Next week, a series of events will be held in Geneva covering the follow-up to the World Summit on the Information Society and most importantly a preparatory meeting for the next IGF in Rio in November — and there is NOT A SINGLE hotel room available in the entire city. I tried four different online booking sites and nothing. So I found hotels where you can’t book online and called them. Nothing. And I have just got off the phone to the official hotel reservation service in Geneva, part of the tourist information office, and they tell me that Geneva is officially completely booked for 22-25 May.

Where the hell am I going to sleep?

Update: I’ve had to book a villa three miles out of town and actually in a different country (France). At one point I was seriously looking at Lausanne – a 40-minute train journey away. I will call around on Monday and see if there any late cancellations, but it looks like I have a long trip each morning and evening. Lesson learnt: book hotels in Geneva early.

It is my pleasure to announce the creation of a new dynamic coalition.

The Dynamic Coalition for Online Collaboration has been set up to aid the existing dynamic coalitions and hopes to provide these and future groupings stemming from the IGF with online collaboration tools in order to help them carry out their tasks in the most efficient and effective way possible.

While the IGF process produced a remarkable degree of collaboration, one of the biggest challenges for these self-formed groups will be in holding consultations and discussions with one another since their members are both geographically and politically diverse.

The Internet’s ability to share, discuss, alter and enhance information is unparalleled in human history but this information remains largely one-way. It is to collaborative work, where people work together to accumulate knowledge and thrash out answers to problems, that this global network is turning. And the dynamic coalitions represent the forefront of this movement in global policy terms.

The Dynamic Coalition for Online Collaboration recognises that a good deal of effort and energy is likely to be expended by these groups in an effort to find the optimal way of collaborating online and so intends to devise best practice guidelines alongside and in conjunction with these groups in order to aid the process to its fullest ability.

The coalition will evaluate the available collaboration tools and provide two-way support and advice on what technical solutions and approaches are best suited for multi-stakeholder discussions. We hope that this approach will also result in improvements in accessibility and hence participation from developing countries.

We will be open and transparent, open to all who wish to contribute and focussed on providing practical solutions. Anyone that wishes to know more, or wants to get involved, please visit the collaboration site we set up and run for the Athens meeting at “igf2006.info”, and click on ‘dynamic coalitions’.

Information on another of the coalitions as outlined in Geneva – the Freedom of Expression dynamic coalition – can be seen here on Christian Moeller’s blog.

He gave some stats from the first Athens meeting in November 2006 that might be worth preserving:

• 1350 participants (including 152 media, and coming from 97 countries)
• 8 translation booths and 20 translators
• 50 buses
• 7 metal detectors
• 4 X-ray machines

By the way, there is an IRC chatroom on chat.freenode.net in the room #igf going on as we speak.

It should be an interesting meeting. The one thing that no one is any doubt about is that the IGF will be bigger and more important in 2007. Born out of international discussion (some might say argument) at the United Nations over problems thrown up by the Internet – especially the best way to agree to fix problems – the IGF caught most people by surprise when it became a tremendous success, despite all the opportunities for it to be otherwise.

This year the meeting should get the resources it was starved of last year but at the same time the 2007 meeting in Rio de Janeiro could prove explosive mostly because of continued disagreement about how the Internet is currently run and who gets to make the decisions.

That argument is still ruminating so this 13 February meeting should be an opportunity for people to review and enjoy IGF 2006, discuss what worked and what didn’t, and agree on how to make this year’s meeting better. To this end. the organisers asked people to send in comments to help form discussion and have posted them on its website.

I have been through them all and have put together this quick summary of what everyone agrees on; what most people agree on; and where there will be argument. Where there’s argument, I have given what I hope is a balanced and objective review of what the argument is about and why it’s happening, plus predicted what is likely to happen.

There about 20 responses in all, covering governments, business, academia and non-governmental organisations, which is surprisingly few considering the IGF’s profile and the clear interest there will be in the meeting this year. Here’s the breakdown:

Everyone agrees there should be:

• Faster, cheaper food
• Better wireless access
• Fewer panellists
• More notice of events
• Events finalised earlier and speakers approached earlier
• More online collaboration

Everyone also agrees that:

• The dynamic coalitions were a good thing
• The host country should sort out visa issues early

Most people agree there should be:

• More interaction in workshops
• Shorter main events
• An expansion of the “plaza”
• Less overlap of main sessions and workshops

But there will be disagreement on:

