Internet Governance policy solutions cannot be developed merely through physical meetings. Bringing global actors together involves very high costs and however useful it might be, the proliferation of conferences places a heavy burden on everybody’s agenda. This situation threatens the inclusiveness of multi-stakeholder processes and delays the production of concrete outcomes. 

The solution is of course ongoing working groups operating through online tools. Mailing lists however have strong limitations and although a flurry of applications (such as Skype, Adobe connect, Google hangouts and many other) have drastically reduced the cost of casual teleconferencing, serious work in small groups for several hours in a row requires more reliable and performing virtual spaces. 

This short Birds of a Feather session is intended to gather interested actors to explore the feasibility of building a network of high-performance connected virtual meeting spaces for Internet Governance working groups, taking advantage of the dramatic lowering in costs of bandwidth, flat panel displays and image compression. 

A joint effort of technology providers, organizations (including IGOs), civil society networks and Internet services could help build a series of connected local hubs providing high capacity teleconferencing that could be used by multi-stakeholder initiatives, as well as to facilitate remote participation in numerous meetings, including the network of IGFs.