The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. 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, just to announce that this workshop will be translated in six languages. You can grab your translation radios outside in the foyer. Also, we remind you that all sessions are being live streamed and translated and we invite you to go to the IGF web site and the IGF YouTube Channel to watch and share.
>> JUAN CARLOS HERNANDEZ: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Juan Carlos Hernandez, International Affairs Coordinator at the Mexican Telecommunications and Broadcasting Regulator, the Federal Telecommunications Institute. It is my pleasure to be here with you. This session will present the outputs of the 2016 IGF stakeholder‑driven best practice forums on IXPs, IPv6, gender and access, and cybersecurity, as well as showcase the outcomes of the Phase 2 of the IGF policy options for connecting the next billion.
The session will highlight that these community activities have resulted in tracking resources from which policymakers can draw when addressing Internet policy issues. The session will also seek community suggestions and input as to how these outputs could be taken forward into other relevant IGF fora, and how IGF community intersessional work could be enhanced looking ahead to 2017 and beyond.
The discussion will also address how to improve IGF outputs in light of the recommendation of the CSTD Working Group on IGF Improvements. It is my pleasure to give the floor now to the Chair of this session, Constance Bommelaer from ISOC.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. I'm Constance Bommelaer from The Internet Society, and I had the pleasure as a previous MAG member, and an IGF community member, to participate in developing what we call IGF intersessional activities with many others. So a few words about IGF intersessional activities, and basically why we are holding this session today. The goal here is really to present the outputs of a year‑long process of IGF activities.
We've heard the call from the Internet Community. We've heard the call from the UN CSTD Working Group on IGF Improvements, the call to have more outputs, that the IGF evolve a little bit, remains a platform for discussions, but also be able to synthesize and deliver some best practices that then stakeholders, policymakers, leaders of the Internet Community can then take home and implement in their various countries and communities.
This said, of course, the purpose is not to change the mandate of the IGF. The mandate of the IGF is detailed in the Tunis Agenda, and it is clear that it is not to become a negotiating body developing binding outputs. So there really is a fine balance here to observe and find.
A few words about the methodology, whether for the best practices or what we call the policy options that were developed. In the spirit of the IGF and the IGF's tradition, it has been multistakeholder and bottom‑up from the beginning to the end, both in terms of selecting the topics, gathering inputs, and also editing the draft outputs that will be discussed today.
For 2016, it was mentioned we had 4 Best Practice Forums, one on IPv6 adoption, another one on IXPs, another one on gender and access, and finally a Best Practice Forum on cybersecurity, and then a horizontal track on developing policy options for connecting and enabling the next billion, when we say enabling, it really is to indirectly support reaching the Sustainable Development Goals through the use and development of Internet access.
I will conclude with a reminder: The draft outputs of all of these tracks of work are available on the IGF web site. They're open for comments. We have a system of Web platform where anybody can add some comments. These comments will then be taken into account by the Secretariat towards final conclusion of the Document and the publication of these various documents, shortly after the IGF.
And with this, I will hand it to our Moderator, who will facilitate the discussion, presentation of the best practices but also the policy options for connecting the next billion. Helani, please.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you Constance and for everybody being here. My Co‑Moderator and I will take over different parts of this. In this, I hope we bring about not only the substance of the discussions, especially in the Best Practice Forums, but also commentary about the process, about the multistakeholder nature and the value of that and what the participants gained and why that is important in connecting and enhancing the next billion.
And we will start off with the Best Practices Forum addressing really the three key enablers in cybersecurity, IPV, the numbering, and IXPs, and then we will also have the Best Practice Forum on gender which is a very key constituency and there's a recognition that the issues there need to be addressed in a particular focused manner.
So without further ado, let's actually start off, because we would like audience participation. I would like to ask, give the floor to Markus Kummer and Maarten Van Horenbeeck who will talk about the Best Practice Forum on cybersecurity.
>> MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Chair, good morning. I will be very brief this Best Practice Forum is a follow‑up to two previous Forums, one on unsolicited communication that is spam and the other one on CSERTs, incident response teams. The experts involved early on, this should be conceived as a multiyear project. We had excellent discussions and we also looked forward upon where to move from here to find soft support for the IGF, so to speak.
We did not directly address connecting the next billion, but it's clear that cybersecurity is a key component for the next billion coming online, and one way or so of looking forward would be to link cybersecurity to the Sustainable Development Goals.
We also recognize that the soft support of the IGF is precisely the very multistakeholder nature, and some of the discussions on cybersecurity take place in Government only, places such as the global Group of Experts which is linked to the first Committee of the United Nations dealing with security and disarmament. So there breaking down the silos and Building Bridges could be a role for the IGF going forward, but we also recognize that much work is done elsewhere and we don't want to duplicate work that is done elsewhere. With that, I hand over to Maarten who will talk over about the substance.
>> MAARTEN VAN HORENBEECK: Thank you very much, Markus. When we started this new Best Practices Forum as a group we came together and we really thought about topics that would actually make sense for us to tackle and what we discovered was that cybersecurity as a term itself is actually very controversial and it's one of those terms where quite often, one particular stakeholder community steps forward and other stakeholder communities steps back because they don't feel like they have the ability to contribute in a multistakeholder way to decisions that are made that are somewhat related to them, but they don't have direct input.
So what we wanted to do within the Best Practices Forum was to find a way to address that problem and we very early on decided in the first two calls on the topic that we were going to focus on finding and identifying Best Practices in cooperation across stakeholder groups which was interesting for us because it was different than the two last BPFs on unsolicited communications and CSERT which were very much focused on communication within a stakeholder group and how the interaction with the other stakeholders would happen. So we got started by asking each of the stakeholder communities to provide input on the topic focused on a number of different questions and we asked them to bring forward examples of Best Practices and examples of cooperation that had succeeded. We received 17 responses which was actually very good compared to the previous years, 17 formal responses that were actual write‑ups in terms of Document, which were provided to the group and then we had several groups which were brokered by the IGF Secretariat where discussions along those topic lines took place and we identified outcomes and areas of consensus.
In addition to the areas of consensus, we also focused on identifying areas of difference where stakeholder groups didn't agree on particular things and approaches to cooperate and we came out with a draft Document for public review, which contained both the consensus statement that most groups agreed on, and those areas where further discussion was actually valuable.
And then here at the IGF, at the meeting, we had a feeder session organized by an affiliated participating group which really focused on those areas where communication wasn't easy, where cooperation was difficult, and how those policy spaces could actually be opened to other stakeholder communities and that was provided as input to the main session, which took place yesterday morning.
During the main session, we asked both participants and non‑participants to the group to come and actually provide input on the Document, and discuss some of those topics that were more controversial. We have a long list of outcomes and I by no means intend to go through all of them right here but some key ones I think are important to mention was that multistakeholder involvement is essential, and it's essential for stakeholder communities to trust, respect and understand the expertise that was offered by the other communities.
