Internet Governance research projects of DiploFoundation are associated with the capacity building training program annually organized since 2005. The program is divided into three phases: an online course, a research phase and policy immersion. It is based on the main IG themes: infrastructure and telecoms, the legal issues, the economic, social and development issues. The program provides participants with the necessary background of IG and online research skills, while giving an insight to the critical issues that enable them to bring in, discuss, analyze and finally perform a research on the global and local IG-related concerns and challenges. The course and the research groups respect the Multistakeholder composition of the IG field as well as the diverse professional disciplines of the participants. High importance is given to the area of expertise, age, gender and the geographical distribution: Africa, MENA region, Latin American, Europe and the Pacific) are the base of the program. Due to the changing nature of Internet, there are many emerging issues that need to be tackled. Every year, the brainstorming of research topics is conducted jointly by the participants and the organizing team throughout the course in an attempt to cover a wide range of topics supported by relevant case studies that are identified as local or global challenges. Priority is given to topics constituting high interest of leading institutions namely ITU, ICANN, and IGF. The research methodology adopted is based on a collaborative learning approach. This gives the chance to a group of qualified participants, who successfully completed the online course to perform their research according to the kit of Diplo’s research guidelines. It should be noted that the program participants are junior and senior professionals engaged with various stakeholders, which already possess relevant knowledge and experience in some aspect of the IG field. The research is conducted online, based on various platforms such as Diplo Portals, Blog, or Wiki. Each group is supported by the expert associate and monitored by a trained tutor who guides the participants by assigning the tasks namely: setting the outline and dispatching the parts that should be covered by each participant. The tutor’s role also includes coaching and merging the different sections of the parts completed by the participants and making sure that the structure and style is coherent and respecting the referencing style that Diplo is following. The main objective of the research is to come up with recommendations to policy makers in the IG fields with a sharp focus on local concerns. The methodology enables and encourages the multilingual work, bringing in an important missing component in IG research. Finally, the research program identifies the future researchers who might be granted with research fellowships; these fellows are encouraged to submit new research proposals. Their work is being promoted by Diplo, while they are encouraged to share the research findings with the relevant stakeholders at the local level. It is important to highlight that it is been very challenging to define a stable and effective research methodology that can be followed. The best practice is yet to be defined by introducing different improvements based on the feedbacks of participants and wider academic auditorium. The elaboration on achievements, difficulties and challenges faced with this collaborative online research methodology will be presented within the full paper.
CITATION STYLE
Boujemi, H. (2008). DiploFoundation Internet Governance and Policy Research Approach: Achievements and Challenges. In 1st International Giganet Workshop. Paris,France.
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