Rushing rushing rushing to put together the materials I’m going to need for my presentations at the Internet Governance Forum next week in Athens. The main focus of my talks will be on creating new modalities for broadbased participation in internet policy through various communications and information technologies. What is interesting is that there are a few promising public forums and blog spaces that have been set up to try and increase public participation in the somewhat unknown but important international body. Notably:
- The IGF has their own discussion board, which is somewhat moribund at the moment
- There’s igf2006.info created by Kieren McCarthy and Jeremy Malcolm. This is a drupal powered site that has an impressive list of features, including blog hosting, forums, polls, and real-time chats.
- And then there’s igfwatch.org also created by Jeremy Malcolm which is somewhat a personal blog of Jeremy’s but also a great aggregator of news and commentary about the IGF.
- And of course there is the civil society Internet Governance Caucus, which was started during the WSIS process and apparently has continued on beyond WSIS
All of these are modest but good starts for garnering more public attention and participation in the debates around internet governance. What I really could use is a nice blog aggregator tool.