Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)
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Montreal workshop was great
The Montreal regional meeting concluded Monday afternoon, and it took me until now to find the time to report on it. It was an energizing meeting. Attendance hovered around 50 most of the time. Our experiment with a more outreach-oriented program on the first day was definitely a success. Thanks to support from Media@McGill and specifically Professor Becky Lentz, the first-day program attracted a large number of students, mainly undergraduate students. Many new members joined, and plans for another workshop and program in Washington DC next year were discussed, although nothing is definite yet.
The first day started out with a long panel discussion of what internet governance is and how different academic disciplines, ranging from law to sociology to economics and political science, relate to it. This was a rich discussion, perhaps overly long. I started out with an overview and was followed by Sandra Braman, Derrick Cogburn, Laura DeNardis, Chris Marsden Caludia Padovani and Daniel Pare. The panel discussed the definition of "governance," the Internet in relation to other historical communication technologies, the problem of agency in studies of the relationship between technology and society, the role of the state and private sector in Internet governance, and whether IG as a field is a "flash in the pan" or more enduring. Questions from the audience forced the panelists to define terms that they normally take for granted, such as when Laura DeNardis was asked to explain what she meant by "protocol".
That session was followed by an outreach session tailored to issue-oriented presentations and discussions by civil society advocacy groups. Net neutrality, copyright, and privacy/surveillance. This included representatives of CIPPIC, SaveourNet.ca, and the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.
On the second day we had more standard academic research presentations. These are intended to be "workshops" where ongoing research is discussed, but it is often difficult to walk the fine line between presenting finished or near-finished papers, and presenting work in progress at various stages, and the presentations occupied various places on that spectrum. The panel with Braman's research analyzing the entire corpus of RFCs and Kuerbis's research on the social networks underlying the development of RFCs related to the security of critical internet resources was especially interesting. As a purely personal opinion I enjoyed and learned a lot from Xu's presentation on the Green Dam incident in China and Wouter Stol's analysis of police case data on cybercrime.
The small but comfortable facility (Thomson House) facilitated a lot of useful networking and interactions among the participants.
Most of the slide presentations will be available - look for a blog about those. I see that someone has already posted some photos from the event.
My thanks to the other program committee members, the program committee chair Meryem Marzouki, the local organizing committee Becky Lentz and her student Juliana, Claire Roberge and Media@McGill.
The first day started out with a long panel discussion of what internet governance is and how different academic disciplines, ranging from law to sociology to economics and political science, relate to it. This was a rich discussion, perhaps overly long. I started out with an overview and was followed by Sandra Braman, Derrick Cogburn, Laura DeNardis, Chris Marsden Caludia Padovani and Daniel Pare. The panel discussed the definition of "governance," the Internet in relation to other historical communication technologies, the problem of agency in studies of the relationship between technology and society, the role of the state and private sector in Internet governance, and whether IG as a field is a "flash in the pan" or more enduring. Questions from the audience forced the panelists to define terms that they normally take for granted, such as when Laura DeNardis was asked to explain what she meant by "protocol".
That session was followed by an outreach session tailored to issue-oriented presentations and discussions by civil society advocacy groups. Net neutrality, copyright, and privacy/surveillance. This included representatives of CIPPIC, SaveourNet.ca, and the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.
On the second day we had more standard academic research presentations. These are intended to be "workshops" where ongoing research is discussed, but it is often difficult to walk the fine line between presenting finished or near-finished papers, and presenting work in progress at various stages, and the presentations occupied various places on that spectrum. The panel with Braman's research analyzing the entire corpus of RFCs and Kuerbis's research on the social networks underlying the development of RFCs related to the security of critical internet resources was especially interesting. As a purely personal opinion I enjoyed and learned a lot from Xu's presentation on the Green Dam incident in China and Wouter Stol's analysis of police case data on cybercrime.
The small but comfortable facility (Thomson House) facilitated a lot of useful networking and interactions among the participants.
Most of the slide presentations will be available - look for a blog about those. I see that someone has already posted some photos from the event.
My thanks to the other program committee members, the program committee chair Meryem Marzouki, the local organizing committee Becky Lentz and her student Juliana, Claire Roberge and Media@McGill.
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