The meeting has been plagued with wireless Internet drop-outs. During the opening ceremony yesterday, apparently this was a side-effect of the organisers' covert use of mobile phone blocking technology as a security measure. Today, when the Internet was unavailable for the entire morning at least in the upstairs rooms, it can only be put down to poor planning. This seems to be a recurrent problem for the IGF.

I began the day at Governance for Gate Keepers - Shaping Access to the Internet, at which panelists discussed how gate keepers can shape access to content not necessarily through brute mechanisms such as filtering, but through the structural and economic power that allows them to apply policies in aggregating and presenting content to the user. The Global Network Initiative (about which I've previously written, before it had a name) is a self-regulatory response to this issue, but one that lacks in public accountability.

Next up was the meeting of the Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards, which focussed on government procurement of open source software, and then a planning meeting for Saturday's workshop on The Role and Mandate of the IGF. My last workshop of the day - since I had some "real" work to finish off with my colleagues after that - was Towards a Code of Good Practice on Public Participation in Internet Governance - Building on the principles of WSIS and the Aarhus Convention, which aimed to produce a document setting out base standards of information, participation in transparency in Internet governance. This is properly a responsibility of the IGF itself, but given its immobility in respect of its mandate, it has fallen to workshops such as this to take up its slack.

Tonight was the "cultural event-cum-dinner" organised by the Indian government. Given that I had already eaten two large buffet meals that day, I looked forward to the dinner with less relish than I otherwise might. But it turned out to be suitably grand, and Egypt will have its work cut out for it. I can't help but wonder, though, how much better the IGF's online platform could be if half of the money that was spent on meals and entertainment had been diverted into development of online collaboration instead...