Memory and documentation in internet governance: the challenge of building vollections

Event report

[Read more session reports and live updates from the 12th Internet Governance Forum]

The session, moderated by Mr Hartmut Glaser, Executive Secretary, CGI.br, matched stories and reports concerning the building of collections, shedding light especially on initiatives focused on Internet governance and related subjects.

Ms Susan Chalmers, Internet Policy Specialist, US Department of Commerce, NTIA, talked about the Friends of the IGF project which aims to preserve the memory of the IGF, including all editions and content such as videos, transcripts and reports. She said that a new version of the portal was launched during this IGF, with a new section on the platform where content of the National and Regional IGFs (NRI) will be placed. At the end of her speech, Chalmers invited interested people from the NRIs to collaborate by sharing their content on the platform.

Mr Ron da Silva, ICANN Board Member, talked about the difficulties of putting together all the information that has been accumulated over the 20 year existence of ICANN. He said that the data is only valuable and useful if it can be retrieved. Silva affirmed that ICANN has a document management system in place, but it lacks a few key attributes, such as sufficient mechanisms to label information, with the result that information is neither quickly or easily retrieved. He affirmed that it is important when thinking about information governance that there are two main elements: first is an architecture that can support it, and second is the discipline around tagging all documents across different languages.

Mr Jean C. F. Santos, Technical Advisor, CGI.br, presented an ongoing CGI.br initiative to build an Internet governance collection available to the general public in Brazil. Santos reported that CGI.br has been developing an Internet governance collection consisting of a physical and digital archive of books, reports and all kinds of materials related to Internet governance. The project involves the acquisition of new pieces, along with donations made by partner institutions. Santos said that one of the most important phases of the project was the software assessment to help organise the collection and to make it publicly available. This tool is an open source platform and the reason for the choice is not only because of the cost involved, but mainly because of the opportunity for interoperability standards. He said that some of the challenges in the information organisation is that the field of Internet governance is complex, taking in the use of standards, semantics and controlled vocabularies.

By Nathalia Sautchuk Patrício