FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES – ENHANCING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 24, 2013
4:30 P.M. LOCAL TIME
NO. 75
HOW TO FIND THE NEXT GENERATION OF INTERNET INNOVATION
and
OPEN FORUM
THE EMERGING LANGUAGE OF INTERNET DIPLOMACY PROJECT
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> We are just waiting for one of the speakers. We're going to wait for two more minutes and then we'll start, okay?
>> Test, test.
>> SYLVIA CADENA: We're going to discuss today, how to fund the next generation of internet innovation. We have of a flash session, 45 minutes. Short and sweet, hopefully. I'm joined by people that are going to share with you different approaches to funding available for innovation and internet development, the portal, the globe itself.
To my left, I have Ernesto Majo. Then Jens Karberg. Jennifer Haroon and Marco Pancini. My name is Sylvia Cadena. Ernesto is going to explain the programs. I'm just taking care of the time for you.
>> ERNESTO MAJO: Hello, good afternoon. The Alliance, our colleagues and others, Lacnic, based in the Caribbean and APNIC and Asia‑Pacific. APNIC covers the region.
When we decided to have this Alliance, we developed independent programs. The first coordinator of that program. When we create the Alliance, the idea was to create a bridge between researchers and their funds. Lacnic with support of IDRC, The Coalition of Internet Society, we created this in order to give funds to people in our region. During the first eight years, we just gave funds for new projects. We make calls and we evaluated the Coalition Committee, independent consultants that we come back to collaborate with us.
During that time we just fund for new projects and sometimes we decided to create the awards. The idea was to give more visibility for the developing regions. At the same time, programs, we understood that the, if we created a brand, an umbrella program, to cover the three regions and the three initiatives, we can help to connect better, with the money to develop these areas.
During the last three years. The last, during the last three years, we were working together in an independent way, our independent programs. We have, we take our own decisions, for example, with the way, the evaluation of the projects, the way we bring the calls and the subject of awards and funding. But at the same time, we work in a coordinated way. We have some company activities and of course, we are linked with IGF's agenda. We decided to align our, our promise to the IGF agenda. The awards are linked with that.
So, we select one award for every main topic of the IGF agenda. So just to finish, I want to say for us, it's a very good experience. It's not easy because we are three independent companies. Independent organizations, with different communities and different realities. But we are committed to create a real bridge between the researchers and ideas with the funds and we are trying to do the, we think that we are a very mechanism in order to link that. So it's just my experience.
>> Sylvia Cadena: Now to give the floor to Jens Karberg.
>> JENS KARBERG: Thank you. I'm here representing Sida. It's a great responsibility for us when we work with these issues. I will not just speak about internet, but a bit broader, of how Sida works with ICT and put up some aspect of how we work and some aspect of ICT that I find important to look upon. When Sida worked with ICT, I think three main themes we're coming back to. The first one would be to work with policies. The reason for that, Sida's a quite small actor. Sweden is a small country. But, but also, it's many other actors in this area. So we need to collaborate with others to find good ways of working and find standards of how to work. We need to find partners in that work.
The second aspect, this is an area where we're still struggling to integrate ICT within all the work that Sida does. So, not just, you have specific programs on ICT, but to mainstream it into our normal business. I would say that is a quite hard work to do for an organization like us. We have different specialists in, in the areas and the topics and the regions we are working with. We don't have a broad competence when it comes to the technical side, but also the aspects of ICT in the organization. That's why they also need to collaborate with others to get that experience, but also to educate ourselves in that area.
The last thing, I think is important for our work is to work with innovations. Innovation in different aspects, both in, in how, how models for how we work, but also how ICT, itself, could be, could be innovative. We can do new things that wasn't even possible before.
And one way of how we work with innovation is, is the support we have to, to Seed Alliance to find smaller, smaller and local, local ways of using ICT, in an innovative way.
But, of course, we're also working with other ways and here's also collaboration with the private sector; different type to solve research and other things. If I leave those three things for the way we're working and just mention three aspects of ICT that I found important to think about when funding or working with ICT, the first thing I would say is the sustainability aspect of it.
Not just to, it's, I mean, ICT, at the moment, it's very, very fancy, in one way. And a lot of actors are, are willing to, to fund new aspects of how you can use new technology to, to work in a more efficient way. But it's much harder to find sustainable ways of working with ICT. And that is also why I think this, with collaboration, is important to see what other actors do to reuse the experience that other has, maybe to change it, but use experience that already is out there.
Also to find ways of how to scale smaller support, smaller innovations, to reach a bigger scale.
The second thing would be to look at the context. It's, it's very, very important to, to see the context and see how, how it's not just used, ICT has been used in that sense, in many ways, you take one application and put it in a new context. Of course you have the risk to not be successful.