• The members and structure of the Advisory Group
• Whether recommendations or conclusions should be made by the IGF
• Whether the discussion should focus more on “access” and include “internet governance” – which means ICANN.
• Future funding of the IGF

Before getting into the arguments though, I also came across three potentially interesting ideas in the papers:

1. The IGF act a body that helps foster and promote inter-operable technology
2. The IGF adopt the traditional RFC Internet approach to produce texts of broad agreement
4. The IGF incorporates three-minute presentations of ideas and announcements

Now, the problem areas:

Advisory Group make-up:
The Advisory Group is very large (40+ members) and it has a slight bias toward governments. Inevitably, governments are fine with this, whereas those who end up with fewer people at the table – most notably civil society – want it to change. There are two arguments likely to be put forward:

1. The Advisory Group did a sterling job and tearing it up and trying to decide a new group will eat up months of valuable time that should be spent organising the Rio conference.
2. The huge size of the group resulted in most of the agreed problems with the Athens conference: namely that people couldn’t agree on panellists or topics so we ended up with far too many panellists and far too many topics. The government influence also led to the three-hour plenary sessions that people broadly agree are too long.

Likely outcome: The advisory group stays as it is with perhaps a few changes, but is pressured into developing better ways of being decisive.

Should the IGF make recommendations or conclusions?

A real sticking point. Under the Tunis Agenda, the IGF is allowed to make “recommendations”. However, the IGF Secretariat recognised early on that it would be far better that the Athens meeting did not do so or it would quickly have descended into argument and fallen apart before it even started. Instead the emphasis was on constructive discussion and information-sharing. And it was all the better for it, sparking the creation of “dynamic coalitions” that stretched right across the globe and stakeholders.

However there is a strong argument that if the IGF does not make recommendations then it will quickly become an irrelevance. The people turning up to the IGF are busy people and they won’t spend a week in one place just to have a chat over problems.

Of course, the reality of the situation is that it comes down in the middle. The IGF couldn’t afford to make recommendations last year and it almost certainly can’t make them this year because it will result in massive arguments, which will see the IGF fracture and its recommendations be ignored either way. The IGF needs to have another year building on the success of 2006 and then, when its processes and philosophy is rooted and agreed upon, *then* it will be safe to make recommendations.

Likely outcome: Same approach as last year is taken, with emphasis placed on the dynamic coalitions.

Discussion of “access” and ICANN
The elephants in the room. The two most difficult topics concerning the Internet behind which pressure is building.

One thing that everyone will say publicly is that “access” has to be discussed more. Access in this sense is usually taken to mean “getting people in developing countries online”. And everyone broadly agrees that this has to happen – without it, the poorest nations will lose out further. But politically, it is a can of worms. There are a lot of unpleasant truths to be faced once you get beyond the grand words.

For example, access comes with a cost. It will be very, very expensive to provide, say, Africans with fast Internet access because it not so much upgrading infrastructure as creating the infrastructure. There is also little profit incentive since the end customers have such low income, and it is companies that work by profit incentive that have the most resources and expertise in Internet matters.

The limited infrastructure usually comes courtesy of a monopoly telco with a business model of getting a lot of money from tens of thousands of individuals (including companies) rather than smaller amounts from millions of people. In Western minds, this is usually explained with reference to corruption; and in developing countries’ minds with Western companies’ control of the data pipes. Both are true to greater or lesser degrees but what is clear is that the very people in the best position to change the situation have the least to gain by putting through any changes. Unless, that is, the political and business landscape changes around them.

This is why the more debate and the more global pressure brought to bear, the more likely the situation is to change. But before that debate can even take place, there is a need for people to understand the situation so that perceived racial and cultural biases don’t cloud the issue. How do you do that? By having discussions and putting access on the agenda, but not make it the centrepiece.

A new conceptual model

That said, I was intrigued by an idea I heard last week from someone who knows a thing or two about this problem. He suggested that rather than the IGF’s agenda comprise four different topics wedged into a square, like it was last year, that it be given a different conceptual pattern: that of a circle in the middle with the other issues circling around outside it. Access forms the circular core. I rather like the image and the idea.

One of the things of real practical use in Athens was the workshops where advice and help was given almost informally about regulation regimes, infrastructure and capacity building and – vitally – engineering courses so countries can develop their own talent. A hundred local engineers are always going to have a bigger impact than 100 imported short-term-contract engineers.