Also, cybersecurity as a term is loaded with context and the IGF has an opportunity to redefine it as a common goal and work towards a common understand of what cooperation really means.
Roles and responsibilities are also not fixed and neither should they be, because technology and security is a very evolving topic, and input of particular stakeholder communities may change over time. Some cybersecurity issues become more or less important over time.
And then finally there's a significant opportunity for more Civil Society input. Compared to the last two years of Best Practices forums, we saw a real increase in the amount of Civil Society participation and that input was actually very, very valuable.
Towards the future, we talked about a number of topics where we feel the BPF can contribute and one very big one as Markus also mentioned is finding alignment between cybersecurity goals and Sustainable Development Goals, and how do we identify ways where cybersecurity can really support bringing the Internet to that next billion of users.
And also growth of access also should go hand in hand with quality of access and quality is definitely a cybersecurity issue.
Finally, differences with other forums. There was actually a very big difference between the Best Practices Forum and other forums where this type of discussion takes place. The most important one is that cybersecurity expertise is not evenly spread and that's something that came up in every single discussion we had as part of the BPF and the IGF and the Best Practices Forum offer a great opportunity for different organizations, different stakeholders with differing levels of expertise to come together and share problems that they don't have the opportunity to share in another context. Thank you.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much, Maarten. It is meant to be 5 minutes for each Best Practice Forum, not for each speaker so we've already run over and we've got a very tight schedule, so I'm going to ask everybody please to try and stick to those five minutes.
Our next Best Practice Forum is Renata Aquino Ribeiro, who will speak on gender and access.
>> RENATA AQUINO RIBEIRO: Hello. The Best Practice Forum agenda is in its second year. In 2015, it produced a comprehensive and extensive output document on the theme of online views and gender based balance. This year the policy recommendations from 2015 have been summarized in a user base demographic to be widely disseminated in 2016 the BPF gender focused on studying challenges pertaining to women's ability to access and benefit from meaningful Internet access. The BPF community specifically decided to focus on the barriers preventing women from gaining and benefiting from meaningful Internet access, and also it investigated and mapped over 60 initiatives around the world that are overcoming these barriers.
In undertaking this work, the BPF went to great lengths to engage stakeholders at different phased of the BPF's work including the use of frequent and regular online meetings, a survey, the gathering of case studies, Regional strategies for communication, and importantly, its participation at various National and Regional IGF meetings with the aim of gathering more local case studies and experiences related to contextual challenges faced by women in accessing the Internet.
The BPF is in discussions with stakeholders to promote better and wider use and awareness of its existing outcomes and ongoing work. It has for instance partnered with the ITU and the UN Women in their equals initiative to help map, initiatives that are addressing the gender digital divide and continue to engage with various stakeholders to promote its work. The BPF will following its successful session on Wednesday work towards finalizing conclusions and recommendations in its outcome report and will also continue to engage its vibrant and dedicated community on how its work can continue in 2017.
It welcomes stakeholder input and how this can be done both at this session and on its mailing list. For the National and Regional IGFs, we have already gathered input from Brazil IGF via its new Conference session and LAC IGF which had itself a session on connecting the next billion covering the BPF's work. For Asia Pacific IGF, our input was gathered at the same time as LAC IGF, the same day, so we had both National and Regional IGFs, discussing the BPF's theme and that fed back into our Document.
We also have Regional strategies for communication, which involve the use of mobile messaging, collective documents, and authorship given to our vibrant community which also resulted in documents created by participants of the BPFs such as the Declaration for young women in Latin America.
This Declaration became also a statement adopted by Civil Society in its joint Civil Society meeting, and is currently available in the Best Practices platform.
There are many paths of engagement in the BPF, but this Regional work, coupled with the theme of gender and access, is something that has brought the BPF to a whole new level. We have now a very multicultural community of participants and their assessment of initiatives which helped bridge the gender and access barrier is increasingly for us to understand the future of Internet Governance and the important issues that surrounded this theme. Thanks.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you, Renata, for taking less time than allocated but also thank you for walking us through a really systematic description of the multistakeholder process at every level in every region. I really appreciate that.
Now we move over to Izumi Okutani and Sumon Sabir who will speak on IPv6.
>> IZUMI OKUTANI: Good morning, everyone. Before I share about our work, I'd like to do a quick recap on what IP address is. This is a technical identifier you need to connect devices on the Internet, just like phone numbers that you need to communicate and telephone. And the current version that most of us use is version called IP version 4, IPv4, and this has run out of new available stock of address space to distribute to the coming new users so this new version called IP version 6 which is available in such a large volume that you don't have to worry about running out and be able to accommodate connecting to the next billion users.
So that's what IPv6 is, and I'd like to share some of the key points that we've summarized in our Document. So the general status of IPv6 is that it's happening in certain areas, such as major global contents that most of you are familiar with, such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and in the area of mobile. Certain mobile operators observe over 70% of its traffic available in the IPv6.
On the other hand, if you look at the global deployment of IPv6, it's a little less than 8% and there are disparities between different countries where Belgium is observing over 50% of deployment and there are other countries where the deployment rate is almost 0. There's still a lot of room for improvements in support and local contents. I'd like to share what each of us can do to promote IPv6 deployment for policymakers, industry decision makers and consumers. So policymakers, you can require vendors to support IPv6 and the equipment in the features which is not available in the same manner as IPv4, and providing technical challenge to deploy IPv6 network.
There are also things that they can do to raise awareness of business decision makers in industry to deploy IPv6 or raise awareness for consumers to choose v6 supported equipment. They can also help in the area of capacity‑building to provide trainings perhaps with help of private sector so that engineers are able to deploy IPv6 technically. For business decision makers when you purchase new equipment to deploy new network, make sure you choose v6 supported ones, and also turn on IPv6 commercial service by default, without requiring users to apply for v6 service explicitly. There are also things you can do as consumers.
So look around in your environment at home, whether it's a v6 supported, all your devices, your home router, your mobile, and if your jump stream ISPs are not connected to IPv6, or if the contents you see regularly is not available in v6, ask for it and this will make them realize their commercial needs for v6 deployment can lead for them to deploy v6 so these are the things that each of us can do to encourage v6 deployment and accommodate environment for connecting the next billion. And I pass it on to Sumon for the summary.
>> SUMON SABIR: Thank you, Izumi. The message that the v4 is over, there's no more v6, we cannot grow with that. So we already have to use v6 from now on. So if we want to connect the next billion to the Internet, we have to go to v6. As an individual, as a Government, as an industry, as individual, we must check for V6, all our devices enabled as Izumi mentioned. As a Government if we have enabling environment to v6 to promote that so the industry feel we need to do it immediately, as industry we must take care we're offering to our end users. Then we could achieve the goal of connecting the next billion. Thank you very much.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much, Izumi and Sumon and for sharing your efforts to try and smooth out the unevenness of IPv6 deployment.
