Best Practice Forums

All of the tangible outcomes from the IGF’s BPF's conducted in 2016 are now published, including:

These resources are the outputs from bottom-up, inclusive, and community-driven activities of the IGF that took place over the course of 2016.

The IGF, along with the facilitators and rapporteurs for all of the respective intersessional activities, are grateful for the invaluable support given and time invested in these activities by numerous stakeholders and volunteers. We would also like to recognise the leadership and dedication of the coordinators, facilitators, and lead experts who supported the IGF’s intersessional work over the past year, including Aaron Hughes, Anri van der Spuy, Brian Gutterman, Constance Bommelaer, Izumi Okutani, Jac SM Kee, Maarten Van Horenbeeck, Marco Hogewoning, Markus Kummer, Sumon A. Sabir, Renata Aquino Ribeiro, Segun Olugbile and Wim Degezelle, among many others.

What can you do with the IGF’s intersessional resources?

We encourage all stakeholders to share these resources with their respective communities to ensure that the IGF resource outputs also become useful inputs into other processes of relevance to the Internet and its governance in 2017 and beyond.

We hope these resources will not only be useful for policymakers and other stakeholders, but will also continue to symbolise the IGF community’s belief that multistakeholder collaboration is fundamental in effectively addressing pertinent Internet policy challenges.

Background

Looking back on the 2015 BPF process: Observations, Thoughts and Suggestions to Enhance the BPF Process, Participation and Outputs 

2016 IGF Community Activities: Modalities and Timeline(s)

IGF Best Practice Forums (BPFs): A Participants Guide

About 

A report produced by the UN General Assembly Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Working Group on Improvements to the IGF called for the development of more tangible outputs to ‘enhance the impact of the IGF on global Internet governance and policy’. To enrich the potential for IGF outputs, the IGF has developed an intersessional programme of Best Practice Forums (BPFs) intended to complement other IGF community activities. The outputs from this programme are intended to become robust resources, to serve as inputs into other pertinent forums, and to evolve and grow over time.  

BPFs offer substantive ways for the IGF community to produce more concrete outcomes. While BPF outcomes have already been useful in informing policy debates, they are also viewed as iterative materials that are not only flexible but also ‘living’ in the sense that they can be updated at any time to accommodate the pace of technological change faced by internet policymakers. BPFs have the freedom to define their own methodologies; tailored to each theme’s specific needs and requirements. The term ‘best’  in BPFs should be interpreted lightly because the topics of BPFs often relate to themes that need to be addressed in a flexible manner in order to accommodate the pace of technological change.

2016 THEMES

 The MAG agreed upon four themes for the 2016 Best Practices Forums, namely:

  • IPv6 (continued from 2015)
  • IXPs (continued from 2015)
  • Gender and Access (Building on 2015 BPF on Countering Online Abuse Against Women Online)
  • Cybersecurity (new in 2016, builds on 2014-2015 BPFs on SPAM and CERTS) 

 2016 Mailing Lists

2016 BPF on Gender and Access:

https://www.intgovforum.org/mailman/listinfo/bp_gender_intgovforum.org

2016 BPF on Cybersecurity:

https://www.intgovforum.org/mailman/listinfo/bp_cybersec_2016_intgovfor…

BPF on IXPs (2015-2016):

http://mail.intgovforum.org/mailman/listinfo/bp_ixps_intgovforum.org

BPF on IPv6 (2015-2016):

http://mail.intgovforum.org/mailman/listinfo/bp_ipv6_intgovforum.org