[governance] CFP for Athens GigaNet Conference, Oct. 29

[William Drake]

Please distribute as appropriate
 
 
Call for Proposals
 
Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)
First Annual Conference
Divani Apollon Palace & Spa Hotel
Athens, Greece
29 October 2006 
 
 
The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) is an emerging
scholarly community initiated in Spring 2006.  Its four principal objectives
are to: support the establishment of a global cohort of scholars
specializing on Internet governance issues; promote the development of
Internet governance as a recognized, interdisciplinary field of study;
advance theoretical and applied research on Internet governance, broadly
defined; and facilitate informed dialogue on policy issues and related
matters between scholars and Internet governance stakeholders (governments,
international organizations, the private sector, and civil society).
 
In this context, the GigaNet plans to organize conferences to be held on
site prior to the annual meetings of the new Internet Governance Forum
(IGF). The first such conference will be held on 29 October 2006 in Athens,
Greece prior to the inaugural IGF meeting  <www.igfgreece2006.gr>.  The
final program, when available, will be posted on the IGF website
<www.intgovforum.org> and on the websites of relevant academic
organizations.  Attendance at the conference will be free of charge and open
to all registered IGF participants.
 
This is a call for proposals from scholars interested in speaking on one of
the three round table panels to be held at the conference.  The panels are
described in the preliminary program below.  The Program Committee will
select four to five speakers per panel drawing on the following materials to
be provided by applicants: 1) a one page maximum description of the proposed
presentation indicating its specific relevance and value-added to the panel
in question’s thematic focus; and 2) a one page summary curriculum vitae
listing in particular the applicant’s current institutional affiliation(s),
advanced degrees, scholarly publications relevant to Internet governance,
and web sites, if available.
 
These materials should be emailed directly to the respective panel chairs
listed below by no later than Monday, 25 September, midnight GMT. The
Program Committee will notify applicants of its decisions via email by 4
October. The selected speakers will give ten-minute presentations, after
which there will be open discussion with audience members. While this is not
required, speakers are welcome to provide a written text or Power Point
presentation to be linked off of the conference web page.
 
 
---------- 
 
Preliminary Program and Roundtable Panel Descriptions
 
 
9:30-9:45       Welcome and Overview
                       Wolfgang Kleinwächter, University of Aarhus, Denmark
 
 
9:45-11:15      Theorizing Internet Governance: The State of the Art
Chair:              Peng Hwa Ang, Singapore Internet Research Center
                        Email: tphang [at] ntu.edu.sg
 
In recent years, scholars have begun to analyze Internet governance issues
using the theoretical tools of their respective academic disciplines.  While
issues surrounding ICANN have attracted particular attention, there also has
been significant work done on the international governance of digital
international trade and intellectual property, privacy, security, speech,
and other topics.  Such research often has been rather specialized and
geared toward the distinct audiences interested in each issue-area, which
limited intellectual cross-fertilization. These topics are related, and
Internet governance should be seen as a broad but coherent field of study
that merits elaboration and support.  Mapping the landscape of relevant
theoretical perspectives is an important first step toward this end.
 
The purpose of this panel is to consider questions such as: What aspects of
Internet governance are uniquely interesting and worthy of scholarly
analysis?  How has Internet governance been addressed by scholars in the
social sciences, humanities, law, and other disciplines, and which
theoretical approaches seem to be the most promising for which issues and
dynamics?  Do these efforts point to the emergence of a coherent research
agenda and the cumulative development of new knowledge? Are there
barriers---intellectual, institutional, and other---that might have to be
overcome to advance that agenda? How can Internet governance develop into an
interdisciplinary scholarly field that is taken seriously by academics and
also capable of providing useful inputs to the Internet Governance Forum and
other policy development institutions?  What lessons can be learned, if any,
from other fields defined by the object of inquiry/dependent variables
rather than by shared theories and independent variables, e.g.,
"communication studies," "information studies," and "women's studies"? Are
there national or cultural differences in the ways scholars approach these
matters, and if so how might these be reconciled?
 
