paper are anonymised, with wording like "one commentator commented" or "several of the comments discussed". Since the submissions themselves are all publicly available, I can conceive of no valid justification for such obfuscation.

So where have ths submissions come from? The synthesis paper refers to "the 28 submissions that were received from 12 different contributors prior to the consultations of 3 September". From the schedule, it is clear that these are the substantive submissions intended for the Rio meeting itself.

The Secretariat also repeats the the claim that 813 users have registered on the IGF's Web discussion board, though as earlier revealed here most of these so-called users are spammers.

So is this synthesis paper actually intended to be that for the Rio meeting, rather than that for the September consultations? If so, why is it being released now, since the consultations are meant to be directed towards procedural matters rather than the discussion of matters of substance?

And why does the paper state that it is "to be completed after the consultations of 3 September 2007", when the deadline given for substantive contributions for Rio that are to be included in its synthesis paper passed on 10 August?

In any case, I will wait for the final synthesis paper for Rio to be issued before summarising its substantive contents here, but this draft, masquerading as the synthesis paper for the September open consultations, is not a promising start.