Shaping What Comes Next: Inside the IGF Expert Group Meeting

Last week at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Expert Group Meeting we considered what changes to this 20-year-old, UN initiative are required now that the UN General Assembly has made it permanent. This small, invitation-only gathering was tasked with the future of the IGF as a permanent UN mandate and how it achieves outcomes. Now that the IGF’s place at the UN is secure, we can stop trying to prove that multistakeholder dialogue matters, and start showing what multistakeholder governance is multistakeholder governance is capable of delivering.

This means civil society can find purchase for its work in IGF work itself, rather than considering the annual meeting a venue for outreach and promotion of its work that ultimately happens in other places.

The IGF is being actively redefined and the process is open to meaningful influence. I attended representing the Social Web Foundation, both a civil society organization and a key player in the technical community. My remarks were informed by other civil society organizations: the Association for Progressive Communications and its members.

Across discussions several core tensions and opportunities emerged. Rather than either/or, in almost all cases I view the IGF as being able to balance both:

1. Dialogue and influence decisions. There is clear pressure for the IGF to move beyond being a convening space and toward something that can influence decision-making processes. This includes stronger alignment with global frameworks like World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the Global Digital Compact, and more intentional pathways for IGF outputs to inform policy fora. This is possible without losing the open, iterative, multistakeholder dialogue that makes the IGF valuable. The approach is to enhance and make more visible the IGF’s ongoing work between annual meetings. Like standards bodies, the authority to push forward points of view and outputs within intersessional work rests on those who are participating in those processes, and the fact that the output is part of a multistakeholder UN process.
2. Institutionalize top-down and elevate bottom-up. The permanent mandate creates an opportunity to rethink governance, structures, and operations of the annual meeting. At the same time there is broad recognition that the IGF’s legitimacy comes from its bottom-up nature, particularly through national and regional initiatives (NRIs). Embedding those processes more directly into governance is essential to strengthening the utility of top-down institutionalization while putting resources and attention on the more valuable bottom-up and direct impact potential of NRIs.

For those of us working on the social web, open protocols, and public-interest infrastructure, this moment is a significant one that can help leverage the IGF toward outcomes, not just outreach.

The IGF has long been a space where principles of openness, interoperability, decentralization are articulated. Last year SWF hosted an IGF session on decentralized social media. What is changing now is the hope, or the expectation, that concrete ideas grounded in these principles can translate into real outcomes both in policy processes and technical designs. To achieve this, two elements are needed: topic coherence and inclusion.

Concrete proposals already exist to strengthen topic coherence through organizing work into thematic clusters, streamlining and better coordinating ongoing work between annual meetings, and producing outputs that are targeted and usable. Some cross-institutional examples for the potential impact of IGF intersessional work:

• The IGF Best Practice Forum on Cybersecurity has mapped and advanced international cybersecurity norms, producing outputs that feed into UN processes, national policy debates, and capacity-building initiatives across the ecosystem.
• The IGF Policy Network on Meaningful Access has produced concrete recommendations on connectivity and digital inclusion that have been taken up in Global Digital Compact discussions and broader UN development processes.
• The Internet Architecture Board – not an IGF intersessional group – made a statement about the technical hurdles to backdoor encrypted messaging that was specific and credible to the debate at hand given its composition, not its authority.
• The IETF created the technical standard for non-Latin domain names, ICANN deployed it operationally, and ITU Resolution 133 created pressure from governments to implement it.

Strengthening intersessional work reflects a shift toward treating the IGF as an ongoing governance process, not just a yearly event.

Moreover inclusion gets addressed if participation can be reframed not just as a value but as infrastructure. Unlike other internet governance institutions like global standards bodies, the UN provides funding for participation, language accessibility, and mechanisms for meaningful engagement from underrepresented groups and developing countries. Substantively, the IGF  can attract more structured engagement with governments, while simultaneously advancing openness to non-state actors in settings that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of multilateral diplomacy. 

What was clear in this meeting is that this outcome is not predetermined. It is being actively constructed and influenced by those participating in the process. The next phase will include rounds of consultations on many of the subjects under consideration by this small expert group. It’s important to think about how to leverage the IGF for tangible outcomes that bridge SDOs and other sites of influence over internet governance.