 
11:15-11:30     Coffee break
 
 
11:30-13:00     “Enhanced Cooperation” and Interaction among Stakeholders
                            in Internet Governance
Chair:              Milton Mueller, Syracuse University, USA
                        Email: info [at] internetgovernance.org
 
In addition to creating the Internet Governance Forum, the Tunis Agenda
calls for "enhanced cooperation" among governments. This language originated
with the European Union's June 2005 criticism of US unilateral control of
ICANN. The EU claimed that the WSIS statement constituted, "a worldwide
political agreement providing for further internationalization of Internet
governance, and enhanced intergovernmental cooperation to this end" and
that, "Such cooperation should include the development of globally
applicable principles on public policy issues associated with the
coordination and management of critical Internet resources."
 
The purpose of this panel is to consider questions such as: What are the
causes of US-EU tensions over Internet governance? What institutional form
might such a "new cooperation model" for deliberations among governments
take? How viable is the distinction between "day-to-day management of the
Internet and "public policy?" What, more generally, is the role of national
governments in Internet governance in relation to other stakeholder groups?
What implications might “enhanced cooperation” have for civil society and
multistakeholder participation? How might such a philosophy lead to changes
in the structure or processes of ICANN? Proposals outlining any other
approach that provides insight into this aspect of the political battles
over Internet governance are welcome.
 
 
13:00-14:30     Lunch break
 
 
14:30-16:00     The Distributed Architecture of Internet Governance
Chair:              William J. Drake, Graduate Institute of International
Studies,
                        Geneva, Switzerland
                        Email: drake [at] hei.unige.ch
 
As the WSIS agreements recognized, Internet governance involves much more
than ICANN or the collective management of naming and numbering. Internet
governance also includes the development and application of internationally
shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs in
a variety of other issue-areas, e.g. technical standardization, cybercrime
and network security, international interconnection, e-commerce,
e-contracting, networked trade in digital goods and services, digital
intellectual property, jurisdiction and choice of law, human rights, speech
and social conduct, cultural and linguistic diversity, privacy and consumer
protection, dispute resolution, and so on. These activities take a variety
of forms and are pursued in a heterogeneous array of settings, including
governmental, intergovernmental, private sector, and multistakeholder
organizations and collaborations. In parallel, the international regimes and
related frameworks they establish vary widely in their institutional
attributes, e.g. the collective action problems addressed, functions
performed, participants involved, organizational setting and decision making
procedures, agreement type, strength and scope of prescriptions, compliance
mechanisms, power dynamics and distributional biases, etc.  But while there
is now broad recognition that the architecture of Internet governance is
highly distributed, there has been little systematic scholarly analysis or
policy dialogue about its precise nature and implications.
 
The purpose of this panel is to explore and clarify some of the lingering
ambiguities, including questions such as: Which governance mechanisms are
relatively more or less important in shaping the Internet¹s evolution and
use?  How well do these mechanisms cohere, and are there tensions and gaps
between them? Are there crosscutting issues that merit consideration from
analytical and programmatic standpoints?  Are there generalizable lessons to
be learned by the distinct communities of expertise involved in different
issue-areas with regard to best practices and institutional design?  Does
the distributed architecture pose any challenges with respect to the
effective participation of less powerful stakeholders and the global
community¹s ability to govern in an effective and equitable manner?  Looking
beyond formalized collective frameworks, under what circumstances, if any,
may private market power or spontaneously harmonized practices constitute
forms of Internet governance? What is the current role of governance
mechanisms for international telecommunications, and what might that role
become in a future marked by convergence and potentially non-neutral next
generation networks?
 
 
16:00-16:15     Coffee break
 
 
16:15-17:45     GigaNet Business Meeting
Moderator:      Avri Doria, Luleâ University of Technology, Sweden
 
 
17:45-18:00     Closing
 
 


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