Those who have been following the IGF for a couple of years may remember that the agenda for the 2007 meeting in Rio de Janeiro once included what were called speed dialogues - essentially the governance equivalent of speed dating, in which participants intensively debate a particular issue around a table, before rotating to a new table with a new issue to consider.

Speed dialogues were summarily removed by the Secretariat from the agenda for the Rio meeting before the September 2007 open consultation meeting came around, with no warning or advance consultation, and minimal subsequent explanation. My reaction at the time to this disappointing decision is recorded at length elsewhere.

Well, it may be happening again. At the open consultation meeting earlier this week (which I missed, as I am driving across Australia and have limited Internet access), the inclusion of moderated debates in the schedule for the Hyderabad meeting was questioned - by the usual suspects, whom I have politely referred to in my book as Forum doves (and less politely on this site as Forum weasels).

Thus the ITAA, ISOC, ICC/BASIS and ETNO suggested that the debate sessions be softened by recasting them as sessions for "dialogue and debate", that would not (as Nominet frankly put it later in the afternoon session) threaten governments and business. This suggestion was forcefully resisted by Milton Mueller (who later took up the same issue on his blog, supported by other Forum hawks (that is, those who favour reform to the Internet governance status quo), such as China.

The lengths to which ICC/BASIS, in particular, will go in seeking to limit the IGF's capacity to fulfil its mandate, was brought out again in the discussion of dynamic coalitions, which still have no formal interface with the IGF as working groups of other organisations do. Far from joining in calls to remedy this deficit (there was for example a consensus at the meeting that dynamic coalitions should be required to report to the IGF on their activities on a regular basis), ICC/BASIS sought to further distance the dynamic coalitions from the IGF, urging that they be prohibited from referring to the IGF in their name, logo, materials or events.

Its intransigence was confirmed yet again during discussion on how the IGF's first five years should be reviewed pursuant to paragraph 76 of the Tunis Agenda. ICC/BASIS was alone in opposing the suggestion that the IGF's success should be externally as well as internally reviewed, on the far-fetched basis that an external review might recommend that the IGF's mandate (or rather, perhaps, its narrow conception of its mandate) be expanded. As all other discussants recognised, a solely internal review, as ICC/BASIS proposed, would have very little credibility.

Thankfully more reformist voices are still being heard by the IGF's Secretariat and MAG, though they may receive precious little feedback on their suggestions until months or years later. Thus, perhaps belatedly responding to some of my own oft-repeated criticisms, Markus Kummer announced that the Secretariat was finally in the process of updating and upgrading the IGF's Web site to use a content management system (CMS), which would provide "more community tools available for participants".

Perhaps also in response to criticisms about the lack of tangible outputs from the IGF, it was foreshadowed that at the Hyderabad meeting, and following meetings, a book of the proceedings would be published. Long-awaited reforms such as these, moderate as they are, will certainly influence my own response to the IGF's eventual external review.