SEVENTH ANNUAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
SUSTAINABLE HUMAN, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
7 NOVEMBER 2012
14:30
INTER REGIONAL DIALOGUE SESSION
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Seventh Meeting of the IGF, in Baku, Azerbaijan Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Good afternoon, everyone. Please get your headsets if you don't have one. Because that's the only way you can hear anything. This session will be starting in a few minutes. This is to be the Interregional Dialogue on Internet Governance Forum. Once again, welcome! And get wired up, please. Welcome. My name is Nnenna, I am representing an IGF like most of us, and I have been asked to moderate. So I'm not Chairing. What I need to do, my chief job is to make sure you keep within our two-minute slot limit, and if you don't, I will just get up and punch you.
Maybe someone can volunteer to be the punch man, so I tell you who to punch and you go there if they go beyond two minutes. We have a long list of speakers, and in our earlier consultation what we decided was to try and limit ourselves to two minutes each so we will get the grasp of our efforts, and be able to plan better. We are having two sessions, two sessions of 90 minutes each. But for this session, you will agree with me that we have already taken about ten minutes off it, so we will run for 80 minutes, go for a tea break, come back, and run the other 80 minutes and go back home.
And just in case you don't know there should be some European champions league going on tonight on soccer. A few of us will have to step out, so I would please request that we allow people to make a quick intervention, step out and come back so we can achieve better.
This is what we are going to do. In the first 80 minutes, we will ask you to introduce yourself and share with us one or two emergent issues from your national regional or whatever IGF. So what we are doing now is to introduce ourself, introduce our governance Forum, and share with us one or two emergent issues. I'm going to begin with the two people who are sitting just by me. Yes, one is in red, one is in blue. What does that mean? Okay. Nothing.
>> Mrilyn Cade: Thank you, Nnenna. My name is Marilyn Kade and I am the chief catalyst of the IGF USA. Our name is a little different than the other national and regional groups and that's one of the indications of the flexibility. Our name is IGF USA. We have a steering group of 87 people that is constantly growing. Just to quickly focus on the emerging issues for us, I want to first of all point out that we are I think you will find we are very different than most of the initiatives.
We take a global perspective with a national view and we do no national issues. The emerging issues for us I needed to say that because the emerging issues for us are the risk and threats to the multi-stakeholder model not within our own country, but that we see that are really emerging elsewhere. In particularly we are concerned about the risk and threats to the IGF that in some cases are growing out of a lack of understanding of the relevance of Internet Governance and we see the need to demystify what Internet Governance is by talking about its component parts, such as privacy, security, the freedom of access to information, so that when we talk to people, policy makers and others about Internet Governance, it seems more relevant.
So an emerging issue is the need to demystify and enhance understanding of the relevance of Internet Governance as really applicable to both business Civil Society and Governments. And then I think also we have a very significant focus on trying to insure that that moves then into broadening the participation of more and more people and organizations and entities and Government, different kinds of ministries in Internet Governance. Thank you.
>> Leonid Teodorv: Hi, I'm on the organizing committee of Russian Internet Governance Forum. I would echo some of Marilyn's concerns and I would also add specific problems typical of Russia. Number one is that the velocity of the development of Russian internet on the one hand and that the low intensity of the dialect on critical issues pertaining to Internet Governance on the other hand which can partly be ascribed to the lack of support of local businesses in the range of problems on the part of the local businesses and very, very low interest and huge lack of academic support or academic interest in this area. So no academia sort of exists in this area, no research.
Number two, and this is very serious and this is a political issue, a least politicized issue, a very oppressive trend in Russian legislation specifically as far as the internet is concerned and the brandishing the flag of against child pornography. The quite noticeable attack on certain wealth, on basic internet's rights and freedoms. This is a very alarming and very disturbing trend and we are perfectly aware of that.
I believe that it may hamper further development of the Russian Internet Governance Forum, and the Internet Governance in the Russian segment of the internet per se. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, good afternoon, everyone. My name is I'm professor of I went on to be a part of the( INDIA IGF) MAG, the multi-stakeholder group that put together the India IGF recently. This is the second IGF we have held. India Internet Governance conference, but we believe we can call it by any other name. It would still remain one of the first key initiatives that have been able to take the discussion on India and Internet Governance in India to every platform possible. So whereas we have had great success in Telecom with internet, it's not nearly been close.
Our interventions and Internet Governance is only just beginning and with the critical numbers that India republicans, this is something that we take very seriously. So I'm happy to share that this was initiated and led by the industry. This was one of the most multi stakeholder and well represented initiatives with participation of four stakeholder groups, academia, industry, Government and a fifth constituency we managed to create. This was two days and we dedicated a half day session to a session this was led and constituted entirely of the youth.
One of the key concerns that still remains for the country the size of India, $1.2 billion, all of the size of China or Russia, a single national IGF does not address these concerns. So with the numbers and the disparities within regions, within India and we are looking at regional and enhanced cooperation. That's one of the things I'm hoping will emerge to institutionalize best practices against different IGFs.
So our key concern is we are clearly looking at a possibility of two or three national events which can debate and frame the key issues with a series of regional events that can stem debate and can influence policy. So for us, an emerging issue clearly would be how to continue to engage with the Government because there are moments when you don't know when you are in the room or out of it. So that's one of the key concerns.
The second is clearly the fact that we would want to expand the scope because being truly representative is one of the key challenges we have in front of us. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Many thanks India. I had taken a gentleman, but I didn't know he was wearing a red tie. So I kicked him out and I took a gentleman who is all blue. So you are welcome. It's a blue day.
>> Mark Carvell: Well, blue is usually associated with sadness, so I hope I can cover the entirely opposite spectrum if you like of emotions. My name is Mark Caravel I'm from the U.K. Government. I'm not going to talk about the UKIGF. I defer to my good friend Martin Boyle who is here and going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about the Commonwealth IGF, the CIGF which U.K. Government has been very supportive of. We put money into it and we facilitated activities and so on. For those not familiar with the Commonwealth Internet Governance Forum, this was established in 2009 and falls under the Commonwealth connects programme, which is a programme for the a vehicle for knowledge and technology transfer across the Commonwealth states.
And it's a unique kind of Forum in a way because it's not regional. We have members of the Commonwealth across all continents, but the idea for this came together really out of the global IGF that they were going to be issues of common interest amongst Commonwealth member states and there would be value in formulating an identity for the Commonwealth in the global IGF which we are doing here very actively, and also to promote awareness of the multi-stakeholder model amongst all of the Commonwealth membership which includes a lot of developing countries and stall island states, some of which don't have the resources to engage directly in the global IGF, so the Commonwealth IGF serves that function.
We meet during the global IGF as I just mentioned. We don't have separate stand-alone meetings at this time, although that is something we may well consider in the way ahead for the Commonwealth IGF. We do a lot of on line activity. We have a website and that's linked with social media, Twitter, Facebook and so on and content related to Internet Governance that has relevance to the Commonwealth, that affects the Commonwealth indeed, is posted on the website on a regular basis.
We have regular blog contributors consisting of experts from all over the Commonwealth providing regional perspectives of the across the whole range of Commonwealth experience across the globe. And there is a newsletter which captures a lot of this key information that's distributed every four to six weeks or so.
We started with the first project on child protection. We had a tool kit which we developed two years ago, and there is in fact a session on that now as we speak which will be with a view to updating it. A big project at the moment is cybercrime. We have a Commonwealth cybercrime initiative. We will have a workshop today at 4:30. That is a unique coming together of a lot of key partners in tackling cybercrime. We have the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, The Council of Europe, ITU, telecommunications organisation, ICANN and several partners active in the cybercrime field who have come together in this field.
That's the main focus at the moment. We also have a youth project under way. We have a young person sponsor here at the IGF in Baku. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks a lot. We will go this way and that way and I'm going straight up to you. There is a mic, there is a wireless mic in front of Arab IGF that will go down. It may come just to you after him, so keep awake and keep attention.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, UKIGF. Don't go too far from the microphone, please introduce yourself and give us an idea of what the emergent issues in your IGF.
Martin Boyle: Thank you very much chair for your forebearance for allowing me to start here, I am Martin Boyle I'm with the UK IGF, which was set up shortly after the IGF was initially created with the intention of trying to helpshare among UK stakeholder what was coming out of the IGF and helping the stakheolders to prepare for the IGF meetings , we have been going for quite a number of years and this year in March, we held a main annual meeting and that was based on issues that had been identified by UK stakeholders as being of significant interest to them and workshops there helped us to prepare inputs into three panel sessions in Baku, one of those is on content and changing markets for contents and that takes place tomorrow and one on identity management which is taking place now, and the third one was on the issue of acceptable behaviour on the Internet and this is issue that has come out of the London Internet Conference and budapest cyber conference. and last one we talked in front of a parlimentary conference a couple of weeks ago and at a meeting we had this morning. one of the major issues that was from their talking about the acceptable behaviour on the Internet was to try and move the dialogue and this is at the reuqest of the UK government which has been a driver of doing that wider consultation , moving the discussion put of a very heavy government focussed forum and widening it to a multi-stakeholder environment. So we did that workshop in front of parlimant and this morning adn one of the messages that came out was to encourage other regional and national IGF initiatives to pick up this theme working with their governments and help with their governments to understand the issue of aacceptable behaviour.
