Comments on: IGF-Rio: Remote Participation

By: Jeremy Malcolm

Jeremy Malcolm — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 07:38:47 +0000

You make a good point that remote participation must be recognized as part of the event’s official agenda. That is the main difficulty that we face at the moment; that the Secretariat has misunderstood the need for investment in online tools, apart from a flaky Webcast and an embarrassingly basic informational Web site. Everything else has been left to the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition, which itself is quite ineffectual at the moment largely due to lack of funding for server hosting. Last year, the igf2006.info site that Kieren McCarthy and I put together on short notice (due to the Secretariat’s disinterest in doing so) was at first hosted on private Web space, but that proved insufficient for the task when it fell over – twice. For a few hundred dollars a month or less, the Secretarit could easily alleviate this problem. I would also love to speak to those who were responsible for the remote participation mechanisms for the International Seminar on Cultural Diversity, though it may be too late to emulate what they did for this year’s IGF meeting.

By: The Click Heard Round the World

The Click Heard Round the World — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:32:17 +0000

Enabling remote participation at the Rio Internet Governance Forum: blogging and virtual worlds…

Brazilian blogger and researcher Jose Murilo Junior posts an interesting set of questions regarding how to enable effective remote participation at the upcoming Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janiero in November. Jose references my thinking on thi…

By: rikomatic

rikomatic — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:08:39 +0000

Hi Jose, thanks for the link and your further thinking from my original post about this a year ago.

Two suggestions for how to proceed in Rio (synchronous and asynchronous): event blogging and virtual worlds.

While web forums and chats are lower bandwidth, they also tend to benefit mostly the people who are physically at the event to help them to take into account the views of others outside the room. They see a bunch of text scrolling on the screen and a moderator pulls out the best question out of the many submitted. But web forums and chats are a poor substitute for the end user who really wants to FEEL like she is participating in a discussion.

Instead, I think the explosion of the blogosphere around the world points to blogging as the main means for people to contribute in an asynchronous, individualized, and in-depth manner. A group blog set up for the event, enabling people to post long questions, musings and proposals and to respond to each other, is much more correspondent with current internet culture and norms. Many active bloggers will merely double-post their own thoughts on both their own personal blogs as well as the Rio group blog, which should be welcomed and encouraged. Others will engage in blogging for the first time, and thus feel empowered to speak out on their issues.

Web forums tend to wither on the vine after an event is finished. But initiating and aggregating a blogger discussion can have a much longer shelf life and impact.

Meanwhile, virtual worlds deserve consideration for remote participation in Rio.

There are definitely new possibilities that would not have been possible to imagine even a year ago. The growing internationalization of Second Life (with Brazil and Japan being two of the fastest growing segments) makes this particular virtual world a real possibility for bringing in new, technically savvy voices on a real time basis. I would argue that Second Life is the MOST accessible and participatory technology currently available that most replicates the experience of actually being at the event, particularly with real-time video and audio enabled.

Next year there may be other more open, web-enabled virtual worlds that are better suited for the IGF. But for this upcoming event, Second Life is actually the appropriate level technology, even with the broadband and fast computer requirements.