The first day of the MAG meeting began with a debrief of the discussions over the two days of Open Consultations that will inform the MAG’s ongoing work. In particular, the debrief noted the following:
- Open Consultation participants believe that the four thematic areas (data, environment, inclusion and trust) are still relevant for IGF 2020.
- Open Consultation participants want to maintain the youth track, and the new tradition of the IGF music night in the virtual IGF this year.
- There is wide interest amongst Internet governance stakeholders in staying up to date with the United Nations Secretary-General’s digital cooperation agenda, and particularly in actively working to develop concrete improvements to the IGF, in keeping with both the WSIS+10 IGF mandate renewal, and the longer-term goal of the proposed IGF plus model. There were proposals from participants in the Open Consultation to hold a main session at IGF 2020 on the UN Secretary-General’s Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, the IGF plus model and the leadup to the 20th anniversary review of the WSIS process in 2025.
The MAG discussed how to follow up with the roadmap for digital cooperation and agreed that facilitating a dialogue amongst IGF stakeholders at IGF 2020 would be very useful. The MAG may also develop a list of questions to send to the UN Secretary-General’s office, to follow up on the question and answer session held during the Open Consultations with Under-Secretary-General Mr. Fabrizio Hochschild, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General, to further seek clarifications on the Internet governance and IGF-related aspects of the digital cooperation agenda.
The rest of the Day 1 plenary of the MAG meeting was dedicated to discussing the results of the four workshop evaluation groups. The afternoon ended with breakout rooms of each of the workshop evaluation groups to discuss the feedback received in the plenary session. The groups will report back to plenary on the morning of Day 2 of the MAG meeting with their final lists of selected workshops.
Registration for this week's Open Consultations and MAG Meetings are open through to the end of the meetings on Friday.
Summaries of the first and second days of Open Consultations are also available.