The 2006 Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was held in Athens (Greece, 30 October - 2 November) and its overall theme was 'Internet Governance for Development'.
IT for Change submitted a paper titled 'A development agenda for Internet Governance - Call for a framework convention on the Internet'.
We also organised a workshop about ‘Exploring a framework convention on the Internet’. The aim of the workshop was to generate a debate about the assumed importance to gather ‘globally accepted principles on public policy’, as required in the Tunis Agenda, for the governance of the Internet. The theme provided a political overlay to all the four topics for the Athens meeting, as well as its overall theme of ‘Internet Governance for Development’.
Prior to the meeting, and in response to the call of the IGF, we submitted a theme 'Defining and fostering the ‘public-ness’ of the Internet – issues of public interest, public domain, public infrastructure and public good in the context of the Internet'.
After the meeting, IT for Change sent a letter to Nitin Desai, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary General on IG issues, on behalf of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus (CS-IGC), expressing concerns about the fact that significant follow-up activities mandated by the WSIS on issues of public policy concerning IG had not taken off.