The first preparatory meeting for the 2011 Internet Governance Forum has ended with a significant degree of uncertainty thanks to ongoing bureaucratic delays.

Over two days, representatives from business, government, civil society and the technical community met in Geneva in order to decide the path forward for the sixth annual meeting of the Forum, dedicated to discussing global governance issues for the Internet and due to be held in Nairobi toward the end of the year.

Those plans have been hamstrung by the United Nations in New York, which continues to delay crucial decisions about the event dates and the event’s key decision-makers.

Closing the meeting, Kenya’s representative and meeting chair Alice Munyua repeatedly asked for others’ indulgence as she explained she did not have final dates for the event – it will be somewhere between September and December, she said – nor had dates been finalised for the second preparatory meeting in May.

On top of that, there is still no replacement for the main meeting organizer, Markus Kummer, who left the United Nations in December, with a representative from the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) telling attendees that they were still finalising the job description, which will then be put through the usual UN recruitment process.

And to make matters all the more surreal, the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), which was in the room trying to decide the agenda and structure of the next IGF, may not even formally exist.

The MAG has been put together and chaired by former special advisor to the Secretary-General, Nitin Desai, since 2004. Desai was appointed by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, with whom he shared a good relationship, but ended his term earlier this year.

The new Secretary-General has yet to decide a replacement Special Advisor and only that person can decide on the make-up and structure of the MAG, the UN has decided. In response to questions about this crucial role, a UN representative said he did not know when a decision would be made and refused to even be drawn on the process that will be used to arrive at a decision.

Bureaucratic delay – or something else entirely?

While many would be tempted to write off the destabilising delays as typical United Nations bureaucracy (and a good reason why the organisation should not be given a central role in governing the Internet), the widespread suspicion is that they are deliberate.

The Chinese government in particular has been behind efforts to turn the open and “multistakeholder” IGF – where everyone has an equal say – into a traditional inter-governmental body where decisions are made solely by government representatives.

Those attempts have been consistently stymied by Western governments – as well as business, civil society and the technical community – who wish to maintain the broader form of decision-making that has made the Internet what it is today.

However, with China a rising force in the United Nations under Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the end of the IGF’s initial five-year remit has been used to try to force the IGF onto a different path. The head of UNDESA, Chinese national Sha Zukang, has made various efforts to move the IGF into a more governmental direction.

At the same time, UNDESA is half-competing with another arm of the United Nations, the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD), which is in charge of deciding broader changes to the structure of the IGF. The CSTD has also taken a very pro-government approach, most recently causing outrage when it held a last-minute and late-night meeting in December in order to push through a decision that the crucial IGF working group would only be comprised of government representatives.

In this context, delays to deciding the two key posts for the IGF – the Executive Coordinator and the Special Advisor – as well as the continued failure to name actual dates for the meeting (ostensibly in order to fit in with Under-Secretary Sha’s schedule) provide the pro-governmental forces with greater leverage over the process while frustrating efforts by the pro-multistakeholder group to continue on in the same vein as the previous five years.

Pushing on

Nevertheless, attendees in Geneva appeared determined to push on with the business of the Internet Governance Forum – designed to act as a global focal point each year for the world to discuss big issues stemming from the Internet.

In the course of discussions, the theme that has been on the minds of many in recent weeks – the role the Internet has played in the Middle East uprisings – came to the forefront. As topics go, it is likely to be extremely interesting to a very broad group of individual worldwide, although MAG members were at pains to ensure the IGF maintained its traditional neutrality, as well as continued the work from previous years.

The end result was the final title: “Internet as a catalyst for change: Access, development, freedoms and innovation.”

With traditional governments doing everything they can to impose old and outdated structures on the IGF, the irony was far from lost on those in the room.

I was the remote moderator for two workshops at the IGF today: Digital inclusion: reaching the most socially excluded people in society (workshop 114); and Protecting the Consumer in an on-line world (workshop 112).

I’m not going to give rundown here but I am going to stick videos of both below – highlighting the excellent live video and video archive facility in place at http://webcast.intgovforum.org.

Workshop 114

Workshop 112

Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania. And Lithuania is north-east of Poland and underneath Finland.

In an exhibition center on the outskirts of Vilnius, over the Neris river from the big, beautiful Vingis park, are currently the 1,000 or so people in this world who spend their lives obsessing about Internet governance. I’m one of them.

This is the fifth annual Internet Governance Forum – IGF – and the last under its current mandate agreed by the United Nations. The forum is going to be extended for at least another five years but we’ll all be pretending we don’t know that until the last day when the “Taking stock” session takes place.

Here are some things you need to know about the IGF:

1. It’s very open. If you can get here, it’s free. If you really want to get on a panel, you’ll find someone that will let you. You don’t need to be particularly interesting or concise.
2. An enormous amount of information about how the Internet is run and perceived right across the world is readily available. If this is the sort of thing that interests you, you’ll be very happy.
3. There’s too much information and too many people on too many panels.

Milking the IGF cow

Lithuania is not a rich country – that much is obvious when you drive through it; even more so when you walk around the local neighbourhoods. If you’ve ever been to a post-Communist European country, you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from.

But in that way that poor countries with rich neighbours have, the locals on the periphery of the IGF meeting clearly felt certain that they could massively over-charge and no one would notice.

To get to “LitExpo” you really need to get a bus or a cab – it’s too far to walk. And so the hosts have – as they always do – put on a shuttle service. The only downside is that have decided that the price for the week should be 75 euros – which is a huge sum – around 260 litas – in the local money.

