Remote participation plans Re: [OCDC] Re: [governance] Do

[Lee McKnight]

Hi,

Following on from Brenden and Jeremy's notes, first to be clear I do not
wish to disparage anyone's efforts to build the virtual presence of the
IGF.  Also to be fair to the UN and IGF secretariat, I suspect it's not
that they are unwilling, they just do not have resources/a funding
stream allocated for these purposes.

Say, maybe ICANN, Google, a foundation or two and/or the RIR's could
throw some  money in a pot and help move the IGF from the theory of
global virtual community towards a more multilingual and dynamic
reality?  Or IGF could start soliciting small individual donations
online a la the Obama campaign.

For example, I threw $250 in a pot to help ICANN get started a decade
ago, and I didn;t even get a free t-shirt : )

Point is, we know everyone is presently doing the best they can, but if
IGF is going to merit its life extending beyond 5 years, it needs to
really embrace its multistakeholder nature and suck up
resources/time/talent, and yeah cash, from all available corners of the
nascent virtual community, to build that community. 

The first step is to acknowledge a UN business as usual approach will
not get IGF there, ever. I guess Brenden, Jeremy, the dynamic coalition,
working group etc are working on suggestions for next steps, and I
encourage them all to think both short term and medium term what could
be done, at low cost since IGF resources will always be limited.

Lee

Prof. Lee W. McKnight
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
+1-315-443-6891office
+1-315-278-4392 mobile
>>> Jeremy at Malcolm.id.au 06/02/08 9:18 PM >>>
On 03/06/2008, at 2:09 AM, Brenden Kuerbis wrote:

> It does, as best it can with the meager resources it has, but IMO it's
> in the wrong format. One way to make it more useful would be to
> utilize RSS more.  The Secretariat advertises a feed on the home page
> (http://intgovforum.org/igf_rss_feed.xml), but the last entry is
> December 8, 2007. Is there another feed(s) that isn't broken?

No there isn't a non-broken official feed.  There is a meta-feed of  
unofficial IGF-related resources at http://igf-online.net/gregarius  
that aspires to completeness, but could do with more source feeds.

> E.g., it sure would be nice to have an IGF events feed
> so I could create a widget that could be placed on someone's blog or
> website. Or it sure would be great if I had an IGF transcript feed so
> I could easily create audio files for podcasting.

Exactly, and even if these were not provided in RSS format, it would  
be sufficient that they were provided in some other open format such  
as a Web service that others could repurpose in the manner you  
describe.  (Brenden, please consider contributing to the early draft  
requirements document at
http://wiki.igf-online.net/wiki/IGF_Virtual_Community 
, which I think you will find to be on your wavelength.)

I won't forward my off-list conversation with Chengetai Masango  
without permission, but the problem we run into is the Secretariat is  
willing to devote no resources to this.  The Rio meeting, for those  
privileged enough to make it, came with a seven-figure price tag, but  
for the majority of Internet users who cannot make it out of their  
home country, any investment above $0 is too much to justify.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm LLB (Hons) B Com
Internet and Open Source lawyer, IT consultant, actor
host -t NAPTR 1.0.8.0.3.1.2.9.8.1.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'

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