The 16th annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting will be hosted by the Government of Poland in Katowice from 6-10 December, under the overarching theme: Internet United.
The convening of the IGF was announced by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on 18 July 2006. The UN SG established the Advisory Group (aka the Multistakeholder Advisory Group – MAG) to advise the SG on the programme and schedule of the Internet Governance Forum meetings. The MAG comprises members from governments, the private sector, and civil society, including representatives from the academic and technical communities. In addition, representatives of former IGF host countries, as well as representatives of intergovernmental organizations.
The IGF MAG has held 14 online meetings and 2 open consultations so far which resulted with deciding on :
The IGF 2021 Issue Areas :
The IGF 2021 programme content will be based on two baskets: a main focus area basket with two focus areas, and an emerging and cross cutting issue basket with four issue areas. This is intended to enable a more focused IGF (through the main focus areas), while at the same time keeping the IGF open for new and emerging issues and giving participants choice (through the emerging and cross-cutting issues).
1) Main focus areas:
- Economic and social inclusion and human rights
- Universal access and meaningful connectivity
2) Emerging and cross-cutting issue areas
- Emerging regulation: market structure, content, data and consumer/users rights regulation
- Environmental sustainability and climate change
- Inclusive Internet governance ecosystems and digital cooperation
- Trust, security, stability
Organisers of the High-level Leaders and Parliamentary Tracks will be invited to connect with these baskets. National and regional IGF initiatives (NRIs), Best Practice Forums (BPFs), Dynamic Coalitions (DCs) and Policy Networks (PNs) will also be invited to consider addressing the issues within these baskets.
The IGF 2021 Workshops :
In light of community feedback requesting a more substantively focused programme, in addition to individual workshop proposal scores, the MAG’s selection process looked at the proposals’ cohesion with one another under each of the issue areas for 2021. With a view to creating session issue area tracks, and reducing overall redundancy, the number of selected workshops was limited per the issue area.
The MAG selected 83 workshops of out of 203 proposals.
Multistakeholder High-level Body (MHLB) :
The IGF Secretariat/UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) & the Office of the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology organized a briefing update on the proposed approach for implementation of the IGF Multistakeholder High-level Body (MHLB).
This approach takes into account the various written inputs received and consultations that have taken place to date, including those provided for the Options Paper for the Future of Global Digital Cooperation, the response to the Options Paper by the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group Working Group on IGF Strengthening and Strategy, and the public online consultation and written inputs submitted in February and March 2021. The final decision and determination of the body’s attributes will be made by the Secretary-General of the United Nations and his Executive Office.
