Nominet held a meeting over the IGF on Monday which has attracted a fair amount of attention, most of it revolving around Nitin Desai’s remarks at the end, picked up by the BBC.

I have grabbed the audio from the meeting and produced a series of MP3 files which you can download and listen to here. I will also post them on the IGF200.info blog. All files below:

• Opening Panel: Emily Taylor (Nominet), Alun Michael MP, Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (22 mins)
  
  

• Security Panel: Jean-Jaques Sahel (DTi), Mark Sunner (Messagelabs), Dave Evans (Information Commissioners Office), Guy Hosein (Privacy International/LSE), Richard Allan (Cisco)
  MP3 file (35 mins)
  
  

• Child Abuse Panel: Peter Robbins (Internet Watch Foundation), John Carr (NCH), Camille de Stempel (AOL/ISPA)
  MP3 file (22 mins)

• Openness Panel: Andrew McLaughlin (Google), Dr Yaman Akdeniz (Cyberliberties UK), Prof Jonathan Zittrain (OII/Berkman)
  MP3 file (34 mins)
  
  

• Emerging Issues Panel: Howard Williams (Worldbank), David Harrington (Communications Management Association), Malcolm Hutty (LINX), Chinyelu Onwurah (Ofcom)
  MP3 file (42 mins)
  
  

• Closing remarks by Nitin Desai
  MP3 file (10 mins)
  
  

I have also done a file combining just Nitin Desai’s opening and closing remarks, which you can grab here (mp3, 20 mins).

I should add that I was hoping to post videos of each sessions but have been thwarted by the combination of video formats and video editing software. I have a (very large) grab of the whole event in .asf format but have given up on editing after wasting hours trying to get it into a more usable format and only ending up with out-of-sync pics and audio.

Hopefully Nominet will ask the webcast company to do the split and post them in .avi or .mpeg files. The pictures are not that important anyway and are huge files so the MP3s are more useful and shareable.

So Nominet held a big meeting in London on Monday covering the new Internet Governance Forum that will meet for the first time at the end of this month in Athens.

In some ways, it was a sort-of mini IGF in that it took the same free-ranging panel approach and that it explictly held two panels on two of the four main themes of the IGF – “security” and “openness” (Nitin Desai pointed out that had the meeting been in a developing country, the panels and debate would have been on the other two themes – diversity and access).

It was also similar to the real meeting in the role that I have been asked to play: “chief blogger” – meaning scouring the Internet for interesting comments and reading them out to the room. Actually, this term “chief blogger” has led some to ask whether I’m some of kind of official IGF blogger, which I certainly am not, so I will refer to my role as “blog watcher” from now on.

The general feeling is that the meeting was a success. The room will filled with people who know alot about Internet issues – and for once it wasn’t dominated by the political issue of US control but rather the question of what problems the Net has thrown up and the best way of dealing with them. Moderator Sarah Montague of BBC fame did an excellent job of keeping the discussion moving, not allowing people to get away with platitudes and, crucially, not allowing discussions to slip into jargon.

In fact, the only part of the meeting that fell down was my part. The interaction from online users was pitiful. As such, this post will cover that element of interaction with online users, and I will cover what was actually said at the meeting in a different post. But I want to tackle this issue of interaction because it strikes me that there are serious issues here and it needs some good brains on the problem to figure out how to make it work.

There was an early success with the wireless router I brought from home (the building staff were unhelpful about such matters apparently) which I had pre-configured at home, plugged in, and managed to supply the room with Net access. Although my decaying laptop failed (yet again) to smoothly link to the network so I had to borrow one from the webcasting company and rebuild all the editorial web connections I needed from scratch.

This was the essence of my role: scour the blogs for any information about the meeting and interject it as and when asked. Since this was only a small and short meeting, there was never going to be blog coverage so an addition was a question tool, used at the Oxford Internet Institute IGF meeting a month ago. The question tool was rapidly deployed at the last minute with the aid of Jonathan Zittrain and enabled people to post questions online, plus vote on posted questions, thereby pushing them up the list, and so registering wider interest in the question being asked (you can see the end result of this here).

