Internet Governance
IGF’s multistakeholderism has demonstrated a practical solution that helps countries to increase their diplomatic footprint without allocating additional resources. Multistakeholder national IGF bodies are appearing. Governments are coordinating more with business and civil society. Some small and developing states are represented in Internet governance policy processes by experts from academia and NGOs. Sometimes, fostering such inclusiveness is mainly a matter of coordination, and creating a national multistakeholder framework. Dedicated capacity building through training programmes involving various stakeholders from the same state also helps: co-participants in a training programme tend to develop mutual trust and a team spirit. Strengthen remote participation through the establishment of hubs5 It is natural for a forum that discusses Internet governance to use the Internet to extend participation in IGF meetings beyond those who can physically attend. Nowadays, besides regular Internet broadcasting of meetings, the main innovation of the IGF has been the introduction of ‘remote hubs’. Remote hubs are defined as local meetings that take place during and parallel to IGF meetings, hosted by universities, information and communication technology (ICT) centres, NGOs, and other players who deal with Internet governance and policy issues. They project a simultaneous webcast of the meeting so that remote participants can stay informed about what is being debated. As part of a remote hub, participants can send text and video questions to be answered by IGF panellists in real-time interventions. In addition, hubs host panels and roundtable discussions correlating to IGF themes from a local perspective. Through these activities, the local hubs enrich coordination between global and local policy processes. For example, during 2008 IGF, the remote hub in Madrid followed the session on cybersecurity and later continued its discussion on cybersecurity in the specific Spanish context. A total of eight remote hubs operated in parallel with the 2008 IGF (Madrid, Lahore, Barcelona, Belgrade, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Bogota, and Pune). More than 450 event hours were broadcast for remote participation and a total of 522 remote attendees joined the meeting during the four-day event.6 After successful test implementation in 2008, the concept of remote hubs was adopted by the IGF Secretariat. As a result of strong support from the host country and Remote Participation Working Groups (RPWG),7 the IGF in Sharm El Sheikh in 2009 saw an increase in the level of remote participation to 12 hubs from every continent. The remote webcast was greatly improved, and both main sessions and workshops were attended remotely by hubs and 188