IGF Open Consultations
23 February 2011
Geneva, Switzerland
3:00 p.m.
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Open Consultations of the IGF, in Geneva. 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.
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>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Take our seats, please.
[ Gavel ]
>>VINCENZO AQUARO: Welcome back, everybody.
I want to thank you for the contribution of this morning.
We open now this afternoon's session, and we will start with summarizing what we discussed this morning.
So I want to give the floor to Madam Chair, the moderator of this meeting.
Please, madam.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much, and I hope you all had a good lunch. Good to have you all back.
I will go quickly through, summarize in brief what was discussed this morning.
Discussion on themes, overall themes, cross-cutting, main session themes and themes for workshops, there was an update of course from Kenya on the planning process and including what the main theme at the national level. Suggestions around principles, role of regional processes, and remote participation. And then procedural matters, which were also raised under the following root themes: Message to policymakers, and that's engagement with members of parliament. Considering principles, topic by topic, as well as workshops and best practice, you know, as progression to our main session.
The issue of framing themes as questions received quite a lot of support. And the summing up of some of these sessions, we can ask -- the summing up of some of these sessions we can ask concretely was the question answered.
On themes, it's still nonexhaustive and I still like Bertrand's calling it tagging by cloud. Very interesting way of looking at it.
There is the issue of accountability, transparency and inclusiveness as a possible theme. Internet governance for development and the emphasis on people-centered development as well as acknowledgment that development should be relevant to the livelihoods and the social conditions, you know, of people. So again, the emphasis on people-centered development.
And then mobile technology and mobile Internet -- you know, Internet policy, and of course asking the question concretely, what is mobile Internet and how does that contribute to development.
Access to infrastructure, to knowledge, the openness of the Internet, the rights to connect, also as possible themes. And then human rights and democracy online. And somebody mentioned localized Internet democracy as very important.
Cross border issues and Internet as a common good, the coherence of national and international law and the responsibilities of governments or countries to countries -- to each other. The example was given about the recent Egyptian experiences and broadband in East Africa.
And then cross-cutting themes. Some of the suggestions, a people-centered Internet, Internet for development; capacity building, by whom, for whom, various levels, what has been done; as well as issues and challenges for policymakers and regulatory authorities, and other cross-cutting issues.
And on the structure and program, there was a general feeling and support for openness to nonfeeder workshops to ensure inclusiveness. And then continuity in pre and post IGF through ad hoc groups, through papers and working groups.
And then questions of workshops scheduling for maximum impact was also brought up.
And then there was the question about being concrete about Internet governance and development. I do -- you know, we acknowledge that of course the IGF focuses more on policy. So I think -- and not so much on applications and the rest, but also, you know, keeping in mind the importance of that.
So that's a brief summary. If there's anything missed, we have the transcript, which we can provide but you can -- Yes, I'm sorry, I missed the issue of -- very important issue of youth skills and entrepreneurship and innovation that also received overwhelming support as a theme.
So that's a very brief summary of what we spoke about in the morning.
I'll hand over to Chengetai so he can introduce the theme I think 4, because we noticed we haven't really exhausted discussions around a selection criteria for workshops. I think we need to discuss that a little bit in depth to be able to come up with criteria that the MAG, the informal meeting tomorrow could discuss, as well as the number of workshops. One or two people raised concern about the workshops being too many, but I think in the history of -- one of the good thing about the IGF is we have never really said no to workshops. And if we are going to be saying no, how are we going to be doing that? So it's very important to come up with a very clear-cut criteria. If we want to reduce the workshops, we will have to say no, and how do we do that, you know, concretely, would be important.
So I think, Chengetai, please.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Yes. Thank you, Alice.
First of all, I just want to touch on, under this topic, there's the types of workshop formats because traditionally we have had theater, classroom and roundtable types of organizing the internal structure of the workshops. And if you have any comments on that or any new ideas on that, that would be welcome.
And the selection criteria of workshops. In the past, we have selected workshops. First of all, we first checked on whether or not they submitted a report from the last -- the previous year, if it's the same organizers. If it was a dynamic coalition, whether they have been active and they have filed a report with the IGF Secretariat. And we have also had willingness to merge, because in the past, we have had workshops merge, but there's been some discussion about the value of merging of workshops, which you may want to touch on.
Also, the multistakeholder support. Each workshop had to have support from at least three groups. So it's not just one stakeholder group that is presenting the workshop.
They also have to have developing country support or gender balance. So among the panelists, they have to have a panelist from the developing country and also of different gender.
The last selection criteria that we used to use is the relevance to the theme of the IGF meeting.
If you have any comments on that, that would be helpful as well.
And as Alice said, the number of workshops, because I think last time we had close to over 90 different events. Some people see value in that, but there's also the opposite side that says that the focus was too diffuse and people may not be able to get the best value out of the IGF if we have such a wide range of workshops. But as you have already mentioned in the morning, that some people do think that this is a good idea, but it's just a question of balancing the two.
With that, I think I'll give it back to Alice.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much.
Open the floor for discussions on the selection criteria as well as perhaps a little bit more discussions around the number of workshops.
Please, comments.
Yes, GLOCOM. Yes, sorry.
>>ADAM PEAKE: Thank you. If I can just make an off-topic comment, if I may. It's Adam Peake. I happen to be the chair of ICANN's Nominating Committee for this year. This is a voluntary and independent committee of ICANN that selects part of that organization's leadership, and as you all know, ICANN is usually one of our subjects when we are talking about Internet governance. And it's my pleasure as the chairman of that committee to host a cocktail for you all this evening, so that from 6:00 today, we can perhaps talk to each other about what Internet governance is and perhaps you could help us think about good candidates for ICANN to take on these leadership roles.
So if you would like to have a drink and a small snack, those will be available to you from 6:00 p.m. in the Delegates Restaurant which is on the eighth floor of Building A. So that's the eighth floor, it's the Delegates Restaurant. I suggest you try to get there going up two floors via the escalators and then walking over to building A. There are two elevators that will take you up once you get into building A. It's from the main assembly area.
So look forward to seeing you, I hope, from 6:00 p.m. for drinks, either alcoholic or nonalcoholic, with some snacks. And hope you will all be there.
Thank you very much.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you for that invitation. I'm sure we will all want to be there. Thanks.
So back to the agenda. If we could get comments on the selection criteria for workshops. Bill Drake, please.
>>WILLIAM DRAKE: Thank you. One of the best ways to get a full appreciation of the wide variations in the quality and coherence of workshops is to edit one of the volumes on the annual conferences. So I did the one for Sharm El Sheikh, and I had to read very closely through the descriptions and then subsequent report-backs from all of the different working groups, and it was absolutely astonishing to me. I mean, there were workshops held where somebody submitted a report that was three sentence fragments, and then there were workshops where somebody submitted ten pages and repeated verbatim literally every grunt and "uh" that somebody stated in the course of the proceedings.
So it just -- The main point of that is really to say there has to be much clearer standards going in and after the fact for what the expectations are. It seems we have all -- I think we wanted to be very liberal and open and inviting to everybody and not discourage, but I know every year I have looked in the months between the last open consultation and the conference and seen that there were workshops approved that still had like most of the speaking slots were TBD, and where the description of the event, what it was supposed to achieve, was quite thin and it was very unclear to me how these could possibly be approved.
So I think as an overall point, the expectations, the level of quality -- of the coherence of the presentation of what the focus is and the listing of who is going to be speaking and why has to be wrapped up earlier and done in a very professional way, with full names of people. Not like, you know, Bob from Nairobi, you know. Full name, full title, what country. You know, it shouldn't be that hard to provide all this information.
Obviously, also, the point about saying if people didn't submit reports on the previous years' workshops, they wouldn't be allowed do it again next year. I would take that seriously, and I would think that would winnow out a number of cases as well.
So without wanting to be too exclusive in any way, shape or form, it's reasonable, I think, to expect to people to meet a certain standard of quality when you're organizing an event under the aegis of the United Nations that people are flying around the world to attend.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Anriette, APC.
>>APC: Just some comments in response to the question about selection.
When I think reports, as you have been using, should remain a criteria. I think reflecting on Bill's input, substantial reports or real reports would be an important criteria.
I think the other criteria is what we discussed this morning, which was about feeder workshops, workshops that can usefully feed into the overall theme of the IGF and main sessions. And then as proposed by the UK and others, reserving some slots. I would propose that the MAG decides on a number, but reserving maybe something of up to five slots for workshops that deal with emerging issues that are not necessarily directly related to the themes of the main sessions or the overall IGF.
And then I think in future, what also can help as a criteria would be implementation of one of APC's proposals which is an online evaluation form which participants can fill in at the end of every workshop.
I think that in order to deal with some of the problems that have emerged -- and I think someone mentioned it this morning, one of the speakers in front -- is more active engagement with workshop organizers. I think in between initial submission and selection, then the process of merging I think needs to be handled with more sensitivity by the MAG and the Secretariat.
I think the MAG has done its best, but I do think that sometimes a merging has not been helpful to the outcome.
So I think sometimes it might be more productive to say no to a workshop proposal than to say merge with Pete, Penny and Jane.
And then I think another role or another criteria which must become -- it's there on paper but I think it's how workshops are facilitated. The number of speakers and how time is allocated for discussion.
We have too many workshops at the IGF where the entire duration of the workshop is taken up by speakers. And I'm not sure how you can monitor that, but some ideas that we have had is making use of MAG members and making use of MAG members on-site during the IGF.
So one concrete proposal would be to have a subcommittee of MAG members who work with workshop organizers. So to take some of the pressure off the Secretariat. And who takes on the responsibility of engaging with them, checking with how they are organizing their event, who is going to facilitate it, what facilitation methodology they are going to use, are they aware that they need to leave certain time for discussion.
And I think the other suggestion we had was that it might be useful to have MAG members assigned to certain thematic clusters of workshops, for example, and to have -- I think Chris was mentioning this morning how for the critical Internet resources session, they set on and met with workshop organizers.
Now, I don't think this happened equally with all main sessions. And here again, I think the MAG can help to facilitate some of those processes.
Chengetai and Alice, I'm not sure if those are all very -- I think a lot of those will be -- you have already tried to implement them, but I think maybe a more deliberate approach to workshop organizing could have better outcomes.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much, Anriette.
Raul, and then Fouad.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you, Madam Chair.
I think that the format of the workshop is an important issue. Most of the workshops have the same formats as several panelists spending all the time for the workshop, and I agree with Anriette that the participants should have more time also to be engaged in the discussion.
In the LACNIC, the organization for which I am the CEO, have innovated in the last few years with the format of the workshops, and I think this is very important. And we should ask the people that is proposing workshops to be innovative in the formats.
The opportunities that the organizers give to the participants to be engaged in the discussion should be one of the criteria for selecting the workshops.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you.
I had Fouad and then Marilyn.
