Until last month, intergovernmental affairs have been conducted almost entirely face-to-face. Since that is no longer safe, the United Nations, its specialized agencies, and other international organizations are scrambling to implement the technology and processes to meet online. Large in-person meetings have been cancelled or postponed, while technical meetings are increasingly entirely online. Some agencies have a longer history of remote participation and they have made the switch rapidly, like the ITU, IMF, and World Bank. Others, like the WTO, do not have the same institutional history of allowing virtual participation in its formal meetings. Consequently, it is taking them longer to adjust.

Anyone who has experience with online meetings could be forgiven for assuming this migration should be simple. However, it is not.

While heading public participation at ICANN, I led the team that designed and implemented remote participation in ICANN’s meetings. We had to ensure that remote participants were on an equal footing to those who were in the room. This was an enormous technical and logistical challenge, greatly complicated by the need for simultaneous interpretation in several languages. Interpretation requires, among other things, very high audio quality for everyone connected, plus a great deal of discipline by remote participants and moderators to avoid extraneous noise disrupting the interpreters’ ability to hear clearly.

We had an enormous advantage: ICANN’s stakeholders are used to working online. Even so, we worked around the clock for months to make it work (at scale first for ICANN’s 2010 Nairobi meeting). By contrast, diplomats have very little experience working online in a negotiating capacity, as intergovernmental meetings often don’t allow anything beyond webcasting, which is a one-way view.

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