We now have the next Best Practice Forum is on IXPs.
>> Thank you, and good morning. We're going to report to you very simply on Best Practices from our experience real practices from Internet exchange points.
IXPs are in a critical factor for us to consider with respect to connecting the next billion and the unconnected, is to recognize that unconnected communities are enabling connectivity through IXPs and community networks and our role is to enable them. Internet exchange points quite simply are a meeting point for networks to exchange traffic over the same technical platform. They do help with cheaper, better, faster traffic, better quality of service and help improve the Internet ecosystem not only from a technical perspective but a human technical perspective, training people. A great deal about Internet exchange points is building trust among the community and the people, putting them together.
IXPs grow and develop with the support of the local community. The importance of trust as I mentioned before and cooperation between local stakeholders is paramount. It's the human trust network that is developed among the participants at the IXP in developing it, growing it and sustaining it.
Last year's BPF focused on forming this community, and the necessary trust and cooperation to establish IXPs which create the very core enabling environment.
>> And while last year's BPF really focused on how to establish IXPs, this year we wanted to take it one step further and look on how to make those IXPs successful. The BPF looked into the management, how to run an IXP, how to overcome challenges and how to make them play the role that they should play and ‑‑ should play to help their communities evolve, and develop an inclusive and sustainable Internet in their societies.
It's important to understand the very simple principle the BPF took. It is looking at knowledge, knowledge that exists in the community in different parts of the community, different organizations, work done by IXP Federations, but also experiences by individual IXPs. The idea is the knowledge is there but it's not spread everywhere. One of the main purposes of the IXP, of the BPF is to bring that knowledge together and that's not in one Document. That happened throughout the process, a process where the mailing list people discussing on the list, sharing Best Practices. Yesterday we had a workshop where we heard different case studies from IXPs, also to share their Best Practices, their success stories.
And the next step is the output Document, is only capturing all this knowledge that we, with the BPF, want to make available to the whole community so knowledge picked here and there, real examples, real experiences, are now put together and given back in open resource to the community.
Therefore, I think the output document, the output of the BPF is very important, or it's very important that it doesn't stop here. Now the output has to be taking up and has to go back to the communities. I think it's very ‑‑ the Document itself will be very interesting for developing IXPs that want to see what happened elsewhere in the world, how people, or how other organizations solved their challenges, or similar challenges.
It's also very important for decision makers and the stakeholder organizations in communities that don't have an IXP or that are still looking in how they can develop their local Internet. Because for them, there are lots of ‑‑ there is a lot of information that came out of this process that clearly explains what the benefits can be of an IXP for their communities, and they can take it up, they can start the discussion in their communities, start to talk, maybe look for expertise outside of their local region but have the clear message and take the decision, bring people together and set up and start working on an IXP.
So I think this is in a short overview I think the main process, the main thing we did last year, and the message should be clear. IXPs are very available to help and build up the local Internet Community and the BPF can help by giving the information that's available in the world back to the people that are interested. Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much. Just getting a sense of the human and community sides of it not just the technical side is very insightful.
We'll move to the next session, and we'll take questions from the report backs from the Best Practice Forums on the end of this.
The next panelists will speak to the connecting, enhancing the next ‑‑ connecting and enhancing the next billion. We've got a set of four speakers. I'm going to just ask you, while you make your inputs, to also address some of the difficulties or challenges in the practice of multistakeholderism when one is involved in these initiatives, and respond to some of the sense or concerns that these initiatives are kind of acted upon and some stakeholders and execution by others so that there is it multistakeholderism actually in practice here and within different multistakeholder groups, who is participating? Are you actually getting participation the from different regions, different parts of those different multistakeholder sectors.
Thanks very much. We're going to start with Anri Van der Spuy from the IGF Secretariat, please.
>> ANRI VAN DER SPUY: Thanks, Alison. I'd just like to provide a quick overview of how we got to the point where we now have a draft 2 on the IGF platform and also perhaps to answer some of your questions around to what extent we managed to engage a variety of stakeholders. Like other intersessional activities, this one also adopted the similar approach of being open and inclusive and bottom‑up. We worked with the community to develop a framework Document in which we highlighted the key things that we wanted to look into this year. As we all know, connecting and enabling the next billion is quite a broad topic so the community decided that they wanted to focus specifically on the Sustainable Development Goals, and then also how we can take policy options to not only global levels, and keep it at this level, but how it differs at various other levels nationally and regionally.
So just in terms of the methodology approach, it was similar to last year in the sense that we issued a call for input. That call for input contained a list of questions that we asked people to respond to. If people didn't want to respond to those questions, we also welcomed background contributions and as you all know there's a lot of great work in this field that's been published recently so we also considered that. We reached out to people directly to have that reflected in our report. Examples are, for instance, The World Bank's digital dividends report. We reached out to GSMA has done recent work on how specifically mobiles can support each of the SDGs, the APC, the WEFF and also the various IGF intersessional activities from which we welcomed a lot of substantive input. I'd like to mention specifically the DC on community connectivity and the one on public access and libraries which really provided us with very substantive and useful input this year as well as the Best Practice Forums so we managed to get quite a lot of stakeholder input although that can always but improved. I think this is a good way forward. At least it provides a good platform to start with.
We still continue welcoming input. So far we've received around 60 contributions from 45 unique contributors. As mentioned by Constance earlier, a second draft is now on the IGF's review platform and we'll welcome input until more or less the middle of this month, I think the 20th of December, after which we'll try to conclude the Document and publish our final output Document.
That, to add to that, we might be building on that depending on what the MAG says to produce a Draft 3, so this doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of connecting and enabling the next billion. In terms of content I'm not going to go into a lot of detail but just to highlight the three key themes this year, the first one as you can notice from the way in which the title of this initiative has changed, there's a clear move from just looking at access to looking at meaningful access.
So that's why the words "and enabling the next billion" was added and we see that in a lot of our contributions we need to look at not only the demand side but also the supply side. We need to look at to borrow from The World Bank analog complements to this issue and I hope Frank will add to why we need to look at things like Human Rights and ensuring that we have an Internet that's universal in line with what UNESCO called the Internet universality framework.
Other key themes in that regard is that we need to look at different levels of access and the way in which we're looking at access, are we looking only at community access? Or are we looking at private access? And in that sense, what's been quite clear this week is the movement to looking at community networks, and that's also, we've got significant input from the Dynamic Coalition on community connectivity and we welcome that as a useful new addition to this work.