>>FOUAD BAJWA: Thank you, Chair.
During the Vilnius IGF, I got the opportunity to organize a workshop from IGC which was Workshop 54, Innovative internet Governance Ideas, An Open Space for Sharing.
Some of the experiences I had, I think we should continue to strengthen those, including the real-time transcription. I see this as a strategic point because even in the event that we missed some workshop reports, the transcription is available on the IGF Web site after the workshop.
And in most of the transcripts that I viewed regarding the workshops, many of the workshop organizers tried to sum up in form of one or two paragraph summary of what was happening in the workshop for the participants. That is a very good approach, because it's been recorded by the Secretariat and it's available for further consultation and review for future workshops by the same groups.
So that is one advantage point.
The remote participation is once again worth congratulating because, okay, there were some bugs, but I wouldn't let those undermine the great effort that was done with remote participation. There was a readily available team which would be available on the phone call or maybe a walkie-talkie message, and they would remove all the problems.
And because of that, the remote hubs, for example, in my country, Pakistan, were able to successfully participate well in the workshops.
Another point of concern which comes out of my workshop was to actually have more people who are directly affected by the Internet to be present at those workshops, which brings us back to the basic question that how do we get the stakeholders from developing countries and how do we actually encourage their governments or their multistakeholder groups to support the presence of such actors within our workshops.
There's an important point I would like to make over here that whilst discussing how the workshops should be organized or what should be the best format and so forth, it would be worthwhile discussing how will we approach the overall meeting. Whether we go for workshops in the first two days and then we move the sessions into the next two days, which is more of a MAG issue for discussion, but still, that will really affect how the workshops are organized, number one thing.
Number two thing, yes, the number of -- in my workshop, most of the participants raised this question that there's too many speakers, the introductions and the basic preliminary debates on the topic at hand actually take up too much time, and it usually gets hard to sum it up.
And then at the same time, there were certain workshops had really famous faces in them; right? Especially when you have a workshop being attended by Vint Cerf. You would have people even standing outside the room and blocking the entrances to the other workshops.
So this is very necessary that having a possible list of workshop panelists or the speakers would actually ensure in planning that what size of the rooms should be available to such workshops. Because underplanning causes a lot of disturbance during the meeting and the workshops.
Obviously, we experienced a problem with, for example, my workshop was organized in one of the rooms which were the open-air rooms, I would say, and we had a lot of trouble with the audio because somebody in the next room used to speak and it used to appear in our speakers.
And that -- Because if you go to the transcript of workshop 54, you would actually see us in five, ten minutes trying to remove the word in the speakers.
So this is not at all the problem of the hosts, but still, certain consideration should go into this.
There was a lot of suggestions in the workshop regarding that people want to see the real stakeholders' groups coming in. For example, people who -- This is just to quote an example. The people who make music, and the issue, people who feel that the Internet poses sort of a threat or a benefit to them because of the availability of their music online. Similarly, educational resources for people and how they make use of those resources.
More than 2,000 universities across the world have opened up their courseware as open courseware. This is an important advancement within the space of access to knowledge.
So somehow we should start looking into actually bringing in people who are part of these movements and who can better share what are the benefits that are being extended by them to the general people.
There was a great interest in actually whenever you see a very young face amongst the panelists -- like, for example, we had seen last year, we saw Amelia (saying name) and a couple of other European youth participating who shared a lot of very interesting concepts in the workshops in which they were participating. This also gives you a very fresh perspective about those issues under discussion in those workshops.
So I believe that it's very important that the actors that are directly being affected by the Internet should also -- somehow we should ensure getting them into the workshops.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Marilyn Cade.
>>MARILYN CADE: My name is Marilyn Cade, and I am going to speak in this case as an individual participant and someone who has organized workshops at -- and events, supported speakers on major panels and also acts as the chief catalyst of the IGF U.S.A. It would be extremely helpful if we could know as early as possible what the physical resources are that are available in terms of the sizes of rooms and the flexibilities of the rooms. And I will just give you an example.
In the workshops that I did at the IGF U.S.A., in the workshops we did at the IGF U.S.A., we were using auditorium-style seating. This really limits the ability to have flexible design and setup of the room. And if you want to work in an interactive way, there are certain limitations to that.
It often helps -- that gives you, perhaps, a larger number of seats but it limits the flexibility. And if we're trying to advance real participation and interaction between the participants, then we need to keep that in mind.
So as soon as we can know the number of rooms and the flexibility of the rooms to be designed according to the needs of different kinds of approaches, I think we would find that very helpful.
You may find that actually one of the reasons you end up with so many panelists is the only way to get people facing the rest of the audience is to put them all in a row at the front of the room.
And I think, also, the ability to support sophisticated remote participation, and if we can figure that out early -- that is, is it possible to do video out, even if not multiple video in, to particular workshop settings. We will be, at the IGF U.S.A., we will have a remote hub that will operate doing the Kenya IGF from one of the universities in Washington, D.C. Our group is committed to that. But it will be important for us to understand whether we can really effectively participate at the workshop level in terms of the facilities that are available.
As soon as possible -- and I know there are many stars to be aligned. As soon as possible, knowing the dates is very important to us in terms of understanding the booking of senior executives, ministers, senior officials, but also the plain-old person and expert we are trying to get into the workshops who very often, also, have very busy schedules.
In order for many of them to raise the funding to come and participate or to justify, if they are a business person, to justify coming to the IGF, they very often need a speaking opportunity in a workshop. And I ask that we keep that in mind.
If it's possible to start the IGF on a Tuesday, leaving Monday available for pre-events, I will say that I would find that very helpful. I'm in dialogue with a number of other organizations, both NGOs and business associations, about trying to organize a very deep-dive event on the day before which would justify bringing senior executives to the -- to Kenya. And if I have to run that meeting on Sunday, I think the odds of my getting those folks to come and do a related topic but a very deep-dive topic would be diminished.
Finally, I will just say again, and I will repeat something that I said this morning, let's try to design the number of workshops and the approach of the workshops around the audience we want to attract, and about the participation we want to enable.
And I would make one final comment. I'd like many of the suggestions that Anriette made because one of my concerns is that the MAG has been forced to wear too many hats. They are trying to be the program committee, and they often also are presenting workshops or they are presenting in workshops. And I think if there is the possibility of utilizing the expertise of MAG members to support particularly new workshop organizers, that this -- and thus to move some of the MAG at least into more program planning and program workshop support, this might be very helpful if we want to attract new workshop organizers.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Marilyn. I think we will respond to the issue of dates later. I think regarding the physical resources and areas -- and remote participation, I think speaking now from a host country perspective, we will respond to that after -- you know, after -- yes, after the meeting we've had about the needs for this meeting. So, yeah, I would put that as an issue that the host country will have to respond to later. Thank you.
I have IGC, the Internet Governance Caucus.
>>IZUMI AIZU: Good afternoon, Madam Chair. My name is Izumi Aizu, and I am speaking for myself as some comment. On the workshop format, I would like to bring some suggestion or maybe innovation from the people from -- on behalf of the people from the non-English-speaking country areas. It might be very useful if we could allocate some of the workshops that the working language of that workshop is not English. It can be French, Spanish or the major U.N. languages where interpreters are there, so it may not cost any additional resources but the main players or actors of this workshop are not English-speaking people so that it will give much more sort of local, cultural, linguistic identity or diversity into the IGF. Otherwise, all the workshops is as if it is a sort of de facto standard that English always be the working language. Of course, I don't understand the French or Spanish, but I'd like to see that to happen.
Likewise, because we are the Internet Governance Forum and, yes, we have so far used remote participation, it gives the remote sense to the remote participant. Even though we have the remote hubs, it is still remote.
While we have good technology to make it upside down, how about making one or two or three workshops be all remote or all virtual? The main speakers come from all across the world. With the current level of technology, this is not too difficult. Otherwise -- of course, there are some merits of having the physical meetings face to face and add a remote participant as if they are sort of secondary participants. But why not invite some keynote speakers on some major panels all remote, in certain designated, limited rooms or slots. That might expand our IGF into the virtual space. These are sort of the suggestions I came up with. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Izumi. I have Bertrand and then Peter Hellmonds.
>>BERTRAND de LA CHAPELLE: Thank you. Bertrand de La Chapelle. First thing is there are clearly different types of workshops and at least two main categories. Some are educational. Some are capacity-building. They are basically providing understanding of an issue and those workshops are mostly oriented towards panels? They are mostly about making sure that the different perspectives on an issue are presented on the panel, and they are very appropriate for a classroom type of setting.
Another category is more oriented towards discussion of interaction among the participants. Here I would fully support what Anriette and Raul have said. Those workshops should be much more oriented towards interaction and reducing the level of panelists.
So in a certain way, I am not that much concerned if a workshop that is of that nature doesn't have clear speakers as long as we know that the format is going to be an interactive thing and the topic is appropriately formulated. So the topic is important, and this is more appropriate for more sort of square table or roundtable format that has been experienced very successfully in Vilnius because it changes the interaction. So using those two categories for planning and asking, basically, the people who submit proposals to distinguish between the two is important.
The notion of an online evaluation form exposed is a very good thing, and I think it is extremely useful to get feedback from people. In a certain way, I'm wondering -- it has drawbacks, but I'm wondering whether we could not use a somewhat similar type of thing on the list of proposals just to have like, not like or support to test from the community not only in the MAG the interest for a specific topic. It would not be a decision-making tool, but it would clearly show the interest for one topic or another.
And if there is information about the session, for better or worse, most of us have been participating in those processes for quite a while, so there is a knowledge about the kind of speakers that were there and the organizers and how good they were in the previous years.
In terms of the intermediary type of sessions, I'm wondering whether the three-hour slots that we are locating for main sessions could not be divided into a one-hour sort of roundtable in the same big room, sort of roundtable exchanges between the key workshops that have been addressing related topics so that it would directly feed into the next two hours of real interaction with the room. So this would bring better connectivity between the workshops and the main session. It would have an additional benefit, and this is a question that will be on the table for the MAG but also for us as a global community.
If we could do a little bit of exercise to do the kind of clustering that Anriette was mentioning, maybe looking at the list of workshops that we had in the last five years, they can be grouped into some clusters. And if we in the MAG and in the discussions tomorrow could identify for each main session one or two themes that would be actually identified as the questions, clearly formulated as questions on subjects that have been addressed in one workshop, two workshops, three workshops, five workshops in the past, there could be an agreement that there would be no workshops on that topic this year because it would be addressed in the main session in the wrapup type of thing because the fear we have is that we have an overload of topics. All the topics addressed in the past remain on the agenda, and every new one is just adding a burden.
And, finally, a suggestion that is somehow unrelated but that is also on the organization and I think goes in the direction of what Marilyn was saying, setting the scene in the morning of the first day could very well -- whether it is merged with the reports of the national or regional IGFs or not, could very well be oriented towards a sort of taking stock of what happened in Internet governance since the previous IGF.
