IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
16 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION R/N 7
1530
IGF USA
********
Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
********
MARILYN CADE: Now the microphone is on. All right. We're going to get started. My name is Marilyn Cade, and I act as the chief catalyst to the IGF USA. What we're going to do today is race through a bit of an overview of what we did at the IGF USA 2010 and tell you where to find more information about what we do at IGF USA.
The good news is that like any environment where there is a catalyzing role, that means that there are lots of other people who are involved in actually creating, thinking about, and contributing to IGF USA. And to perhaps steal a thread from a previous first lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton, who is now the Secretary of State in the United States, it, in fact, does take a Village to build a national IGF. And we are certainly learning that and learning the value of continuing to grow the size of the village and ensure that there is broad diversity and participation of all the people who are interested.
So you should think of us as talking about, really, a very nascent endeavor that this is our second year, but I think all of us in the steering group really believe that we're just beginning to learn about and to build the environment for the IGF USA initiative.
I am going to skip the introductions because we'll be hearing from a number of the parties who are in the steering group. We're going to cover quickly the key events and priorities that the IGF USA focused on, and we're going to hear from Kirsten Bennett, who is with Imagining the Internet, because Imagining the Internet plays a very vital role in providing visibility and history and documentation to what we are doing.
We will then give you a quick report of our programme for IGF USA 2010, talk about next steps, and go to audience questions.
I am going to introduce in a few minutes a new topic called the use of scenario stories, and when we get to that point you are going to find a paper in front of you relevant because it discusses some work we did in examining the future of the Internet.
The goal of IGF USA may be very different from that of other national or regional initiatives, and that may be because our genesis may have been somewhat different. We basically built the steering group out of a conference call that I convened from my Rolodex from 75 or 80 people, and 65 of those people showed up on the conference call to talk about whether or not there was interest in a national event.
Out of that, we eventually evolved to a steering group that still has 56 people on it and that consistently received the planning information. There's a more informal coordinating group that has evolved out of that of the really heavy lifters, most of whom are here today and who continue to have to respond to 3:00 a.m. emails and phone calls, and that coordinating group really provides the broad brain trust for thinking about what we're going to do and how we are going to do it.
It is very informal, the steering group remains open, and people do come in and out of the steering group.
We were looking at an interest in a national initiative driven from a concern that we saw that the phrase "Internet Governance" didn't actually have much meaning in the United States. And it's really interesting because that is what you just heard, for those of you who were here, from the Russian IGF as well. Our problem probably was that most people, when they think about Internet Governance, were probably thinking that the government ought to be doing or that it was done by ICANN, so some of the similar problems that we all face in trying to define Internet Governance.
And we started out thinking we need to help define what Internet Governance is.
So we've done two national IGFs. They have both been held in Washington, DC. And we will continue with -- at the end, the plenary of 2009, the audience participants at the IGF USA 2009 felt that a priority should be the continuation of the IGF and the modalities of the IGF. And so we have continued to reflect that as a priority initiative in IGF USA 2010.
We had about 165 attendees In 2009 and about 260 in 2010. And I'm going to turn this over to Kirsten to tell you about the role of Imagining the Internet and where to find all of the great work that they have done on behalf of the IGF USA.
KIRSTEN BENNETT: (Off microphone) -- an initiative based out of Elon University in North Carolina. The centre's work is basically to assess people's attitudes about the potential future of the Internet, and what it does is it helps to inform policy and help identify some key issues moving forward.
The Imagining the Internet centre is at imaginingtheinternet.org, and you can find all the information. It includes documentary video like this one, also a survey we conduct along with the Pew Internet American Life Project. You can also find there a vast prediction from Internet stakeholders. We've been invited here today by Marilyn to briefly talk about some of the documentary journalism that researchers at Imagining the Internet have carried out at the IGFs the last two years.
So this is a sample of what we did this past summer in 2010, and it was a team of students and faculty from Elon University, and if you click on the links tab. Yes.
This is the Web site with the information from 2010. We took highlights and edited them into a flow player which you see to the right. If you click on that, you will see some of the remarks.
I would like to point out that the IGF USA is not the only one of these national initiatives. This is actually quite amazing. The Tunis Agenda did not talk about national and regional IGF type meetings. It only talked about one.
