IGF
Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group / Afternoon session
22 May 2013
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Open Consultations of the IGF, in Geneva. 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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>>ASHWIN SASONKO: Ladies and Gentlemen, I think it's 2:35 now. We can continue our discussions. First of all, I would like to thank the EBU for inviting us for the nice lunch upstairs. So it should be bad time for us to continue the meeting because all our stomach are full. Hopefully it doesn't affect us, of course, because we will continue our discussions on the IGF program. And hopefully we can finalize a summary of the program we should follow in Bali. So I would like to pass it to Markus -- my friend Markus to continue the previous discussion before lunch.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Chair. We have had, I think, a good discussion on the regional track and before lunch there were some people who would have liked to take the floor and now I -- I think it was Matthew was one of them, correct? And Martin. Mark. Okay. And Yuliya, yes. And can I also ask you to be so kind to keep it as short as possible. Thank you.
>>MATTHEW SPEARS: Would you like me to proceed, Markus? Okay. Thank you. I'm not quite sure where we left our discussion before lunch. It seems like an age ago, and thank you for the lunch. But certainly from my perspective it would be interesting for, I believe, for the IGF to have a robust discussion and input from the regional IGFs and national IGFs on some of the common challenges that they may be facing and indeed differences with regards to Internet Governance. It would be incredibly useful, I believe, to have also some discussion of what best practices they may have put in place to address those challenges. And therefore, it might be useful to have a half day or a day in which representatives of those regional IGFs or national IGFs come together and talk about their common challenges and what they've done to address those challenges and then that that discussion in some summary format be taken forward to a main session or the taking stock session so we can all benefit from learnings at regional and national levels.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Mark.
>>MARK CARVELL: Thank you. Good afternoon. Just briefly, first of all, to second your proposal for a pre-IGF event for the national and regional IGFs but just need to be mindful of what else is going to be happening that day. There's the ministerial high-level event and maybe other sessions. So if it is a busy day, you might want to consider an alternative. And maybe that's an open forum during the main part of the IGF itself. A suggestion that perhaps you invite a paper to be submitted from the coordinators for the national and regional IGFs setting out objectives, priorities, key facts, and then from the collation of those papers you could pull out some common threads, variations, different approaches, differing priorities, and that then could stimulate -- you know, you could formulate questions that could then stimulate discussion, why are there variances in the approaches or the value of shared approaches.
So rather than simply having each report, you know, you actually can formulate some questions to create a proper dialogue to sustain a 90-minute session. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Yuliya.
>>YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you, Markus. I would like -- I think we -- I don't know how this will fall in our discussion that we had before lunch but still I wanted to share an idea that I think the global IGF should be a platform that will encourage national and regional initiatives to share their results of these regional and national initiatives and they can create projects that came out from -- at the regional and national level from the discussions that took place. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I think with that we close the list. Martin, you were -- not adding other people to the list. Martin. Have you asked for the floor? No? Okay. In that case, we close the list of the speakers we had before lunch.
Now, this discussion will be carried on tomorrow morning. There's a group, including Marilyn and Paul Wilson, facilitated by those two and they will meet at quarter to 9:00 tomorrow morning, and everybody interested to discuss this issue is cordially invited to join them. Quarter to 9:00 tomorrow morning, presumably in this room, unless we can make another room available, but I think it will be possible to meet here in this room.
One -- I think the -- also discussing -- yes, Paul would like to --
>>PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Markus. I was just wanting to suggest that we clarify the mailing list that exists so that there might -- there might be a few messages to exchange between now and tomorrow morning. So anyone who's going to come along tomorrow morning could make sure they're on that list. And so I'm not myself even sure what list we're really using as an official -- so there is one, right?
>> I'll send it --
>>PAUL WILSON: Send it to the MAG? Okay, thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: But just to summarize the discussion we have had and also listening in formal talks, there seems the idea that we have the interregional -- I mean, we always had the interregional dialogue and I think it has been fairly successful so far and it's not so that also the Secretariat has not been in touch with the various organizers of the national and regional meetings. But, you know, we all said there's room for improvement. And mainly also on how to bring the findings into the main IGF. And one possible way that obviously would have also have to ask the regional and national organizers whether they would agree to that would be to have a meeting on the pre-event day. Yes, we are aware there will be other competing meetings, but there will be less competition. There definitely are less other meetings. Last year we had a -- I think a very good meeting on enhanced cooperation, it was an all-day meeting. It was extremely well-attended, and I think it worked well. And it gives a nice space where you have less distraction from other meetings.
Normally there's a GIGAnet meeting, that's a tradition on the first day and there will be the ministerial, but there is relatively limited overlap, I think, between these meetings. We don't know yet who else will ask for slots and presumably there will be other people but that could be one option. But the interregional dialogue takes place on the Monday, the day of the pre-events, and that would allow also the regional and national organizers to discuss among themselves what they can actually bring into the substantive discussions of the meeting. So they would have a common platform to decide how they want to interact with the main meeting. That would not exclude the possibility for the national and regional IGF meetings to have separate slots. But looking at that, some of them are actually not workshops in the sense we use the term, that is, looking at the theme from different perspectives. They're usually more presentational, saying what they have done and what they have achieved. And there's merit in having that, but then I think they should be more looked at like open forums, and also we could consider maybe giving them -- discuss giving them shorter slots. We are not forced to give 90-minute slots to everyone who asks for a slot. We discussed the flash concept EuroDIG uses. These are, I think, half hour slots. We could give one hour slots. Half hour is a bit short maybe if you want to present a meeting, but I think we can be flexible there. And I think we should encourage -- we have to do as much as possible to include them, I think, into the program. So with that, I would like to close discussion, for the time being, of the -- of this issue. I think it is important, and that we look forward to hearing from Marilyn and Paul tomorrow morning when they have the other meeting and also you have feedback on mailing lists from them directly from the regional organizers.
I wonder if I could ask Theresa to report back on your breakout meeting on enhanced cooperation.
>>THERESA SWINEHART: Sure. So -- sorry, I was a bit caught offguard so let me just try that. So we had a meeting, and my apologies for the fact that it ran over and it set our schedule off a little bit. We covered a couple of things, an administrative overview, what's been done so far, our objectives, and then had a good discussion on what we thought we might want to strive towards in light of the IGF meeting. Just on administrative overview, those who are interested in being on the working group and participating in this should please indicate their interest to the Secretariat. It's open to MAG and non-MAG members. So let's make that -- just so that everybody is aware of that. We will set up a listserv and do as much work as possible over the listserv, perhaps a teleconference call, and we're going to take a look at some other forms of engaging.
So far what we've done is begun the compilation of some resource materials. It was highlighted in the discussion also to look at resource materials and other documents that have focused on multistakeholder engagement also in the context of development. And so we'll be looking at compiling that. But if anybody has anything that's very helpful.
On the objectives, we spent some time on trying to look at what would be a good deliverable leading into the IGF in contribution towards the dialogue that will happen on these two topic areas at the IGF. Mark from the U.K. had outlined, I think, a good approach that we'll seek to strive for which would be creating a draft single document with a digest of materials that covers a wide range of areas including the materials used as something for us to strive for. We hope to get some of the -- the majority of the work done by the end of June. So the draft materials can also be used at some of the national and regional dialogues and to finalize the draft materials that would go into the discussions at the IGF itself. So that covers the update on this. And again, anybody who's interested, please let the Secretariat know.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you for this. Are there any comments on progress of this group? If not -- and sorry for putting you on the spot without warning. I also would be interested, we had actually created a capacity building track and I know there have been some very good discussions. I can't remember who was the facilitator of that track. I do know that Vlada was clearly involved. It would also be interesting in hearing back from that group on how they see to -- how they integrate this track into the program. I think capacity building is something that is important and the -- in my modest opinion, the IGF has actually done quite a lot of capacity building and contributed to capacity building at all levels. How we can enhance I think would be good to know from this group. So I hope that we can find a slot where we hear back from this group.
But we have to -- originally we said we had hoped to break into groups to assess the workshops, but the general feeling was it's better to stay in a plenary mode and look at the overall program. But workshops and the rest of the program is clearly closely linked and as many said, the energy of the IGF to a large extent is in the workshops and the question is how best to integrate the workshops and find a good way to help participants to navigate their way around.
When we look at the potential program, we have four days of IGF. The first day is the pre-events. We've already mentioned that. Then on the Tuesday there is one half day is more or less given and that's the opening -- yes, please.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Just to be sure that we are on the same page, could you specifically say who -- what would be the first day, what date? Is it 27 of October or --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Sorry, I don't even have the calendar in front of me.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: 22nd or --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: The day before the opening is --
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: The day before is 22nd -- day before is 21st.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: 21st of October.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: So when we are talking about pre-conference events it's 21st.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes, correct. Actually when we're talking about calendar issues, I just wonder, I think last few years there were no MAG meetings during the IGF and we have also found it is very difficult to hold MAG meetings during the event because everybody is running around. But I just wonder whether it might be possible to have a meeting on the Sunday preceding the pre-event. That would be -- I mean Sunday afternoon or so, just arrive maybe a day earlier and have a MAG meeting on Sunday afternoon, 20th of October. Just flagging this possibility. If I see a general uproar against it, I withdraw it immediately. Yes, Raul.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: That's too complicated for the -- those of us that are traveling from far away because it means that we will have to depart from probably Friday or even on Thursday in order to be on time for having meetings on Sunday.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. If it's not possible, then it's not possible. And -- but Monday is already the day of the pre-events, which may not be that easy for MAG members as they may be involved in many of these events. But we have to find one way or another, I think, of maximizing our presence while we are there. Mervi, please.
>>MERVI KULTAMAA: Thank you, Markus. We had an ad hoc MAG meeting in Baku towards the end of the week just for an hour or two and I thought it was very useful so we could share experiences from how Baku went already there at place. And I don't know, I least I can spare one hour or two from the schedule towards the end of the week to discuss.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Yes, I think we will have to see how we find a slot. But my view it will be good to have a meeting right at the beginning and then yes, also it makes sense something towards the end. Ayesha, you would like --
>>AYESHA HASSAN: Maybe one idea to just keep on the list would be an hour of the lunchtime on Monday so that we're not pulling people out of any of the substantive events. An hour-long meeting at the beginning of the week over lunch could be fine. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. We'll factor that in. Thank you. Well, once again, back to the schedule. Then on the 22nd will be the official opening. That will be either in the morning or in the afternoon. I have found the formula to have the opening in the afternoon rather to be relatively relaxing. If you have it in the morning when all the important people arrive it can be quite stressful and the afternoon gives you more time to sort yourself out. But we leave that to the Secretariat and our hosts to sort it out. But one half day is blocked. And the last half day, Friday afternoon, is also blocked for the closing session. So that gives us basically one, two, three, four, five, six 3-hour slots in the main room where we have interpretation and the six 3-hour slots can be divided into 90-minute slots so we would have maximum of 12 90-minute slots. And I call them slots deliberately and not main sessions because we can do with these slots what we want. What is common to them is we have interpretation in all six languages of the U.N. And also, the room is much bigger, of course. But one of the challenges we have found actually is filling the room. The challenge is to make these slots attractive enough to fill them with interested participants.
One idea I think that found much favor was having the round table format of similar workshops. This could be one option worth considering. And we have -- we have lots of workshops and we have clear clusters of related themes. I think that could make for interesting interaction. We had a lengthy and productive discussion yesterday on picking up where we left last week in WTPF, that is on discussing the role of governments and multistakeholder cooperation. This is a very strong theme in the workshops and that would definitely be a logical main session. But again, we don't have to have a three-hour session. We could have a 90-minute session at the beginning of the week introducing the theme and having a 90-minute session towards the end of the week wrapping up the theme because there will have been many workshops on this issue. So -- and we decided again to recall in Paris that we would try to be (indiscernible). One proposal I was found -- I also thought found a lot of support was to have the open forum format where you have an open microphone and where people could discuss whatever they wanted to discuss. And that could be related to the themes we had traditionally used. That is from access to diversity to critical Internet resources. We could pre-structure it a bit but without a panel, just have a very open discussion on that.
I also sense there is a clear preference for having open discussions rather panel sessions, and I think there was some criticism of having too many panelists and certainly having too many well-known faces.
So with that, I would like to open the floor for brilliant suggestions so that we give the Secretariat food to work out the program paper. Chris and then Zahid.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Thanks, Markus, just to speak strongly in favor of your suggestion that we have an open session, an open forum, at which we can basically have any topic we like, and I think it should be made clear to everybody that we can have any topic we like but say to people some of the areas we will be covering are what we -- what we refer to as I think our regional themes. So I just wanted to speak in favor of that. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And it wasn't my suggestion. I was listening to what came from the floor yesterday and it was a suggestion --
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: I'd like to speak in favor of whoever's suggestion it was.
[ Laughter ]
Susan's suggestion.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: It was Susan. Zahid.
>>ZAHID JAMIL: Is it possible -- can we discuss themes, for instance, right now at this stage? Is it appropriate to go into that? I just wanted to check on what sort of themes and -- is it open?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: I was thinking of having more of a higher level discussion.
>>ZAHID JAMIL: I'll wait then for later. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yuliya first and then Mark.
>>YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you. I wanted also to go on the subject of a number of speakers. I don't know if it's appropriate now, but just wanted to support you, what you said, that we need to try to have a limited number of speakers. And when I was making the assessment actually I realized that the number of workshops, still they were proposing something like ten speakers. So from my point of view we should, you know, advise this -- these organizations to reduce the number of speakers obviously. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I think right at the beginning we said a workshop should never have more than four or six speakers and that obviously got soft of into oblivion. Susan and Raul -- yes. Well, Susan and then Raul and Mark. Yes, yes.
>>SUSAN CHALMERS: Thanks, Markus. I just -- yeah, with respect to the open forum idea, just to kind of iterate what I was saying the other day, I thought it would be nice if in the closing session it could use -- be used not only to serve as a platform for attendees to talk about subjects of interest to them but also kind of like the two-minute -- I really liked the two-minute ICANN open forum where you do have a constrained time limit. I think that's fun. It makes it exciting. And then they could also produce suggestions to the MAG while we are there to hear them in person. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Raul.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Yes, I think that's -- the format of the open discussion is very good. But I think that's a good compromise is to have a list of resource people. But it has -- this selection of resource people has been a bit disorganized in the last few years. So I think that's one thing that we can do. It would be good for open -- for encouraging more participation would be to try to promote through the regional and national IGFs and also through the different stakeholder groups to put forward resource names related to each of the main themes so we can provide those names to them, moderators of each session, so they know the people that will be there and they can pick up a few of them for promoting or motivating participation from people from all the regions, from different perspectives. I think that it could be good, without having (indiscernible) I agree very much that we should not have a large number of speakers.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Mark.