Depending on the cab driver (and it really does depend on the driver himself), a ride to the centre costs between 10 and 50 litas. So even if you were unlucky, you would find that getting a cab every day still works out cheaper than the mass coach transit on offer. Oh, and the shuttle coaches run only twice a day from your hotel – once very early in the morning and once after everything is over.

Of course, people being what they are, the majority has paid this stupid price.

And the second rip-off (so far) – 36 litas for lunch. They have you confined in the exhibition centre (and there is not so much as a sandwich cart within a 20-minute walk), so let’s get everyone to pay $13.50 for a bog-standard lunch. This is just an annoying con for people like me, but for those from developing countries, it is cripplingly expensive.

I predict some very angry exchanges in the next week.

What? Eh? What you say?

While I’m having a moan – the acoustics are terrible in most of the meeting rooms. This is because LitExpo is an exhibition hall. So in creating the separate rooms, they have just put up tall exhibition walls – you know, one-inch thick cloth-covered walls. And no ceilings.

So for about half of the meeting rooms you can hear – very loudly – what everyone else in the other room over the hall is talking about (albeit slightly garbled). So, of course, the people in your room either talk more loudly or turn up the PA system.

So the other rooms do the same. And before you know it, we’re all yelling at one other trying to be heard. This is not conducive to reasoned discussion. In fact, I think it can be safely summarized as infuriating.

I can see you (and hear you, unfortunately)

Hotel rooms

I’m going to add one more pseudo-moan. Lithuania, it seems, offers exactly what you ask for – but not anything beyond that. This leads to some interesting situations – two of which are apparent in my hotel room.

I have a coffee cup, and a packet of coffee and milk in my room. But no kettle. Clearly someone previously asked for coffee in their room. And they got it. Maybe it was two people – maybe the second person, seeing the coffee, then asked for a cup and some milk (well, creamer). What they forgot was to ask for something to provide hot water.

Is it now contingent on me to push the envelope further and ask for a kettle to contain and boil the bloody water? I’m not sure – this is a strange land. I fear I may push it too far and lose the cup in the bargain.

The other thing is the huge bathroom. Really big. The kind of shower you want at home – so much space that you can walk around in the shower area. Luxurious. And that’s only a third of it – big bathroom space, and space for the sink and the toilet.

This is great. Except the bathroom is actually the same size as the rest of the room. Which is a bit odd when you come out of the super-bathroom and feel cramped in the actual room. Clearly the architect insisted on a big bathroom. He just forgot to add that he wanted the room itself to work in the normal 1:3 bathroom-to-actual-room proportions.

I also have a desktop PC with screen, keyboard and mouse on the desk. I haven’t fired it up but I already know from the look of it that I had a better computer when I left university – and that was 15 years ago.

Still, it’s the thought that counts.

gTLD nonsense

Even though this is the IGF, ICANN politics are never far from the agenda. So in a session about IDNs this morning, we were treated to, frankly, a rant from Jamil Zahid – who I actually like very much – who horribly mispresented the issue of top-level domains for developing countries and promoted an IP lawyer delay-and-destroy argument as coming from a developing country concern perspective.

Fortunately ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush was in the room and tore into the dodgy and fear-mongering arguments. But it was a depressing sign that the combatants in ICANN will do anything and go anywhere to get a leg up.

Gala event

So the Gala event this evening was at the Vilnius Modern Art museum. It was a pretty peculiar affair.

I can’t fault the locals on the food or booze – there was plenty of both. But how come the art museum had basically been stripped of any art? A few statues were carefully clumped together and surrounded by tape barriers and the rest were presumably put in storage before the guests turned up. Which meant that we all basically had a drink in a big white warehouse.

Inevitably it came to the speeches. Why local dignitaries insist on giving speeches at social events is completely beyond me. It never works, and it just frustrates those giving speeches. Especially in the Internet world where people have a peculiar tendency to keep talking – loudly – even when asked politely many times not to.

I have always been in two minds whether I love or loathe this.

On one level, it is extremely rude to talk loudly in the same room as someone giving a speech. And to keep on talking when asked to be quiet (especially when there are plenty of other rooms to go to).

But on the other hand, this conference is about the Internet, not about giving politicians yet another platform to bore everyone to tears. When it’s going on, it feels a little bit like the Internet itself – lots of people trying to be serious and share information, while being drowned out by people who don’t give a shit.

In this case, however, it was actually the prime minister of the country, Andrius Kubilius, trying to speak. You’d think that a prime minister in his own country could command a bit of respect. But no. Anyway, he took it well. To become prime minister you known he’s already been in worse spots.

The prime minister speaking to a packed and attentive audience

What was kind of sad was that someone had written a whole speech for him, including frequent references to the recent win by the Lithuanian basketball team – a BIG deal in this part of the world. The rousing speech fell on deaf ears. Most people didn’t know who the guy was on the little stage. That’s the Internet crowd for you.

Now if he’d told a couple of jokes, or make a cat dance, well that would have been an entirely different matter.

I posted the video of the United Nations’ representative Sha Zukang losing it about a week ago but forgot to stick up a blog post about it.

It was a remarkable thing: Egypt’s first lady had inserted her own agenda into the Internet Governance Forum’s schedule – which caused no end of problems as everything had to be reshuffled. But also her visit brought with it some over-the-top security precautions: no mobile phones; extra invites to be allowed into the building; restricted access; and – the big issue – everyone being locked down in the main room, unable to leave, while she wandered around in the “village” of booths outside.

