IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
16 SEPTEMBER 2010
SESSION 126
1130 - 1330
REMOTE PARTICIPATION IN THE IGF AND IN THE
REGIONAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE MEETINGS
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Good morning, everybody, I think we'll get started. I'M Ginger Paque, from the remote participation group and I would like to welcome everyone present in the room or around the world. And points out that some would say remote participation is not an IG issue but an application, a tool or a resource. I think that it offers technique and a set of tools but is an idea issue as well a development issue and capacity building issue and access issue and issue appropriately addressed in IGF where much with of the real implementation has taken place. We start with remote observation then we have remote input and now we're achieving remote participation in IGF and setting best practice. As we overcome technical and organizational issues we can turn to fostering more interaction and better from remote participants. Can we engage remotely and connect locally?
What about other forms of remote participation, for example, social reporting and continued on-line discussions. -- for example, social reporting and continued on-line discussions. We'll have three themes the role and international relations, increasing inclusiveness on remote participation, and the interplay with related processes. And we have a nice group of panelists and participants and, of course, being a panel that focuses on participation we're hoping that everyone will join us remotely and in person. Is this Philippines hub connected? This is something that we're going to find? We have everything working here. But we have a panelist from the remote hub in Philippines and they're having connection issues. I think they're having electrical problems without electricity we don't have internet and so they're running into problems.
I would like to go around and ask the panelists to introduce themselves and give a brief presentation on their main points and then we will ask the people -- the rest of you to join us with your ideas. And we'll begin a discussion on the main topics. Maybe we start with Anriette. She's a south African living in Johannesburg and working as executive director of APC weapon international network with 50 organisations. And much of their work is done remotely on-line although not synchronously. So, she'll explain some things about that. And Anriette go ahead.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you, Ginger. I -- I have my three points. But I think I want to start by really recognizing the work that Diplo has done and in fact I can think as APC, seeing through the IGF process how well remote participation works APC is now actually doing real remote participation as well. We always work asynchronously because our members are in all time zones. Now we can see it's possible we have our own on-line meeting platform and we're using it to thanks a lot. And I think really the work you've done is very significant. It's very hard in these rooms. And I think that what I would like to see mixed -- so my first point is can we call it enhanced participation instead of remote participation? And I think the term remote still implies if you're not physically in the room, your participation is slightly less significant.
My second point is how can we create a more level playing field for the remote participation? We get every year the improvements of nominal. And I think there's still a few things that I would like to suggest. And maybe we can explore in the discussion, and that is how some components of IGF process take place purely virtually. The poetry meetings for example why should we travel to Geneva for a preparatory process and Geneva process feels like quite -- you never are quite sure whether the suggestions you make will make it on to the agenda or not. And there's a feeling of lack of a level playing field in that process. Perhaps if everyone that participates from the Secretariat to the multi-advisory group to the rest of the community, participate virtually, that difference can help -- will disappear. I think another -- another challenge is having remote participants have more impact in terms of agenda setting.
In spite of the improvements the paradigm is still that the remote participants listen and they ask questions and occasionally they speak. But that's the exception rather that the rule. But, they don't often feel that they are actually shaping the topics for discussion. I think that's something I would like to hear feedback from the room. How can we change that and transform that? And then I think another way of changing this is that with within the IGF, have some sessions with all the participants are put in the position of a remote participant so that, for example, in this room it would work much bet per we all had head sets on and microphones and we would actually be able to hear much better than we are now. So I think that might be a good experiment for the next IGF to try to replicate the remote participation virtual meeting platform experience, even with the physical participants in the room.
We've done that in APC and it actually works extremely well. And then, my third point is I would like to see -- I think the remote participation process in the IGF has been very powerful. But if we go to what I refer to as enhanced participation -- and I want to hear what Jovan says we should call it it's not just dealing with geographical distance I think what we learned and gained in the last few years can really help us to change how global governance take place. And allow us to deal with other forms of diversity. And really achieve more inclusion so that we really -- we look at it as a means of -- as a means of addressing the -- the linguistics and the cultural and the class and the geographic distances and exclusions that there are in global governance. To do that would require a process. It would require capacity building and require more than just having hubs and it would require a change in attitude from the global governance institutions themselves.
And I think it can be done. And I think that that would be for me, that would take the work that we've done and that you've particularly done around remote participation, into a process that actually could have a lasting transformative affect on global governance.
>> Thank you very much Anriette that was a great opening and I appreciate that and I myself am looking forward to hearing this conversation between you and Jovan. I have trying to convince Jovan it should be local participation. We are remote. The ones on-line are local. We are the remote ones. So it's actually local participation. But we don't really want to get lost in semantics but it brings out a good point. Just now it occurred to me perhaps given we're not so many people, maybe we could ask if anyone has any burning reaction, don't wait, raise your hand and get started right away. And also, instead of waiting and introducing everyone one at a time, can we go around and have every single person with, including the quiet -- should I call them quiet participants, the nonpanelists have everyone introduce themselves, briefly, and then we'll continue.
Is that okay? Does that sound -- so could we start?
>> ANELINE: I'm Aneline I work for APC and based in Uruguay.
>> TIM DAVIES: I'm Tim Davies based in England I've been working on the social reporter aggregator part of the process.
>> AMIN: Hello everyone. I'm Amin from Egypt in international relations.
>> LEE HIBBARD: Hello everybody my name is Lee Hibbard I work for the council of Europe. But, I think for this discussion I would like to be supporter are member of European dialogue on Internet Governance European IGF because we use remote participation in that event and I think it worked very well. Thank you.
>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: I'm Jovan Kurbalija from DiploFoundation and since hear I was present in the last IGF I will make analogy with tool but wigs I wear, one is IGF informal hairstyle Hippee sort of long hair. Yet it's more formal this is my participation in IGF it is more formal carefully combed hair related to my other work in diplomatic circles in diplomatic training academies. And what I've been trying to bring is the bridge between IG community and community which is essential for the global governance in my view, thank you.
>> RAFIK DAMMAK: I'm Rafik Dammak and student at University of Tokyo. Just with my remote participation I discovered it since I started to be informed on Internet Governance.
>> RAQUEL GATTO: My name is Raquel Gatto and I'm from Brazil. I saw there are flyers left if you want to know a little bit about it. I'm also from Diplo -- I was a Diplo STUDENT and I'm not your remote moderator. So you'll hear some intervention hopefully.
>> I'm (Off Microphone) and I work and am based in South Africa and also a Diplo student. Thanks.
>> MALICO: Hello my name is Malico, researcher technology and society in Brazil. I'm here at Diplo fellow and as a participant of the remote participation with working group. Thank you.
>> RODNEY TAYLOR: Thank you I'm Rodney Taylor with Kushian telecommunications union the CTU is responsible for Caribbean IGF and we held our 6th IGF in August of this year and I'm very keen on the issue of remote participation. So far we've been able to Webcast the last two. But I think we obviously going forward would like to make it more interactive where we can actually have feedback from those who are watching. Thank you.
>> JUDY: My name is Judy and I come from Kenya and a walk with regional Internet Governance around Africa.
>> CHUCK GOMEZ: I'm Chuck Gomez with Veri sign and I'm chair of the ICANN GNSO council and most of our work is done via local enhanced participation.
>> KATIN TORY: Okay. Good morning everybody. My name is Katin Tory from Gambia and of the free and local software foundation for Africa. Also, a member with of the Board of Directors of ICANN where I am on the public preservation committee. So I'm especially delighted to be here because remote participation, of course, as you can imagine is very important to ICANN. I'm really looking forward to this. Thank you.
>> Hi, I'm from Sri Lanka and I'm with the (Off Microphone) foundation.