So context is important. The last thing I'd mention is to mind the gaps within ICT. Sweden Sida is working extensively with, for example, women and girls use of ICT but we can find many other gaps between countries, within countries, accessibility for disabled people and so forth. These aspects are very important, I think, in that we should make an effort to work in. I think I'll stop there, thank you.
>> Sylvia Cadena: Now we give the floor to Cesare Marco Pancini.
>> MARCO PANCINI: Thank you. I'd like to start mentioning our smaller, medium business online. An initiative we run globally to empower a small and medium enterprise. Also an additional sector to know how to open up to the, to the global market. This is an initiative run in all the different regions. From Europe to South America to, to U.S. and to Africa and Asia. Other two initiatives that I would like to mention and then I will leave the floor to go to a few of them. The Global Impact Award is a way Google is choosing to support entrepreneurial. We just finished a challenge in the U.K. and so soon the finalists would be, would be presenting the project to our panel of experts and we are in India at this moment. If you want, you can go on Global Impact Challenge, research is and see the contests running and vote for them.
Google is also engaging The Alliance for Affordable Internet. Coming together in order to advance the possibility for, for developing countries. People in developing countries to assist to broadband and fixed line. Because we believe ASIS is a very important requisite in order to not only express your fundamental rights, like freedom of expression, but to have the opportunity of funding, funding, a way to make, improve your life and start an activity online.
I would like also, to leave to Jennifer to talk about some initiatives we're doing that I think are very important.
>> JENNIFER HAROON: Thanks, I'm Jennifer Haroon from our access team and Google headquarters in Mountain View. As Marco said, when we think about supporting innovation and the internet ecosystem, we think about it in two ways. One is, bringing access, particularly to emerging markets. Marco mentioned our participation in The Alliance for Affordable Internet, we focus on enabling technology and access through policy change. The second is through actual technology. There we look at new technologies in house, such as Project Loon, our support of TD white space, but we also support development externally. We recently funded researchers at Stanford and Berkeley to develop some network designs based on software‑defined networking, which we hope will enable the deployment and management of rural wireless networks in much more scalable manner.
So, that's the bringing access. The second part is then supporting the internet ecosystem. Marco mentioned a few things that we do. We have an organization within Google called Google for Entrepreneurs. They hold a lot of training days. Those can run the gamut from, for students, sometimes they're held for small and medium sized enterprises, for entrepreneurs and there's also some web content where folks can go themselves, online and do some of the trainings.
We hold a broader range of marketing contests, developer contests in the hopes of supporting the next generation of internet entrepreneurs.
>> Marco PANCINI: Thank you, we will also take any questions you have about what Google is doing in fostering that fellowship.
>> Sylvia Cadena: Thank you, Marco and Jennifer. I took some notes about your presentations and before opening the floor for people to ask some questions, which I hope you have been taking a few minutes to do that, I'd like to see which one of the panelists would like to answer about what are the challenges that you're facing when you're trying to push for active collaboration between all those different initiatives that are coming, that you're seeing on innovation here and innovation there. Oh, they should be working together and what sort of things do you, from Google and as a private sector foundation, sponsorship kind of thing that you're doing. And from Sida, as a government agency, what sort of methodologies you use to foster that collaboration. That'd be great to know. Anyone want to go first?
>> JENS KARBERG: Yes, one thing is, of course, we're trying to find methods of bringing people together. Both, both for direct collaborations, maybe for partners that we already have support to, but also to find different forums where people can meet and with just a meeting and that could bring collaboration together. For example, we have Stockholm Internet Forum for two years now, which is forum for discussing democratic issues and freedom of expression on the internet. Which brings together around 400 people each year to, to discuss these issues.
In, in last year's Stockholm Internet Forum, we had summit for developers where we brought developers from, from, south and north to sit together for a few days, to see what ideas they're working on and how, how they can build networks for more, more enabling people in both groups. I'll stop there, I think.
>> JENNIFER HAROON: I think the one aspect you already mentioned, that is very true is the need to partner to do all of these activities and at Google, we partner with a lot of different constituencies in all the activities that Marco and I mentioned. The country of Sweden is one of the members. That's really important, in other aspects that we do. We may partner more locally, so for instance, in some of the tech hubs that we support, many other local businesses and some global businesses too are supporters of the tech hubs. They help mentor entrepreneurs. It's not something that can be done by one organization alone.
>> MARCO PANCINI: If I may add, if there is some, we have a lot of different activities and very different fields. Collaborating with the local constituencies, really including both the institution, the industry and the Civil Society in these initiatives.
>> Yes, I have a question. I want to know which, which, which are the key elements that somebody who is trying to apply for funds, trying to fund his project, what, what are the key elements that you identified for funding this kind of project? The key elements you're seeking.