Anyway, after the First Lady’s little segment about protecting kids online and a panel of “experts” forced to find some way of tying the IGF into the youth of today and protecting kids online — which was a complete waste of everyone’s time, to be frank — she wandered off but left everyone stuck in the main room.

Not everyone was happy about this. Many people wanted to just go to the toilet having been in the room for several hours. The UN’s head honcho – a very prickly Chinese man called Sha Zukang – was also unhappy as he had trouble getting back into the room to chair the next session on the future of the IGF itself.

As you can see from the video below, Sha was annoyed with the fact that lots of people were standing at the back waiting to be allowed to leave. But even when the situation was explained to him, he was already too wound up to care and came out with an extraordinary outburst.

Considering this has only been one or two minutes, it was really too much – and everyone commented as such. Of the many comments I heard at the back of the room, and that evening, the most common description of the short-fused Zukang was “prick”. The event also sparked a few UN old hands to recall other similar outbursts.

Anyway, here for your viewing pleasure is what happened:

So I’m sat in the opening ceremony of the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh – a cosy cinema seat at the further front-right of a giant summit hall – watching the various dignatories giving a wide variety of dull speeches.

The first thing that strikes you is how much more professional this meeting has become since its inception four years ago.

It helps that the venue is ideally suited – plenty of rooms in a self-contained space with enough room to install all the endless components that make up a big meeting – but even so, for a meeting whose very existence is up for discussion this week, it is a pretty self-assured animal.

I put my money on the IGF becoming a set-in-stone institution. For the next decade anyway.

Oh no! I’m being censored again

Just as inevitable as dull speeches at these events is the Grand Censorship Moment. It’s come early this year, barely hours after the doors opened.

Yes, it’s time to get up in arms at the evildoers that stop us, the people, doing whatever stupid nonsense enters our skulls.

Inevitably it was the Chinese (isn’t it always?). Some group decided the IGF was the ideal spot to launch a new book about efforts to censor content on the Internet.

In order to get as much attention as possible, a banner advertised that the book contained information about the Chinese government’s firewall. The advertising worked – a Chinese government official saw it and asked the organizers to take the banner down. So they did.

Cue much tweeting, frothing and wailing as the brave stood up to the oppressors. And lost. Again. But there’ll be hell to pay this time, you mark my words. The people will rise up. This was the spark. This one. A book about censorship censored for chrissake! (Well, a banner about a book taken down – you can still get the books in the lobby I believe).

I understand the Chinese government is going to erect a huge banner tomorrow describing the book as “not that interesting” and “nothing new really”. And we’re ready to pull that one down as soon as it goes up – are you with me, brothers? The revolution begins here!

Vote now for the dullest speech

Jerry Yang – a tedious rundown of history of Yahoo! – a company that is still desperately trying to find its reason to exist.

Tim Berners Lee – a lovely bloke, hugely intelligent but a dreadful, nervous speaker

Hamadoun Toure – it’s either mad frothing nonsense or hollow threats about the ITU working with other organizations as partners. The latter this time around.

Sha Zukang –UN top nob. A wandering missive about how great the Net is and how great the IGF is, unless of course it’s actually rubbish. Either way, Zukang wants to tell you that he wants to hear from you.

Egyptian prime minister – I genuinely don’t remember what the leader of this land said.

Tarek Kamel – Egyptian telecoms minister, a lovely guy but addicted to namedropping and rabbiting on about how he is best mates with Vint Cerf etc . He was *there* you see. He may have invented the Internet in Egypt.

All equally unimportant

There’s always magic snapshots at events like this. As I strolled out the venue to head back to my hotel for a quick lunch, I wandered across a red carpet flanked by velvet ropes. Just as I did so, a noticed a small gaggle of blue suits at the other end.

Sure enough, there was head of the ITU, Hamadoun Toure, being given due deference by three Egyptians, having been driven in through a special gate and dropped off with a 50-foot red walk to the conference doors.

I could go on about the ITU and the Internet and how this fantastically self-important organization remains convinced it can change a global communications network to fit with its own false pre-conceptions. But I won’t.

I will note though that the great, extraordinary thing about the Internet is that it accepts no kings, and it polishes no egos. Sure, people can get up on a stage and bore us shitless with their wise words while their image is projected 20-foot high behind them – but it’s just theatre. If you got a comedian up there that banged out a few good Internet jokes, the whole room would be grateful and the rest of the speeches would be completely forgotten.

Apart from the three Egyptians, the two men whose job it was to open the door and this lowly representative of an Internet organization, there was no one there to see Toure’s grand entrance. And the thing is: no one cared. There were all too busy figuring out how to deal with the various problems the Net continues to throw up.

Not that there is any shortage of egos in the Internet Governance world – the funny thing is that there are SO MANY. At least one in three people wandering around here is utterly convinced of their own brilliance. But the heros of course are the people that spend their time working on giving everyone else out there somewhere greater influence.

Totty Index

There is a very simple index to figuring out how important or influential a meeting is: the number of extremely attractive women.

I’m not daft enough to try to explain why this is, it’s just a fact, like the number of fast food joints in poor areas or the amount of gold-plating in newly-rich people’s houses.

The Totty Index™ for IGF 2009 is high – about halfway between a wine bar on a Friday night and a book launch in the West End. But it’s still not World Summit status. And although I was sat next to a high-class Russian prostitute on the plane in from Cairo, there are surprisingly few pros hanging around the hotel bars.