The reason why I say this is because it is used a little bit today to be an introductory session for newcomers. And I wonder whether in order to make the schedule a bit lighter, some of the workshops or the sessions that are really about getting people up to speed, educational and capacity-building could not be anchorage to hold this as a presession, like having it in the weekend before, like there are many parallel events.
If we could take the habit of having one day before where people would want to make, basically, an educational session, would organize this before, it would make the schedule a bit lighter and get a habit of bringing people up to speed.
And, finally, I think we have clearly witnessed that what we've been saying during the last five years regarding the importance of the youth, we've clearly seen in the recent events the importance. And this would be extremely important this year to have a strong participation from the youth, including people who have been active in a certain number of events recently. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Bertrand. Peter?
>>PETER HELLMONDS: Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, I would like to thank Bill Drake and Anriette from APC. They've made a couple of very good suggestions. And I think to summarize what I heard -- the summary of criticism from Bill is the lack of professionalism that he has seen in some of the previous workshops.
So if following your question on what would be suggested selection criteria, I would suggest a couple of them, starting with it should be professional. There should be balanced representatives, participation from different stakeholder groups.
Part of being professional would be that this is a well-prepared workshop. And, of course, it should have relevance to the topics of the current IGF.
I would like to see these criteria evidenced by certain things. And a couple of those were suggested already, such as the quality of the previous years' workshop report, if it is sort of a repetition or a workshop proposed by someone who has done previous workshops.
The number of different stakeholders who are participating in the workshop can make sure there's proper balance and representation.
In terms of professionalism, I also would like to see that all speakers are confirmed well in advance and there should be a certain deadline for confirming speakers.
I would like to see that the workshop organizers also organize support personnel; and that could be, as Anriette suggested, members from the MAG or also previous members of the MAG. I am one of those. And I think also evidence in some way of how the workshop organizers support remote participation.
In terms of evaluating this criteria and the evidence provided, I would suggest that because it's quite difficult to answer the question of legitimacy of who is the right sort of group of people to make that determination, that we need to think about installing a transparent, open evaluation process, a process based on pre-established criteria and perhaps even some kind of a scoring system.
In that respect, I remember that I myself in my company have something that's called the Quality Award. And I have been a member of the committee making sorts of determinations of which of the submitted proposals makes it into the Quality Award.
And what we've done there is we have used a scoring sheet where we award points to a number of different selection criteria questions. And then, basically, you can make a determination based on having a certain proposal and having achieved a minimum score. That takes away the need for some sort of obscure black-box approach, and I believe in the past the difficulty in turning down any workshop proposal was precisely the problem.
And, Bertrand, thank you for pointing this out to me, the problem of who is the judge in terms of who has the legitimacy to say your workshop can be there and your workshop not because they will raise the whole Pandora's box open about the legitimacy about the IGF.
And I know in the previous past, our esteemed previous Chairman, Nitin Desai, he has taken sort of the approach to say, "Well, we accept all of the workshops" and the only way to reduce the number was by suggesting to merge. And I think that's been pointed out by, I believe it was, Anriette but also others that that's not necessarily the most professional approach.
Because if you have a highly professional group organizing a really well-organized workshop and they are being forced to accept some sort of group of people who are just not professionally enough, then it reduces the quality overall. And I think that just proposal of merging is not necessarily the professional and correct approach.
So I believe it would be better for us if we could find an open, transparent process that clearly spells out these are the criteria we will apply, that's the scoring system we will apply, this is the cut-off number of points that will get you in or not. That takes away sort of the arbitrariness of decision-making. So that would be my suggestion.
However, there's two more things where I believe I would like to see a little bit variation to my suggested very strict regime. And that is, one, as mentioned by Bertrand, I would like to see some sort of a youth corner. I do not expect the youth who are 18 -- 17, 18, 20 years to have necessarily already -- I mean, some may, but not everyone -- that level of professionalism that I would expect from someone who is in my era or Bertrand's age group.
So I would like to make some leeway in allowance to have sort of a youth corner. And maybe it could be joined or in a similar fashion as an experimental corner that allows us for some innovative kind of fashions. But that's the proposal where I would make allowance for some innovation and deviance from the strict sort of professional criteria that I would apply otherwise. Thank you very much.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Remote participants, yeah?
>>MARILIA MACIEL: Well, I'm speaking for myself. This is Marilia from Center for Technology and Society/Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil. I would like to speak about the first point, the selection criteria for workshops.
First of all, I believe we have to reach an agreement that the slots that are assigned for workshops, they are a public space in the sense that they belong to the IGF community. And it is the IGF community that should make decisions about this space and how they are given to workshop proposals with the facilitation of the Secretariat. We have to recognize that workshop organizers are volunteers, and we should value that. But that is the public interest of the community in some topics that should also be taken into account.
On that regard, I believe that the communication in between open consultations has to be strengthened. We are trying now some form of online consultation in order to discuss the agenda for the next EuroDIG. I'm not going to go into details on that. But I'm sure that EuroDIG organizers will like to talk about later about how we are organizing this agenda consultation.
But we believe this is important, especially because workshop proposers that are from developing countries, they are usually not here. And it is much easier to say no to a proposal from someone that is not sitting beside you or is not in front of you. So it is a great disadvantage.
If we had a way to discuss this online through a more long-lasting consultation, it would be better and maybe it would help to correct the problem regarding legitimacy of who says no to the proposal.
Regarding some specific criteria, I believe what should be taken into account is, first of all, the pertinence with the themes that have been agreed to be main themes in the IGF in this particular year. This is not to say that we will say no to workshops that are not feeder workshops. But only if the workshop is pertinent with the main theme, then it should be given an additional point for it, for pertinence with the main theme.
Another point is that the workshop is framed around a clear problem or issue, just like the main sessions. If it works with main sessions, maybe it would be good as well to have clear problems in the workshop proposals as well. Multistakeholder and different views and balanced views from developed and developing countries are important, but they should not be artificial. How to avoid to be artificial, it is a good question. But the views of speakers shouldn't be sent in advance. And maybe some funding should be set aside to bring more people from developing countries or from groups that cannot make it to the IGF because sometimes it's hard. You can only invite people that are already going to the IGF, so you have a very limited number of people in order to choose between to invite to be a speaker at the workshop.
So maybe some of the funding and another related topic is transparency regarding the funding of the people that are taken to the IGF. It has to improve. But maybe some of these fellowships, the funding should be set aside for people from developing countries to be in the IGF as speakers.
And another point is compliance with the requests that have been set by the IGF Secretariat. For instance, reports for previous years and maybe appoint a remote participation moderator, if you don't appoint a moderator. It is difficult to allow remote participation to take place.
And, lastly, a framework for proposing workshops and for evaluating workshops, it is a good idea. We agree with the proposal that has been set forth by APC.
And I would just like to make one additional point from a remote participant. We have someone that is following the session that speaks only French. And when I sent the link of the agenda of the meeting, the person could not follow it. So I believe that translating the documents is something that is really important in order to allow more wider participation even in the open consultations as well. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Marilia.
I have ICC/BASIS and then Nominet. ICC/BASIS?
>>ICC-BASIS: Thank you, Madam Chair. Jennifer Warren on behalf of ICC/BASIS. We certainly think these workshops offer great value to the stakeholders that are able to participate in them. But the value can vary by really three things: The quality, the accessibility and the relevance. So criteria should really focus on trying to maximize those who are there to participate both as panelists, speakers as well as participants in the workshop.
So a couple of thoughts in terms of criteria. The criteria need to have consequences in the sense that we have the challenge of implementing them. So while we've had deadlines in the past for speakers and such to be identified, there have been no consequences to not meeting those deadlines.
And perhaps a differentiated approach between the types of workshops that Bertrand mentioned would be one way to eliminate that all types of workshops must have the speakers identified by a certain time. But if we want to, for example, pick up on Fouad's point of trying to make sure of accessibility, it is important to know that those workshops that will have very attractive, highly visible speakers will be able to be accessible by being put in rooms that can accommodate all those that want to be able to engage in those discussions. It is not just for the planning purposes, but it is for the benefit of those who are attending which should be a real focus for us.
With that in mind, I am a little concerned by focusing on the reporting out after the fact as being a characteristic of the quality of the panel. Unless we strive to ensure that every workshop has a separate repertoire assigned to it, I'm not sure we can determine that the participants who were able to be in that workshop derived lesser value because the after-report was not of a certain quality compared to others.
So I'm not sure that's a, as we would say, apples-to-apples comparison. I would encourage us to think about that a little bit more closely.
Also, I would like to suggest that we -- as we look to whether workshops are relevant, we don't discount them because similar topics have been raised previously or because there have been workshops, as I said, on that topic previously. We are in a new location. We have new participants who have not perhaps -- unless they have been following remotely, which is a little bit more recent, have not been able to benefit from the dialogues that many of you who started with WSIS and went through five years of IGF now know by heart there are many new people constantly coming into this space. And we should, again, remember that they will be part of an audience that would benefit perhaps from things we have heard twice or maybe I have only heard once.
So -- and so we're also very supportive of the remote participation and the transcription service. That's a great benefit for enhancing, again, the global availability of our work and our discussions.
The last thing I would highlight is -- and it kind of goes back to preparing the quality of the workshop. While I express concern about using after-the-fact reporting, perhaps requiring or asking at least for some inputs prior to the workshop, not just a two-line description of the workshop, but perhaps a thought piece, what we called in our contribution a white paper, but something to get focused so that when there is a variety of workshops to attend, you have some thoughtful piece to guide you as to where you might wish to go and that will also, I think, enable better followup afterwards for Bill and the reports.
So those are our thoughts. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Nominet?
>>NOMINET: Thank you, Chair. I'd like to start off by drawing a little line between workshops that are feeders to plenary sessions and workshops that are not. And I can't remember which previous speaker made mention of the idea that if it wasn't a feeder, it was an emerging issue and there should only be perhaps five of those.
And I think that might, in some right, be something where a rule is not necessary but, rather, an element of common sense is needed because, I think, one of the interests that I would have is looking to try and see where people are identifying significant issues, where they're identifying an imaginative approach to topics, whether new or old.
And I wouldn't like there just to be an arbitrary, "Well, here, there are five and we have already got the five and, therefore, we are no longer open to innovation or to new issues or to issues that are not on the agenda."
That having been said, I think certainly what I took away from last year was that certainly for two of the plenary sessions the work that was done on feeders and identifying the feeder workshops into the plenary session had two values. The one was to try and make sure that the workshops fitted into this wider picture of the plenary session. So, in other words, they were actually contributing something to it I think that was particularly important.
The other aspect is it became quite clear when there were two workshops that were really covering almost identical ground. I think that relationship between the plenary and the feeder workshops was actually generally beneficial.