The one main part of the document was also around the SDGs, as I mentioned. We looked at how Internet access should be able to help as a whole in enabling development, Sustainable Development, and then we also try to look at the 17 specific SDGs and tried to highlight case studies and narratives we received from contributors on how specifically Internet access can contribute to different SDGs.
This part I think is a starting point. I think we can still add to a lot of this and we will continue to look at the contributions that we've received this week to add to that.
Lastly, the Document also looks at National and Regional specificities around access and this part we welcomed a lot of input from our National and Regional IGF initiatives and also the DC on community connectivity as I mentioned, and then some people, Christopher Yoo will be speaking to their great initiatives around this and case studies and just to conclude, I think, as I mentioned before, this is hopefully a useful starting point for the community, and we look forward to hearing from Alex, Frank, and Christopher around how we can continue to build on this. Thank you.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you, Anri. This was a very good description of a year‑long possibly very painful process, not just the process of collecting the input but then coming up with a summary Document which is more than just narrative and actually has synthesis so I would like to thank Constance and everybody else who worked on this.
We now move on to a speaker who needs no introduction, Frank La Rue from UNESCO.
>> FRANK LA RUE: Well, thank you very much. I will also try to be very brief because our positions have been made very clear. But we strongly believe in the Best Practices Forum and in general in the whole exercise of the IGF because we strongly believe in the multistakeholder approach to everything we do. Let me begin by saying that within our mandate, the most important mandate of UNESCO is to build peace by facilitating the free flow of ideas and knowledge between poems of the world. This facilitates understanding and peace building. I think this is valid for all ICTs. Internet is the mechanism for this free flow of ideas and knowledge.
So we give as UNESCO and we have brought this message here, equal importance to connectivity, to the next billion people connected, is very important for us that that connectivity reaches especially those that have been historically marginalized for ethnic or for economic reasons but at the same time, we give equal weight to the content. Connectivity without content would not suffice. We need relevant content and this falls into the SDGs agenda, the 2030 agenda we're looking at, which gives us exactly the framework. So today we're talking of Internet from a demand side, a supply side, but also very importantly the policies that accompany that. For us, the first element of those policies should be a Human Rights focus, should be universal access and neutrality of the Internet, and many of the elements that will facilitate to reach the legitimate and necessary content.
Some of that has been mentioned and more and more as we have had the different IGFs and debates around the world, the idea that to have a gender focus is not only to make ICTs and connectivity accessible for women, but it's also to have a gender approach in the connectivity and in the content that is transmitted, which will facilitate the SDGs not only Goal 5 but also the possibility of all goals.
Equally we believe that communication and information to build knowledge societies is relevant for all 17 goals. Obviously we have been working in several of them. We worked on 4 on education. We have worked on 5 on gender. We work on infrastructure. We work on the Document heritage and preservation of documents and libraries and archives, but specifically on 16, on facilitating the public access to information, which we believe is fundamental to exercise Human Rights, to democracy, and now to development.
Let me finish by saying in the Best Practices, we strongly feel that the IGF has demonstrated time and time again that Internet can only be understood and can only be planned for the future with a strong multistakeholder dialogue. Not only worldwide, organized by the UN in this case, but it should also be an example for every single state and policymakers in every state. It is absolutely essential that every state build its own multistakeholder dialogue internally to guarantee these policies. So then we can see that information and knowledge can become part of the development, but also can become part of the gender equity policies, can integrate all groups, all minorities, all sectors of society, but also can allow the reaching of the further development policies.
So we would in this IGF more than any other emphasize the need to restructuring. We're doing a study now we will share hopefully by the next IGF on the Best Practices of Internet in the debate of multistakeholder dialogues and policy presentations. Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much, Frank, and for your reminding us that people can't exercise their rights unless they're connected but also importantly unless there's content that's relevant to them, that they will not be able to either.
We look forward to the Best Practice report because I think people are really trying to bring these connectivity and sort of post‑connectivity rights issues together.
We now have Alex Wong from the world economic Forum, please.
>> ALEX WONG: Thank you. Let me first commend again, let me first commend the Secretariat for the excellent paper that was used as an input. I thought it was actually an excellent reference and served as a Foundation for some of the discussions we had in my own personal learnings from this. I think the major themes the group that I was involved with, and we held a few sessions related to this theme of connecting the next million, that I'll highlight is first of all the message I took away from the power of local empowerment and particularly the community networking Working Groups that have done great work and I thought the session they held here was fantastic and it really opened a lot of eyes on how this is a real phenomenon we have to start adapting and realizing how to take advantage of.
I think the DC on Libraries with the public high‑speed access angle as a key strategy that we need to look more closely at to connecting the next billion or the next 4 billion was a major message, as well, and of course, these elements both then enabled the local content that is such critical ‑‑ that will be such a critical enabler.
The second point I'll make, which I think was real great progress, was this issue of data and Christopher will talk more about that but this whole theme of how can we make sure we're collecting the data, how can we work together to contribute data? Because a lot of data is out there but it's not being made available for appropriate reasons but how can we create places to test that out? There were good side discussions done how we can do that. I'm looking forward to seeing how those progress. Finally there was a major theme about how can we coordinate better.
With the world economic Forum together with global connect, Alliance for Affordable Internet, ICANN, IEEE, ISOC, ITU, people centered Internet, UNESCO, World Bank, it's a long list on purpose because we felt that as global organizations we need to come here with a message we're trying to work together as best as we can, a Coalition of the willing and the comment of our Moderator about the challenges of a multistakeholder process so far the egos haven't come into play. Maybe at some point they will and we'll have to work that out as we get there but it's a great starting point. That's a message that is an important message for IGF as we go forward and try to move to action.
So in terms of process, because that was one of the questions the Moderator asked us to look at, I think on the next billion opportunity it's time to move to action. We've all been talking so much. And one proposal could be that we make next year's Forum a presentation of some of the projects that are going, based on commitments that are being made now. I can already say on behalf of the Forum and together with many partners that are part of this and our activities and country programs such as the one in Northern corridor in Africa and Argentina, I'm happy to present together with the partners that are driving this initiative what we're doing, invite others to get involved and report back in a year's time on progress. Maybe those are thematic or country workshops that can be held more comprehensively and get more Ministers here from those countries to be involved in the dialogue.
I think also the final comment I'll make, or two more comments, on forward looking, there was a session we held with the ITU UNESCO Open Forum, that took place yesterday, that digressed into some of the future issues that we need to also use this Forum to discuss, future issues such as the shared economy, such as issues that are going to really ‑‑ that are really resulting in conflict with societies for those being left behind.
