Planned: Institute for Accountable and Transparent Multistakeholder Internet Governance

I'd very much like to contribute to establishing an Institute for Accountable and Transparent Multistakeholder Internet Governance (ATMIG) with seat in Zurich, Switzerland. (Justifications for choosing Zurich)

Working towards this is currently essentially a personal initiative, although it might become the topic of a so-called dynamic coalition within the framework of the Internet Governance Forum.

ATMIG's objectives will be to

  1. Identify the important tasks of internet governance
  2. Identify the important principles which need to be upheld by internet governance processes.
  3. Evaluate, for each of the important internet governance tasks, whether the currently-existing internet governance processes meet the needs and conform to the important principles.
  4. Where needed and feasible, establish appropriate internet governance processes.

RewardRights Licenses

Stewardship of the Free RewardRights License is one of the internet governance processes which might be directly managed by ATMIG.

Web Accessibility Certification

Here is a detailed outline of a presentation held on November 1, 2006 at the "Equal Access on the Web" workshop organized by W3C at the the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens.

A key observation is how a "critical mass" of interest in this certification initiative has arisen from a multistakeholder working group that was tasked with developing guidelines for the implementation of a law which requires all Swiss government websites to be accessible for people with disabilities (the Equality for People with Disabilities Act, EPDA).

ATMIG might make it one of its focus areas to work towards internationalization of such certification of website accessibility for persons with disabilities (Presentation at Athens IGF, Internet Quality Labels proposal) and on being a good steward for the Free RewardRights License (License text, rationale).

Further Potential Focus Areas for ATMIG

At a later stage, ATMIG could extend its scope of activities to cover also privacy and anti-spam concerns.

Norbert Bollow
Last updated: April 21, 2007.