Last week you may have noticed some of the news coming out of the inaugural Internet Governance Forum, a "forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue" set up at last year's UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). As always with these events, nothing concrete can really be decided because it is, after all, just a forum for knowledge transfer, best practice dissemination and other terrible marketing synonyms for "discussion". But a few proposals grabbed the headlines, none more so that the Internet Bill of Rights which, I seem to remember being bandied around before.

According to Emily Taylor of .uk registry Nominet and on the IGF Advisory Group, the event was pretty darn successful thanks very much, not least because it helped less (internet)-developed nations learn best practice in certain areas and generally encouraged free and open discussion. And because there was no pressure to make policy decisions, she added, government representatives could be less diplomatic and political in their views, which has got to be a good thing. There were hints that it was slightly a victim of its own success though – only 800 participants were expected but nearly double that turned up, and some taking part in the larger panel discussions felt that the scale was just too great to get meaningful dialogue between all parties.

But for a first time out, the general concensus seems to have been positive, and with the formation of Dynamic Coalitions of various stakeholders to undertake various projects, the momentum should be carried on to the next event in Rio de Janeiro next year. Now I just need to work out how I'm going to expense that one…