The Internet Governance Forum takes place this year in Bali, Indonesia on 22-25 October 2013. The main theme of the meeting is “Building Bridges – Enhancing Multistakeholder Cooperation for Growth and Sustainable Development.”
This year, the IGF introduces new sub-themes that are more specific compared to broader themes of past year. The sub-themes are:
- Access and Diversity – Internet as an engine for growth and sustainable development.
- Openness – Human rights, freedom of expression and free flow of information on the Internet.
- Security – Legal and other Frameworks: Spam, Hacking and Cyber-crime.
- Principles of Multistakeholder Cooperation.
- Internet Governance Principles.
As a global multistakeholder platform for debating Internet governance issues, the IGF offers a unique networking opportunity with senior government officials, business leaders and key players from IGO/NGO and academia. For ICANN, this is an avenue to engage with participants who are not regular attendees of ICANN meetings, explain to them our mission, and update them on work underway.
As in past IGFs, ICANN is hosting an ICANN Open Forum, and organizing two workshops. The Open Forum is scheduled on Thursday 24 October, 14:30-16:00 in Room 6. It is designed to be an interactive session with ICANN executives and representatives of its various constituencies engaging in an open dialogue with IGF participants on a variety of ICANN related such as:
- The Internet as an engine for growth and sustainable development: Important to highlight ICANN’s effort in promoting and advancing the DNS industry in developing regions. Equally important to note that a sub-element to being an engine for growth and sustainable development is fostering a healthy, stable and resilient Internet ecosystem. This is important for capability building, technical engagement, training and collaboration with the diverse range of participants who rely on the Internet.
- Regional engagement strategies and enhanced cooperation: The work undertaken by community members in developing regional engagement strategies is an example of an enhanced cooperation model on the ground.
- ICANN strategy panels: Led by community; address issues of direct relevance to the Internet Governance space.
- ICANN public responsibility program: Initial efforts to focus on education and training; the online learning platform.
This year’s ICANN workshops include:
- Workshop 217: “What the New gTLD Program means for you” – Day 2, 23 Oct, 16:30-18:00, Room 3.
- The workshop reviews the current status of the new gTLD program, including an update on the evaluation of applications, and related processes of delegation, formal objection and string contention.
- Workshop 32: “Next in IDNs: linguistic diversity in the Internet root” – co-organized with APRALO – Day 2, 23 Oct, 14:30-16:00, Room 1.
- The workshop provides an overview of the IDN Variants process, discusses the issues implicating language communities and outlines the way forward.
ICANN community members will also be organizing a number of workshops. Here is a sample of several:
- Workshop 62: “How can the Internet be an engine for development and growth?” – Day 2, 23 Oct, 14:30-16:00, Room 2.
- Workshop 210: “The technical community role in global Internet governance” – Day 3, 24 Oct, 14:30-16:00, Room 9.
- Workshop 212: “Exploring the dimensions of multistakeholderism” – Day 4, 25 Oct, 9:00-10:30, Room 4.
- Workshop 249: “Civil society in ICANN’s multistakeholderism: The GNSO case” – Day 2, 23 Oct, 16:30-18:00, Room 8.
- Workshop 253: “Debate on ‘closed’ generic top-level domains” – Day 3, 24 Oct, 11:00-12:30, Room 10.
An interesting pre-event that takes place on Day 0 is a workshop on Digital Preservation of Cultural Treasures in Bali. It demonstrates yet another success story of collaboration between different stakeholders in using the Internet and technology to preserve endangered languages and cultural artifacts. The workshop will take place on 21 Oct, 16:00-17:30 in Room 10.
More information about the meeting can be found on the IGF website: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/.
