[governance] IGC questionnaire Q6 for review

[Ginger Paque]

6. If the continuation of the Forum is recommended, what improvements 
would you suggest in terms of its working methods, functioning and 
processes?

Since the value and effectiveness of the IGF are obvious, with 
near-unanimous response that it should continue, we believe that the 
review should focus on addressing the issue of more inclusive 
participation.   More importantly, the energy not needed in a review of 
the current process could be spent in the search for ways to foster more 
active inclusion of rarely heard and developing country voices through, 
but not limited to, remote participation.

And here, in keeping with WSIS principle 13:

 

 “In building the Information Society, *we shall pay particular 
attention* to the special needs of marginalized and vulnerable groups of 
society, including migrants, internally displaced persons and refugees, 
unemployed and underprivileged people, minorities and nomadic people.* 
*We shall also recognize the special needs of older persons and persons 
with disabilities.”

 

we include for example, Indigenous peoples worldwide, people with 
disabilities, rural people and particularly those who are the poorest of 
the poor and often landless or migrants, those concerned with promoting 
peer to peer and open access governance structures built on an 
electronic platform, those looking to alternative modes of Internet 
governance as ways of responding to specific localized opportunities and 
limitations, and those working as practitioners and activists in 
implementing the Internet as a primary resource in support of broad 
based economic and social development.

This requires a willingness to consider the inherent limitations of 
structures and processes that may have seemed natural or inevitable in 
2005, in the wake of a somewhat traditional intergovernmental summit. 
For example, it may not be most inclusive and appropriate for the 
"forum" of the Internet Governance Forum to be conceived as an isolated 
face-to-face meeting held in a far-flung city.  Rather, perhaps the IGF 
should take a leaf out of the book of other Internet governance 
institutions such as the IETF and ICANN, in which most work and 
engagement takes place between meetings in online and regional fora, and 
for which global face-to-face meetings are more of a capstone for the 
work done elsewhere.


Selection of the host country for any IGF meeting is a complex
decision. The IGC considers that the location for meetings should more
clearly support participation by individuals and organizations with
few resources. Accessible (perhaps even not urban) but less popular
sites should be chosen, where airline competition and routing options
make lower costs possible. City/country cost of hotels and food should
be taken into consideration as well. Final meeting dates and sites
should be announced 360 days in advance to allow for budgeting and
advanced planning, and to ensure that transport, food and lodging is
competitive and convenient.

 

[Vanda, edited]

Considering the relevance of IGF and its achievements during its term 
and the need to spread and improve the resulting information and 
policies, the IGF should support regional forums around the world, using 
its mission and brand to strengthen movements already existing in some 
regions and to help others to start.

The regional forums - holding the stakeholder model, signature and the 
support of the IGF – are a powerful tool to foster the implementation, 
in a regional/ local level, of several suggestions raised during these 
years to address the Tunis agenda stipulation for "development of 
multi-stakeholder processes at the national, regional… level". This 
should be complemented by more formal support for Remote Hubs to the 
annual IGF meeting.


[Shiva, edited]
The IGC suggests that the multistakeholder community and the IGF 
establish a program to offer improved funding to extend travel support 
for panelists. Such funds would enable IGF main sessions and workshops 
to bring in more diverse opinions to the IGF including experts who have 
particular expertise, but are not the usual IGF participants. It would 
also help those participants who have a keen interest in contributing to 
panels but have difficulty in traveling to the IGF.

Similarly, we must no longer avoid considering the need for new 
structures and processes for the IGF that would allow it to produce more 
tangible outputs through a process of reasoned deliberation.  In the 
past various such innovations have been considered - including speed 
dialogues, moderated debates, and roundtable discussions - but always 
the MAG has demurred from going through with these reforms due to the 
reticence of some stakeholder representatives.  Although it may be 
palatable to all - change never is - the IGC contends that the IGF as a 
whole will suffer in the long term it it does not prove its value to the 
international community by adopting mechanisms for the production of 
non-binding statements on Internet public policy issues.
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