The thing that came out was to try their governments understand the acceptable behaviour to try and inform the discussion and perhaps in conjunction with some European partners. and thank you
>> UKRAINE: My name is Ula, and I'm here to represent Ukrainian IGF which depart end of September this year and mainly the Ukrainian IGF changed a little bit form this year. It was one day meeting, very successful and would like to bring an issue of remote participation. It was a very, very successful and remote participation coming from two countries practically if we count the connections. The main issues I would like to underline as came out from this meeting, it was mainly how to better protect consumers so to make better consumer protection in the field of information society, how to make responsible Government in the field of information society by legal and regulatory measures as well there is a need that came out from this meeting of the development and the reviewing of the existing legislation or drafting legislation of the field of information society subjects of the information society as well as the assistance for better broad band expansion in Ukraine.
So that mainly was the main issues for Ukrainian IGF. I'm here to speak about an initiative called youth Internet Governance Forum which I am a member of MAG, organizing committee of this youth Internet Governance Forum which during the consultation meeting of IGF in Geneva in May of this year. So we already, the main issues that young people think need to be addressed, it's practically safe and responsible use of internet so cyber execute issues, copyright issues and ICTs for better economic and social inclusion of the voice of young people. Just to give you a few more details, after the meeting that took place in, the consultation meeting in Geneva in May of this year, the website of this youth Internet Governance Forum was already developed so you are welcome to have a look at the video clip and the message of the young people on WWW.youth.com.
>> MODERATOR: That's where we go to get the message of the youth. Ask someone from IGF. I would like to add to the youth perspective of emergent issue in my country and which has taken of the greater perspective thus far because the youth will realize we realize are the ones creating content. So most of the bloggers and people uploading pictures and events and videos are young people.
So for us there is a big chunk of youth inclusion in the national IGF, and he we are a country that has something called youth parliament. In Cote d'lvoire we have young people elect young people to a kind of house to decide on the issues of young people and these young people have been very instrumental in drafting the charter of online behavior in the country. So I kind of feel that my emergent issues in my country actually the same with other countries.
We are going left and right.
>> AUDIENCE: With your permission may I add 30 seconds of intervention. It's a Twitter intervention. Thank you. So we are at WWW.IIGC.IN. The half-day session was part of EuroDIG this was a unique event for us because you had participation across the country from 25 colleges which had representation and you had the best orators speaking on issues around Internet Governance, anonymity and not only the debate but passionately they ran the IGF. So you had youth volunteers across every session participating, selecting jury and being involved and engaged and that's something that I'm very passionate and very proud and happy to share.
>> MODERATOR: Our remote moderators, in case there is an IGF on line we will be glad to get feedback from those people. Who has got the mic in front of it since it's an IGF? Okay, the mic is in front of her.
>> AUDIENCE: I am Christine Arida. I am from Egypt which is assuming the role of the Arab IGF Secretariat and I'm here to report on the Arab IGF which took place only one month ago from the 9th to the 11th of October in Kuwait. Actually, I can't really report on a full year of activities because the Arab IGF initiative was only approved last January and the IGF itself meeting took place in October so it was just a year of preparations, and I will come back on the preparations and how they were in a multi-stakeholder in the second part of this session.
Regarding the emerging issues, our three day meeting in Kuwait had a very vivid discussion. Let me tell you that we had around 300 participants from 16 Arab countries spanning across all different stakeholder groups which has made the discussion very rich because we had so many different perspectives on the table.
And I will maybe try to reflect on some of the issues that were popping up as mostly important from the different sessions. The sessions actually went along the very same lines of the global IGF, the classical themes. So the issue of a broadband connectivity and developing broadband networks in Arab countries was heavily discussed and in that respect there was a focus on mobile connectivity, and on IXP's, internet exchange points and the need to have that and one initiative was Forum actually to have sort of a dynamic coalition upon interested participants in order to hook with IXP initiatives and programs taking place in the region.
The issue of content was also very hot. It was, the message was clearly sent out that local content has to come back home and that Arabic content and the presence of it is kind of low with respect to usage which is increasingly emerging from the Arab world. One other issue that took a lot of discussion is the issue of openness, and it was related to the Arab spring and to the different momentum which is happening in the Arab world and there was a clear call to have the Human Rights perspective always within the picture and to have freedom of expression handled as a very important issue for Arab populations.
There was a call for Government to have this perception always in mind. Two more issues I will tell you quickly, it was identified that it is very important to develop the domain name industry in the Arab world and so there was a call for international partners like ICANN to partner with the Arab community to develop this entity, and last but not least was the youth session which was very vivid like you were discussing about the youth. It was one of the best sessions in the Arab IGF and it focused on two main issues, on the issue of empowerment, and on the issue of the effect of social networks to empower youth. And it was looked at as it has to be, Internet Governance has to look at how to power through entrepreneurships. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: If you would give the mic to the gentleman.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. My name is Makan Fey for the United Nations Commission for Africa. My mission is hosting the Secretariat of the IGF and organize the African IGF in Cairo from 2 4 October with the African commission.
>> MODERATOR: Could you bring the mic closer?
>> AUDIENCE: We organize the African IGF in Cairo from 2 4 October 2012 it was African commission and partners, the Frankfurt organisation, Google, APC, Net Party, and Subregional African IGF. It was multi-stakeholder approach where we had Government, academia, private sector, Civil Society, regional and international organizations. We also had another which was participation of the various subregions. There was five, North Africa, East Africa, Centre Africa, Southern Africa, West Africa, and also various national IGFs.
Some of the issues which came out from the discussion of regional national figure was that consultation was needed to identify the national attributes experiences and expertise make it more suitable to play the role of the convener of the IGF. And also the engagement was needed from all stakeholders and needed also to focus on the discussion to take in account what was priority at the national level.
So it was agreed that remote participation in discussions also is key and that the original, the should take part. We discussed during the meeting also the various teams of the International Governance Forum itself and we added one department what as digital strategy to see how Africa should work together for its representation in various international Forum including ICANN. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I want to endorse as West Africa IGF that that actually happened. And I also want to add that within the framework of the West Africa IGF which held in July this year, one of the main issues was it's been there for two, three years and we haven't found a way around it. One of it was the black listing of West African countries for those who live around that area, they know that there is a lot of national IPs coming from our countries are being black listed and we had also the issue of the issue that we have another issue we have unresolved which is still emerging is that of data centers and the security of data centers, and, of course, Cloud both linked.
But, yes, I want to endorse the Africa IGF did actually raise those issues that the Secretariat is speaking about. I think we need to come to the side of the table and maybe take a lady. The lady sitting by you yes, we are going to take Italy and Nigeria together. I think it's better if you walk because you don't have heels. So we just take Italy and Nigeria together.
>> AUDIENCE: We agreed Italy and Nigeria we are good friends, members. So two weeks ago we had the IGF Italy and it is the fifth that we had since the beginning. And one characteristic of Italy is that every year we change the town. We are rotating in order to spread the word inside the country. Then we had an important, an important meeting where we started discussing about the identity in the network and how the individuals may control and verify if the real personality is reflected in the network in a proper way and then how to intervene if this is not true.
Then we had a very important meeting that focused on the issues of the moment that are more perceived by the community, that are digital divide in Italy among the regions, the problem of the infrastructure for internet of the future, and then the problem connected of the relation of the cities with the Government, so the open Government, the open data and these kinds of things in the agenda. Today we speak a lot about digital agenda that is in Europe in countries, European countries very important because it is the future.
And then the in the internet and freedom of expression and things like that. One thing we obtained that was very, very relevant is that two people that participated not in person but remotely wrote a statement on internet freedom of expression and on how to defend the internet and then also the position of Italian Government in region of the WCIT this was caused by the appearance of the IGF Italy that we obtain two minutes to listen to us and made response. This is very important.
Finally, it is important that in order to prepare this IGF in Baku, we started one month after before this meeting public consultation on internet principles and trying to involve all of the community and we obtained very significant results. These are the main lines, and we have here also a document with the description of the results. We don't have a copy for everyone, but we can leave at least two or three, and also the description of this consultation that we made in Italy. Thank you. Mary?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. My name is Mary Uduba and I congratulate the
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: It was on.
>> NIGERIA: Internet Governance Forum. He didn't hear me. And briefly on emerging issues, we looked at Cloud Computing, local housing, localizing Cloud capacity, security implications of Cloud Computing, vulnerability in the profiling of IP transaction and traffic and it was a hot it was really a hot debate on that. We take exception to the fact that the traffic coming from Nigeria is profound and that's what we are bringing to the IGF that we take exception to that.
And then the sustainability of the model. It was the case this is the seventh dialogue, what happens, how do we continue to sustain this dialogue in the IGF. Then the of Secretariat national and youth participation. Those are the emerging issues.
