On 16 and 17 February 2006, consultations were held in Geneva to organise the Internet Governance Forum, a result of deliberations during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) to include a wider group of stakeholders.
These consultations were held in a genuinely open and inclusive spirit, with about 300 participants representing a large variety of stakeholder groups, including some who would not have been accepted under the stricter accreditation rules that were applied for WSIS.
The consultations were led by Mr. Nitin Desai, the Secretary-General's Special Adviser for WSIS, who explained that he intended to listen to the various views about the Internet Governance Forum and then faithfully report to the Secretary-General about the points of general agreement, and that he would describe the range of opinions on issues where no consensus exists.
There was wide agreement on the general principle that the Internet Governance Forum should be very open and inclusive to all kinds of stakeholder groups, and also that the management structure for the forum should allow all kinds of stakeholders to contribute as equals in the decision-making processes. A variety of ideas on how this could be organized would be reached.
An important question was how many days the Internet Governance Forum should last. Although initially there appeared to be a consensus on "two to three days", when Chairman Desai proposed it several interventions called for a longer duration.
However if the IGF is scheduled to last for a long time, the leading technical experts whose presence is important for the success of the IGF are much less likely to come.
There was a lot of discussion on possible topics for the Internet Governance Forum, and all stakeholders have been invited to submit in writing their top three choices for public policy issues to be discussed at the first meeting of the IGF, together with a short explanation on the reasons for these choices, by 31 March 2006.
Also public comments are open until 28 February 2006 regarding the need for a multistakeholder group to assist the Secretary-General in convening the IGF, what the mandate of this group should be and how it should be formed.
The website for the Internet Governance Forum now includes transcripts of the consultations in Geneva and a summary of the positions which were stated.
Internet Governance Forum website
http://intgovforum.org/
EDRi-gram: First Consultations on Establishment of Internet Governance Forum
(18.01.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.1/igf
(Contribution by Norbert Bollow - Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure)