It's in my job description, as Official Bugbear to the IGF, to be grouchy. And I must express my appreciation to the MAG and Secretariat for making my job very easy. But I also try to be at least a little forward-looking and optimistic in my wrap-up blog post on each IGF meeting, even if that optimism is sometimes found buried in several layers of subtext.

My optimism for this meeting will not be on account of anything the IGF has done, as this year's meeting was, as several people have already pointed out, rather boring (in the plenary sessions at least). Even my own closing session address for civil society was judged by a Secretariat consultant as having "good balance." (A bad sign. Next year I am considering more extreme measures to shake things up.)

Rather, my optimism lies in the hope that the IGF is soon going to get a kick up the pants from the CSTD (Commission on Science and Technology for Development), to push along the much-needed reforms that I've been championing for five years. Yesterday this body announced its plans for the formation of a new, independent and consultative working group to look at improvements to the IGF.

The working group will be established by the end of October, and will work from the results of a questionnaire on improvements to the IGF that will be posted on the CSTD Web site that month. It will cover the format of the IGF meetings, its outcomes, and its working methods, including the MAG, Secretariat, and mechanisms of outreach to other Internet governance organisations. The working group's report will be presented at the CSTD"s May meeting, ahead of the (anticipated) sixth Nairobi meeting of the IGF.

An independent review of the IGF happens to be something that I called for 18 months ago, when the IGF insiders were insisting that an internal review would be sufficient. Now, don't get me wrong - the CSTD is no white knight. It's an intergovernmental group, and thus even less multi-stakeholder than the IGF"s stacked MAG. But the working group that it will form (by October), will be modelled on WGIG, which contained about one-third civil society members. It was from those very members that the definition of "Internet governance" that we now use came, as well as the idea of the IGF itself.

Through the informal grapevine (why do UN people seem to think that this sufficient?), I have heard that the CSTD will be accepting nominations from the IGC for civil society members of its working group, and from the ICC for private sector members . (As you may know, I'm currently the co-coordinator of the IGC, so you might think that someone might have told me about this. But no; I had to ask, and apparently would not otherwise have been told.)

Probably the private sector and civil society will put in about ten members each. Included in each slate will be about three members from the Internet technical community, which does not have its own stakeholder group. (Though two of the technical community speakers at the "taking stock" session this year said they wanted one, and since this community holds such influence with the IGF insiders, even on general public policy issues, they well end up getting it.)

But, you might reasonably ask, why is the CSTD needed - why shouldn't the IGF self-organise, like other Internet governance organisations do? How can I justify calling for a intergovernmental body to step in and interfere with what should be a grassroots process?

Well, the answer is right there. It should be a grassroots process, but it isn't. The MAG is dominated by a few powerful voices who hold the power to block consensus on measures needed for the further fulfilment of the IGF's mandate. Much as I like to bag it, there are some really great, smart, committed, progressive people on the MAG. The problem is, there are also more than a few sticks in the mud. And two of them run the whole show.

Markus Kummer and Nitin Desai are universally applauded for their administration of the IGF process, respectively as Head of the Secretariat and Chair of the MAG (though as we'll see, the roles tend to merge). And indeed, they are both highly professional, adroit and hard-working diplomats. But on many occasions it has been these two supposedly neutral leaders of the IGF who have constituted its most reactionary force.

Don't believe me? I'll give an example from this year's IGF process, beginning back in March 2010, when the MAG was discussing the issue of the IGF releasing "messages" from its meetings (essentially a watered down version of the "recommendations" of its mandate, as "dynamic coalitions" were a watered down version of "working groups").

As the long thread on the MAG mailing list shows, there had been a lot of very lively debate around this issue, and the group were coming progressively closer to agreement.

For example, some who had previously objected to the IGF producing "key messages", were able to work out a compromise in this thread by dropping the word "key". Others were able to change their view based on the experience of regional IGFs that had experienced success with "messages". A set of criteria were being worked out for the messages that the IGF might issue, including:

• the messages are not a negotiated outcome


• the are not a "formal" outcome of the IGF


• they represent what the organizers/moderators of each session see as their personal immediate takeaways from the session


• they should be based on the summing up of the sessions at their closing

So, at this point, with so much progress having been made, what would a strong and fair leader do? Would he or she, seeing that the parties were beginning to agree, attempt to facilitate a consensus on the issue? Or, would this leader throw in the towel?

What actually happened next was that Markus pronounced, "Our discussion revealed that we are far from a consensus, however rough, in this matter." He went on to say "We can of course go on and on discussing issuing messages, but in my reading of the various positions expressed there seems little point in doing so, as we would only keep repeating the same points." And so that was that. (Remember also, Nitin Desai, not Markus Kummer, is meant to be chair of the MAG.)

I may be in a minority of one for not showering the IGF's esteemed leaders with profuse plaudits, but I ask you - does the above exchange exhibit strong leadership for the IGF?

And there we come to the need for the CSTD. It is only an independent party, such as the CSTD, that can force the MAG to make the reforms necessary to answer the demands that civil society has been making for five years, and - let's make this very clear - that are also required by its mandate from WSIS. The MAG, under its current leadership, has time and again proven itself simply incapable of doing so.

For in all this debating, the rather fundamental point is missed that whether or not the IGF should be capable of making recommendations simply isn't the MAG's choice. An IGF that is capable of producing "recommendations, where appropriate" is demanded by its mandate in the Tunis Agenda. So the fact that the MAG, or certain of its members or leaders, might believe that it would be a bad idea for the IGF to attempt to do send messages (still less recommendations), is neither here nor there.

Moreover, the IGF has often been called an experiment in global governance. The very point of the experimental method is that one should test an unproven hypothesis (or process, in this case), observe the results, and depending on the outcome, make adjustments and try again. So it would be quite easy - and obvious, at least to me - for the IGF to agree to attempt to produce recommendations or messages out of its sessions ("where appropriate"), on a trial basis.

If, as everyone seems to fear, this attempt would fail miserably and the IGF's participants fall into intergovernmental negotiation mode (though I'm sure that wouldn't happen, because the process wouldn't be designed that way), participants could simply declare the experiment a failure, and move on - either tweaking the procedures for next time, or turning to me to say "I told you so" and leaving it at that.

This is why the CSTD, with strong input from civil society, has renewed my optimism for the IGF this year. Jaded and indignant after years of seeing ideas for improvement stymied, I am now excited that we might get a second chance to put things right, over the heads of the Secretariat and the incapacitated MAG. I'm now looking forward to the IGF again.