Egyptian wine

They ran out of non-Egyptian wine yesterday so last night hundreds of attendees were introduced to the delights of the local stuff.

It is dreadful. In a desperate attempt to buy their way out of the situation, one table ordered the most expensive bottle on the menu. Everyone tried hard, whoosing the contents around their mouth in the hope it might run out of energy and reveal a hidden taste of grapes beneath, but no go – the best compliment came out as “actually, it’s not that bad”.

Compared to the whisky though, it was liquid love. I never thought I’d see the day where I left a glass of whisky behind. To be fair, I’m pretty sure it was actually a glass of hairspray. Which would explain the waiter’s matted crop of smelly hair.

I am leaving my job as general manager of public participation for ICANN on 25 November.

Yesterday, the COO sent round a note to staff; this morning I find myself elevated to the point of wanting to dance. Whenever I leave a job, I get the feeling of a weight being lifted off my shoulders and, shortly after, feel the excitement of future possibilities. This time, it is particularly strong.

I still have a busy meeting in Seoul in just over a week to deal with, and then more work for the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt two weeks after that. But from December I will be free to apply my energies wherever I wish and man does it feels good.

I’ve learnt a hell of a lot over the past two-and-a-half years but with the ending of a big agreement between the organization and the US government (and they said it couldn’t be done), with my boss heading back to Australia, and with a feeling that my ability to effect changes has passed its peak, it is definitely time to move on.

Update: I just found my original post on taking the job. Pleased to see I have managed to stay true to myself, although I may have to evaluate performance against my own goals in December.

What will I be doing?

I have a long list of things that has been building up for a while. My Sex.com book and its film rights, a book on the domain name industry, a book on the cutting edge and revolutionary uses of the Internet. I may write my Great Drunks book. I may write my Rockall disaster book.

I have two business plans. And I have my beloved journalism: the new Internet extensions will be fascinating; I am absolutely itching to get stuck into electric car technology. Two people have been asking me to build their websites for a while. I definitely want to do some consulting on participation and the Internet to save people huge amounts of time and trouble figuring it out for themselves. And I have an overriding desire to do some real good in a broader sense – maybe get into some of the gov2.0 stuff going on.

My head is buzzing with plans; just need to take a week off surfing and fixing up my van and it will all come clear. I’m also getting married to Sapna in April in San Francisco and we will probably move up there in the new year, which I’m also excited about.

So great opportunities lie ahead. In the meantime I need to stop writing this post and get back to the unbelievable list of things to do for the ICANN Seoul meeting.

Below is the note that the COO generously sent to staff yesterday re: my heading off.

Hello all,

Kieren McCarthy has decided to leave his role as general manager of public participation at ICANN.

Kieren has been with ICANN since February 2007, initially working from the UK and then moving to Los Angeles. In that time he has worked tirelessly and won frequent plaudits from the community and Board for improving ICANN’s interactions with its community and lowering the barriers to participation in the organization. He will be leaving at the end of November, following the ICANN Seoul meeting and Internet Governance Forum in Egypt.

Some of Kieren’s achievements have been to revamp the ICANN website, restructure the public comment process, greatly expand and improve remote participation at meetings, produce monthly magazines, encourage and assist the production of a range of other newsletters and updates to the community, introduce professional photography and video, create a meeting question box, and oversee many of ICANN’s web presences including the blog, public participation site, meeting sites, mobile site, and the front page of the main ICANN site.

Kieren has been pivotal in the introduction of ICANN’s translation and interpretation programs, its consultation principles, and its document deadline policy. He has also introduced ICANN to a range of social networking tools, used to improve interaction and communication with the community, as well as a number of innovative sessions at international public meetings, including a joint meeting of representatives of all ICANN’s arms.

Kieren is leaving to work on a range of projects. He will be partly returning to journalism and will continue to cover Internet and green technology issues within California for the foreseeable future.

I’m sure you all join me in wishing Kieren great success in these next projects.

Thanks!

Doug

I was at the United Nations in Geneva last week to watch what was happening to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) as it prepares for its third outing, this December in Hyderabad, India.

Actually I was there for a different reason – an ICANN consultative meeting on the future of the organization the morning before the UN meeting – but it seemed daft to fly all that way and not check out the day of open discussions about the IGF. Plus I have a real soft spot for the IGF and the people that have worked extremely hard to make it a success.

I was a witness to the IGF’s creation, on paper, at the World Summit on the Information Society back in 2005, and then followed it all the way through various preparatory sessions as a reporter.

At the inaugural IGF in Athens, I was asked to be the conference’s “blogger-in-chief” – a position that, ironically enough, my current employer tried to veto. As a semi-official part of the IGF, I also got to see behind the scenes, and was impressed with the hard work, dedication and calm handling of what was an enormous and risky experiment. A lot of people at the time confessed to turning up just to see what would happen – spectators to what could have been the biggest diplomatic car crash for a decade. In the end, despite the odds, it shone through.

Her name was Rio

Inspired by the meeting’s efforts to find Internet-style solutions to some very big problems, I also helped set up one of the new “dynamic coalitions” – for “online collaboration”. The extremely limited resources the IGF team had meant that their Internet options were extremely limited – and this at a time when everyone was talking about Web 2.0.

By the time the second IGF came around, this time in Rio de Janeiro, I had made the unusual choice of taking a job with ICANN which unfortunately put a whole different complexion on things. The Brazilian hosts were making it very plain they intended to make ICANN a central discussion point of their meeting – and not in a positive way. ICANN instinctively went into a defensive crouch, and you can hardly blame it considering the organisation was nearly torn limb-from-limb during the WSIS process.

