What academia's doing at the IGF

Jeremy Shtern from media@mcgill, a new "hub of research, scholarship and public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology and culture" is on the spot in Athens to provide an overview of the discussions. I bumped into him today and asked him a couple of questions about academia at the IGF and about other impressions he’d be willing to share. Visit his latest report on the IGF.

Jeremy Shtern from media@mcgill, a new "hub of research, scholarship and public outreach on issues and controversies in media, technology and culture" is on the spot in Athens to provide an overview of the discussions. When I last bumped into him he said "it is difficult to effectively follow the simultaneous four workshops and main session. Which is unfortunate because they overlap in terms of theme- so, if I go to the ‘openness’ main session, I miss the ‘opennness’ workshops."

Also, he added that "A great deal of the effectiveness of this event seems to hinge on the development and work of the informal dynamic coalitions," which means that in his view, after the initial blabla here, the true power of influence on a future policy will come from the coalitions that are put together. As I personally see it, there is a risk in following the prescribed route of "dynamic coalitions" (a term branded by the UN bureaucrats). These will tend to be listened to by international policy-makers only if they are in their nature, made up a of multi-stakeholder mix of groups. That’s definitely a limitation in the way the different logics will be able to surface.

The framing in multi-stakeholder coalitions is a way to water-down the divergences. That’s not necessarily something civil society in particular would want, especially since these coalitions are not just dynamic by their sheer existence. A whole lot of money and time is involved in participating in those and the longer they last, the more small groups and associations will be sidelined and their voices with them. This is especially true for organisations operating in developing countries. Will they show up next time around? Will they be able to take part in the "dynamic" coalitions on an equal footage than PhD students at Yale University? The inequality in resources is already there, why extend it even more in making the process so long and costly?

Just as an illustration in how long processes curtail participation significantly, you need to ask yourself how many people were left out of this IGF just because they couldn’t get a visa to enter Greece. This discourages and keeps many extremely competent voices out on the long-run. You can invent as many technological gizmos as you want, but there is nothing like face-to-face discussions and negotiations.

"Though the panels are very multi-stakeholder, Civil Society seems to be speaking far more than any of the other stakeholders during the main sessions," Jeremy also observed. I tend to agree with him but again, I’m wondering if this is sustainable in the middle or long-term. Academia, the private sector and governments will certainly have a stronger say as the years go by. This has been the case during the longish WSIS process. I don’t see why the IGF should be different in that regard. I predict that general participation in the IGF will fade in Rio and Cairo.

Now, speaking of academia, I asked Jeremy what he thought about GigaNet, the Global Internet Governance Academic Network. "This is an important development because academics really are unique as stakeholders in this process- for one thing, unlike activists or governments, academics have no real stake in the success or failure of the IGF- either one can just as equally serve as a topic for research," he dryly replied. "The issues brought up at the IGF cannot be covered by any one scholarly discipline, thus there is a contribution to be made in creating an object-based research network like this. It is, as David Souter reminded us during his GigaNet talk, fundamental to bring scholars interested more generally in governance of society into the discussion of Internet Governance- political and academic alike."

Visit Jeremy’s latest report on the IGF.

Photo: Jeremy Shtern.