>> Jennifer HAROON: Well it depends on which mechanism of funding. I know it can be confusing, but the Global Impact Challenges that Marco mentioned are specifically looking for non‑profits that are using technology in a really innovative way for what they're trying to solve. So for instance, we don't, those awards aren't done by sector, health, education, they can be any sector, but specifically looking for very innovative uses of technology.
In contests we do, then it really depends on the contest. So, for instance, we have pure coding contests. We're looking for amazing developers. And, and the contest normally involves solving problems, using computer programming or they can be marketing contests where their skill is around a small business or ends coming together and putting together a really nice marketing campaign. It sort of depends on, on the parameter.
>> Marco PANCINI: And on the other initiatives we mentioned, focusing on small and medium enterprise, for example, in this case, we were really open to all the different sectors and to the old community of entrepreneurs. So not only to the one that are focused on new technology, but also, we were thinking, specifically, according to the different region specificities of the different region, to people that is trying to, for example, bring online the family business in fields that are completely, like tourism, manufacturing, we had a donkey farm, a farm selling donkey milk. A product made with donkey milk from Belgium, all over the world.
We had a small firm selling worms from U.K. in all the world. Not mentioning all the great projects and ideas from developing countries. So in this case, it was very general, in this case, more than supporting these activities from a financial point of view, like on some of the initiatives that Jennifer has mentioned, we were more providing them the tools, the knowledge, and the information they need in order to really consider the opportunity of going online.
>> Sylvia Cadena: The last question before we open it to the floor. We have fifteen minutes for questions from the floor. Is about, everybody that has ever been involved in deploying or implementing any innovation or not, so we know the initiatives that are needed in the community. Have ever heard of the word sustainability? You have to become sustainable, you have to demonstrate you can carry on. I'd be very interested to understand how the Sida sees sustainability and how they partner to build that capacity and what Google thinks about that as well.
>> No, that is very important. I mean, you can just look at many big companies now, within the sectors like Facebook or Twitter, how it's become very big, but now when they are looking into long‑term sustainability, they, have to struggle. But...it's the same thing when working with this type of support. We need to find sustainability solutions and it's always easier to do that in the beginning of the project than in the end of the project. Because, in the beginning, we, we can come in with funds to support the project or program, but, we won't do that for eternity. We need to find solutions that could sustain the program itself.
And I think one way, one very good way of looking to sustainability is to, to find solution on real problems. It's quite often that, that, especially with new techniques and new technologies, that, that you find, very interesting solutions, but the question is, is certain, is that a real, real problem that needs to find a solution, is this a problem that, that people, everyday, are struggling with?
So, I think that is one cornerstone. And of course, being, working in the area that I do, we also, of course, have to look at empowerment in general, but also empowerment for poor people, specific. That is very important aspect of the work we are doing.
>> Jennifer HAROON: When we think of sustainability, there's a couple things. It's absolutely essential. We provide training and mentorship, I think that's one way to help sustainability, the tools for entrepreneurs so they can build their businesses. Some of, one thing that Jens mentioned that I agree with is connections. The purpose isn't just to learn what we may be training about but actually connect entrepreneurs and students to their local internet community so that they can help each other. And then the last thing, Jens, that you mentioned, that I couldn't agree more about is the relevance. So, a lot of our programs, while they may seem global are actually very local. So, for instance, Marco mentioned getting your businesses online. We do that at a local level or some of the trainings I mentioned, those are done around the world. Then you find that the solutions pop up from the local community for the issues that they have. Rather than you know, like a global contest to try to solve someone else's problem. That doesn't tend to work as well.
The entrepreneurs, in that area, know best about what kind of solutions to come up with.
>> Marco PANCINI: Maybe, if I can add from this point of view, something we've done in Spain to support the fight against unemployment. We work together with universities, local university on massive open line course in order to make this training, this training content available for, for all the people that would be interested. Not only the ones that were following the trainings at the university, but also the ones that will not travel. So again, it's knowing, building a knowledge that can be shared is very important in order to make this initiative sustainable.
>> Sylvia Cadena: Thank you, Marco. Now the floor is open for questions. The lady at the back, first.
>> Thank you, I work for the World Bank. I want to give a little context for my question. I'll try to be very brief. We have recently launched a global partnership called open data for development, which aims to build a coalition of all the institutions that are supporting developing countries with open data initiatives. And we have entrusted the Open Knowledge Foundation and Open Data Institute to spearhead the partnership and we've given them a grant of $1.2 million for the first year. Our financial contribution will be for three years and hopefully after that, the partnership will take a life of its own.
Within this partnership, there's a list of activities we are doing. One of them has to do with the creation of a library of open database applications and can travel across borders.