Can this be a place where we take a few steps forward on where Internet is going to be transforming people's lives and societies and making sure we're addressing some of those issues upcoming, the sensitive issues and I'll end with an excellent one of our participants made in the session related to the multistakeholder process. At the risk of being a bit provocative the comment was made that multistakeholder is great but let's not make that the be all, end all because we also have to move to action. It reminded me of a quote I shared in the session yesterday that Margaret Mead said which is that never doubt a group of committed individuals can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has so we need to be multistakeholder. Everyone in this room is multistakeholder but we have to move forward and move to action and we should count on you as individuals to take action and let others follow you while we maintain that balance. Thanks very much.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you, Alex. We move to Christopher Yoo. There's a lot of discussion about collecting the data and really understanding impacts and how do we measure all this activity? Christopher?
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Well, thank you very much and may I have my slides please? So we are delighted to be here. We are 1 World Connected. You may recognize us by the orange shoes and the shirts we're wearing. The orange shoes support the UN trust fund and violence against women. You may recognize us more prominently from the coffee in the village which is not there today and we've received some comments regretting that so we're happy to be here. We're really committed to doing some of the empirical work that is going on.
Anri mentioned that talking about the work on policy options for connecting and enabling the next billion, was it helpful? I would say it's essential. It was a starting point for analysis and we really salute and thank the great work that Constance, Anri, Brian and others have done to make that possible. That was the starting point for our work, to try to understand what is going on and looking at phase 1 and as the inputs came in in phase 2 and from the NRIs and IGF we also build on a lot of partners. Listing partners is always risky, because you risk leaving them out. I noticed on the panel, Helani and Alison have been instrumental, as have ICANN and other organizations. Networking community has been, as Alex noted, has been helpful and the conversations we had here at the IGF.
We were reaching out actively to Governments. You asked what we're doing. We're looking and are working on a plan to reach out to every stakeholder group in every region of the world. We're open to anyone, but we're taking it upon ourselves to make the effort to get the broad based engagement. What's the scope? We're attempting to make every effort to connect people to the Internet, Government led, Civil Society led, business led, every single one we can find and to gather data that assesses the impact of these analyses. There's a lot of great work going on and the catalog itself is useful to share that information with other people but in addition, empirical validation, any metrics is largely missing and when it does exist, it's piecemeal and doesn't in a way collect it in a way that does not permit comparisons across projects.
Our goal is to try to develop that data and develop the metrics. It's very labor intensive but a University‑based program is actually a very well suited because for students this is a wonderful opportunity for them to develop their skills. We're now developing the metrics that go along with them and then we'll allow and disseminate this information to the entire community. Where are we? We've identified 200 plus case studies. We've done 20 of the narrative portions as an introduction. We have a Web page, a crowd source alternative for people to simply feed in stories we'd like to develop. We'll blog about everything we do and we'll push this information out to the community.
I'll tell you two quick stories. There's more information on the slides. Econet wireless in Zimbabwe, they're providing cell towers off the electrical grid powered by diesel generators. In addition to providing Internet access they're providing the first electric power to homes. They have to have surplus power at a very affordable rate but they're actually providing vaccines. The challenge of vaccines is they have to be kept cold without electric power, you can't do that. They have vaccinated 250,000 children there and they're currently expanding into Ghana, India and other countries in the future. The project in Kenya uses unlicensed spectrum and TV white spaces. They're also connecting 10,000 individuals, they're connecting schools. In terms of impact we talked to the principal of one of the schools and she reports the test scores have gone up on every single subject on the Kenyan National exam. We're able to get some of the metrics. We're hoping to turn them into more consistent evaluative tools we can use across the Board.
So this is the basic scope of the project. This is really open to everyone. We're determined to not only to make it open but actually act upon that and we're trying to reach out to everyone we can find. There's a Dynamic Coalition associated with it, with a mailing list. We invite you to join it. We invite you to link to us on social media, and also to provide information into what we're doing. We need help identifying case studies, new ones. We need help improving the ones we have and we're actually working with Helani, Alison and others to try to develop the metrics. We'd appreciate the engagement of the entire community to make this possible and every conversation we've had has enriched our thinking. We've had fantastic discussions with Governments which in many ways have been the most difficult part of this but we're very encouraged by the progress and our contact information is here. Please get in touch with us whenever you can and we really welcome your participation.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you, Christopher. Everyone in the audience either knew about all of this, because you had participated last year, throughout this year, in the intersessional activities, or you had no clue, in which case you probably have a broad sense of what the connecting and enhancing the next billion sort of platform, let's call it, was about, and that report.
We would like to take your questions, particularly if you were involved in it, about what it meant for those who participated, and about that process, either in the BPFs or any of the other initiatives, like the WEF and the other stuff that was going on.
You can raise your hand, and we will send a mic to you. Over there. And I would kindly ask you to keep it to a very short intervention, one minute, and we will try and collect if there's more than one, a few questions, and get the panel to respond. Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Just your name first and then your organization.
>> My name is Raoul Plommer. I'm here representing Electronic Frontier Finland, as well as the Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity. And I'd like to ask Christopher Yoo: Is it true you get most of your funding from massive Internet operators?
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: So we are getting support ‑‑ I'm sorry.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Take a round of responses please, questions, please. Any other questions?
>> My name is Juan Ortiz. I recently finished a Google policy fellowship here in Mexico. And I would like to know, when we tried to create targets about connectivity, we often generate two incentives. One is to connect more people and the other one is to, for Governments to show that they're connecting more people. And these do not necessarily go in the same direction.
So are there any ways in which you're working to, for example, make more transparent the methodologies Governments are using to measure the increase in Internet connectivity? I think if we create standards for Governments to show how they're doing this, how they're doing ‑‑ how they're creating the samples, how big the samples are, et cetera, it would be of great help.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you, and behind, yeah.
>> Hi. I am Niko from NETmundial from the DC3, Dynamic Coalition and community on connectivity. I was very glad to listen so many panelists mentioned the work of the Coalition and the persons of the connectivities movement in this IGF has been awesome.
I would very much like to have the community connectivity movement represented there in the panel next time. I think it's pretty much worth it, and there's another issue that many of us have been feeling that our work is being used to showcase interesting cases connected to community, while pushing different agendas. This worries us pretty much, and that's why we would very much like to be directly represented next time. Thank you very much.
>> My name is Michael Ogio. I'm an ISOC Ambassador. I work with many of you. And this is an initiative I've been very excited about ever since I heard about it last year. What I would like to ask and running the risk of sounding like a broken record is: How we can incorporate energy needs more into this initiative. That is, how can we contribute to more sustainable energy practices when we are thinking about bringing the next group, the next billion people online, as that will be taxing on our already taxed energy resources. And it is something that we need to consider, considering the global footprint, the global carbon footprint of the Internet.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: We have a question from over here and remote participation, and we'll get responses.
>> I'm from Mexico, and I represent the Federation of Library Associations. I'm really pleased to hear you mentioned libraries as a focal point for connectivity. Libraries are important for content and access to information. And I would like to ask you to emphasize also the development of media and information skills. They're really important.
