[bestbits] Thanks! (and short observations on the IGF Retreat)

[Stuart Hamilton]

Dear Colleagues

I just wanted to send a short note thanking you for supporting my participation in the recent IGF retreat, and alerting you to some next steps. In the next day or so a compilation (organized by topic) of the ideas and suggestions that emerged from the retreat will be made available in a format that permits paragraph by paragraph commenting.  This public consultation will be open for two months until 26 September, 2016. It's now time for everyone not at the retreat to get involved and make comments - I'm sure it will be posted to these lists as soon as it is up on the IGF website.

While I'm here, I'd also like to offer a couple of limited observations of the retreat. Fundamentally, I felt that for those of us there it was a very open wide-ranging discussion that the outcome documents summarise very well. I don't have much to add in that regard. The one area that was extremely interesting to me though was the idea of the MAG as this gigantic conference organising committee, and what a waste of expertise that seems to be. Speaking from the perspective of a staff member at an international organisation that arranges an annual conference for 3000-4000 people, moving from different region to region each year, there seemed to be a number of areas where a more focused approach to conference planning could produce a better outcome. At the MAG meeting before the retreat I was struck by the amount of MAG members I spoke with who were exhausted and exasperated at having to review >200 workshop proposals. Maybe I was being naïve, but going into the retreat I had assumed some degree of organisation on the MAG that would allow for workshop assessment by area of expertise i.e. proposals would be divided up across groups of individuals, sharing the workload, and playing to each individual's strength in terms of subject knowledge. Not the case apparently, and in my opinion clearly an area that should be addressed.

I suddenly realised that my own organisation's annual conference, which features hundreds of sessions and meetings over five days, and has a core conference organising committee of around 10 people, was massively more efficient than that of the IGF. We never really got into discussion about the MAG's effectiveness in the retreat - we did talk about how to better deal with the MAG's nomination process, but we didn't go deep into MAG re-organisation. However, it doesn't seem to me that changing working practices would go anywhere near the MAG mandate, and shouldn't be controversial. At the same time as addressing the workshop review process, there could also be better organisation into sub-groups/working groups on engagement and outreach, information dissemination etc. In side-discussions at the retreat I did discover that there have been/perhaps still are working groups on engagement, but I was not able to ascertain if this is something that get set up each time a new MAG is formed, or if there really is a structure in place to tackle different topics, and utilise individuals' expertise. I'm still left with this as a bit of a grey area I'd like to understand more.

Anyway, just some observations as I said. I encourage you all to take a look at the document that will shortly go online, and participate in the public consultation.

Cheers,

Stuart


Dr. Stuart Hamilton
Deputy Secretary General
International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
P.O. Box 95312
2509 CH The Hague
Netherlands

00 31 70 314 0884

Twitter: @ifladpa

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