IGF 2018 - Day 3 - Salle II - Youth Session

The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. 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 event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. 

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>> Good morning. I'm not going to go down there. I think this is an informal meeting. I think we're outside of the schedule as well. In any case, the reason we wanted to make this informal gathering is continue what we started at Geneva which was to see what's happening on the level of the youth engagement in the IGF

      So, in Geneva, we had quite a good number of people present. An impressive number of people present in the room and the content was impressive that was delivered at that session. So, we requested a couple of things. We tried to run through a couple of details after that meeting. I think in July of this year, we concluded a couple of -- call for public input. But unfortunately, it did not result in a -- in a good enough, I would say, number of -- of organizations and individuals that submitted comments, although the quality of the received comments was excellent. But we wanted to pause a bit, the whole summarizing and creating the plan until this meeting because it was very close in November. Ask him hoping that there would be more people here. But it would be good to see this year such a small group, how are you engaged as young people in internet governance, first of all in your local communities and speaking on the regional level or on the global level. So, we could understand better your perspective and then what are maybe -- which we should build on that you received in that -- (indiscernible)

      Just to maybe summarize for you what was received, so-called mentorship program which is a very ambitious request, I think, that we just wanted to first of all clear with a wider group to be sure this is the ending point and kind of compromised attitude of the -- on the wider group interested in the stake holder -- in the Europe engagement and, of course, the young people. They also called for effective XHUB occasion platform effective communication platforms and called for the material to explain the whole process and also the substance.

      That is something that we have enough resources to cover but we're fortunate to have a good group of friends, the community questions and supports it. So, if maybe you would comment to see what are your views, we could maybe make sure we have a year in front of us to corrections and implement them that would result in increasing the number of young people that are involved.

     >> It's Maryland. I'm going to -- I'm going to make perhaps a fairly strong point of order comment about a concern I have. I happened to be deeply aware of what's going on because I'm involved in a number of ways. But it's actually very obscure to most people who are participating and come to IGF on understanding the work that is happening to date. For instance, the analysis that they did with the participation in a way that identified four or five different models, even that information is not broadly -- it's available but not easily accessible.

      It seems to me one thing that would be very helpful would be to think about a sort of a high-level power point presentation that's fact based. It gives the examples of what's in place today. So, for instance, I'll do this quickly, for instance, at IGF USA, it had youth involved in different ways. We don't have a specific youth program, but we've had youth involved in organizing the maybe workshops, the speaker, etc. And I think since there's no one size fits all, I think it's really important to kind of start out with a little quick survey about what's going on.

      The second thing that concerns me a little bit is when you use the word the youth movement is asking for or youth is asking for this. We have a microcosm of the entirety of youth across all of the -- all of the issues that exist. We have some that want to be engaged with the national IGF. We have some that want to have a separate identity. Sort of that could be an elder's IGF and a youth IGF and a women's IGF, etc.

      It's important to kind of go back to first principles and make sure that anyone who is expecting to use the IGF brand, it is a brand associated with the UN, does accept adherence to the core principles open and closed door, etc. And the exception needs to be made that it has to be articulated with an exception if you know what I mean. And put that out for discussion. I'm just going to give an example. The coalitions are not required to be -- they can be a birds of feather group. But we don't -- they don't have to have all stakeholders, etc.

     We've had three. But they could get started and grow. But I think we have to figure out what the core principles are that if you knew -- if you say you are part of the IGF family, maybe -- and maybe we need to start examining whether it's sort of an umbrella term, but here's the core principles that everybody knows that they need to adhere to.

     >> Thank you, Marilyn. I do think the principles, sometimes I like to call the values, the higher-level values that we adhere to are important and that's the framework within which we should all -- we should all behave under. What we faced since the last IGF is the growth of the youth IGF that developed and has principles just as national and regional IGF. Last year at IGF2017 in Geneva, we had nine of them. Today we have 14. So that's a significant growth in less than one year. And I have to say that it's more impressive than just that number of grow canning youth IGFs when you actually see what the teams are doing in their respective communities.

      It seems to me that that number will grow and continue increasing based on the number of the newly emerging stake holder teams that are approaching the secretariat to learn more on how to establish the youth IGF. And this meeting here in the past few days, I've been approached mostly by young people who asks how they can formalize their enthusiasm to work on internet policy and create that expectation.

      So, one of those that's actually running the excellent -- with the youth IGF and also here from the Indonesian IGFs. If you could just quick LIR share your views with those who are listening to us. What was that? I saw the fly tear, for example, and I followed it on-line. I thought it was quite impressive. But I was wondering if there's an interest 234 the country to find those things.

      And, for example, that's what I learned at this meeting yesterday. I met with senior government officials that are working very ambitiously specifically on developing a youth IGF. They have an IGF that's successful. So interesting to see that the senior officials are working on something developing explicitly for the young people without interfering in the bottom-up processes.

     >> I liked your comment. Thank you for allowing me to speak. My name is -- and for the record, I'm the coordinator for Indonesian youth IGF which we have just been originating in 5 October, 2018. And we did mission IGF. We have a -- with the public with also youth. We had around 20 to 40 youth participants from high schools and the university. We discussed the about hooks. At meetings we discussed about the -- as well as hate speech.

      So, we introduce how young people can engage in internet governance and the establishment of the Indonesian youth IGF is the platform we can use to convey the inputs, comments, critics, suggestions to the stakeholders. Because at the moment, we from Indonesia and Asia are part of the multi- stake holder group of Indonesian IGF. So, any issues, any comments that given the Indonesian youth can be directly conveyed.   We do not want to be seen as social society organization, instead, we want to be seen as a forum that helps many young experts, many young government officials to be in the same platform, to have discussion on how youth can be engaged in various ways.