So the idea is that if you have an open data application that is also a development problem in one country, you shouldn't need to do an apps competition and recreate the wheel in other countries. If the app is really good, you should be able to deploy it and replicate it in other countries. The key element for us, in this activity line is replicability. The question is whether Google and the Swedish Corporation and other presence in the room would like to help us collaborate with us in this partnership, in this activity or others.
>> Marco PANCINI: We can for sure exchange our information and with our local team that would be more interested, unless you have already contact with us, we'd be happy to exchange contact information and to take it offline.
>> Sylvia Cadena: One of the things we're looking at is the cooperation between the programs. In the Pacific or Caribbean or in Africa and try to find out those connections. By having everyone here in Bali, it's like having them in a meeting that is relevant to work they're doing and making connections with people like you and the rest of us, it is really interesting and is basically taking the next step on how, knowing that really, we can't do it all by ourselves and that we can't reinvent the wheel all the time.
As part of the Seed Alliance, one of the main initiatives is to generate the bridges between the regions. We're collaborating between how the winners might be able to collaborate with each other and grant programs, how we administer the funds and run the processes, to streamline everything and we are able to give more funding away.
So, I guess everyone in the table has different approaches to the issue, but I think we all agree that collaboration is, active collaboration is key to the problem.
So there was a gentleman on the second row if you want to ask your question.
>> Good afternoon, Dan McGeary, from the Pacific Institute of Public Policy. I want to make one quick, but rather large recommendation to you. The biggest challenge that I've seen in working as I do with many developing and even least‑developed countries is the challenge for developers is just getting paid. It's really that simple. I'll note that developers in most Pacific island countries can't buy or sell on either the Apple store, Google Play store or numerous other platforms. It's a knotty problem. An extremely difficult nut to crack and that's why institutional support from donor agencies and other institutions, the World Bank included, I might add, is critical. And, I think, innovation, coming from leaders such as Google, can really help to take, you know, a useful, engineering approach to bypassing the bottlenecks and just smoothing the path.
But if you do nothing else in the next two years, find a way for developers to get paid and you'll see an incredible blossoming of activity.
>> Jens Karberg: I think open data is something very important for the Swedish government. Both in being open in what we are doing and how we are using our resources to, to, to work with development, but also in, in the support we are giving to, to emphasize on open data and looking to, if open source is an option in the case we are working in. And, and what I'm going to say, sorry, I forgot. I'll leave that and come back when my answer is coming back.
>> JENNIFER HAROON: Dan, thanks for that comment. I definitely agree. Payments and financial systems is a complex issue, but it's something that Google is working through. In the meantime, as we work through complex issues, what I mentioned about connecting local entrepreneurs, helping them find other sources to bring their apps or their businesses to their local community, so that they can find sustainable support.
>> Jens Karberg: I think that's one very important aspect. We are trying to find different way of giving entrepreneurs how they should work. Both in training people to think, think business‑wise, but also trying to work with structures, usually within countries, but also, also on, on global level, but to, to make structure more, more friendly for entrepreneurs and businesses to work. That's one of the aspects that Sweden is emphasizing very much on.
>> Sylvia Cadena: The last question from the floor. The gentleman at the front.
>> Thank you, I'd like to go quickly. My question would go to Google. And I just want to know if here, it's possible to have some technical contact with Google because in our country, the Google maps is so output of date and sometimes I, and my research team, would like to update information, but we do not know who to contact and how to do it properly, in order to come up to date.
And second one is about our project, we have a lot of projects in the development of mobile health. Most of them are localization buzz services and that's why it's critical for us to have a Google market that is up to date. One of them is an eCommerce solution that will allow anybody or any patient to find the process within this area and try to find if there is a pharmacy that has a product or need and buy and be delivered. But for some medicines that are critical, we'd like to track, on time, and know where the products are in the way of delivery.
So, I think that's so critical that if you can have some context for that, form this, okay? But I think technical assistance would be better for us, in order to have a more efficient project. Thank you.
>> Marco PANCINI: I think it's important to take offline this conversation to understand exactly what is the concern. If it's more a problem of the maps, the maps aren't updating or if it's a problem of the organization data, in this case, probably there are some work around, but we need to verify if all the functionality of Google maps are available in your country. Let's take five minutes to talk about that later.
>> Sylvia Cadena: We have run out of time. There's the next session coming up. So, I really appreciate all the questions. I'm sorry I didn't have time to include the other hands in the room that were raised. Thank you very much to all our panelists. If you can leave your cards, we can maybe hang out at the outside of the room so we have the chance to exchange that information, it'd be great, this is the place to make those connections. Thank you very much for coming.
[applause]
[Transition to next meeting]
>> Test, test. 1, 2, 3.