>> I'm from Finnish parliament and I'm assistant to MP and I choose this workshop because we are organising first Finnish internet for next week and we'll have a Webcast and chat channel and I am interested about your experiences. Thank you.
>> I'm going to ask Bernard who came in from troubleshooting problems he's the tech wizard for the remote participation working group you could briefly introduce yourself.
>> BERNARD SADAKA: My name is Bernard Sadaka. I'm a computer and communications engineer working currently with the Secretariat on the remote participation platform along with ladies from the remote participation working group. I'm very glad to be here. I'm looking forward for an interesting workshop. But I'm not sure I will be all the time here. So I hope you excuse me.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: We're pushing human cloning because we need several Bernards. Okay. Now, I would like to continue, thanks, everyone, because we hope you will join us in the discussions, ask questions and make comments. I would like to turn to our next speaker who is Nermine Saadany who is at the ministry of communications and Information Technology. She worked as IGF 2009 senior coordinator with IGF Secretariat and is also a DiploFoundation board member. So we did a lot of work and appreciate very much the interaction here with Nermine. Nermine will give us highlights on how the internet has been facilitating communications between different stakeholders and how it influences international politics and increases the flow of information and the participation. Nermine.
>> NERMINE EL SAADANY: Thank you, Ginger. I hope my voice is heard in this room. First of all, I'm honored to be a Diplo board member and I do believe in what Diplo is doing in the nation and we're convening especially with the youth part. And maybe you'll agree with me two or three years ago we were looking at the internet impact in the socioeconomic development aspects and daily routines of our lives. Nowadays, with the development of the technology and fact that we are here very far away from Africa and from Australia and from Latin America and I'm sure that through our remote participation we will see active participants from those remote places. This in particular has been affecting largely the development or the way the politicians are doing and convening their daily work. We now see that, for example, President Obama is going on-line, especially to address not only the citizens of the United States but even the globe and the citizens of the whole world to make sure that his message reaches the majority of the people around the globe.
The media people, for example, will go on-line to discussion and debate upon certain politicians or campaign on election campaign or whatever to make sure that their voices as well are heard not only for their own group or within their own country, but across the borders of their own nations. In natural disasters, for example, we see as well that politicians that cannot really reach the disastrous place can use remote facility of the technology, and I would agree with Anriette we need to revise the term remote for citizens in disastrous places and give them encouragement we are there for them and they feel them as well even if they are away physically from the place. The technology now actually forces certain developments and we have to consider these kind of developments and make the best use of. It for example, I would like to suggest that maybe if we want to have the next IGF in Kenya we can have a session totally remote.
We can have like telepresence and we can have certain topic being discussed from active participants not active from the room, but active from other places and we can have this kind of activity and reporting back to the main session of the works. Because now we're here and as Anriette mention withed the participants will comment on what we're saying. Why don't we have them as panelists among ourselves here in the room. They are not here not because they don't want to be here. But certain circumstances has you know, curtailed them to be here physically. So we give them the chance to active participate ate in this way. So I will leave the point here and maybe we can come back at a later discussion. Thank you.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you very much, Nermine. Does anyone else have anywhere mic, could you turn your mic off. See if that helps. I'm finding headphones help a lot. So if you -- the first nine people to get to the corner can get headphones. Nermine, very interesting. Thank you very much. I'm really looking forward to discussing with you the possibilities of combining Anriette's ideas and yours to a remote session. From there I think we should go to a very practical viewpoint and that will also free Bernard up to go around troubleshooting other sessions. So I'm going to ask Bernard Sadaka to come back on and tell us a little bit about the practical side of remote participation. Bernard.
>> BERNARD SADAKA: Yes, thank you. Well, to start I'm not going to talk very much. But I just want to say that a few statistics which are going to be shared in the press conference which is happening at the moment like in five minutes. Well, this is going to be tough. We so far had 18 remote panelists. We had 24 hubs which successfully ed connected to the platforms and 360 plus participants connected to our remote participation platform. I would like to explore our platform a little bit in 30 seconds to show you now I'm sitting in this room, room number 8 and I'm connected to all the other rooms starting from one to 7 including nine. The main session and the press conference at the same time. And I'm able to manage all the sessions at the same time. And whatever -- whoever needs troubleshooting we're troubleshooting on-line through the platform.
Imagine how powerful this platform is. Imagine how good our moderators are. Imagine the future of Internet Governance through remote participation. I mean this is very powerful. This is very meaningful to our society. And I don't want to be very optimistic. I do agree and I do admit that bandwidth is a big issue in remote participation. But at least, at least we're the minimum bandwidth that all our participants have we did manage to have at least audio feed from these participant and I'm very pleased to say that. And I would like to at the end I would like to ask you all if you have any questions about it, if you have any inquires, or if you would like to organise your own remote participation in your own region we can organise it remotely, we can do whatever you want. We are trying to advocate internet governance through remote participation and I hope everyone will be able to do so.
I'm going to have to ask you to forgive me, because I have to jump to the other sessions. If you need anything from me, the guys and everyone will be available to ask me to come. That's it for me. Thank you.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Okay. Thank you very much Bernard. So are you finished gentleman?
>> I wanted to compliment some information about the platform. Because this is the first time we managed to have the Web cast inside WebEx and also to put captioning. I believe this is really important for people attending this session remotely, not only for hearing disabled people but for people that have English as a first language this has been really really important and it's been an improvement this year.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: You're talking about the closed captioning in every single workshop which is something we have to thank the Dynamic Coalition for people with disabilities who have pushed for this and I can tell you that yesterday I was remote moderator on a session, where one of the remote hubs had a firewall problems and connection problems on the last mile and were unable to get into WebEx. They watched the transcript. They could get -- so through the closed captioning they were able to watch the session and then they were able to connect through text. So they actually, without the former platform were able to participate fully using the closed captioning provided on the IGF Web site. And Skype. So there are options and alternatives. You just have to be flexible. I would like to ask our colleague from Finland if you would like to check in with.
>> Can I interrupt you for a second? Before I go I wanted to make sure that (Bernard) you don't even need to connect to WebEx in order to remotely participate. As I am going to show you now, we have global call-in numbers that anyone can call And actually listen to the conferences that are happening and -- conversations that are happening and also participate from his phone to everything happening within WebEx. So they don't even need internet in order to connect to our session. And this is -- I mean I think this is excellent for when it's regarding band width issues and everything else.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: So we have remote participation without Internet. That's -- that's good. I wanted to make sure Bernard you're aware our colleague from Finland will be looking for -- you're from Finland, right? -- will have their IGF and looking to implement remote participation in case we can offer some help. Okay. I'm going to ask Jovan to give a short presentation and some information perhaps in response to Anriette and other ideas on diplomacy and remote participation.
>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you Ginger. We'll have the naming problem -- there was already discussion on appropriate adjective to be used should be remote or enhanced? And what I'm going to do, at 430 I have remote session with remote hub in Belgrid which is organized foreign languages and there will be quite a few linguists and I'll ask them what they can suggest. And it is probably a good example of the -- another aspect of remote participation. It is element of the so-called long tailor capturing expertise in the different circles. In this case, they may help us to find the appropriate term for the remote with enhanced local participation. But generally speaking, by opening the policy process to more people, to remote participation, we're having expertise that exist in the circles that would be otherwise disconnected from the policy process.
Therefore we are enhancing the quality of the discussion and possible inputs, ideas that could have the policy process itself. And this is the first point which I wanted to make. The second one is well related to the fact that in all presentation, obviously, we had very positive braces in the remote participation is great break through and we're very happy that we managed to support this idea. I will try to highlight two points that could be if you can call it, advocate points and they're related to the interaction with very formal traditional processes, in this case, diplomatic circles. We have to be aware in diplomacy that rituals have been developed over the last three or four centuries. They've qualified in Vienna and conventions and Vienna congregation and those rituals are imbedded into diplomacy and based on formalities and hierarchy and on protocol and this is the fact.