>>MARK CARVELL: Yes, thanks. I support the idea of an open forum, open mic session, time-limited ICANN style. That's good. I just wondered what the mechanics of that is for picking up points for discussion? I mean, you'll have a good moderator to handle it, I guess, but no panel. You haven't got immediate sort of opportunity for reflecting on what's just been said at the mic. So some sort of thinking about the management of the dialogue, if you like, generated by the open mic contributions. Just think about that a bit more maybe.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I think this was also mentioned yesterday, that we had actually had sessions without panels in the past and then used it as a format with asking people to write down their questions in advance and then there were assistant moderators grouping the questions and passing them on. But Chris was experienced in --
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: So thank you, Markus. And Mark, that's a really good question. I think one way that we've done it in the past, Markus is right, we've had questions in advance. But another way to do it, which we've also done, we've used quite well in a number of sessions, has been you pretty much -- I mean, there are off-the-wall topics that no one imagines are going to come up, but you've also got a list of topics that you're fairly sure will come up. And it's just a question of knowing the people in the room who are definitely going to be there, that you can go to to respond to a comment that's made. And that's part of the way of running that stuff with a -- the facilitator and moderator. In a room of that size and with a crowd of the size that's possible to have, you'd probably need to have two people running the session and a couple of people helping, as Markus has suggested. But it can be spontaneous as long as you know you have people in the room that can help you answer the questions. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: And obviously it does need a skillful moderator who is also familiar with the subject area. And I think we have experimented in the past with professional moderators, journalists, that worked fine up to a point and we came then back to using MAG members. Chris was one of them. And there was a -- Chris and Jeanette were a tandem, we had the Civil Society and somebody from the technical community, and they worked extremely well together. So that definitely can be an option. Tero, please.
>>TERO MUSTALA: Thanks, Markus. One possibility which came to my mind regarding this open mic would be to collect the feedback from the audience with that kind of concept, either on the last day or, you know, at last possible moment in the program where we have the big room available. Or then possibly, just some idea, have a half an hour session every day late in the afternoon to collect the feedback from the day, if that's possible.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: I sense there might be two different concepts of the open forum, one might be more inward looking and one on the IGF. We have done that in the past. The taking stock session was actually what worked; how did it work; what did you like; what did you not like? It proves extremely useful. You get feedback, and there's merit in having that. The other one would be in having an open forum to discuss the very broad agenda and more substantive issues. And I think there is merit in both. And I could also imagine why don't we have two of those sessions? It's the most democratic way of having an open dialogue by allowing everybody who wants to give his or her opinion to take the mic. So Izumi.
>>IZUMI AIZU: Thank you, Chair. I also support the open forum. Whether the first kind or second kind is another question. But, if you remember, I mentioned some cultural diversity thing of the Asia Pacific people or non-English speakers especially. So my suggestion is to, one, is to give a sort of sheet of paper for everyone. Collect them. And maybe organize that or comprehend these to put into the context. And also sometimes we may need some extra encouragement. Some very smart people are shy or just listening. Especially in Japan or China or Indonesia. Some really smart people don't speak up like me. So some kind of moderation or help in the staff might -- or create that kind of culture or chemistry, atmosphere, breaking the ice, stuff like that may work. I will work with you. Some colleague in the Asia Pacific regional IGF may, I believe, may be very much will to help that kind. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. That's a point well-taken. There are cultural differences. And we have to take those into account. But, as Chris pointed out, we have done so in the past and with distributing little pieces of paper that people can write down their question. That actually helps. We can also prenotify people, approach them beforehand. Look, we would like to call on you to answer a question, if you know they are knowledgeable. And they may not put up their hand or go to the mic themselves. But, if we approach them, they may be happy to talk. Bill and Quasi. Bill, first.
>>BILL DRAKE: Mark referred to the open forum session as being an ICANN-style open forum. Of course, you know that in ICANN meetings, the purpose of the open forum is for everybody to get up and beat up on the board and staff. So, if we -- my question, first question are we going to do that with you guys? I don't think that should be the focus. I think it should be outwardly focused and not so much the IGF and how it's working. I think we can do it on substantive issues and do it with two moderators who are drawn from the community who have expertise. In the past it was not just -- Chris and Jeanette was one combination. We also had Janis and Anriette did one in Sharm, if I remember. I felt that worked well both times. Another dimension we could do with this, I suggested it yesterday, about sort of preplanting some broad structuring questions. You could even -- you could crowd source it a bit. You could ask people to comment via the Web site, say we're going to do a session about topic X, enhanced cooperation, and invite suggestions from whomever as to questions we might take up. And people could enter those. And then the moderators would look through those and sort of maybe announce in advance four or five main topical questions that would structure the flow of the hour and a half. And people would come somewhat prepared knowing kind of the boundaries of what we're going to be doing. And that might help also with folks who have more trouble spontaneously communicating if they know in advance there would be a discussion about dimension X of enhanced cooperation, they could prepare something in their mind and come and see it.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: I think I would include you in the bashing out. I think MAG would be part of it. Honestly, I think there would be merit in having this kind of feedback session. What works. We used to do that. Right in the beginning the taking stock was that. What should we improve on? What not? A lot of useful suggestions came out of that. The memory is still fresh. The experience is still there. People are still spontaneous on that. And it doesn't need to end up in bashing up session but really give their comments and criticisms, suggestions that can be helpful. Qusai?
>>QUASI AL SHATTI: Thank you, Mr. Chair. If we're going to have open forums, we need to show that we have enough audience there or majority of audience participating. In the Baku meeting, the main session at the point did not have 40 to 45 attendees. The others were distributed with the workshops. So I would say if we would have open forums regarding the structure, either we have them without workshops in parallel or we have them with reduced number of workshops or we do the open forums in one day and we do the workshop on different days. This is to ensure that we have enough audience, enough participation and people are in the room to exchange views.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I see Mervi, Chris, and Jeff. Mervi.
>>MERVI KULTAMAA: Formulate the taking stock and the way forward session around a good moderator or two who would somehow summarize what happened in this year's IGF and give, perhaps, two minute slots for open mic around what have you learned this week and -- and with the understanding that the comments would be somehow documented for later use. And also I wouldn't mind hearing about how people would like to improve the IGF. That would be helpful as well. Of course, this doesn't prevent from having open sessions on other substantive issues.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Chris.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Thank you. If we're going to have an open forum, then it can be open to cover everything with guidance, right? So you don't have to have a separate session to do with feedback. You can make feedback on the IGF one of the preprovisioned topics that is going to be covered on open forum.
So, basically, the way these things work is that the more -- you've got -- the more topics you've got that you can throw into the room, in case, you know, as Quasi said or someone said there weren't that many people in the room. And the more you've got to throw into the room the more likely you are to generate debate and discussion. So I'd encourage the thought of having one session at whatever time is sensible that deals with all of these things -- the pillars that we've talked about, feedback on the IGF and so on and so forth and do it all in one go. Take the notes as suggested. And start having a conversation in that session about all of those things.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Jeff.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: A couple thoughts. I agree with Mervi. I think, if we're going to have a taking stock or a feedback kind of session -- and I'm speaking specifically more about the comments on the IGF process itself or the reaction to the meeting, I do think it's important to have some process for documenting those in order to make it a meaningful process. I think, in other words, just having a session and then not having those points captured, I think we lose the benefit of doing it.
To Chris's point I was thinking there might actually be enough there on a taking stock to just do that its own session. Especially given that we have the IGF improvements and enhanced cooperation, that might be a way to integrate it. However, we could just set aside a certain amount of time, if you're having an open forum where ICANN does on we're going to have an hour on this set of topics or certain time set. But it seems to me there's so much happening kind of outside the IGF right now that we would want to talk about that it's valuable to have a taking stock session that includes this broader perspective as well. I would just note I think that is a preferable way to the closing session panel I was part of last year, which I thought kind of ended on a low energy note. And I think this could be a much more interactive good way to close the entire IGF as well
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Fiona.
>>FIONA ALEXANDER: I just wanted to voice my support for the concept of this open forum to get people in the room to engage but would offer maybe a bit of a twist. There seems to be having momentum on the taking stock, get input on the IGF itself and the structure. But you could also have an open forum at the beginning and get input over what people want to talk about at the workshops and the main session. That might be a substantive what are you looking to learn this week or what are you looking to talk about? So you could do it in both cases as well.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: That could actually be an option should we think -- thinking aloud, should we have the opening ceremony and opening session in the afternoon of the first day. We could actually start the morning with this kind of open forum, which would be a kind of agenda setting forum, so to speak. You know, what are the expectations? What would I like to see discussed? For me this issue is really important, so on and so on. And then, right at the end, the taking stock open forum. Now whether this session would need to be three hours or 90 minutes can be discussed. But I think that might work.
Just to also separate them, looking at broader issues. I clearly share the view of those, I think there is value in having an immediate taking stock from participants when the experience, the frustrations may be -- and everything is still fresh, but also, maybe, hopefully, the enthusiasm so that we get immediate feedback. More thoughts on this? Yes, Paul?
>>PAUL WILSON: I'm not entirely clear on what taking stock is all about or what's the -- what's really the intended point, the purpose. I may be the only one here. But have a session to talk about what we've been talking about in the last week in very general terms seems it might not be a very directed process and it might not produce as much as it could.
One of the things we've spoken about many times when we've been asked to consider is are the outcomes of the meeting and outputs of the meeting. And, to me, that implies some sort of synthesis to be done by someone that condenses the proceedings, the week into something that's reportable and that can be discussed. I don't know if taking stock is supposed to produce a sort of synthesis by consensus of some kind or whether -- whether it is or not whether we could look at synthesis as the purpose of the -- of this session more specifically. The problem with synthesis, though, I think is it's not an objective process. If you tried to make it objective, it would turn into a negotiating session, I think. But synthesis can be a subjective process. And we could certainly invite syntheses to be provided by multiple competing syntheses of the event to be provided and recorded. But, again, only if that's the point of taking stock.
There's some random thoughts, if you like. But, back to the original point, I'm still not entirely clear on what taking stock is supposed to achieve. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Historically, I think it was, basically, allowing people to say what they liked, what they did not like, what worked well in their view and what did not and what should be improved. And at the beginning it proved very helpful indeed. But maybe because the IGF became also more mature and more routine, there was also maybe less need to do that. I don't know. But, again, if we experiment a little bit more, then there may be need, maybe also a little bit more need to do -- to give actually a feedback was it good what we did. But you introduced another idea. And that is any substantive discussion on synthesis, which is another, I think, extremely valuable comment. But I would like to recall that, actually, the secretariat in every meeting was usually very quick at producing a summary record but maybe did not get enough attention or was not valued for what it's worth. It was usually gave her a fairly comprehensive description of the main point that had been discussed. But maybe we can also think about how to enhance this process. And, as one of the criticisms was there's no takeaway, some concrete sort of output, maybe people like to have a piece of paper in their hand when they go home. But this is yet another idea. Mark?
>>MARK CARVELL: Thanks. Just on an early open forum session. I'm a bit hesitant about that, because -- well, first of all, time is precious, you know, for maximizing the opportunity for the program of workshops to proceed and the pressure on time for the main sessions as well. Firstly.
And, secondly, we've had this open consultation preparatory process leading up to the IGF. And isn't that providing one of the principles of opportunities for expectations to be realized in -- or to be expressed and then realized in the expert programming that the MAG is undertaking with the secretariat. So I just am a bit hesitant.
And, thirdly, you may get some sort of discordant views about the program early in the IGF, which may be a bit uncomfortable. I don't know. I'm just -- as I say, hesitant on those 3 -- for those three reasons. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Desiree.
>>DESIREE ZACHARIAH: Thank you, Markus. Yeah, I would also agree with my colleague Mark and his comments. I think, although IGF really needs more innovation and new ideas at every IGF, to put it out on the first day without providing certain bullets and agenda what points are to be discussed and is it outward looking or inward looking, some kind of orientation for people walking into the room, I'd be also a little bit unlikely to really support that process. I think it's much better if it's in the middle of the week or before the taking off process. So that's my comment.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Okay. I think we have exhausted this particular -- no, they have not. Veronica, yes, please.
>>VERONICA CRETU: Thank you, Markus. Very brief. I think that this kind of open forum is important not only at the very beginning of the event but during the event but during each and every single day of the event. Talking about innovating with IGF, last night I spent some time putting down some ideas. And being a participant and at the same time an organizer of different events, I came up to some kind of conclusions and accumulated feedback from participants.
I think it's important to set the scene for each and every single day within an event. So, if we have a platform that allows people to get together for 30 minutes maximum in a single space where they hear about what is going to happen during that particular day, what sessions are there, what are the important announcements, like housekeeping things, I think this is something that is really good orientation for the participants, especially the newcomers.
I also believe at the end of the day, we're talking about feedback. Each and every single day has a chance to be improved. And this can be done if feedback is accumulated on a regular basis, which means that you can accumulate feedback at the end of the workshops. You can accumulate feedback at the end of the day. And we, as MAG, can sit together and look at how we can -- what are the small changes we can make into the next day agenda. Be it technical, be it conceptual, there is always space for improvement. Why wait until the very end of the event and miss this opportunity to improve little by little as we move ahead? So, in line with this, a 30 minutes kind of wrap up session at the end of the day, at the end of each day, I find it extremely important. So these are just some proposals, some ideas. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I was actually coming to that. And I was going to ask you -- I read your paper. Thank you very much for putting the hard work in the evening.
I think it also ties up with what Tero suggested that the end of day having a feedback, I think you made a similar suggestion. Question is, well, it would be an experiment. Will it work? Will people actually go at the end of the day to the session? In a way, I think the orientation session would be indeed very useful as it would allow the secretariat to give some housekeeping information. Maybe this workshop has been cancelled or whatever. So you can go there and you gather the information in the morning.
I'm not sure whether the advertisement of workshops would work. You say one minute each in theory. But then people, once they have the microphone, they keep it. Yes, it does need some discipline. But it also takes time giving the floor from one to the other. I would see that more as a Secretariat-led session guiding participants through the program of the day, this is happening. Also working out sort of the various tracks. For those of you who are interested in this issue, go to workshop so and so and so and so in that room. And this is definitely something worth exploring. Right at the beginning we had a sort of reporting back session from the previous day, but that fizzled out. People didn't come any more. And also I think most workshop organizers were just too long in reporting -- I mean, we wanted to give them the opportunity to do it. It has had the advantage of giving a flavor of what happened in all the U.N. languages because it was in the main room with interpretation. And then to have gathered at the end of the day, yes, will people still have the energy to go to -- but we could try it. I don't know.
Are there other opinions on that? On the one hand, an orientation session every morning 30 minutes before the parallel streams start and in the evening a 30-minute taking stock session every day. Tero?