KIRSTEN BENNETT: Got it. We also kept a blog with near real-time written posts, and also we uploaded video during the conference for those that weren't able to participate in a particular workshop or a panel discussion. And you might be wondering why all this coverage matters, and the reason why it matters is because the issues of the Internet affect everyone. They're vital that stakeholders from all sectors of society discuss these competing values in order to enhance cooperation and arrive at the best possible outcomes.
IGF is a forum for these important debates and discussions but only for those present at IGF or participating remotely.
So imagine the Internet's coverage provides a way for these discussions to be carried beyond IGF and make these ideas and issues raised available to all over the very medium we are working to support as it evolves. It also is a way to archive and document it, and it's actually a part of the Library of Congress Web archives.
Okay. Now here at the global IGF, our team is carrying out video surveys that many of you have been a part of. We are interviewing IGF participants, asking you to share your thoughts about important issues, including mobility, open access, and the future of the IGF.
And this is a montage of what we conducted at Sharm El Sheikh last year, and we've been doing this at every IGF since it began.
This was a question, what is your greatest hope for the future of the Internet, and this question is also included in this year's survey.
Wow, that's a huge -- it's a huge question because -- I suppose -- well, Internet --
KIRSTEN BENNETT: All right. Let me pause. So far this year we've spoken to about 60 IGF participants, and we are hoping to continue that through the next rest of today and throughout tomorrow. So if you haven't had a chance to stop by, please do. We are located in the Village between ICANN and ISOC, if you know where that is, and you can find a member of my team, myself, Sam, Drew Smith, then our faculty advisor, Glen Scott, and we would be happy to speak to you.
And I also wanted to say a special thank you to Janet Anderson, who has done a tremendous amount of work for Imagining the Internet. She couldn't be here with us, but I'd like to recognize her and all the tremendous work she has done.
MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much. You can learn about what we did at the workshop 2009 plenaries, 2009-2010, and they're absolutely fantastic for us and a very easy way for us to provide a documentation and a documentary on what we're doing.
I want to introduce Fiona Alexander, who is with Department of Commerce, a member of our steering group, along with members of her staff. I've asked her to comment about the plenary sessions.
(Video still playing)
FIONA ALEXANDER: Very briefly, because I know we are on a tight schedule of where things are, so NTI has been a strong supporter of IGF conference globally, but also the U.S. IGF. Thanks to Marilyn, a lot of folks in the room, that's actually growing, and it's just an amazing amount of work. Folks come together quite quickly.
Just a personal observation that I've noticed is the WSIS process and the ten years that went into that, watching an international multistakeholder process develop was interesting, and there were ebbs and flows, and it really gelled.
What I realised when we talked about kicking off the U.S. IGF process, we didn't have a multistakeholder approach domestically, and it's been interesting to watch the dynamic of our process mirror the global process. I don't think everyone really appreciates, but we do definitely.
Just briefly, (overlapping video and live speaker)
-- sort of gave an update on what we're doing domestically with Internet policy agenda -- staff in the audience at that time, let alone officials -- and we make clear to folks that we take it seriously, we show up, we participate, and we listen. And everything from that day we discuss back at the office, and it feeds back into our policy-making discussions in our own agency. So we want to stress that at that point that it's multistakeholder process and the importance of it and how it directly impacts U.S. government policy making, and I think that's testament to sort of all the good work you guys do.
MARILYN CADE: We are going to get a very quick overview of the workshops, and I just want to make a point about, again, I would say we're really learning as well from what all the other national initiatives and regional initiatives do, but we are taking what we defined initially as I would say a national perspective with a global view, and this will likely continue to be -- for us, but we'll hear about that. I've asked a member of our coordinating group and also an organiser of one of the workshops to quickly moderate a very fast-paced overview from the workshop speakers. I'll turn it over to Jonathan.
JONATHAN: Thanks, Marilyn. I guess moderation means just sort of refereeing these two-minute time spots. So Liesyl Franz had the workshop on cybersecurity, so why don't you go first.
(Overlapping video and live speaker)
-- very multifaceted issue, and as far as attention both on the strategic side and the operational side. So we took the five periods of focus, the development of a national strategy, collaboration between government and industry, combatting cybercrime, incident response, and building a culture of security or awareness. So those probably aren't unfamiliar concepts for those of you who have been participating in the workshops here.
