Crowdfund neutral reporting of ITU Plenipotentiary 2014

The story of the project

With the tenth anniversary of WSIS coming up in 2015 and the United Nations due to decide what to do with the IGF when its current mandate ends next year, Internet governance (IG) is approaching a key time in its evolution. In this environment, if you cannot attend the mushrooming number of IG-related events, you can rely on Samantha Dickinson’s tweets (@sgdickinson) and blog reporting to keep you up to date with what’s most important. Samantha is followed by many people with an interest in IG issues and many of us, including government representatives and journalists, rely on her reports when we cannot send our own representatives to meetings. Even if we can be in the room, Samantha’s tweets often get to the heart of the issue faster than we can digest it ourselves.

Samantha’s reporting makes an important contribution to keeping IG debate open, inclusive, and effective.

The final major event for IG this year will be the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2014 in Busan (20 October – 7 November). This three-week event will decide the ITU’s work plan for the next four years and will review the ITU’s Internet-related resolutions, including:

• Resolution 101: Internet Protocol-based networks

• Resolution 102: ITU’s role with regard to international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet and the management of Internet resources, including domain names and addresses

• Resolution 133: Role of administrations of Member States in the management of internationalized (multilingual) domain names

• Resolution 178: ITU role in organizing the work on technical aspects of telecommunication networks to support the Internet

• Resolution 180: Facilitating the transition from IPv4 to IPv6

What follows is information about a crowdfunding project to fund Samantha Dickinson to attend the Plenipotentiary and provide neutral, open reporting of this important event.

How the funds will be used

The funds will be used to support Samantha’s reporting from Busan for three solid weeks, including drafting sessions that will be held late into the night in weeks two and three and throughout the weekends.

During the meeting, Samantha will:

1. Tweet live. Member states will be identified in publicly webcast sessions but Chatham House rules will be used in non-public drafting sessions.

2. Write regular blog posts summarising the discussions and providing insight and analysis on what is happening in Busan. The blog posts will be published under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence, enabling you to publish part or all of the posts, or tailor them for your own communities.

The cost breakdown for the three weeks is:

There is wide interest in having neutral reporting of the ITU Plenipotentiary from the community, and through word-of-mouth before going public with this crowdfunding drive, a range of organisations from different stakeholder groups have already committed USD 13,000 to this project. We are now seeking the remaining USD 11,500. We are also asking contributors to allow us to publish their names to enable full transparency. Funds do not have to be provided before the Plenipotentiary begins, as Samantha will absorb the costs up-front.

If you are interested in helping get Samantha to Busan so that she can work for you while she is there, by making a contribution no matter how great or small, please contact Samantha at: samantha@linguasynaptica.com

For information about this project on Samantha’s blog, where all the Plenipotentiary blogs will also appear, see Reporting from ITU Plenipotentiary.