When we come to issues I will raise the issues. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Where is Canada IGF? Okay. Not too far. The region is very far, but the man is sitting very near. By the way, did you ever hear there was a time Zimbabwe and Canada were neighbors?
>> CANADA: That was awhile back, before my time, only briefly. So we have had two Canadian Internet Forums and that's what we call them the CIF because there was a C IGF before us as we heard, so we have the Canadian Internet Forum and it tends to be fairly domestically focused in comparison to the IGF USA which tends to be fairly global in the subject matter discussed there. So over the years we have refined the process by which we conduct the CIF. It's really a three stage process that leads to a final all day in person Forum and event.
We begin by doing a national survey where we pull a minimum of 1200 people. So we get relatively accurate results in terms of what are the issues regarding the internet that are concerning Canadians. So we do statistically relevant survey. We get results that are as they say plus or minus 2% 19 times out of 20, so it gives us quite an accurate feeling of what the Canadian public is concerned about with regard to the internet. We follow that up with a two month online consultation guided by the survey results but also allows Canadians to freely input other issues of concern or interest.
And it's interesting to see how those two inputs diverge. One of the reasons we did the survey is we wanted to get what we would call fact based input in comparison to when you have often small, extremely motivated and interested groups who then can what we would say, force issues through the tyranny of the minority.
So we try to balance those two elements, fact based and broad based input as well as specialized and deeply held passionate interest. At the conclusion of that we hold an all day event. It's a one day Forum where we bring the results from those two things together as well as have various speakers from both domestic political and internet scene as well as foreign speakers. We had Butron La Shapel, for example.
The key issues tend to be average digital literacy and that would be fairly broadly defined. We had elements that were both how to behave on line and we have seen I think some workshops on that area here at this Forum, but also broader, more broadly interpreted in terms of digital literacy including, perhaps, how to install malware, or not install, prevent malware on your computer, installing antivirus, having the basic functionality to manage your own computer in your own on line environment. The real emerging issue we saw that was different from previous years was around sovereignty on line or jurisdictional issues. And as I'm sure most people know, we sit on the northern border of the United States, and much of our traffic, internet traffic has to flow through the U.S. and resides in U.S. data centers and transits U.S. based internet exchange points. And Canada and the U.S. have very different privacy regimes so that's become I would say a relatively hot topic in the internet space is how do we reconcile our traffic flowing through foreign jurisdictions that have different privacy, very different privacy regimes.
That became a very hot topic particularly in light of the domain seizures that the U.S. customs agency or ICE was doing and how that would affect the Canadian internet space. That was one of the hottest topics. The in person Forum had 434 participants at the Forum. The survey was 1200 people, and the on line Forum had over 3200 unique visitors. Those are some of the numbers that comprised the participation in the various elements of our Forum. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Canada. Well, I think that unique input can only come from Canada. You may want to come this way to the man from Gambia. We are not taking him now because he is so far from Canada, but we are going to take LACNIC. We just jump over the U.S., come to Panama and go down. Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is I'm officer of learning. We perform the secretariat for the LAC IGF, we only organize the LAC IGF. So I wanted to start clarifying that this is a multi-stakeholder event we held in our region and the group of organizers is also multi-stakeholder. It started being an agency that from the internet community, and the so Civil Society but it started to spread and become stronger and to upgrading not only in the participants, but also in the supporters of the event and the organizers of the event. Now there are committee of organizers two from each stakeholder, two from the private sector, two from the Government, the region, and their mechanisms in order to rotate the Governments and to be part of this programme and two from community and Civil Society.
Among the five different additions, we have been rotating the location between different countries in the region and this year was also the first time we did a call for application or different organizations that want to hold the event, four different organizations applied and we had in order to get the place and it was held in Colombia in September.
There was also a local multi-stakeholder group that got there in order to drive this endeavor, and it was very successful meeting. We had the face to face participants, 160 participants from 20 countries of the region because this is not only Latin America, but Latin America and the Caribbean. The Caribbean has also their own IGF, but this IGF is not only for Latin America.
What is also a record is the quantity of the participants in the remote, there were like 427 participants in three days meeting and the meeting started being the previous editions, panels and speaker and this time was open discussions in equal footing and the agenda was determined in a process some of the upgrades on the process of the termination of the agenda at the time there was a survey and 187 answered from the community helped to determine the agenda. So with all of those input we have a structure similar with the main sessions of the IGF and the emerging issues were plenty in every one of the topics.
WCIT and the ITR, principle of Internet Governance neutrality, the typical discussions that the IGF has and also cross cutting issues such as development Human Rights and capacity building. So it was an interesting initiative and it will be improving through the years. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. That was very interesting to have people from the region and the Caribbean as well. But we are not going to take your neighbors. We are going to go up to Europe and take EuroDIG.
>> AUDIENCE: Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you. On behalf of EuroDIG, The European Dialogue on Internet Governance, EuroDIG is an event. It happens every year in the past few years since 2008, but it's really an event and a process. And so you need both the process and the event together, so my opinion and what I see has happened over the last years is that it's a case of building capacity, people come together. You have Conference calls a lot. You put things together. You have planning meetings.
We have one or two planning meetings together a year in preparation for the physical meeting. And that's what I mean by a process, because the event gives you focus. You meet physically. That's really very important. But if you want to be inclusive, if you want to be open, transparent, you want to show that I'm listening to you, then you really need to make an effort, that's what we found, to get those people into discussions in between the meetings.
And I think we do a lot we try very hard to try to bring in as many people as possible. So we have this sort of motto which is always open, always inclusive. It's never too late to get involved. So it's very flexible. It's very difficult because things come to light it makes things difficult to fit everything in, but we had over for the last EuroDIG which happened in Stockholm in June this year, that was the fifth one since 2008. We had over 70 different proposals for different events which is hard to reconcile in two days.
But we did it. And it was a lot thanks to the Swedish authorities, the Government, the ministries. It's not a Government led event at all. It's shared. I want to say that, but to have the physical event, it's really very helpful to have some Government support because they send letters out to their ministers, their peer ministers in different countries getting the level of impact at the political level is great, but they know it's not a Government led event and it's a shared thing.
So having that Government support in one respect is very useful, but there is a strong Civil Society basis see. Businesses are involved, of course. Technical communities are involved. We have quite a few people who are multipliers. One thing about having dialogue is to make sure you have people that can reach out to people and they multiply the impact. And that really works if you have people that have a good reputation, that really spreads the happiness and there were 600 people or so in Stockholm which is probably the record so far in terms of attendance. There were five remote hubs in different capital cities. We had eight workshops, five plenary sessions and five pre-events. We created new things to let people have a 30 minute space somewhere in poor legal for people to talk about things that are particular, which are very intimate not for plenary.
So we had 30 events over two days. Intellectual property was an issue, difficult to get the right actors in the room. Everyone was singing the same song because, of course, we need to share and create, but the people who are defending copyright were not in the room. So we are learning if we don't get the right people in the room next time, we don't do the session. We let the session go. We use the session for something else, basically, otherwise, what's the point if everybody is singing the same song.
In terms of time, I will stop there by saying we have messages from Stockholm at the end, messages from the end. It's rough consensus not conclusions. We had 100 youth involved. 3,000 Tweets which reached about 500,000 people, I understand. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. We are going to hear from Gambia and hear from Sweden that has played a key role in EuroDIG.
>> GAMBIA: Good afternoon, I'm Ponslate the conveyor for IGF in Gambia, the IGF in Gambia.
>> MODERATOR: I thought it was convener.
>> GAMBIA: Convener, sorry for IGF in Gambia which works with the ITS association in Gambia in direct collaboration with the Ministry of Information, Communication and Infrastructure, which is presently overseen by our president who we consider as the champion of ICT in Gambia. The IGF in the Gambia has taken a structure that is always going to be held in the first quarter of the year so the last IGF was held in the first quarter of this year which was in February of 2012.
With the collaboration with the Ministry of Information, communication and infrastructure, we also have certain key stakeholder that discuss about pertinent issues in regards to what we want to do within the Gambia ICT system in terms of Internet Governance. That is the local ISOC. The University of Gambia, the local governmental agencies, the chambers of commerce and industry, and also the regulatory authority.
One key area that we touched on in our last Internet Governance Forum, which is what we did a two day event is in the area of Internet Governance for development, and the decision was taken that we have to get certain key ministries to come and discuss how the plan to use or the understanding of IG for development and we are very lucky that the ministry that did that this year was the ministry of social welfare whose minister Ms. Foteem Bagi gave a presentation of what we can, what the ministry is planning in terms of IG for development.
One key area that came up during our discussion was Gambia is part of the countries that are getting the submarine cable, the African coastal Europe submarine cable which will be launched where there is 23 countries involved this December 19th is to generate more local content especially when we discovered from this presentation from this IGF for a population of 1.8 million we have over 100,000 of children that go to school through the Islamic system of education. So we want to make sure that the children have Arabic language which they use to study on the internet. Since then it is developed that we are going to have internet exchange point sometime next year.