This is the reality of the diplomacy. In global policy processes in IG and other processes time and change we have top find interaction within these two worlds, very formal remote participation inclusive engaging and the other very formal usually close circles but effective. We can criticize from outside the diplomatic process duty don't think it will help us to advance the case which I suppose all of us share to have more inclusive and more legitimate diplomacy therefore we have to understand some of the features of that traditional process and need for protocol and for some elements. That bridge between what is gradually developing in a remote participation, and which is demonstrated on these two slides the bridge between inclusive and ineffective so far inclusive and exclusive effective is in my view the key for the future not only of the IGF for remote participation but with of global policy making.
And the reasons that they're not just ethical to have more people involved but practical. Because if you have international conventions and treaties, drafted in the closed circles, they're usually not implemented. Therefore there is a need to increase Lynch massy of global policy making. Diplomats meet and draft agreement and after that many agreements just remain there on the draft. They don't get implemented. People don't feel emotional attachment to it and I can find you many examples. One is intellectual property rights. We have a convention with property organisation but people in many countries all over the world seem to feel those conventions do not reflect the global interests and they feel when they copy the software or DVDs they feel they are doing ethically correct and that's a problem with a global policy making.
If it's not inclusive and doesn't reflect interest of the as many people as possible it is not implemented. And it is in my view the huge challenge that we are going to face. And in that context what is happening in the IGF is laboratory of the global policy making and something which will come to the other agendas including UN and other policy processes maybe if three or four or five years time. But it is in my view inevitable development. There will be more and more requests and what we have to see is how to bridge these two groups. One is Copenhagen summit. This is crowd. People on the street and all over the world, 6 or 7 billion people and other traditional diplomacy which is exclusive and effective and that's challenges how to make this process on the left-hand side both inclusive and effective and remote participation provides some useful inputs and experience that has been done in the IGF is of the broader importance not only for Internet Governance community but also to the diplomats Worldwide and other global policy making processes.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you for bringing in that other -- the other aspects so we have a whole range of remote participation and involvement. After seeing that range now I think with this we're going to go back not much to the council of Europe but to the Euro experience we would like to hear what you have to say. thank you, Ginger. Before I start can I ask a question. How many people are connected remotely to this session? Do we know? No, no, outside.
>> Outside, I'm sorry, six.
>> Six, six in the whole world? Six people connected in the whole world? Okay. And it's just I'm excited by the potential for remote participation. And I really love the idea of people wanting to have a chat with you, with us, and to you know, even though you're not here, it's -- I find it very thrilling. So I'm very thrilled to be here and I would like to thank you all. I would like to thank Ginger and Diplo and Jovan and (Off Microphone) for all their commitments. And things just don't happen just like that. It takes a lot of engagement and it takes a lot of passion I think and it takes a lot of working well beyond the hours that we work to do these things to deliver these things. And my own example, my own personal example is the European dialogue on Internet Governance and what we did this year in Madrid at the end of April in which we really ramped up the whole remote participation, remote hub as cross Europe.
They were approximately -- there were approximately over the two days, 200 people connected remotely at different times. There were ten remote hubs. So ten groups of people in ten different capital cities, sitting and talking for different lengths of time between themselves and connecting, sending in comments, and you know, generally feeling a part or a little bit a part of the discussions. And it was very thrilling to know that we were having that feed. It was the first time for EuroDig to really do that and it was a lot, thanks to -- allowed thanks to -- yes, it was allowed thank to you Ginger and Bill gram and others to make that experience work. And I really appreciate that. And I'm excited -- I was excited by the EuroDig experience which I saw a lot of potential. And there was a lot of contributions.
(Lee) and I think we all agree that dialogue is important. That's why we're here. And, we understand that we see the importance of virtually connecting. It's a form of -- it's all new forms of democracy, inclusiveness exists words like Jovan mentioned and new form with of diplomacy perhaps maybe and just like we use -- for me it's like a parallel universe to conference call. It's a way of including people earlier on upstream, downstream and trying to you know get connections. So for me the technology is just a medium towards a greater understanding about things. So, what I wanted to say is that the EuroDig experience, did it work? Yes, I think it worked. Does remote participation work here? I think, yes, it works to an extent. It works to an extent. It's not fully realized I think. I think we can maybe agree to that.
But we see the potential. But what works, what works about it? I think just the fact that we can include other people with makes it work first of all. And if we can include one more person that's not here then for me, it's a success. So just one more. So if we can keep adding the ones and twos I think that's important. So we start modestly. And we take baby steps and eventually those steps become cultural shifts and demand for greater ramped up remote participation. And how does it work? That's the really important question I think. It doesn't just happen overnight. It's -- tore for me EuroDig the remote hubs was about preparation. It was not about just connecting on the day. The council of Europe which supports the EuroDig has offices in many capital city as cross Europe. And we asked those office if they would like to take part.
They said yes. And they wanted to mobilize people locally, regionally, to come in. And they created through their offices groups of people like my people to meet and discuss and it was preparation. If there was not preparation it would not work. It's a whole process. It needs mobilization. It needs -- I mean, looking to the future for the next in with Belgrade, next year it's going to need lots of preparation. The success for me for remote participation in EuroDig next year is preparation, preparation, preparation, that means from next week when I get back to the office, I want to connect people by teleconference, maybe eventually remotely by with other means, and start preparing the substance, to start preparing what is it that we need to -- why do you need to connect?
>> You need to connect because these issues are important for you. While this one is particularly important. Okay, so early on upstream they start focusing their attention and start having a sense of what they want to discuss and they start averaging in a way they average. So you -- the interest, the attract to people is based upon preparation. So, for me, how it works is the most important thing. So, preparation is the key. And why does it work? Because like Jovan said like you said, inclusion, it made people feel included. When we have the remote -- when we saw the people in different hubs talking and sending in questions in the EuroDig last year -- this year, it was very exciting I think for them and it was very exciting for us. And I had some feedback from different hubs. And they were enthused to be a part of it.
The feeling of being included and it's also new for many of these capital cities the feeling to be just a part of it and discuss these issues was so positive. And it's just the beginning. So, it was a very positive experience for a lot of people. And good feedback. And people want to do it again. But it will only work if we start early and prepare properly. Did -- did remote participation in with EuroDig shape policy? Well, one good example is that the Ukrainian experience based upon that they have now set up a national IGF platform and I heard yesterday that it also is a Russian platform which is being set up too. That experience helped -- it did -- well did it shape policy, maybe not. But it shaped a movement to which would implement policy. So stop me from talking too much Ginger.
But I think with regard to what Jovan said about with diplomacy the question is is what's the -- what is very note? What's the objective of remote participation? Is it just a dialogue? It's more than dialogue. It's inclusion. It's inclusion. It's a feeling of being included and a feeling that you can participate in democracy or many elements of democracy. And dialogue and ability to mobilize, mobilization, it's a whole new process. We understand that. But it's not just dialogue. Looking to the future what's the tipping point? Where does it go? Where does remote take off? So much that it is demanded. I don't want -- I want remote. I'm not going to the IGF. I'm not going to be involved unless it's remote. Because I have a lot of stakeholders or people I work with who need to be connected.
I'm not just going to go there and then report back to you. In fact, when you see all these workshops and the amount of information which is circulating how can you fully -- how do you find the time to report back all of that work. It's just difficult. It's important to -- I wonder when that tipping point is? And is it a cultural shift? Do you feed a cultural shift to really make that tipping point happen? I mean, when will that demand really take off. I mean someone once told me it took Microsoft five years and Twitter three years and I wonder how long it will take for remote to conquer the world. My other question then is there a limit what can be achieved by remote participation? What is the limit? Can or should it replace physical meetings or diplomacy. I think it is often by physical contact.