It may also help to expand the view of access beyond just poor countries without Net access. Access is vital in every country: from more Wi-Fi hotspots in Europe; to cheaper computers in India; to making the business case for government-backed broadband roll-out. China is leaping ahead, as is South Korea. In Mexico recently, I noticed that there was plenty of bandwidth in the cities but people were still using Internet cafes. The same was true when I was in Colombia. And I remember when in Tunisia, the pride with which I was shown the new computer room in the hotel I was staying at.

The prices of Internet cafes have come down with demand, but it is absolutely vital that the jump is made to where people have their own computer, like I am using my laptop right now. When you have access in your pocket (as I have done for at least two years on my phone and PDA), the Net’s possibilities explode.

I should also mention the $100 laptop punted by Nicholas Negroponte which I have always been, and remain, deeply sceptical of. But I hear that the demand created by his high media profile has created an expectant market and now Intel is looking at a $200 laptop to cover people’s needs. That’s the power of discussion.

And that is really the extent of my knowledge and understanding of access issues – all pretty shallow stuff based on little more than anecdotes. Which is all the more reason why access should be discussed more widely – so we can get some facts and figures and everyone knows what we are really up against.

ICANN

The other topic of controversy is, of course, ICANN. At the last IGF there was some quite explicit efforts to prevent widespread discussion of ICANN (under the cloak of “governance of the Internet”). There was nonetheless some public conversation about in the opening session, and a workshop effectively dedicated to it, but it didn’t blow up and sweep away the other topics much to everyone’s relief. A lesson from WSIS.

But as numerous people have pointed out, this doesn’t mean it is off the agenda. And since the next IGF will be held in Rio, it is sure to come up in sort form as the Brazilians are one of the most sharply critical parties when it comes to ICANN – or, more precisely, the US government’s continued oversight of ICANN.

I would predict though that there is still a majority of people though that want to make sure not so much that ICANN *isn’t* discussed but that all the other vital elements *are* discussed. There will always be a venue for Net governance arguments, but the IGF is – and should be – much more than that.

I should state by the way that I am now actually an ICANN employee (general manger of public participation) so my comments may be viewed as biased. In my favour, I have publicly held the same view for a long time while acting as a journalist.

Likely outcome: Some element of ICANN’s role, discussed under some pseudonym, will be on the Rio agenda; the access discussions will progress slightly but still take up far less space than they should.

Future funding

This post is going on a long time – apologies – last point of controversy: funding.

The IGF suffered tremendously last time from having only a tiny pot of funds. That the IGF wasn’t a complete shambles is mostly thanks to the remarkable skills of Markus Kummer and Chengetai Masango who made up the IGF Secretariat (although it would be extremely unfair not to also mention the voluntary and very hard-working Advisory Group; the hosts, Greece; the UN staff and organisers; and the people that did put money in of whom I am certain about only two – Nominet and ICANN).

This time around, the situation should be much better. For one, the IGF was a big success – something that Kummer said in the press conference on the last day of Athens would be a huge boon as he could now showcase what the conference was to potential donors. Plus the business crowd were more impressed than they expected to be, so there should with luck be more businesses putting in money and also making more of the plaza idea. And then maybe governments will be persuaded to invest a little more seeing as the IGF appears to have carved out its spot.

Nevertheless, there will still be argument about where the funds come from or should come from. And then, no doubt, complaints about perceived bias in favour of donors, or exclusion of others on the grounds of financial ability. And then there’s the issue of travel grants to people in poorer nations – another hot potato. And so on, and so forth – whenever it comes to money, there is usually argument both behind and in front.

All that aside

I have perhaps concentrated too much on the negative here but I felt it might be useful to point out the situation surrounding the points where people are likely to disagree.

Personally, I am looking forward to seeing all the people I met in Athens, and have met at previous Geneva meetings, because when you step away from the small arguments every one of them – and they are a very, very diverse group – is in the room in order to make the Net work better and to get the most out of it. And it’s always exciting to be in amongst that sort of gathering.

I should also say that the collaboration site I set up with Jeremy Malcolm for the IGF meeting in November may serve as a useful resource for people wanting to know about what is going on in the meeting tomorrow. Check out the http://igf2006.info/wiki/RemoteParticipation webpage for more information.

The IGF official site is at http://www.intgovforum.org. And – ah ha ha ha – I have just noticed that the IGF Secretariat has put together its own synthesis document of all the contributions it received, so this entire post may have been a waste of time. If you want the official, and no doubt more objective view of people’s positions, you can download it here [rtf].

