IGF 2023 – Day 4 – Launch / Award Event #9 University Diploma South School on Internet Governance – RAW

The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

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>> OLGA CAVALLI: Okay.  We should start.

Let me stop my mic here.

Okay.  Thank you.  Thank you very much for being with us.  For those on site and online, Hola.  (Speaking Spanish).

(Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: So I will switch to English now.  Thank you.  Thank you very much for being with us.  And this last day of the IGF, 2023, in the beautiful city of Kyoto, and beautiful country of Japan, which I love very much, and it's so nice to be back again to this nice country and visit it again.

From such a long way from Argentina.  I think it's most different place we can travel from Argentina to here.  There's no other place so distant like Japan.  So it makes it very, very special for us.

So what we want to share with you is a story that started in 2009 but has changed very much in the last two years because of some agreements that we have done with very good friends of ours.  I'm here with our dear friends from Universidad Estadual da Paraiba, Alfredo and Marko.  Marko was a student of the school, and Universidad Estadual da Paraiba was our partner in the last meeting and I want to show you some pictures and also we have our friends from Internet Society Foundation who has been helping the school.  The school is possible thanks to the contribution from different stakeholders, companies, governments, universities, some of them give funds and some other give help in different ways.  So I will show you a PowerPoint, which is not long.  But I think most beautiful thing from the PowerPoint are the pictures.

I prepared this in English, but you can figure out the ‑‑ let me take this out.  No?  So this is the first one.  This is about the South School on Internet Governance started in 2009 with the idea that I want to show you in a moment in the next slide.  This is a very nice picture we took in one of the two editions that we will see in Washington, D.C., and the Organization of American States venue, in the middle of the picture, you can see our dear Vint Cerf by my side in the middle.  I'm with the pink jacket.

And we organized it there two times, in 2016 and 2018, because the Organization of American States was interested in the activities of the school.  There you see the group of 200 fellows.  That was a very nice meeting.  And this is also a very, very nice meeting for all of us, and we're here and remote.  This is the group that gathered in the northeast of Brazil, thanks to the help of our friends of Mark, Claudio, and Ersovald.  And CGIRB, Internet Society Foundation and other companies that help with some funds.  We could gather the same amount of fellows that we had before the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, we used to have 200 fellows.  We went totally virtual during two years in the pandemic and then last year in Buenos Aries, we gathered less people because we were just getting out of the pandemic and we were not sure if we could ‑‑ if we could be safe.

So it was smaller.  Marko was there with us.  And this year he came not as a student but as an expert and also he helped us a lot with what we did with Claudio and Percival.  Why we thought this idea was interesting in 2009, we wanted to enhance the participation of Latin America in all the Internet Governance processes.

So we want to increase the number of representatives, but also we wanted to increase their relevant participation.  Not only being there, but are being there, making comments and proposing things that could have an impact for Latin America, because the problems of Latin America are unique.  We are the most beautiful region in the world.

(Laughter)

It's diverse and beautiful, but we have huge inequalities, which is unique in the world there's no Oregon place in the world.  I live in Buenos Aries and I live in a neighborhood that has connectivity like, I don't know, Manhattan.  But 500 meters away, you have a poor neighborhood that it's in problems.  So that ‑‑ that huge difference, inequality is ‑‑ is really something from Latin America that we are trying to solve for many years but makes it different, the needs that we have and the problems that we have are different than what happens in Africa, Europe or North America.

So having that perspective and bringing it to the international negotiations is why we did it.  We had the school in 2009 and there are fellowships to all the participants.  Nobody pays for participating in any of the activities that I will show you now, that have been growing.

So we had gender balance from day zero.  The same amount of ladies and men as fellows.  We tried to do that with experts.  That is more difficult, but we tried to do that.  All the activities are free.  We had from day zero translation into English and Spanish and the three times we organized in Brazil, it has also translation, English, Spanish and Portuguese.  And the target audience, many people tell me, well, should I attend?  Why?  Who is attending?  Why?  Really, the target audience is quite broad.  The only thing that you want to have is a desire to learn about how the Internet works, how to get involved in the different spaces where the Internet is defined, where the rules that make the Internet work is defined ‑‑ are defined.

So this is what you want to do, or you want to have in mind, and also we want people that is not already much involved in the process.  We want people from the boundaries that are interested in getting involved.

