On 25 February 2013, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General Wu Hongbo sent an open letter to the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), informing them that he had asked me to serve as Interim Chair for the Open Consultations and MAG Meetings. I was asked beforehand whether I would be ready to accept this role, but I had no confirmation that this would happen until the day the letter was sent out.

Should the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) have gone to Baku? This question dominated discussions before and during the recent IGF and was an issue discussed widely among participants as well as in the blogoshpere. Many people, who I highly respect, held the view that hosting the IGF in countries, like Azerbaijan, was a mistake: “Azerbaijan is the wrong place to hold a forum on Internet freedom. The government has been vicious in its attacks on journalists and bloggers. The UN must choose more carefully next time.”  [1]

On November 8, 2012, I stood in as moderator of an extraordinary workshop for a colleague who was unable to make it to this year's IGF covering the topic: "The Internet of Humans - Online Human Behaviour & IG Policy Impacts".

This was an interesting mashup of Sociology, Social Psychology, ICT and Internet Policy dimensions with several of the panelists dipping their toes into more than one of these areas to hammer home their point.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to travel for over 30 hours, arrive just in the nick of time for a meeting starting merely 4 hours after you finally check into your hotel, use all of your available energy to shake off the jetlag, keep going without sleeping for a further 16 hours, attend a Google Big Tent meeting masterpiece .... all without your luggage, and with no hope in sight of having your clean, freshly washed and packed clothes for the next day?

The 3rd day of the 7th IGF was dedicated to human rights. A timely debate!! No less than 9 workshops tackled aspects at the intersection of human rights regimes and internet governance, and many more touched upon their specific implications. Out of these, three  were focusing expressly on freedom of expression, and another three explored the policy implications and means to reconcile adequate protection of human rights and internet dynamics.