      I mean, we are welcome with any input from any youth movement other than that we have -- I mean, we have -- in global, we have the grassroots. We have ICIG and we have -- the initiative. We can collaborate on all of those and from my perspective Indonesian IGF is not an organization or a -- the advocacy itself. But we want to hear from the youth, what do you want? How do you want us to shape -- how do we shape the governance together. That's what we have in mind.

      And however, however the internet governance ecosystem youth in Indonesia is really not in shape yet. We know that there are some issues on the internet. But we do know that it will shape their governance. So, we also have a plan to do some and some -- that you are part of that governance so we want to find a local champion. A local Asian to help to spread the issue on the entire government. So, it will not be done by us. It will be helped by our local champion, students from high school, students from the university. These people, these young people and help us to spread the news. And we are waiting for their inputs and comments in shaping their governance.

      The Indonesian IGF. Thank you. 

     >> The secretariat for Asia Pacific regional IGF. And so, Jenna is here with me, the ambassador, is actually the organizer of the youth IGF part. But if started in 2010. We provided the platform to have the youth IGF to have a parallel with us. It's almost 10 years. And so, since then, we always have this youth chapter that we support. So, the budget actually falls under the IGF budget so we prove good support to them to make sure it happens.

      So, the ambassadors carried it out. I think it actually starts -- it started like a capacity effort to provide some trainings to the youth locally to be able to participate in the APRI drive itself and this year we will start to integrate more of the youth participants to the APRI itself as well. It will not only be in their own sections but they'll have some play before the governance top picks so they can participate in some of the subjects and we have new town hall sessions. We hope they can contribute to that as well. That's why we have some exercises with them in that. And then they can constitute the paragraph.     We see it as an integrated effort and make sure they can streamline the drafts but not only within the youth draft actions. I'm not sure if you want to add anything at all about the youth IGF?

     >> So, actually more of the details in the IGF sessions. This summer I went to organize the IGF for young people from Asia Pacific regions. We have some young people from Vanuatu and some students from Australia and Taiwan. And we have some sessions about internet topics that we should have including interactions on-line, etc., so it's a platform for young people attending the IGF to interchange the idea so we can based on more -- on our open -- before like -- because we are parallel with the APR-IGF so we can actually come up with some concrete idea from a youth perspective so that we can voice out and advocate out an opinion. And have town hall sessions and we have some -- we have some town hall sessions. It's like preparation sessions in our youth IGF so the sessions for young people attending IGF to make them more prepared to voice our opinion. And it's like attending the session. It's very good because we can see that the difference in Asia Pacific region, we have many different concerns. Because like Asia Pacific is a very diverse area, region.

      They say that, for example, students from Australia have more concern about gender equality. But students from Vanuatu, maybe they have a higher concern about internet access. So, it's a good chance for people from different economies to know about youth from the same region, what's their concern. So, it's like a good opportunity for us not to only have our stance or our opinion voiced out in APR-IGF. But also get to connect with youth in the region.

      Thank you so much. I think we have -- yes, five minutes to wrap this up. But there are two things that I think are very important. And that is for a couple of months, a subject of our discussion s until we finally agreed on a couple of principles. The first one is that in Indonesia, the IGF said we don't want to be seen as just the youth association. That's very important. You are not the stakeholder in nature. I'm looking at youth here. There are six of you sitting there and I'm sure you're very close in age. It's how it looks to me.

      But I'm pretty sure some of you are probably studying to be engineers. Some are studying to be doctors. Some are studying to be in political sciences and so on. So, there is already a substantial difference when it comes about your stake holder aspirations. That's what we agreed on. The way the youth have the stakeholder is you have different backgrounds. Just because you don't have your professional affiliation and organization that stands behind you and the work doesn't mean you don't present the stakeholder view. So that's one thing that took us a couple of months to agree on.

      And the second one is what we just heard here, there are different interests from different students coming from different regions, that's a reality. Among national and regional IGFs is just that depending on where you live, you're in geographic locations in your regional position, your interest -- substantive interests, really, are dependent on your location. That's important to underline. And that the new IGF has no exception compared to national or regional IGFs or any other organizations because they're young and they're just starting their professional career.

      We do have one complication that we asked the secretariat. We did it earlier this year. So, I would like to update the publication because there's a significant number that showed up later. But it seems to me you're upgrading your work more and more. So even the existing that I'm describing that that should be maybe updated. So, you can find it on the website. But it would be good if you could also be involved in forums that we're organizing to tell us what you're doing. That's prompting us to do certain things.

      The second thing is to build on what we started from Geneva. So there are those results of the public saying it's not a lot in terms of the quantity when it comes to the quality of inputs, I think it's important. If we could just expand on that, make sure that we do a proper outreach. I think it was a bit difficult to do. You still up in one place. One place I could reach you or not even familiar with everybody. But I think these face-to-face readings do help.

      And if you could also help us spread the word, the second start will help to engage in the IGF and see if those inputs that are received are summarized on the IGF website actually with reflection. So, there is my contact -- or the contact of the secretariat on the website. And just so you know, it will be really good if you could let me know, just send me a quick e-mail just so I know where are you? Who should I contact for what you're doing? And that would be very helpful then for us to make sure that we actually did due diligence when it comes to bottom up.

      I think we have to leave the room. There's another session. If we have any last questions before we leave?

     >> Anaya, this is a youth session, right? So, can we do a self-y together?

     >> Can we do a what?

     >> Can we do a selfie together? This is youth session, right?

     >> Yeah. If there are no comments or questions, thank you very much. I hope to see you around the venue until the end of the day.