[IRP] Call notes and next steps...

[Dixie Hawtin]

Dear IRPers,

Great meeting yesterday - thanks to those who attended (or tried to attend, apologies for any difficulties with the service!) Notes from the call are below - please especially note the "next steps" stage and see if you would like to be involved with anything...

Participants
Rebecca Mackinnon, Brett Solomon, Matthias Ketterman, Sam Gregory and Dixie Hawtin.
(A few people were unable to connect in to the call as Powwownow didn't work very well - if anyone has suggestions for a different conference call service to use please let me know)

Discussion
We began the call with a quick overview of what the IRP has achieved so far since the IGF 2010 and our ongoing initiatives (for a list see the agenda sent around last week). Most of the call was spent preparing for the IGF.

* The IRP workshop: We discussed how best to use our workshop space and agreed that a very important issue to address is: copyright and human rights. Intellectual property is one of the main IG battlegrounds at present. Debates are very polarized, and influential copyright lobbies are successfully promoting "solutions" which erode human rights, enable unaccountable censorship and privacy violations and undermine due process rules. This is a problem in both developed and developing countries. We have decided to use our workshop to build support and awareness for the fact that while copyright infringement may be a problem, solutions cannot undermine human rights standards. We can explore how the problem is playing out in different countries and in different policy forums (e.g. ICANN, OECD etc.) and define the place of intellectual property within the human rights framework. If you would like to be involved in organizing the workshop please let me know and we can set up a smaller email group to focus on this. If you have suggestions for speakers and key questions/initiatives, please put these in the Google Doc (see below).
*Effective Advocacy at IGF: As Brett noted - business lobbies tend to be well-organized for maximum impact at the IGF. We are going to try and take a leaf out of their books and start strategising now. We need to identify: our key messages to promote at the IGF; the key challenges that we will need to rebut, and key workshops to attend. Please fill in your thoughts in the Google Doc (below). Nearer to the IGF we can have another conference call, using the Google Doc as a basis from which to build a coherent strategy. Note, there is likely to be disagreement over what messages we should be pushing and what are key challenged are - throw everything in the Google Doc and we can argue it out later!
*Solidarity with Somali Refugees: Marianne has suggested that the IRP find a way of showing solidarity with Somali refugees and some other IRP members have followed up to say this would mean a lot to them. However, we are still looking for ideas. Does anyone have any thoughts or any insight into which organisations/initiatives are well-respected?

Next steps:
*Locate further volunteers to help translating the 10 IRPs.  Priority languages include: Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Malay, and Persian.
*The DRAFT Charter Commentary will be sent around in the next week. Look out for it and please give us comments.
*The Google doc can be accessed here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao4pSJn7RgATdEJPcktHUVVxSm1GRnVaZ0p2bTFZdEE&hl=en_US Please add your thoughts, or send them through to the list if you would rather!

ALSO NOTE: when booking accommodation/travel make sure you account for the Human Rights Pre-event on 26 September - more details to follow!

All the best,
Dixie
___________________________________________________________
Dixie Hawtin
Project Coordinator, Freedom of Expression and Communications Global Partners and Associates
338 City Road, London, EC1V 2PY, UK
Office: + 44 207 239 8251
mailto:dixie at global-partners.co.uk
www.global-partners.co.uk<http://www.global-partners.co.uk/>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.internetrightsandprinciples.org/pipermail/irp-internetrightsandprinciples.org/attachments/20110805/ab7de586/attachment.htm>