The day before the official opening of the IGF has been taken up with three parallel side-events: the second GigaNet Symposium for Internet governance academics, a Standards Edge conference on Digital Inclusion about the potential to further global access through open ICT standards, and an open South American civil society forum (which I skipped, not speaking Spanish or Portuguese - and the other two events being enough to juggle).

There was also a one-day conference hosted here yesterday on Equitable Access by the APC, which I missed due to other commitments. As a side-note, as in Athens some of the concurrent events seem not only to overlap in scheduling, but in content. Some seem to have been organised for the benefit of the organisers (by increasing their status, academic recognition, funding and so on) as much as for those attending. (But it would be hypocritical of me to complain, because I gained a free lunch out of it today.)

Before I touch on today's side-events, some notes on organisational matters. The registration procedures were very well organised and went more smoothly than in Athens, and the conference swag was more substantial (we get a t-shirt this time; woo). Dominica posted an entry yesterday about some deficiencies in the shuttle service with which I would broadly agree, since it cost us R$35 for a taxi ride to the venue this morning from Copacabana, but of course you get what you pay for... The Rio organisers have in any case improved upon the wireless Internet access that was provided in Athens and provided a few more powerpoints (though inoperative today).

The event I began at was Standards Edge on Digital Inclusion. It was opened by Marcus Kummer, who talked his usual talk about how the soft governance of the IGF is a new form of cooperation by which international governance is being adapted to the needs of the 21st century. However close analysis of such statements usually reveals Kummer's prejudices. In this case he described how one of the most remarkable outcomes of WSIS was that governments decided to allow the other actors to interact with them as equals.

Of course, it could be argued that he has this the wrong way around. Internet governance was largely the province of the Internet technical community well before WSIS, and to a large extent this remains true today. So on one view, far more relevant in real terms than the outcomes of WSIS is the extent to which the technical community has begun to allow governments in the door, as for example as in ICANN's GAC.

As for the substantive presentations, I did learn something from those I heard, particuarly from the first panel on "Digital Inclusion and Literacy Through Open Standards" about path dependence, in which the network effects of a standard can form entry market barriers for new technologies (as in the case of the QWERTY keyboard). However an open standards development process can facilitate the production of a high-quality standard that whilst achieving market dominance, does not exclude a multiplicity of vendors from competing for the best implementation.

To be critical of the Digital Inclusion event, given that the only real advantage of an in-person presentation over a publication to an online forum is the potential for face-to-face interaction, insufficient time was left for this, except informally during the breaks and the closing cocktail reception.

This was not a fault of the GigaNet symposium, which wisely limited all speakers to ten minutes in order to leave sufficient time for questions (though a number of speakers did not have the foresight to condense their papers sufficiently, and were cut off part-way through).

Again, I won't summarise the papers here as I did last year, because they are online. However, the paper that provoked the most discussion was that of Milton Mueller on extending network neutrality as a principle for global Internet governance, which is indeed well worth a read.