>>TERO MUSALA: Just continuing. I'm not sure whether it really makes sense. It's hard to say. At least I think that, if there is some kind of 30-minute feedback of the day, there has to be people listening to the feedback. So it may be kind of 30 minute MAG bashing. I'm sure, if the room is empty, so you talk. But there is nobody listening, it doesn't work.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Ayesha.
>>AYESHA HASSAN: Thank you. Ayesha Hassan. I get the feeling that, at some point in the discussion, we're trying to take new ways to do something and say we need to do it every day or every morning or every evening or every something. Maybe it would be good to just try a few different experiments this time. So perhaps we could have an orientation session two mornings or three mornings and have a feedback session for 30 minutes or whatever it might take. I would suggest doing one in an afternoon first hour of the afternoon slot and another at the end of the day.
I think what we can do to innovate this year is sort of not be stuck in the slots that we have and really use them creatively. And then we can have interesting feedback on, well, maybe the afternoon slot nobody is going to come because they just extend their lunch. Or maybe more people come there because they want to end their day early. That kind of thing. If we give different opportunities, we'll be able to get more feedback.
Likewise, as a general point, in thinking about coming to this discussion, my sense is that not every topic is suitable for any particular format. Not every topic needs two hours or 90 minutes. Each one of them we need to look at it and find something interesting to do with it this time in order to have a new set of experiments to go forward. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Susan.
>>SUSAN CHALMERS: Thank you. I just wanted to say that I think that's a great idea that Ayesha just expressed. I think that -- and this is something that I had mentioned in -- during the Paris consultations that I think it's okay to have a willingness to experiment and see if some things don't necessarily work and to learn from that. And so also, just with respect to what Fiona has suggester, I do think it would be a very welcoming and positive way to begin the IGF to encourage the people in attendance to share their thoughts before the workshops take place and to use that -- the closing opening forum, if we're going to call it that, as a session for people also to -- as I had mentioned before, share their thoughts on how the IGF could be improved and maybe even get their comments or feedback on those day-to-day different opportunities for taking stock. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Subi.
>>SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Markus. Subi Chaturvedi. The IGF in Baku last year was really my first experience. But there were certain things which were really helpful. And for someone who can't be there on all the days and they have restrictions or constraints a morning read-out session of about half an hour as to what happened the previous day is very helpful. It helps you ingrate with the events and different processes that have unfolded and also a heads up of this is what is on line. The secretariat is efficient, and they do that beautifully. That is of great value and input.
In the evening, the general feeling was there are receptions and dinners and people have places to me. Many people articulated there will be people in the room. That's all that I have to say. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. That was very helpful. Vlada.
>>VLADIMIR RADUNOVIC: Yeah, just support of the idea of experimenting, of course. I think these short sessions, whenever we put them, in the morning or evening, half an hour session, the attendance depends on how interesting they're going to be. I think we can think of ways -- as long as we can produce conflict of opinions, bashing to some extent and maybe a debate type on certain topics, people will be there. So we just need to find an interesting way to present it to make it interactive for people and they'll be there for half an hour.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Well, there seems to be different opinions. Some people seem to think they'll be tired in the evening. But why don't we do that? We're going to play around a bit, as Ayesha suggested, have one session, maybe at the end of the day, have one maybe after lunch. And then we see which one -- people do vote with their feet. Yes, Vlada.
>>VLADIMIR RADUNOVIC: Give one of these sessions to Veronica to organize. I'll bet they'll be there.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: We can do that. We'll ask Veronica to do the evening challenge. That will be her challenge, and we'll see. The morning session, I think, as Subi said, that would be more for newbies or so. That would not necessarily take to place in the main room. I don't think huge crowds would turn up to that sort of session. However, it might provide value especially for newcomers just to, you know, this is happening today. And that clearly can be led by the Secretariat just provide the information of what's happening today.
As we have started with the orientation session right at the beginning, I think that's also -- I think is appreciated by newcomers and that was also essentially led by the Secretariat with the help, or farmed out to some MAG members with the help and assistance. So we will maintain these formats. But we can experiment with the 30-minute sessions, maybe have one at the end of the second day and have one at the -- early afternoon of the third day. Then we'll see what works, and I take up the offer. We'll have Veronica to organize the evening sessions. Okay.
We have also to find -- and I think the point is also well-taken that we clearly need to adapt the format to the content. But, again, I think one of the -- we'll have the discussion on what should be the content of the sessions. And I think the workshops provided an extremely good input to that. But we did not have an agreement whether we should move away from the themes we had used up to now or whether we should take a step further and move towards new themes.
But, again, point was also made that it's not necessarily a dichotomy between the old themes and what's in the workshops. In the past the secretariat had tried to put the workshops under the headings of the themes we had traditionally used. That is openness, access, diversity, security, privacy, critical Internet resources. But it wasn't always that clear, also development. And this time the Secretariat used the themes we had identified at the Paris meeting as headings. And we corresponded fairly well to the workshop proposals we received.
I don't know, Chengetai, whether you'd like to introduce or talk a bit about the list you have sent out to the MAG. You know how many workshops we have under each proposals? But, again, I think we have to be mindful. We did say we're not going to look at the workshops in detail now. It's just, basically, at the high level. We have received -- I forgot how many you put down. 156 proposals. We have to -- and there will be 10 Dynamic Coalitions, in addition 10 open forums. That would bring the total to 177. And that clearly is -- would be an overrich menu. In terms of parallel tracks, that would be what? Easily 12 tracks, yeah. We haven't done the mathematics, but --
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Basically, we've calculated that there will be 12 slots per track. So, if we want -- it's up to you to decide how many tracks we want. If we want 6, that will be 72. Just carry on and add 12 per track. But then we also have to be take into consideration -- I see the Indonesians frowning at me a little bit because the number of tracks, of course, increases the expenses for them.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Chris.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Thank you, Markus. So this is -- we always get back -- we always find ourselves at this point at this MAG meeting every year and we always have a long and extremely exciting and fruitful discussion and end up doing nothing. We tend to end up just saying it doesn't matter, we'll just stuff in as many workshops as we possibly can. And I would really like to put in a plea for not doing that. It has a series of consequential effects.
One of the reasons why attendance at the main sessions has dropped and been dropping is because of the number of clashing events. I recall a circumstance two years ago, I think, where we were severely hampered in one of our main sessions because a number of the people that we would have normally called upon to engage in vigorous debate were elsewhere at workshops and that makes life very difficult. Now, I accept completely that we cannot have -- streamline where we have things not clashing, I get that. But I really do think that we should make an effort to find a sensible number of workshops and do the work to cut the numbers down, rather than simply take the easy option which is to just accept them all. I don't -- I would be very interested in hearing from our hosts as to what they think is an ideal number. They may not be prepared to say but it would be very useful information if they could tell us what they think is an idea number.
I also make -- sorry, one other final point. I don't know whether the venue -- how many rooms the venue has and so on, whether it would even be feasible to have that number of workshops, but again, is it a question of -- if it's a question of making rooms with very thin walls that you can't lean against and with that stuff I would encourage we don't do that either. Thank you.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: From what I've seen the place is big enough. But then the discussion has been before these set of meetings is to reduce the number of workshops. So the question is, are we going to stick to that or are we going to be as open and as inclusive as possible.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Subi.
>>SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Markus. Subi Chaturvedi. I know you mentioned we're not going to get into details, but I do have a question. We've rated these workshops and we did have a long discussion yesterday morning about bringing in new voices. The ratings were done before this discussion. A lot of the discussions that flow in from the WTPF and WSIS, they were about engaging new governments, developing countries into conversations and making them a part of the Internet Governance dialogue at the IGF. I've been an academician and grading and grading is something we do for a living, not just something we do over the weekend. But I do worry about certain things, and I'm just going to take a minute to flag them.
If you're rating someone who's a bright economic student but is -- his first language is not English, they're not going to do well. If they've also been writing the same exam for the last four years, they're likely to do better than the others. There are proposals from developing countries which are falling between the cracks. So when we look at evaluation, I don't know how that's going to happen. Thematically when we organize, and I know we're all here to present our opinions in our personal capacity, but we also represent stakeholders and communities. But I just don't speak for India, but Argentina, Pakistan, China. A lot of these are proposals that are first-time proposals. They're also governments proposing sessions and some of them have not mentioned names of panelists. So I don't know what is the criteria we're going to use for selection or elimination. Not that they did not have panelists but honesty they had conversations. And I met with them before I left for my session here in Geneva. They did not name panelists because they didn't have confirmations. So I just want to flag these issues that when we go into deliberations, if we can just be mindful of this status at some point. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Yes, this is to a large extent an iteration of a discussion we had yesterday. But the -- in Paris we actually said reaching out, going for new faces would be important. So that was in a way part of the remit of the rating. But I take it, it doesn't translate into result the rating. Ayesha and then Zahid.
>>AYESHA HASSAN: Thank you. Thank you, Markus. Two points. Yesterday I think myself and several others voiced the fact that we shouldn't do an arbitrary elimination of workshops. So we now have -- in the discussion several types of filtering opportunities have come out. Should we -- so one thing I'm thinking is, if we look at the math and say the assessments that got below X number, how many of them are there and if we took them out and looked at them carefully for a qualitative filter, that may be one systematic way to apply what has come out from the consultation yesterday which is, please don't just arbitrarily throw them out. And that would be part of the work that the MAG members and the groups that would work tomorrow could do, is really look at them and say, does it fall into the comments that Subi has just made. I know other people have come up to me and explained that they had this many panelists or not that many panelists because they were trying to have a more interactive format and they don't know what their score is but they would like to be able to explain that. There are so many different elements. But I think if we sort of say to ourselves, those that got over X number as a rating they look like strong candidates. What's that number. And we look at the other bucket and do a really qualitative filtering on them by topic area. That might help us to understand what we're really looking at in terms of parallel tracks. And some of those in the lower numbers may fall off. That may be the decision.
The other thing I wanted to point out is when we're looking at the parallel sessions if you have Dynamic Coalitions, you know, others have brought this up to me as well, that they may only have 15 people in the room. And that's okay. They may have 35 or 50 or 100. But they're kind of very different types of meetings so that the open forums, even certain workshops we may look at the formats and say this is just -- this needs a meeting room and they're actually more of a meeting or they want to have an interactive discussion which can be called a workshop but they're maybe not going to actually use the rooms that are allocated for the workshop. So those are my points. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Zahid.
>>ZAHID JAMIL: Thank you. I'm going to try to anonymize what I am about to say. Somebody came up to somebody late yesterday in the evening and said hey, by the way, did you know you're on 15 workshops as a panelist? And the guy went what? Really? I didn't even know that. There is a reverse problem which is that as Subi said those they didn't put the names up because they didn't want it be inappropriate to name the panelist because they hadn't got confirmations but they had discussions. And then there are those situations where names have been put up, but there hadn't been any discussions, forget confirmations with the individuals who are named as panelists. So I would say we need to look at that as well as a factor, and I would totally support what Ayesha just said. Look, let's start with the first processing. How many have got high marks or high scores? Put them aside and look at what we're left with in a logical way and then sort of look at whether there's quality or interest in what is proposed in those topics. Maybe they're new topics. Maybe they're interesting topics. And I think it may help with some of them to reach out to the proposers and see if they can sort of, you know, clarify or in some way improve that. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Qusai.
>>QUSAI AL SHATTI: Let me be the first to support what Chris said and what my colleague Zahid said. If we looked at the Workshop Proposals we would find similarity in some topics, between five or six of the proposals. The difference in topics between them is minor actually. So these workshops can be even joined together because there isn't much differences between them. That's one.
Supporting a reduced number of workshops, this is definite. And reducing the (indiscernible) session when we have a main session is also an idea that we need to see within the structure of the program. To have audience in the main sessions, again, we cannot have people let's say invited to many parallel sessions while we need to have a discussion with a main session. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Milton did you ask -- yes, please.
>>MILTON MUELLER: Yeah, I just wanted to mainly react to something that was said earlier about the workshops drawing audiences away from the main sessions. And again, I think that that's completely the reverse way to look at it. The reason people are going to workshops instead of to main sessions is because people are more interested in what's happening at the workshops. And the reason they're not going to the main sessions, which is a theme that was sounded several times yesterday but I do not see being raised again today, so I want to reiterate it, is that the main sessions are not doing anything. They are essentially just very large workshops. And so in that respect, a main session that attracts 200 people which you think should attract 2,000, you know actually that's doing pretty good. But if it's just another workshop you have no reason for it to attract any larger an audience than that. And if it is indeed structured exactly like a large scale workshop, I think you're wasting the whole purpose of having a main session. The main session should be focused on outputs, on getting people you have gathered there together to agree on something to do what the Internet Governance Forum is supposed to do which is to build support and consensus for shared principles, norms, decision-making procedures and other routine theoretic stuff. That's what you need to be doing in main sessions. And so I suggest if you put real issues into a main session and give everybody an opportunity to participate, that you will, in fact, get very good participation. I suspect that if you give a bunch of pre-canned questions and a bunch of pre-designated people that you're going to call on in these main sessions, as was done a few years ago, and if you discourage actual discussion of controversial issues as has been done, people will stop coming to the main sessions and they will not go. It doesn't matter how many workshops there are. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Matthew.
>>MATTHEW SPEARS: Thank you, Chair. A number of us have been batting around some ideas, and I'm not sure now is exactly the right time to raise them but it has to do with how a structure for the workshops and main sessions, so it might answer some of the questions that have been raised, particularly the last one that Milton just raised. So I don't know if you want to move to that at this point in time or I can come back to that later.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Why don't you go ahead.
>>MATTHEW SPEARS: Okay. We have a PowerPoint, but I won't subject you to that. So I'll try and explain it. So the idea is how can we structure workshops and workshop tracks and round tables and then the main sessions into something that actually has a flow and a consistency that is output oriented and refocuses the main sessions to address some of the concerns that were just raised. So what we've done is we've taken the thematic clusters that have been circulated that I believe are five at the moment and increased them to seven or eight. We've developed a process whereby distinct tracks from those thematic tracks would lead into round tables. And both the workshops and round tables would seek to produce some form of output, tangible output. We recommend and suggest that the main sessions actually be refocused into focused sessions. And I think that this is where we suggest you could address issues such as spam which tends to be a very important issue, at least has been raised as an important issue for this IGF. And possibly also as an area where you could address the government role in multistakeholder models which is also something we discussed at length yesterday.