And I'm not sure you can replace that. But, remote participation is about dialogue. It's physical and it's virtual. So it has its place. I would like to know more from you where you think that tipping point is. And at what point will we demand that we don't hold meetings unless they have closed captioning, remote links, you can see the people, and then really, which means that we demand inclusiveness in the dialogue. Thank you.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you very much. Sorry?
>> A quick comment.
>> AUDIENCE: Just a quick comment about the tipping point. When we started capturing IGF meetings five years ago in Geneva I expected other UN agencies will look and see, okay, let us try to implement that this is interesting and empowering and this inclusiveness. Unfortunately after five years I think the only people who use it for one of their meetings, it seems that that question of professional culture is more challenging than we expect. And there is example in UN in policy in Geneva but it didn't take sort of following use.
>> Allow me to step in as well. I have a couple of comments. I agree with Lee and you have both very important points because remote participation is not by simply means listen to the discussions. It needs intense preparation back home. I remember that when we were in the process of hosting the IGF we were requested and this year as well we were requested to have remote hub in Egypt and we can't do it because we didn't have the resources to invest the money and effort to mobilize the community of remote hub and having them actively participate into the discussion. Neither did we have the time even this year. And this actually makes me refer to the importance of the capacity of the remote participation. Maybe you can include it in one of your eSources or something because as a government for example we need to know how to do it, and to do it right.
Not only just log in to the discussion of one meeting or another. Thank you.
>> One more point if I -- sorry, sorry.
>> LEE HIBBARD: One more point. Being realistic about the value of remote participation and so we don't spoil it, it's what the real challenge in a limited time frame whether it's one or two day meetings or four days of meetings or two hours of meeting together is that if I have lots of discussion dialogue, and you're trying as a moderator to include the remote, it's very difficult to up include it all. Because you know you have to have a feed coming in all the time. You have to -- it's very difficult to make it seamless. You need skills to do that. Plus if people want to talk if there are 500 people on-line connected to the workshop we would not be able toe talk as much as we're talking because they would all want to talk as well. We have to be realistic. How much dialogue can remote facilitate in a meeting like this.
Because people will feel frustrated with if they can't have their voice heard. If there's 50 questions we won't address 50 questions this meeting. I can hardly address three or four because there's -- it's managing the time here physically is determining the success of the remote connection. So they need to feel -- we all need to feel like we're being licensed to. You need to know if you're connected remotely that I'm listening to you and I'm going to direct your question. But there's only so much time you can react to questions. So we have to be realistic. That's very important. And that makes me -- I would like to make a proposal for future remote is that if the time frame is such that it's difficult to fit everything in, as we ramp up and become more interested, then we should at least try to prepare and have preparatory meetings whereby we have you know a shadow preparatory remotely connected discussion where we collect, we harvest the ideas and discussions in remote hubs and those things and we make sure that it's driven into the preparation of the physical meeting.
Because that's needed too, too make it realistic and try to get the voices heard. That's the part of the preparation.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: I'm going to jump in now because I think I might be the oldest in the room and I forget things. And we'll let Raquel talk. Also some of the comments I have I would like to make go back a little ways. We're going to get them lost. And I think it's very, very important to reinforce the point that Lee made, that for me at least remote participation is about inclusion. Most times the people who most need to be at the IGF or at these meetings are precisely the ones that cannot be here and who do not have funding and can't make. It they didn't get Visas and air ticket on time. And those are the people that most need to be here. It's -- it is about inclusion and it is about bringing those people in. So, that's -- that makes remote participation more important than ever. One thing I would like to mention about the numbers is we have 11 in satisfy to participants and six remote and ten panelists.
It's not actually a bad proportion of that ratio. We have almost half as many remote participants as in satisfy two participants. The upstream downstream preparation is important. We are working on it. I don't know if you're aware. But the remote participation working group had at least ten online sessions preparing and teaching for remote moderators. And we did quite extensive e-mail preparation. So we are there are definitely a capacity building and preparation not only in topics in agenda setting as Anriette and Nermine indicated but also technical and ease of participation so that people do get involved. Each time it has been better. And when we complain about with our remote participation I think we're being a little bit picky because if you think about it right now, we're sitting here in this room, and the reason we're wearing head sets is not because Anriette suggested we be remote preparations it's a defense mechanism.
We can't hear. I doubt very much we're going to go around complaining. Yes, we know it happened. But if this was remote participation they could say yeah we hardly could hear, but we're very hard on remote participation. And you see problems in a conference room not enough plugs. Yesterday no one could present a document. And if you're at home in the office you can print it, e-mail it and get it out. So I don't think we should be more demanding of remote participation than we are of in-person. So, -- wow this is just a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate everybody coming in and talking because I'm learning so very, very much. I promise I'm going to stop. One more point with. I find last year I attended Sharm el Sheikh remotely. I gave a presentation remotely and in a workshop remotely. They went seamlessly.
(Microphone may be off) okay that's a signal I'm talking too much. You're getting back -- that's not true. I planned that just to show that in C 2 participation has problems as well. Conspiracy. I was closing with saying that I found the remote participation experience in Sharm el Sheikh to be extremely rewarding and extremely complete. And I told the participants for this year that I felt like I had an Omni present power because I could look at the overview and switch workshops and go back and forth if I didn't like a workshop I switched to another one. I could watch two at the same time. There are some real advantages to remote participation if we are properly prepared. And yes I will stop now and turn it over to Raquel is next on my list and then Marilia.
>> RAQUEL GATTO: First I need to do a correction with the numbers. Actually, I discovered that some of the participants are here at least three of them team, Edmon and myself. So we're overlapping the numbers.
>> We also have people watching the Web cast and following on Twitter who are not in the WebEx room and there's a number of them also. These numbers don't represent the full amount of remote participants.
>> RAQUEL GATTO: It's great, yeah. So actually my observation was just to add on what Lee was saying about with results of the remote hubs and we had the opportunity yesterday just in the main session about access and diversity. We received an e-mail from Bangladesh hub and I allow myself To read again because it's very clear how we can bring results and we can construct IGF national IGFs and local knowledge. So, that hub participants in today's two main sessions it was yesterday. We had around 55 participants from managing internet resource and about 20 for access and diversity. For most of the participants this was an eye-opening to IGF. We never had such an opportunity in the past to witness and participate in this Forum. We are all really appreciative of IGF Secretariat for providing remote participation tools.
Quality of video and audio was exceeded our -- has exceeded our expectations. Though we all participated remotely clarity of web casts made us feel we were there. This is the Bangladesh hub had broader participation from Government, regulatory agencies -- WebEx is popping up -- regulatory telecom education institution and service providers and (Off Microphone) society. Officials attended the hub and most of them felt happy to see in the room sharing the views in open center. Bangladesh hub also is thankful for BPC for organising remote hub to give us an opportunity to be participate of IGF 2010. We are now in agreement to establish a national IGF to continue our participation in our future IGFs. This is a clear message to the work that has been done. And I think it also since we could not get the Philippines hub it's a feedback from one of the pieces we are building on.
So I give the mic back to Ginger.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you very much Raquel. We'll hear from Marilia and then Anriette.
>> Actually I wanted to make electrician considerations and hear feedback from you because there's some things I believe we need to improve in terms of process. And I wanted to hear what you think about it. The initiative about with with remote participation began with two legs. The first leg was Diplo trying to push forward democracy and building courses about that and making -- raising capacity and Ginger was one of the persons moving this theme. And on the other hand it appeared out of frustration because in Brazil, there was going to be remote participation. And because of political sensitivities onsite, there was a decision that there was not going to be remote participation. That the chat was not going to be displayed on the screen. And this was really let down the Brazilians because they were working a lot in order to do that and at the last minute it didn't happen.