>> Good afternoon, good evening. Thank you for joining us after this late session after long day. Great to see so many colleagues from the Diplo community and those joining us by browsing the net because of good Wi‑Fi. The main purpose of this flash session is to update you on the language and the IGF Language Project. To explaining where we are and what we plan to do with this project. This project is interesting because it is trying to combine data mining and to put powerful data mining tools in public hands. As we know from the recent developments, data mining is used by private sector, by security agencies and we think that there is important cause, and important need to provide also data mining for public institutions and general public. Because there is some sort of difference, there's no even playing field in global politics when you have all these players having powerful data mining tools and then governments, international organizations, Civil Society not having that.
Now, this is our, our attempt to, to combine those few needs and also to facilitate, as much as it is possible, evidence‑based policy making. Now the product has a bit of ancient history. It's 2004 when we did the research on keywords at the, key, of the main resolutions and declarations. What was then my sort of big discovery, in the use of how the different prefixes were used in describing the internet‑related phenomenon. As you know, we have the few prefixes, e‑cyber virtual net and digital. At one point, I realized it was the meeting in Europe that e emerged as a prefixed. Previously it was mixed. One of the reasons was that European Union adopted a few years before the Lisbon agenda for digital Europe. And everything was e. Then they influenced this and then everybody else followed after the European e, it was in Asia, 11 times using e. America 14 versus Asia, 32.
Now one cares. I was following personal interest, what was going on and I started noticing paternity. Gradually cyber was used more and more for security discussion, e for eCommerce, digital for digital divide, and you can, through the analysis of prefixes, you can see from what angle people are approaching Internet Governance. And we analyze, for example, transcript of the, which is the main purpose of the project, we analyze all transcripts until now, until Bali. You can see when cybersecurity was present on the agenda.
That's, I'm just inviting you to put on the curators, when you read or follow the speech or you read the article, through the use of this prefix, you can see if the institution or person is coming from security sector, digital, the development sector, eCommerce sector.
This was how the project started. We counted easily. We analyzed few concluding documents of the university summit. It was the first exercise back in 2004. It's a goldmine. We have transcripts from the old IGF meetings. You have everything, what has been said in the preparatory meetings and overall meetings. From that, you can really learn a lot. You can learn a lot about these tectonic changes as you'll see in a few minutes about the gender, or participation of different stakeholders. We speak a lot about stakeholders. When you analyze the participation of different stakeholders, you can get the clear picture of who is really active or who is just participating nominally.
It was an extremely powerful tool to provide us with both academic research, but also evidence‑based policy making. We can see what is going to in the, in the IGM meetings.
So, as I indicated, the question of data mining is extremely delicate. Those are open data, you can find transcripts at the IGF website and we think that it is extremely important that we empower governments, small and developing states to use data mining tools in their policy making. It creates discrepancy in policy making process which doesn't help. Ultimately doesn't help even those who have advantage in deleted this process.
Now...you will see, I hope it will work. Let me just go to this report. What we plan to do, once a better version of our data mining tool is ready, we will make it public for both communities to do data mining themselves and to use the tool as they like. Some sort of open data, open data and data mining approach combined.
Now...let me just show you the few findings from the research, until 2012. It's good that here we have Maria and other who participated in this project and you will please, you can, you should comment on it. Here's the analysis of the participation according to the gender distribution from the first IGF in 2006 to Baku in 2012. You can see the progress, the gap between male and female participation from 78% in attendance versus 21%, narrow to 64.82, 34.20. You'll see what is the current situation in Bali. Observing the rooms, I can see we'll further close the gap between, at least in this room, gender balance is, I think we have a dominance of the latest, which is good.
Now, what we also notice, what was contribution by gender and some colleagues thought that, in the percent of the words spoken overall during the meetings, it follows more or less general patent of the overall meetings.
Now, here is the graph which made some comments. I will say, I have to be careful not to pass the judgment around the gender line division, but there was a, this shows that apparently ladies were more talkative during the IGF because while their participation was about 30%, as you can see in this chart, at least they managed to be, to have proportion there of contributions there, more than male interventions in the overall structure.
And then you can have also, the analysis of different words that were used, according to female, female/male participation. Think both sides are thinking a lot. Female used thanks, very much, internet, one, this part of the website is accessible.
We did also, research, on multi‑stakeholders. Some of IGF ‑‑ let me see ‑‑ how different communities, and what was their overall participation in the, in the spoken part of the IGF. And here is, is a bit complicated, but you see here, few lines, academia, business, government, international organizations, NGOs, technical communities, in the interpretation of this graph, you can see that, for example, when there was a strong intergovernmental presence, there was a high participation of government and you can follow the different graphs.
Here are the percentage, total number of identified participants in the IGF Textus Corpus 2006 through 2012. We have to make one important caveat. We managed to identify 51% of contributions automatically. Now we're preparing the platform for raising this identification, precision level to 80% to have statistically solid base. I devised 51% is still weak. Because it, we couldn't do it, transcripts were not good enough to, to identify speakers.