As a result, I stepped back from helping out the IGF organizers – something I still wish I could have avoided. Although since I helped ICANN to become more open and forthcoming in Rio, I am content with the belief that I helped ensure that the IGF didn’t come to represent a place of combat rather than a location for collaboration and open discussion.

The Rio meeting also saw the collapse of the dynamic coalition I had worked hard at. Partly it was due to the fact that my new job left me with no free time, but more so it was thanks to several people trying to use the credibility that had been built up behind it as a political platform for their personal agendas.

I explain all this because from a personal perspective my natural bias would likely be to see the IGF as going down the tubes. It has only a five-year mandate from the UN Secretary-General and the Rio meeting saw a lot of people pondering whether they would bother to attend the next.

It’s not as if there aren’t already 1,000 different conferences about the Internet. Governments appeared to be stepping back from the process; the fight-fans who had hoped to get ringside tickets to a global Net bout felt cheated; what were the dynamic coalitions actually achieving anyway; and, what exactly was the point of going to India? What would you miss if you didn’t go?

Muffled movement

I’ve not followed the progress of IGF 3, so I have to say it was a delight to see that, far from it falling apart, the whole Internet Governance Forum seems to be coming together.

Don’t get me wrong, if any normal person off the street walked into Room XIX in the Palais des Nations last Tuesday, they would have been overcome with the sense of self-interested individuals having an incredibly long and incredibly boring discussion about something that should somehow be exciting and riveting but very clearly wasn’t.

The IGF process remains the domain of insiders, geeks, paid advocates and people with too much time on their hands. A significant number of the Meeting Advisory Group (MAG) that makes most of the decisions surrounding the IGF don’t even bother turning up to the open consultations. I was tempted to do a headcount but for some reason my natural trouble-making inclinations failed me.

So if it was the same old rigmarole, the same people talking to the same people saying the same things in a heavily padded room through little plastic ear cups, where does my optimism come from?

Almost entirely I think from the IGF Secretariat. The UN staff has been given some stark assessments from headquarters in New York. It is fortunate that the IGF hardly costs the UN anything, relying instead on voluntary contributions, but it is still a big show put on by the United Nations so it has to show its value, and show it soon.

A review of the forum has been ordered and despite efforts to socialize the idea among the great and good gathered in Geneva, it is going to start at the Hyderabad meeting whether people like it or not.

The IGF has to show progress, it has to start carving out its own role, demonstrating its value, and produce something of real originality. Otherwise it’s a goner in 2010. And the IGF Secretariat has started work on that, very carefully and cleverly and with all the diplomatic nous that its main figure, Markus Kummer, is renowned for.

The most significant example of this is in the colour-coding of workshops that will take place in Hyderabad. The emphasis of the IGF has always been on multistakeholderism, which means, basically, getting governments, business, the technical community and civil society talking together.

The workshops are supposed to be multistakeholder i.e. have someone from each group, but this has been frequently ignored, or given lip-service to, or somehow not quite managed in the past. This year, the workshops were listed online and given a colour code – green for fully multistakeholder; amber for not fully multistakeholder; and red for more work needs to be done.

The pressure is then placed on the organizers to get to a green status. And this process has also had the effect of getting people to work together to merge different workshops in order to get the full quotient of people. It has forced people to work together to a common goal. And it has worked in large part. I counted 88 workshops for a possible 98 spots with 1 red, 15 amber and the rest green.

Officialdom

There will be three main issues at the 2008 IGF, and they are:

• Reaching the next billion
• Promoting cyber-security and trust, and
• Managing critical Internet resources

For these three, there are two “official” workshops each, and the same gentle pressure has been applied as with the other workshops – albeit with less success – to get those jostling for position to work together.

This is a step forward from last year where the workshops often proved more valuable than the main sessions. By getting egos to clash over workshops, it may be that the main sessions aren’t dragged down through bureaucratic compromise.

There will still be the need for people – especially government ministers – to have set pieces, but there have been requests this time for moderators to be expert in the field, rather than simply expert moderators. And that shows that there is a hope for more in-depth discussion of the issues this time around. A depth that you get from policymakers, not politicians.

Dead dynamics

The IGF seems to be finding its feet and becoming more structured. Panels in the morning will “distill lessons” that will then “focus the debate” in the afternoon. It won’t work like that in reality of course, but the stated intent is there and everyone agrees with it, which is a clear step forward.

The IGF website is also far more organized. It still looks horrendous, and it is difficult to find material, but the amount and quality of information has taken a big step forward – particularly the inclusion of carefully edited MAG list emails. Only a handful of people will ever read them, but it is the act of having them that is important.

There was also an effort by Nitin Desai – the UN-SG’s special representative – to press the dynamic coalitions into coming up with the goods. Those coalitions that haven’t produce reports on their activities have been threatened with being “archived”. The IGF Secretariat was very careful not to come across as making demands but it is clear that a clean-up is underway (to arrive at a “reasonably tidy house”, according to Desai) – and rightly so. That the coalition I formed (and resigned from just after the Rio meeting) is more than likely to be swept up with the broom can only be a good thing.

It is also worth noting that one or two governments and businesses are also taking a bit of a punt of the IGF and have contributed significant sums of money this time around, lifting at least some of the pressure off. The Canadian government in particular is said to have donated a couple of hundred thousands dollars just to allow for increased participation in the Hyderabad meeting.

