Internetdagarna Day 1, United Nations and Internet Governance

I attended the seminar with two sessions on certificates and SSL. These two presentations where however repeated on day 3 as part of the OWASP track, so I have decided to postpone the blog posts on these topics – revisiting the two talks most certainly did not hurt.

The last presentation I attended on day 1 was entitled ‘United Nations and Internet Governance’ and it was in English. This is one of those sessions, I would normally attend, but experience tells me that attending sessions, you would normally not consider often leading to surprising insights and interesting angles.

The session started out with Markus Kummer the (former vice president for ISOC) giving an overview of the “Internet Governance Forum” (IGF).

The IGF is a special organization working under the United Nations (UN), see the about page on the IGF website.

The IGF works on what can be considered global problem with the Internet. IGF is an open platform for a plethora of stakeholders to debate and discuss the Internet. The IGF does as such not hold any sort of mandate, but see to that concerns and issues are raised in the right fora and organizations. IGF differs from classical intergovernmental organizations and fora since it is based on a multi-stakeholder collaboration model.

An example given was the IDN issue, raised by many countries with alphabets ranging outside the 7-bit ASCII alphabet. The issue was raised in IGF and then solved via the proper stakeholders.

IGF was formed as an outcome of “World Summit of the Information Society” (WSIS) work in 2005 with a timeframe of 5 years. In 2009 UN extended this for 5 more years. If this is extended further is hard to predict, since some stakeholders are interested in more governmental influence and a closer binding to UN process and structure.

Markus mentioned the ‘Tunis Agenda’ as one of the important documents describing the IGF work and premises. IGF is described as a very extra-ordinary UN forum, in that sense it works outside with stakeholder outside the normal governmental sphere dominating the UN. Markus emphasized the importance of these stakeholders and the paradigm under , which IGF conducts it’s work, since non-governmental stakeholders provide a reality check, which is most needed when dealing with something as complex as the Internet.

Following Markus was Juuso Moisander, Juuso represents the Finnish government in IGF and EuroDIG. EuroDIG is the European branch of IGF. EuroDIG is having their next meeting in Stockholm, Sweden in January 2012.

Last speaker in this seminar was Nurani Nimpuno (@nnimpuno), Nurani is one of the many stakeholders playing an important role in the IGF. Nurani supplied Markus and mentioned the IBSA proposal (PDF), which is another important document produced in the context of IGF. The mentioned documents are interesting info if you are interested in getting more in depth with the work going on in IGF.

I do not feel my post is giving this particular seminar the depth and detail in deserves. The topic was quite interesting and Markus; Juuso, Nurani and the moderator Staffan Jonson provided excellent insights and descriptions of the workings of IGF, but this was very new territory to me, so I might now have caught sufficient detail and angles to capture all the facets of the IGF work, but I hope that this post can help to spark an interest in the work carried out by the IGF.

One funny thing I did pick up one thing and judging from this post and the seminar that is that the use of acronyms is most certainly not restricted to technical documentation and systems.