[governance] [6 of 6] How best to link with international processes and institutions?

[Jeremy Malcolm]

The final question of the MAG questionnaire, which we have been progressively working through, is:

How best to link with international processes and institutions?

The discussions that take begin at the IGF mostly end there, too.  Although we hear much about the effect that the IGF is having in the wider world, the Secretary-General's report on the IGF's renewal noted "that the IGF had not provided concrete advice to intergovernmental bodies and other entities involved in Internet governance" and "that the contribution of the IGF to public policy-making is difficult to assess and appears to be weak".  A workshop held on this issue by IT for Change in Sharm had reached the same conclusion.  So how do we improve this state of affairs?

We might recommend that just as the IGF and its workshop organisers will be appointing online rapporteurs to bridge between online and offline discussions during meetings, so too there should be rapporteurs whose job it would be to summarise relevant discussions at the IGF and to forward them to external institutions, and to act as a conduit for feedback from those institutions.

Ideally these summaries would include both main sessions and workshops, since much of the valuable discussion at the IGF takes place in the latter.  Alternatively, they could be limited to the main sessions provided that a better mechanism for feeding the output of workshops back into main sessions was realised.

In either case, such summaries transmitted from the IGF need not take the form of recommendations (though in the rare event that a rough consensus had been reached on a particular issue, there is no reason why they couldn't take that form).

Do you like these ideas, or do you have others of your own?  Let's hear them.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Project Coordinator
Consumers International
Kuala Lumpur Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East
Lot 5-1 Wisma WIM, 7 Jalan Abang Haji Openg, TTDI, 60000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 7726 1599

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