Despite the paucity of commentary here for a couple of months, of course preparations for Hyderabad have been proceeding apace. First, the MAG met again in September to act upon the input given at the preceding day's open consultation meeting. As expected, the reactionary voices of the private sector as described in the previous post were treated as controlling by the IGF's timorous advisory group. When the meeting schedule was released later in the month, lo and behold there were no longer any sessions for "debate", nor even "dialogue and debate", but merely "open dialogue". Supposedly this was to "better reflect their nature" rather than because the IGF is terminally afraid of upsetting anyone's apple cart.

Then in October, as also foreshadowed in the last post, the Secretariat unveiled a new CMS-based Web site for the IGF, with the promise that it would include "more tools for better online collaboration". It is unclear exactly what those are. On the surface, the site seems to be nothing more than a superficial makeover of the old one. Simple collaborative tools such as a wiki or blog are still nowhere to be seen. Of course, I set those up for the IGF years ago on the IGF Community Site, but the Secretariat would rather you didn't know about that, judging from its refusal to link there.

Then in November the IGF received a much-publicised lambasting from (of all sources) the ITU, with its Secretary General Hamadoun Touré proclaiming it a "waste of time". Of course he's right, for reasons I've outlined here ad nauseum, but has the ITU been seen amongst those from civil society, academia and developing nations who are attempting to remedy the situation? I mean, this is an organisation the sum of whose written contributions to previous IGF meetings have amounted to reprints of ITU whitepapers. Still, this high-level slight should increase the pressure on the Secretariat and MAG to imbue the IGF with at least a veneer of relevance ahead of its five-year review by the UN.

The final development of note has been the release of the synthesis paper of stakeholder contributions to the Hyderabad meeting. Stakeholders only bothered to make a measly fifteen contributions for inclusion in this synthesis - down again from 28 in Rio and 79 in Athens. Clearly, the IGF has been consolidating its eminence as an Internet governance institution.

Following a familiar pattern, the contributions highlighted up front included those that praised the IGF as a successful experiment because it "did not attempt to make decisions", and mischaracterised my own more critical submission as stating "that the IGF has been a success to the extent to which it fulfilled a vacuum that existed within Internet governance for a multi-stakeholder forum to address Internet-related public policy issues." In fact, my contention is that the IGF should have filled that vacuum, but that to date it has failed to live up to that hope.