Last year I had an experience of doing two workshops where the whole emphasis was on promoting dialogue. And I was actually very, very pleased with the way that the people who came to the workshops took that up and contributed.
But that was actually not something that you could write in before to say, "Well, this workshop is worth choosing because I've identified something that we will deal with as a discussion."
So, for example, somebody would come up and say, "I'm limiting the number of speakers" but that that in its own right doesn't work if the speakers speak for five times as long. So I think that what came out for me was -- and we spoke about this this morning -- the idea where you're specifically asking questions. And I think the approach of "I am asking a question, and this is what my question will be" could actually be a very helpful way for the MAG to try and identify where workshops were producing added value and particularly when they were feeding into a workshop, what it was that they were going to be bringing into the discussion.
I'm a little bit concerned about the idea of setting workshops as lesser value than plenary meetings. I think they're different and I think for somebody who is interested in the topic, actually having a good variety of workshops in that topic, is actually more important. So I think we do need to just sort of step back a little bit and say, "The only legitimate environment or the only key environment or the best environment is the plenary," I'm actually far from convinced that that is the case. It might be for some subjects to some people. But I think it is this balance and perhaps a dynamic balance between these that is important to try and make sure that you get it.
Youth. And over the last two years, the UK IGF has had a youth delegation. And I am very, very conscious that trying to get a young person, a teenager, to stand up in front of a huge auditorium, it's just not a very good environment to break them into.
And here again, I think we do need to, and somebody made a comment, I think it's a useful one, of trying to make sure that we are helping and encouraging young people to contribute as and where they are able to. And that does mean helping, mentoring them, and perhaps getting somebody to help talk them through issues. And it is easier to do that in a workshop than it is in a plenary session.
Just one further comment I would like to make, and that's about parliamentarians and the parliamentarian engagement in the IGF. And again, as I said this morning, it is quite important for these people to have the opportunity to enter into dialogue and discussion with the experts on a particular topic. And I think for developing understanding for these people, again, working in workshops is a particularly useful thing to do because then they can actually enter into a proper dialogue, a proper exchange with the experts in the field in a way that it's actually very difficult to do in a plenary where people are standing, queuing for a microphone.
Thank you, Chair.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much, Nominet.
Finland.
>>FINLAND: Thank you, Chair.
Well, certainly there have been many good suggestions.
I would like to extend the idea of thinking in terms of questions to the workshop organizers.
If the candidates for organizing workshops could formulate the proposal in a question, it might be easier for the MAG to evaluate if the issue has been already addressed. And this is something what I think Bertrand mentioned. Yes, he is nodding.
Also, once a workshop has been approved, the questions, if they are shared beforehand with the workshop participants, they could help them to prepare their own thinking for the discussion in the workshop. And also, to think in terms of questions might crystallize the outcomes so that they would be more focused and directed as answers to those questions.
Also, something which hasn't been probably mentioned yet is to create a special space to showcase good practices. I think we have had that before, but we should keep that also in mind this year, so that -- well, Alice challenged us to think about what we actually mean by Internet and development. In such special space, we could, for example, demonstrate about skills and entrepreneurship and, for example, the best practices of what new business models could be created by Internet, and especially mobile technology.
So there are many, many good examples. For example, transfer of funds through mobile banking or Village Phone Ladies or you name it. What you have, for example, in East Africa.
So I think with such a special space, we could bring more pragmatism to our IGF meetings.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Very useful.
GLOCOM.
>>ADAM PEAKE: Thank you very much. Adam Peake, and this is a personal observation, personal comment.
Just looking at the chairman's paper, chairman's summary from Vilnius, and there were 113 workshops, best practices, dynamic coalition meetings and open forums. So 113. And if our goal is to actually reduce that number, then I want to go back to what Bill was saying. I think you need very much a rules-based system for doing that.
I don't like the idea -- and I am a former MAG member. I don't like the idea of the MAG sitting as some sort of judge and jury on this. I think it would be extremely difficult for them to do without strict rules that were agreed by the community.
So whatever they may be, yes. If it should be that the workshop should have three multistakeholder partners, then by a certain date if you haven't identified those partners, you lose your slot. I think that's a reasonable criteria.
If you haven't named the speakers by a certain date, then you lose your slot. If you haven't written a description and a set of goals or whatever it may be about that workshop by a certain date, then you lose that slot. And it's extremely important that those rules are applied to every stakeholder, because we have international organizations that make these applications, and it may be very difficult to refuse an intergovernmental organization. So it has to be rules based.
Don't start picking on the smallest and weak and culling them. It has to be fair and across the board, because we are multistakeholder.
So I think some very clear definitions of what is required in terms of workshop proposals, and then making sure that those are set to a very strict timeline, and that timeline is adhered to. And that would make the MAG job easier.
I don't think the MAG is there to be an executive that has that kind of power over what appears and does not appear at the IGF.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. ICC/BASIS, and then Nurani.
>> ICC/BASIS: I just wanted to make an additional follow-up comment on how to incorporate some youth issues into the agenda. And I think as others have noted, it's a challenge to think about them in person. I think on the other hand, what better community to reach out with through the Internet and through the new tools that, as Peter was saying, some of us who are a little older may struggle with. So a suggestion may be to really focus on some of the creative remote participation in the area of youth and think about how to incorporate both, maybe, real-time activities as well as some social networking components into ways to do outreach to those communities and try to get them engaged on a more regular basis.
I think that's probably the generation that is least likely to view an in-person meeting as being essential to establish relationships and have a dialogue. So could we take advantage of that and encourage that participation through these online means?
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you.
Nurani.
>>NURANI NIMPUNO: Thank you. I'd like to pick up on some of the points that both Adam and Bill made previously. I don't think that you necessarily need stricter criteria. I don't think we need to develop some complicated matrix with very complicated scoring system. I think as long as the criteria are clear. Some of the ones that Chengetai mentioned that we applied before, like multistakeholder support, developing country support, gender balance, relevance to theme. I think there's nothing controversial about those. But what has been lacking in the past is maybe a clear process with deadlines, and what Jennifer was talking about before, that there needs to be consequences. That if we can go back and communicate with the workshop organizers and they still haven't identified -- or haven't confirmed speakers before the deadline, I agree with Adam, there's nothing controversial or unfair about saying, "Sorry, you haven't fulfilled the criteria."
So I don't think we need a stricter system. I just think the criteria need to be clear, and there needs to be a clear process, and we need to stick to those.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you.
Bertrand again.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Very quickly to support the two suggestions. One, to ask the workshop proponents to -- it was Mervi who said that, to present their topic in the form of questions. I think this is clearly going in the right direction. And the second thing was Jennifer was suggesting using inputs and asking the workshop proponents to make a one-pager explaining why this question is important, is extremely useful. And I would add something regarding this one-pager. It should explain why the question is important for all stakeholders. Not why they want do this.
But this question is formulated in a way that makes it important for all stakeholders. It may be for different reasons, but it is a way to explain why it should be brought at that level instead of being dealt into another space.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: I have Netherlands, then Greece, and then we'll close this topic and move on to the next agenda item on remote participation.
Thank you. Netherlands.
>>NETHERLANDS: Okay. Thank you. I am Arda Gerkens from the Netherlands.
We think it's very important to have a role for the youth in the IGF, and we would like to suggest that we create an online platform with an international youth IGF where the youth can relate to the topics that we are discussing here today, and the topics that we will have at the IGF in Kenya.
And then the youth then should have their own workshop where they can present their reflection and ideas on all these subjects. And we would like to emphasize that this should be an international platform with international youth IGF, and not only national.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Netherlands.
Greece.
>>GREECE: Thank you.
It has been said in the past that workshops are the bread and butter of the IGF, and I'm a bit worried about not offering any alternative to the ones that cannot meet some deadlines.
And I think that the workshops count for a large part of the attendance of the IGF.
So if they cannot meet some deadlines on time, they could convert themselves to a dynamic coalition, or some other form, and continue to get together and discuss that particular issue. If there are technical difficulties. So this is something that we can think about.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much.
I think I would like us to move on to the next agenda item on remote participation. And I'll ask the IGF Secretariat, Chengetai, to introduce that topic.
Thank you.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you, Alice.
From the synthesis paper, participants generally felt that the Vilnius meeting was better than any previous meeting for remote participation. And I think this was also largely due to the efforts by the Remote Participation Working Group which worked closely with the IGF Secretariat, organizing the remote hubs and also the remote moderators and also they did very good work with training the remote moderators.
So this is another thing that we need to discuss about remote moderators, because last time I remember it was very, very difficult for people to identify remote moderators. And I think if we make that clear at the beginning, that should be possible.
Also, ways to integrate the remote participation into the sessions. Should there be things like should they be given preference? Some people were also mentioning that, for some people, they actually made the effort to come to the conference, and then the remote moderator -- the remote participants come in and they start be given preference. Should we allow this or should we say only those people who are from developing countries -- I'm not too sure. That's up to discussion, if you want to discuss that.
Yes. And also the remote hubs. How do we strengthen the remote hubs?
We had a very good -- How many remote hubs did we have, Marilia? Yeah, 31 or 32 remote hubs. I think that was a very good effort last year.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you.
So the floor is open for comments on this issue of remote participation, integration of remote participants and moderators.
Any comments?
France.
>>FRANCE: Just a quick idea. All the young people today use smartphones, iPhone, Android platforms. Would it be possible to have some kind of application? Because they are really -- I don't know how to say it but they really use these kind of tools and it would be some kind of new things that we should explore so they can follow the process in IGF on the smartphone. And even better, if they can participate on the smartphone would be great. But I'm not technician so I stop here.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Chengetai, do you want to respond to that?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you. I also forgot to mention one of the contributors to their success is a donation by Cisco of their WebEx platform which we plan to use as a standardized platform. And it works with iPhone. I'm not too sure whether it's Android compatible, but we can check that. And people can communicate with -- use the iPhone to log into the sessions and participate.
We also try to have some use of the Twitter feeds, but also it requires volunteers. And yes, we're going to make a big push with the youth, and maybe the Kenyan hosts can also make some sort of plan where they can give them phones for the duration of the meeting. I'm not too sure. I mean, I think we can look into that so that people can tweet during the sessions and keep up with all the issues being discussed.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you.
Any other comments?
Okay. Marilia.
>>MARILIA MACIEL: Well, first of all, I believe one thing that is very important, not only for remote participation but for other things in the IGF, is to have clear rules of procedure. I believe that the flexibility we had so far in the IGF has been very important, so the IGF could be a bottom-up driven process.
But we have five years from IGF, and some procedures should have been institutionalized somehow. Most of the meetings and forums have some rules of procedures, and this lacks in the IGF. It would be good for the stakeholders and it would be very important for remote participation, because this is one of the issues that, for the past years, has depended a lot on the sensibility of the Secretariat and the chair.