We have a broad base of panelists from Microsoft, the IT Sector Coordinating Council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the IT ISAC, the IT Information Sharing Council.
So we had a well-rounded group of expert panelists, and they remarked about recent experiences or anecdotal stories that they shared with the audience. Had a very robust discussion about all of those topics. I would say it really ran the gamut. Thank you.
ROBERT GUERRA: Yes. Hello. Good afternoon. I'm Robert Guerra. I helped moderate the session at the U.S. IGF on critical Internet resources. We had speakers from a variety of stakeholders, from Internet Society, from ICANN, as well as AT&T. We went through the different panelists in terms of what they've been doing as far as in the case of ISOC, explained a little bit of their role in terms of how they work with a variety of stakeholders, not only in U.S., but abroad as well. VeriSign spoke about their role in terms of the infrastructure that they have in working with others, in regards to RN, their role both in the U.S. and in the North American region as well.
We got into a discussion a little bit about security in regards with ICANN as well and, again, wanted to make sure that it was -- the critical Internet resources weren't just the Internet alone, but just the broader infrastructures that are required. We also -- AT&T kind of mentioned their role.
There was a very lively Q&A session that I can best describe that can of had two trends. One, the panelists asked each other questions, and then the audience -- not everyone in the room was familiar with everyone, so you had your issues of how this is playing out in regards to IGF context. And given there was a high level of representation from the State Department, talk about in terms of some of the challenges in regards to how this issue has been seen internationally and going forward the great challenge in terms of industries elsewhere in terms of IGF mandates.
So I think including, I think, what we saw was that at times, the stakeholders need to talk to each other sometimes a bit more. Again, had a very robust discussion afterwards, and to this day I think it's created --
(overlapping video and live speaker)
It's my job to summarize the cloud computing panel that happened at the IGF USA. And we had representatives from NGOs, government, from business as well as academia, and discussed a lot of aspects of cloud computing.
One of the things that keeps coming up is whether or not this is sort of a solution without a problem, and I think a lot of that really got addressed in this session because people -- Jack Suess from the University of Maryland was talking about how universities are using the cloud more and more for collaborative purposes. Evan -- built recovery.gov, which was a really huge project for the United States, the Obama Administration, to talk about the funds and how they're being allocated for the stimulus package. Managed to save them several million dollars by moving that application on top of the Amazon Web services, for example.
So there was a lot of optimism about the potential the cloud holds. At the same time, there's concern, obviously, about the privacy, security implications, and even to some extent what the free speech implications are with having centralized cloud services and those interested in having such information centralized.
There's a lot much issues still to be addressed, a lot still on the table. Some are technical. Encryption may be one of the solutions to issues being raised. The -- is the end user as opposed to having human readable stuff on the cloud. There's also regulatory issues as well. There's a real push to finding harmonization of data protection and privacy laws around the world so small businesses, et cetera, can make use of cloud applications and not have to worry about fragmented services around the world.
So those are some of the things that we discussed. A wide discussion.
(Overlapping video playing and live speaker)
Thank you, Jonathan. So I am going to summarize the DNS session. We had quite a broad spectrum of panelists. We had a consumer protection lawyer from the Federal Trade Commission, intellectual property lawyer. We had someone from the FBI who came in to talk. We had a senior policy advisor. And we also had a registrar as well as myself from a registry service provider.
It was really a very interesting session. Each person had a different perspective on how the DNS is used, an indirect mechanism for any kind of malicious use. So I think that the audience enjoyed it and people asking about more details were some of the examples people were offering and talking about.
We didn't come to any specific conclusions, per se, or recommendations, except to observe, as you might expect, problems with the DNS are certainly not local or even regional to the U.S. DNS is obviously a global infrastructure. So the problems are worldwide.
Some examples were talking about coordination with other folks in other areas, especially the law enforcement representative that we had. We had specific concerns about trying to track down domain abuse.
In addition, it was -- sorry. I lost my train of thought.
Two things I wanted to say, now I forgot what the second one. Yeah, so it's not specific to the United States, and there were no other specific recommendations except that there's more to be done and more discussions to have, and I think it's something that's appropriate for the larger audience, and we should continue that.