Access is not enough if the skills are lacking in our population. Thank you. Good job.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: And one remote participation question please?
>> Yes, from Deidra Williams, Civil Society, West Indies, said I wonder why diesel rather than solar generators. I wonder why diesel rather than solar generators.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Great so that was a great set of questions. We can think about it in two categories. There's a question about process transparency and funding, who is at the table? Who funds you? Community networks, private sector involvement, and so on.
And there are substantive issues of Best Practices about energy, content, media, and so on. So since the first question was actually addressed to Christopher, we will start with Christopher, and the other panelists, please respond, just indicate if you want to have a response, thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you for the question and thank you, Helani. Transparency is critical. We disclose every supporter of the project on our web site. I would say that our, the way we're supported is a reflection almost a mirror of the way the IGF itself is funded. We're actually supported by a multistakeholder group of organizations.
The technical community is providing support, Governments are providing support and businesses are providing support. And we are open to anyone who is willing to, we're now getting personal, individual donations as a result of the work we're doing at the IGF and we have been approached by people in that manner. And so we're committed to really being open in that way and transparent. I will say Civil Society itself is not actually contributing because they're usually not in a position to do that but they're contributing in a many, many other ways, mostly by supporting the actual work which is what we're doing.
I would say that because it's based at a University we insist on academic independence. We're committed to studying every example we can identify. There's some place for privacy reasons the refugee communities are reluctant to do that. That's understandable but there will be no bias in what we'll collect. We will collect every study, it will be publicly available and disseminated and our commitment is to let the data do the talking and we can actually find out what's really going on without any bias.
And that is the benefit of holding it to academic standards. The last question if I may Helani on the remote question, why diesel not solar? Everyone would prefer solar. We're looking at case studies are people are attempting to deploy. The technology isn't there yet. There's at least one or two promising examples but that's where cross cutting data collection can be helpful. When someone solves that problem we can disseminate the information to the rest of the community because many people are working at the same time and there's a duplication of effort. When we solve that we need to share that as quickly as possible to everyone.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Thank you, Alex, thank you, Chris. Constance, Alex, and then Frank.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much. So there was a question about statistics and basically the figures that Governments put forward in terms of Internet access. The IGF, I don't think is equipped to do that work but certainly you've put the finger on something that's very important, being able to compare figures and understanding exactly what is behind those figures.
To my knowledge, there are a number of intergovernmental organizations who do that work, including the ITU, the OECD, the European Commission, and from what I know, the purpose is exactly to do what you had described, understanding what is behind the figures and making sure there's a clear and transparent methodology.
There was another question about participation and entering that the work of the IGF is fully inclusive. The methodology of these Best Practices and policy options really what makes this exercise unique and a little bit complicated, if you compare this exercise to what's been produced at the OECD or other intergovernmental organizations is that we work on the basis of a bottom‑up process. So the findings, the correlations, everything is established on the basis of some research but essentially on what stakeholders spontaneously feed the process, what they contribute to the process.
We've reached out through the National Regional IGFs and tried to reach as many stakeholders as possible. You talked about making sure that the panel is inclusive. I think it's just a matter of filling the communication gap. The IGF is still a young organization, with limited resources, and if we're able to reach you or additional stakeholders next year, that will be a win. In any case, the process is completely, completely open so I really wanted to emphasize that. Thank you. Back to you, Chair, Moderator.
>> ALEX WONG: Thank you, a couple thoughts back on the question on energy companies or energy discussions and I would add to that health discussions, financial inclusion discussions, all the outcomes that Internet or connecting the next billion are going to imply. We have to get those companies in the room, or those organizations that work on those issues in the room at IGF.
I think the way to do that or one idea is for the UN to leverage its legitimacy to approach other UN organizations that deal with health care issues, or energy issues, and get them to either Chair Working Groups or Chair white papers and then they will pull in the companies and the Civil Society organizations that represent those issues and they'll come, because they'll want to be represented. So I think there's an opportunity to match the bottom‑up approach which is beautiful about IGF with some top‑down assertiveness. That's something we can think about on how we engage other sectors into the discussions. We have to have those other people in the room to talk about diesel versus solar or privacy issues in health care that will inevitably arise.
The second comment is actually on the libraries. I sort of feel we're going back to a model that was proposed 10, 15 years ago but I just wanted to give the context, it actually fits to the phase 1 paper which says access or connecting the next billion will only happen if you also address other areas such as skills, awareness, affordability, local content. And then for me, libraries is a great solution that's now come back as a force, so has schools because there's a place where access can be done affordably, people can gather to talk about skills and training and be reinforced as a community. I didn't mean to be naive to say that. That's what I meant to add so the work the Coalition has done on that is great. Thank you.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Frank.
>> FRANK LA RUE: On that note, I wanted to follow up on the libraries. I think it's very important what was said, beyond the fact that libraries can give services, can give training, can be places of meeting and communication. Also libraries are in essence a place for documentary preservation and knowledge preservation for sharing and this is crucial in this transition to digital forms. Libraries will continue playing a role and this is essential because this documentary heritage and maintaining and preserving it also adds to the future knowledge of next generations of our past, but also to the question of identity which is again essential for cybersecurity and for the security of the world of today in terms of strong identity as a form of preventing violence.
This brings me to a topic linked to the libraries which has been mentioned here which is essential for us, the question of building the local networks. Using the local content we have all said there is local knowledge. It has to be systematized and shared and this is important and there has to be the local networks and the local ISPs is very relevant but this idea of local knowledge has to be used in a culturally relevant way, within respect to cultural and linguistic diversity, which is another priority which Internet should have. If we want to make development possible, development is only possible when local communities assume the development agenda and for that, the content has to be understandable, has to be relevant, has to be usable. And this means to relate to the culture, to the language and to the reality.
>> Very briefly on the energy issue, the library issue and connecting and community networks, and this ties in with Government transparency, community networks need spectrum in order to operate, so I would put forward a modest proposal: Why not have a panel next year on how spectrum can be used, shared, dynamic use where is it enabled in the resource banks. Many countries have a spectrum table which show you assignments and allocations.
Second thing with the library issue and thank you to our colleague from Mexico, we spoke with you the other day, there are libraries in a box, wi‑fi enabled, from what I understand. A great partner for community networks. This is a great sort of an exciting topic to think about moving forward. And on electricity, I know some community networks, I'm not speaking for them. I would never do that ‑‑ use solar power and other interesting alternatives. I would say that if you're going to have a UN representative body bring this issue forward, that you'd also partner up with someone like Idi which has the BRCK, which has a local power source solar enabled. It might help charge phones and other devices, but let's think about partnering up with Civil Society if you do have a UN lead on the electricity issues. Thank you.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: And Juan Carlos.
