WSIS

Online participation website for ICANN

December 2, 2006

So I was asked by ICANN’s “executive officer and vice president for corporate affairs” Paul Levins to do an online participation website for its meeting in São Paulo, starting officially on Monday.

Paul was at the IGF in Athens last month and saw the site that Jeremy and I had done for the IGF in order to try to get some online interaction both by people that couldn’t be there and by those that were there. In fact, in retrospect, the whole thing dovetailed with a conversation I had had with Paul when I visited ICANN in Los Angeles on a whim two months ago.

Despite alot of well-founded criticism of ICANN in the past (much of it from me) about the organisation being secretive, insular, opaque and whatever other term you wish to use, it struck me that ICANN had actually taken the criticism on board this time and was looking for ways to open up a bit.

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The dotcom contract and dangerous USG myopia

December 1, 2006

I am very tired so I have had to check what the new dotcom agreement – amended and then approved late yesterday by the US government’s Department of Commerce – actually says several times before I believed it.
Even now, I’m not so sure I have got it right. Which is worrying because I’ve just written [...]

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Guardian article on IDNs. Wait for the complaints…

November 24, 2006

I forgot to mention yesterday that I had an article on IDNs in The Guardian: “How engineers tamed the internet’s Tower of Babel“, which was basically an attempt to explain one of the other sides of the Internationalised Domain Names by referring to Patrik Fältström’s comment at the IGF that the technical side of things had now been agreed.

The article actually started out as coverage of the domain “£.com” but rapidly led to covering the issue of symbols on the Net, hence IDNs. I might post up my original article here as I had to cut out a lot of stuff in the rewrite focussing on IDNs. I might as well get that info up. I tried to use £.com to get across to English readers the concept of approving some “symbols” and not approving others. I think I managed it but not as clearly as I had hoped.

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How to avoid learning perhaps a little too much about Kieren’s life

November 16, 2006

I mentioned about a month ago how I was considering setting up a second blog so I could more easily separate my personal and professional life. And yesterday, twice, I was reminded that there is a bit of an unusual overlap when I spoke to two people: one, the spokesman for a company I regularly [...]

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UN asks for Net governance forum feedback

November 13, 2006

The secretariat of the Internet Governance Forum, part of the United Nations, has updated its website to include all the session transcripts, plus Markus Kummer’s “informal summing-up” of them.
More interestingly though it has also stuck up an online form asking for feedback on the meeting, asking the broad questions: What worked well? and What worked [...]

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Guardian article on the IGF

November 9, 2006

I’ve a piece in The Guardian today which is a broad summary of the IGF last week. It basically says that what could have been a disaster ended up being a success and finishes with Nitin Desai’s arranged marriage analogy – which I think was brilliant.

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IGF: The *real* story

November 7, 2006

You’ve seen the show, read the reviews, bought the T-shirt, but now it’s time to reveal the *real* Internet Governance Forum, the kind of IGF that only photographs with pleasingly childish captions can provide…

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The Internet Governance Forum in pictures

November 4, 2006

I was at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens last week taking pictures, among other things. I have finally been through all the snaps and have posted a few below amid a quick rundown of events.

The remainder can be found at my IGF photo gallery/archive at kierenmccarthy.co.uk/photos/igf/. If anyone has any questions or queries, [...]

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IGF: The good, the bad and the psycho cleaners

November 1, 2006

The Greeks drove me to it. Last night, under the cover of conference quietness, I sneaked into the Apollon hotel store room and stole a waiter uniform. I’m not proud of it, but I am proudly wearing it today one for simple reason – I want my own coffee and water, and I don’t want [...]

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IGF: Moderation, frustration and making people uncomfortable

October 31, 2006

You reach a certain level of frustration and then, suddenly, you relax. The struggle becomes impossible and then you realise that, ultimately, it’s not that important. You’re still breathing air, you still have legs, this will come to an end.
What on earth am I talking about? The mild insanity of hosting a global, revolutionary Internet [...]

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