We are very lucky lastly to say in any of our local IGFs we organize we try to get key experts from within the region help support the process in areas we don't have expertise, like in internet law because we are talking of going in to looking at areas with intellectual property so through the Ministry of Communication in Ghana we got a lawyer to support us and we got ICANN to support us too in the process of getting the Gambian community to under the top level demands that were launched thank you very much..
>> MODERATOR: Sweden IGF. Really? Just by him?
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from Sweden from the Telecom regulator authority. My name is Anders Johansen. And our main challenge is, one is to broaden and get even more stakeholder in the country interested and active in discussing and identifying challenges and forming policies on Internet Governance. Another one is the neutrality, the challenges to cause an impact. Concerning our national IGF we have two parts, since 1998 we have a three day event we call the internet days, and we gather around a thousand people in that event and it's driven, it's multi-stakeholder driven with many people engaged in preparing and taking active parts in the discussions. The other part of the national IGF is a reference group on Internet Governance which also is multi-stakeholder and we, we, our regulator authority invites it's open to anybody who wants to take part on the net or also physically in four days in events four days a year, half a day events.
And at the moment, there are about 80 people more or less active in this reference group and the idea is to discuss and when possible Forum national standpoints on Internet Governance issues and sometimes we can do it, sometimes not, but we can when we can't do it, we identify the different views that are seen among the stakeholder and we can discuss.
Of course, this national dealing with the Internet Governance is not all of it. The international is even more important. So that's why that's one of the reasons that we hosted EuroDIG last summer. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. My name is Ping Wung. I'm Chair of the multi-stakeholder for Asia Pacific regional IGF. I have a bunch of slides, but I'm not sure you can see picture. The logo is quite nice of bamboo. And then in June and July in Tokyo, you have to imagine about that one. In the photo is Abatosan who is one key person. There is mention of him in the panel report. We have 300 participants over three days. It's the third time we are having this only, the first meeting in Hong Kong, second in Singapore, but it's definitely growing.
We have a youth IGF composed of youths, and it's been going well, a bunch of youth from Hong Kong who are here in Sweden, one of the leaders here Janis.
>> MODERATOR: Welcome!
>> AUDIENCE: Then there is a nice hall, it's really shiny. You see floor is shiny because we are using for the first time. To get to the programme, the key part of it we discussed mainly issues you all discuss. Some new things that I want to add, law enforcement on internet, free expression, internet history, then asking called internet ecosystem, a solid market. I have not idea what it is. I attended it but still no idea. Then protection of children, IGF update, open data, cybersecurity.
On the points of agreement, there were three points of unanimous agreement and there were some areas to work on because I think we are all concerned about differences. The first is the criticality of IPv6. I think you heard Jeff Huston talk about it. In Asia Pac we run out of addresses. Part of the problem is the vendors don't all have V6 equipment. Some of them don't even have to V6. Some is privacy in order for Cloud Computing to take off. Many of you have mentioned Cloud Computing and security. From our discussion the agreement, the unanimous agreement was it's not security at issue. It's privacy protection. You have international privacy agreements in order for Cloud commuting to take.
The third agreement was ICT for disaster relief. And we led a group after that to go to the area where the tsunami hit in Japan to look at how ICT may be used. The man of the town gave a presentation and cry on stage. You don't hear anybody cry on stage in IGF meetings but it was very moving because of the disaster and if ICT can help, we all feel something good and useful to contribute. Okay. That's it.
>> MODERATOR: I thought he was going to cry, but anyhow, no, he didn't. Can you go to the other end to Portugal, and could I see the hand, hand of Asia Pacific? Okay. That's Asia Pacific. Now I'm going to cry because he has got it all, but you have to come.
>> PORTUGAL: Thank you very much. My name is Pedro. I'm representing ISOC Portugal. The other is the science of foundation and technology that belongs to the ministry of education in science. We have the event took place on the 10th of July. We had 150 physical participants in Lisbon and around 30 remote participants. We would like to improve that, but it was what we had.
We prepared the document that we call messages from Lisbon that you can get in paper format from the EuroDIG booth and I will talk later on a little on EuroDIG. The discussion this year was organized on around several topics. One of them was open universatility and neutrality of the internet. We understand that this topic is very critical. Then we discussed cybersecurity and privacy, intellectual property rights and basically there was a big discussion. We are the participant of the Portuguese Pirate Party. It was a lively discussion, and there was more or less unanimous understanding that the legislation is not adapted to the current research of present media.
We discuss also new business and cross models. Social networks are becoming very critical and it was also a hot topic. Then we had a discussion on the multi-stakeholder model and we invited someone from the telecommunication regulator to caulk about WCIT. The position of the port few gees regulator is that the internet is not should not be discussed at WCIT because the old regulations take care of what's relevant.
And as you are pointing me that time is going on, I would just lake to announce that the next EuroDIG will be in Lisbon on the 6 and 7 in July so after Sweden we will be in Portugal and I hope to see if of you participating. If you are not Europeans, any way you can participate because it's an evolving model. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. We will bring the microphone over to Benin and it says the parrot party came to Portugal IGF. It's not the parrot, it's the pirate. But I do understand that Portugal is a very colorful country.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. My name is Jovi Atune from ISOC. We are part of the organizer of the national IGF which is the first IGF in Benin. It was part of a week ceremony called internet week in the country. So it was an opportunity to discuss about some issues. The main one was the cybersecurity that people found very important in our region now and the other issue we talk about was also the ccTLD services. So the participant found very important to have a better ccTLD service in the country. And then also the discussion was about the internet in point.
As we focus on the importance of local content. So we think that that is something that should be something seriously considered. And finally one important issue of the discussion is that we should have this Forum every year as we started, so we have a committee that is in place and the intent is to have every year one Internet Governance Forum at the national level. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Please, where is New Zealand IGF? Japan. I wanted to see the hand of New Zealand. Just before Japan advises us on the emerging issues I would like to see the hands of all of the countries that are here because I only have four minutes left after Japan. So if you reporting on any national or sub regional IGF I would like to see your hand now, so that we schedule you after Japan. After this we will go for tea, whether we will break for 10 minutes. We will reconvene and we will harmonize emerging issues and take our challenges and one or two key recommendations. And I do hope this will be okay for us. So we are going to round up now, go for coffee or tea or water. Come back for another 90 minutes and during those 90 minutes, we will be asking you to share with us the framework of the administration of the IGF. Some have started already, but we also like to get more input. We are going to take our challenges, we are going to take possible recommendations, and all of this we shall bundle up debriefing tomorrow, and that will round off our report to the Secretariat. Japan. Please don't cry.
>> JAPAN: Thank you. I'm from mobile operator. I work for the Japan ISP association, which is the host secretary for the Japan IGF. So IGF Japan was started two years ago and then we had this annual meeting this year co located with APR IGF for one session focusing on Cloud Computing. So generally what we want to keep is to have an annual meeting and discuss various issues related to Internet Governance, but at the same time we have various organizations in Japan which work directly with the ministry or indirectly with the ministry for a self regulation so that most of the Internet Governance issues are covered by all of these organisations and these mechanisms at the moment. That is why we are currently satisfied with IGF Japan having just an annual meeting.
So the current issues related to Internet Governance is the first one is really the relationship with the internet for disaster recovery. Because what we found out in this disaster is not only that we can use internet for the recovery, we have many, how do you say, understandings of old regulations that will prevent local Government to keep private data in a secure manner, which means that they were just washed away.
So in order to keep these private information in a manner and also allow the people to access these data from various locations, we might need to restudy, you know, all of the understandings or the background of all of the regulations which are protecting privacy. Secondly, child protection and banning of child pornography is quite a large issue which is going and Cloud Computing, which is currently discussed under the Japan United States internet economy dialogue is also getting a very large issue, and WCIT. We are also sending a large delegate to try to protect the internet freedom. Those are the large issues currently running, and one big issue which may emerge is we have a big operation between the police department and the ISPs in case of direct law enforcement doesn't work. But because there was some failures in the mechanism that the police department, you know, punished the wrong people, so that may be a very big issue starting next year how to fix that operation. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: You need to do like this with the microphone, just give it to the lady behind you. I'm very impressed with the disaster relief role of internet and the data security that is behind it and that phrase is ringing in my mind. We can't have data washed away. We can't have our data snowed out. We don't want Sandy blowing away our data and I think that is something that needs to be worked upon further, the internet and disaster relief. I live in a country that has just come up from war and we are building the idea of internet for peace. Internet for peace building, and I do clearly relate to that point. We are going to end with Lillian, Uganda and East Africa and know that you are standing between us and tea and you know that saying in Africa that only a bad woman stands between people and a meal.
>> UGANDA: I'm Lillian Niroga and I coordinate Uganda Internet Governance Forum. I may not speak either for the East Africa IGF because I think there will be a representative in the session that follows, but just to pick some of the emerging issues that we are to discuss. Some of these issues have had we have some sort of common issues coming up.
To give a brief background, this year's IGF was the seventh held in Uganda. It was held on August 10th. We had over 100 participants and for the first time we saw a lot of Government support, which I think I also had from EuroDIG. The IGF in Uganda has always been headed by Civil Society, but this year we had a lot of Government support which is a positive thing for us. So just not to hold you between you and your coffee, I will just look at the emerging issues.
