As I write this I am flying back to New York from Athens where I attended the first ever Internet Governance Forum. It’s been a tremendous experience that I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a part of. What follows is a quick flyover of how the whole deal went down and…
Category: Information Society
My talk on “Intellectuals in the IGF”
David Allen of Collab CPR asked me to be on a panel on "Intellectuals in the IGF" in Athens, which I just finished speaking at. My role was to address some of the more practical possibilities of engaging academics more cohesively into the Internet Governance Forum, based on my experiences with the SSRC program on…
Machinima Fest Preview TONIGHT (8PM EST) in Laguna Beach theater!
Woo hoo! It’s tonight here! See you alls there!
Remote participation at the IGF: so remote that no one knows about it
The Internet Governance Forum has done an admirable job setting up in very short order a number of means for remote participation at the meetings, which conclude tomorrow. These include webcasting, a discussion forum, live text chat, email, SMS, blog aggregation, and even submissions via video! All admirable and welcome to see. The question being:…
Chinese rep: “we don’t have software blocking Internet sites.”
Yesterday, during the "openness" session at the Internet Governance Forum, there was a fascinating interchange among the panelists, the audience, and finally a member of the Chinese government delegation on the question of Chinese censorship of the Internet. The controversy kicked off with a representative of Rapporteurs Sans Frontieres, a group legendary for their media-stealing…
Dramatic example of network (in)security at IGF
There was a real world demonstration of the difficulties and dangers of network security at the session on security this afternoon. Someone, hopefully from the IGF secretariat, had set up a wifi network called "free_wifi_net" accessible in the conference plenary hall. The moderator noted in his introductory remarks that if you connected to this network,…
My talk on e-democracy and the IGF
I prepared a statement for the panel on "Internet Governance for Participation," which I just finished speaking at. Time was running short, so I gave the abridged version of this session. Here’s the complete presentation, which is entitled “Top-down, Middle Layer and Bottom-up e-Democracy”…
IGP06 : Liveblogging Session on Openness
During the morning of Day Two of the first Internet Governance Forum, there was a multi-stakeholder dialogue on issues of “opennness.” The session spent the bulk of time talking about freedom of expression issues and particularly the responsibility of companies in using their influence to pressure governments to be more open. Then the moderator moved…
Internet Governance Forum06: Day 1 Wrap-up
So the first day of the first Internet Governance Forum is over, thank goodness. I clearly look like hell, cause all my old friends from the WSIS walk up to me and say, “Hi Rik, good to see you! Man, you look like hell.” Here are some of my highlights that I can summon from…
Crappy wifi stymies liveblogging the IGF
Ugh, I just lost a fairly detailed post on the Internet Governance Forum because of the crappy wifi here. Sigh, irony. The IGF began this morning in Athens, which I walked into not-so-fresh from an overnight flight. To get get a sense of what’s going on, you can check out the webcasts of the event,…