As some readers might know, I am one of the founders of the Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition of the IGF, which began in early 2007 with grand ambitions to help the IGF Secretariat to drag the frankly rather embarrassing official IGF Web site into the Web 2.0 era, by opening it up to the community to collaborate on developing the IGF's online presence, drawing on a pool of information from official, host country and community sources. These plans were given short shrift by the Secretariat, who insisted that on maintaining the strict separation of information into official, host country and community silos, that had been so ineffective in Athens.

Well, history has repeated itself. Unperturbed by the OCDC's failure to sway the Secretariat on the merits of an open, multi-stakeholder approach to online and remote engagement, a separate group calling themselves the Remote Participation Working Group came together after the Rio meeting while the OCDC's server was down, to put forward its own plans to the Secretariat to "combine the webcast of the IGF with a platform for interaction, which would be available before, during and after the meeting." Various initiatives including the gating of IGF meetings into and out of Second Life were developed by this group. Until, that is, the Secretariat again put down its foot and resolved that it would endorse no such innovations, limiting the role of the group to working with remote IGF hubs.

The Secretariat is acting well outside the legitimate bounds of its authority by dictating to stakeholders what form the IGF's programme of remote and intersessional online participation in its meetings should be. The Secretariat's role is a strictly facilitative one, not even mentioned in the Tunis Agenda. It must therefore at all times remain subservient to the stakeholders themselves, as represented in the MAG and through the open consultation meetings and dynamic coalitions. And with the appalling hash that the Secretariat has made of the IGF's Internet presence, you'd think that that would be one area at least in which it would be happy to allow stakeholders to take the lead.

The Online Collaboration Dynamic Coalition (not quite dead yet, despite the best efforts of some) is responding to the Secretariat's failure by putting together a proposal for a radical overhaul, proposing the development of a platform for an IGF Virtual Community. The preface to the proposal states,

The establishment of the IGF was an ambitious innovation in global governance for the Internet. Whereas earlier Internet governance institutions such as the IETF, the RIRs, and to some extent ICANN, emerged largely from the grassroots of the Internet technical community and utilised principally online working methods from the outset, the IGF is the first new Internet governance institution to be structured principally as a face-to-face annual meeting, and aside from the activities of its dynamic coalitions, it remains set in that form.

Whilst this may have provided a more natural means of engagement for some stakeholders from outside the Internet technical community, it has distanced the IGF from ordinary Internet users and limited its potential to draw in the breadth of community engagement that the other Internet governance institutions mentioned above have enjoyed. Thus even when mechanisms such as Webcasting have been provided to bridge the annual meeting with online users, these have been underutilised because remote users have not felt part of the same community as those meeting in person.

To improve the mechanisms of remote participation made available by the IGF therefore only addresses part of the problem. What is more important is that the IGF produce a virtual community to motivate a broad cross-section of users, including those who cannot afford to attend the annual meetings, to participate actively and enthusiastically in year-round policy dialogue. In short, the IGF must welcome online discourse as a principal means of engagement in its activities, not merely as an adjunct to its discrete annual meetings.

To date, the IGF has fallen short in this. Where other Internet governance institutions host vibrant and effective virtual discussions that benefit from the unique discursive properties of the online environment, the IGF does not. The development of such a virtual community for the IGF has been limited by a number of factors, and it is the purpose of this requirements document to set those out, and to sketch the institutional, technical and social modifications that the IGF should commit to if it wishes to foster the development of a more engaging online environment for the IGF community.

Although the Secretariat will naturally have no part of this proposal, it is being put to independent developers for costing (since the IGF's needs exceed the capacity of its volunteer stakeholders), and will then be presented to the September open consultation meeting for all stakeholders to comment upon, and hopefully to raise funds to realise. In the face of a groundswell of support for change, even the Secretariat will find it difficult to maintain its overreaching control over the means of online participation in the IGF's meetings.