One of the biggest emerging issues was protecting children on line. So actually the main theme was promoting on line safety, especially for the vulnerable and we are targeting children. And we heard from our Government that this is a programme that is going to be taken on, and they also reported to us that in the past IGF we were talking about a lot of policy issues and this year we had a number of policies, especially cyber laws that we have passed so it was positive to hear Government reporting to us that they are implementing some of the issues we had been talking about.
Last but not least, Nnenna, we talked about the issue of eGovernance, especially at open governance. We posed the question whether the Government was doing enough because one of the main challenges we are facing is not just infrastructure, but accessing information. So this was a big issue, and also the issue of internet liability. Last year we had a lot of governmental, we had a lot of interference in how ISPs were operating. We had a number of take downs on certain contents, although it went successive, but this is an issue coming up in Uganda. On our next we are having one of the challenges and I would like to see how other IGFs are doing how to involve private sector in these discussions because for us it has been a challenge.
It's one of the things we are looking at taking on in the coming IGFs, and also we come up with a sort of a reference group that we would like to see taking on the IGF, the Uganda IGF to another level. So in the next session I would really die to see how the other IGFs are dealing with challenges. Thank you, Nnenna.
>> MODERATOR: What we will be doing after break once again is to continue our discussions on emerging issues. If there are burning issues that have not been mentioned, I will please ask you to bring them in so we have a greater idea. We will look at management and administration of our IGF and we will look at key challenges and a few recommendations. Once again, thank you for coming. And one great issue has just emerged, and that is coffee. See you.
(Break).
>> MODERATOR: We will start in two, three minutes. I'm sorry, but we need to wrap up. We should be able to start at 4:45, I hope.
Five, four, three, two, one, zero. Okay. Welcome back. What we will do now is to remind ourselves of what we did for the last 90 minutes is to introduce ourselves, introduce our IGF and laid what we thought were our verbal issues. He is going to remind us of all of that flow of information for the first round, and from there we are going to move forward.
>> Thank you. I will go to my list and read all of the emerging issues identified during the previous issue. Multi-stakeholder model, lack of support and interest in Internet Governance issues from the local business and academia. Oppressing legislation especially with regard to blocking entries content, how to engage in discussions with Government. Then we move to child protection and cybercrime, content and need for more local content, changing market for content, identity management, acceptable behavior on the internet, how to better protect consumers in information society and how to make Government more responsible in information society, need for safe and responsible use of internet and the broader inclusion of youth, creative content. Then we had a new concept, Internet Governance, broadband connectivity and development of broadband networks. Data centers and data security, Cloud Computing, identity in the network, digital divide and infrastructure for the internet of the future, Government to citizens interaction, eGovernment, eDemocracy, open Government data, vulnerability and profiling of IP transactions, sustainability of the multi-stakeholder model and of the IGF, digital literacy and how to behave on line, online sovereignty and jurisdictional issues, principles of internet governance, network neutrality, internet as a public, capacity building in Internet Governance, intellectual property rights, internet exchange points and the need to develop local contents again, IPv6 and transition from IPv4 to IPv6, privacy and data protection and here it was mentioned that there is a need for international privacy protection treaty at international level for Cloud Computing to be promoted, ICT for disaster relief, openness, universality and neutrality of the universality, social media, CLTD services and last thing self regulation and self regulation of Internet Governance and again, eGovernance and eGovernment. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks a million. Quick question, I'm not going to ask if you endorse that because I was here when you said all of that. The question rather is are there emergent issues that have not been captured? Because this is very important for us going forward. Are there issues you think have emerged that were not captured?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you one thing I am thinking about a tool if we could take those issues and put them in an Excel spreadsheet, right, as a follow up, and then some of them, I could begin to merge some of them, right.
Sort of they are similar enough and we could figure out so instead of having 37 or I may have the number wrong or 22, we would have 12 or 15 because the commonality will help us and then we could leave on our Excel spreadsheet some blanks for capturing emerging issues that we didn't speak about already or that someone who wasn't here didn't write, and then we would have this great compilation for our report, anyway, from our workshop. That would also help us, I think, for me, I'm just looking yesterday in the Arab IGF workshop, there you are, I proposed a sister to sister interaction between the IGF USA with the Arab internet group on picking a couple of subjects. And being involved with them when they address the subject and having them come and be involved with us.
So this list, to me, might begin to show where those sister to sister interactions would begin to be natural.
>> AUDIENCE: I think it's a great idea, and maybe we have should have and I don't know if it makes sense where the different regional initiatives that they are involved. So I can as Arab UFC, the USIGF and East Africa are interested in that specific topic and we can come together and talk about that a bit more.
>> MODERATOR: You never cease to amaze me. You never cease to amaze me because she can bring out innovative ideas on the spot. So we still have some time to do the emerging issues. Do you want us to go back to emerging issues and cluster them or do you want us to do that in the debriefing tomorrow.
>> AUDIENCE: If we could send the emerging issues summary out, we could look at them overnight, and see about natural affinity and, right, and bundling, and then we could be pulled in tomorrow with some ideas. Would that work?
>> MODERATOR: We have a debriefing tomorrow. It's at 9:30 just across 9:00 or 9:30? 9:00 in the morning, it's in the room just here that's room 11 tomorrow at 9:00, please. I beg your pardon. 9:00 tomorrow morning. So you get out of your bus and you come straight to room 11, and we plan away for all of the lists we have made. But for the benefit of those who are coming in later, what we did was to remind ourselves of all of the emerging issues and the question is is there any emerging issues that was missing on the list? Did you think one was missing?
>> AUDIENCE: I don't know whether I missed it, but is there something about mobile challenges, like using mobile internet and specific challenges attached to the fact that, you know
>> MODERATOR: I didn't hear mobile because nobody mentioned it, but you want us to add use of internet on the mobile, mobile content.
>> AUDIENCE: Access, content. I think there are specific challenges linked to the fact that the internet is going mobile more and more
>> MODERATOR: So the theme will be mobility of the internet.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, like an umbrella issue, yes.
>> MODERATOR: Internet mobility or mobile internet? So we get it correct? Which one captures your idea better?
>> AUDIENCE: We mentioned that the Arab IGF that it was a point that maybe it dropped, but mobile access, extending access to the internet via mobile devices and mobile internet.
>> AUDIENCE: If I could ask our colleague it seems to me that the idea that the internet is going mobile brings with it a whole lot of yet like today you worry about viruses on your laptop, you are only now beginning to worry about viruses on your mobile device, but soon it's going to be a huge problem, bot nets and other things. So if we use an umbrella that is mobile internet or mobile something like that, we can put other issues underneath that.
>> AUDIENCE: Could be extending access through mobile and addressing the challenges that come along.
>> MODERATOR: Could you please write mobile internet access as emerging issue so we get everyone on the same page. Any other issue that has not emerged? Yes, Gambia?
>> AUDIENCE: I want to say within the emerging issues give this pitch on the youth IGF, I didn't see it being captured in the repertoire's report. I felt it was an emerging issue. I don't know if I'm wrong. I just need clarity on that. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Youth I think we said a lot of youth, youth, youth. Yes. Please verify that it's in your report, but it should be there, please. Nigeria, are you requesting to speak in.
>> AUDIENCE: I came in late so I don't know if something was said on child on line protection.
>> MODERATOR: Anyone want a mic to add on emerging issues, please? Any other issues that did emerge that are not on the list, please? So nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero. Okay. Right. Could we go into a discussion about the framework, the administration, the management of our different Forum. I do recall that EuroDIG is having a dialogue, Canada is having a forum and not an intergovernance Forum. So some people are having internet meetings, some are having regional meetings, some are moving from one city to another, like Italy told us, and some other people are not having it as Internet Governance but as internet Forum, and some, I think Benin and one other country spoke about internet days. So these have been the different framework.
So the question now is do we want to share more because we said, okay, we are going to come to it and now we have come to it. What is the format of your Internet Governance? Who manages it? What is the management matrix? Who administers what? That will advise all of us, and that's what we are doing now. There is no particular order. So if you would like to share something, please raise your hand.
Okay. I will begin for myself. You volunteered me. The Internet Governance has a Secretariat which a project manager that is paid resident within the regulatory agency, and we have a website, and this person is the official face of the IGF in Cote d'lvoire so that is the framework we have now during our IGF we did elect an IGF president in Cote d'lvoire who is also part of the regulatory agency. So we have two people that are the face of Cote d'lvoire Internet Governance, the president and the project manager. The project manager's job includes going round the country to do education, to engage with different stakeholders, to do, to sensitize, to take questions, to consult, and to report to the community and if you go to our portal IGICI.CI, IGICI.CI, you will find out that we are even bringing up news. So part of the work of the project manager is to share what is happening in all of the Internet Governance areas.
So the website has become a kind of knowledge clearing house on IGF issues, on events, on news, on who is doing what. So it's become a landing page for us. That's what I can share from Cote d'lvoire, and then we come over there. The microphone is not far from you.
