UNESCO contributes to the fifth Internet Governance Forum

The 5th meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was held in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 14 to 17 September 2010. It focused on the following issues:

• managing critical Internet resources, 
• security, openness and privacy, 
• access and diversity, 
• Internet governance for development, 
• taking stock of Internet governance and the way forward, and 
• cloud computing.

In conjunction with the meeting, UNESCO organizes two workshops:

Privacy and Social Networking (16 September)
This workshop examined the interaction between privacy protection, freedom of expression and security.

Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet (14 September)
This event is a follow-up to a well attended discussion on Internet Censorship and Filtering by the participants of IGF 2009 in Sharm el Sheikh. UNESCO took this opportunity to release an in-depth analysis entitled Freedom of Connection – Freedom of Expression: The Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet. This report, conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute, builds upon previous discussions and provides a panorama of observations and useful exploration of the subject.

UNESCO also organized an open forum to present its activities on multilingualism in cyberspace, open educational resources and open access to scientific information. In addition, UNESCO installed an exhibition stand to present the Organization’s overall activities and programs.