And you can, you can see here, that what is the distribution with government is 34%, NGO 17, technical community 14. I won't be going out through all those charts, they're quite, quite clear and we provided some interpretation about various variations from the IGF to IGF.
Now...what we are now preparing is a new platform. Where we will have automatic search and possibility to generate insights from this textus corpus directly by general public there.
The project is extremely interesting and one area where I'm particularly curious about is the area of GMO motions. How the different regions and different countries frame political issues. And I started observing it during our courses, on Internet Governance, as most of you went through these courses, we had groups from Latin America, from Mediterranean region, from Africa, from Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia, Asia‑Pacific. And it was, and they, the methodologies, making comments on the same text. People were annotating, literally the same text. And you can see regions developing completely different dynamics around the same text. With, I will be now simplifying, but Latin America having quite a lot of reflections and post modernism on social issues. Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, quite a bit of conspiracy theories, Asia, blue sky possibilities access, also Africa access. Now I'm simplifying, but just to give you an idea.
Now, that element, just observation was going in our courses, made me think about this question of how different regions, countries, professions share the arguments. And it is, it is extremely, extremely interesting and extremely revealing to see, especially for multilateral negotiation, we do not see the same thing in the same way. And it's so obvious, but when you see through the, through the text analysis, it is becoming very powerful.
I'm generally inviting you to think about the research projects activities along these lines. It is real, I would say it is the goldmine for ten or fifteen doctoral theses. I'm not aware of any policy process that's been captured so clearly as it is in internal governance policy process. This is generally the framework. What we did, what are the possibilities? And how we can proceed further with, with developments.
I think the, the possibilities are limitless and, but, ultimate objective is to introduce data mining idea into work, procedures of the public institutions, activists and people who cannot rely on the extremely powerful corporate or security machineries for data mining. All of data is in public domain and it's done through rather simple procedures. The application is not that complicated. It's getting complicated with these physiologic emotions and it's becoming more sophisticated, but we're not speaking about rocket science. It's getting better.
Okay...good. I can see excitement in the room, no? Go ahead.
>> I'm playing a little bit with this database now, but before, one interesting statistic there was before, since 2006, 2012, was the difference, I don't know really how this analysis of the text works. But it was an analysis, a context between the usage of the words. And it shows up that the number of governments have very similar statements. Those are usually the less representative countries and the dominant countries like U.S., U.K., Egypt and so objection have different type of words that are used. Which means they have statements that are much more complex and developed. Their knowledge is much more developed than developing countries. There's a graphic which shows perfectly this difference in the mere statements and the usage of the words.
But, what I wanted to say, I'm laughing because I did a search now on this new beta database on the participants that were most talkative since 2006. And those of you that know some of the usual suspects among us, would probably like it. The most talkative person was Bertrand de La Chapelle, then Markus Kummer, the Chair of the Secretariat and Milton Miller with 9,000 and Zumi from Seoul Society, Annmaria, even Wolfki, Alicia, Parminder, 5,000, 6,000 words, Peter Major, Dan Vincent with about 5 and a half thousand. And myself, 4,500. And then, Emily Taylor, Janice Karakolice and so forth. Mark Karr, I didn't see you. The point is, we can search really, we can search per name, per stakeholder, for specific organization or country, for gender, there's a lot of possibilities. I'm sure, we could probably start charting this. People would probably like to see where they are.
>> Here's the list of the most talkative countries. First it's Egypt, then U.K., Brazil, Kenya, Switzerland, Greece, France, U.S., Lithuania, Sweden, China, Canada, India, Portugal. And you can see the host countries were the most talkative. You had official speeches, welcome speeches and yeah. Here is the list. What was in Baku, U.K. was the most talkative, then Sweden, Netherlands and the whole list. Region, Western Europe and Others, by far, ahead of other regions. This is very important chart, trust me, he did, it's a similarity of speeches, how the different statements are concentrated and who is similar. Brazil, as you can see, is different. Switzerland, Egypt, U.K., Greece, Kenya and then you have concentration of countries. According to his comments, other countries were probably doing quite a bit of copy and paste of speeches for their ministers or their government officials. The others put an effort to develop real substantive arguments. And new points.
And, here are those, those charts. Which is, which is beyond my understanding what is it all about. There are some explanations. Again, Switzerland, Brazil, U.K., just a minute, Greece are different from other players.
Okay...please?
>> Thank you. Actually, I'm Jong‑Il Sung from Bangladesh. I know about the foundation applications and first of all, I saw a couple courses included and in the course, I notified for developing countries, 20%, I think 20% discount there for developing countries. My question, is it possible for developing countries to maximize that discount to participate in this course?
