hello! i am posting right from the middle of the wgig meeting in the chateau de bossey, somewhere in the geneva countryside.

i am sorry if i could not manage to post more, but connectivity here is terrible. we were promised connectivity everywhere, but this boils down to a single dsl/wi-fi router in one side of the building, that will crash completely as soon as more than three people try to use the wireless network - and every few minutes someone has to go and restart it the engineers' way (shut it off and turn it on again). the main meeting room has wi-fi in it, but apparently no one realized that they had to connect the wlan with the dsl router to make us able to access the rest of the internet. alex pisanty got fed up to the point of standing up in the middle of an important discussion to raise a "formal protest" (whatever that means in this context) about the problem.

similarly, the entire organization of the three days retreat has been a bit shaky; when we got here, everybody thought we would have to edit the draft report that we already had put together by online collaboration, and write the last chapter (recommendations), which was still just a stub. however, when we entered the meeting room for the first time, there was no network and no printed drafts, so the entire first session was punctuated by people begging for colleagues to let them actually see the text we were discussing.

moreover, we have now decided that we don't just need an executive summary that the secretariat could compile, but an actual "short report" that still needs to be entirely written, and, especially, agreed upon. that's why i am here at 7am, waiting for karen banks, to start a 2-people breakoff group that is working to prepare a draft of the new chapter three - the assessment of whatever goes on over the internet and related problems and recommendations - for the group to discuss later today.

yesterday, however, we managed to produce the core of our recommendations - the one about a new "multistakeholder internet forum", and the one about the entire range of options for governmental oversight. (well, according to some of these options, it's actually governments doing everything.) the session ended at forty minutes past midnight.

but sorry, i really have to go... more, perhaps, tomorrow morning.