The prep meeting

So, what actually happened at the all-day Geneva meeting?

Well, from my perspective, there were five things of note:

1. The usual prepared statements were fewer in number – thank god
2. The governments seemed to be taking less of a public role – not a good thing and also the explanation for why there were fewer prepared statements
3. The Brazilians have decided to use the emotive issue of child pornography to political ends. What political ends people will find out in December, but the cynical powerplay is disheartening
4. The IGF Secretariat were larger, more prepared and more confident
5. Some people – notably civil society – still don’t get it

On the Brazilian thing: the Brazilians, who I very much like on a personal basis, flew over a Senator who has been heading a drive against child pornography at home. He then provided a very loud, almost-ranting political speech about the subject, claiming that Brazil was three years ahead of the rest of the world.

I have a very significant distrust of anyone using child pornography on the Internet as an argument for doing anything with the Internet. As a UK citizen, I have seen my Parliament’s main committee on the Internet completely overrun by zealots for all sorts of controls using the emotive shield of child porn to deflect perfectly reasonable questioning. I have seen efforts to introduce ridiculous laws written through the distorting lens of child porn. And I have seen upfront and in person the lives of innocent people ruined because political pressure opened the door to flawed police investigations.

Every time someone raises the issue of child pornography online, they come armed with a rhetorical question: why aren’t we doing more about this? And then proceed to outline a series of measures that would see them laughed out the room if they were discussing any other subject.

As such, when I hear a Senator boasting about how his country is so much more advanced on fighting child porn than anyone else – which, incidentally, is exactly what the UK claimed last year – I become immediately concerned. My prediction is that shortly after the Brazilians outline the fantastic work they have done removing this repulsive (and extremely niche) activity, they will then outline how everyone else can do the same. And that it will just so happen that those methods fit perfectly with their political goals.

Debate and dialogue

But onto the fact that some people just don’t get it. The most notable case is an academic who I’ve known for a number of years and who I know from experience never tires from railing against imagined malignant influence.

There was a semantic argument at one point in which someone asked for the main sessions to be called “debate and dialogue” rather than just “debate”. The idea being that people don’t necessarily want to just argue with one another, that there should also be some sharing of ideas and experiences.

It was a fairly harmless proposition, subsequently agreed to by others, but in the eyes of some the suggestion represented something far more grave and sinister. And so a false debate started on the issue of debate. The proposition was that the word “dialogue” be added to the title, but it was misrepresented as having been put forward as a sole replacement – and then furiously denounced as such.

The issue of debate thus became that day’s controversy, and speakers, bored from having flown halfway across the world to sit in a huge beige hall, found something to fight over. It was a complete waste of everyone’s time but it does demonstrate that some people still haven’t got it.

Got what? That the IGF’s unique selling point, it’s original nature, its very value and essence comes in getting people from different backgrounds and cultures to overcome their suspicions and differences and find a solution that they can all agree on in furtherance of an Internet that everyone benefits from and which no one can control. And a big part of that process is people letting go of the chips on their shoulders.

Civil society, for example, wants public policy debates where advocates thrash it out, firing facts and figures at their opponents, uncovering misdeeds and through this approach define the best way forward.

What it fails to realise is that the people that actually make those decisions in the real world – governments mostly, but also industry actors in democratic states – don’t use that approach for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. All you end up with is bold but unworkable statements from parties that are now in a confrontational relationship. It’s the opposite of arriving at policy decisions. Fine in a courtroom; pointless in a drafting office.

The people’s representative

It’s not just civil society that still has problems adjusting. Governments have terrible trouble grasping the idea of being an equal stakeholder rather than the decider. They failed miserably when the MAG was being readjusted to provide non-government actors with more power and insisted on retaining their majority position. Likewise, government representatives still can’t bring themselves to participate in the debate, preferring instead to read prepared statements or react only to statements for which they know the official line.

Government representatives also rarely mix with the others in the room. Many shun public meetings altogether. And they provide only a minimum of interactivity with the IGF’s flagship products: workshops and dynamic coalitions. Their placid behaviour in public is, sadly, matched by petulant and unreasonable behaviour behind closed doors.

But it is all very much better than it was. Three years ago, no one trusted anyone else. As the IGF processes have continued and no one has “lost” anything, so the focus has gradually drawn into the issues and solutions to the issues.

There is still paranoia and its flipside, plotting, but what the Geneva meeting demonstrated through its glorious tedium was that the multistakeholderites are just as content planning a meeting together as they fighting with one another.

The longer the IGF continues in the same vein – finding a way to avoid pressing one another’s buttons – the more this understanding will be allowed to foster. And then we will really have a forum worth visiting. It won’t be sexy, it won’t be good TV and it won’t be particularly interesting but it will get some serious work done on an enormously complex subject – namely, figuring out how to deal with this Internet thingy.

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.

Openness and transparency

How much of that was because of the community complaining, and how much thanks to the WSIS process, and especially the Washington meetings where accountability and transparency were driven home by the DoC of all people, is something that can be argued over. But since I have spent god knows how many hours (days, weeks?) trying to get people interested in ICANN and what it does, plus make sure that what it does do is recorded (not to mention trying to make sure it can’t do anything it shouldn’t), when I was asked to do a website to help this process along, I thought about it a bit and decided it was worth a go.

Besides, I have been moaning and moaning for years that the organisation that oversees the Internet doesn’t use the amazing tools that Internet technology has produced, so this was a chance to put my money where my mouth was.