Not all round tables would feed into those specific focused sessions but those that were relevant would. So for example, perhaps multistakeholder and enhanced cooperation principles might feed into the multistakeholder government role and multistakeholder model focus sessions. I'm sorry, this is bit complicated, but the focus sessions would be tasked with coming up with some kind of output. However defined. Then -- and I can go through this in more detail if you wish. We could also anticipate perhaps one or two new main sessions, just call them new sessions, where the IGF might actually invite people to speak on an issue that has relevance to Internet Governance but it's something that hasn't at all been covered in the event, just to make it interesting and enticing. And I've already spoken earlier on about the regional focus track and how we'd like to see that evolve. So I can go into that in more detail, if people are interested, or I can circulate this to Chengetai, if that's valuable.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes, thank you. That's very helpful. This is precisely the kind of discussion we need to have on how to integrate, and I like what you called the flow and consistency of integrating the workshops and making -- giving sense to the main sessions and why not also give them a different name. And please, send it to Chengetai who can then circulate it to the right place. Theresa. I have quite a number of speakers. Theresa, Olga, Raul, Bill, Jeff, Tero, Chris, and Ana. And Chen, yes. Theresa.
>>THERESA SWINEHART: I think actually if we could get what Matthew had raised circulated, I think that could be quite interesting and useful to move our discussion forward.
I think a few things with regards tot he workshop in reviewing them all and on reflection I would agree that the criteria that we had outlined are to some extent more traditional ones and that we need to be thinking outside the box. To the extent that people have come up with new ideas or new approaches, and also the issue of confirming names versus not, I think several of us were listed in things that we didn't realize and several of us were listed in things that we did realize, so I think that there's some clarity there. And having said that, also an opportunity to help identify who might be excellent alternatives and start building those out.
With regards to some of the criteria, some of us were just thinking about some ideas, so these are not mine by any origin. I think we'll credit Ayesha who I wish would raise the flag but anyway. So maybe some criteria to start with would be is this a new organizer or does the proposer look like they need help or input or guidance. The second might be is the topic area of special interest to this IGF. The third, should an outreach be made to see what the real intention is or would they want to merge? I notice that some of the workshops we have 28 or 30 on specific topic areas and we may have opportunities to create threads around some of the main sessions or opportunities to merge them. And that would really take away a huge weight from the amount of workshops that we have, if we look at those numbers. And think creatively how we might get those integrated. And then the -- the fourth one, the fourth criteria we might want to consider is, are they introducing a new creative format or approach. So some participants I noticed, at least when I went through them, had a limited number of panelists or maybe just one moderator. What we didn't have in reviewing our criteria was, was there a creative format to encouraging a dialogue on a substantive issue? Was it some initiative similar to what's done at some EuroDIG or other kinds of events, and that wasn't captured in how we were evaluating this. So I think there is merit in re-looking at these from a different lens. And several lenses and seeing how we might actually consolidate these down just through some natural processes.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. This is also very helpful. And I think clearly want to have people to come to Bali, and we discussed that yesterday. Some people may need to have a speaking role in order to get travel permission, but it does not necessarily need to be a workshop. And I think your suggestion to look at clusters of workshop, can we find a format that we bring them together, have a round table discussion, would be maybe invited speakers, we give them a special format, whatever. But let's look at it in a creative way and let's make sure we don't push anybody -- put anybody -- push anybody away. Olga.
>>OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Markus. About pushing people away, I did the grading twice, with few information and with more information. I have the feeling now that once I did it with few information I must have been unfair to some or -- or -- well, to some of the workshops. So -- and then we did the gradings with more information. I wonder how many of us could do that because I have talked to several people and they told me they didn't have the time. So I'm not interesting in knowing who, but do we have enough revisions to make a decision? Do we have -- do we -- did we receive so many to really say that we can do this gradings and make the decision about the workshops because I saw the number yesterday, but I -- I'm not sure.
I like the criterias that Theresa expressed. Maybe we could build upon from there and I like that. I like the suggestion made by Ayesha about having smaller rooms, medium-sized rooms and bigger rooms. Some workshops are small but they a lot of value and then you have the transcripts. And about main sessions, I wonder if we need so many main sessions. Maybe we could have less. I think some of us have expressed some ideas around this concept. Maybe we could have less main sessions, not so much at the same time with so many workshops. And we could refocus the purpose of this main sessions. Perhaps get two, one at the beginning and one at the end, or three. I don't know. Thank you so much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. A comment on the main sessions, I'm good at that, and I will ask maybe Chengetai first to comment on how many assessments he received.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: As of this morning we received 26 assessments. I'm going to send a final one out tonight and also with the names of the people who did them. But it also must be noted that it is not just going to be a quantitative assessment, then we're just going to use the numbers because you're going to break up into the groups, you're going to have a chance to discuss the 35 or so workshops. So you can still do some adjustments and then whatever your group decides, you know, just bring it to us and then we'll discuss it in the greater MAG at the end of the day.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: So 26 feedback is actually not that bad, considering we did not -- we said the new members are free to do so, but they're not required because they're new to the game. But I think it's -- it gives some -- at least some solid starting point.
To the question of main sessions, well, basically you can play around with what you want, but you cannot get away. We have a main room and we will have interpreters. And we cannot have interpreters for the opening day and for the closing day and give them two days off in between because next year then we won't get any interpreters anymore because the U.N. would say this is wasting resources. But we can do with the slots what we want. These slots, there are 12 90-minute slots in the room, in the main room, where we have an interpretation. We can put a workshop in a big room but that may not be particularly conducive because in a big room you don't really talk easily to people and less interactive or whatever. But we are free to do what we can, but we cannot get away from this -- we have to use the main room. And the problem in the past has been how to populate the main room because people voted with their feet and went to the workshops.
I lost my list. Now I found it again. Raul.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you, Markus. Several things. One thing is that while I understand that it's very difficult to not schedule workshops at the same time than the main sessions, I think that's a -- we can try to at least reduce the number of workshops, as has been said, proposed at the same time of the main sessions.
The other comment regarding the workshops, I'm not sure what Olga means about few information or more information. I evaluated the workshops with the information that all of us received. I don't know if there is any extra information.
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>OLGA CAVALLI: Just for clarification, I did it twice. Once it was very short, very short description. And then I did the grading -- it was before the Beijing meeting. And then with the -- with more information. So I have the feeling that the first time I didn't have enough information. Maybe I was mistaken because I didn't have that in front of me.
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Okay. I understand now. I evaluated the workshops with the 425 pages of PDF that was handed me. Okay. That's that.
Now -- so I was scared if I had to review still longer information.
[ Laughter ]
But some comments about the proposals is that as it was pointed out before, there are many proposals that are very similar among them, especially I remember some workshops about big (indiscernible) that were very similar, collaborative efforts on cyber security and also some on human rights that look very similar between them. Some of them it's almost identical. So I think that's even if we approve some workshops we have to still ask the organizers to try to check the other -- other workshops that could have been approved too and that could look similar in order to try to show in those -- those workshops.
Other thing that's -- that is a matter of concern to me is the list of speakers that -- because as Zahid said before, it is clear that many people that is listed as a speaker has not been -- have not been consulted. And in my own case, I am listed three times and I have not been consulted by anybody. So I think that's -- I evaluated better the workshops that clearly show that they have diverse integration of panelists or invited speakers. But it is not fair if we discover later that the speakers that were listed are not confirmed or even they have not been consulted. So it could be probably that -- I don't know if we can fix that, but what we can do or we have to do is to be very strong asking the organizers of those workshops that are approved that they ensure that the -- there will be diversity in the workshops when the workshops have speakers or round table. And in many cases, even the wish list of speakers say that there will be somebody from a given organization but it doesn't say who and so it's difficult to evaluate the diversity from the point of view of gender or geographic diversity because it is a very different situation depending on who they speak on behalf of, that given organization. So I think that's the information that we had is not very good in terms of quality. But I don't know what we can do except to be very strongly to remind the organizers that they have to accomplish (indiscernible) in terms of diversity.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. One very simple step to address one of your concerns could be that every one of you checks his name, how often it appears, and if you noticed that you have been listed without being asked then tell them no, you don't intend to participate and suggest maybe someone else and especially from developing countries. That could be one way of dealing with this. Bill.
>>BILL DRAKE: Thank you. I agree with Chris when he said, you know, every year we have the same exercise and I often feel like people lose their will to stick to it. You know, we do -- we go through all this process of doing the rating and then when it comes down to actually having to make decisions that somebody might not be happy with, we kind of lose our willingness to stick with it and end up kind of expanding the program.
I -- to me it would have been arbitrary to say we just take six tracks and 72 panels and stop there. It's not arbitrary to say workshops that are ranked below a certain threshold probably don't make it. That's not arbitrary. If you've had a collective review process where we've asked people to do this work and we have to trust that the MAG members who did it took it seriously and tried their very best to apply the criteria. If we're not going to make real use of their efforts, then we shouldn't ask them to do it anymore. And we'll just approve everything. That would I think not be desirable. I know that I've been to a number of workshops that have not been very good and that I can't understand how they -- they got cleared. And this year I thought the general level was actually better than what I've seen in some previous years. I have the general feeling that they were getting more solid. Other people I've talked to have felt differently. I thought that the quality was getting better, and actually I was surprised when I saw the numbers. This is a tough crowd. We ranked them a lot harder than I kind of was expecting.
I think as long as we apply clear and consistent criteria, as long as we have a clear understanding of how we're doing the rating, and this is what I was trying to -- on the list spur discussion about exactly how do we understand the criteria and make sure everybody is applying it the same way, then I think we should actually use that as guidance to -- I'm not saying to radically chop something but, I mean, if you've put people through the exercise and 25 people have said this is a -- on a scale of 6 this one is a 2.5, I think it's a pretty good bet to say maybe that one really doesn't quite make it. So I don't think we should be afraid to make that kind of call. And, you know, if we're going to start to reevaluate ones that did less well based on who's here and able to speak for it, then we're creating a process where the people who have access to this process, who can come to Geneva and sit and represent the workshop or say my friend submitted that one and I think it's a real good one, we shouldn't put it down, then we're getting into a certain inequality. So I would encourage trying to take the process we've set up seriously. Next year I hope we can be more consistent and more clear earlier on to everybody exactly what the evaluation criteria were. How do we view workshops that have 16 names on them? How do we view workshops that have no actual names, just a list of institutions, with no actual person contacted and confirmed? How do we view ones that -- whatever. Where they're -- one person submitted the proposal and has no co-organizers or has one co-organizer that's from the same stakeholder group. Is that diverse, less diverse? If we could have clear consistent approach to all these things, then I would say we should be using the criteria to actually make decisions rather than shying away.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you.
I think this is -- seems to be the general feeling. Yes, we take it seriously. There's a lot of work has been done as an assessment of the proposals. And we have to take that seriously. But, at the same time, we also have to take Subi's comment seriously. And I would maybe say yes, set some objective criteria and see what's below but grant preferential differential treatment to proposals coming from developing countries. You said proposals get better and better. That's good news. But at the same time many of them are people who have done that before. They're getting better and better at doing what they've done before. As newcomers, by definition, there may also be language barriers. So we may also look at those with a little bit more leniency and coach them, help them to go forward.
Looking at the proposals we received -- and had we gone the way of, okay, let's go for 6 tracks, then the cutting mark would have been 4.5. We would have ended up at 72 workshops. 4.42. Okay. Chengetai corrects me. He's very precise.
If we lower that mark, let's say, to 4, then you would end up with a little bit more than 120 proposals. I think that might be manageable to work with and then also correct. Look at -- I mean, I'm not saying we would have 120+ workshops. But at least look at them more closely and see which ones can be merged and so on. But there's a starting point.
I have quite a few more speakers. Jeff.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: Thank you. I definitely reiterate the points that Bill and Raul are making. And I'm just trying to think about practical steps to help implement those. And I do feel, I guess, a uncomfortable with the whole process as it's currently being implemented. It's all about cutting and reducing with these criteria. And, while I strongly support the idea that there should be criteria, is there a more positive role that we can play in the MAG to try and help get people who maybe had good proposals that weren't fully developed or might have expertise, even if they're workshop isn't going to be accepted? I think if that's all we're doing in this process, it becomes kind of a negative response. And, at the same time, I just wanted to call out that we also had a goal of trying to reduce these mega panels and encourage innovative proposals. And I do worry that the diversity criteria, as a major part of this, is running counter to some of our other goals. And I had some people who were workshop organizers point that out to me. So I would suggest maybe one idea is can we have a category of -- you know, show that you're being inclusive in the participation in the workshop, which may not be a panel, per se, and having a diversity of viewpoints and things like that without holding to it. But I worry that, if we keep applying the same criteria, we shouldn't be surprised that we end up with the same problems every year.
And then the other point I wanted to make was really, since Anriette is not here and I thought she articulated very strongly last year or last meeting, that having a diversity of viewpoints and complementary workshops so that we're filling out the view of things, whether it's cyber security or other issues. I thought we had a very good discussion in February about that. And that may get to Raul's point about let's not have four workshops on the exact same topic, but try to impose maybe some constructive feedback encouraging workshop organizers to either merge or diversify their topics a little bit better so that if -- we can create a track of workshops that will then feed into -- what we talked about then is creating kind of the roundtable approach. So on an issue like cyber security, the goal would be to look at the issue from many different perspectives in a set of workshops. And we should apply that as a criteria to the workshops as well and then think about how that would all feed together. I know it complicates our work, but I just encourage us to think about what we can do in a positive way to help improve the quality as well as where we're weeding out the low end as well.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And I think it's a good reminder we should not -- maybe we should look at it in a positive way. But we'll have to give the green light to a number of organizers so that they know they can go ahead and bearing in mind that we'll have to work with others to see how we can accommodate them in one way or another into that the program. Tero.
>>TERO MUSALA: Thanks. I would like to get back to the original calculation, what Chengetai presented some time ago regarding these 170-something workshop proposals and how many parallel streams we would have. That is based on the assumption that every workshop takes 90 minutes. Yeah, that I was afraid of. Because I think we have heard many, many speeches here in these two days telling us we should have some options than either zero or 90 minutes. And, if we have some other options where one is, for example, 30, minutes which is called flash in EuroDIG where I thought we heard positive reference from Switzerland this morning, if we have in a way several of those proposals taking only the 30 minutes, for example, it saves a lot of time or in a way gives us other possibilities. We may also give some other people just 60 minutes. This doesn't mean that, if you have a lousy proposal, you get 30 minutes; and, if you have an excellent proposal, you get 90 minutes. I think we should take a look at the substance of the issue. My bet is we find bunch of those that can well do with 30 minutes and we find bunch of those that can do with one hour. Because not all sessions are as interactive as we're dreaming of. And this would give us freedom in playing with these numbers and not just cutting straight from some definite point.
