The following text is excerpted from an ongoing discussion on the IGF Advisory Group mailing list. The only changes made relate to an effort to anonymize the comments in respect of the Chatham House rule. The discussion took place between 01 - 15 July, 2008. (Markus Kummer) We set 30 June as a deadline for applying for a booth in the IGF Village. We have had a very limited response so far, presumably not due to lack of interest but more to insufficient PR for this possibility.We hope that this will be an attractive feature of the Hyderabad meeting and it would be a shame if we were not able to put this village together. We have therefore extended the deadline by another two weeks. Please help spreading the word! (Writer A) I have been on vacation and because of this this response might be already a non-issue. Do you have a list of requests sent in so far that you can share? (Markus Kummer) Dear Writer A, Our previous email did not trigger off much response - all the better if you are more successful! We have received demands from the following entities: ITU WIPO Council of Europe European Commission/European Parliament Swedish Post and Telecom Agency ITU WIPO CENTR ICANN NRO NOMINET.UK Children's Charities' Coalition on Internet Safety (CHIS) & European NGO Association of Child Safety Organizations (eNACSO), UK End Child Prostitution Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) International, Thailand DIPLO Foundation GS1, France ICC-BASIS Imagining the Internet, USA International Development Research Centre (IDRC), India Internet Governance Project We are in the process of contacting those who had a stall last year and have not asked for one yet (e.g. ISOC, APC). (Writer B) Thanks for the update. I think people may be confused about what they are asking for when the request a booth -- is it something they construct themselves, or pre-built as a package, how much space, etc. At least I am guessing this is the case for APC. Anyway. I will check to see if there's further CS interest. (Markus Kummer) Dear Writer B, The basic idea is to adapt the supply to the demand, as we did in Rio. Our Brazilian hosts did an excellent job last year to make most of the available space. This year, we will have more space at our disposal and can offer bigger stalls. I rather liked the solution at GKIII in KL last year, with a tent for each exhibitor. Like last year, the stalls, booths or tents will be offered free of charge. We will be able to give more details next month. Many thanks in advance for canvassing interest. (Markus Kummer) Dear colleagues, We have been in touch with many workshop proponents during the past few weeks and encouraged the merging of workshops. While we have not been very successful so far with regard the regular workshops, the development with regard to the main session workshops is fairly encouraging. The website gives a fairly incomplete picture of the situation in this regard, as discussions are underway among various parties who are willing to pool resources and there are some MAG volunteers who are adding their expertise. We have updated our Web site, separating those workshops that are involved in negotiations to form main session workshops and the regular workshops. Also the regular workshops involved in merger talks are indicated by a yellow highlight colour. As we updated our Web site before we had time to send out an explanatory note to you, we have already had some reaction. It was pointed out that the only workshop listed so far under critical Internet resources should not be there, as it was dealing with the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. However, this workshop, proposed by Bill Woodcock from PCH, is dealing with this issue in terms of process rather than substance. This would seem appropriate, as the theme is about global, regional and national arrangements and we hope also to be able to count on Adiel and Raul to be involved. Theresa has also promised the support of ICANN for this main session workshop and I expect Bill to bring in an and Marco an ITU perspective. Please note that nothing is yet fixed in stone and in some instances workshop proponents may wish to pull out and revert to their original standalone workshop, if for example, they feel that they don't fit into the concept that is being developed for the session. While in other instances additional workshop proponents may wish to join. We will keep encouraging others to merge with other regular workshops. As these discussions transform into more concrete arrangements we will update the information on our Web site. Like last year, we aim to make a pre-selection from the many proposals we have received and hope that it will be possible to give the go ahead to some 40+ workshops by the end of this month or early next month. We thought it would be useful, like last year, to organize a straw poll based on the application of common criteria, based on our discussions, such as: ú relevance to the agenda of the meeting; ú diversity of views and perspectives; ú multi-stakeholder approach; ú geographical diversity; ú involvement of developing countries; ú relevance with regard to the cross cutting priorities of development and capacity building. Please find attached to this email an excel file containing a listing of all workshop proposals with columns for grading them in the above criteria. We suggest applying the following simple likert scale under each criterion: ú 0 = unclear ú 1 = somewhat meets criterion ú 2 = meets criterion. We would be grateful for your feedback by 25 July. As the table is rather long, you may wish to take a 'positive list' approach and only mark those you think are most relevant for the Hyderabad meeting. Also, there is no need to mark those, which are in the process of merging into a main session workshop. Your reaction should give us some guidance with regard to their ranking. In addition, we will also take into account their willingness to cooperate, to reach out to other workshop proponents and their responsiveness to cooperation initiatives and whether or not they organized workshops before and filed reports. Merged workshops will be given priority. Those who organized workshops before without filing reports come last in the pecking order. We hope that we will be able to finalize the programme at the next MAG Meeting in September, taking into account the discussions during the Open Consultations. ATTACHMENT: workshops_scoring.xls (Writer B) Thanks for this new listing. I won't have time to look in detail for a day or two, but a couple of quick thoughts after skimming the list. Many of the proposals involved in merging discussions are now missing their original descriptive text. I think it would be a good idea if a record of the original proposal was left, give an idea of the source of the new merged proposals. Access: I am pretty sure APC offered their "mobile revolution" workshop for the access main session, and wish to keep the pro-poor workshop as an independent workshop. The Internet governance project offered their "after the JPA" workshop for the arrangements for Internet governance session (and offered it a long time ago...) So perhaps you could put Bill in touch with Milton to arrange this. Not sure we want both sections of the CIR session to focus on IPv4/6 transition, though the RIRs' policy processes are of course one important part of the "arrangements" section. Think we need to take a bit of care here or we'll end up with some political hassle. If I've not said so before, I volunteer to join other MAG members to help with the access and critical Internet resources sessions. (Writer B) Correcting myself, seems Internet governance project withdrew the JPA proposal and instead hope to be part of the IPv4/v6 transition part of the session, offering this workshop to merge. Apologies for any confusion. (Markus Kummer) Dear Writer B, My apologies. We had made a mistake and have corrected it since. The IGP is joining the other for the main session workshop on the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, while maintaining the JPA proposal as a stand alone workshop.