Here then is a blog post about why I took the job and what I hope to achieve.

The position is actually explicitly mentioned in ICANN’s bylaws. It says:

“There shall be a staff position designated as Manager of Public Participation, or such other title as shall be determined by the President, that shall be responsible, under the direction of the President, for coordinating the various aspects of public participation in ICANN, including the Website and various other means of communicating with and receiving input from the general community of Internet users.”

When I was first asked if I might be interested in the job – less a month ago – I was very far from convinced. For one, I love being a journalist – finding out information, interviewing people, writing up the results and then publishing them as widely as possible. I particularly love it when the mere provision of information results in real changes.

I also feared that taking a job with ICANN would be a cop-out. I have seen countless colleagues take the corporate buck and lose all sense of perspective. Within months they arrive in snappy clothes and tell you that you need to see things from a different viewpoint and that it’s more complex than you realise. Perfectly true in many situations, except sooner or later you find them bending the truth as far as it can go in order to cover up some minor misdeed. If I took a job with ICANN, I asked myself, how long before I am doing the same while deluding myself that I am slowly changing the culture from within?

Fortunately the answer is that ICANN’s culture has already changed and the main job of manager of public participation will be to simply reflect that fact.

Bacon with wings

ICANN old-hands will scoff at that assertion, and most of the remainder will be distinctly sceptical, but that’s the truth of it and I would not have taken the job if I didn’t believe it to be case. The reality is that ICANN has survived intact from the WSIS process; it has largely made peace with VeriSign; it has found a way to relate to country-code managers; and even the complex and double-edged relationship it has with the US government is stabilising. ICANN as an organisation is finally finding it feet and it has plenty to prove.

The legal and financial breathing space it has enjoyed recently has seen the organisation expand and grab some of the best people from the various organisations swirling around the Internet. The results have been dramatic. IANA has become what it always should have been. The waters of both the gTLDs and IDNs are becoming calmer – something that seemed impossible at one point. Nominet and Denic have signed up with ICANN. The organisation even has the self-confidence to start turning a critical eye to its own constituencies and committees. ICANN is listening and changing.

I have seen these changes happening slowly over the course of the past three years but it hit home personally when I was asked to do a participation website for ICANN’s recent Sao Paulo meeting. I wasn’t sure about doing it but decided to put my money where my mouth was, and quickly found that it was ICANN staff more than any other group that took to the idea of more direct and immediate interaction.

But why take the job? Because I had already grown used to the idea of working toward sorting out ICANN’s issues when I had applied, with a level of seriousness that surprised me, to become a member of the ICANN Board. I realised that journalism, while it served to highlight a few issues and to keep the wider community informed, was oddly ineffective when it came to encouraging real change.

So I re-read the statement on my Board application late at night about a week after I had been asked to consider the job of general manager of public participation, and in the morning I woke up convinced that being offered the position was, if not exactly destiny, then whatever comes close to it for a realist.

History of the role

There is some history to general manager of public participation, which I will very briefly outline. It was first proposed by ex-ICANN president Stuart Lynn back in 2002 when he published a paper for reforming ICANN.

Lynn’s vision for the “Manager of Public Participation” came in three parts:

a) Responsible for managing the public comment and participation process for ICANN on all substantive matters. Will solicit, receive and report to the Board on all public input on matters put out for public comment.
b) Responsible for managing all ICANN public forums, public e-mail list, etc. Provided necessary electronic access to publicize findings and recommendations, all of which will be available to the public.
c) Provided with support staff and other resources necessary to carry out responsibilities effectively

ICANN was doing a poor job of sorting out comments made by people watching the various processes but who weren’t an everyday part of them. It was far too easy for people to ignore the public comment forums. The mailing lists were, and continue to be, dominated by a few individuals who often rehash the same arguments and are aggressive to newcomers. It is a very time-consuming and unrewarding task to scour the public comment boards – as I have found countless times as a journalist covering ICANN.

In the end, you tend to rely on people forwarding you a link – to message 243 – and even then you have to go up and down the thread before you can make out what exactly is being referred to.

Another common attribute of ICANN mailing lists is immediate criticism of what can appear to be any suggested change. ICANN staff have complained for years that anything they suggest is immediately seized upon and torn to pieces. The reality is slightly different of course. There is undeniably a certain relishing of finding holes in new suggestions, but often the problem stems from the fact that there is not enough inter-communication between groups, so each group forms it own philosophy on different aspects of the Net. So when something appears at the start of a new consideration process, it is often the philosophical thread running through the document, rather than the actual content, that seems so out of place.