And luckily, the Secretariat was very sensitive to give support for remote participation, but it is not good to have something so important that relies so much on personal sensibility and personal contact between the parties involved.
So it would be good to have more institutionalization in this process.
The second thing is that remote participation should be seen as an all-year process, as the IGF should be seen as an all-year process. From the time we are starting to discuss the agenda, it is important that we start remote participation because of the reasons that were discussed before, to bring in voices that cannot be here in the open consultations in order to advance their proposals and workshop proposals and views and so on.
So there should be more careful thought about the agenda of the meeting, and maybe it's time for us to have an online space for the exchange of views among the stakeholders. We have the list from civil society that we discuss things among us, but particularly I think it's difficult to reach out to other stakeholder groups. For instance, now in the CSTD discussion, I would like to exchange views on the contributions, but I didn't find a way in order to contact other stakeholders. Maybe it is time for us to develop some form of communication among all of us that would last throughout the year and would help us in this process of building the IGF online as well.
On the issue of having preference over physical participants, well, I don't see how remote participants would have a preference at all, because the impact that you have so far, we have not developed a methodology that would be as good as being on the physical spot. When you are here, you can raise your happened right away, you can put pressure on the moderator, you can talk to the person outside the session, you can network.
So it is -- Some things are not on the reach of remote participants to have, so I don't see that giving them the floor when the floor is open for questions, and maybe give them some kind of a priority in order of questions, this is not giving them preference, per se.
And one thing that we are trying to advance in EuroDIG besides the collaborative process of agenda setting is to try to have one online meeting one or two weeks before EuroDIG, only with remote hubs. So remote hubs have a time and tranquility to bringing their concerns about the agenda. So we have time to forward these concerns to the panelists and to organizers of workshops, because on the spot, it is very difficult to receive input from hubs and to reflect this on the discussions that are taking place. It's very fast.
So maybe if we can organize a previous meeting with hubs this year, it would be something important. And the Remote Participation Working Group that is behind and pushing for remote participation, and I would like to acknowledge the huge, huge, importance of the work that has been carried out by Bernard, Ginger, Raquel, Rafik, and Charity. They would like me to raise two points here. The first one is the need to integrate remote participation with social networking, and it goes along the same line as has been mentioned before, and we have to have a way to capture what is being said on Twitter, not only because remote participation takes place there as well, but also because a different way of telling the story, of telling what has been discussed here goes on on Twitter. Sometimes we are hearing something in the main session, and people on Twitter are bringing and adding so much voices sometimes on other directions. So you have a whole narrative that is being constructed about the IGF on these platforms and we are missing it. We are not saving it. We are not accumulating that.
So we have to figure out a way to capture these feeds that are coming in in social networks.
And the Remote Participation Working Group would like me to say as well that we are going to advance some training guidelines for IGF Nairobi remote participants and hub organizers, and you would like to be in touch with the organizers of the IGF in Nairobi in order for them to help us spread the word about these guidelines.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. There is someone at the back. I'm sorry, I couldn't see your name, but you have the floor.
>>VLADIMIR RADUNOVIC: Thank you. Vladimir Radunovic from DiploFoundation. I've moved the position. I am trying to lose the track where I am sitting.
Basically, Marilia said quite many things that I wanted to but I will still emphasize a couple of them. First I really want to thank on behalf of Diplo and I guess on behalf of the IGF, to the remote participation team, they developed a magnificent thing that has never been done in this kind of processes, and it's developing more and more.
One particular thing I wanted to draw your attention to, knowing all of them working on remote participation, as this is a team of people that also went through our programs, and knowing how much effort they invested in organizing all of this. We shouldn't be naive that it is about the technology. They have the technology in the small finger, as we would say. It is as much about the organization.
For instance, the EuroDIG examples and the way we are developing remote participation throughout the process, ongoing, for the EuroDIG involves a couple of platforms. It also involves discussion platform, hypertext, Twitter integration and so on and so forth.
But more than that it, involves the human resources and the organization of that, which means if we want to think about organizing an ongoing process and having, for instance, instead of number of workshops, discussing certain issues for the first time on the -- at the IGF, we might have these discussions in the online space. The groups working on organizing each workshop or session can be working throughout the year using the online tools. This needs an organization along with the tools.
Remote Participation Working Group, in that sense, I'm sure needs much more sustainable support, sustainable planning, procedures and funding from the IGF and from the Secretariat as well in that sense.
On Diplo's behalf, we are working on codifying some of these procedures and best practices from the past, and we hope to be able to support with some documents working together with Marilia and remote participation team.
But once again, I just want to remind that there is a need of support from all of us for remote participation organization, and not just relying that they will be able to handle all the these things on their own.
Thanks.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much.
I have UK.
>>UNITED KINGDOM: Thank you, Madam Chair.
The achievement in Vilnius in significantly enhancing remote participation was quite remarkable, and all credit to those involved. And it's good to hear from the earlier speakers that the Remote Participation Working Group is obviously working hard building on the success of Vilnius. And the previous speaker's point is well taken about the crucial importance of the work of the team and the working group, and all of us in ensuring that the extent of remote participation for the Nairobi IGF is even better and builds on the success of Vilnius.
And I may be showing ignorance here, not keeping track on everything going on in terms of the remote participation agenda, but I'm aware there were reports submitted by the hubs and so on. What I -- Maybe there is such a report, but I think it would be of great value for preparation for Nairobi that comprehensive assessment of how everything did perform for Vilnius is report, and that might cover three areas. First of all, were there any significant geographical gaps that, for whatever reason, just could not be bridged? Secondly, what was the pattern of remote participation across all the IGF constituencies? Were there any dips in terms of, I don't know, civil society participation amongst all those who did participate through the hubs and so on?
And then thirdly, the awareness program, sort of stakeholders not able to get to the IGF in Vilnius. Was the awareness program successful in reaching out and simply promoting the opportunity you can still take part through the hub. And for all -- in what was the case for all 30 hubs, did the programs really work. The marketing of it, if you like. That would be the third element of the report.
But forgive me, maybe that report has been done but I simply haven't seen it. But learning from the Vilnius experience is obviously crucial to do a Rolls Royce job for Nairobi with its development agenda and its particular need to reach out globally to all sectors and societies and every country, small island state, lease developed country, less developed economy, and so on.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, UK. I have ICC/BASIS.
>> ICC/BASIS: Thank you. My name is Jimson Olufuye, vice-chairman for WITSA, speaking through ICC/BASIS.
The idea of remote participation you can say is one of those beautiful outcomes or value addition to IGF when it comes inclusivity. And I want to suggest we should keep it and also bring in new ideas to promote participation of wider group in the remote access to the IGF events.
I want to promote that perhaps we can encourage the national IGFs to also have Remote Participation Working Group or team so that those that cannot attend the main event, they could have perhaps a point, a telepoint, wherein more people can assemble and effectively listen in and participate with a video conferencing solution, you can see what's going on, and the moderators live can also see those that want to intervene live in discussions.
The second thing I think we could do is sensitization. Many people are not aware that this opportunity is there. So with more sensitization and awareness created that by the fact that you are not there, but feeling that you can still participate. So we can encourage the national IGF to organize with the local, remote team or working group that would set up a base for more people remotely to participate in the main event. And also organize a brought-based sensitization to get more people from the developing world to participate in it, the new principle of IGF inclusivity. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. A remote participant? Okay.
>>MARILIA MACIEL: This is a comment from Yuliya Morenets from TAC, Together Against Cybercrime. It says last year we organized two local hubs in France for the IGF in Vilnius. We met in Strasbourg and Toulouse. The comments we had from the audience are, all the workshops were in English and it was a real problem for the local community to follow the discussions. It concerns all actors. The interest for the discussions and the issues is present, but we would like to suggest to have a number of workshops in other languages, as Izumi suggested before, or to have a real-time interpretation.
And this is a very common feedback that we have from hubs, that the language barrier is something important.
And just to make two quick comments or reactions that there has been reports from many of the hubs, they have all been published in the IGF Web sites. They have different levels of details of the sessions. We have not really established a framework for the reports from the hubs. Maybe we should do that in the future. But one important point is that what are we going to do with these reports? It is like the reports from workshops.
Sometimes you want to push workshop organizers to write reports, but who is going to read it? The person is not encouraged or stimulated to write them.
I'm afraid that if we don't do anything with the reports that come from hubs, we are not encouraging them to write good reports. So we should decide what to do with this kind of reports, how to feed them maybe into the next assessing meeting of the open consultations to open the space, just to read a summary of the reports that came from hubs to have an idea of the discussions that they have in the hubs.
The IGF Secretariat put together some figures of remote participation. I believe we should review it as well. It is very hard to measure remote participation because you have sometimes 30 people in the hub, and they connect sometimes as a hub so it is difficult to be sure about the figures.
But the first figures that were published by the Secretariat showed that we had a very significant involvement from developing countries.
If you see the participation, the physical presence in the IGF, Latin America, for instance, had 5% of participants. But if you take into account remote participation, Latin America participation rises up to 20% or 20-something percent. So it's significant that developing countries are using remote participation to bring in their voices, therefore, the importance for us to improve the dynamics. And I do agree with the importance of themes in national IGF hubs, that we work with remote participation.
And I would like to reinforce the need for our workshop organizers to appoint remote moderators. This is very important. Without them, we can't work remote participation. They are ones who link who is participating remotely with the session. It is very important to appoint them early in order to give us the chance to work with them and train them on the platform. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. Chengetai and then GLOCOM, Bertrand and Marilyn Cade. Chengetai?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Oh, I just wanted to say that we do sympathize with the need for translating and for interpretation. But as you know, the major hurdle we're finding is that we need the funds to do that because you need to pay the interpreters. If you have an official translation, that might work, but we can't back that officially. That might be something you can look at.
But for officially in the workshops, we really can't do it at this present moment in time given the resources that we have.
And all the other points are very good points, yes.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Adam, GLOCOM?
>>GLOCOM: Thank you, Madam Chair. Just following along on this idea of measurement, one of the things that was happening during the main sessions in Vilnius was that we had remote moderators or moderators of remote participation. And they would bring in the comments from the remote hubs.
But very few of the moderators actually told us who or what the hubs were. And so better instructions to the moderators on what they should be describing would be helpful.
The example I can remember is that only one of the moderators, for example, said, We have 40 people in Dakar and they are commenting on such and such an issue. We have 30 people in Jakarta and they are commenting on such and such an issue. If you actually tell people what location they're in, then that becomes much more interesting. You have a notion that there are a certain number of people in a place and they are contributing.
Most of the moderators simply just said, "A remote comment is" and this is the comment. We really want to know, get the idea that we have, you know, 40 or 50 people in a town, in a city somewhere on the other side of the world. And then they are actually bringing the notion of those -- the physicality of those people into the meeting. And that was much more effective when we did hear that we had real people, a number of people, in Dakar. So think a little bit more about how we introduce remote access, I suppose.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Bertrand?
