[WSIS CS-Plenary] CFP for Athens GigaNet Conference, Oct. 29

[William Drake]

> 
> Please distribute as appropriate
>  
>  
> Call for Proposals
>  
> Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet)
> First Annual Conference
> Divani Apollon Palace & Spa Hotel
> Athens, Greece
> 29 October 2006 
>  
>  
> The Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) is an emerging
> scholarly community initiated in Spring 2006.  Its four principal objectives
> are to: support the establishment of a global cohort of scholars specializing
> on Internet governance issues; promote the development of Internet governance
> as a recognized, interdisciplinary field of study; advance theoretical and
> applied research on Internet governance, broadly defined; and facilitate
> informed dialogue on policy issues and related matters between scholars and
> Internet governance stakeholders (governments, international organizations,
> the private sector, and civil society).
>  
> In this context, the GigaNet plans to organize conferences to be held on site
> prior to the annual meetings of the new Internet Governance Forum (IGF). The
> first such conference will be held on 29 October 2006 in Athens, Greece prior
> to the inaugural IGF meeting  <www.igfgreece2006.gr>.  The final program, when
> available, will be posted on the IGF website <www.intgovforum.org> and on the
> websites of relevant academic organizations.  Attendance at the conference
> will be free of charge and open to all registered IGF participants.
>  
> This is a call for proposals from scholars interested in speaking on one of
> the three round table panels to be held at the conference.  The panels are
> described in the preliminary program below.  The Program Committee will select
> four to five speakers per panel drawing on the following materials to be
> provided by applicants: 1) a one page maximum description of the proposed
> presentation indicating its specific relevance and value-added to the panel in
> question’s thematic focus; and 2) a one page summary curriculum vitae listing
> in particular the applicant’s current institutional affiliation(s), advanced
> degrees, scholarly publications relevant to Internet governance, and web
> sites, if available.
>  
> These materials should be emailed directly to the respective panel chairs
> listed below by no later than Monday, 25 September, midnight GMT. The Program
> Committee will notify applicants of its decisions via email by 4 October. The
> selected speakers will give ten-minute presentations, after which there will
> be open discussion with audience members. While this is not required, speakers
> are welcome to provide a written text or Power Point presentation to be linked
> off of the conference web page.
>  
>  
> ---------- 
>  
> Preliminary Program and Roundtable Panel Descriptions
>  
>  
> 9:30-9:45       Welcome and Overview
>                        Wolfgang Kleinwächter, University of Aarhus, Denmark
>  
>  
> 9:45-11:15      Theorizing Internet Governance: The State of the Art
> Chair:              Peng Hwa Ang, Singapore Internet Research Center
>                         Email: tphang [at] ntu.edu.sg
>  
> In recent years, scholars have begun to analyze Internet governance issues
> using the theoretical tools of their respective academic disciplines.  While
> issues surrounding ICANN have attracted particular attention, there also has
> been significant work done on the international governance of digital
> international trade and intellectual property, privacy, security, speech, and
> other topics.  Such research often has been rather specialized and geared
> toward the distinct audiences interested in each issue-area, which limited
> intellectual cross-fertilization. These topics are related, and Internet
> governance should be seen as a broad but coherent field of study that merits
> elaboration and support.  Mapping the landscape of relevant theoretical
> perspectives is an important first step toward this end.
>  
> The purpose of this panel is to consider questions such as: What aspects of
> Internet governance are uniquely interesting and worthy of scholarly analysis?
> How has Internet governance been addressed by scholars in the social sciences,
> humanities, law, and other disciplines, and which theoretical approaches seem
> to be the most promising for which issues and dynamics?  Do these efforts
> point to the emergence of a coherent research agenda and the cumulative
> development of new knowledge? Are there barriers---intellectual,
> institutional, and other---that might have to be overcome to advance that
> agenda? How can Internet governance develop into an interdisciplinary
> scholarly field that is taken seriously by academics and also capable of
> providing useful inputs to the Internet Governance Forum and other policy
> development institutions?  What lessons can be learned, if any, from other
> fields defined by the object of inquiry/dependent variables rather than by
> shared theories and independent variables, e.g., "communication studies,"
> "information studies," and "women's studies"? Are there national or cultural