>> JUAN CARLOS HERNANDEZ: A comment on what institutions are doing in terms of statistical information that is so important for a regulator of the Sector in order to achieve the goal of guaranteeing access. At the Federal Institute of Communications, we have carried out important work in these matters. During the three years of its existence, we have had quarterly publications with statistics, including information related with penetration of fixed and mobile broadband, and we're also working regionally in Central America and with our counterparts in Latin America in order to promote this topic in a way so that methodologies can be shared and information can be used commonly in terms of investments and competition in our markets in favor of the users.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: Izumi?
>> IZUMI OKUTANI: I also want to touch on the comment about measurement. It's important we have factual and accurate measurement to understand the current state so we can try to think of what other things we need to address in addition, and I think a couple of our speakers have shared what the Governments or intergovernmental organizations have done to share the statistics. There are also statistics available based on the community initiatives so for example in terms of IPv6 there are engineers, scientists, providing information on which country is having its particular rate of IPv6 deployment and you can dig deeper into which operator within a particular country is having a particular deployment rate and these are very factual. It's not just the Government that provides a reliable data but you can Google in terms of IPv6. I'm sure there are other resources available in other areas.
I also want to touch quickly on the comment made on how do you actually maintain energy and contribution in these kind of initiatives, Best Practices and other intersessional work? I think one of it is maybe more outreach so I found it interesting how the Best Practices on gender and access have reached out to each of the National and regional IGFs not just on the mailing list but went to the face‑to‑face meeting to discuss it. We tried to do that for some of it within our BPF. There's room for improvement in that area, not just online interaction but when there are opportunities face‑to‑face interaction and collect knowledge and feedback.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much for that. I just wanted to briefly comment on Jane's point about the use of spectrum and obviously this is a critical area. Most of the people who need to be connected are in prepaid mobile environments and these are following old traditional telecom licensing patterns. There have been a series of spectrum workshops in fact this round and they've been on the edges in the smaller workshops and there's one right after this, so I think that will be an important thing in the future, absolutely, yeah.
I think we can take another round of questions. I think we're going to start with our remote participants. Do we have any remote questions? None at the moment?
Okay, we'll start on this side this time.
>> Good afternoon. My name is Ephraim Aguilar. I come from InfoTech, and what I'm trying to research a bit more is on the problems of the use of IPv6 and truly which are the findings in developed countries and developing countries and those who have a zero index that are not being used, since as we said from the beginning of the meeting, it is a limiting matter in order to get to the one billion that are still lacking, if we don't have access to IPv6.
So I think this is something that is fundamental. I wish we could tackle it a bit more, solve this problem, and with this, reach our commitment of getting to that one billion more. I wanted to know if you have any more information on this matter.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Okay, then we'll go here.
Here. Thank you.
>> I'm from Sri Lanka. It's a question about connecting the next billion, which I think we all agree as an objective, but when we look at many of the initiatives that have been trying to do that over the past 10, 15 years in the developing regions, we find that a lot of them have not really been able to scale up so this question is particularly for one world connect. When you look at documented projects and initiatives, how do you look at their ability to be sustainable, to be able to scale up? And also, do you differentiate between what I call forever pilots, those who forever retain as pilots, and we've had a lot of these in the past many years, and the quality beyond simple connectivity?
Because even for the billion or two who are connected, relevant content and quality of access remains big challenges, so these are questions I'd like to flag particularly for you.
>> Hi. My name is Louise, I'm a researcher at the Center for Technology and society in Brazil but impart of the youth observatory and the youth at IGF program. I wanted to congratulate the work of the BPF Gender and Access this year, and to understand the world of gender means to access its intersection with economic and social, cultural and many other aspects, but most importantly with youth so this year I wanted to highlight the work of some women from the Youth Observatory that we inputted into the BPF gender with our young Latin American Declaration, young women Latin American Declaration and just highlight this work, and to actually bring up the question of the role of the youth and the many youths in the future of the BPFs and also to ask to Renata, how does she see the role of the BPF gender in the next year and most importantly how to assess more specifically the National and the Regional, and mostly the local within this complex perspectives. Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you for that focus on some of the future things we should be looking at. We can go straight on, please. Other people would also focus on that in the last few questions we have, that would be great.
>> Good morning. Carlo Moreno from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. I would like to ask all of you commenting on the practices on connecting the unconnected to go beyond access, that when we collect the impact of those different initiatives, we don't only talk about numbers on people connected, on enabling bandwidth, investment, et cetera, but we also look at what type of society these types of initiatives are trying to create. The transformative effect of the Internet and the impact that it may have on changing the world we are living in beyond just providing access to people. Thank you very much.
>> I'm from Freedom Forum of Nepal, so I'm wondering that the Internet governance is very new in my country so this is my first time to attend the IGF. We are thinking of giving the right to information for the people, and we do a proactive addressing those issues, my institution, NGO. But when we talk about the Internet connectivity, there are some kind of Nexus that they only do a kind of business rather than giving a service.
There are a few experimental processes in Nepal that one a social activist tried to do kind of a free Internet access in the remote villages, even a free wi‑fi process, but there are lots of obstacles, the social activists are facing so I'm wondering that is there any idea to make a connection with all opportunities what really the deprived community will need, and need to be help for them? Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much for that. Right here in the front.
>> Thank you very much. My name is Helen. I'm a member of IFLA and also of the Mexican Librarian Association, and I want to thank all of the people that talk on behalf and recognize the work in libraries. But I want to remind that IFLA has this program, Building Stronger Library Associations, and I think that the Library Associations in different countries can contribute for all of this work to reaching out to a billion people.
I would like to remind that the Mexican Librarian Association has some partnership or conversations with the Institute of Communication, and I think that's a place where we can work together on metrics. We can have more accurate measurements on what's the outcome and work reaching to people.
Mexico has a network of over 7,000 public libraries, and I think that's a golden opportunity to work with the community at the first level as has been mentioned from down to up. Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much for that input. To acknowledge there's extraordinary indicator and measurement work going on in the region. In Brazil we have a center of excellence in this area so we should be drawing on the Regional data and capacity and expertise that's there not only at the multilateral level. If we can go to our remote question now. I'm afraid this will have to be our last question.
>> Remote Moderator: Okay, thank you. This is from Bruna Santos from the Brazilian Youth Observatory. She says: Regarding Regional youth participation, we have a contribution to the BPF gender which to us very nice link incorporated at the BPF's work. Therefore my question is: What are the next steps regarding participation? What can we do next?
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much. We've got very little time left, so I'm going to ask the panelists who questions were posed to. Renata there was one specifically on gender, if you would take that. Perhaps the one on youth if you could address that when you're addressing other questions because I'm not sure where else we would put that and Christopher you've got some specific questions and you'll go at the end. Yes.