Islands of thought

This situation was creating islands of thought and counter-productive argument. The role of general manager for public participation, as Lynn saw it, would therefore help make sure that coherent arguments – often hidden among the bile – were pulled out and given the necessary attention.

Inevitably, Lynn’s restructure plan was attacked from the word go. But, largely, he was right. It is just a shame that this public participation manager role has taken so long to be filled, because there has always been – and remains – a constant need in ICANN processes to flag up the best ideas, wherever they come from, and to air the views of the many different Internet constituencies so that others can gain a better understanding of their perspective.

Kieran Baker took on the role briefly in 2004 but was caught up in press relations and never had the time to get involved in the participation side of things. Now, however, with Paul Levins dealing with the high-level stuff; with a new COO, Doug Brent, helping co-ordinate ICANN functions; with a number of regional liaisons doing alot of the outreach; and with a separate media advisor job which should be filled soon to deal with the press side of things; the role of general manager for public participation can do exactly what it was intended to.

And that is?

Broadly I see the job as doing three things:

1. Getting more people involved in ICANN and its processes – and that means businesses, it means NGOs, it means academics and it means the (wo)man-in-the-street who has some technical knowledge or who wants to learn more about the Internet.
2. Make that involvement count. This is the really tough part. Trying to make sure that this vast array of people all find interacting with ICANN worthwhile. ICANN is a complex beast and many of the processes are involved. But nothing is *that* complex. I often argue with people – usually elitist types – over what people are capable of comprehending. My argument is: get any TV watcher to explain to you the different interactions involved in their favourite soap opera. It is always vastly more complex than any real-world interaction. You just have to get people interested in something and provide them with good information and they will grasp pretty much anything. And then the second part – you have to make sure what they say is listened to and, where needed, acted upon.
3. Putting an end to this “us versus them” mentality that still lingers. How do you do that? By allowing people to talk to one another. People remain wary of ICANN staff; and ICANN staff remain wary of hidden agendas. All that will be blown out the window if people are given a space where they can interact in a relaxed way and can start talking to one another as human beings, rather than representatives.

Enough tree-hugging philosophy – what are you actually going to do?

I have alot of ideas which I am going to sound people out about – both in ICANN and outside, with those who follow ICANN and those that don’t. As such, ideas I have now are likely to expand, or shrink, pop-up or disappear. But at the moment this is my gut feeling:

• Provide clear, simple explanations of the processes going through ICANN
• Take some of the unnecessary pressure off ICANN staff by providing tools that help people reach broad consensus about a particular topic among themselves. ICANN staff can then act as facilitators rather than scapegoats.
• I intend to maintain a blog, or other similar mechanism, that will basically let everyone know what I’m doing in the job. It’s amazing how willing people are to help when they can see you are trying hard to achieve something.
• Make the ICANN website a useful resource. And try to make absolutely sure that emails from people don’t fall through the cracks
• Allow people to invest more, interact more and share the burden of filtering information.
• More “soft” discussion.
• Real, efficient, effective and valuable interaction in multiple languages. It is absolutely vital that people are able to interact with ICANN in languages other than English. My approach is: there is no option but to have a multi-lingual ICANN so let’s start now and figure out a way over each obstacle as we come to it.

The bigger picture

ICANN represents what I believe is the beginning of a new model of global interaction and decision-making where numerous stakeholders: governments, business, non-governmental organisations, academics and, well, anyone with a solid interest in a particular issue, work together to arrive at what they think is the best way forward.

I think possibly the greatest gift the Internet will end up giving us will be this ability for disparate people to work together toward a common goal, with the end result that decisions about very important matters will be faster and more effective. ICANN is effectively the guinea pig in a gradual global movement toward more inclusive policies across all sectors and across the world. And that movement is there for the simple reason that the end results are better.

The United Nations is definitely moving in this direction. And only a few weeks ago I spent a day with various academics and UK Cabinet Office representatives at the Oxford Internet Institute where it was quite clear that people there were thinking along the same lines. But as yet no one is quite sure how to do it.

Part of my role will be about finding ways to get widely different groups working together: with one another and with ICANN. And I am determined to tell everyone what I learn on the way. With any luck I will be able to spread more of the peculiar sense of possibility that the Internet consistently instills in people.