Some other options we have had previously, which always is a guidance to merge, which nobody actually likes. But I still think that also there is a possibility to merge and get somewhat more balanced program. So let's not forget this switch, which we had agreed before we started this discussion. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. No, you're right. There is an agreement we will experiment with different formats. And I think the point was made some of the suggestions are just presentations of a report or whatever. Interesting enough. But they're not workshops in the sense we've used before, and 30 minutes would do for those. And, obviously, that would free up a lot of space. Chris?
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Thank you, Markus. I'll try to pick up on a number of threads. So I agree with -- what Matthew is suggesting makes perfect sense whether we can get most of this done for this meeting, I don't know. Ayesha's suggestions about smaller rooms, yes. Theresa's list of ways of looking at the workshop proposals, and I would say yes to those. But I question whether we should be using those to go back and look at workshops again. And I'll get back to that again in a second.
Bill's point about having a number of workshops saying we've got six tracks as being arbitrary, I agree with that. But we still need some guidance, I think. We clearly know we can't have 300. So we must get some guidance. And there has to come a point in our deliberations where we with start working with a number of workshops we've decided to have. We seem to suffering from what's sort of like the reverse of buyer's remorse. Every time we reach a point where we've actually done some work, we then immediately think we've got to back and do it all over again just to make doubly sure we've done it right in the first place. If you want to draw a line and say, well, look, currently, we have 72 at 4.47. But, if we went to 4, we'd have 420. How many would we have if we went back to zero? It's just as valuable an exercise -- you're being arbitrary to say 4.47, 4.2. You're being just as arbitrary to say 4. Just because it's a round number doesn't make it any less arbitrary.
So I would really appreciate some understanding of whether -- going from 72 to 120 is a significantly large difference in the number of workshops, puts a significant amount of strain on our Indonesian colleagues, and I really think we need to be very careful about that.
I just have one more point, I think. Oh, two, actually. 90-minute slots for the openings -- sorry, for the main sessions, Markus, is not -- a 3-hour slot is a 3-hour slot. Two 90-minute slots is not three hours. It's actually 3 hours plus because you have to change over. So it's really important to remember, whereas, if you have one single slot that goes three hours, that's fine. If you have two 90 minutes, you've got to allow a reasonable amount of time in between to change over. So that skews your timing. That also applies to workshops. If you're going to have 90 minutes followed by 90 minutes or an hour followed by -- you've got to allow a little bit of time in between for changeover. Otherwise, it becomes logistically impossible to deal with. So that's really important.
The other point I wanted to make very quickly is on diversity. I'm a massive fan of diversity. But I think we look at diversity the wrong way. What we should be looking for is diversity over the whole program. And I'm not convinced that we necessarily need diversity over every session in respect to every session if you have diversity across the whole program. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Yeah, I think diversity for each session is a bit of a legacy problem. To begin with, everybody was a bit nervous. No, we have to make sure that individual workshops don't get captured by one group. We can leave that, I think, behind us.
As to the rooms, Chengetai tells me they're either big or huge.
[Laughter]
So there is a limited amount of what we can do to change the architecture of the Convention Center. The point is well-taken. We can split a 3-hour slots into two slots. And the interpreters will allow for that and give us some credit. It gives them also a break if we don't make the break in between one hour. Ana.
>>ANA NEVES AMOROSO: Okay. After all these speakers, I was thinking what should I say because everything I wanted to say was already said. But still I think I can add something. And it should be on the main sessions, because it's something that really worries me.
So, besides the first session and the last session, all the other sessions -- I think that we could have something like the TED talks. So it should be like people presenting how cloud computing changed their business model, how cyber security changed the policy in a government, how privacy rules are being applied. So it should be something very alive and like a testimonial. So something different. I don't know if you're getting my idea. So it could be like the IGF.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I've heard a lot of interesting comments on the TED talks, but I've never attended one myself. I'm not sure -- well, all ready to explore whether that's an adopted format, also bearing in mind cultural differences. But, yes, let's look into different possibilities.
Chen, please, yes.
>>HONGBING CHEN: Thank you, Dr. Kummer, just two points. First point is about the rapid growth of workshop proposals number. I think it's a good thing for us. Gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, I don't think that we should consider ourselves to be judges who can issue some decision arbitrarily. I think we would rather -- I mean it's better for us to be sniff dogs who can sniff good stuff out of a bunch of things. It's kind of a test out of our wisdom and ability or taste, even. It's a test for us. We should meet the challenge bravely. We should not arbitrarily curtail the list of the workshops before we break them into the six tracks or six slots thematically. That's first comment.
Second is, after we break workshop proposals into six tracks according to its theme, then we should give special consideration to the developing country's needs and their concern. I fully subscribe to what Subi said. You know, like in China and India we have -- in total we have 2.5 billion people. We should not get to the topics they are interested in ignored. We should pay special attention to them. Sometimes we know that the proposals which have been deleted or which not have been accepted, it's because of the language problems and also the presence or the presentation. I mean, attendance rate is not so high in some workshops. It does not mean the quality or the topic is not interesting or not attractive. But, because of the people, the attendance, many people could not speak English. They could not understand fully English. So I think maybe we can help them in this way for some of the workshops which are of great interest to announce English speaking people or audience, maybe we can arrange some language interpretation for those workshops just to give them some -- I mean, equitable -- to do justice. To be equitable. I think maybe also the geographical -- equitable geographical distribution is another factor could be considered like countries, Pacific island countries. Although the numbers of the population is not so huge, not so big; but we cannot neglect their needs and wishes. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Points are well-taken. And I like your description of the MAG as sniff dogs. Izumi.
>>IZUMI AIZU: Thank you. I was trying to see the result of collective evaluation. And first thing is compared with my evaluation and how much matching and how much I'm not. It's largely okay, I feel. To consider what is arbitrary or what is not, I also tried to set the numbers as yesterday proposed or suggested like 80. I tried to find, you know, how many it would be per theme, which secretariat put the labels. I mean CIR or human rights on each. And here's some result that, if I may. There are five proposals from CIR as a whole, and four of them made it. Let's say above 80 threshold. For the enhanced cooperation there were 27. And 14, about half, made it. For the growth more than half. 20 out of 37 made it. For Internet governance, I think it's highest. 12 out of 15 made it. On the contrary, for human rights there were 30 proposals and only 7 were inside the top 80. For the multistakeholder principles, 15 out of 23. What does it mean depends on your interpretation. And others 1 out of 2. Roughly, these are the -- just about slightly more than half. That's 81 versus 156, or two proposals were not really evaluated. So it's actually 154.
I'd like to propose to have some -- as somebody already mentioned, to see more positive ways rather than just cutting off the ones who didn't qualify and set up, perhaps, one special working group across the themes to see.
And also I ask with Chengetai if we can put a smallest provision. Have the one proposals labeled to be from the developing countries and the other is new proposals and especially we look into those who are not in the high score areas where, if you put 80 as strongly, then you -- chances are higher to lose. But, if you say lower that -- I don't mean that just target 120 is good ways. Rather just read quality of these and give reasons why we want to have this one. If there's certain rules to be suggested or improved, we can tell them. And two ways, perhaps, is one is so that, if we can reach at end of tomorrow, for those additional 20, say, so we may have 100 workshops which are sort of granted. We may leave some more room for those others or maybe including these 10 or 20 or 30 just like we did perhaps last year that we send some message to those proposals, if you can work on one of the two weeks and come back with much more concrete proposals, for whatever reasons, we will consider. It's a little bit too much, it sounds like -- actually, last year when I was a coordinator for all the emerging things, I was asked by the secretariat to reconsider some of the proposals defined. And we included with the discussion -- amongst the working group members, we, I think, declined one and maybe accepted one, something like that. I don't remember one. It's not the final decision we're going to make tomorrow. But have some kind of methodology to address the issues of our mutual concern. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And I think even among those that scored relatively well, there may be similar workshops that could be merged or work together. But we have these merger discussions right from the beginning. Everybody's in favor of merging, but nobody wants to be merged. May look very similar. But, when you talk to them, oh, no, no, we mean something completely different with our workshop. But, nevertheless, I think to the layman at least, when you look at some of the proposals, I think many made the comment they really look extremely similar and worth considering of just locking them all in the same room and having a roundtable discussion on this issue. We could have five, six of these proposals. Could be a good workshop. Patrick.
>>PATRICK RYAN: Are you talking to me?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes, Patrick.
>>PATRICK RYAN: Thank you. I retire my card. I think everybody has already said what I wanted to say on that point.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Marilyn then. What's been said. But I'm going to ask for a major improvement for next year and ask you all to consider doing some of the things you've talked about doing like much earlier alerting to applicants that they shouldn't use your name, if you're a MAG member, because they think they're going to get favored treatment by using you or because they don't know anyone else and they haven't figured out a better way to get additional names. So it's great that you're addressing it now, but I have a concern between today and tomorrow. I hear a lot of good ideas about how to help take some of the more diverse workshops and move them into a high-performance category, a high-opportunity category. But, unless you move some of the folks that have large numbers of workshops out first, I'm not sure how you make room for the new guys. So that would be a question I have.
And then the other point I just wanted to make is that I heard you say earlier that, you know, there were 70 workshops or 80 workshops and 10 Dynamic Coalitions, et cetera. Dynamic Coalitions normally don't attract -- not all of them will attract a couple of hundred people. And, when I do the math and divide -- and let's say we have 1500 people. And I divide 8 rooms into 1500, I'm a little worried that we might miss some of the workshops which may be the most interactive, the most dynamic, particularly among youth, where 30- 40 youth interacting with each other may be one of the most exciting -- particularly youth from different regions, one of the most exciting dialogues that we would hear.
So I'm just looking for continuing to follow how you evolve this. But a couple thoughts about, if you have over 2,000 people, I think we have to make sure that there's enough rooms for them and they're not just stuck in a room with 3-400 people where they won't have a opportunity to interact.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Veronica?
>>VERONICA CRETU: Thank you, Markus. Briefly, I want to get back to the issue of flash sessions. As one of the organizers, moderators of the last session last year and coming from a developing country that had a possibility to share best practice or a case study, this has been a very valuable experience. So I think in cases where we have workshop proposals that seemed to be incomplete, where, as Susan mentioned, there are no names of the speakers but the discussions around the speakers are going on, this is that opportunity where we can look at and have a constructive approach, positive approach and suggest that this kind of format.
If we accept idea of flash sessions, I think we should have maximum of four per day, which would make 16 total flashes during the entire IGF. The flash sessions do not need neither big nor huge rooms, so we would need some space in the halls or corners or somewhere. But this is a very valuable platform for developing countries, for the newcomers who are for the first time there to learn how to share, how to interact, how to present their experiences.
I also found out from last year that flash sessions require promotion. If you want people to come and gather, they need to be promoted. So before the IGF itself, through the online interaction, online platform, and during the IGF. So this -- these are just key takeaways but I fully support this approach where we can insert it or infuse it insert it into the overall agenda.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And, you know, I think we have a general agreement to experiment with this format. My question to you, you have more experience with that, why only four a day. Because if you have 90 minutes or 30 minutes, you fit in more slots, if that's also one of these concerns.
>>VERONICA CRETU: This would be a minimum. This would be a minimum. Everything depends on the space, on what space is available for this kind of -- because in our case when we did it in Moldova in a flash session, we didn't have a big room. There were not very many people but there were people who are really interested to learn how we did it. So I'm not sure about the space that it's available for this purpose. We need to ask them -- the organizers, the cost. But this would be a minimum from my perspective, four per day.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: My idea would have been once we have the shorter sessions, then make sure we have as many as possible.
>>VERONICA CRETU: Okay.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: To allow us to accommodate more Workshop Proposals.
>>VERONICA CRETU: Okay. I agree. I support that.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Now as to the -- I have not visited the conference center, but I mean, we have also experienced in Hyderabad with poster sessions, and I think on the whole I think it was more or less Diplo that animated them and I think on the whole a good experience with that. To have an extra space where people can meet, have poster sessions, birds of a feather or whatever we want to call it, the flash sessions, as far as I understand it, would be basically okay. We would look at the workshop proposals and say some of these may be better off with a shorter session. Let's give them a 30-minute slots, so the room could be similar to that of all the workshops. But the rooms are either big or very big.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Yes, you can --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: But I think we can leave that safely to the -- our hosts to work it out with the Secretariat, how best to accommodate. Yes, if you know there are not going to be many people, of course it's nicer if the room is not too big. But you can also do a lot with seating arrangements, have a hollow square where people sit around a table, see each other and maybe have some plants in a corner to make the room look a little bit more intimate.
>>VERONICA CRETU: Just a suggestion, Markus. To accommodate more flash sessions, I think it would be easy if there is one room that is dedicated just for the flash sessions, then we have like 30-minute slot, break, another 30-minutes, and if it's clearly inserted into the overall agenda, then it's perfectly fine.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Thank you for that. Baher, then Yuliya.
>>BAHER ESMAT: Thank you, Markus. I just want to echo what others have said about workshops, and I think the key thing here is not the number. I think it's the quality of the workshops. And I think part of what the MAG has done in evaluating workshops was to try to identify, you know, workshops that, you know, with good quality, good content and those that did not meet the criteria. So in the end I don't think we should refrain from disqualifying some workshops just for the sake of being open and inclusive. And the -- the evaluation that is provided by the MAG, I think it does provide a good basis for this, you know, evaluation. Whatever the threshold is, whether it's 4.0, 4.4, I think we can agree on that. And one more thing about merging workshops, I think we can still do more even if proposers or proponents would not want to merge. I think we could reach out to them again and as you know for a second or third time and encourage them to merge. And just for example, so one of the workshops I, you know, personally proposed in the first and very initial phase, you know, I found that it was very similar to one other workshop and even though we were not requested to merge, you know, we did -- I mean, I did reach out to the other organizers and we agreed we should merge. So I think we can still do that with people we know. And as I think Raul said there were clearly some -- or many workshops under certain topics that looked very similar, like in human rights and freedom of expression and all this.
One last comment I want to say is that I'm sympathetic to the notion of helping newcomers, new organizers and try to give them like bonus points or help them complete their proposals. And I think the MAG, you know, can find the ways to do that. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And I think those organizers who reach out spontaneously to others should be especially commended. I think this is -- I know it has happened already, I think, that some workshop or potential organizers realized they were very close to some others and decided spontaneously to work together and cooperate. Yuliya.
>>YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you, Markus. Yuliya Morenets from TaC. I would like just to take a number that we've already underlined and to bring the issue support. And first of all, what Raul just said and I believe Chris said before concerning the -- a number of similar workshops and I think we will need to encourage people to merge. And I think also it will bring new ideas and obviously will be helpful even for new initiatives and new discussions. Concerning the flash sessions, actually I wanted also to support this idea. Was also an organizer of a flash session last year during the EuroDIG and really it will allow to go into details and discussing the specific topic. And maybe for the newcomers who will have or who have actually under 4.4, it will maybe -- we could, you know, encourage them to organize a flash session because it will be short format and maybe will be easier to organize for a first time. So just an idea to bring.