>> AUDIENCE: Can I ask you to add a topic before we go. That is we need to describe the multi-stakeholder or do you want to do that separately?
>> MODERATOR: Unless you feel you have. What we are looking for is unique experience in the administration and management of IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: In order to be related to the IGF it has to be multi-stakeholder on an equal footing do you want to say that for a second round and talk about how we deliver that? I'm happy to do that. I just want to be sure we address that. I think it's an important challenge.
>> MODERATOR: Let's do something. When we come around, please give us all of the principles you feel should be in the administration and what you are living, what is happening with you. That helps advise all of us.
>> SWEDEN: Sweden. To promote dialogue because we are very keen in EuroDIG that we promote dialogues. We have a format saying that we don't have speeches, not absolutely not more than ten minutes. Very often less. And to 90% last time, I think this worked out. People, high decision makers, like president, although we don't have a president in our country, but we have other considered important persons and we try to be strict and not give them very much time to promote dialogue. So we have 10 or 12 points to guide every organizer of a session or workshop how it should be managed concerning, for instance, time limits and reporting, of course, we can improve it in EuroDIG but we make an effort to promote dialogue and not speeches.
>> MODERATOR: EuroDIG is a basket of European IGF countries, IGF in different European countries. That is what makes up EuroDIG. It's a dialogue.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, all of the 47 European countries are invited and I think last year maybe we had 35. I'm not quite sure. And, of course, there are some countries more active than others, but still it's a wide range.
>> MODERATOR: Great.
>> AUDIENCE: I want to add some point to clarify, EuroDIG although not institutionalized has a small Secretariat, a group of enthusiasts who administer all of these logistics and collect all of the input over, I mean, during the year, to some up and to come up with the final agenda and basically to implement the event as itself, thank you.
>> MODERATOR: So EuroDIG runs more or less like the global IGF, but for Europe sort of. And we know that the next EuroDIG is going to happen in Lisbon, Portugal.
>> AUDIENCE: I think it's fair to say since I participated in some of the national IGFs, I see Portugal sitting here and others, the National European Initiatives do not report to EuroDIG. EuroDIG doesn't charter them. They are independent and free standing but they may choose to participate with EuroDIG. Is that correct?
>> AUDIENCE: That's correct.
>> AUDIENCE: The Arab IGF has tried to work on the four main, I don't want to say guideline but best practices of global IGF, which is transparency, bottom up, multi-stakeholder and inclusiveness and openness to all stakeholder so it's a meeting. It's a yearly meeting that happens. The first one was, like I said in Kuwait last month. But in order to maintain the bottom up approach, the call for establishing the Arab IGF was done in consultation with the broader community. So this was done in a big meeting where invitation was extended across all stakeholder and where the basic guidelines for setting up Arab IGF were done. The Secretariat is at the national telecom regulatory authority of Egypt and it was a proposal made by NTRA which was accepted. We had to look for umbrella organizations because the involvement of Government and the process institutionalizing the process within the Arab region is very important.
You can't have just like, for example, in the EuroDIG dialogue when is done through maybe volunteer work, but you have to have something institutional. So we are having two umbrella organizations which is the UN ESCWA. And the Arab states spanning across the whole Arab countries and both umbrella organizations have passed through the normal process, resolutions through ministers, through the council of ministers to let's say endorse the Arab IGF. So the Government does not have any control, Governments do not have any control over the Arab IGF, but they actually endorse it and we share with them the report via the umbrella organizations. This is how it is. We run the whole show preparing for intersessional through a core group, which is very similar to the MAG of the global IGF it's called the Arab MAG and it consists of all stakeholder. It was selected to have a balance between the different stakeholder groups and gender balance pretty much what is being done in the global process and it has taken care of all of the work and it will take stock of the first meeting and prepare for the next meeting as we go. So that's from one side. We have had some challenges if you want to get on that. We recommend that. Okay.
>> GAMBIA: Thanks. I'm Postlat from Gambia. We, when the Gambia IGF started it was initiates through the west African IGF and consortium that was led by FOSFA, the social society which gave guidelines when they appointed national presentations for each countries on how they wanted it to work in the spirit of multi-stakeholders so we have a national resource person for IGF which is in the case of Gambia is myself that works directly with the Ministry of Information, communication and infrastructure. As they are the ministry responsible for all ICT matters, and me, myself as national resource person, I am not a standalone.
I fall under the umbrella of the ITS that works with the ministry because they have to give guidelines with what is in the national context of the ICT, what should happen. The ministry is sort of happening with myself set up like a local MAG and that local MAG constitutes of all key stakeholders that cover all areas within the multi-stakeholder approach. So we have the non governmental association of NGOs, we have the university of the Gambia for academic. We have the regulatory authority, and we have also the chambers of commerce covering that and all of the ISPs, of course. Within the ministry, we are not just working with the ministry without they have a focal person on IGF. What happens is within all of these various local market that we have, they all report to their constituencies through the various web platforms on what's the national process is about, and apart from so when we have any information to send about what happens locally, we have we send it to the west African Internet Governance Forum website because we felt it was not necessary to replicate local IGF website because all of these various constituencies that are part of the multi-stakeholder approach they all have means to disseminate information to their various constituencies that are key stakeholders within our Forum so that is the way we operate.
The last thing I would like to say in the last IGF what we discovered taking a clue from how you have the UN and IGF Secretariat, we are all key stakeholders met with the local UNDP in Gambia who acts as the UN resident coordinator. So they too now decided to be part of the whole process and to be involved as a local UN agency which I think really helps us a lot. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Since 2005 we have a forum on information society. It was part of the deployment that set up another society agency that was merged this year with foundation for science and technology. So we launched that deployment, but nevertheless since 2005 we had this Forum on information society that was by the Government, but it was organized already with the other stakeholders and we had as far as I remember, well, on accessibility, eCommerce, digital economy, and in 2010 we organized the first Forum on information society on Internet Governance. It was the very first one.
What we do is that the ministry starts a process, and then invites stakeholders from the academy, from the technical community, from the private sector and from the Civil Society. And we all together, we organize, but one thing is to organize and to hear all of these stakeholders, the other thing is how this influences the decision.
And so it influenced the decision, for instance, on a deployment on accessibility, for instance. Now in 2012 we were merged with Foundation for Science and Technology and all of these agencies is now in the department that is called information society department.
And what we started to do was to organize together with ISOC Portugal that was set up last this Forum on Internet Governance. We continue with this Forum on information society, on different themes, and one of them is each year on Internet Governance. So after this Forum, we launched the messages of Lisbon, they are no conclusions at all. They are, the main messages were conveyed by the several speakers that were invited or that they wanted to be a part of.
It's not only of the speakers, it's from the audience as well. Last, the last thing is that we publish, we public a booklet from every Forum on Information Society. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you I'm from Finish Foreign Ministry. In Finland we have the FIF, Finish Internet Forum and it's organized by our national multi-stakeholder which is working group. The group itself was established before the WSIS summit in Geneva because we needed to coordinate national positions and, therefore, it's steered by the Finish Foreign Ministry, but it's a group composed of different entities across all stakeholder groups and it functions as a steering group for the Finish Internet Forum. We have now had three annual events of Finish Internet Forum, and they have been held in different premises.
We have a couple of principles which have been established, and one is that it's open and inclusive. We don't charge anything for participation. Part of it is always organized in English, so that we have had some foreign entities and we have also cooperated among the Nordic countries. We discuss current topics of national interest but we also discuss some issues that relate to international Internet Governance, and we have just decided to change the timing of the event. Before we organized it every Autumn, but now we see it more fit to organize it in Spring so that we can fit into the regional EuroDIG meeting as well as to the global IGF.
And we are trying to make it a process instead of just one annual meeting so that we organize smaller events all throughout the year. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Chair, may I ask for a couple of minutes extra because I have something to amuse everyone and this is truly a unique experience. Thank you. First of all, the Russian IGF operates in a very competitive environment. I deliberately left it for this session just to let you know that some countries have internet days. Russia, as usual, is sort of special, so we have Russian internet week. Not we, but, I mean, the internet community.
Last year usually it's held outside Moscow. So last year 16,000 applications were submitted for that event, and 3,000 people were lucky to find accommodation in that area to attend that internet week. Next we have Russian internet award, which is a Russian Oscar ceremony and it's given prime time on the national TV. The awards are given in the 15 categories it I'm not mistaken. So it's been held for the 10th consecutive year if I'm not mistaken.
Third, we have private initiatives like some of you may know the name of Ugen Kasperski. So he deployed a train to the Russian regions because Russia is as big to travel from one side of the country to another from east to west it takes eleven hours by plane. So this train is sort of full of, you know, technicians and engineers and internet guys, so they go to certain regions, like, you know, paratroopers, they are there on the field so interact with locals and to give them some basic understanding of what the internet is about.
