Last week, the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) took place in Guadalajara, Mexico. This yearly fest of multistakeholderism has undergone quite a few changes since its first edition in 2006. The agenda is better structured, the sessions more interactive and the organisation has professionalised over the years.
Amongst the subtler changes is the decreasing visibility of the technical community and the more technical subjects in the IGF schedule. This is not a bad thing. It shows the maturity of the format to move on from the purely operational issues. When one would tag the different sessions and put them on the Internet ecosystem map, it would be very clear that we have now almost completely moved to the upper "content" layer.
Previous IGFs also suffered a bit from a "reset" symptom: every year, the discussions seemed to start at the same point where they had started the year before, rather than where they left off. Excellent examples of how this has improved is the discussion on the unique user identifiers or the session on enhancing cultural and linguistic diversity on the Internet. Videos of all sessions should be online shortly.
In addition to providing the structure and platform for these discussions, IGF serves another crucial role: it is the perfect meeting and networking environment. In a way, an IGF week feels like a gigantic Birds of Feather session and everyone goes home with a longer contact list and a dozen new ideas on cooperation. Two concrete ideas that we’ll present to the CENTR community are the possibility of setting up a transparency portal for law enforcement requests and the possibility of a crowd funding initiative to research the jurisdictional aspects of the Avalanche Operation.
CENTR also organised its second European Networking Cocktail @ IGF where European stakeholders such as members of the High Level Internet Governance group, the European Commission and the European Parliament met with European ccTLDs and other technical operators. It was again a successful event providing excellent networking opportunities.