The discussion was on two things: Vista, tying in “trusted computing”, and Internet governance – and on it were host Gareth Mitchell (a lovely bloke I met in Tunisia at the World Summit), woolly mammoth and terrific IT journo Bill Thompson, the unnervingly smart John Palfrey from Berkman/Harvard, and the Iranian blogger bloke who name I have forgotten and just looked up – Hossein Derekhshan – and, well, me.

To make matters worse, the producer Colin Grant, called me up and we were discussing what I thought about Vista and Net governance and I said I’d get hold of a copy of Vista before the programme. This I failed to do because Microsoft for some peculiar reason had refused to hand them out until – well, until about now, early Jan.

So I reviewed the presentations out there and read Guy Kewney’s bit about it (Guy always somehow gets there first) *but* I failed to tell Colin this, so once the programme started recording, Gareth kept leading me in with “well, Kieren McCarthy has been trying out Vista…”

I considered saying I hadn’t but then decided not to as I was sure the same points could be made, although I wish I had been able to give an image of the OS in people’s minds. Having listened to it, it doesn’t sound as vague as it felt at the time, although I do have to work on speaking more clearly and coherently. Bill Thompson, who has vastly more experience at radio and TV than I, has a much clearer, more distinct way of summarising.

Anyway, I think it’s quite a good programme. My parts are definitely the weakest, and unfortunately my comments on Net governance were cut out for time, and they left John Palfrey’s material in there – which was absolutely the right editing choice.

It was interesting to have the chat expecially since I was in Oxford, Gavin and Bill in London, John on the East coast of the US and Hossein in Madrid (although for complex reasons that I have forgotten we pretended he was in Canada). It’s a shame we weren’t all in one room, we’d probably come up with something really useful.

Anyway, here be the MP3.

Both have been for Internet organisations, which should theoretically make things easier. The first was the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens in early November, and the second ICANN’s Sao Paulo meeting now in early December.

I figured while some things were fresh in my mind, I’d do a blog post about what I’ve learnt. And the title “the possibilities and the realities” took about two milliseconds to pop into my mind.

The site

It is comparatively easy to set up a participation website once you have a basic framework in mind. But it only occurred to me today that I had built this framework in my head through years of working for online publications and following the media side of the Internet, and that much of it was the sort of information that is only obvious once you know it.

Here then is an off-the-top-of-my-head meander about what goes on and what works.

Keep it simple

It is very, very easy to flood a webpage with information for the simple reason that people will all want access to different bits of information, especially at a meeting.

The websites that have to cram as much fast-moving information into one page as possible are news websites. And if you watch over time, you’ll find that more and more links and sections are added to a website over time. Then someone realises it is impossible to navigate, so a designer comes along and stick in some lines and pictures to divide it up a bit. And that staves off the clutter for a bit, but then the page starts getting full again and some sections become less relevant, which starts causing tension.

Sooner or later someone decides there has to be a redesign and the redesign gets back to the lovely position where you were at the beginning – a clean design with minimal clutter. But then the extra sections begin again… And so on, and so on.

Different strokes

With a meeting website, that process happens much faster. Because it is very hard to tell in what direction the meeting will go or what people will be interested in, you have to allow equal room for each element. The funny thing is that people get attached to different elements. So someone could be drawn to the fact that they have their own publishing space (a blog, say), or they find they love commenting on other’s pages, or they find that fast, interactive communication is what does it for them (chatrooms). Each person then finds this element far more important as a result and will push for it to be given greater prominence on the site.

What is odd is that people tend to take to one approach, and at the same time, they tend not to like the other approaches. So it’s not as if you can just offer blogs, or chatrooms, or comments because whichever one you cut out, you are also cutting out that segment of people that are drawn to that approach i.e. if you kill chatrooms, people won’t suddenly start writing blog posts; they just won’t bother at all.

What is strange, I have found, is that people are comfortable with forums – the relatively formal and relatively slow approach to interaction – but ditch them immediately when something more immediate is offered. Rather than forums acting as a combiner of self-publishing, commenting and chatting, they tend to act as the ruiner of each. It pays to offer a choice.

At the same time, most people are comfortable with *not* interacting. In the same way that most people don’t talk up in a meeting, most people are content with watching others interact online. How do you get people that may wish to interact but don’t feel comfortable enough entering into it straight away? Provide anonymous interaction.