(Overlapping video and live speaker)
-- needs to be an important part of everything that we do. Thank you.
I am going to give you really a very short summary -- (Audio from video overtaking live speaker)
-- synergy between what we did on --
The United States Congress asked for a report on various aspects related to child safety and a multistakeholder -- was put together supported out of the Department of Commerce, and our workshop was chaired by --
Looked at practicalities and changes that are really under way and how different the experience is with young people who are raised in an always-on environment.
So without saying a whole lot more, I am going to introduce the concept of digital citizenship, which moves from just taking a look at child safety as a protectionist attitude and really assumes that from the very beginning we need to build the capability, understanding, and active involvement of children and youth in the ecosystem of using, living with, learning about, and being safe from risks in an online world.
I get to introduce a really fascinating topic now. It's fascinating to us. I hope you're going to find it fascinating as well.
In the closing session, as I said, in 2009, just an audience participation session, we sort of spontaneously and strangely came to consensus. It was not the objective of the closing session, but we sort of spontaneously, across the 160 attendees, decided that our priority -- or one of our priorities -- really was to ensure the continuation of the global IGF with its present modality. So we began planning this programme. We were thinking about doing two sets of workshops, and I was familiar with the concept of scenario stories.
(Video overtaking live speaker)
There's great work on that. You can find it online, and I'm happy to share information with you. The steering group decided to look at that as a way for us to think about the future of the Internet for the Internet Governance Forum.
So we took the year 2020, and we wrote that, and I'm not going to dwell on the fact that they had in front of them printed copies of the scenarios that they developed.
You are going to hear now very briefly each of the teams introducing the key points, and I want to introduce Irene from VeriSign.
IRENE: Good afternoon. Before I start, I wanted to acknowledge the great work and imagination and creativity that my colleagues have brought into this scenario. Thank you.
So we assume that the Internet brokers, as we know it today, a single, undivided platform providing open access to danger to anyone, with users joining that platform every day, more and more users joining that platform.
Well, we tried to imagine a snapshot in 2020 where that is no more. It has been replaced by a fractured net, a scenario that can best be described as Internet islands. So in this scenario, individuals, companies, and governments use control of the Internet as a safe place to shop, to learn, and to connect. More importantly, individuals, companies, governments -- Internet is a safe space to do these things.
So once this is lost, everything is lost, and people try to look for solutions, suboptimal solutions with limited usefulness of the technology that is available. And so far -- start offering solutions.
So governments start offering control of the environment where their citizens can have access to the Internet, but the down sides are that the government have control and keep control over their citizens and their activity on the Internet. And these governments also control the content that users in any particular country can reach.
Companies are offering also Internet where they offer to their consumers, their customers, walled gardens or fortresses, whether they're protected from cybercriminals, but this is walled garden where companies have significant knowledge about their customers. So it's not ideal situation by any stretch of the imagination.
And part of this scenario that is quite troubling is the situation of emerging technologies in developing countries. Developing countries are effectively left off any island in this digital divide.
So this is a scary scenario we imagined, so we tried to work our way backwards to see what are the conditions under which something like that can happen, and what could we possibly start doing today to avoid this scenario from happening?
And so with the help of our discussants and the great work of my colleagues, we came up with the following list of drivers for the scenario that are the conditions for something like that to happen.
So as you can see on the slide behind me, national security concerns, well, it is one of those. Explosion of spam, phishing, cybercrime, farming is another one.
A series of financial disturbances, crises, economic problems could result in sort of chronic economic weakness, when over time it becomes okay to tax eCommerce, so introduce Internet taxation as a source of revenue. This is another scenario. We even thought about something like Internet trade preferences as an option.
Another driver for this might be a country's increasing need to protect and control their culture, society, and way of life in general, sort of feel threatened by intrusion of other cultural elements in their own national culture.
Growing lawlessness on the Web can make it hard for firms to protect their intellectual property, so they could also start pushing for these protected spaces or Internet islands. And all this taken together -- thank you -- results in growing tremendous pressure on the multistakeholder Internet Governance model, where the institutions that we know today are put under great pressure and eventually marginalized. And so the bottom-up consultative nature of the process is destroyed, and the system that we know today basically collapses under that pressure.
