IRGO 2 Reflections

Vikram and I have been in Dunedin this week for the second unConference organised by the Internet Research Group at Otago (http://irgo.otago.ac.nz/). The theme of this year's event is Resistance and Control.

The unConference attracts a range of people mainly local, and with a good proportion (around 2/3) from within academic life. There are also practitioners and advocates here such as ourselves, and a range of other people interested in the issues. You can read more about the theme at the site linked above.

I've been mulling on resistance and control as topics for a while. It's clear that globally, states are taking a growing interest in the Internet. Whether it is the debates in the U.N. system on the administration of Internet naming and numbering, or the ongoing effort to make ISPs responsible for the content their users access (just two examples), states' eyes are on the net. Wikileaks is yet another example that feels related, though is not necessarily so.

It is clear that citizen responses to the ideas governments have do have an impact. Citizen pushes in a range of places helped draw most of the sting from the A.C.T.A.; the final version of that agreement is not the disaster many were forecasting. The PublicACTA event we convened helped make a difference in this too.

In New Zealand we have our own example of the #blackout campaign derailing the thoughtless and awful Section 92A of the Copyright Act, and again the replacement is far less bad than it could have been. Citizen pressure made a difference.

So what takehomes?  I am writing this post before the final wrap up session, but two things stuck out to me:

• collaboration between various Internet researchers in New Zealand needs to get dramatically better. InternetNZ is convening the NetHui 2011 (www.nethui.org.nz) and I wonder if that can provide a platform to start a more formal collaboration. Do we need an online or real Internet policy journal? An annual nationwide Internet policy conference?
• the importance of spaces like this unConference which are open and inclusive in building the capacity of civil society broadly, and those engaged with the Internet specifically, to identify changes in the Internet and in our interactions with and on it and develop responses to them.

As was the first unConference in 2009, this has been a worthwhile and interesting event. I am really pleased that InternetNZ decided to sponsor it and by so doing, helped make it possible.

You can follow the tweets on #irgo2 and I will add an update after the wrap up session, either later today or on Monday.

Jordan (@jordantcarter)