So, after that I believe that we tried on the next year to do something that would like bring remote participation in but it has been a very difficult process in terms of building trust with the other side, like what Government says about the ritual of the diplomatic environments is so true. And we have seen that we have come a long way in terms of contact with the Secretariat and I mean they have been very helpful and everything and very supportive. But it's something we have built from ear to ear. In the beginning there was no trust. And from one year to the other we have begun to build trust. But the problem is that I believe this is build on personal trust. And this worries me because this should be a more institutionalized initiative. If I'm not here and joinier is not here and if Michael goes to other organizations and don't do IGF anymore I don't know what will be the future of remote participation because it's not been institutionalized.
It's not said anywhere that this is something that is participate of the IGF and best practice of how to build this into the IGF process. So I believe this is something we need to move forward and that it requires I think political preparation. And I'm not sure of how we could address this. I know that you have been in the IGF process for a while and you understand this process better than I do. Maybe if you could bring in some thoughts about that I believe it to be really really good. Other thing is that we have started to work this year and I would like to hear from team about with his feedback. Last year, when we had this workshop about remote participation one of the criticisms was that there was too much information on-line and too little integration. There was no umbrella that could hold together all of the different information coming from remote participants and in the WebEx and Twitter and facebook et cetera and team has created a platform that is aggregator of all this feed that are coming from remote participants and I believe that it's going to be improved from one year to the other.
But I believe if we can do it it can be amazing because if you follow the main session, you see all this political statements being made and you see like people saying, oh, we don't want political statements anymore go straight to the point . the point is this you were avoiding this point because of this or this and people are talking about us on Twitter and all this creates amazing parallel narrative of what is taking place here. And we have been losing this from one year to the other. That's why I believe that initiative of the aggregator is fundamental and I wanted to hear from team as well how we can push this forward and institutional lies it better and prepare better for next year. And the last point, I totally agree with what Lee said about with making some components of IGF process and take place remotely.
It doesn't make sense we go to Geneva And actually this is bad for developing countries because it always takes place in Geneva for you it's easier to be there and for me I can be there all the time. Because of that, developing countries don't have such a power to influence the agenda setting of the IGF, for instance, we try to bring some things like that, knowledge that is important to us but we're not trained in preparing meetings and other -- put this in the main session sessions and let's approve nor workshops. It's difficult for us in terms of not only bringing more people in but terms of equality as well and participation of equality among countries and stakeholders. And I believe that remote participation could also have an important role complimentary role in terms of regional meetings because we were talking in the other session over there that it's not clear the role of regional IGFs how they fit into the umbrella of the Internet Governance process and this kind of preparation, this remote preparation that can be done months before the meeting.
This is very important to in my opinion to link the prep pair tory regional and imagination national meetings with IGF to have it throughout the year. Thank you.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you Anriette and we ask you to jump in.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: I was going to say do you want to respond first Tim? And I think Ginger left out one major advantage when she went through it. You can participate in your pajamas. Don't forget. And I think that the other just also in reaction to Marilia I think on-line learning platforms and virtual learning has been very influential in developing expertise and platforms. So I think we'll probably see that as the on-line learning increases, it will have a ripple affect that influences remote participation. And another limitation a physical limitation and this from Ginger is that I can't actually bring the mic closer. And I think I want to respond to Lee's questions. He said is there a limit? And I think it depends on the type of meeting. And the number of people. I think there might be a need in something huge like the IGF to have a more differentiated strategy for remote participation.
And it is great to have six people in one workshop and two in another and ten in another. But maybe we can identify which sessions are strategic where developing country issues perhaps are being discussed and it's really important their voices are heard. And then we maximize participation in those sessions. And I think there is perhaps a tendency to legitimate processes like this by introducing remote participation. But if they want effective participation perhaps fewer sessions, that are open, but most strategic sessions could have a greater affect. And I think it also depends on technology. I think -- and this takes me into your question about where is the tipping point? I think once meeting facilities that places everyone on a level playing field like IGF meetings the technical community is meeting like this for a long time all sitting in a room in front of laptops and don't talk to one another.
And I think once their technology is available so that there is equal participation whether you're inside the room or outside the room, I think we might begin to see that tipping point. But we also should not take that there are real forces that might counter that. Often in a global governance process you have a particular international organisation funding and paying for travel of people to come to the event because they want to Influence the outcomes of this event because this is politics. And what would be interesting to see is whether this is replicated in remote participation or not and I think it's something for us to watch out for. And I think we should use it. We should use the remote participation to Democratize process rather than the same old patterns. And Lee also asked, can or should it replace physical contact?
And I'm not sure. I think that it's -- the answer is probably yes and no. But I think, you know, and -- if we look at this long-term and if we also look at governance processes having different steps and different components and maybe it can. I think also if you look at young people use the internet and mobile phones almost exclusively for social interaction. So this what many people of our generation experience as a different type of interaction face to face from the type of interaction that you have on-line. Those divisions, those differences are going away. So I think it's probably fairly open. I just find what Marilia saying about it being institutionalizes I think it has to be and I think you're right and I think at this point in time it probably won't be. I think there are access infra structure problems that are mitigating against that.
I also think there are political traditions within the international system that is mitigating and against that. I can imagine the developing country Governments for example in a UN process would be quite drawn on the one hand they would feel it could enhance their participation and on the other hand they might feel that the lack of access to technology could mean that it could decrease participation. And then, of course, we all know Government officials like to travel all over the world. So they might want to carry on having those perks as well. I think we do need border change. So I think it's interesting. I think we really should -- and those of us -- and that have been, yourselves that have been at the forefront of those and make this a movement not just for making these meetings more inclusive, but really making the decision making process more inclusive.
And I think we need to look at institutionalizing it within the IGF group. I think the time is right and there's no reason why it can't be taken to another level. An I would like to hear those of you that have been thinking about this how this can be done.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you, Anriette. Right now we have Tim and my colleague on the list and then I suggest we give Edmon and -- Rodney okay from there what I would like to do is make sure we finish presentations and we'll bring in other elements that should be involved in the discussion. Please make note of the things you're wanting to say right now and I'll let Tim takeover.
>> Tim: I'll try to do this with some enhanced participation. If everyone has their laptops and I'll read a link which is bit.league/IGF-SR for social reporting. And that will show you and it's written there it if you can see that, it will show you Twitter messages that are going on during this session. And we hope people are watching the Web cast but are not in the WebEx and I noticed that in many sessions to be the case. And then we have people in the WebEx not here. We've been trying to bring that together. And what it struck me we have is we have a combination of formal and informal remote with participation. We have in WebEx the more formal, which maybe we need to think about what is the protocol for participation this that space building on Jovan's points and we also have this informal engagement happening internet time and multi-tasking with people inside the venue and outside the venue and talking to each other and talk ago cross rooms and having what has felt to me like a really enhanced engagement in events and sharing links.
I noticed in sessions which papers are handed out someone finds that paper on the Web and shares the link to it on Twitter and anyone following that then has a comparable experience and in fact enhanced experience they can search through that document and find out what exactly is being talked about and quote it and share it back to people. And this is going on. It's interesting to work how do we bring that and build on this experiment to bring that into the process. Recognizing that to integrate that informal network into the formal process would be challenging but can add for participant here to be able to see that. So we have questions following us I believe from Germany and he said on Twitter, the remote part space need not just be about with audio conferencing but about text. I don't just want to ask questions I may simply have statements which could be silently consumed could those be made visible to people in the room.