So the discussants were very actively engaged into the scenario, and they were absolutely unanimous that this is a scenario we need to avoid. We need to make everything possible to not reach a so-called tipping point where, from a few islands that, in fact, currently already exist, we reach a point where islands are not only an exception as they are today, but they become the norm. So the Internet becomes truly fractured.
Also, four kinds of possible islands were identified, totalitarian island, where it's all about control of information; liberal island, where it's about citizen protection and trade protectionism; a corporate island, where customers are being protected by corporate entities; and a cultural island, where language and way of life and culture are being protected.
One aspect that was stressed over and over again is the importance of civil society, civil society and NGOs into the -- into preventing that from happening. So people expressed the opinion that NGOs' work is critical in bearing witness, representing the underrepresented, and sort of serving as the resource for firms and government.
Of course, people were very, very concerned about digital divide and such a scenario perpetuating the digital divide that existing globally.
So most importantly, and my last point, is what can be done today to make sure that this doesn't happen in the future? So it's clear that we all need to work together. It's obvious that governments or corporations or even civil society alone, nobody can prevent this scenario from happening alone. So working together is critical.
Second point is that the IGF, ICANN, and other parts of the Internet Governance ecosystem that we know today should be kept equally open to all stakeholders.
And another important point, specifically about the IGF, that it should preserve its current structure and mandate and not turn into a policy or a standards-making body because this will be a negative development -- development in light of avoiding this scenario.
And last point is that the discussants expressed the opinion that we should try to increase participation in Internet Governance events throughout the world. And some people thought that the frequency of meetings should be increased. Other people thought that we already started process of original meetings is a great way to spread the word about what is Internet Governance and why it should continue. And last, that at these meetings, people should share best practices and tools so that the system that currently exists is preserved.
Thank you.
MARILYN CADE: Thank you. Let me introduce Steve DelBianco. You will see some consistency in the backgrounds of all the scenarios, and that's on purpose because the year 2020 is not that far away. Steve, let me go to you. Four minutes, then we are moving to Pablo.
STEVE DELBIANCO: Thank you, Marilyn. I want to first recognize Walda Roseman, one of the co-authors, helped lead the description.
As described, these scenarios are not predictive of the future. Rather, they are supposed to be plausible outcomes that will be really provocative so people can think about the drivers and whether the outcomes are actually desirable.
I would set up this global government for the Internet by saying that in the U.S., at least, we just sort of assumed that ICT industry, media companies, and NGOs would continue to be the major drivers of policy on the Internet. But this is an alternate scenario. It's a scenario where businesses and citizens demand that governments, working together, move in and take centre stage at managing the global Internet. And why do they do it? For the drivers that we talked about here. I call it sort of a perfect storm of converging forces here, where consumers have lost trust in content and commerce, mostly because of fraud that's run rampant. The businesses can't handle the losses anymore, the fraud that falls on them, plus the lawsuits that come in where they're sued over user-generated content and sued over privacy problems.
Then governments, at the same time, are actually having some success at closely working together to thwart terrorist attacks. They've even worked together in this future scenario at helping to solve some of the aspects of global climate change. Maybe they've worked together to help solve some of the global financial crisis that hit us just in the year 2010.
So those three drivers together bring us to the next slide, which is what does the world look like in 2020? Well, the Internet, by 2020, despite the same similar set of drivers that Aren had, is not islands but one giant continent that's closely managed by coordinated government regulators. They are overseeing online content and eCommerce, and governments and business have begun to pick up on that by requiring biometric authentication before people go online. In the scenarios we handed out, you'll see the details in there, but we also talk about how online publishers of content and user-generated content are liable. They are sued now when anybody posts a YouTube video that violates any aspect of law or provokes civil suit.
You need an online license to go and use the Internet. That's the world of 2020, and our discussants in the next slide had a uniform reaction. They said by all means avoid this this scenario. We need to do everything we could. The other reaction they had was this scenario seemed a little too plausible.
So we said there are huge barriers to innovation under a heavily regulated, globally coordinated Internet. Suggest too that many governments would probably lack competency to manage the Internet, and we know that courts lack the competency to issue rulings coming out of a single case that have sweeping effects on how the Internet runs.