So in this competitive environment we try to build our own identity, our own brand, if you will and to sell it. This is not easy, but I must say that we launched, we were happy and lucky to launch the public private, I would say private public initiative because we team up with the ministry of telecommunications, I mean, regardless of what I said during that oppressive legislations like that, they are really supportive, and we have a joint organizing committee and the ministry usually giving us free facilities and media coverage because that's the ministry for telecommunications and mass media and I would love to see whatever editor in chief who would turn down the minister's invitation to cover that event, and also Visa support which it comes to certain people coming from overseas.
Meanwhile, we and our sister company, because we are a non profit and the sister company is a regular business, so we provide funding, we provide man power from the work force, and we provide website. We launch that website three years ago, plus a couple of other NGOs helping us with that. So sponsors we have only information sponsors, not any other businesses are involved that much because we don't want to sell our brand for some, you know, miserable, I don't know, $5,000 offered by some foreign companies. We are Russians, we have our own pride Russians, we have our own pride.
This is pretty much bottom up initiative. Let me tell you that the ministry does not dictate or impose whatever rooms or suggest any names, this is purely by our initiative, and then to sell our brand and sell our brand we need to be creative and Marilyn saw that we need to concoct or come up with new formats which would ignite Russian audience, which is sort of a little bit, you know, resistant, I would say, in terms of absorbing new ideas so you need to ignite them. You need to store their interest all of the time, so that is why we try to combine. We see this event not as idealic per se, rather as an educational event which is still needed for Russians to grasp the concept of multi-stakeholderism and just to finish this, we try to get big names to deliver certain presentations, we try to establish some dialects like battles, and we try to get more people like prominent internet practitioners to lecture at local universities as side events, which is great success. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Now, wasn't that a series branding speech! Okay. Thank you, Russia.
You can now go on report that you made waves at Baku IGF and you got two times applaud.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm going to speak about the IGF USA, but I want to open my comment by commending you, NNenna for your or the of summary here of the different approaches or terminology that we use to describe these events and activities we are all using to advance the multi-stakeholder model and engagement in Internet Governance.
I really like the diversity because I think it really shows that we are in fact being bottom up and meeting the interest of the communities that we are trying to serve. The commonality, I think, that brings us all together is a commitment to multi-stakeholder, to transparency, to accountability to the community, and to advancing some kind of positive activities and change as a result of organizing these events.
IGF USA as I said earlier is probably going to sound really different to all of you because we do nothing that is about national level policy activity, and that is because we want IGF USA to survive. There are so many think tanks and lawyers engaged in policy work in Washington, and companies that have so many resources focused on, you know, national cybersecurity and privacy, et cetera, that any new entrant into that space would immediately find themselves head to head in competition and just squashed. People would not participate. It would be, you know, the wrong thing to do.
But what we are doing is to try to take the global need for understanding about Internet Governance and educate back into this rich tapestry of think tanks, academics, businesses, and he make they understand what they do at a national level has a global implication. You are probably astounded that we consider IGF USA's major responsibility raising awareness and understanding about what Internet Governance is and why it matters.
And it's so we are making very slow progress, but we are making progress. That's a major thing that we do. We have a steering group of about 75 to 80 people. It grows and changes every year. It's totally open, so literally anyone who asks to be a part of the steering group as long as they commit to the principles, and they commit to participate, they participate equally in the steering group. I act as the chief catalyst, and the work is, as usual, is done by about 20 to 25 very actively involved people. But every time I threaten to take somebody off the steering group list because I haven't seen them or heard from them, they refuse to let me take them off the list.
It's all we do is to plan we do something that may be useful for you to understand in that we brief and debrief around the public consultation for the IGF, and we try to empower individuals to participate on their own, not on behalf of the IGF USA in the public consultations either remotely or in person so that they go and they are informed. We also brief and debrief about the other key activities in the larger internet ecosystem. So I have a road map of meetings and events, and we brief them on the WSIS plus 10 consultations and that they should file comments so we use it as kind of a briefing environment. We use a name site. We have very, very few resources.
The only I have a two part time interns for four weeks a year and a part time assistant that works three hours a week except for the time that we are actually, the six weeks right before the event, and then she works a little bit more. All of the sponsorship is expended completely against the food, the printing, et cetera, and I think the total administrative cost for the past two years have been less than $5,000 in terms of the money that was spent on administrative costs.
It's not going to last. That's a fragility that has got to be fixed. We need more resources, but it's that's where it is now.
>> MODERATOR: That's a very important insight which I think will kick us off on the road to challenges, and you started off by saying the IGF USA is outward looking so that it will survive and you ended up by saying it's fragile, it may not survive. Okay. That's a very good one.
>> AUDIENCE: I said it's fragile but I didn't say that didn't mean it wouldn't survive.
>> MODERATOR: I think it will survive as long as you are there. So now we are taking challenges. If you want to add management, please, just go on with challenges. Okay? Do you understand what I mean? Because we have half an hour remaining. It's 120 seconds that I have given to each person.
>> AUDIENCE: Just background information to start because I didn't have the chance to speak in previous session, but like IGF has a particular format, it's very collaborative, there are more than 32 countries involved in our policy development discussion and it's a multi-stakeholder discussion one of the main efforts trying to engage all of the stakeholders and also engage, try to engage all of the countries, it's hard in the Caribbean, but we provide grants to participate for people from all of the countries in the region, and we rotate the meetings. So the last meeting we had people from 32 countries in the region and more than 150 participants. Next year we will keep this format of making an open call for participants for entities that try to host the next meeting next year. We will keep the format of an open agenda determined by the community on basis of we will keep the format of discussing an agenda similar with the main topics of the IGF, but with regional flavor that the survey could provide.
We are increasing our budget. Last year we had $100,000 budget and this year we are improving 30%. So we hope we can continue improving this participation, and this doesn't count. The Government funding because, for example, the economic commission for Latin America and the Caribbean has a strategy on Information Society strategy and the Government and those staring committee participating as members of the group for first thyme this year and all of the Governments that want to discuss the agenda in the region are coming to this event. So, for example, Brazil provides grants for other Government resource to participate to this meeting, so we went over 10 different governmental relations in the regional IGF.
This is much more than what we have, originally have in this IGF. So, for example, last year, the proposal, the famous ipso proposal was discussed previously in the regional preparatory meeting and it's actually the place where the agenda is discussed in our region in Internet Governance, and this is speaking of challenges, what is becoming more and more the place to discuss Internet Governance.
We are also providing the IGF is very far away from our region year by year. Apart from the Brazil IGF in Rio, most of the times we have to travel more than 24 hours to come, and a lot of money spending in traveling. So this time last year we provided grants for three people, full covered to come to the IGF in Nairobi, and this was the first time, and we tried to get people that came for the first time to the IGF and into session 12 where we put six grants full cover to come to Azerbaijan and also people that are the first time that are participating. So it's a success in that sense and we want to improve even more.
Many people three of the people were speakers at the session of the ones that were and came for the first time. One of them was speaker at the main session. The one that's currently now on, and there are people that are relevant for the community, but they didn't have the funding to come, so we want to improve that. That's part of our challenge for the future as well. I think I covered mostly our, the format situation and the challenges for the future. We want to keep multi-stakeholder, and one of the challenges formalized is this structure that we have and LACNIC is waiting to participate. Maybe in the future we can do that. At the moment we have been the only ones dealing with this activity. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks. I think that experience explains a bit about what is happening in the West Africa IGF as well. We kicked off with initial funding from a donor. We had a consortium of 7 organisations and after two years it's going down, and we are not sure how this is going to play out, but I do see signs that maybe the regional organizations would want to buy in this to keep the sustainability, but I'm really very sorry, LACNIC because if we are going to Bali in Indonesia, that is farther than anywhere.
>> AUDIENCE: This is a very nice place, so, I won't mind.
>> MODERATOR: Everybody wants to go to Bali, but that is a long, long journey. And I think the budget issue, it's going to come up with almost all of us unless you are from the Indonesian Internet Governance, otherwise, in fact, Indonesians will have to travel as well. Everyone is traveling down to Bali. It's going to be I think this is something we need to capture in this report because this may be the furthest we have to go for an interest Internet Governance Forum. You have the mic in front of you and we will come back to Finland.
>> AUDIENCE: One of the the main challenge we have in Gambia is local resource in some key areas of pertinent issues to Internet Governance. I think that is one of the key things that this community here from the different regions can support, and then I will be very grateful like the said to know the different groups that are here. So in case we are coming up, since I said earlier on our first IGF, our IGF is always in the first quarter of the year. If we need someone, an expert in Cloud Computing, if I have to contact the Russian IGF to recommend someone, and we see what we can do. So that is a key area that really affects us. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you I think our challenge in organizing Finish Internet Forum is Finland is a very small country. We have a small stakeholder working group which functions as a steering group, and the organisation is really based on the active participation of few individuals, so I don't know what happens if those individuals move to other tasks or lose interest. We have to work on the stability all of the time. And in this context, I would say that funding is not a problem for us, not because because we might have a little bit.
(Applause).
Let me explain. It's not a problem because we organize the Finish Internet Forum in a public premise. It might be a university or we had premises provided by Government entities, parliament. We organized one session in the parliament of Finland. So that's why, and we always found a company or even a Government entity who was able to provide funding for coffee and even for lunches, and that's all we actually needed. So that's why we didn't have any problems with funding, but the lack of resources and lack of active people is definitely a problem.