I felt very privileged to be following workshops on-line and seeing silent statements from many people and those are been some of the best contributions I've seen in workshops as Marilia says the debate takes off there when the statements are maybe -- could have been prepared long before and read out. And so I think we have challenges here to work on how to bring the processes together and show people how they can enhance participation but also how there's distinct ways of participating. I think that's the main thing I'll say that. Bought really I'll make sure we write up the learning from this aggregation experiment. And the one thing that was crucial to making that work was a very simple infra structural thing knowing about the structure of IGF and I had to spend a long time exacting data from the programme and make sense of what are the sessions and we had to encourage people to when he they share content make clear which session they go to.
Only some have that message and can participate. It's simple things about sharing structure of IGF in digital forms would be helpful, too.
>> Jennifer: Thank you. Would you please give us your comments?
>> Can we wait until other presenters are done and I can come in and comment? Okay.
>> Ginger And Rodney did you want to speak now.
>> Rodney: Yes because it was just a point really in relation to intervention that was made by my colleague here with respect to some of the issues -- it may be a small point but with respect to developing country issues and developed country issues, I just think that that should not not be the approach. I think what we really need is developing country perspective on all the issues. All the issues are relevant to developing countries which captures a broad range of countries. And I think if we look at some of the issues as developing country issues and developed country issues we may approach it in the wrong way. What we need really is developing country perspective on all of the issues being presented. And I also wants wanted to say that n indeed the work that Diplo is doing with respect to capacity building is also very relevant in terms of participation because it's not just a matter of again I mean this point was made logging in but being able to understand the issues.
And the work that Diplo is doing with respect to raise ago raising awareness and building that capacity is critical -- is a very critical part with respect to even creating the interest of the policy holders within developing countries who sometimes really don't think that the issues are relevant. Thank you.
>> Ginger Thank you Rodney. Because I know we have -- we had -- this discussion is incredible and we have a lot of things we need to build on. I am going to suggest that we do what is another kind of remote participation is that, for instance, yesterday we had a net neutrality pan panel I was very unsatisfied with the outcome and we will be posting that transcript on-line and continuing that discussion to bring in the points we didn't have time to do or we didn't figure out the thought processes. So I would like to invite all of you to please look for the transcript on line. I'll publish it and we'll build on this. Because you guys are wonderful. We have some great ideas. And in that vein I would like to thank whoever is doing our closed captioning because they're doing a wonderful job and it is what is going to enable that continuation (thank you).
>> Right now Edmon I would like to get over you to I won't introduce you would you please.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Not a problem. This is Edmon Chung. I think I guess both your thanking the captioning scribes and also Tim's comment just now is good segue to what I wanted to talk about. Ginger asked me to sort of prepare three points I wanted to talk about. And the first of which is you know I guess having some experience with what is so-called remote participation and somewhat share the sentiments of not call it remote participation is that there's -- it's of great importance for both formal and informal channels. And I think for me, actually, I think Lee mentioned a question whether where were we when people actually demand this type of remote participation and allow people to do this? And sorry to say at least ten years ago when I was starting to participate in ICANN or IATF I sort of took it for granted.
One of those is you know it was actually to my surprise when I went to some other conventions or conversations that this is not available. So, I am one of those who would say that I definitely demand it. And I -- I guess a good example is myself just a little earlier I had to skip to another workshop to give a presentation while the same time I was actually watching the live Scribe here again the Scribes are phenomenal and it allowed me to sort of keep an eye on what is happening. So it's also important I think for those in -- at the venue. So I think what was talked about remote participation, it's to me, it's more like network participation or network enhanced participation kind of thing. So, I definitely think that it's very important and enhances the whole experience. And it is one thing that at least myself completely demand and in any type of conversations and speaking of that I wanted to talk conferences and I wanted to talk about the formal and informal communication channels.
We talked a little bit about institutionalizing. It my experience after actually organising different events in fact introducing sort of on-line discussion during seminars or even training programs that we have done before, tells me that the formal channels sparks the initial sort of participation, but really what happens is that the discussion then moves to informal channels. That's how it works. I mean, even in the conferences like IGF or wherever, a lot of discussion happens in the hall ways. And that's why one of the questions about whether face to face meeting is important, I think it's some parts of it cannot be replaced. And in terms of the remote participation or network participation, both the formal and informal channels are equally important. We look at the participation right now. Just a few people on the WebEx.
But there are a lot more people watching live Scribes and a lot more people watching the video and that then you know, the conversation may be taking place on Twitter, it may be taking place on facebook or may be taking place on their own instant messaging and that is I think the really the power of this technology and I guess what we are calling remote participation. So we really can't measure only you know what is on the official sort of remote participation. And I think this is something even if you institutional lies let's say we put a Twitter wall right next to that, the same thing would happen. A lot of the conversations are somewhat more intimate and also a lot of the conversations are intended to be as mentioned silent statements. Not everyone, even if they are watching the official proceedings, not everyone wants to post to the official place.
They want to have their own spaces. And sort of what my experience is, we have this programme called net mission, but then we had seminars and workshops where we initially encouraged participation from the students to on-line chat as the guest speaker was speaking. But quickly we realized that the actual conversation is happening outside you know because we -- they were able to connect and they were you know chatting with each other. But that actually enhances the experience, because then they can share information, they're searching on-line and a lot of that is sort of necessarily informal because that actually then informs the formal discussion. I think that is definitely the experience we had I think at ICANN with some of the meetings that we have. In fact any meeting we have, there's a sort of bat channel chat that is happening that affects you know what is then being said.
So I think that definitely needs to put into context. And we shouldn't be measuring just you know remote participation so nobody really is using it, we don't get any comments and think that it's a failure. It's definitely not the case. And just by providing the information and providing the Web casts and live Scribes on-line and that itself is important. And somebody talked about sensitivity and I guess in Brazil. But what I was really excited about is a recent experience actually in China. And if China can do it -- well, China -- the recent China internet conference I was extremely excite excited to see there was actually a live -- it was not Twitter for other reasons, similar reason -- it was not Twitter but Twitter equivalent being on at every venue -- every room has a live Twitter equivalent to service that people can keep posting to and there's a dialogue going on.
And if that can happen anyone China, I think it's -- it serves as a good direction that we're heading.
I'll quickly talk about two other points which I think are less of an item. But, again, I think the informal channel is really important. And then the second point that I had is the importance of immediate feedback. I mentioned that as the -- as we have these sort of conversations that are going on, having somebody as someone just pointed out somebody was saying something about the session going on, having somebody interact at the venue sort of immediately, or even you know having some obviously having sort of a official look a Twitter wall, is important. Because it's important that there's an immediate feedback. Those who are participating remotely, while a lot of them might just want to be silent participant, some of them -- when you see that your participation could immediately be reflected in the live venue, that is really of great importance.
And final point I want to talk about is the importance of participation from those at the venue. Not only to bring those remote participating conversations to bring it to the table, but also you know spark discussion that I personally try to you know in the sessions I'm in, I try to be on -- that's why I'm on the WebEx. Because it's -- sometimes when you're not speaking during the session it's useful for those who are at the venue to interact with the remote participants as well. So I guess with that, those are the three main things I wanted to talk about in terms of the experience that we had in organising different events, even blogger festivals and training programs that first of all, you know the formal channel but also the informal channel is really the ones that are even more exciting in fact. But, you can try to -- you can try to institutional lies it as you want, but the conference a lot of the real conversations will happen in informal channels.
So that's the nature of the internet itself.
Second one is immediate feedback at the venue. It's very important for those who are participating to see that you know, those in the venue can -- are paying attention as well.
The third one is those who are participating here I guess I would encourage everyone to be on the WebEx and not only could we talk to each other through that channel, but it would also help remote participants be more active in interacting with the what's happening live. Thank you.
>> Ginger. Thank you very much. Wonderful points. I would like to point out that I think you contradicted yourself. You said that you thought that the reason that physical meetings would continue to be important was corridor diplomacy you didn't use that term but you were talking about that in the networking and you went on to explain how does that does in fact happen remotely.