Anne Onymous

Now this is a difficult area because if you allow anonymous interaction on the Net these days, within a day you will be flooded with automated spambots and the like. Not only that but there is a perverse type of human personality (and they *love* the Internet) that draws great pleasure from taking over conversations between people. As such, you have to strike a balance.

Some kind of verification process is needed. And the solution is to allow anyone at all to see what is on the site, but only those that are willing to provide at least some detail to be allowed to add to that information. And the most important element of this is to make that verification process as simple and non-threatening as possible.

One thing I’ve learnt from working on numerous online news sites over the years is that you have to leave the doors open for everyone. Once people have got used to you, and “trust” you – i.e. they have invested time and effort in getting to grips with the site and reading what is there – if you then ask them for information about themselves, they will usually hand it over without a fuss.

Getting the info

The absolutely vital job you have to do before telling people about a website is to “populate” it with content. If someone arrives at a website and nothing much is there, it doesn’t matter if the very next day there is 2,000 pages of content, that person won’t bother to return until they are encouraged to by some external force.

People should find something useful in a site straight away. They need to think: this might be handy later. And that usually means acting as a source of information for something that they know they will forgot in a day’s time – like the exact time of a meeting, or the room, or the name of the person that did that thing.

But the complete flipside to this comes in keeping that information up-to-date. Meetings in particular move extremely fast – speakers change, rooms change, agendas change, times change. Anyone who has ever run a conference soon builds a system that deals with sudden changes as just a part of the process – something that will happen.

From the perspective of running a participation website, if you don’t find some way of tapping into that process, you are out-of-date and increasingly hopeless as each hour goes by. One of the odd things about the IGF and ICANN sites I have run is that they have been in parallel with established sites that are plugged into this process. Because of the experimental nature of participation websites in serious organisations, both sites have been loosely affiliated with, as opposed to a firm part of, the process. I believe this is likely to change next time because of the unnecessary repetition and chasing of information.

Call of the wild

The really strange thing is that this process of chasing and replicating information can build up completely non-sensical barriers between people – even when you are sat there and you know it is daft. It is hard-wired into the human brain for some reason and no doubt would have some tremendously useful function if there was a nuclear winter, but the solution to this odd rising sense of aggression is, very simply, to talk to people and prove you are not up to no good.

A good solution is to provide people with their own ability to add information. That way, there is nothing to rub up against. But there is no doubt that if there are two sources of information for the same thing, it requires a concerted and conscious effort for those sources not to end up in competition with one another.

Old habits die hard

Something that has been intriguing to me on one level is how people may not like the system they have, but they would rather stick with it than change. It’s perfectly logical and a part of human nature, but it is still amusing.

The advantages of a something new have to be pointed out. I’m sure a marketing executive could talk for days about this very topic but since I have long considered the modern obsession with marketing the sure sign that we are all doomed, I have never had to consider this element much. It may be worth getting a Net-savvy marketing person to advise on participation websites. Much as it pains me to admit it, they would probably have some useful insights.

Anyway, as a result, the most popular elements of both sites that I have built and run have been those where this is no alternative elsewhere. I am certain that if these sites continue, they will start to bring in more people as they realise they can get everything in one spot, rather than have to jump between different sites, or bits of software. But starting out, people are suspicious.

Get on with it

I’m waffling on, so I will tighten up and get to some points.

• Government people: I can’t for the life of me understand how to involve government people on the Net. Anyone with any insight please email me. Surely these people have email accounts and buy books on Amazon? An extraordinary low number of government officials will have anything to do with the Internet – even when they are sat in a room discussing the future of the Internet. I find it extraordinary and I am going to discuss it with the people in government that I know. I wish I was in Sao Paulo for just this reason. If there is a government official that knows me that fancies a free, confidential lunch in London in the next few months, just get in contact.
• Lessons:
  There are lessons to be learnt. Among them are:
  • Get the site up early – as early as possible and advertise it as widely as possible, let people get used to it
  • Give people free reign. But within boundaries. It is very easy to screw up websites if people are allowed to put in code, or add pages to a website – and in 99 percent of cases because they are trying to do something useful but haven’t had the 100 hours of learning you have.
  • Be open and friendly. Saying ‘no’ at any point pisses people off – especially if they are taking a risk and trying something they haven’t done before.
  • Get someone in authority on board. At the IGF, I was I think tolerated because Markus Kummer and Chengetai Masango knew that I had only good intentions at heart. But with ICANN, Paul Levins approached me and we have built up a level of trust that has seen him help smooth over some tensions his end while at the same time making lots of new possibilities open up
• Possibilities
  And it is those possibilities that are the most marvellous thing about the Net. I think one posting did it for me today and made the whole thing worthwhile.

