A documentary journalism team from Elon’s Imagining the Internet Center will be filing reports from the UN-facilitated Global Internet Governance Forum in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the week of Sept. 13-17. IGF annually draws nearly 2,000 participants from government, business, academia, the technology sector and civil society who gather to discuss the issues tied to the new knowledge society being established as the Internet evolves and expands.
During the IGF events, you will find the Imagining the Internet team’s coverage here: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/igf_2010/default.xhtml
The Elon documentary research contingent is being led by Glenn Scott, associate professor of communications, and it includes School of Communications seniors Kirsten Bennett and Drew Smith and junior Samantha Baranowski. The enterprise is being planned and managed by associate professor Janna Anderson, director of the Imagining the Internet Center. She will also be reporting on the Global IGF, covering events from a remote hub at Elon. To read more about IGF or to connect to IGF’s streaming video from some live events see the official site: http://www.intgovforum.org/
Elon’s team of student documentarians is conducting a video survey at IGF to measure experts’ attitudes regarding the key issues tied to the future of the Internet. Travel expenses are being funded through grants from Elon’s Undergraduate Research and Fellows programs plus funding from Elon donors, the Imagining the Internet Center and the School of Communications.
The Imagining the Internet Center is also co-sponsoring several workshops and panels at the event, and it will have representatives presenting information at four different IGF sessions.
Smith will be a featured speaker on two panels. He will talk about education and capacity building at a panel titled “Core Internet Values and the Principles of Internet Governance Across Generations” which is also scheduled to feature Vint Cerf of Google, Bill Graham of the Internet Society, ‘Gbenga Sesan of Paradigm New Nigeria, Grace Bomu of the ICT Consumers Association of Kenya, Laura DeNardis of the Yale Information Society Project and Nii Quaynor of Ghana.com. Smith will also appear on the lead panel at a workshop titled “Internet for Youth,” a group effort to brainstorm options for participation by youth in Internet governance debates on the local and global levels.
Bennett will be a featured speaker at a “Regional and National IGF” session, where she is slated to provide a report about the Imagining the Internet Center’s documentation of the 2010 IGF-USA for the global IGF participants. Bennett was part of a documentary team from Imagining the Internet that covered the United States IGF meeting in July in Washington, D.C. (http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/igf_usa/igf_usa_2010.xhtml). Among the other participants in the session will be Steve DelBianco of NetChoice, Iren Borissova of VeriSign, Liesyl Franz of TechAmerica, Fiona Alexander of NTIA, Jim Galvin of Affilias and Sally Wentworth of the Internet Society.
Scott and Baranowski will be panelists at an IGF workshop presented by the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values. Scott will provide a summary of the Core Values of the Internet session that was presented at FutureWeb, the series of events hosted over three days in April 2010 by Imagining the Internet at the global WWW2010 meeting in Raleigh (http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/futureweb2010/future_core_values_internet.xhtml).
Baranowski will present a summary of youth participation in OneWebDay online activities. Students from Elon University have contributed more than 50 video clips and blogs to the OneWebDay site over the past two years (see one example here: http://onewebday.org/2009/09/14/one-web-day-the-webs-benefits-elon-university-interactive-media-program/), and they hosted a 2010 OneWebDay event for several hundred people at Elon University – you can see the video clip here: http://www.youtube.com/user/ImaginingtheInternet#p/u/0/Qr7-dwbTWvc
The objective of the Dynamic Coalition on Core Internet Values is to debate and find answers to fundamental questions such as: What is the Internet? What makes it what it is? What are its architectural principles? What are the core principles and values? And what is happening to the core values in the process of its evolution? What is it that needs to be preserved and what changes are inevitable? The Imagining the Internet Center is one of the sponsoring organizations of this coalition.
To see Imagining the Internet’s coverage of previous global IGF meetings see:
IGF 2009 in Egypt: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/igf_egypt/default.xhtml
IGF 2008 in Hyderabad: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/internet_governance_forum_2008.xhtml
IGF 2007 in Rio de Janeiro: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/internet_governance_forum_2007.xhtml
IGF 2006 in Athens: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/internet_governance_forum_2006.xhtml