>> EDMON CHUNG: I missed one more point that would happen remotely as well but there's another I guess what some of the geeks call super high bandwidth interaction and that's something that can really not be replaced at least at this point I can see in the technology, it's the gesturing is the you know like -- people can see me gesturing. But they may not be seeing who I'm gesturing it to. And there's in the hallways and you know a lot of things that is super high bandwidth which you know right now I think the technical we have still cannot fully capture at the moment.
>> Ginger Okay. Great. I stand corrected. I would like to ask our colleague now to intervene. If we have time, Marilia I don't know if you want to explain a little bit about remote hubs or we'll see how many people wanted to add to the conversation. So just let me know. Okay? Go ahead and then Judy.
>> Thanks Ginger. Good afternoon everybody. As I said before in the introduction my name is Katim Tore open source foundation of Africa and member of Board of Directors of ICANN which I'm on the remote committee. This is why this meeting is especially important to me. As I've been telling people I think it's very important where the cusp I think of significant break through to have very profound impact on governance and meetings. We might see this as a solution to meetings. But at the end ever the day the end result of this would be improve governance by virtual and increasing quality of participation that we would have for a reason. I think it makes sense to have greater corporation between ICANN and the IGF because we all have frequent meetings. Hopefully IGF will have frequent won't meetings not only the global one but also the regional ones.
I can also -- ICANN has tons of meetings not only international meetings but regular meetings we have. I think it makes sense for us to sit down together and see what we can do to explore ways and means of leveraging resources and talents and seeing what we can do to deliver the best possible service to the stakeholders and community. And the other thing also, the point that was raised was what was going to limit it this remote participation. I thought off the top of my head there's going to be probably a number of factors that would affect the limit or the limits of remote participation. First, of course, will be -- we get to the point it's extraordinary expensive to fly. We consideration participation if you have sources provided to you. The other driver for more participation of course would be also convenience.
Anriette said you can show up in pajamas and nobody would know. I think we can say also you don't have to deal with whether you don't like -- I moved from where I was from here I'm freezing cold here I'm slivering like you would not believe. It was like I wish I was sitting in my bedroom participating and I would be sweating instead of freezing. That would be a driver as silly as it might sound. There's also security concerns that could be drivers to remote participation with. Classic example of this is what happened or what we experienced during ICANN in Kenya. For better or worse there's a lot of people who said because of personal -- at the level of governance that would not try because of the talk about wars it's not safe and there is going to be a big risk. It's not justified what is going to happen here.
And what is happening is a lot of people ended up participating remotely. And people -- it shows us exactly what was possible. And it was especially timely or mostly likely a blessing in disguise because it happened at a time where Kenya finally had about two or three (Off Microphone) and they could take those all the way to the conference center and getting bandwidth we needed to do streaming and also support remote participation. So of course finally, there's also going to be the -- issues some governance will decide for whatever rather than go to China or Venezuela i would like to have them stay rather than go to the countries. And let me add briefly there's going to be a capacity constraint. More and more the people use this I think we'll get to the point where we become victims of our own success. Was it Mark Twain that says the place is so is popular that nobody goes there anymore.
I can see that coming. Along those lines when we think about remote participation let's not look at it as a tool to support meetings let's see it as something that could have a global impact. The way I see it the internet if you're doing anything that doesn't have a global dimensions it probably is not worth. So by way of action points what I would like to suggest again is along the lines of what Virginia was saying dialogue and another point would be to what we can do to conquer steps to ICANN and sit and try to figure out how we can build a strong and lasting relationship. One. Number two, there's a lot of United Nations countries and they have the best connectivity in a lot of these countries. They could leverage in my opinion to provide remote hubs not only for IGF but for ICANN to also promote remote hub facilities for ICANN and then of course we can also look at the -- the internet is visible.
Start developing networks of remote participation facilitators and in that vein we can also do on-line survey, survey monkey or whatever you want to use an on-line survey of remote UNICEF or UNDP or ICANN. Basically go and say what do I have in country X, Y, Z and who is the person to contact and then basically it will help I think it would be a wonderful planning tool and opportunity for us to basically leverage the interests net. I think that's pretty much about what I had. Again, thank you very much for a wonderful meeting. I almost pulled out because what's it called again because this place is so cold. But let me say one final point. ICANN, one thing I would suggest is what we want to explore is possibility of using multi-language web feeds. Right now when we do this we stream what's being said. But we have simultaneous translation in six languages why can't we stream all of those languages on the Web so you just connect in and of course you can also build structures to pup port that web feed be it WIKI or what have you.
And so with that I'll keep quiet and I'm really excited about all of this. Thank you very much.
>> Ginger I'm excited about it too. I warn you we'll count on you to help us solve some of the problems you mentioned. Katim also reminded us we did talk about continuing this discussion, building on the transcript. So I would like to invite those -- there's two of you over there and here I don't have your e-mail addresses if you would like to be included please before you leave today give me your e-mail address to I can include you on the discussion list as we continue. Also, Bernard had to leave again. But he did attend the press with conference and he said there were 15 people connected to the press conference remotely. So the press conference held here did have remote participation and to of the participants actually presented questions which were then answered by Markus, the participants in the press conference.
So the image of remote participation is reaching out a little bit further every day. And I think we have Judy next waiting to speak.
>> Judy: Thank you Ginger. I work with software foundation for Africa. On a project -- I'm a project coordinator and I work with regional IGF east Africa and west Africa. It's normally a trick when your boss picks before you, you took away all my lines. So I'll do the two lines you didn't speak Katim. I will mention about with accessibility when it comes to remote participation. When the remote hubs make their requests I don't know whether that is considered or considerations how accessible will the place be and how many people can get there? And then I'll further continue to emphasize on the capacity building. And I know that in Kenya we got involved in the Internet Governance because of the few of us that did the Internet Governance capacity building by Diplo and so we understood why we needed to be in this.
And so to further approach this even through the Kenya Government it has to make sense. And lastly, I would say the information that is being picked from the remote participation, it must have impact. It must make sense. Thank you.
>> Ginger. Thank you, Judy. Since you did mention remote hubs be Malilia would you like to give us quick overview of the remote hub structure for those that might not be familiar how it works and I would like to ask those who have not spoken yet if you have input we would like to hear it. So signal. Thank you.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: The remote hubs it's very simple. Meetings that take place in parallel with the IGF in several city around the world where people go and gather together to watch the Web cast and then they conduct discussions about the topics that they have seen. Of course, people could watch the Web cast individually from home or office. But what is important about the hubs is that it's a way to build a connection with other people in the community who have similar interests. It's a way to build a community interest in IGF. It's local to discuss IG and in fact the Web cast is only leak a feeder for discussions that are going to take place locally. Usually the hubs do not watch all the Web casts for many reasons such as time zone difference et cetera. They pick sessions they want to watch and they use it like a study point for local debate.
And I believe that this setup this hub setup has already generated fruits like in the e-mail that was read earlier the hub was a starting point in order to build IG scene and create a local IGF and Bangladesh next year. So I believe it fulfills this purpose with us. And for myself I just wanted to make one brief comment about we turn to the question of how to institutional lies remote participation inside the IGF process. I would like to comment a bit about the code of best practice for participation in Internet Governance meetings. I don't know if we can do something similar like that when it comes to remote participation. Lee had to leave. But he came here and he said something that is important with. We should build a framework for remote participation that would apply to national, regional and global IGFs and create like a structure and coherence between remote participation and several steps of the Internet Governance process.