>>BERTRAND de LA CHAPELLE: I think there is something that we touched a little bit in various comments -- Sorry, Bertrand de La Chapelle. We are talking about remote participation which is a tremendous tool for the actual event. I think there is a need to complement this by discussing even further the tools -- the other tools that we use in between.
Marilia was mentioning the need to have mailing lists. I have always been surprised that since the creation of the IGF, there is a mailing list that was supposed to be for all participants. And it has never really been used, never been activated, never been promoted in any way.
Platforms will be useful to try to help the preparation. We don't need to wait until Nairobi to think about very simple ways to facilitate this work. But in that respect, maybe what we will have to address in a different space is the question of funding.
There is a tremendous amount of material that has been created by the first five IGFs. And there has been a tremendous amount of work done by those who have edited the successive books.
However, the Web site at the moment is still oriented towards the preparatory process of the IGF and mostly towards us rather than the general public to tap into the resources. You need to have a very good knowledge of how the IGF works to actually dig into it and get the information.
I wonder whether in parallel with the preparation of the IGF Nairobi a call to actors for a financial support or an in-kind support to do a very concrete action to in addition -- without revamping this Web site for the moment, but to have a sort of entry point into the database or an ability to valorize the database.
I will quote no names, but there are other processes which are in the same space that have much less information that do a much better job at valorizing the information they have than we are doing. So I think it would be very useful.
And, finally, we are improving here on a daily basis the functioning of the IGF. And I would like to suggest regarding the previous discussion something I didn't have the opportunity to mention. We could envision the notion of a poster session which actually would feed into the question that George was raising about if you don't have a workshop, what can you do. And there could be a poster session with very limited five-minute slots where people could, for instance, explain what they have been doing. This is a side note.
I just wanted to conclude for the record by saying, I find it a little bit sad and surprising that when we are talking about remote participation, which is a concrete tool, to facilitate the participation of developing countries, if you look around this room, none of the actors that have been so vocal in saying the main problem of the IGF is the participation of developing countries, none of them are there. None of them are there to propose ideas. None of them are there to propose funding. None of them are there to propose solutions. And I'm very happy to see that we are addressing those solutions.
But I wanted for the record to notice that it is a little bit unsatisfactory. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Bertrand. Marilyn?
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Madam Chairman. My name is Marilyn Cade, and I will, first of all, associate myself with many of the previous speakers' comments and note that it would, in fact, be very welcome if additional players who have expressed concerns were able to schedule themselves to spend time with us as we work together to organize what I know is going to be a fantastic IGF in Kenya later this year.
It is very exciting to me that we will be coming to Kenya and to the African region. And I would like to speak now very briefly just to note a comment about the national and regional IGFs and then perhaps suggest that there may be another, better time to talk further about the national and regional IGFs. They're each very, very unique.
And while all of you who organize a national or regional IGF are aware of the uniqueness of your initiative, I don't think that everyone in the broad stakeholder family does have a full appreciation of the great diversity and the significant implications of the emergence of the national and regional IGF initiatives.
I have been spending some time looking at many of them, and I am the chief catalyst helped by many, many other people in the United States from all stakeholders to organize the IGF USA.
As I said earlier, we will have a remote hub that we will operate from Washington during the Kenya IGF as well as having a number of people there in Kenya. But I think we should perhaps in May, if we could, consider having a very quick round of three or four-minute updates from the national and regional IGFs about the fact they're taking place, not a report on what they're going to do but the fact they're taking place and little bit about what they're going to focus on. That might be informational and helpful to all of the rest of us. And I think it would also be helpful, then, in understanding how reporting-out sessions from the regional IGFs or any special sessions from the national initiatives might fit into the program.
I just want to make one final comment to support Marilia's comments about training of moderators. It is very important that we take that seriously as workshop organizers. I'm thinking perhaps that we have not fully appreciated and taken note of the significant contribution that is provided by the remote moderators and the moderator -- the fact that people are having to -- you really need to organize your process differently to ensure effective participation for the remote participations. And I think that both technical and other kinds of training might need further enhancement if we are going to be successful in deepening and growing that particular aspect of the IGF.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Hungary, you have the floor.
>> HUNGARY: Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Peter Major, and I would like to talk on behalf of the dynamic correlation and accessibility and disability.
Reacting on the remote participation, that was the language barrier which has been brought up on one occasion. There were many references to the transcript. I know from DiploFoundation that transcripts made a tremendous effect on remote participation as well. People who have language barriers, poor English, they just actually don't take the floor, can follow the remote even -- can follow even remotely.
I think there might be one step even further. Eventually the transcripts may be translated using tools which are available already online. And, well, let it be. It may cause some amusement as well, but probably so much the better. Probably we don't take things so seriously. And it should work.
I remember last year when we had the ICANN meeting in Kenya, in Nairobi, everything was broadcast using the transcript. So one could follow the video, one could follow the transcripts and the audio. And probably if you go one step further and we explore the opportunity, probably we come up with a solution that is much cheaper than having an interpreter in realtime. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. I have Peter Hellmonds and that will be the last person on the floor. And then we have a 15-minute coffee break before the closing.
>>PETER HELLMONDS: Thank you, Madam Chair. Very quick and more like a question and a suggestion. I believe -- I have seen some remote participation issues where it was difficult to get access, especially during the first day and I would like to suggest or ask even the remote participation coalition that this should not be just set up for one event but something that would be an ongoing endeavor tested throughout the year with tools that are widely available, don't necessarily require downloading of special applications but something that more or less is available through the cloud on an ongoing basis, allowing us to make sure that whatever technologies in use will work at the event of the next IGF. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Sorry. I had Brazil as the last. Brazil?
>>BRAZIL: Thank you, Madam Chair. Very briefly, I had the opportunity to mention about -- to mention a question of remote participation in my first general comment. But I would repeat, just for the record, remote participation is not a channel of participation aimed or restricted to developing countries. We are talking about improving transparency and accountability of IGF as a whole. I think this is important to have in mind.
Second, I'd like to follow many of my colleagues that supported the idea of creating clear rules and more sustainable planning, procedures and even funds for improving the structure that can help to promote a great effort in the remote participation assistance.
I just mentioned especially the speech made by our colleagues from DiploFoundation. I found them very interesting.
Regarding the question of languages and translation, indeed, if we considered that the remote participation is not only a process that occurs during the sessions but also a process that can help the discussion of IGF subjects during the whole year, maybe the questions of language can be better dealt with.
I mean, if we prepare -- if we foster discussions in Portuguese, Spanish, French, on issues about -- that will be part of -- that will be in the agenda of IGF, maybe this is a way to better involve people and improve awareness of the IGF debate to the great public.
And, finally, I would like to mention the Brazilian experience about discussion -- about discussing our Bill of Rights of Internet. Usually a Bill of Rights of Internet is only discussed in Parliament or in Congress. But in 2009 and in 2010, we had the opportunity to use electronic platforms in order to foster debate, foster the awareness about the importance of discussing rights in the Internet space.
We experienced that many people, many people that -- who benefit or suffers the impacts of Internet get in touch in the process, really participate in the process. That is something that I feel that we also need, that occurs to IGF. We want to involve people.
So in that sense, Brazil would like to -- in the future meetings, to present a more detailed contribution about our experience in this Bill of Rights and maybe it could also be useful for the remote participation of IGF. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you, Brazil. Marilia?
>>MARILIA MACIEL: It is a suggestion made by Yuliya Morenets from TaC and Raquel Gatto from NIC Brazil. Their suggestion that we take advantage of volunteers such as young people or maybe students from the faculty of interpretation and translation that could help with the translation of the discussions from the IGF. It doesn't have to be perfect translation, but something that would help people who are connecting remotely to follow the discussions.
And for myself, I would like to say that I agree we should develop platforms and ways to discuss the IGF throughout the year, and we are happy to help that.
I would just like to remember the community that we -- we are happy to help the Secretariat, but we work as volunteers. So sometimes for us, it is difficult to dedicate such an amount of time throughout the year. And I believe that maybe it's time for the IGF and its Secretariat to reach out to other organizations as well in the U.N. family such as UNDP and other organizations that have online capacity-building, that have expertise on online platforms or standards for e-government, for instance, and bring them into the process. After all, the ecosystem should be helping one another to implement the WSIS principles and the development agenda as well. Maybe it is time for us to contact them.
We are going to help. But maybe with their assistance, we can give remote participation more scale. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. I would like to go for a coffee break now of about 15 minutes. We come back at quarter past 5:00 to discuss concluding items in terms of the next steps for the preparatory process, the dates. And there was a suggestion by APC to have national and regional IGFs just present very briefly on what their plans are. So if you could come back in 15 minutes for the last session. Thank you.
(Break)
[ Gavel ]
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Okay. Welcome back from your coffee break. I would like to quickly go through a brief summary of the session we had on selection criteria for workshops as well as the number of workshops.
Some of the ideas that came up were actually divided into two sort of sessions or cases.
One was around how should workshop topics be decided, and the other one was how can workshop quality and access be improved.
Some of the points that came up were based on past performance, based on availability and quality of past reports, and there was an issue by APC, a reemphasis on perhaps making sure the reports are substantive.
And then they must be relevant to the current IGF themes. The importance of reserving some slots for emerging issues, the importance of balanced participation and relevance to stakeholder groups, regions, as well as linguistic diversity.
The availability of remote participation, including appointments of a moderator for remote participants. And then using a scoring system or seeking feedback through online questionnaires or interest groups.
And then asking or inquiring whether a topic should be moved to a main session or not, as well as coming up -- ensuring compliance with it, enhancing compliance when it comes to disqualifying proposals that do not adhere to the rules. Some of the rules are just deadlines or deadlines for speakers and identifying the stakeholders.
Now, on improving or quality of workshop and access, the lack of professionalism was noted in some of the workshops. The importance of enhancing remote participation was reemphasized again. And then the requirement for workshop plans, identification of speakers, as well as providing very clear deadlines, and clear rules of process so that, then, workshop proponents would be able to follow and the MAG would be then be able to decide on how to allocate workshops based on time.
And then recognizing the difference between educational workshops, discussion workshops, as well as communicating information to facilitators and or organizers of the workshops on time. Promoting youth participation, and this youth participation, the idea of perhaps having a youth space, but also I think important to think about mentoring of youth and ensuring that the youth are engaging with the IGF community as well.
The idea of saying no rather than merging workshops. It's much more respectful to say no instead of forcing workshop participants to merge workshops that might otherwise be very different. And the idea was raised about MAG or other supporting workshop organizers, either volunteers from the MAG or from other areas and spaces. And then asking questions and providing links to the various workshops and to thoughts and pieces.