>> It's good that you use this IGF language to ask a practical question. Which matters. Well, we have the course fees, which are on the website, we provide discount and in the past, when we used to get the funding from the various governments, we used to provide scholarships to cover the expenses for people from developing countries. Which is our main mission, a system for small and developing countries. Therefore, the short answer, the current situation is that we don't have extra funding for the scholarship. We are working very hard and there are signs that we get something for 2014, we'll distribute the paper and leave your e‑mail indicated you're interested in it and we will update you on the developments.
>> Excuse me, I'm Shrideep, part of the 2009 Diplo Capacity‑Building Program. To be present here at IGF is, I completely give the credit to DiploFoundation. Without its training, I wouldn't have been here or I wouldn't understands the whole process of standardization as well as the IGF. One question that is hitting me, that is from my part, currently I'm an ISOC, I'm working with ISOC Nepal chapter. What I believe in is, especially when I look at the policy level, still today, still today in developing countries, there is very less amount of you know, awareness about Internet Governance and standardization issue. Is DiploFoundation willing to reach out to the policy‑level people. Until now, it is just leveled within the normal people.
>> Excellent point. You have been reading exchange of e‑mails between Latin and me.
[laughter]
>> It's really music to my ears to hear that it helped people to join the IG process. We were open to the community and generally developing people, smaller island states and developing countries. And, there is real impact in that field. But what we are noticing now is that, with the change in Internet Governance, the main focus area and weakest link and most critical part is to strengthen policymakers and government officials. We're trying to find the Ways and Means to focus on helping policymakers to participate in the IGA process.
We have a small process which we're launching on Saturday for Pacific island states. City Pacific, which is aiming at helping officials from the small island states to participate in multilateral diplomacy in Geneva. But exactly, this is the point where we're trying very hard to convince donors to put some funding into it. I'm a bit disappointed by lack of understanding among donors, especially from corporate sector about the relevance of government officials and their role in Internet Governance. This is really, for me, bit surprising and shocking. Yes, there's a need to develop community and the results are here and we are very proud of it, but for overall Internet Governance, the weakest link is in government departments currently. Thank you for the question.
>> Yeah. All thanks to you, I guess.
>> Hi, this is Sarah Kiden. I'm an ISOC IGF ambassador. Last year, I was a Diplo fellow to Baku. Thank you for that. I just wanted to ask if there's some kind of follow‑up on previous participants to see what we're doing with the knowledge they got from DiploFoundation, thank you.
>> Thank you. Good, good point. Yes, we plan to do some sort of follow‑up exercise through community with Stephanie, with, with our website and there is one activity where we will try to, let's say, reenergize our community. This is Geneva internet platform. Which, which will be most‑likely started in March 2014. Aimed at helping, among other things, small and developing countries to participate fully in, in the Internet Governance processes in Geneva international. And there'll be varies online activities, but also, institute participation, research fellowships and that will provide quite an interesting new convergence point for the formal courses involved in policy processes in teaching, in research, to provide the new context for your involvement in, in this case, Internet Governance Engineering International.
>> I'm simply curious to know who was Lebanese that spoke like 730,000 words in the IGF in Baku.
[laughter]
>> No, it's not me.
>> Okay.
>> Hi, thank you, Jovan. I think this is a powerful tool for the community to understand, not only the IGF policy itself, but relations month actors. We need to be open to the results and outcomes we may find when we start to look. And I think that some very established arguments, like for instance, multi‑stakeholder participation may be challenged by this project, but in this moment, it's important we have a clear understanding how much less‑powerful actors from developing companies are for, have been able to really voice their concerns. There are things maybe we should look into. Like, are you planning to develop some kind of interface that, that anyone would create searching parameters. So, it's not only the things we've already looked into, but anyone with an interface could search for different things. This could be really important for researchers as well to look into different topics that all this raw material provides us.
And I think that these transcripts have always, to me, been very important way for people to understand the history of the IGF in the whole process and maybe to be able to ask the specific question, will make it easier for people. Going through the materials, just, it's, it's so much, the value of the material is so great, but you can go through it, so if you can ask specific questions, that'll be wonderful. Even for people, for capacity building, for people to understand what is going on and what happened in different years.
Since you talked about the Geneva platform, do you plan to integrate this in some way with the platform or with an initiative that has been discussed? As far as I heard, GIPO is about tools for mining and visualization. This could be something to look into as well.
Since we still don't have this interface that people can ask their own questions, I would like to suggest that maybe another thing we could look into is how much local people have participated in the IGF. I think it's interesting the IGF takes place in different regions around the world. This means more participation from local people. I'm not very sure that this actually happens. How it has really impact on the engagement of the local community and if the local community hasn't been engaged, how it could provide so the IGF can really engage the local people.