What was -- I wanted to say as well, while general feeling when I was making the assessment, actually I was -- it was great to have all the detailed information, but I was missing somehow the short summary we had during the first round. So I think maybe for -- maybe discussion for next year, it will be useful to have also a short summary with the few sentences in order to be able afterwards to go into the task and read the detailed description. So thank you so much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much. I have four more speakers on my list. Chris, Subi, Mark, and Susan. And Jim, yes, correct. Chris.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Question for you. I may have missed something. This discussion we're having now, is this all about informing what we're supposed to be doing tomorrow?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Right. So we need to make -- we actually need to make a decision? Do we need to make a decision now or are we able to make a decision tomorrow morning? Or should we maybe discuss that for a half hour before we make a decision about --
[ Laughter ]
-- whether we can make a decision now or tomorrow morning. Do we need to make a decision this afternoon?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: I would hope that we agree on how to proceed tomorrow.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Is it even remotely possible to get a small idea --
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: I would like some sort of guidance.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Yeah, is it remotely possible to get some idea from our hosts about an acceptable ballpark kind of number that might be workable maybe perhaps? Because the simplest thing to do -- frankly, the simplest thing to do is to just say we've marked them all, we've got 120 of them, we'll have 120. I mean, I'm not suggesting we should do that.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Well, I think it's a big convention center, but again, the question is, do we really need to fill every single room we can fill? And also, to make it available, I think there's also a cost associated to it. And we had the discussion yesterday, there were different views expressed, but my reading in Paris was there was a clear request from the stakeholders to reduce the overall number of -- and I'm not saying now of events but of parallel tracks because it was feeling it was too sprawling, the whole event. And I think we are moving that way.
Now I think it would be good if we can come out of this meeting and have a decision on number X of workshops that are given the green light, you guys go ahead. But I don't think we can do that based on a -- just a figure, let's say 4.5 is the mark and everybody above is allowed to go through. I still think we need to assess each of them and some of the various points made. Some of these might actually be merged and whatever, and then others would be --
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Markus, I agree with you 100%. My question is, what am I assessing them towards? If I know that you -- we've decided that we're going to have 100 spots or 80 spots or whatever, then I've got something to work towards that enables me to start really getting clear about whether I think these -- these ones could amalgamate. They may be -- I know that if they do, they will be in. If they don't, they won't. Right now I've got 120-something, is it, on the list?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: 150-something.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: 150-something. And absolutely no idea how many -- you know, getting close to how many we need to get to. So I'm unclear as to how we can hold a discussion tomorrow. I'm not asking for a finite number. I'm not saying it's going to be 72, but if we could get some idea that, you know, we think around about -- how many did we have last year?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: We had up to 11 parallel tracks last year.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: So how many workshops did we have?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Had about 144 events. But as I said, each track can take 12 sessions, 12 slots.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: No, I understand that. So how many workshops did we have last year? Roughly. Just a rough stab.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: I'd say 114.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: 114.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Yeah.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Okay. Do we all agree that 114 was too many? Because if we agree that 114 is too many, then we can start working on, you know -- it just seems to me that there's no way we're ever going to come to a conclusion unless we have on the one hand a methodology for working through all --
>>IZUMI AIZU: Excuse me, if I may.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: -- the workshops and on the other, some idea of the number. Thanks.
>>IZUMI AIZU: Well, the problem is that we don't agree. That's the thing.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Can we finish the list of speakers? Subi, Mark, Susan, Jim, and Anju. Subi.
>>SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Markus. I'll try and be as brief as possible. When I made that appeal I didn't mean to make it a personal appeal of support for certain people. I did start out by saying that -- and I can name proposals. While stating at the outset that I completely respect the time that members of the MAG who have been around and knew who've taken the time to do this exercise, there's a lot of time. And I think it was about 485 pages in the PDF. As someone who was new, it took me longer because I wasn't very familiar with the process. But I do want to state some points at the outset. There were about six proposals that are listed on the critical Internet resources which was not one of the teams, so there is -- and there are others who are not but would have made more sense and would have scored higher if -- in terms of relevance to the team if they knew that they could also propose something similar. So there are ratings and then there are ratings. And I -- we've had two wonderful days of discussions and we've discussed everything from transparency, openness, opening up the list or keeping it closed. I do believe, as members of the MAG, and I concur with Jeff, that there has to be a positive mentoring role. So going to the extent that at the next IGF, if we can even have a workshop that teaches people how to write proposals, I mean, we have to be able to facilitate people. And it is longer, it takes more patience, but I think we owe it to everyone to be able to do that.
On the questions of why we go to a new region every time with the IGF, I want to reiterate Chen's point that it has to be of relevance and which is how you get more people in the room. We're trying to worry about more workshops and how there might not be enough attendance, but if you have workshops that make sense and are actually being run by people from those regions, we tend to have a greater propensity towards having more people in the room. So just between Baku and Bali, access and diversity and issues of importance to about 700 million subscribers, whether they're in the mobile -- Jeff is in the room and AT&T fixed line is not going to change the world. But AT&T wireless will in our region. And these are issues that we care about. So while evaluating workshops, you know, if we can still create filters, I would be grateful.
Also on the main team, the minister reiterated at Baku that Internet to (indiscernible) is something that we're very keen in open, sustainable, and equitable Internet so when we do get to the main theme, not in the same words but in the spirit, if we can see the reflection, I do want to second the idea of building bridges. Thank you, Markus.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Mark.
>>MARK CARVELL: Yes, thank you. I want to come back to what I thought was an agreed objective of picking up issues that were raised at the WCIT and developing in the program for Bali sessions that produce outputs. You know, ranges of options for dealing with solutions. And I'm thinking in particular of spam and cyber security. Now, there are two workshop proposals on dealing with spam. One is the Internet Society one and the other is the low scoring proposal from the International Digital Economy Alliance, number 323. For a reason I don't quite understand the Internet Society one, number 140, isn't actually listed in that group for legal frameworks and cyber crimes. I'm not sure why that's the case. But anyway, so here you've got two workshop proposals which you can merge and construct a session that will produce a package as I've described it previously of options of how to deal with this, what is the extent of the problem, the impact on network efficiency and so on. And I also feel we should invite representatives of governments in Dubai who are particularly concerned about this issue and its effect on networks and other negative consequences. Picking up the idea which I think somebody came up with earlier, that we be a bit proactive and actually bring people into the session who have been concerned about this in the past. So we kind of build on these two workshop proposals and construct a session. That's going to produce something in terms of package, that's an immediate takeaway. You involve people who have been concerned about this in the ITU and in that way you've got a kind of -- a real meaningful session that's got a product, if you like. And it's showing how the IGF is addressing a major area of concern that came up in a treaty-making conference. So there's that. And similarly with cyber security you've got several workshop proposals, I think. We should bear in mind the opportunity to construct something on cyber security for the same purpose. To give this IGF the opportunity to seize an issue, construct an output, and see -- demonstrate how concerns raised in ITU fora in particularly can be translated across to the IGF and something meaningful and concrete and constructive happens.
My third point -- sorry to hold the mic a bit -- is child protection. Now, I think there's one very obvious proposal on child protection in the list of workshops. At the WSIS forum last week you had Kofi Annan saying that this was an issue for the WSIS review. And in the ministerial round table last week, which I participated in representing U.K. government, I heard at least one minister saying that this was a very critical issue, child protection. We've -- I'm aware that there are proposals that have been already rejected for workshops. I think we should look at how we might ensure that child protection doesn't drop off the list of IGF priorities in view of this, as I say, being raised last week in the WSIS forum and in an ITU-constructed forum. The right place, I think, is for the experts to come together in the IGF and look at this with a -- moving the agenda on. I know child protection has been a regular feature of the IGF and there may have been some sense of fatigue about it, but as I say, it's still a live issue for ministers and somebody, you know, of the caliber of Kofi Annan saw fit to raise it in the context of the WSIS review. So can I just sort of remind everybody ahead of tomorrow that we have this sort of sense that we need to construct meaningful outputs and address issues that have surfaced with political resonance, if you like, for whole Internet landscape, the multistakeholder model and so on in various fora. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And nothing would prevent us, for instance, for giving some of these workshops a main slot with interpretation in the main room. Putting on my ISOC hat, we are clearly working on that, bringing in policymakers to Bali and I think the ministerial pre-event will also help. But bringing in policymakers. Susan.
>>SUSAN CHALMERS: Thank you, Markus. Susan Chalmers. I was thinking that I might go ahead and venture perhaps a shell of procedure that we could use for dealing with the workshops and then I invite everybody to kind of make modifications or to shoot it down completely or whatever anybody would like to do. But just for the sake of efficiency going forward. I think that a basic operating principle for us, for the MAG, might be I would suggest that we proceed on the basis of what is already agreed. We had this discussion earlier this morning about if a decision was made with respect to the mailing list then maybe not open it up unless there is a consensus of returning that decision. So from where I sit, I recognize that there was a general desire to reduce the number of workshops that was expressed during the Paris consultation. So if we take that, then we can from there aim to have a fewer number of workshops at Bali than there were for Baku. So if you start from that premise and we have a grading system that has been used, I might go ahead and suggest that in terms of selection of workshops we might go ahead and pick a number or try and agree on a number and then from that number we can take a look at a number of workshops across each theme, themes that have already been agreed and if there -- and then start from there. So if there were some workshops that didn't make the cut that -- that MAG members feel that perhaps they would be good workshops to encourage, some novel contributions or some novel formats, perhaps we can extend an invitation to some of those workshops and invite them if we want to do flash talks or new or innovative formats, invite them to resubmit on that basis if they want or to reformat. But I do think that going forward it might be easier if we kind of operate based upon what was agreed in terms of reducing the workshops and having them a theme and then taking -- taking a look at the composition of all the workshops at that point. And I just make that suggestion, and I -- so I'm very happy to have other people go ahead and modify it or change it completely. But I just want to put that out there. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Yeah, I think along these lines, I think it will make sense that we agree on the baseline. And I think this 4.4, whatever, would give us 72 workshops as a starting point that we could give them the green lights at the end of our two days here. But, nevertheless, we need to have a check of them. Because some of them may indeed have mentioned 30 times the same people, and they've not been asked or whatever. And there may also be potential mergers among them. So I think we have to validate -- we have to take, I think, the feedback we received from the MAG members seriously. And those who reached a certain level can safely assume that they have sufficient quality. But that has not yet been addressed. Other concerns expressed and maybe Chen and Subi speaking on behalf of 2.5 billion people. You know, there is, in fact, a need to give differential preferential treatment to developing countries. And some of them then we have to work proactively with.
But -- and then some of them we can offer a flash session. Look, your workshop -- but that may also actually be the case of some of the ones that's called high. Nothing says they need to be given a 90-minute slot. They may also be given, "I think it's interesting but I think you can do that in 30 minutes." We really need to go through the list as it is.
We also have to do mathematics. And I'm sure Veronica will help us in working out the potential slots with given room of tracks having flash sessions in one room a day. When you have as many as possible, I think we can have 8 or so or maybe two tracks for flash sessions. So maybe we can accommodate most of the proposals, if we use this approach. But we can also look at so many similar proposals. Why not suggest why don't you all team together and have a roundtable discussion with our panelists, whatever. But consider all of the people you named are invited, speakers, if you need an invitation in order to get travel clearance. But, yes, we have to go through the list at one point or another.
Jim, you asked for the floor.
>>JIM PRENDERGAST: Sure. Thank you, Markus. Jim Prendergast with the Galway Strategy Group. I've counseled two workshop proposers. One is a newcomer and one is a previous organizer. The previous organizer was the youth session that has been referred to already. Just to give people context on that, it was 65 total attendees in the session, 35 of which were youth and 29 of which took to the microphone.
We had representation from Asia, the Nordic youth, local Azer youth. If anybody remembers the television talk show host Phil Donohue, I was Phil Donohue during this session running around with the microphone. There was so many people who wanted to speak.
The other -- both proposals were submitted as roundtable discussions to take advantage of the desire for more interactive discussions that we discussed in Paris. So listing two or three people as the discussion facilitators, you know, obviously, that does not present a wide range of diversity when you look at who are the names that are associated with this. I think one of the things that concerns me is I understand the constraint that you have in trying to go through 157 proposals and assign numbers to them. That's never going to be an exact science. But you do have to somehow make a cut. But somebody referred to as maybe the diversity of views, criterias maybe legacy. And I'm concerned that it's impossible to have diversity when you only list two or three people on a piece of paper.
So I guess what I'm asking is, you know, as you do these evaluations, consider the new and innovative formats. And don't inadvertently penalize those folks in a number ranking when they do decide to take the new different and highly innovative path that's been offered to them.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Anju.
>>ANJU MANGAL: I have a feeling we're repeating ourselves, which is probably a good thick because some of us have short memories. And I think I can speak for myself.
We discussed that quality is important and quantity. And yet we're not grading it based on that. I also emphasized this point yesterday and asked how we as MAG members can actually determine what -- whether it's quality or -- whether it's good quality. So I see that these are some of the growing concerns.
And, like some of my colleagues mentioned earlier, certain workshops bring diversity and they sort of need assistance in improvements. So, again, how can we as MAG members assist them?
When I look at the grading system, and also the grading of the workshop, at times -- and this is a personal feeling, at times I feel that workshops are graded based on whom you know and whom you like and maybe who you think will play a bigger role. So some of the newcomers don't get the green light, but they might actually be the one facing the bigger problem in the country.
And I know that the reality is that everyone wants to gain something because they want to leave the forum with something. So how are we supposed to be helping this community? And I know it's difficult to reach out to everyone. But, for example, if each of us focus on just one or two workshops, we can maybe find ways to propose a better output, like, for example, what Izumi said and his idea about having those workshops. Like we have -- we had currently -- like, for example, we had 158 workshops and we're currently 58 MAG members. So, in other words, if you divide it, you can focus on two or three workshops each and then decide whether it meets the criteria. And then we also give them the benefit of doubt, and then we could interact with the other MAG members to see how we can find the gaps or assist them to actually get the green light. And I guess this will also give our proposers a chance to understand why it was given a green or a red light.
And my last point is: Is it possible to get into, like, small groups to discuss and throw in ideas to look at how we can improve the workshop grading? Because I'm sure with the transcripts and notetaking, we might not be able to get the real key points as discussed today or yesterday. And we might forget some really, really important points when we go back to our countries. And I also feel sorry for the IGF secretariat to put everything together. So maybe this is something we might need to consider.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. That was the idea to get into small groups, and I hope we can do that tomorrow. And I would hope that we can agree on that today.