Of course, we have fellows that are involved, like Marko, for example, but most of them should be people that really want to ‑‑ we don't have any age limit.  We had from high school students to people that it's young like me for many years.  This is ‑‑ I copied it from Claudio.  So we think that diversity is nice from young people to experienced people being women, men, and ‑‑ and I think that diversity ‑‑ we think that the diversity is beautiful.  Also in backgrounds, we want engineers, lawyers, journalists, specialists in international relations, and all together, diplomats, parliamentarians.  All together makes a really very interesting mixture.

So this is the picture of the evolution.  You see at the beginning we were less.  The big ‑‑ the big quantum leap was in 2012, when Bogota, where we started to have 200 people and before then it was a little bit smaller.  Apart from the pandemic issue, we never went down in the number.  The things really changed in the pandemic because now we are totally hybrid which brings a new complexity for the budget, for the technology involved in the meeting, but ‑‑ but it also brought a very new thing.  We have fellows from all over the world.

We have fellows from India, Italy, Africa and I will show you now the cohort of diplomats ‑‑ of diplomas.

So this year in Campina Grande, you see that group of people, and then we had like 200 online, from many, many places of the world that I will show you in a moment.

So, like three years ago, I got in touch with my deer Cristina Parr aga, who was my professor of university Mendoza.  Unfortunately, she's not among us anymore.  I'm so sad for that.  Sorry.

So we talked to her several times about the idea of involving a university, and enhancing the program with a university diploma and with research.  And she was ‑‑ she really understood the concept.  It's not first university that we contacted.  But she understood the idea, and she talked with the authorities, with the dean of the university, and then the colleagues that are now in the corps with us, follow that idea and ‑‑ but she was the one who started it.  So I'm grateful for her help.  And she was my professor at university.  So she was a very, very good teacher and a pioneer among women engineers.

When I started we were very, very few.  We are still very fewB. out at that time, we were much less.  This is a picture of my dear university.  And this agreement allowed us to offer this diploma.

So now we have three stages.  What we started with one week of training has evolved.  The people that were attending the one week said it was a lot of information at the same time, that they needed more training ‑‑ pretraining.  So now we have an online training.  Self‑assisted.  Based on video, podcasts and reading materials that have been published Spanish, English and Portuguese.  That is given through, like, eight weeks.  Three hours per week.  And then it's the one week intense 40 hours on site or virtual.

And since last year and this year, we have added the possibility of making research with tutors of the university and that allows those who finish the ‑‑ the research properly to receive a University Diploma from University of Buenos Aries.  All the materials are in the YouTube channel.  After each school, our team splits all the presentations, the keynotes and panels and puts a sign.  So you can easily find in the YouTube channel all the content if you want to review it or you want to make research or just curious about what happened in the school.

And we were recognizing by the WSIS Prizes as pioneers in capacity building.  This is the Internet day that was a virtual with the first cohort of diploma that we ‑‑ that we ‑‑ that we share.  There's Claudio there.  Percival.  (Speaking Spanish).

And it's Cristina in the picture, Cristina, dear friend from University Mendoza, and I will give the floor to them.  And there you have students from Africa.  You can see them on the right.  We had three fellows that finished the study from Africa.  All virtual.  And also, a lady from Italy, and another unit from Colombia.  But there were many had others.  We just invited some of them to give some comments and share some ideas with us.

And this is the group of fellows.

It has become a global school with more ‑‑ mainly participation from Latin American students but as you can see from the list, we have Bangladesh, Chile, Colombia being Honduras.  Jamaica, Mali, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Zambia.  And now that advertise virtual in English and in Portuguese, it's changed very much.  And there you have the amount of fellows that were 400.

And finally, we ‑‑ we published a book in partnership, and it's in Spanish, English and Portuguese.  You wrote an article, right?  You wrote an article?

>> I did but I meet the deadline.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: I invited you and I did.  I do so many things that sometimes I forget.  So this is what I wanted to share with you.  It has been for us a fantastic journey.  I'm very happy.  Today, I receive an email from Judy Barungi, she's from Kenya.  She finished the diploma last year.  She was in the ceremony.  And she was very happy because she was selected as a pioneer woman in I don't know which program in Africa.  She was very grateful.  So it's very, very, very ‑‑ very rewarding.  And I would like to invite now my dear colleagues from university Mendoza, I see I have Karolina and Oswaldo, and (Speaking Spanish).

