Submission of Suggestions or Ideas for Issues to be discussed at the 2014 IGF
Mr. Deirdre Williams
The issues that I would like to see discussed:
How to make the IGF more of a year round activity (rather than an annual conference;
How to streamline the inclusion of the outcomes of national and regional meetings into the global meeting (I believe there used to be reporting during the opening session?)
How to improve publicity and public awareness of local national regional and global IGF related activities.
Improving remote participation facilitation in the interest of broader inclusion; this should include consideration of ways to get past the problem of time differences.
I am pasting in a suggestion that I made to the Friends of the IGF group last year: "One of the issues that seems pressing to me is the 12 hour time difference between the Americas and Bali. This is an opportunity as well as a challenge, because it will affect a large number of vocal potential participants who will support us if we can come up with a good solution, so that the solution can become an accepted process to help other people from other places in other years.
It seems to me that there should be a way to use an aggregation of pre-Bali content (I may be giving this a new definition - I mean the information available NOW on the sessions and workshops planned for Bali) to invite and record input from remote participants, hubs and individuals, for whom synchronous participation would be very difficult. Some such mechanism was proposed during the Latin American and Caribbean IGF held in Argentina at the end of August where concern about this time difference was expressed. I haven't thought of a "how" yet, but perhaps there are technical people who would see this more clearly than I can."
Thank you
Deirdre Williams,
Saint Lucia, West Indies.