I had done a story for The Register in the morning covering the meetings and encouraging bloggers to interact, and this was picked up by one of the biggest blogging sites out there – Boing Boing – so I was fairly confident of some interaction. It was not to be. Some work colleagues look in on the meeting and posted a question or two, and Jon Zittrain also contributed one or two items but apart from that, the whole process attracted only three people.

Feedback

As a result the feedback I was able to supply to the moderator was minimal at best. And, with some irony, the one time I had an excellent question, supplied by Glyn Wintle, and indicated to Sarah Montague I had something, she couldn’t see me above the lights and ended the panel discussion before I had a chance to jump in. In the break, we worked out a system between me, the webcasters, and the moderator but very little else was forthcoming. Many of the people in the room were only aware of the online element because it was explicitly referred to by the moderator and also it was possible to bring up my laptop screen on the screens either side of the stage and on screen built into the panel’s desk.

Interestingly, some of the questions on the question tool were usefully answered by others within it – i.e. there was a parallel discussion going on online.

So what?

Well, a big element of the IGF is – or is supposed to be – interaction and involvement from people outside the room. After all, we are talking about the Internet Governance Forum. There has been a lot of talk of collaborative software, much of which has been ignored or poo-pooed by governments, but the IGF really is an opportunity to get these new technologies working and show their value.

Of course the great advantage of this type of interaction is that people don’t have to physically travel to the meeting to find out what is going on, plus there is the opportunity to have input into the meeting. This is particularly useful for people from developing countries who simply can’t afford to travel to Athens, even if they had the time and inclination.

Not everyone is happy about the idea of these tools being used to produce input into the meeting. And it is now my considered opinion that at this moment, this year, real-time feedback and input from the Internet is not going to work as a formal interjection. The input is too inconsistent and it requires intelligent filtering. I found in the Nominet meeting that listening to what was going on, plus checking out what people were discussing online, combined with attempting to boil this information down into something that could be interjected into discussions at the appropriate point was frankly too taxing. It is simply impossible for one person to do it by themselves and requires a team of people.

Talking fast

Discussion in a room actually moves incredibly quickly so the time that it takes to get feedback from people online, filter it and supply it to the room produces a delay that stilts real discussion. As such, the best method of including web-produced questions and content is to make it a separate cut-off from discussions. The moderator drawing a distinction. In the same way that on some TV shows, they make a point of “going to the phones”. Phone technology and, more importantly, humans’ comfort with phones has increased to such a level that you can now have conference calls, but even so they are not the same as face-to-face interaction. With most people still uncomfortable – or even unaware – of the new Net collaboration tools, perhaps it isn’t surprising that this divide exists.

But all that aside, I was still expecting between 10 and 20 people to be online during the Nominet meeting and they simply weren’t and that raises some important questions now only about why, but also about how you can encourage interaction.

These are my thoughts and ideas and I welcome anyone that has other input. First, reasons why the interaction from online was so low:

1. Very few people knew the meeting was going ahead (The Reg and Boing Boing stories appeared only hours before the actual meeting started)
2. Most of those who knew about it before then were in the room
3. Very few in the room had laptops and so could not interact online (I counted three people)
4. People couldn’t get the webcast or were not able to watch live (apparently, the controls didn’t work in Firefox so any new entry to the webcast started at the start of the meeting even as it was still going on).
5. People didn’t know where the interaction was going on – or even if there was any

The more technological and social reasons:

• The system was not friendly or simple enough – people were put off interacting
• People couldn’t see the point in interacting (after all, the questions made weren’t actually asked in the room in the end)
• People don’t want to interact (most people in a conference room don’t ask questions)
• The system wasn’t made clear – what would happen if you did type something in?
• The system was confusing or set up in a way that didn’t work – most people are not journalists and/or used to framing precise questions