I'm going to tell you ‑‑ I want to tell you that the University did not only offer us the help of the tutoring of the professors to the students, Carolina, she's absolutely genius.  So they manage all the pretraining and all the training in the week so they know who participated, how many times, if they comply, if they didn't comply.  So then we can be sure if they are able to do the diploma, the research for the diploma.

Also this year was very challenging because we have three languages and many more students than the year before.  So I ‑‑ Carolina.

(Speaking Spanish).

Oswaldo Marianetti, he's been also very, very helpful.  And Mariella, she was one the tutors of the fellows.

(Speaking Spanish).

>> CAROLINA GONZALEZ:  (Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Carolina says that she's happy to be part of this group.  And the engineering ‑‑ the engineering faculty has diverse, very diverse careers in engineering.  When I started it was only one.  Electronic and electricity.  But it has grown and also the university has grown a lot with other areas, like they have medicine, infirmity.

Nursery, architecture.  Really the university has grown very, very much, which for me, it's very ‑‑ it's an honor to be part of that group of people and for them, it's very special to share the work of this group and the diversity that we bring to their work.

(Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Carolina, she says they are very happy to have gone through this challenge that this year was very challenging with a lot of much more students than the year before and three languages.  But she and I want to also stress the fact that Raitme was there.  If you are there.

I see your picture here.  When you want.  Thank you, Carolina.

Mariela.

I want to say that Mariela, she lives in the south of province, but she's in the south.  So the university has different branches in the province.

(Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: She says she's grateful for what we are doing together.  She said something she's interested.  She's interested in reading the materials that will be developed by our students this year that last year were very ‑‑ at least the ones that we reviewed were very, very interesting.  Thank you, Mariela.

(Speaking Spanish).

So we are grateful for Raitme for managing all the platforms from the students from day zero to the end when they finish the diploma.  And in total, it's like six months of work for the students.

Okay, I would like to go to my dear friends.  Sandy, are you there?

Sandy Palma?

>> SANDY PALMA:  Hola.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: I like your background.  I will do the question in English.  And then I will translate.

(Speaking in Spanish).

I would like sandy share with us her impressions after being a fellow.  She was a fellow more than once, and also ‑‑ but now she's very well recognized for her work in cybersecurity with her own work, with her NGO Honduras Cibersegura.  So how do you see this ‑‑ this journey that you have done with the school?

>> SANDY PALMA:  (Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, sandy.  She said that fell in love with cybersecurity after the first school that she attended.  That was in 2018.  That school was ‑‑ we called it cyber south Internet Governance.  It was very much focused on cybersecurity.  It was the idea from the Organization of American States.  And since then, she has been involved and now she's a very well recognized professional in cybersecurity and now she's grateful because she has friends all over the world.

And not only friends but colleagues where she can share experience and to whom she can share experiences and knowledge and working opportunities.

(Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, sandy so much.  I didn't know that Honduras Cibersegura was something you did together.  A spinoff of the school.  Well, Sandy, I have to summarize.  Maybe I forget something.  She says that from ‑‑ from the ‑‑ when she participated in the school, she started to do several things related with cybersecurity, and also hon Dorr use University with Claudio, and it seems to be the case that it was born in the school, the idea, which I didn't ‑‑ I think I knew but I didn't remember.

And now she's well‑recognized and she has received several awards and she's grateful for the school.  Thank you Sandy.  You want to add something more?

>> SANDY PALMA: (Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Sandy.  She's very grateful.  She says that this opened many doors to her, and she hopes that they will have many schools in the future with many more students.

(Off microphone comment).

(Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Osvaldo, is grateful for the relationship with the university.  He's hopeful that someone will help us with the Portuguese documents that we have to talk about.

He has been managing all the team, working with all the ‑‑ all the professors.  It's not only Mariela and Carolina, but also there are, like, ten other teachers in the university that have been helping with ‑‑ with the ‑‑ with the research.

(Speaking Spanish).

Now, I will change the floor to my dear colleagues here with me, Claudio and Mark.

We can do it in English.  So I have some rest from my new profession.

Claudio was a fellow in ‑‑

>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: 2015.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: (Speaking Spanish).