>> RENATA AQUINO RIBEIRO: Folks, what energy? We are on the last day of the BPF, and we already have questions about our next year's work. Wow! So it's amazing to get these questions, and, yes, there is more, there's so much more, to do. It is great that you're already thinking of it, and as a multistakeholder community, the IGF will continue to invest in its intersessional work, and the BPF, which has been ‑‑ which has continued to have linkages to previous work, will also and try and keep this linkage going.
And it is amazing to have such a varied group of youth participants and such an energy to contribute to this work. It is incredibly important, and creating Regional and National links also goes through, considering regions and groups, so we have the youth from Brazil, we have the youth from Asia, also involved, and we hope to have even more.
So it was great that you could send in contributions to be incorporated, and this is what the intersessional work is about. We have to build bridges to get to this IGF, with our records, with our policy recommendations, from a discussion of a multistakeholder community, ever more vibrant and ever more rich. You all can have your voice. You all can have your say. We need you to prepare for next year. We need you to shape the next IGF, the next intersessional work. Thank you for these contributions.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much for that and if panelists you don't have to use the minute, you can cut it short, please do. Constance, please.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much. I'll try to address very quickly two questions, the one about youth and the one about next steps. As Renata mentioned, the engagement with the community does not end with this IGF. We are already calling for themes, ideas for next year's IGF, Best Practices and policy options. If there's appetite to develop a Best Practice Forum around the theme of youth, I think that should really be put forward, and personally, I think it's an excellent idea.
More generally in terms of next steps, immediately after the IGF ends, we will be engaging with the community to identify next year's themes for Best Practices, and also thinking about how to take the connecting the next billion to phase 3, and I think Alex and Christopher mentioned the direction that could be possible, which is really to go from the level of theoretical policy options and supplementing them, supporting them with case studies, information that comes from the field, and in any case, this proposal and other proposals will be put forward to the next MAG meeting. Thank you.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thanks very much. Christopher?
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: So to pick up on a theme that both Alison and Alex mentioned, information sharing is critical, it's what we're committed to. We're building as we said initially on the excellent work that Constance and this group has done and we've leveraged with the gender BPF and helped develop their case studies and their case studies are now ours. It's a good example of how this works. We collaborated with the BPFs on IXPs.
The question about making sure it doesn't scale, yes there are permanent pilots. That's why we're doing the data. And we are a major focus of what we're looking for is sustainable, scalable business models for connectivity. And I've been cautioned, maybe model is too strong, approaches, scenarios. The exercise has been one of complication not simplification, reduction and that we're learning there are different factors we need to take into account that are making the problem richer and more complicated but ultimately is what's necessary to make it useful.
And so part of the metrics question is, an attempt to try to figure that out, the quality of access, to try to assess what the upward path is going to be and to try to make all that and we're getting instruments now and combining with other sources of data to find ways to do that in a cost effective way but I agree with you 100%. I'll confess, we're at the beginning of that process of developing those strategies and that's something we'll welcome you participation on.
Lastly, the think I've heard constantly is the need for real data. That's what our project is all about and the leverage from sharing it. We've talked about solar and spectrum. We already have identified examples where people have done innovative things in using success to effect policy change to, in Vanuatu they opened up the 900 megahertz band support community networking. They've convinced the regulator to overlay additional licenses. The hard part is measuring impact beyond these things. The SDGs have tremendous momentum. In terms of the type of society, Carlos we've had a conversation about this, that's the hardest of all. We get qualitative assessment about this but in the end, this is the time for us to try to build those solutions.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thanks very much, Christopher, Izumi?
>> IZUMI OKUTANI: Thank you for the question about IPv6. I was wondering our topic might be too technical and so happy to have someone aware of the issue and see the relevance and importance, so thank you so much.
And then the interesting thing about IPv6 is there's no correlation between high rate of V6 deployment and the GDPs so it's not just the developed countries who will do well in IPv6 but countries such as Peru, Ecuador, Greece, Trinidad and Tobago, these are the countries that are within the top 20 of V6 deployment rate and we're sharing case studies in different parts of the region across not just the developed countries so it's in our Best Practices document. It's also like measures being shared in last year's document and what Governments can do, what the community can do.
We've also identified the challenges that we're facing and the three points that I shared at the beginning on what each person can do are the things we can do to address how to overcome these challenges, and there are actually, like, a couple of other resources available I'm happy to share with you individually after this.
And lastly, I do recognize that there's still a need for more deep study into why a particular country is doing well in IPv6, where the economic or social environment is similar and the other countries with very similar environment is very low, and I think there's limitation in doing this just on volunteer basis so I believe that we need some dedicated, paid professional researcher to take over this work on further analysis. But we already have a couple of available researchers, and happy to share with you, and take a look at our Best Practices document.
>> ALISON GILLWALD: Thank you very much, Izumi. Last word from Frank.
>> FRANK LA RUE: Very last word, two words. One is on the libraries again. It is true and I was very pleased to hear where friends from Mexico and public libraries from Mexico, that libraries are everything we said about the centers of research and documentary heritage, but also they're great resources for gathering data and information. This is part of the focus we're having in the work we're doing around the world, is documentary heritage, yes, but data recollection and processing in libraries, which is fundamental.
And the final word is very important, was mentioned here, is this is the international IGF of a multinational level. It is very relevant to have now Regional and country IGFs so the policymakers can receive input for their policies and for the future of Internet in their own countries and their own regions.
Thank you and we'll see each other next year.
>> HELANI GALPAYA: So let's close it up by Constance, our Chair, and the Host Country Chair, Juan Carlos, with having one minute interventions.
>> CONSTANCE BOMMELAER: Thank you very much. I would simply like to thank the different leaders, experts, people from the Secretariat who have been carrying the work around intersessional activities whether with Best Practices or with the policy options. As I've said, this has really been a multistakeholder bottom‑up exercise, which makes it unique but also a little bit more challenging than what usually takes place in other fora.
And also allow me to conclude by saying that the engagement with the community does not stop with this IGF. The draft outputs are still up on the IGF web site, open for comments. They will be finalized shortly after. And as I've said, we are already welcoming some ideas, thoughts on how to take the Best Practices and also the policy options to the next stage for 2017. Thank you very much.
>> JUAN CARLOS HERNANDEZ: The policy options for connecting and enabling the next billion that was summoned today has been a great effort of the community, an effort concentrated in improvement of Internet Governance, in the achievement of tangible results that will allow for us to achieve our SDGs. I conclude this intervention calling your attention to the need to discuss the challenges that we need to face related to the use of technologies in order for them to maximize their social, economic, and political impact.
It seems to me that this represents an opportunity to show the multistakeholder model value. In the name of Mexico and the Institute of Telecommunications of Mexico, I thank you all for your participation. Congratulations.
[ Applause ]
[ End of session ]