So that's a very brief summary. Of course there is going to be a transcript of the session, which is much more detailed. But these are some of the issues that came up.
And then there was the issue of remote participation. On the issue of remote participation, how might remote participation be strengthened. Again, reemphasizing clear procedures, especially for remote participation. Considering an earlier process to give remote participants greater opportunities to both providing input to the process or even deciding on the structure and workshops as well as providing opportunities for engagement at different levels.
So the idea of an online space for online remote participants to exchange views.
And then the use of social networking tools and smartphones more extensively. And then encouraging IGFs to set up telepoints where people can gather.
The idea of providing a framework, a clear framework for reports from hubs to incorporating articles from remote hubs and including participation figures, remote participation figures.
Interpretation into other languages would be helpful. Of course, bearing in mind the lack of resources at the IGF Secretariat, so again, it would require a lot of volunteerism here or support.
And then more information on the Web site to bring issues to the fore, as well as expanding training for remote moderators and workshop organizers.
Remote participants, again, request quite a lot of resources and organization, and we would really welcome a certain level of sustainable support for it, as would be finding other specific initiatives such as Web site improvements as well. So that was also an idea that was brought up.
So that's a brief summary of the two sessions on (poor audio) and remote participation.
I would like now to move to the last agenda item, looking at next steps. But before we go to the next steps, which are basically around calendar of dates around the May meeting, June meeting, I think I would like to give the floor to our regional and national IGF organizers to just give us a brief background, a brief view on what they are planning and links to what the main IGF will be doing. Thank you. So the floor is open to regional or national. Valeria.
>>APC: Thank you, Alice. Valeria Betancourt from the APC. Before providing information related to our plans to organize regional events in Latin America and Africa, let me stress the importance of ensuring that the regional perspectives are taken into account when building the global IGF agenda.
So avenues should be really provided to make this happen. And the organizers of the regional meetings should be encouraged to participate and contribute in the next open consultation, and I'm sure that the MAG could also propose some other ways to have a more regular and substantive exchange with the regional process -- with the reasonable processes, actually.
We would also like to concur with the proposal made by Brazil in the morning to include the regional perspectives sessions as part of the setting the scene main session, because it could really contribute to have those perspectives tabled in the discussion in main sessions and in workshops.
In relation to the plans to engage with regional meetings, APC really had plans to engage with the organizing of regional events in Latin America, in the Caribbean, and southern Africa, and we also aim to support national processes in Colombia and South Africa.
I would also like to mention that we would like to take the opportunity of the regional meetings to discuss the recommendations that the special rapporteur on freedom of expression will present this year in the -- will present this year to the human rights council. It could only -- It could not only contribute, sorry, to raise awareness about the relevance of human rights to Internet governance, but would also help to initiate a discussion around what realistic possibilities for policy work around this area might be in each of the regions.
Specifically on the Latin American regional meeting, and also as a way to improve the process, the organizers intend to have -- to build the agenda in an open, collaborative and participatory way, building on the EuroDIG's experience.
We hope to be able to inform about the place and dates in the next couple of months, but August has been mentioned so far for the Latin American meeting.
Yes, we know there is a proposal from the organizers of the West Africa meeting to have it in Nigeria from the 27th to the 29th of July. And the southern Africa IGF will be in South Africa, and August is also being considered as a possible time for this meeting.
So that's it. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much.
I saw Kenya.
>>KENYA: Thank you. Thank you, madam moderator.
As I mentioned in the morning, Kenya as a convener of the East African IGF is in discussion with the government of Rwanda, and Rwanda has agreed to host this year's East African IGF. And the many forecasts of the eIGF will be youth ICTs, innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as parliamentarians, high-level meetings for parliamentarians to extend skills, development and capacity building in issues of ICTs, legislation, and policy-making.
The dates have not been finalized on, but we are looking forward to sometime in August, September.
We want to be able to get the linkage between the East African IGF with the three IGF forums we are going to have. The first -- rather, before the May IGF, we intend to have a three-day event, and the topics and the items and the issues which are going to be discussed and agreed upon during the East African IGF are going to be received across and be able to inform the pre-IGF. And from the discussions I have gathered here, most of those issues are likely to make their way to the main IGF event, and more so even into some relevant kind of workshops.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Nominet.
>>NOMINET: Thank you, Chair.
I'd like to say just a few words about the UK Internet Governance Forum.
We held the first meeting of our preparation for Nairobi just a couple of weeks ago, and we focused that discussion on three areas: cloud computing; access, in particular for marginalized and vulnerable users; and for us a completely new theme related to content and what the future of a content industry might look like. And we also used that event to launch this year's round of the Nominet Internet awards. This is the looking for examples of best practice, which responds to meeting some of the challenges. And its wish to try to celebrate successful achievements rather than looking at abstract cases of concern.
Our next step, and we haven't fixed a date for this, will probably be to do a further meeting in June. We are planning to do some scenario-type exercises, and we've got three or four topic areas that we think are of specific interest. And we will try to whittle that down to doing perhaps two or three, depending on interest.
One of the main spurs for doing scenario work is to try to development engagements and involvement in the IGF process. So to be able to get the message out to a wider community of people. And in particular, to try and identify areas that are of specific political and commercial and social interest.
So, for example, two, which I think are probably quite promising and likely to go ahead, one would be, again, on this access by vulnerable people because this is quite an important initiative in the UK to try and reduce the digital divide. And of course the people who are not on the Internet by and large are the most vulnerable people in our society. And the other one is on the content sector, again trying to look at the balance of interests and what might be the way that a successful content sector might develop to meet some of the expectations of users.
So I think that's actually sort of, for us, sort of a new activity, and we think it's particularly interesting. And once we have done the scenario exercises, I hope that we will be using those exercises to widen that network and to get other people involved, and to use the scenarios as very active tools in the UK IGF process.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Marilyn.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
I will speak as the chief catalyst for the IGF U.S.A. We have a quite unique title, because it seemed, when we first formed the IGF U.S.A., we were going to spend a year and a half determining roles and titles. And we perceived that that would probably not be an effective way to achieve organizing a national initiative.
I say that because for two years before launch being the IGF U.S.A., we actually had two or three-hour events before and after the IGF that were used to brief a wide number of interested parties. And I would just say for anyone who might not yet know that they are ready to start a national initiative, that they might think about pre and post events as a way to begin to build some interest at their international level.
We have a steering group that has roughly 65 people on it, and we held our first steering group meeting to begin to plan the IGF U.S.A. 2011. It will take place in July, probably the second or third week in July.
We pioneered the use of scenarios last year at the IGF U.S.A., and I will just say for any of you who are interested in learning about our experience, you can find a very interesting video story about them done by Janna Anderson's group, imagining the Internet, and that is at IGF dash USA.U.S.
This year we will repeat the use of scenarios, and we also have offered to use scenarios collaboratively with at least one other national IGF, and possibly two. At this point, we will be teaming with the Russian IGF in May to do a mini version of scenarios.
We use scenarios somewhat differently than I think that Nominet just referenced. The program this year will be, again, a one-day program. It will be at the Georgetown law center in Washington, D.C., but there will be three pre-events, two- to three-hour events, perhaps one half-day event, that will take place at American University, one in Silicon Valley. We're thinking about doing a small event at Syracuse University, if possible. And we will be doing an event for our equivalent of parliamentarians. In the United States we call them Congressmen or women. So we will be doing something for the staff and for members of Congress who are interested in this particular issue, that's more of an awareness of what is Internet governance and what is going on in the Internet Governance Forum.
We will have one round of workshops, and cloud computing remains a very hot theme among the steering group, as does the issues related to mobile and online applications, privacy, cybersecurity.
The scenarios that we did last year -- and this year, all participants will participate in scenarios. Last year, we offered workshops in conjunction with scenarios, but this year, all participants will participate in scenarios, and we will then have a plenary discussion about the perspectives.
Our three scenarios last year were used to help build awareness about what is going on globally on the issues and perhaps questions and tensions about who should govern the Internet.
So the name of our scenarios were Internet islands, users reign, and governments are beautiful. You must visit the Web site.
This year again we will focus on governance issues and discussions, and we're very enthused that we are now seeing the growth of interest in participation of young people from several of the universities, so we are going to be deepening our participation from young people.
In the past, we have had actually much younger participants, more in the 14 to 17 age. And it has been a small representation, but very interested. So this year we will be moving more into the college-aged as well.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. I have Netherlands and then Marilia.
>> NETHERLANDS: I'm (saying name) from the Netherlands, especially from the NL IGF, because we launched the NL IGF at the beginning of this year. And we will not organize just one meeting in advance of the IGF but organize several meetings in preparation of the IGF in Nairobi on several subjects. And it will be for multistakeholder-ed and especially we invite parliamentarians to join us and to interest them to visit and to come along to Nairobi as well.
Subjects we think about are cybersecurity, governments for development, mobile development and -- as well as a youth IGF.
And in March, we will launch a Web site which we will definitely share with you. And, of course, we also use social media like Linked In and Twitter.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. Marilia?
>>MARILIA MACIEL: Thank you, Marilia Maciel from CST Brazil. Three very quick suggestions regarding regional meetings. The first one is that maybe we should develop a framework for reporting back from regional meetings. I don't know if this has been done, but last year the IRP Dynamic Coalition has done a framework for regional meetings to report back about human rights and it was very valuable. Maybe we should do this framework for other issues as well.
The second suggestion is that maybe we could get -- the Secretariat could facilitate an online meeting between regional meetings' organizers not only for the Secretariat to keep track of the process of organizations of regional meetings and publish the main points on the Web site but also for the regional meetings to communicate with one another so they have a general view of what is being discussed and tabled on each region. This would be valuable as well and ventilate the agenda of the regional meetings.
And, lastly, Secretariat and probably the MAG could assist on that. They should reach out to regional meeting organizers and others to receive inputs for the agenda of the IGF on this early stage that we are still shaping the agenda. So maybe to reach out for them and to look for inputs. They had the meetings last year. I'm sure they have issues to raise that are of their concern. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. I have IGC and Finland and U.K. IGC. IGC?
>>IZUMI AIZU: Again, this is Izumi, not for the IGC. I have three information about national/regional IGFs this year. First is just about one hour ago I received an e-mail from APRICOT. There is a regional conference on the Internet. And they discussed and decided that the second regional IGF of Asia-Pacific will be held in Singapore just before the ICANN meeting in Singapore in coming June. That's likely June 16th to 18th-ish. Details are not yet decided or communicated to me. With the move from Jordan to Singapore of the ICANN meeting, they decided to take advantage of that.
The second one is the AP Internet leadership program. It is modeled after the Internet governance summer school that Wolfgang started which will be held in Beijing, Beijing Normal University, July 6th to 8th. It is sort more of an academic focus. The so-called Internet professors of Asia-Pacific will gather to give it primarily a research meeting and clear high-level economic focus with a small elite group, whatever it means. And it is kind of a summer school AP-wide, and they talk about technology and infrastructure and CIR issues and legal issues and the future of the governance.