I wanted to thank you.  We were talking about you with Carolina when she was remembering all the work that you did, and I ‑‑

(Speaking Spanish).

I wanted to thank you for all of your help and also Carolina mentioned that you are really special and you are always there for her work.  You both have done a fantastic group ‑‑ couple of partners in helping us with ‑‑ with the fellows and all the stages for the pretraining, the week and then in the diploma.

So thank you very much, Raitme, and I want to ask Claudio here a question.  He was a fellow in ‑‑

>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: In 2015 in Costa Rica.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: You didn't know the school, did you?

>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: No, I didn't know about the school.  We met by chance in Geneva.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: We met.  He was alone at a table and I said, well, let's talk to him.  He seems to be bored.

(Laughter).

>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: I was an unauthorized ambassador of the following IGF, which was being held in my state in Brazil and I was there to observe.  I was writing and researching on Internet Governance for sometime but I had never had the opportunity to interact in the environment.  It's been a door opener for me.  I've been ‑‑ and this is something interesting.

I had some space for research and to debate and to discuss in Europe.  I was based in Brussels and Portugal then, and then afterwards in DC.  I was pretty much involved in the global space but I didn't have a door open to the Latin America environment.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Okay.

>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: Which in the end is my home and now in this ten years, Olga, not only have I taken part in events that are held in Brazil, by the Brazilian steering committee, but I have taken part in the Argentina Internet Governance and all the editions of South School Internet governance and I set up the school in Honduras.  We participated in Peru and Colombia, and I'm very grateful, among other things for the fact that I am back in the terrain, back in the environment, in Latin America which is where we are supposed to assist and to cooperate.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Where we belong.

>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: I really love to ‑‑ to use this space here to thank you, Adrian and Oscar for the bravery to bring the school out of the main capitals with the ‑‑ where the best infrastructure is usually located.

It was tremendous work to make it happen this time, but I think we made an awesome impact being able ‑‑ having the Tass tock mobilize local community I have understood how hard ‑‑ Internet governance is not an intuitive concept.  It's something very interesting.  And the school helps a lot in developing that.  So having the need and the task to disseminate the idea of Internet Governance with the local community, with the press, with the universities, local authorities, social society, I understood and now I can measure before and after the school how important it is to have the school in the environment to engage students to engage universities, to engage civil society so that they now understand what happens there.

The fact that the fellows from university of ‑‑ of Mendoza are taking a third step now, because there was a second step apart from the intensity.  You put up a boarding program some years ago that's very important.  It's hard to come into a week that's so intense with no knowledge of what Internet Governance is and make it right.  So preparing the onboarding program was already a phenomenal first step.  Now you are putting a post‑production step which is the bring writing of this diploma.  We are coming up with a help team with Portuguese, that are able to help you analyzing and evaluating those papers.

And just to close, to ‑‑ I think I have ‑‑ I finally found a nice way to communicate with my local community and make them aware the importance of understanding Internet governance nowadays and after a phenomenon like the South School in my Hometown is clear, because we are not dealing with an aspect of human life.  We live the digital ecosystem is where we live.  It's our home.  It's part of who we are.  And it's very difficult to take care of something that we don't know well.

So that notion has very much helped my Internet governance schools in general, but particularly by the design and by the approach of the South School of Internet Governance, the South School Internet Governance, thank you very much, once again.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: I want to thank you for recognizing the value that it had for you, the school, that's very good for us.  And ‑‑ and all the passion that you ‑‑ that you put in all the things that we did in Campino Grande.

It was challenging.

(Speaking Spanish.)

We have a Vint Cerf in Latin America.  It's ‑‑ can you ‑‑ can you ‑‑ can you enable Mr. Oscar Messano?

(Speaking Spanish).

Let's follow with Mark.  My dear Mark.

Tell us your experience in the school.  I knew Mark, it's in my story.  There was a group of NextGen in Buenos Aries, in 2015 and my assistant was ‑‑ I push her for becoming but finally she had a health problem and she couldn't.  But Mark had to get to know her and we ‑‑ we started to get in touch through ‑‑ through Sandy?  Sally.

And since then we have been exchanging some comments and I think we met ‑‑ and then you went to the school in ‑‑ in Rio.  In Rio, that I couldn't go because I had a problem ‑‑ a family problem.  But I attended online.  And since then, he has been a fundamental partner of this school, an informal, fantastic partner of the school.  Can you share with us your experience and your thoughts?

