IGF-Rio: Remote Participation
Dialogue Forum on Internet Rights
Rome - 27 September 2007 (a personal account)
The Internet Governance Forum in Athens did an admirable job setting up a number of instruments for remote participation at the meetings. These include web casting, a discussion forum, live text chat, email, SMS, blog aggregation, and even submissions via video!
The effort was admirable — just the mere fact of the existence of such possibilities in Athens brought new elements into the process. But we could observe also that the remote participation procedures in Athens did not raise much interest. This is a serious problem if the IGF wants to project itself as a new kind of open framework for dialogue on Internet governance.
It’s not like there aren’t important topics being discussed: freedom of expression, cyber-crime, multi-lingualism on the net, surveillance, spam, etc. Certainly there are lots of potential interest, expertise and experience out there that could be integrated into the discussions.
In my view, the problem is that the “if you build it, they will come” approach doesn’t work for remote participation. It requires more.
I thought that maybe you would like to see some brief notes from day one at the Internet Governance Forum here in Athens.