> differences in the ways scholars approach these matters, and if so how might
> these be reconciled?
>  
>  
> 11:15-11:30     Coffee break
>  
>  
> 11:30-13:00     “Enhanced Cooperation” and Interaction among Stakeholders
>                             in Internet Governance
> Chair:              Milton Mueller, Syracuse University, USA
>                         Email: info [at] internetgovernance.org
>  
> In addition to creating the Internet Governance Forum, the Tunis Agenda calls
> for "enhanced cooperation" among governments. This language originated with
> the European Union's June 2005 criticism of US unilateral control of ICANN.
> The EU claimed that the WSIS statement constituted, "a worldwide political
> agreement providing for further internationalization of Internet governance,
> and enhanced intergovernmental cooperation to this end" and that, "Such
> cooperation should include the development of globally applicable principles
> on public policy issues associated with the coordination and management of
> critical Internet resources."
>  
> The purpose of this panel is to consider questions such as: What are the
> causes of US-EU tensions over Internet governance? What institutional form
> might such a "new cooperation model" for deliberations among governments take?
> How viable is the distinction between "day-to-day management of the Internet
> and "public policy?" What, more generally, is the role of national governments
> in Internet governance in relation to other stakeholder groups? What
> implications might “enhanced cooperation” have for civil society and
> multistakeholder participation? How might such a philosophy lead to changes in
> the structure or processes of ICANN? Proposals outlining any other approach
> that provides insight into this aspect of the political battles over Internet
> governance are welcome.
>  
>  
> 13:00-14:30     Lunch break
>  
>  
> 14:30-16:00     The Distributed Architecture of Internet Governance
> Chair:              William J. Drake, Graduate Institute of International
> Studies,
>                         Geneva, Switzerland
>                         Email: drake [at] hei.unige.ch
>  
> As the WSIS agreements recognized, Internet governance involves much more than
> ICANN or the collective management of naming and numbering. Internet
> governance also includes the development and application of internationally
> shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs in a
> variety of other issue-areas, e.g. technical standardization, cybercrime and
> network security, international interconnection, e-commerce, e-contracting,
> networked trade in digital goods and services, digital intellectual property,
> jurisdiction and choice of law, human rights, speech and social conduct,
> cultural and linguistic diversity, privacy and consumer protection, dispute
> resolution, and so on. These activities take a variety of forms and are
> pursued in a heterogeneous array of settings, including governmental,
> intergovernmental, private sector, and multistakeholder organizations and
> collaborations. In parallel, the international regimes and related frameworks
> they establish vary widely in their institutional attributes, e.g. the
> collective action problems addressed, functions performed, participants
> involved, organizational setting and decision making procedures, agreement
> type, strength and scope of prescriptions, compliance mechanisms, power
> dynamics and distributional biases, etc.  But while there is now broad
> recognition that the architecture of Internet governance is highly
> distributed, there has been little systematic scholarly analysis or policy
> dialogue about its precise nature and implications.
>  
> The purpose of this panel is to explore and clarify some of the lingering
> ambiguities, including questions such as: Which governance mechanisms are
> relatively more or less important in shaping the Internet¹s evolution and use?
> How well do these mechanisms cohere, and are there tensions and gaps between
> them? Are there crosscutting issues that merit consideration from analytical
> and programmatic standpoints?  Are there generalizable lessons to be learned
> by the distinct communities of expertise involved in different issue-areas
> with regard to best practices and institutional design?  Does the distributed
> architecture pose any challenges with respect to the effective participation
> of less powerful stakeholders and the global community¹s ability to govern in
> an effective and equitable manner?  Looking beyond formalized collective
> frameworks, under what circumstances, if any, may private market power or
> spontaneously harmonized practices constitute forms of Internet governance?
> What is the current role of governance mechanisms for international
> telecommunications, and what might that role become in a future marked by
> convergence and potentially non-neutral next generation networks?
>  
>  
> 16:00-16:15     Coffee break
>  
>  
> 16:15-17:45     GigaNet Business Meeting
> Moderator:      Avri Doria, Luleâ University of Technology, Sweden
>  
>  
> 17:45-18:00     Closing
>  

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