I made a few basic demands like having access to a decision-maker, and full access to a server, so I wasn’t caught up having to get every small tweak approved by a committee. That was fine I was told and had ICANN’s technical head on the phone a day or two later. And then I checked that the elements of the IGF site – basically: simple registration, immediate posting rights, a variety of input methods – were why ICANN had asked me, and they said yes, so with only a week to go I spent basically every second that I wasn’t news editing Techworld building the site up.

Technobile

There were of course, technical problems – there always are. The fact that the Thanksgiving weekend kicked in just as I was starting didn’t help. So I built the site on my own server and then tried to transfer it, and the MySQL databases, and the various bit of custom coding across. Thanks to ICANN’s technical team (special thanks to Yan and Mehmet) it finally worked, and the only thing that had got mangled on the way were the Spanish characters I had included for meeting info translation. The site is now largely done – well, all the hard stuff is done – so today, Saturday, I have been taking it easy and sitting in a haze due to lack of sleep. I had a fresh look at the site this morning and I think it might work.

The site itself

I made the site more sober (read: less colourful) than the IGF site to give it a better sense of authority. And I spent a while trying to tie in the events as closely and intuitively as possible. My idea was you could visualise the days and the times and quickly see what event you might be interested in – and then with a simple click, get a summary. A click on the summary would then takes you to a page that has everything you need to know. And thanks to some software from the clever bastards at MIT (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/), I think I got that side of things working pretty well – see here.

I chose two levels of tags: one for ICANN’s Supporting Organisations and so working within the existing structure; and the second covering the main topics. Making a topics list is difficult because you don’t want to miss things, or mix things up, but you want to shortest list possible for practical reasons. So I came up with eight and added an option where people can type in their own tags to give it some flexibility.

RSS

The RSS feeds bring in official ICANN news in one box and then blog posts from across the Net in another – I’ve added all the people that regularly cover ICANN: myself, Brett Fausett, Joi Ito (Board member), Susan Crawford (Board member), ICANNWatch, ICANNblog (the blog bit of ICANNWiki), and some others I can’t remember right at the moment. I’ll turn that on tomorrow for the start of the meeting seeing as the site is supposed to be covering just the São Paulo meeting at the moment.

If it is a success then I’m sure the site will carry on to other meetings but I’m secretly hoping that it will be used between meetings as well. It all depends on whether people take to it. And I really think that while you can expect the usual Internet crowd to crawl all over it, the real test will come in whether the ICANN staff start using it. ICANN is still in under-fire mode (although it has started relaxing a little following the JPA) and the staff have a slight bunker mentality. I just hope that they start interacting with the community and in return the community gives them a fair hearing. If the site can solve one problem that wouldn’t have been solved otherwise, it was worth building it.

Here comes trouble

I have yet to hit any difficult dilemmas. For example, I am fully prepared to delete posts and even ban members if they start trying to take over or disrupt the functioning of the site. I can foresee a few situations where that puts me in a difficult situation. But I have designed the site such that this shouldn’t be a problem. It is quite hard for an individual (or several individuals) to disrupt discussion and the site has a good degree of self-monitoring. So everyone will be allowed to have their say – something I believe to my core – but it’s not a case of who-shouts-loudest.

The strangest thing that happened when I was doing the IGF site – and where I was a semi-official blog watcher – was when the site went down because demand was too high and I found myself reporting on my own site. I was tempted for a moment to give myself a really hard interview and stitch myself up just for my own amusement, but then I decided not to take the well-travelled path of media self-regard.

Besides, the thing is – and everyone seems to forget this – the decisions being made now by a very small group of people will form the culture of a medium that will affect everyone on the planet now and into the future. It’s important that we at least do our best not to write in something that people in 25 years’ time despair about. And that means thrashing out ideas in free and open discourse. I hope the http://sp.icann.org/ site will help that just a little bit.

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 conference and then failing to allow anyone to actually access it – the Internet, that is. The wireless access, despite endless complaints yesterday, is still not working at the Internet Governance Forum. This is a mild irritation for most people, but as the mug who is supposed to be officially reporting on what is being discussed online but who is unable to be in the room and online at the same time, it is mind-meltingly annoying.

It isn’t helped by the fact that the Greek hosts have assured me – and others far more senior than me – that providing me with a wired connection is “impossible”. That is except for the enormous Ethernet junction at the back of the room, monopolised by Greek TV. If it isn’t sorted out very soon, I am going to tear out a router out from the *wired* PCs in another room in the hotel and I am installing a connection myself – and god help anyone that gets in my way.

/rant

That rant aside, how is it going today at the IGF? Well, unfortunately we still have the same platform, the same desks, the same rectangular talk-down by those up on the stage (I am told the Greek hosts said it was “impossible” for the platform to be removed – even though I was here two days ago when it was put in place). Now there are vague claims that there are UN regulations that dictate how the room is set up. This is, to use a classic British expression, bollocks.

The real reason is that governments are not comfortable with being touchy feely – they live and so they shall die by desks and authority. Personally I think if you killed the platform and desks, you’d take a *huge* jump in multi-stakeholder discussions. For that to happen though, civil society would also have to meet governments halfway and be more diplomatic and less aggressive in their criticism.

And the way the Chinese government was hounded in the Openness session is a case in point. One of the biggest lessons that civil society has to learn is the line to draw when addressing governments – because they are hoping that the government will listen to what they have to say. It will always be stronger language than the careful diplomatic language governments are used to, but it’s self-defeating to round on a government official. Gentle prodding, careful rebukes – if people want the multi-stakeholder model to work, and it is in everyone’s interests to do so – this is the compromise you have to make.

