On 13 February 2007, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will convene a "stock-taking" session, which is open to all stakeholders who were WSIS accredited, and to individuals with "proven expertise and experience in Internet Governance related issues. The meeting will be held at the Palais des Nations, United Nations Office in Geneva (Room XX) from 10:00-13:00 and 15:00-18:00 hours. Interpretation in all UN languages and real-time transcription will be available during the meeting. For more information and to register for the session, download the IGF registration form. Also, at the closing of the session, we will host a brief wrap-up discussion with colleagues on the ground in Geneva. Cotelco Research Associate and intern at the IGF Secretariat, Sonia Arenaza, will host the webconference and provide feedback from the stocktaking session. Participants from IGP Partner Derrick Cogburn's Globalization Seminar will also participate in the session from South Africa, Syracuse, and other parts of the world. To join the webconference, held from 10:00 - 11:00 EST, please go to the Cotelco Web Conferencing Server and click on the link for the meeting when active. Please use your firstname and lastname as username, and no password.

Steve Jobs has made a proposal that is worthy of discussion in Internet governance circles.   more »

Last week was a busy one for the US National Science Foundation (NSF).  In addition to the meeting reported on ...   more »

On 31 January the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the OECD held a joint conference on "social and economic factors shaping the future of the Internet." Attendance was restricted to about 20 full participants selected by OECD/NSF and another 30 attendees who were allowed to ask questions.

For NSF, the meeting promoted their effort to incorporate "social and economic factors" into the research around their Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI) initiative. GENI is a major new NSF initiative to fund a "clean slate" redesign of the Internet. The intellectual driver of this initiative seems to be David Clark, who was also one of the leading protocol architects of the old Internet. Suzi Iacono, the NSF program officer who concentrates on the social, economic and behavioral aspects of information systems within the NSF's CISE division, believes that GENI can create a "testbed" that will allow social scientists to experiment with the way various protocol or network designs interact with social factors.

My first observation about this meeting is that aside from David Clark's always-interesting ruminations on what problems a clean-slate resdesign of the Internet might involve, very few new ideas were bruited. Almost all of the discussion revolved around the social, economic and political problems of the "old" Internet. More importantly, I wonder whether the desire to link analysis and understanding of social problems to the engineering or redesign of a new Internet is unambiguously a good thing.   more »