I have a few more speakers. Paul, Patrick, Izumi, and Nick. Izumi has spoken already. Then it;s Paul, Patrick, Nick. And with that I'd like to close the list. Chris as well.
>>PAUL WILSON: Thanks, Markus. Paul Wilson here. I've had a lot of experience over the years with the selection process and grading process. We can talk about it forever.
But I take a fairly simple approach. Each of us is here to make judgments based on our experience and our knowledge of IGF. We're getting a lot of assistance in developing our judgment by whole lot of prediscussion that's been going on by a lot of our experience already.
But, basically, the process of applying our judgment is what we're being paid for or not being paid for to be in this room for. We've chosen to do that through a scoring system. And so each of us, I think, who have been through the proposals will have a long list of proposals with numeric scores against them. That's pretty standard. The trick then is to aggregate all the scores, as Chengetai has done, to order the whole list of proposals from top to bottom. And it doesn't -- to me, it doesn't particularly matter in that process exactly how many proposals are going to be successful in the end except inasmuch as we don't want to rate a thousand proposals when we've got 25 places. In fact, it's useful to rate the whole bunch of proposals because we may have mergers; we may have dropouts; we may have different adjustments which may shift the list up and we'll take the next in line.
The scoring system just is something to help us. And it could be as complicated as we want to make it, which will help more. But we draw a line at some point. It needs to be just good enough.
What I found in many of these processes is what's really important, actually, is to go through and establish our judgments and then for the group to meet and to talk about the judgments to have -- what's most important I think is the chance for individuals to advocate for particular proposals to say I really like this one because -- and to allow others to change their scores.
So what I assume we're doing tomorrow is in small groups we're doing exactly that. We're running through the proposals one by one which have been assigned to the group, and we're having a chance to sort of adjust our scores and come out with what should be, at the end of the process, a better sort of more qualified and more considered list.
Look, it's a fairly simplistic process. But I kind of think we're ready to get into it.
As I say, once we have this ordered list of proposals in sort of top-down quality order, so to speak, you know, that gets adjusted in terms of repetition or, you know, removal of repeats or mergers or whatever. And I think that's to be done later.
I think it would help. And what I don't think we've had enough of yet is enough discussion about this process simply to put it down in clear terms and avoid what's been a really long, sort of unnecessarily long discussion here today that I hope we won't have to repeat every year. Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And I like what you call a simplistic approach. I agree with you. (indiscernible) The perfect of the good, and I think we need to keep it as simple as possible.
We really don't have much time left. And I have Patrick, you wanted to say, Nick, and Chris. Can you keep it short?
>>PATRICK RYAN: Yes, absolutely. I wanted to just add on to some of the comments that Chris and Susan had made about the number of workshops. It's somewhat arbitrary to sort of pick a number. It may feel that way. But I think it's important to do so that we all have something that we can rally around, put a stake in the ground.
My impression from the Paris meeting was that you had established, Markus, a number of 80. I don't remember whether I just made that up or whether that was something that you said. But I can tell you that I socialize that number 80 as, you know, just among colleagues very informally and that this whole idea of reducing workshops was very well-received on a general basis. I also really like the idea of integrating some possible flash sessions, maybe giving another bite at the apple, some opportunities for some of the rejected workshop participants to resubmit. Particularly, if we can figure out a way to integrate the beach into this, that would certainly be a novel approach.
Now, I also had one other topic I wanted to bring up, Markus. But I know we're tight on time, so please let me know. Should we wait until tomorrow --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Wait on other topics until tomorrow.
>>PATRICK RYAN: Absolutely.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Nick.
>>NICK ASHTON HART: Thanks very much. Nick Ashton Hart. Something that was said earlier by Mark Carvell really resonated. It seems to me, once you settled on what workshops within a given track are going ahead, perhaps somebody, maybe one or two people on the MAG, could volunteer to sort of husband that track, bring together the organizers of that track, look at the whole set of issues that's covered and ask, you know, is there any topical subject such as Mark mentioned in that track which isn't addressed which one or more of the sessions could adjust slightly in order to assure that you actually have, across a whole track, a comprehensive coverage of that subject. Somebody said earlier you have a diversity of subjects, diversity of perspectives, but you actually have a diversity of coverage across a theme.
And the other thing I would say is, when asking people to combine workshops, if they could be encouraged to not simply take two workshops with four presenters and turn it into one workshop of eight presenters leaving an audience with 90 minutes of being talked at by eight people. I don't know that anyone enjoys the lack of interactivity there.
And, finally, I thank the MAG members for having to go through this Swiss cheese-based experience in grading and selecting. I don't envy you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Thank you for that. See that? Somebody's grateful for your work.
[Laughter]
Chris?
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: So I'm not necessarily suggesting we should do this, but I think it's instructive to take a look at what would happen if we did.
If we were to reduce the time for the workshops to 60 minutes and we were to have a 15-minute break in between each workshop to allow for the room to change -- and I know there are challenges with that because people will run, but bear with me -- you could do six per day and six rooms, which means 36 workshops, which over four days means 144 workshops. So, whilst I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should reduce the time for the workshops down to 60 minutes, there is a considerable time gain to be had by making reductions.
The challenge with us doing that is making the judgment call, which does concern me. So, looking at the workshop -- there's a difference between looking at the workshop and saying that makes the cut and that doesn't and looking at a workshop and saying I think that one should be an hour and a half and that one should be an hour. I'm not convinced we necessarily have enough information to do that. So I'm happy to give it a go, but I'm concerned about, if everyone was reduced, then you've kind of got a case of everyone being reduced. But, if you're going to try to do it, it's very, very hard to do.
So I want to endorse Patrick's point and go back to it again and go back to some kind of guidance on a number would be really helpful.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Basically, I close the list. But Liesyl?
>>LIESYL FRANZ: Thank you, Chair. I don't mean to extend your time. I just want to react to the timing issue. I think on any workshops, whether you have a roundtable or a panel, an hour is very challenging to allow for the interaction of whoever is not speaking but raises their hand in the room for interaction. So I would strongly urge that we consider the 90-minute time frame that includes the switchover of the rooms. We've always been accommodated to rooms that switch over even though some discussions have gone long over 90 minutes and made the room switch difficult. But at least there is that time. Then, if there is a differential, then a 30-minute flash session would be the differential, not an hour to 90 minutes.
I'm a little concerned about flash sessions. I hesitate to even say this because I haven't done it or been there. But just in thinking about the scale of the EuroDIG vis-a-vis the full global IGF, for example, we just need to take that into account and the number of people that haven't been exposed to that. So we just need to consider that as -- when we're considering that option. And, of course, I make my comments for your consideration. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. I would really like to close the discussion now. I think we had the constructive proposal, but there are also concerns that the one-hour slot for everyone might be a little bit short. And I think we had a lot of traction with the idea of having flash sessions. So why won't we work on that basis? And my suggestion would be, okay, let's go. That we approve 72 workshops, that is, would, basically, be the six parallel tracks in the first go. And that would be taking 4.5 point or whatever it was -- 4.42 points average will give us that score.
But let's go through the list. Let's validate whether we really are comfortable with all of these workshops that are more than 4.42. And let's also look at the others. And they will be, potentially, the flash sessions. And we try and work out what the schedule would look like if the others are accommodated in the flash sessions. But that does not mean that we don't also look at potential mergers of sessions and that we would go into groups tomorrow morning to do this selection.
And we have Chengetai send out the e-mail with the assessment. And we have a group which has more of a -- and that's a first time, actually, we have a strong economic action Internet as engine for growth and advancement. We have 37 workshops there. But we would need a facilitator for -- first, before asking for facilitator for each of them, let me read out the other various groups.
The second one is principles of multistakeholder cooperation and enhanced cooperation. And somehow I feel we have a facilitator for that one.
A third one is human rights, freedom of expression on the Internet, Internet governance, principles. Anriette would have been a fairly logical facilitator, but she's not here.
And then we have legal frameworks and cybercrime. And the regional track will be addressed actually before we meet already at quarter to 9:00. Now, I see some flags up. Paul and then Bill.
>>BILL DRAKE: Just a real quick point. Looking at this four-way split, why don't we -- we can reduce it to three and fragment the group less. You've got the last one -- legal frameworks has what? It's got 23. CIR, I would say, could easily go with enhanced cooperation, which is a logical connection, obviously, given everything that we've talked about. Other could go wherever. Doesn't matter. And legal frameworks could go with Internet as engine for growth. And then you've got 50 something -- low 50s on that one, low 50s on that one, low 50s on that one. So you have three groups instead of four, and we split up less. And we can have --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Excellent suggestion. Thank you for that. And, actually, it goes with the rooms we have. Yes, Constance.
>>CONTANCE BOMMELAER: Yes. Just to add on this excellent proposal, I would see Internet as an engine for growth and development -- and as we're expecting discussions about MDG to be more and more important, it might be relevant for our group to consider adding development.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Let's not wordsmith the titles. We can go through that afterwards. But we would agree then having these three groups. Now, could we find --
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Could we confirm the groups again, because I got lost.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. The Internet as engine for growth. And we would -- Bill, why don't you repeat them?
>>BILL DRAKE: If you added to the first group legal frameworks and cybercrime, then that one would have 47/53. And then the second one principles is -- what is it? I can't think any more. 51. So same neighborhood. And then put other and CIR with -- sorry, put CIR with principles and multistakeholder and enhanced cooperation. Just because substantively it makes sense. And then other could go to human rights. Doesn't matter.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Do we have that? Internet as engine for growth and advancement plus legal frameworks and cybercrime.
And then principles of multistakeholder cooperation, enhanced cooperation, and CIR is the second one.
And the third one is human rights, freedom of expression on the Internet, Internet governance principles, and other.
All we need know is facilitators for each of the groups. Internet as an engine for growth and advancement plus legal frameworks -- we can also have two facilitators. Olga would like to take a group. And, Chris, are you volunteering? Yeah, sorry. You need two, yes.
Okay.
Is Veronica in the room from the OECD? Yes. Would you be willing to join that group? Yes. Okay. And we have economic know how in that group.
Theresa, may I put you on the spot for the principles of multistakeholder cooperation? Yes.
>>THERESA SWINEHEART: I hate to ask this -- and I was multitasking, I confess. We're facilitating what?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Breaking out into groups tomorrow to look at the workshop proposals under these headings. And, at the same time can have discussion how best to feed them into the -- how to link them to the main session and integrate.
>>THERESA SWINEHEART: So I'm happy to do that, but only if there are -- if there's help.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes. No, we do need two people to do that.
>>THERESA SWINEHEART: In particular new MAG members and others.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Raul?
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: One question. Suppose that tomorrow we would select the workshops?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: We would go through the list, yes. And with the objective, basically, to -- we would go through the list of all the workshops. And the aim would be to make the selection of the 72 workshops that would give -- be given 90 minute slots. And these are, basically, those above the grading of 4.4, I think, or something. That would give us 72 slots.
But --
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: And we have the evaluation of the compilation of the evaluation for doing that work tomorrow?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: That's available.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: I sent one last night. I'll send another one today.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Paul?
>>PAUL WILSON: Just a small point, but you'll recirculate the latest data with the new grouping of these categories, right? It's not clear what the final groupings are. I'm trying to track them up there, and it's not clear. So it would be useful to have that tonight.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. We'll send that around. But we need a second cofacilitator to help Theresa for the multistakeholder corporation. Subi. Okay. Thank you.
And then the last group will be human rights, freedom of expression, Internet governance principles. And, who would like to volunteer for that one? Paul? And Ayesha. Okay. Qusai, you can also help. I need two or three people to drive this group. We have three rooms tomorrow morning?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Yes, we do.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: And the suggestion would be we meet straight away in these groups?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: I don't want to say anything, because I might prolong the discussion.
[Laughter]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: The first one -- what was the middle one again. No. The first one was what topics and who's going to lead that?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: It's the Internet as an engine for growth and advancement plus legal frameworks and cybercrime. And --
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: So where did CIR go?
>>BILL DRAKE: CIR is the second one.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: The second one?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Enhanced cooperation, principles of multistakeholder cooperation.
>>CHRIS DISSPAIN: Thank you, Markus.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Chengetai makes a good point. It will be useful if, for each of these groups, we have incoming MAG members associated -- so we have Subi who volunteered for the third -- is it the third group? The second group. So it would be good to have an incoming MAG member for the first group and for the third group as well. Susan, which group? Number 1. Okay. And Patrick, did you volunteer?
>>PATRICK RYAN: Sure. I'll volunteer for the free expression group. But I'd also like to take advantage of the fact that Anriette is not here and volunteer her for that group as well. Just kidding. But yes, I'll volunteer for that group.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. So are we all -- sorry, Mark. You have a question.
>>MARK CARVELL: Yes, thanks, just a quick question to make sure I'm clear. The low scoring workshops we have two objectives to consider, to consider whether they can be merged successfully or, secondly, whether we as MAG members or as a group seek to work with the proposers to improve. Am I capturing the two objectives for the low scorers?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: For the low scorers there would be multiple objectives. One of them would be simply to say this is excellent for a flash session as it is. But it could also be -- this could be -- could gain from merging with another proposal and that could also be with a high scoring workshop. Or it could be indeed the MAG decides no, we understand this workshop maybe does not have enough experience. But one MAG member could offer to coach them or couple MAG members. But I think they have to look at it on their own merit. But the basic thing would be to see if they'd be candidates, essentially, for flash sessions. But we should not exclude other options. Tero?
>>TERO MUSALA: Just for consistency, I propose that we get some written principles to help us for tomorrow. Otherwise we have 57 different interpretations of what we should do. Sorry about that.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Okay. I've decided to say what I wanted to say.
[Laughter]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Well done.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Cutting it at 4.42, we have a little bit of a disparity because, for example, we have some categories, as Izumi pointed out, that we have some categories, let's say, for the human rights, freedom of expression where there were 30 workshops but only six made the grade. And then Internet governance we have 15; 10 made the grade. So a third of those went through. So do we want to do this? We can. It's no problem. It's just that we have to be aware of it. Or should we take it in okay, we want 72 workshops, which is a certain message of the proposals that went in. And then take a certain percentage of each group so that you make it equal? Or do you just want to keep it as it is that the high scoring ones -- so it doesn't matter that there are some groups that only have six coming in. And then there's, like, the other group, which has 28 workshops and half of them go in. That's what I wanted to say, and I was a bit afraid of saying it.
[Speaker off microphone.]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: It's a good point. And I knew he was going to say it, and it makes life complicated. I see quite a lot, okay. Okay, okay, hang on. Vlada. Yuliya?