Another interesting observation is that, look, good actors, legitimate companies, they follow the rules we have. But under this scenario, if we have a brand-new set of global rules, the bad actors, they ignore the current rules. The bad actors will ignore the new rules too. So sometimes the new rules developed actually won't stop the crime.
Finally, we did express the concern that it would widen the digital divide. If you could go back one, Marilyn. When they said the scenario was too plausible, they had some folks saying we are not anonymous online. The scare about biometric is not new. The career inclinations of government bureaucrats and regulators might well lead us down this path.
Then we talked about how to avoid it. We had four messages. First, for industry, number one, industry needs to get busy on solving the problems that constituted the drivers that could make this a plausible scenario. There was a loud call, echoed in our general session, that everyone wanted industry to do more.
For governments, we turn to governments and say please enforce your existing laws before you start worrying about creating brand-new laws. Greater enforcement will help.
When new problems arise, try to find multiple solutions as opposed to looking for some silver bullet that will solve it. And please don't overreact to the problem du jour with a brand new set of regulations.
With ICANN, we turned to ICANN to say something we've been saying for years because all of us are very active there, that ICANN should work very hard to recruit and attract more and more governments to participate in the Government Advisory Committee. And for those governments to send more and more high-level people, both technical and policy, to participate at ICANN.
Good news is some of that's happening since the Affirmation of Commitments. We've seen much greater participation.
Finally, turning to the IGF, we had three pieces of advice for the IGF to avoid this scenario here. We want the IGF to continue to keep talking, focus on capacity building. We said that the work of the IGF should, as much as possible, work with technical groups who are capable of doing a deep dive of the technical solutions we need to solve some of the problems we address here.
And also we came to the realisation, look, governments are always going to want to run the Internet. Anything as important as the Internet, governments are going to want to run it. So we need to just get over it, get used to, and get busy solving the problems that will help us avoid this scenario. Thank you.
Marilyn: Thank you. I want to turn to Pablo Molina, who, by the way, in addition of being co-author of the user scenario was the cohost for the IGF USA, and I'll ask you to tell us about users' reign.
PABLO MOLINA: Thank you, Marilyn. I want to acknowledge the other people who worked on this, as well as everybody who made comments and contributions to the documents. We had it easy. Ours was the most interesting scenario. In fact, a quote from one of the audience members was this is one of the most optimistic scenarios, but caution is in order.
Now, by virtue of having this good a scenario, we had much younger and better-looking people in the room than any of the other workshops.
(Laughter)
There was a fundamental presence of civil society and students as opposed to government or big business in the room. Not sure if that is representative of the outcomes that came from there. But basically, the proposal here is that by 2020, social networks, mobile technologies, and cloud computing had evolved with all the problems foreseen in 2010. And this led us to an Internet where many more people had gone online, and those buildings of people had joined social networking platforms. And on top of that, the users were not only generating and controlling most of the information of the Internet, but also exercise all sort of editorial controls over that information.
So this multimedia protection -- production by users really cleared a new flourish of content for the Internet. But there were some issues and nonissues in this scenario, however optimistic it looked.
For example, many of the value questions were proposed by audience members, proposals along lines of watching for privacy, autonomy, discussing identity of people of different ages and backgrounds on the Internet. How about the copyright and the intellectual property of user-generated content? What happens with diversity, with freedom of expression? How about censorship by other users, not necessarily by government? And certainly the editorial control that the markets can exercise or the communities of users.
There was a key question, perhaps coming from civil society groups, are users in this scenario properly represented in Internet Governance, either directly, through intermediaries, or in government markets?
Also, in this vision, do we think it will still be as it is today very English spoken and U.S. centric, or is this not necessarily the case considering there will be billions more coming online from developing nations?
So also it was important to consider that in a very traditional bi-party system in the United States, perhaps there was room for more variety in the political discourse and the suggestion of perhaps having an Internet party joining the Republicans and the Democrats for elections would be something of interest to the country in 2020.
So what was the outcome? What were the recommendations by the discussants? Well, first, that users must help other users be proficient online with the help of volunteer organisations, civil society, and even a more formal programmes. And user control should not come at the expense of privacy, copyright, and most importantly, the protection of the most vulnerable people in online communities.
So the idea is that in 2020, the IGF should focus on education, awareness, and best practices, and that certainly we should rely more on smart user engagement, for example, cloud sourcing and social research.