And he asked of me to mention a second thing that he believes is important that is in the preparatory meetings he believes remote participation, remote participation meeting should take place one day in add raps advance of the preparatory meeting sometimes it's difficult in a preparatory meeting to hear everybody and to be able to system ties and summarize everything coming from E notes. So his suggestion was to make remote meeting preparatory meeting one, two days in advance of the meeting or opening consultations and to feed this into the meeting and to feed the result of this into the presentation so it would have more coherence and people would have per perception that their participation is really impacting on policy and decision.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you Marilia. I'm going to add you to the list. I have my colleague here and then we'll ask for response.
>> CHUCK Gomez: Thank you. My name is Chuck Gomez from VeriSign one thing I noticed in most of the discussion today all of the focus is on participation in meetings. I heard Lee talk earlier about the difficulty of effectively involving large numbers of people in an on-line meeting. So I don't know if intentionally the focus is on just meetings themselves but one way of dealing with the issue of the complexity when you have a lot of people in a live meeting, is by other tools in advance. E-mail, comment periods. Some of you mentioned Twitter and other ways. But I think that's a really important element to make meetings more effective. If the folk -- and I'm sure it's not intentionally that way is the focus is primarily on how to do the meetings effectively, without focusing also on advance activities that can make the meeting more effective I think that's a really important area to focus on.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you very much. Great points.
>> MARILIA MACIEL: Thanks, Ginger. I just wanted to ask I realize that on some platforms very few people are participating like three, four, I was remote moderator this morning and I only had one hub. Why is it that there are very few people participating on-line. Is this something you researched why there's few people with. I'm sure there would be a lot of people that wouldn't to participate on-line. It is because they're not aware they can participate. It's something I want to find out why we have very few people with participating remotely. And the second things I wanted to find out is, remote participation -- on remote participation is for those people that cannot be on-line at that particular time, how can they also participate? Can they write their questions before with hand or end of the presentations -- or for the presentations beforehand.
That's it.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you very much. We will get back to those questions. They're very important. Should we -- we're waiting for Anriette and we'll have Jovan and go back to M with Mirilia questions.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you for the question Marilia. I think that -- well the code of good practice for those not aware of it is now a document and developed by United Nations economic commission for Europe, council of Europe and ourselves association for pro aggressive communications. And even though we've been doing this for years and have a code I feel we just started the process. The code mentions remote participation with. But I think the real value of the code is that it makes the point that there are mechanisms and processes that as a governance institution need to consider that they are as important as face to face participation as they are to remote participation. And such as access to information in different languages to people that are differently able and information about with the background to a process about who are the decision-makers that are part of that process.
So it's very simple. It's just saying you can listen in. And that -- or that you can come to the meeting. So, I think -- but I think if that approach to really enhancing participation and -- can become integrate add approach, maybe analogy here is universal design. It's a concept of universal design. It's design of technology and interfaces that are as available to people that are blind or have no fingers as they are to people that are fully able. And it's saying always design your interfaces for the person who has the most bias in participating. And I think that would be perhaps the kind after approach we can have. And I think in terms of where the code is going, having just a document is not really very meaningful. I think perhaps what we can look at in IGF is a guide to enhancing participation and building that more into the capacity build withing processes as well.
There are some institutions like ICANN that is using remote participation for a long time and the information is always available on-line. And many people yet find ICANN immensely confusing and difficult to participate in. So, I'm not sure if I'm answering that question. I just I think I agree with you. I think we need to push for institutionalizing participation and transparency and access to information in the IGF and make the remote participation part of that process but make it also perhaps a broader process of institutionalizing participation.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: It's amazing how the points are linking back to each other with institutionalization and Anriette I think you improved the points Chuck brought up. Thank you very much. And we'll let Jovan.
>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Just a few quick comments. You notice I left the room for ten minutes with. I had the remote hub in (Off Microphone) and the effect of linguistics and it's one example Marilia just mentioned with withed there's different reasons people are attending and following IGF through remote hubs. In this case there's enthusiastic Professor and few students who came to learn more on the language and internet and they organized remote hub and their interest is in linguistics and this shaping negotiations in mull multi- lingualism and it's their corner they're following the Internet Governance Forum. We should not try to replicate. And this is beauty. People will find different angles depending what their interrogatories. Legal concerns, cyber security, linguistics, development, you name it and you have it. And this is important for us.
This is first thing. Second extremely important aspect raised by Lee and a few other speakers is that it has to be very formal when it comes to planning the organisation and Marilia can spend hours explaining to us her experience in remote participation in group. And that we have to formalize as much as' with I believe. And to have as much to have help and support from the institutions for that aspect. But when it comes to the way how people perceive it it shouldn't be that formal. If you formalize it too much maybe this Professor of linguistics wouldn't be able to think of the possibility he can organise discussion on linguistical aspect. We have to be very formal but when it comes to when is under the bonnet and how it works and procedures and on the other side we have to leave it completely open for people to discover the space and place in the discussion.
Thank you.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: Thank you Jovan. Unfortunately we're running out of time. And once again I see that all of our discussions are linked. I do invite you again to give me your e-mail address if I don't have it and if you are interested in continuing the discussion before we close I'll briefly address some questions and I suggest we continue them on-line because I know you're all hungry and need to get off to lunch. Part of the reason I think there are aren't as many visible in the numbers on-line although there I would agree with Lee if there's even one, it's well worth it, secondly, even if you can't see them, they may be there. A lot are watching the Web cast and they're connected and watching the closed captioning or they're connecting in many of the ways that Edmon in particular mentioned and also other people with mentioned.
So it's not really the only numbers with although this is a problem and there's awareness raising process and capacity building process as you mentioned that needs to be worked on and perhaps we can do some exchanges on how to address those problems. But it is not just the numbers that you see on the WebEx screen. There's a lot more people with particularly if you notice that in a big with hall many of the participants never speak. You don't hear from them. But they're there and they're listening and participating in their own way. That is also true in remote participation the majority of people don't respond. They're listening and enjoying and responding and thinking. Internally. Asynchronously It is very much things Chuck said and Anriette said the preparation and planning for the idea so far people have always been invited to send their input by video or by e-mail ahead of time if they will not be able to attend.
Or they won't be able to be at the session. This is something else that we have talked about and we need to work on to get the previous and continuation the follow up, because as several people mentioned, the meeting is just one moment of the process. The preparatory process and follow up Chuck I really liked what Chuck said that if we don't make the meeting effective and we don't put into action what we did, then so we didn't need to do preparation and we need to do the meeting and we need follow up to make sure we're working on it and remote participation allows that. And any last burning issues? Or can I let you go to lunch. Please.
>> I think the more participation on the other side, whoever is moderating should be equally conversant with them. And I notice some of the participants of earlier meetings are moderating the sessions over there. So it gives a more better background for the participants to join the meeting because they would be more available in terms of resting to the participants. So I think that that is good and also preparation. It is very important so that they go through with the discussions and workshops and participants ready to participate in the meetings properly otherwise they would be a passive listener rather than active person. So I think preparation is important when it comes to remote participation yes as Anriette said earlier it's very important.
>> Just to complement what you have responded, I believe that other important thing in order to raise interest for the remote participants is to have clear description of the workshop sessions. Sometimes you're here and we don't understand. There's so many acronyms on the titles that people don't understand what it's about. And if you don't provide a good description and names of speakers and so on and so on and people won't be interested to join that particular session. That's why we see sometimes sessions that have many more participants than others. And sometimes like Ginger said people are hidden. If you see a hub it's only one person with connecting but then you may have 50 people over there watching together and discussing.
>> VIRGINIA PAQUE: First of all I would like to thank very much every participant because you were very valuable with both input and presence and I would like to thank everyone who had input or who licensed to us, speakers who prepared and people who spontaneously joined us. I think we had an excellent panel and I'm looking forward to reading the transcript and working more on all these issues. Thank you very much for sharing a benefitted immensely from your presence. Thank you (applause)