>>YULIYA MORENETS: Thank you. I would just like to strongly support what Tero just said about we do need a kind of written framework for tomorrow that maybe we need to circulate in the MAG list just to be -- you know, sure what is the basis --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: But the longer we discuss, the less time we give the Secretariat to produce --
>>YULIYA MORENETS: No, no, sorry. And concerning the -- I would suggest to take a percentage of each group for, you know, for the consideration.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Yes.
>>MIKHAIL KOMOROV: Yes. My name is Mikhail Komorov of Russia. I just wonder -- I'm not a MAG member. I'm just a newcomer, actually. I'm wondering if there any criteria -- you know how are you going to mark newcomers. Because no one said how is it -- how is that going to be distinguished from others how their proposals will distinguished. That's why it's quite interesting. I came here just to support my workshop proposal. And I don't know if it's on the list or not and so on or how it's going to be treated. So thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Susan, Ayesha, Subi, and Izumi.
>>SUSAN CHALMERS: Very briefly. Susan Chalmers. I think that the second way that Chengetai proposes would be a good way to proceed in terms of percentages and so also agree with Yuliya.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Ayesha.
>>AYESHA HASSAN: I think that, since me and Paul and a few others are -- Patrick are leading the group that has the situation that Chengetai has described, I would like to take a bit of time with the group to look at the ones that fall under the 4.4 to see whether we want to just cut it off there or not. There might be some that fall into the other categories. I think we do need to respond to and be cognizant of some of the input we received yesterday in that regard. The second thing, Markus, I just wanted to seek clarification because we do have non-MAG members in the room and they've not received the assessment and weren't part of that evaluation process. Can you just clarify what they should be doing tomorrow morning and how they will be integrated into the discussion or not? Thanks.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: That is a good question. And that's, basically, up to you guys to decide. My advice would be to keep it as open as possible and assuming they have not -- I mean, accepting the fact that they have not the same information as you have because you spent a lot of hours actually on doing the hard work, but also listening to their comments. And I think what we heard is clearly saying be sympathetic to new proposals, new voices, and in particular to the developing world. Bill.
>>BILL DRAKE: When we did the rankings, we were ranking them against our own criteria in our heads and not as parts of categories. And we ranked them based on what we thought were the best. If we now say, we put them into categories, oh, there's more in this than that one and we change the formula, you could end up penalizing a bunch that were ranked high because people thought they were good in order to pull in a bunch that people thought were not good in order to have more balance across these artificially created categories. I'm not sure that's particularly fair to anybody. And, to me, it's contrary to the logic of having done this entire exercise. I don't want to spend hours and hours until 2:00 in the morning trying to grade these things if the grades are only going to be thrown out afterwards. This is, to me, kind of contrary to the purpose.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: I don't think we want to throw it out. I think we appreciate the hard work put in. But at the same time what I call preferential differential treatment. And I think it's felt that has not been taken into account enough. But nobody talks about penalizing those who scored high. Just scoring of going through them, checking. Maybe there are mergers or whatever. There might be those who put the names of people who have not agreed. Just a validation process.
>>BILL DRAKE: I understood Chengetai to be saying that we would try to achieve a balance across the three groups by reducing in some and expanding downward in others.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: He asked the question.
>>BILL DRAKE: Okay.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: And your point is no.
>>BILL DRAKE: But other colleagues disagreed with me. And I just wanted to express my view. There are two sides to the argument.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: This is a complicating question that complicates things. In the first cut I would also argue in favor of accepting the cut as it is and look whether you can balance between the groups in a reasonable way to reflect the overall -- but the balancing act would also be that you group a few of them together and add them as maybe a roundtable discussion or whatever. Raul?
>>RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Yes. I think that that's -- in order to make it more simple, I think that's -- each of us know that there is a maximum of 12 workshops per team. And I think they have to bring to the whole MAG the decision. If they find that there are some good workshops that are less qualified but deserve to have an opportunity to be improved or is an original topic or is an original format or whatever else, they have the right to bring it. But not more than 12. And not 14. To reach the -- this number of 12. If they find only 10 workshops, they propose that deserve to be elected, I'm okay. So we would have room for approving -- selecting some workshops from other topics later.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Jeff.
>>JEFF BRUEGGEMAN: As a process point, I think we'll learn a lot, as we're all saying. I don't think we should lock in any numbers. But I think they're very helpful. And we get together in the smaller groups. And I think last year that was an extremely productive process to quickly find out what we're doing. And I would say I don't think we should make sure that we have a certain number of critical infrastructure. But, if we find that there are interesting topics that were raised but the workshop wasn't valid, you would try to fix it. If we find there are three workshops on cyber security that are duplicates and then we eliminate it. I think maybe if we reconvene after lunch or kind of midday to assess the numbers, they're helpful to be guided that we're shooting for a target of around 70-80. We have the ratings as a guiding point. And I think we'll learn a lot on the small group process without locking ourselves into any numerical formula going in. And then let's see where we are.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Would you like to -- Subi? And Fiona. And can we then close the list.
>>SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Markus. Subi Chaturvedi. I just want to concur with Jeff. And this is not -- since we're going to break out into small groups and we'll undertake this exercise, this is not certainly an exercise to dismiss the ratings and indications we have, which are a good starting point.
But we did put out a call with six different themes. And it would be a little strange to have two workshops and one theme and about 13. So, not to artificially impose a balancing act. But, if we can make some effort and make more effort in setting this balance somewhat right and looking at workshops across categories and teams so that we're more inclusive and representative, it would be wonderful. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thanks. To apply it with some flexibility. Fiona and Chris.
>>FIONA ALEXANDER: Yes, thank you. Maybe because I'm new I can say it this time. I'm having a little problem following what we're actually doing. We're solving a problem that doesn't exist yet because we haven't actually gone through the exercise of doing this. But, if you're saying there's 72 workshops and you've now broken us into three teams, we each need to come up with between 24 and 30 that we think are good. And then you bring it back together and have a discussion about the ones that overlap or don't overlap. But this artificial there's got to be a certain number from each group seems artificial versus quality versus quantity.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Well, the first criteria is their scoring list. But now there may be needs for some rebalancing. To have two workshops and one of the major themes when you have 30 proposals indeed might be a bit awkward. Chris.
So there's a real danger here of three teams going off and doing three entirely different things, so we have to be very clear. It seems to me that -- I agree with Bill. Unless you're going to discount your current scoring, that's got to be your scoring point. These workshops would have been scored in a different way if the scorers knew that they were trying to balance the topics. And they didn't. So they scored them just scored them. So the scores are perfectly valid. And the fact that they happen to a skewing of topics is just the result of the scoring. Now, it seems to me that if we set our number at 4-point -- what was it, Chengetai? 4-point something or other. Then, presumably, you go through all those workshops and you make sure that, notwithstanding the fact that they were scored at the right level, they're all okay, they all fit, and everything's all right. And, presumably, that's not a particularly long exercise because they've already been scored, right?
Then we're left with the rest. Are you asking each of these groups to go through the rest by whatever method they choose and come back to the room with recommendations for the following: Either some of these are great for flash mobs, or whatever it was we're supposed to be calling them; and some of these are really good and should be added to the 72 to increase the number? Because that strikes me as being a logical and sensible way forwards. And, if we end up with another 10 that could be added to the 72, then that's fine. If we end up with another 30, we can start this exercise all over again tomorrow afternoon. Won't that be fun? But, if that's the logical way forwards, then I think if every group does exactly that thing, we'll end up with a sensible response. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: That was the idea. Yes. Matthew. Izumi?
>>IZUMI AIZU: Yeah. I largely agree with what Chris said. I was wondering about that. If you look at --
>>MARKUS KUMMER: When you agree, you don't need to say so.
>>IZUMI AIZU: No, no. Because what I read from the table is, number 50 is 4.65 and number 90 is 4.29. In between -- so there are very small margins of these 40 or so in sort of gray areas that we really need to work how they group and I think our task is to define what very much accept -- will accepted be there and then you have to dig more in details of why we need this one, even though it scored relatively low and come back, right? And then are we going to discuss the result as a plenary to make all these final decisions, or how do we -- it's finalized?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: We have to meet in a plenary mode, of course. And question is, what is a reasonable time slot to give to you guys? Well, I mean, you have done the homework. You have gone through all the workshop proposals at great length. It's just a question of validating and looking at them in this light. Three hours? That would be the whole morning session.
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Two? Yeah? If it can be done in two will be better. Have a rush through the list. And meet before lunch in a plenary mode. Okay. Matthew.
>>MATTHEW SPEARS: Thank you, Chair. This is a logistics issue. I have a message from a remote MAG person who would like to know how they can participate. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Well, the Secretariat will communicate that. Presumably it's not possible to have remote participation from three rooms, is there?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: We have a plan.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: They have a plan in mind, that's good.
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: No, are we will sent something on the schedule changes [ Speaker off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Right, the Secretariat will send out the details beforehand. So the rooms are -- Farzaneh the rooms are which rooms? Do we have three rooms tomorrow?
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: That makes two rooms.
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay, okay.
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Give room allocation to each group with the instructions. Yes. Raul. Okay. So everybody moderately -- equally moderately unhappy? That's an excellent outcome. And --
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Well, we have the regional track meeting starting at 8:45. And they -- can we ask them to start a little bit earlier? Paul, Marilyn, or would that be asking too much? Can you start at 8:30? Yes? Well, you know, okay. But you are facilitating, Paul and Marilyn. Sorry.
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Okay. Can we say 8:30, those who are interested in working on the regional track and you meet in this room. Then the three groups meet at 9:30 and we give them two hours and meet then in a plenary mode at 11:30, everybody together. Okay. And before --
[ Speaker is off microphone. ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: 8:30 those interested in the regional track, and that's facilitated by Paul and by Marilyn, meet in this room. 9:30 we have the three groups meeting in this room and in the room that we will get, the Secretariat will send out the information. And we meet again at 11:30 in a plenary mode in this room. And before handing back to our honorary chair for adjourning the meeting, also Chengetai would like to say something.
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Sorry. I just want to be very clear. So at the end of this meeting I'm going to send the Excel sheet out with the workshops and I'm going to highlight the breaking point of 4.42. You've also requested the room, so in the e-mail there's going to be the rooms and there's going to be information on the rooms -- the remote participation.
There was also a request for clear instructions on how to grade -- how to -- how the selection process is going on. That is where I am faltering a bit. Can we have a recap on those clear instructions? Because it has to come from you. It doesn't come from me.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Well, I think summing up the clear instructions, that I at least -- at least I heard, and so please shout me down if I'm wrong in recapping it, is that you validate the workshops that have made this cut of 4.42 --
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: Yes.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: And that means looking at them just to see if there's not any overlap, maybe potential mergers, or whether they have cheated with the names they listed because you have been listed seven times and you have never been asked and you may decide that that for one reason or another, that workshop actually needs to be regraded or whatever. And you also look at the other workshops in this gray zone, whether they can be actually added to the list of the ones that are improved, also in light of various criteria, balance maybe on the themes but also the intrinsic quality of the workshops, and then you look at the others, whether there are the ones that are below, whether there are workshops that would require some assistance, some coaching from MAG members in order to go through as 90-minute workshops or whether they should be flash -- not flash mobs, I think flash sessions was the word. Is that a fair description, fair summary?
>>CHENGETAI MASANGO: One question. Is there going to be a limit on the number of workshops that each group can choose?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: No, let's see how many they choose and let's see whether it makes sense and whether we can accommodate it. And then we meet at 11:30. And before handing back to the Chairman for suspending the meeting, I would also like to remind you that one thing we should be able to come up with is a suggestion for the main theme of the meeting, and yesterday the theme building bridges has found marked support with maybe a subheading of enhancing multistakeholder cooperation, that that's maybe tweaked but this is something we really should agree on tomorrow so we can hand back to the Undersecretary General a proposal by the MAG for convening the meeting. I think that is -- basically the next formal step will be then for the U.N. to convene a meeting. In order to do that, the U.N. will need a heading for the meeting. And with that, I would like to hand over to you, Chairman, for adjourning.
>>ASHWIN SASONKO: Great, Markus. Ladies and Gentlemen, I think it's five minutes to 6:00 p.m., time for us to suspend the meeting. I just want to give -- to share some of my comments actually. This is interesting that Izumi say that many people are shy to speak. He knows very well how the Japanese, how the Indonesians are characters. We are shy because it is our culture and also perhaps used to be none, still like that. It's still like that. And we do not want to have a silent majority. And as a leader I am very afraid of this silent majority. We may make some sort of activities. Everybody seems happy. Actually they are not happy. So it's interesting to see this kind of things, especially in the many Asian countries. So I think we have to take care about that.
Some discussion with the open forum. The possibility for Indonesians to share various experience perhaps in say the activities of inter(indiscernible) island up to handling a vulnerable group of community. I think it's also interesting because you may see also funny things in Indonesia. You ask somebody, have you ever used Internet? The answer will be no. Do you know you have Facebook? The answer is yes, of course. And you have Twitter? Well, I'm a good follower of president of Indonesia. So these kind of things seems funny, but don't forget that there are also many people around Indonesia, who live around Indonesia, and you ask them, have you been to Indonesia? No. Have you been to Bali? Oh, several times. You been to Indonesia? No. You been to Bataan? Almost every week. Bataan is a small island near Singapore and everybody in Singapore goes to Bataan for holiday for whatever. If they need to buy something, so they go to Bataan. So this kind of thing also happen about Internet in Indonesia.
And finally of course I think I should -- I would like to add my colleagues who yesterday discussed about the situation in Bali. I think all of you might aware that Indonesia -- Bali is six hours different with Swiss. But Mr. Chengetai, you know that of course, hopefully. So not only the first day if you are from Europe, you'll be very sleepy in the morning. And if you're from the U.S., you'll be very sleepy in the afternoon. But you are in the eastern area. From Hawaii, then you will be very sleepy at night. You know, 6:00 p.m. This kind of things that perhaps can be considered when you make the meetings. You know, this is just nature. I'm very -- this morning -- yesterday morning I still woke up at 3:00 a.m. in the morning. I just cannot sleep again because it's already 8:00 p.m -- 8:00 a.m. in Jakarta time so --
>> Thanks for using WebEx. Please visit our Web site at www.webEx.com.uk.
[ Laughter ]
>>ASHWIN SASONGKO: Yep, okay. So the computer told me to stop speaking.
[ Laughter ]
And just look at the www something, something, something. Well, okay. I think this just additional information and final, of course, the Indonesia Civil Society and Internet Society is very strong, so it is expected that many members of the Indonesian Civil Society and Internet will join the meeting and it will be good for them -- it will be good for us and hopefully also for the region and also for the world. So with this I would like to suspend the morning -- the meeting until tomorrow morning. And I'm not sure whether you have mentioned about the time schedule tomorrow morning.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes.
>>ASHWIN SASONKO: Okay. Thank you. And see you tomorrow.
[ Applause ]