World Summit on the Information Society

A working group recently took place to help the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Secretariat in organizing the newest Main Session addition to the IGF2010 titled "IG4D - Internet Governance For Development". As you may know, the purpose of the working group is to support the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. During the recent open consultations, the group assembled as an open space to suggest and advise how the IG4D session should be carried forward and organized successfully. Below, Bill Drake summarizes Day 2 of the Open Consultation:

Thank you.

We had a fairly interesting and robust conversation. We talked about the challenge of trying to do a session on a sort of cross-cutting theme like this, which touches on some of the subjects being addressed in other topics, and we tried to focus in a way that would differentiate it from, say, the access and other sessions.

We decided -- we suggested the following:

As mandated by the United Nations Secretary-General, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) established the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) as a forum for stakeholders to air their views and exchange ideas. On May 11, 2010 in Geneva, Switzerland, the IGF held its annual planning meeting, the output of which was transcribed in real-time. All of their past meetings are also archived and may be accessed here.