On 17/11/2013 17:23, Gordon Lennox wrote: re: DG CONNECT's statement:
The current institutional set up needs to be strengthened and streamlined, including the functioning of the Governmental advisory Committee (GAC) to ICANN and an IGF better focused on main challenges in producing concrete deliverables.
the RIPE NCC kindly sponsored travel/hotel expenses for me to go to the IGF meeting in Bali in October. I was initially puzzled that there was an explicit intention not to make any decisions there, but it quickly became clear that this was a very smart thing to do. The result was an unusually open atmosphere considering the attendee spread - civil society, lawmakers, regulatory people, politicians, etc. Pretty much everyone was on equal footing, and that made it easy to approach people or to be approached. Most importantly, the majority of people were enthusiastic about understanding other peoples' points of view. So although the IGF does not produce concrete deliverables - I assume this means anything ranging from policy documents to legal agreements - it produces something much more valuable, namely a better quality understanding of the issues surrounding internet governance from a variety of valid and important points of view. This allows the people who are tasked by our societies to create laws and regulations, to do so on a much more informed basis from a wider cross-section of opinions. There is no doubt in my mind that if the IFG meeting is changed to create a requirement for "concrete deliverables", this critical feature of the forum will be lost. Nick