So the IGF should row mote more inclusive -- should promote more inclusive and diverse participation and yet ensure that it continues to offer egalitarian participation to the community.
MARILYN CADE: Thank you. I am going to move us to the end because we need to allow time for at least one or two questions, and we need to move on so the east Africa IGF can move in.
Real quickly, we'll do a debrief session, debrief from Vilnius, in the afternoon on September 27th in Washington, DC. We are going to begin planning for January outreach briefings. Last January we held a roundtable with UK parliamentarians, and we'll hope to do something like that again in January. And then we will launch the planning for IGF USA 2011. I'm already hearing from some of the NGOs and civil society groups and the steering group that they may like to do some specific outreach to their communities to encourage them to come in and get much more involved in the IGF USA overall.
So let me ask if we have any questions. We'll take a couple before we need to, I think, move on for the next folks.
(Off microphone). Private sector, California. For the last few years, I've been working with the Internet Rights and Principles Dynamic Coalition, and we've been working on a Charter of Human Rights, and this IGF will launch that Charter, and the Charter looks very much as a reflection of the Declaration of Human Rights. It addresses issues of privacy, security, and the full gamut of rights of accessibility and so on. And we had an excellent workshop, well attended, and the next steps are for us to ask NGOs, other governments, Council of Europe, and so on to evaluate our charter. It is very much a draft, 1.0, and we'll be working over the next few months to bring it up to 2.0.
MARILYN CADE: I see -- yes, Stefano.
Am I allowed to make questions to U.S. IGF?
MARILYN CADE: We would welcome it.
Okay. I would like to know IGF USA is now a trademark, as IGF Italy or something like that, and the point I wanted to ask connecting to this is between the two, between one year and next year, if there are other events that are target with this logo, IGF USA. And then connected to this, if you have and how much is the intercessional work from one year to the next one? Experience in Italy is that after IGF Italy, then not much is happening until the organisation of the next one.
MARILYN CADE: You know, we came together perhaps in a backward fashion, I would say, in the sense that all of us were meeting and interacting at the global IGF, and some of us at ICANN and some of us at other events, and then in addition to that, the Internet Governance Project had been doing a number of things.
I had been convening on occasional, about twice a year, government and business dialogue that was about a three- or four-hour dialogue. So what happened, I think -- and Robert Guerro was doing a number of similar things. So what happened was I think we kind of organically came together and turned into a steering group with a shared interest.
And to reinforce a point that Fiona made, in the United States, typically civil society and NGOs are viewed as the watchdogs against business, and so what you often get is actually sort of this. That never happened to us. We actually took the changed DNA out of the global IGF, brought it home, and from the beginning said these are our rules of practice.
So we skipped fast paced through. We completely avoided the normal, you know, slowness of having to build trust in each other.
There were a couple of maybe one or two sessions were people are kind of going are we going to elect people or whatever, and then we just turned into a much larger, looser organisation.
So we kind of keep in touch with each other intercessionally, but we also -- we plan the event. It takes us quite a long time to plan it. I would say we also did this January interaction, the roundtable. And then, upon occasion, we may use the steering group list to bring people together for some other discussion in an informal way.
The brand is a brand created by Jonathan Zuck, created our look, and we use an Ning site, and that gives us a lot of flexibility because it can be updated, people can create their own groups. It's not very active, but it may be over time. I think we're going to be faced with having to put more structure, Stefano, around the organisation for next year because we really want to be able to double the participation and have maybe some remote hubs. And so next year may be our testing year.
One more question, and then we need to go. Yes, Hank.
Just a question about the island scenario. As you consider the possibility that there would be islands, (Off microphone) -- channel s between the islands?
MARILYN CADE: No. So what I'm going to do since our next panel is waiting outside, I'm going to refer you to the Internet island team and to the full write-up and maybe take that conversation further with them.
You have the complete write-ups. I do ask you to go look at IGF-USA.us, and you'll also see all the great reporting work, and there will be a complete written report that will be posted up in a couple of days, as well as a lot more written information about how we informally work together. But if you're interested in particular stories, what we thought about about a particular island, maybe talk to the authors of that and get more of a feel from them.
Thank you all for joining us.
(Applause)
********