>> MARK DATYSGELD: Yes, it's fantastic.  In Internet Governance, I see only two models usually.  One is very closed courses, where you select the students to a degree that they have to be vice minister of something to attend or a Ph.D.  So that's one type of course, with like 30 people.  And then there are the self‑taught courses there are for everyone, but at the same time, they don't have any type of support.

In the South School, it does exactly the middle ground, this middle route where you get bigger cohort.  You get more people.  It's more inclusive and accessible, but at the same time, these people don't get left to their own devices and that kind of middle ground, I think is the way we have to do things moving forward, because the topic of Internet Governance keeps growing.  We need to capacitate more people every time and with the very tailored models for specific people, that's really good when you want to train, like, officials from governments and things like that.

The need that you need to really capacitate, 200 lawyers or journalists, the model doesn't care and it's this model that you are innovating that's really pushing this sort of thing forward.  And like I keep saying, like, I sound like a broken record at this point.  But it really was momentous to do the event in the countryside of Brazil.  Right?

It is nothing we should underscore.  It really is something very important, because when it gets to the point where you can say we need this successfully, it removed the excuse that it would be impossible that it would be too difficult.  So with a few varying age people, a lot of goodwill, the school was carried out successfully.  I saw Adrian running around like a crazy person for four days but it got done.

It's the sort of thing that we need to tell people.  We need to be in the spaces saying, hey, this worked out.  We got a lot of people.  There were a lot of foreigner people there, right?  Like to Brazil.  Many people from outside.  It worked out that the airports didn't somehow implode.  The infrastructure didn't somehow implode.  It just took a little extra effort because it was worth it because now when we look at the students even from the local university, we are engaging them remotely.  Several of them are in touch with us and they are following the sessions.

And this is the sort of thing, it's transformative.  You are really bringing a new resource, a new way of doing things.  So that's why I'm so passionate about this project, right something like, it is a different way of doing things and I enjoy different ways of doing things because they sort of bring new options.

So yeah, always glad to be a part of this, and anybody who wants to learn more about the organisation of the school in the Brazillan country side, because reach out to these three people yes, it involved challenges and it brought a lot of rewards.  Who are we benefiting?  Are we getting value out of this?  And to me, the answer is yes, we are bringing infinite amounts of benefit out of this, because we are qualifying people that otherwise would be excluded from the system.  And this is what the IGF is all about.  This is what we keep talking about loop here, any session you enter is how to include?  How to include?  We need to value the initiatives, they are actually doing that.

So those would be my general comments.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: How do you see the interaction with ‑‑ your experience in ICANN, because you are quite involved in GNSO and many activities.  Is the school did help?  How do you see both worlds interacting?

>> MARK DATYSGELD: ICANN is interesting because when you land in a fellowship or a NextGen, it's good for the names and numbers environment.  You qualify people a lot in that, but they don't put emphasis on understanding Internet Governance.  So it is expected that the person has a background or a soft understanding ahead of time.

So even in terms of entrants, we have a challenge there already, when you are trying to engage with ICANN at that level.  The person needs to have found a resource and capacitiated themselves.  So to me, it works with synergy, right?  We can bring people who did the South School.  Now the thing that I kept telling to all of them, now you are qualified to apply for these fellowships.  Now you have the basis that you need to write a text that people will say, okay this person is knowledgeable enough that they would be able to follow the ‑‑ this sort of meeting.

So it is ‑‑ I consider it sort of a letter, if we were to say it that way.  You know, you get the initial capacitation that then empowered the to person to take on more challenges and more fellowships and that's exactly the thing we want, right?  We want people to grow and strengthen the Latin America community and the global community.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: It's interesting what you say.  ICANN was the focus of my Ph.D.  I never participated in an ICANN meeting during the Ph.D.  And I knew ‑‑ I thought I knew the organisation and I thought I knew their dynamic.  So I went ‑‑ my first meeting was in Sao Paulo in 2006 and I said, wow, I don't understand anything.

(Laughter).

And then different.  Everyone was speaking English in a Portuguese‑speaking country.  This is crazy!  Nobody speaks the local language.  What happens with people who don't know English?  And as they told me, but you speak English.  Yes, I do but what happens with the local?

