[Chapter-delegates] [Report + request] ISOC activities at World Telecommunication Policy Forum, April 21-24

[Bill Graham]

Dear all,

Attached is a report on ISOC's activities at the ITU WTPF that took  
place in Lisbon last week.  You will recall that I consulted you on  
the documents we prepared for the conference, and that we posted  
information for you to use if you wanted to assist by talking to your  
national delegations.  That material is available at <http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/community/wtpf.shtml 
 > in several languages.

To briefly summarize: ISOC staff participating in the meeting heard  
from several government and non-governmental delegates that they had  
read the material we produced in advance of the meeting and had found  
it useful, which is encouraging.  Although the time at the meeting was  
taken up more with formal speeches than discussions about the issues,  
I believe the ISOC presence made a difference.  CEO Lynn St. Amour's  
speech was praised as being focused and to the point <see:  http://www.isoc.org/pubpolpillar/community/wtpf_lsa-speech_20090422.shtml 
 >.  And Chief Internet Technology Officer Leslie Daigle successfully  
intervened in discussions about Next Generation Networks, with the  
result that future discussions about that issue will be more likely to  
respect the boundaries of the ITU's own definition.  That is important  
because we learned that the ITU is planning to very much broadening  
their work without taking into account the work done in the Internet  
standards bodies.

ISOC's delegation met with a large number of delegations to explain  
why it is important to respect and engage with I* organizations,  
rather than trying to get the ITU to expand its activities into areas  
already successfully managed by existing organizations.  ISOC’s Public  
Policy team and head of the Africa Bureau met with approximately 20  
high-level African delegations to reinforce existing relationships,  
and to build new relationships for future collaborative regional  
projects and, in particular, to engage with policymakers on the many  
regional projects which the public policy team is currently leading in  
Africa.  They also used the opportunity to promote the first African  
Regional Internet Leadership Forum for Ministers and leaders to be  
held in Cairo on 29 and 30 September 2009.

In the context of the three ITU World Conferences coming up between  
now and 2012, that could impact on the Internet and it’s governance,  
our contributions here were a valuable starting point to build ISOC's  
presence and credibility with national and business delegations.

More detail is available in the attached report.

We also used this meeting as a trial for a more active way of engaging  
with our own ISOC Chapters and Members, by providing briefing material  
and suggesting that you meet with your national delegations to talk  
with them about ISOC's issues before the meeting.  I would appreciate  
hearing from you whether you made use of those materials to talk to  
local officials.  Please send me any feedback about whether you found  
the material useful, as well as any suggestions about how we could  
prepare for meetings in a way that would be more helpful to your  
Chapter.

Best regards,

Bill

========================
Bill Graham
Global Strategic Engagement
The Internet Society
graham at isoc.org




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: WTPF-report-final.doc
Type: application/msword
Size: 43008 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/private/chapter-delegates/attachments/20090501/3bca604f/attachment.doc>
-------------- next part --------------