Now, there are some things that separate the IGF meeting from the Nominet meeting:

• More people know the IGF meeting is going ahead
• The IGF is larger, so even if the small interaction is scaled up, there will still be enough people online for it to have value – especially since these people are likely to be more motivated to interact
• The IGF meeting is worldwide, meaning that there will be more people who know of the meeting that can’t physically attend – making online interaction more attractive
• More people at the meeting itself will have laptops and/or Net access

But that still leaves a number of hurdles:

• Making the interaction simple enough
• Making clear to people the point in interacting
• Trying to find a way to pull the online interaction into the ongoing real-world discussions
• Letting people know exactly where and how they can interact online
• Finding a way to filter and condense information into a form that has real practical use

This job will be made harder by the fact that I’m not sure it will be possible to bring up the online interaction on screens in the IGF conference room (I will have to ask Markus Kummer if this is possible), and by the fact that alot more information makes it more difficult to pick out useful material.

These then are my tentative conclusions from the Nominet blog watching experience into how to make IGF interaction better, wider, and more useful.

1. Get the interaction areas up online as soon as possible and allow people to start using them so they can get comfortable with the idea
2. Encourage free and open use of the system by as many people as possible both inside and out of the main meetings
3. Make the system as simple as possible
4. Explain how the interaction will work
5. Have a team of people watching and working with one another to help flag and fasttrack interesting comments
6. Try to get agreement for screens in the venue that can be switched to the online interactions when appropriate (this still leaves the issue of making whatever content is important fill the laptop screen so it can be viewed by people a distance away)
7. Expect for most of the useful interaction online to work in parallel to the actual ongoing meeting rather than within it (and find a way of connecting the two without disrupting either)

I’m sure there are others, but those are my thoughts at the moment. I hope they strike a chord with someone out there.

Well, it’s 3.15pm Geneva time and the afternoon session of Sub-Committee A at PrepCom3 of WSIS at the UN in Geneva will start in 15 minutes.

What does all that mean? That for the next few hours a group of around 100 people in a room will start making fundamental decisions about how the Internet will run forever more.

These sessions were getting behind. In fact there was only supposed to be one of these a day but a slow start last week has seen them running two a day and possibly three, with a third tonight.

It was pretty much doom and gloom right up until yesterday. Factions have built up and fallen down. The US and Canada – who always stick to give in the world politics stakes, mostly it must be said because of a pretty similar world view – have started edging apart.

Meanwhile, a group calling themselves the Likeminded group and containing an oddly anti-US Brazil contingent, as well some of the African countries and assorted others has started gathering pace.

I am told there was an OECD gang but that appears to have fallen apart. And the most stubborn so far are Iran and Cuba – quite possibly because the US is being pretty solid in its view that the UN shouldn’t have control of the Internet, and there’s nothing that annoys Iran and Cuba more than the Yanks laying down the law.

However, I had a quick interview with the US Ambassador, David Gross, as well as with the Sub-Committee A chairman and Pakistan ambassador Masood Khan, and both of them are quietly confident that a deal may be struck – no matter how unlikely it looks at the moment.

The Chinese – vital in any agreement – despite having put out a very strong statement earlier in the week which was a barely disguised attack on the US and ICANN, has not been as forthright as you might expect and so with both the US and China appearing to be willing to concede some points, if that agreement is made, the others could well be brought into line.

So what?

Well, while it’s not vital that everyone agree on a system for Internet Governance, if one isn’t reached, it is going to be the ten-ton gorilla in every important discussion regarding the Internet from this point on. And, as you can imagine, that’s going to be pretty often.

So agreement is definitely preferable. Or at least an initial agreement on who should run the Internet, who should decide where it grows and how it grows and how what already exists works with the rest of it.

I will get the interviews with the Ambassadors down on an MP3 with some commentary from me hopefully tonight and doing a broad, clearly story for The Register than this quick blog, but that’s how it stands at the moment in Geneva.