[governance] Re: Letter to IGF Secretariat re website

[Kieren McCarthy]

I think it may be worth reiterating the basic history and idea behind this 
letter.

Jeremy Malcolm and myself (Kieren McCarthy) collaborated in the weeks 
leading up to the IGF on a website that would allow some degree of online 
participation into the process for the simple reason that a website didn't 
exist and we felt this was a very large hole in what was supposed to be an 
Internet Governance Forum.

The resulting website at http://igf2006.info proved to be far more 
successful that even we had hoped to the extent that we had to move it onto 
the IGF's servers (thanks to a very helpful IGF secretariat) on the day 
before the conference opened, and then on the Wednesday demand was such that 
it overwhelmed even this service and the UN's hosting company had to shift 
it onto a bigger, faster server.

This confirmed what we had suspected (especially considering word of our IGF 
site only emerged literally the day before the conference), which was that 
there was great value and demand for an online collaborative site.

During the course of this process - which, let's be honest, was an 
experiment - a large number of people from across all stakeholders, 
government, business, civil society and so on expressed their gratitude to 
us for setting up the site and asked if they could become involved in 
something more structured for next year's IGF. Also, despite initial 
uncertainty, the IGF Secretariat grew to understand and appreciate the role 
that such a site could have for helping people collaborate with one another 
and with them. Nitin Desai specifically mentioned improving online 
collaboration next year in his chairman's summary.

However it was clear even during the conference that people were having a 
hard time figuring out which of the three websites they should go to - the 
IGF official site, the Greek hosts website or our unofficial site. In many 
cases, information was repeated, in other cases you could only find vital 
information on one of the three.

In brief discussions at the conference and subsequently, it struck a number 
of us that if we followed the example led by the new-found "dynamic 
coalitions" and pooled all our resources, that by the time of the Rio 
meeting we could all be working together on a single website to everyone's 
benefit.

Now, we don't know what are going to be the practical concerns from the IGF 
Secretariat, from the host government, and from the other stakeholders that 
took only a small role in our unofficial site. We do know that there is real 
concern about the ability for people to control certain sections of a 
website, for obvious reasons. But we really do think that if we open up 
discussions we can work through whatever issues are thrown up, particularly 
since the technology for this sort of thing (all of it, we should note, open 
source) is now so flexible that it is just a matter of designing a structure 
around people's wishes.

This letter therefore is intended to act as an invitiation to the IGF 
Secretariat, who are the lynchpin in this scenario, to consider our 
proposal. The hope is to make a good enough case that the IGF opens 
discussions over how to achieve it. We shall see where it goes from there.

There is a balance to be struck here between speed and structure. To get 
this letter in as soon as possible means that we have longer to make such a 
coalition work. Equally, I understand that Markus Kummer will have some 
early initial discussions with the Brazilian organisers next month when he 
attends the ICANN meeting in Sao Paulo. So in that sense, it makes sense to 
get this letter to the IGF Secretariat so at least the thought is in their 
minds early on.

The downside to this is that, as yet, we have a very loose coalition of 
people and no real structure for deciding how to proceed. The letter will 
hold the signatures of interested individuals that share the same vision. It 
is perhaps fortunate that these individuals are also highly capable and 
knowledgeable about these sorts of issues, but our hope is really to show 
the IGF Secretariat that this isn't just a whim, that people are serious 
about making this work and so hopefully it will carry more weight.

As such I would encourage anyone that believes that all stakeholders should 
work together on the online side of the IGF (to my mind this is obvious) to 
put their name to the letter. If the UN/IGF Secretariat then thinks this is 
worthwhile pursuing, we will sort out the issues of structure later.



Kieren

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Kieren McCarthy
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Homepages: http://www.kierenmccarthy.me.uk
Blog: http://www.kierenmccarthy.co.uk/

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