It was this post from Maria Farrell – an ICANN staffer who I’m sure I’ve met but only very, very briefly. It was about Whois – which has to be the most thrashed-over and done-to-death topic that exists in ICANN at the moment.

Maria managed to get across in just 462 words a heady blend of professionalism, insight and helpfulness that represents exactly what ICANN is capable of. It is this ability that ICANN staffers see every day and so are so bemused when they see outsiders condemning them for being closed and secretive. But the fact is that if you don’t work in LA on the third floor in Marina del Rey, you don’t know.

And this is the big thing – even if you ran into, for example, Maria, at an ICANN meeting, she will have 100 jobs to do, you will have 100 jobs to do and human interaction being what it is, you would most likely fail to impress on one another how either of you function. This is why social events exist. But the enormous possibility of the Net and of participation websites is that they can do the online equivalent of build respect while also breaking the ice.

I should note by the way that there are several other interesting blog posts that offer the same sort of thing: Kim Davies being reasonable about a subject that you can easily see people getting upset about; Jacob Malthouse offering a more academic, practical and far-reaching take on expanding online interaction; Paul Levins being open and honest about what he’s trying to do.

In the spate of just a few hundred words, a human face is given to highly contested issues. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re going to agree with them but it certainly opens the door for more civil interaction and, as anyone who has had to get things done through a treacle of viewpoints, you can achieve it either by having respect for one another and arriving at gentle compromises, or you can do it by tying everyone up and then sneaking through your own solutions.

ICANN has always been an organisation that favoured the latter – and that is behind a huge amount of the mistrust and aggression directed at ICANN. But it looks as if it may finally be growing up and finding how to pull off the former. We shall see. Fingers crossed.

Both of them made mention of my paella (I note with sadness that only one was interested in the actual recipe however). Now this was a tremendous paella, there’s no doubt about that, but I suspect that there may be a few people out there that don’t want to know about my lunch and so I am going to highlight here an easy solution to the problem: separate RSS feeds.

I have the blog set up so that you can grab individual automated RSS feeds and so avoid having every post appear if you subscribe. I will stick the links below so at least people have an option. Of course, if you want to continue to know a little too much about my life, feel free to stick with the main RSS feed. I don’t mind in the slightest.

• Main blog feed
• Internet feed (includes all ICANN, IGF and Nominet stories)
• ICANN feed
• IGF feed
• Nominet feed
• iPod feed
• Journalism feed
• Oxford feed
• Photos feed
• Podcast feed
• Sex.com feed
• Technology feed
• WSIS feed

You can subscribe to as many or as few as you like.

More interestingly though it has also stuck up an online form asking for feedback on the meeting, asking the broad questions: What worked well? and What worked less well? Plus asking for comments and suggestions for improvement.

And it has set up a page for the so-called “dynamic coalitions” that were formed during the meeting, which is good news as it provides a connection between the groups and the IGF – to both parties’ benefit.

I note that the webcasts are still not up though (have to be shifted into a non-Microsoft format) – and the site itself is still a mess, no more than tracts of text piled onto HTML pages. But that aside, if you went – or if you accessed the IGF online – here’s your chance to have your say. It will be interesting to see the results.

Internet governance: it’s like an arranged marriage

The first UN-backed forum started out as farce – but turned into a triumph

Kieren McCarthy
Thursday November 9, 2006
The Guardian

Lithuania vs Azerbaijan has to be one of the least likely conflicts imaginable. But as attendees at the UN-backed Internet Governance Forum in Greece learned last week, never underestimate the internet’s ability to throw up novel problems…

What’s odd is that I supplied one of my photos to illustrate the piece, and it appears that they used someone else’s. Funny how people are used to their own routes and ways of doing things.

I’ll also note, at the risk of upsetting some perfectly pleasant people, that the ITU asked if it could use my pics for their edition of ITU News. I said sure, pointing out the non-commercial Creative Commons licence I have stuck them under. But ITU News take money from its members (thousands of pounds annually from 7,500 subscribers) so when asked for hi-res versions, I checked it out and asked for the NUJ-rated payment.

Seems £200 is too much for the International Telecommunication Union’s budget. Since the UN didn’t have an official snapper, I’m intrigued to see how the ITU will now illustrate the event. Any subscribers please send me a scan when it arrives.