Modest request that Touré can easily accept. Just before Busan, Carolina Rossini of Public Knowledge led a set of civil society groups in a letter that makes sensible suggestions for the ITU. It was far more to the point than so many of the U.S. and Russian attempts at provocation. I was happy to sign, alongside EFF, the World Wide Web Foundation, APC, CDT and others. Webcasting more of the event, meeting regularly with civil society, having anonline contribution mechanism for all and opening more meetings are simple, sensible steps. In fact, Hamadoun has been actively working on several of these. The ITU is a body of politicians and isn’t perfect, but most of the popular criticism comes from a negative political campaign.
At WCIT, Harold Feld and others from civil society organized a small caucus. I told a friend at ITU and the next day Hamadoun and the caucus had an informal meeting. There’s every reason for them to do more. Several of the recent ITU meetings featured “Informal Expert Groups” that were essentially open to all and proved effective. A platform open to all may be impractical to put together in a few days but is always good. Then, the Internet Society or any friendly government – even the U.S. – could add it to the record. At WCIT, the ITU made available to attendees the complete registration list including most emails. That means that anyone there, including civil society, has the emails and can reach 80-90% of the attendees more effectively than getting into the conference