>> AUDIENCE: Let me draw your attention to a very specific challenge we face, and that's a huge region which to date has been forgotten absolutely. And that's the former Soviet Union including Russia, by the way, because the language barrier, no, I'm, serious, the language barrier it's that challenge we have to cope with, we as Russians because we still feel responsible for our friends and former brother or sister republics. In Russia alone 86% of the population has no command of any foreign language.
And the situation is much worse in those republics. We can see some guys who speak English here, but this is a very tiny fraction of the population. In other words, effectively no matter how many hubs we would install throughout the world, a huge territory is not covered simply because they are cut off. So this is the problem I reiterate at EuroDIG and other Forums, but I don't know what to do with that. This is very serious.
So no foreign language, English mostly. No communication, no awareness raising as far as the internet and the Internet Governance are concerned. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: That's a very valid point especially because I live in a French speaking country, and I do recall that the programme manager for my Internet Governance was asking me do you think we can send a national IGF report in French? And I asked myself, why would she ask me that? If a national IGF is held in French or in Azeri, it just follows that that is the language in which you will send a report to the IGF Secretariat, but it just struck me that someone in IGF Secretariat not be able to read the language in which your national IGF was written, the report was written, and I think that is a key challenge here.
>> AUDIENCE: But you missed the point no Internet Governance Forums throughout the former Soviet Union except Russia and Ukraine. The Baltics, I'm sorry, the Baltic republics, that's a different story, no IGFs at all.
>> MODERATOR: We are looking at beginning new phases?
>> AUDIENCE: I don't know.
>> MODERATOR: Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: When we first started, we were not in any way an IGF initiative, and I just want to reinforce again we are not initiatives, we are not IGFs, we are initiatives. That's important to remember because of the flexibility it gives us and to remember we don't have a formal relationship to the UN. We are adopting practices and principles that are consistent with the IGF, but we also have great flexibility. So when we first started, we held half day engagements where the Government came and spoke with the stakeholder and they were a half day or so and we had a lot of flexibility, we could hold them in different places, I could hold three or four a year around the United States based on, you know, pulling in 40 to 60 people from just an invitation.
In formalizing the IGF USA, we are now back to the fact that we need to go back and add back on these half day briefing events and activities to go to the next step to broaden awareness. And I do think the other thing that I will be interested in seeing when we go through our mapping exercise is what are the commonalities that we are identifying that where we can share information, draw back, for instance, my first response to the comment about needing a Cloud computer speaker was to data mine the last few years list of panelists and speakers.
>> NIGERIA: Thank you. In the case of Nigeria we are trying to revamp the Nigeria IGF, the first of it that something that looks like an IGF as national IGF was in 2008 and it was facile stated by the minister of information and communication then and agencies in Nigeria, in one word, they may have project down for IGF, but there was nobody to drive. So and because I was in the Government and I retired, I say, look, it is an opportunity for me to do something for the country. So I decided with my volunteer work to facilitate it. Now, at the Forum there was the question of where would the Secretariat be? Who would map? What is the principle? What is the process? And even two agencies of Government were struggling, they said it will be their call, the other one say it will be their call, but the agreement at the Forum was that it should be a neutral place.
And I can hear now that there are some that have neutral places and Government like regulatory is a Government agency. So we are trying to see by next year when we are going to do that programme we start on time, engage the industry, engage associations, engage non governmental organisation, engage Government as well, because it was likely funded by Government, and we don't want Government to just fund it because it would also influence some of the things because the report when we finish the report, we have to take it to the minister.
The minister has not done anything about the report. They accepted what we have prepared as the report and they communicate. But in order to push it further than this, we may need to have a strong Secretariat, even if it's going to be in the regulators desk it should be a very strong one that will continue to work on to, but the communication at the Forum was that it shouldn't be in a Government establishment. It should be in neutral and non government or a Forum or just an initiative or an alliance.
So having heard from others our challenge is what to do for it. And I like the idea of Finish not having problem with funding because you got other people engaged on time. I think that's what we should also be looking at. It's not just when it is time to hold an IGF in the region or in the country, then we will start running around. We start engaging potential sponsors, potential resource person on time. Those are my contributions.
Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, and you kicked it off with a round of recommendation, which means engage multi-stakeholders, keep them engaged so that when the time rolls around for a face to face meeting, then it wouldn't be a time for fundraising. We would have had commitment all year round. Arab IGF you are going to continue on challenges and recommendations and we are going to be ending in the next eleven minutes.
>> AUDIENCE: The Arab IGF has had similar challenges like the one that's were listed around the table and funding is clearly one of them, but it's not about, it's not about the availability of funding, it's about how you actually I mean, the funds are there. It's about getting them and putting them in the right channels.
So we have had little time actually to administer the process, the A MAG has worked under very tight time schedule, but we figured out we have to put some progresses in place in order to have sponsors really come in and put the money. So what we did, we initiated a fellowship programme, and we initiated a sponsorship programme, and we have made them transparently available. It came in a bit late, but if they were made earlier, it would have had more of that, but those have made so much difference to get people into the meeting. And so this is something that we want next year to take good care very early on, because if you really very early on put the fellowship programs and you say here if you comment and put some money in there, then you can get your fellows and then they would maybe create your own network so this is one thing.
>> The other thing that I think is important is actually to reach out to communities that are different than to keep players that are different than the ones that usually come to the global IGF, usually go to all of the different meetings because those organizations and those people have invested some time of their voluntary work on one side, and the organizations have put work time from their employees. So, for example, at NTRA we have the Secretariat, which is part of our employees' workload. So it's in-kind contribution. Even the AMAG members come to the organisation so the organisation pays for their travel, their money and the time they work for Arab figure. If you want to then you have to reach out to different organizations so they see what's in it for me and you can connect the dots and have the topics that are being discussed actually address the different challenges so you can actually expand who you sponsor network and so on. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I just have two recommendations to make. It's one long one. If we could all share, we could take the initiative out of the mailing list to share when are we having our national IGF, when are we having our regional IGF so that every other person can know and so that they can join in, and if we could add remote participation as a need within the national IGF and the regional IGF. That way even if it's someone who is national but they are not able to attend in person, they can still participate. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Going onto that, I would like to add from my experience in the Cote d'lvoire and West Africa IGF, it's important that the Secretariat be mutually agreed on. Every country had specific issues and in some countries, the agency may be the best suited regulatory agency may be the best suited and what the criteria will be who has the greatest potential to hedge in all of the partners, to bring in all of the stakeholders, to make them comfortable enough to come to the table. Sometimes in some countries it might be a Civil Society organisation that has this capacity to unite, to motivate, to invite, and to keep people engaged, and in some other countries it may be a neutral organisation. It may be an agency, it may be someone else. It may be a hired consultant that everyone agrees on.
So my recommendation would be that for any IGF we must find the best suitable entity to drive engagement, continued motivation and sustainability. Did I see any hand? Why is it Russia and U.S. all of the time.
>> AUDIENCE: Just because we have the best practices probably. Three recommendations I would put for anyone interested, well, first of all, we will market and sell the event as much as you can. To do this, you can get some celebrities, not necessarily Bill Clinton, but for sure let's say why not Vint Cerf and then sponsors will pop up for sure. Second, take care to nurture and build a strong constituency. That would help, would propel your momentum because they will push you as well as Government or some other stakeholder to do more IGFs in the future.
I mean, they will just compel you to go ahead with that. And third, do not hesitate to put aside whatever critical they may seem issues, but to focus sometimes on certain issues which are pretty local, which may stir the genuine interest and ignite the audience and make them contribute to your discussion. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I have two recommendations and one of them is to the greatest extent possible you invite Chang Tai, the Secretariat to be a part of your session.
>> MODERATOR: Buy him a business class ticket.
>> AUDIENCE: I was just going to say you do need to plan for supporting his travel. It's one of our major areas of expense, but a very important one, but the second thing that I want us to all think about very pragmatically is I can't, I am not paid for any of the work I do on the IGF USA coordination. And I am very committed to interacting responsibly with all of you, but I want it to be very light weight, and very effective and focused for all of us.
So between now and tomorrow maybe because Chris Anna will be back tomorrow, maybe we should be thinking about what is the minimal but critical kind of interaction we want to have. The lit serve we have right now, I'm not sure that's serving everybody. So maybe one conversation we could have as a recommendation is what will work for us? And do we want to look ahead to make sure we plan time for a specific interaction in conjunction with the regular consultations, not in competition, because many of you are MAG members, but whether it's, you know, a side bar hour or something to think about that between now and tomorrow.
>> MODERATOR: We have two, three minutes to take one or two more. Okay. So Marilyn, I think you are the star of the day! Any other issues floating that needs to come out? Any other issues that need to come out? Recommendations? Challenges? Best practices? Going, going, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one and zero. Please do not forget that tomorrow you get out of your bus at 9:00 and you come straight to this room for the debriefing. Thanks.
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