And so I ‑‑ every time I say this, people tell me, oh, I didn't understand nothing either.  So I ‑‑ it happened to me the same.

So I think the school ‑‑ this is also why I thought that the school was a good idea to have a platform.  Those who request a fellowship, if they did participate in the school, so they think that it's a good background.

And Raitme, are you there?

(Speaking Spanish).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you.  Raitme was a fellow in 2014, in Trinidad and Tobago.  We had some budget available.  We paid also his ticket, which is something that ‑‑ (No audio).

It's also difficult to fund it.  It takes a lot of ‑‑ of logistics.  But we could bring Raitme, and since then he has been working somehow with us.  Now it's part of our team, and we are very grateful for his help and moocho gracias.

They have partnered to well with Carolina.  We have other members of the team that are not online and are very, very help fum.

We have Lucas, he manages all the video and the hybrid thing is part of the environment.  And he manages all the videos and also Oscar is our mentor.  Oscar Messano.

(speaking Spanish).

Okay.

And we have Iskal, we have a comment in the chat, which is very nice.  I will ‑‑ it's in Spanish but I will read in English.

I am from a very small town called ‑‑ which I know because it's near where I was born.

This is a province in Argentina, which is by Mendoza which is my province.  With less than 20,000 inhabitants.  I'm very grateful of being a fellow and for ‑‑ I have been partnering and learning and knowing such a nice human group of people and professional.  It has been a very rewarding and enriching experience.  I am from security of information and it was a very, very nice experience.  Thank you very much.  The name is?  Pablo.  Oh, Pablo!  Thank you.

Thank you, Pablo for your nice words.  I read them in English so everyone can understand and the recording is in English.

I don't know we have very few minutes do.  We have any comments from fellows in the room?  Any comments, ideas?

Remind me your name.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Maria.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Maria.

Si, I translate Portuguese.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Speaking Portuguese).

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Many thanks, Maria.  We'll try to summarize what she said.  She ‑‑ she says that she finds the project very interesting and also bringing diversity into ‑‑ into this training program.  And she asked two questions, one is:  Which are the next steps?  And also, how do we integrate more other voices from perhaps the Global South or the developing world?  And ‑‑ okay.  It's okay if I respond in English?

So next steps is the Argentina Internet school of governance.  We have the Argentina that will be virtual with a different format.  We want to do not panels but we want to do more (Speaking Spanish) in ‑‑ in the presentations.  Like one a specialist will talk one hour about a different thing and we want to do a format and see how it works.

We have partnered another university, and we have have the students would comply with the evaluations.  It's a limited number but it's a very interesting.  It's Universidad, it's the only university in Latin America that offers university training in cybersecurity, specific in training cybersecurity.  The first one is organized by renowed specialist in Argentina, Pablo, with many specialists in from Latin America.  That's very good news that we partner them, for the Argentina Internet school of governance.  That's a different thing.

The Global South, it's challenging.  We have to think about ‑‑ we have to include in the program of activities, specialists from Africa, from ‑‑ we do have people from Europe and from North America, from Latin America, but honestly, I don't recall that we have specialists from Africa.  That's something that we could think about.  Maybe you both can help me because you know many people.

So Maria, if you have any suggestions, we are open to comments.

Any comments in the chat?

No.  I think we are on time.  Any comments from here?

You have a mic or here you have another mic.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: We don't have much time.

We are on time.

>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you so much for panelists and the audience.  I'm from the coordinator of Bangladesh's school of Internet Governance and I want to show you my gratitude Olga and her team, for taking this sort of initiative, because actually, we are trying to contribute for the school of Internet Governance for long‑awaited program, which you are trying to initiate.

But we are having more something like digital governance or AI governance, which is more relevant desire.  So it's our ‑‑ what I should say, it's our opinion, or we want you ‑‑ for the next step, we can more take this sort of initiative or this sort of course you can align with the school of Internet Governance.  Thank you.

>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you.  We stay in touch.  We have fellows from Bangladesh, by the way some.

Yes, Bangladesh, India, from Kenya, from Zimbabwe, from ‑‑ not, many but some.  Which is remarkable because of the time difference.  That they want to take the course.  But, you know, when people is willing to learn, there's no limits.

Okay.

Thank you very much.  Many thanks to everyone for being with us.

(Applause)