The Syracuse University community will have the opportunity to witness a global discussion of Internet governance, which concerns creating internationally-accepted laws for the Internet, today from 7:30 a.m. to 8 a.m. in Eggers Hall.

The event is a live broadcast of a Web conference in the Maxwell Global Collaboratory. Participating in the conference are representatives from two larger conferences in progress, one in Greece and the other in Grenada, and from the Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers.

The broadcast, which is hosted by the School of Information Studies’ Collaboratory on Technology Enhanced Learning Communities, is open to the public. As the broadcast takes place, SU faculty and students will be at the conferences in Granada and in Greece as well.

‘Since we have Syracuse at both ends … we thought this would be a good thing to have students witness and participate in,’ said Lee McKnight, associate professor at IST.

David Robinson, professor of geography, said he invited his Latino USA class to the broadcast once he heard about it.

‘Since most of them are Caribbean, I thought it would be interesting for them to listen to it,’ he said.

The university has also invited two high school students from the Onondaga Community College Liberty Partnership Program, a college-prep and mentoring organization.

‘We were invited to bring students who had an interest in the effects of the Internet on the world,’ said Kathy Pisegna, the program’s director. ‘These two were the perfect fit.’

Two SU Ph.D. students, Jeffrey Owens and Mawaki Chango, are with McKnight in Grenada for the Fourth Caribbean Internet Forum, an SU-sponsored conference to develop information technology policy and framework in Caribbean nations.

Owens, Chango and McKnight, who helped found the original forum four years ago, are presenting there. Chango and McKnight are delivering the keynote address for the conference, and then Owens and Chango are giving a separate presentation.

Meanwhile in Greece, the Internet Governance Forum – scheduled to run from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 – is simultaneously taking place.

The event, which was created by the United Nations, will focus specifically on the issue of Internet governance. The IGF was established by the World Summit on the Information Society, a two-part event in 2003 and 2005.

SU professors Derrick Cogburn and Milton Mueller are at the IGF on the part of the Internet Governance Project, an SU-based think-tank.

Published on October 31, 2006 at 12:00 pm