Everything in moderation

Nik Gowing – a BBC World presenter – was the Openness meeting moderator and was taking no nonsense. As a result he livened up the room. He consistently told the people wandering around the room with microphones to hurry up, and to turn the mics on before they gave them to people. Again and again, there was 30 seconds of silence while a microphone was slowly handed over. Gowing was absolutely right to chivvy things along, it added a touch of pace, and I think it has helped create a different ambience in the room.

The problem in the Security session after lunch is that without this active hounding and pushing, the session has slowed right down again. I think what this needs is two moderators. It’s simply too big a job to put on one person’s shoulders – the room is too big, the people are too numerous and the cultures are so different.

There was some interesting stuff in the Openness meeting. It was high-level stuff – intelligent people, talking broadly and knowledgeably. But there is still a sense that the ball is being dropped. The Greek minister, acting as chairman, was less that happy about the Greek blogger arrest being brought up, and I’m pleased to say I am completely to blame for it.

Arrested!

The wireless connection finally arrived in the very last 15 minutes of a three-hour session (I had been downstairs, scribbling notes on pads and saving on Word documents and then coming back into the room – the most unbelievably hopeless and tiring effort). And the fact is that the bloggers were talking about the Greek aggregator’s arrest. Nik Gowing pushed it, and I pushed it further. Am I contradicting what I said earlier about not hounding governments? Yes and No. It was pressure on the host government – and this a Western government where ministers are used to this approach plus Greece – and so it sits in a special box when it chooses to host such an event – as was found out by Tunisia when it hosted the World Summit last November.

I have more criticisms.

The Workshops – at least the ones I’ve stuck my head in – are NOT following the new-style model that the IGF tried to introduce. They have lapsed into conference mode – people rehashing the same Powerpoint presentation that gave last year, but with a few updates. There is not enough interaction.

The IGF is supposed to be more open, inclusive, moving. I think it was Vittorio Bertola who complained earlier that he doesn’t want to step back to the same non-specific, semi-educational boring yarns. He knows this, he’s heard it 100 times before. He wants to move forward – get to the specifics. If others in the room have to learn fast, so be it – this is the Internet Governance Forum not the Web Kindergarten. I agree with him.

And if you don’t believe me – I have been asking everyone I meet whether they are happy with the way things are going. The only people that are happy? Governments. They like it. It’s free research and they still feel comfortable. If government officials aren’t stretched – made slightly uncomfortable but in a energetic and productive way – by the end of the IGF, this forum is in trouble.

The question is: with so much of the process ending up in the hands of the moderators, do we have the personality here in Athens that can pull it off? We have a Japanese and a French moderator tomorrow. The Japanese man will be polite – maybe that will work. I have yet to meet the Frenchman.

The future of the IGF may well rest in their hands.

I don’t know how it happened but Vint Cerf’s on his feet, Paul Twomey is being pulled into the conversation and despite a panel of 16 people, all pretty much determined not to talk about ICANN, we are talking about, yes, ICANN.

I’ve not been able to get a feel for how this first session of the IGF has gone as I’ve been in and out of the room trying to find a wireless connection so I can find out what the blogs are discussing. Even when in the room, I’m pre-occupied with hoping that suddenly the network will go up.

But my feeling is this: there are two many people on the stage. It is hard to harrie people if there is safety in numbers. Kenn Cukier is doing a good job in listening and expanding on questions – and also a good journalistic job is not letting platitudes get by. But even so, there are too many people.

The second problem is that the session is too long. It gets tiring about an hour-and-a-half and people starting switching off – leaving only those so driven by one point to get up and make a point. These people are very rarely, if ever, debate expanders.

All that said, there is still a feeling here that something new is happening. I’ve been to alot of conferences over the Internet and after a while, it begins to feel like the same old thing. The razzle-dazzle and star-gazing worlds are gradually subsumed into the fact that for the people in the room, it is also just their day-to-day job.

That sense of staleness isn’t here – make clear by the fact that the room is still full. I can’t remember the last time I saw so many people stick out a three-hour discussion.

As for my job, I am not being helped out either by the moribund wireless network or the fact that the blogosphere is stubbornly retaining its habit of being obsessed with trivia and – especially ironic considering its speed – what happened hours ago, rather than what is happening now.

All the bloggers that can be guaranteed to be interested in what is going on in the room are actually in the room – and because the network is down, are not able to write any blogs. It is with some irony then that during the small windows they have managed to open, they have taken only the opportunity to complain about not being able to write any posts.

This is my overriding thought: people have a very difficult time getting used to something new – especially when it is happening quickly in front of them. There is a gradually evolving system of interaction being built by the volunteers and conference organisers that by the time of the next session will be tighter. The hope then will be that the rest of the audience catches up. I have a horrible feeling that bringing up the rear though will be the very epitome of this new super-democracy that everyone tells us the Net has produced: yes, the bloggers.

But there was a clear oversight which I shall take blame for because it was my job to push it when it wasn’t going to occur to others – there is no crystal-clear method for people online to interact.

I have built a collaborative website at http://igf2006.info, and done my best to publicise it, but even so, there is no email address set aside for IGF comments. The reason is because of the split of authority between the UN and my semi-official role – but no one cares about that outside a very small group.

We’ve solved it: comments@igf2006.info. You live and you learn.