And if it's possible, to take a look at the participation of remote participants. I'm not sure if this is clear on the transcripts, when a remote participant asks a question or a comment, maybe it's not that easy to extract, but if it's not, maybe to arrange this with the captioning people and to the secretariat to flag, to find a way to flag in the transcripts when there is remote participants speaking. It would help us, even to make a point, regarding remote participation, if it has been inclusive or not. We talk about, we have 40 hubs connected to the IGF. Okay, what did that exactly mean in terms of getting their voices in? That's it.
>> Great, Maria. First on interface, yes, the ultimate, ultimate objective is to have smart interface for the public use.
Now the real problem, data engine is relatively simple to develop, even with some artificial intelligence tools. Interface is more complex, therefore, we are now looking for the second phase to generate some funding in order to develop the interface, but ultimate objective is that it is put for the public UPS. Transcripts are public and it is the main purpose of the project. Global Internet Policy Observatory, one of the proposed features of GIPO. You have dataset on Internet Governance. Whatever is related to internet governance. Which is the basis for developing apps. People will be using it for their own research, policy making and other tools. I think it's a very powerful concept which could give new strength to the overall Internet Governance policy process, increase transparency, increase evidence‑based policy making. Once people have the idea that there is insight in what was going on, some, they'll be more careful in, in proposing different things. More careful in analyzing various options and that can have even impact on the policy process, in my view, in positive way.
When it comes to local participation, it's a valid point. My impression is that we have usual discussion among us usual suspects in many cases. The local people are not participating. I can recall Baku, I can recall Lithuania, Kenya, to some extent, Egypt was more active, because of the local area. It's very powerful with ten people knowing what they're talking about.
That's good point. I'm afraid we'll have to confirm this hypothesis, that the participation is relatively limited, active participation. Yes, we have colleagues from Indonesia here in the room. You'll have, okay, please?
>> Hi, Jovan. I'm going to put my geek hat on for a second. We've been playing with internet‑related things to deal with the policy tool kit we're working on in the Pacific. I can say to you that, I mean, we should talk more offline, but very briefly, as long as the engine that's generating these data, as long as it can output reasonably formatted text, there are a number of really, really nice JavaScript libraries that are available now that open up a world of possibility. I think it's a really fruitful area to pursue. The data available in the aggregated format and post filtering if you will. You need anonymization and a lot of other things built into it, but nonetheless, the possibilities are really quite exciting. So, just remind me to chat to you more about that in the future.
>> It's coming from the Public Policy Institute of Pacific Island States. Quite a remarkable job on raising the level of public policy.
>> Yeah, I was trying to remain anonymous just to skew your numbers. But you know me now.
[laughter]
>> And then we have, the last question, Maria, was about remote participation. I think that from this IGF, we'll have indication about, from the participant's list. What is the challenge, we have to combine few databases. We have to have transcripts, identification of the speakers, then, database, participants matching with the speakers, then the table with the institutions, table with the countries, table with the gender, there are six or seven different, different tables, therefore, that data model requires a bit of merging and matching. Have I answered all your questions? More or less? Yep, go ahead.
>> Just wanted to add, the process this year is a little bit different because we, we incorporate with the secretariat. It doesn't mean we didn't incorporate before, but it wasn't so realtime. Previously, we would want to pick ones, the ones to pick up the list of participants from the website, which is, as you know, on a website, quite, it doesn't contain all the data about participants. I'm not talking about private data, but for instance, on a website, you cannot find the country of the participant, region or stakeholder or what he or she is participating on. This year, we got the full list of the participants from the secretariat, immediately. We're currently receiving all the transcripts. We hope to have interesting data about 2013 in the next couple days. We'll try to publish that on our website. Once materials are published in a couple weeks and the names are put to the speech and the transcript, then we'll be able to have more details about the speakers and countries and so on. Before that, probably about the words and so on. Just wanted to update on how we're working out.
>> Okay, now we'll have some stimulating discussion, please.
>> Hi, I'm Faison Abadhi [phonetic]. I'm in charge of remote CART this year. I know something that'll be of interest to you. This year we had registration for online participants. So, they're around 100 online participants that registered on our website.
>> Thank you. Okay, then, it seems that we covered more or less everything about this promising project. Please stay in touch with us on both, for the language project and the new phase with the interface. Bring your ideas, we'll just, I think it's great that you give us these ideas about the Java scripts and the, and the input and exercise. We'll keep you informed. Therefore, it is exciting time, Internet Governance is moving into a really dynamic phase. It's a turning point, probably what will happen over the next year, year and a half, will define future of the Internet Governance and internet in general. We will contribute in the way we've been doing always, as pro public, pro development, professional institutions, aiming at making the level playing field when it comes to Internet Governance and your contribution and involvement is essential in it. Thank you.
[Meeting concluded at 5:13 a.m. CT].
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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