The third one is the IGF Japan in the pipeline. But we have hosted the preparatory IGF Japan for the first time last year in October as a side event to the APEC TEL ministerial meeting in Okinawa and it was very successful.
So after that, there was a local organizing committee in Japan was formed, or preparatory committee, to make an IGF Japan as a continuum sort of evolving model, not just one-shot event annual.
There have been five working groups proposed dealing with civil rights, personal -- I mean, privacy and ID management and then the protection (inaudible) on the Internet and developmental agenda. And these are sort of the themes they will address throughout the year. But modeling after the IGF, it is a forum for policy dialogue in a multistakeholder open environment. And we plan to have first national IGF Japan back-to-back with the Beijing summer school after that. So the date will likely to be from July 9th to 11th. But it is to be sort of finalized just like the IGF itself. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. Finland.
>> FINLAND: Thank you. Just very briefly, the first Finnish Internet forum was organized just after the Vilnius meeting last year. And in addition to the participation of our own nationals, we benefited from the presence of international guests, some of them are in this room today. So we would like to thank them again for their participation in Helsinki last year.
We have a small but very active multistakeholder authority body and we also reflect our positions and our participation in the global IGF on the basis of our discussions in Finland.
And we would really like to make our own national exercise a process rather than one single event once a year. And, in fact, we will organize a coffee discussion with Professor Wolfgang Kleinwächter next Monday on the complexity of Internet governance. So we have smaller events throughout the year. And the objective is really to raise awareness on Internet-related issues in Finland, across all stakeholders.
To conclude, I would like to support an online page being set up not only on regional processes but also on national ones. And we would be glad to participate in such a page.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. U.K.?
>>UNITED KINGDOM: Thank you, Madam Chair. A short report on the Commonwealth IGF, which I'm speaking on behalf of now. The Commonwealth IGF seeks to encourage greater stakeholder participation from commonwealth member states on policy issues and discussions related to Internet governance.
We do not hold stand-alone Commonwealth IGF events. Our activities are focused primarily on a Web site, www.commonwealth igf.com. And as previously -- the two previous IGFs holding an open session as the Commonwealth IGF at the next IGF in Nairobi, which, of course, is a commonwealth country -- in a commonwealth country. So that has particular importance for the Commonwealth IGF.
The steering committee is currently looking at proposals for the open session in Nairobi for the Commonwealth IGF. After the successful project on preparing a child protection toolkit which we delivered at the Vilnius IGF, we are now looking at the potential for developing our work on cybercrime.
We published on the Commonwealth IGF Web site a report on cybercrime issues. And so the opportunity we're looking at now is to develop this work perhaps with a view to formulating some kind of set of principles or model law. So it is still very much at the discussion stage, but that looks like a concrete line of work for us.
Secondly, we want to develop our links with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association to build up awareness amongst parliamentarians in commonwealth member states about Internet governance issues and the contribution of the IGF and the opportunity the IGF creates for developing awareness, best practice, solutions for commonwealth countries.
Thirdly, we're looking to develop our youth agenda in the commonwealth. There is a commonwealth youth forum, and we are looking at potential projects actually which might be showcased in Nairobi involving young people, particularly students in the media area and journalism area as it relates to the Internet economy and so on.
So that broadly is the status of where we are and look and forward to Nairobi as a showcase really for commonwealth initiatives on Internet governance. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you very much. Council of Europe.
>>EURODIG: Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I'm speaking on behalf of the EuroDIG. My name is Lee Hibbard. There are many people in the room that already mentioned EuroDIG. It is not one person. We all know this is a shared event. It is based upon a lot of the personal efforts of many people. I would like to thank some of the people that come to mind now in this room: Martin, Giacommo, our Serbian colleagues Vladimir, Marilia, of course, Bernard, Sandra Wolf, Mayor Thomas, Francois. There are many people. It has much to do with personal efforts of people, first of all.
Fourth, European dialogue on Internet governance will take place in Belgrade on the 30th and 31st of May. That makes four regional -- European regional events in just over 2 1/2 years since it started in late 2008.
This year it is being hosted by the Ministry of Telecommunications of Serbia with a concerted effort of the minister of telecommunications, thanks to her and her contacts. It is being supported by Swiss AFCOM, by Diplo, by the EBU, by the Council of Europe amongst others. It has a core team of around, meaning a core team, a steering group, around 35 people. We have already had lots of support -- expressions of support regarding support, financial, moral, et cetera.
At the moment, we are at the point of ending the open consultations. We received about 30 inputs, different proposals for themes, for issues to be addressed, et cetera. That's been -- I'm quite proud to say that has been very transparent this year, more transparent than before.
All the information is on the Web site. You can see the history of the proposals, of who has been proposing, where it is going. We have a newsletter. And tomorrow we are going to have a planning meeting here just next door from 2:00 to 4:00 if you are interested. Registration will be open from the first of March.
I would like to say that EuroDIG is always open, always interested and never too late to take place. Those who are interested, please contact us here tomorrow.
Where are we going to at the end of May in Belgrade? At the moment, we have developed a program, an agenda which includes opening and closing sessions, seven workshops, five plenary sessions on a range of topics including priorities for Internet governance towards open European agenda for 2020. We have a welcoming and opening session, high-level session which I think will look towards the role of the Internet, the future of the Internet and what should the Internet be for us. Sessions on privacy, data protection, participation and development, critical Internet resources, new and emerging Internet services and business models, cybersecurity, ethics and corporate responsibility, hate and freedom of expression, digital literacy and skills toward economic and social development, fighting cybercrime, global challenges, new media, freedoms and responsibilities, identity, anonymity, privacy. That's quite a lot in two days to start with.
So I want to stop there. I just wanted to add that we have a very strong youth component coming through in the EuroDIG. The European Youth Forum is going to bring around about 30 or so youth from across Europe to take part and be everywhere on the discussions. They are also organizing a pre-event and a side event during the event.
So I think overall to conclude, Madam Chair, it is about inclusion, outreach, more transparency this year, more fluidity and flexibility. There are new IGF -- national IGFs taking all the time. I counted 13 when I was in Iceland for their own national IGF just a couple of weeks ago.
We are looking forward to national IGFs in the Russian Federation in May, and there was one just recently in the Ukraine. Thank you very much.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Thank you. Wolfgang?
>>WOLFGANG KLEINWÄCHTER: I just want to inform you about the IGF in Germany. We have this year the CERT IGF in Germany. It is a one-day event. And the special dimension this year is that we have particular dialogue between the members of the German Parliament and the other stakeholders because the German Bundestag established an Arket (phonetic) Commission where the German Parliament looks into the future of the digital society. And for us, it is a wonderful opportunity to bring the members of this Bundestag commission into the dialogue with the other stakeholders from the technical communities, civil society and the private sector.
And we are looking forward to the main organizers of this meeting. This is important for the trade union (saying name) and the German Association for the United Nations, the German Association for the Internet Economy, AICO, and the Internet Society of Germany. Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Do you have Sweden as the last speaker?
>>SWEDEN: To the IGF process in Sweden, my name is Anders Johansson. We have since more than ten years, yearly, what we call the Internet Days gathering between 600 and 800 people every year.
Complementary to that, we have since something like three or four years a reference group which gathers several times a year an open group, a multistakeholder group to discuss and help to formulate Swedish standpoints to be expressed, for instance, in ICANN and other international fora.
The last few years, this IGF process, in our country, has significantly moved from technological to societal issues. And that's not only because what's happening at global level, but also, for instance, inside our country the issues of privacy, for instance, has become a political interesting issue.
Now we are discussing how we can broader the perspectives even further in this process. For instance, how we could get even more parliamentarians involved, and also other new stakeholders to take part of the discussions.
Thank you.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Yeah, thank you very much. And I would like to thank everybody who has given us information and feedback on the national and regional IGFs.
I truly believe that there's huge value in national and regional IGFs because really the policy impact is felt more at the national -- mostly at the national level. It's also where the stakeholder model actually works, and we can see it working best in some of the countries where it's actually been followed, like my country, Kenya.
So a very valuable discussion, and very important to understand what is going on, and also important to see -- during tomorrow's meeting, to see concretely how national and regional IGFs could be linked to the global one.
With that, I would like to hand it back to the Secretariat to take us through the minutes and calendar of dates before we close the meeting.
Chengetai.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you, Alice.
I will be very brief since it's after 6:00, and I know there's a cocktail waiting for us upstairs.
So for the next steps in the preparatory process, tomorrow there's an informal MAG meeting in room XXII. This means that it's the members of the MAG, IGOs, and then if there's seating room for anybody else who wants to come in. It's a smaller room than today. Usually we can fit everybody, but if we can't, then it's first come, first served after that. And the purpose of tomorrow's meeting is to refine the discussion of today, come out with concrete titles with the MAG, and action items.
Also, especially since -- we will also take taking in submissions for workshops and other events and other deadlines like that. I think we'll discuss that in final detail tomorrow.
One thing I would like to mention is looking forward, further forward, we have a meeting scheduled for May, which is another open consultation. The dates being considered are during -- attaching to the WSIS forum, the ITU WSIS forum. We can either have them the Thursday and the Friday before the WSIS forum, which is 12th and 13th of May, or after the WSIS forum. So I leave that up for you to think about.
And then we have the June meeting, which traditionally, since last year, well, it's the tradition now, is an organizational meeting. Those people who have been selected, those workshop organizers who have been selected can come in and then they discuss organizational aspects of their workshops or other events. And then, but as I said, tomorrow we'll maybe fine-tune that better with the MAG.
>>ALICE MUNYUA: Okay. Thank you, Chengetai. UNDESA now.
>>UNDESA: Dear colleagues, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Secretary-General, I want to thank all the participants, stakeholders, government representatives for their important contribution today, they give today in this first open consultation meeting of the second cycle of IGF.
All the contributions, the relevant ideas, and the proposals will be incorporated in the synthesis paper, and will be taken into consideration tomorrow during the MAG meeting in implementation of the agenda.
Before closing this open consultation, I would like to congratulate with the moderator, Madam Chair, Alice Munyua, for her role in facilitating the open consultation, and once again thank Kenya for its offer to host the sixth meeting.
Looking at the quality of the discussion today, and thanks of all the important contributes from all of you, all of the participants here, I have a strong feeling that the next Nairobi meeting will be a really great success. And I want also -- I'm sure that with this, we will put the basis for a new full cycle of IGF.
With these wishes, I officially close the open consultation of today, and I wish you a nice evening.
And also remember that 6:00, okay, right, there is a cocktail at the delegates restaurant, eighth floor, building A, offered by ICANN.
Thank you.
[ Gavel ]
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