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,…
Category: Information Society
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,…
Survey of recent e-consultations
As I prepare my remarks for the Internet Governance Forum next week, I’m interested in what can be learned from recent ICT-enabled consultations that have taken place around different political processes. Here are a few notable ones: Minnesota just finished an interesting multi-modal e-debate among all six candidates for governor A joint US/Canadian consultation took…
Internet Governance Forum, uh, Forums
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…
What can the UN learn from virtual worlds?
There’s a very interesting discussion on the how to use the internet to facilitate broader consultations among internet users as part of the UN-initiated Internet Governance Forum’s deliberations. Apparently whatever platform chosen has to meet several conditions: Has to be open source – so people can trust the interface as accurately posting their views and…
Background on the UN’s Internet Governance Forum
So I have firmed up my speaking engagements for the Internet Governance Forum in Athens, which I am headed to on Sunday. I am on at least two panels, one "Internet Governance Participation" on Tuesday and another on "Intellectuals in IGF" on Thursday. That leaves me a lot of time for live-blogging and other outside…
Plone Conference re-broadcast in Second Life Oct 25-27
SL developer Tao Takashi sends out the cool news that he has organized an in-world re-broadcast of the proceedings of the 2006 Plone Conference taking place from October 25-27 in Seattle, WA. Plone is a powerful open-source web content management system with a large volunteer developer base around the world. It’s both easy to use…