Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Naiorbi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 29, 2011 - 16:30 PM
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. 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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>> Welcome, especially to those people who are coming in. It would be quite nice if we could sit around the inner circle, I think, and feel more close.
>> DAVID: Okay. Well, welcome, and I guess we'll get started. This workshop is concerned with the relationship between global and local approaches to public policy.
I'm an academic at the London School. I'm also a Senior Associate of ISD, the Institute for Sustainable Development, which is a sponsor of the workshop and the workshop that is being done here, and Ben Akoh is the person leading that particular project.
Just a few introductory thoughts. I think from my point of view there are two starting points for looking at the relationship within global and local approaches. The first way in which the IGF brand has expanded and to some extent changed because it's been used for national/regional events as well, there's been a lot of enthusiasm for this proliferation of national and regional IGF in recent years, and in practice that's quite a lot of difference in the character of those events, and I suspect, probably as you know, also quite a lot of difference in the level of success, in reality. Though some of them have also been more concerned to access feeder events, bringing issues up to this global IGF, and whatever has been more concerned to relate to their national/regional Internet Governance, public/policy environments and looking downwards to the societies they come from. I think maybe there's a chance now to look a bit beyond the sort of enthusiasm which greets them in the main sessions. And take a bit of a deeper look at the record and what the experience suggested is the potential that they have for adding to public policy engagement.
The second issue is -- that I think is -- rather than -- the complex nature of the interface between Internet Governance and other public policy domains, so I want to see if you may know the work which I've done on mapping of Internet Governance and public policy which was presented in a workshop earlier this week, which tries to emphasize the complex relationship between different tiers and types of Internet Governance activity, of which I'll perhaps stress a couple here.
The first is the continuum that runs from Internet Governance activities which are concerned with the internal workings of the Internet, one, and two, two areas where the Internet has made highly important and perhaps transformative changes in which certain areas of public policy are managed, such as Intellectual Property and some aspects of security in the middle, two of the far end areas, where the Internet is one of a number of different aspects -- a number of different factors which are influencing the direction of public policy, say in areas like educational health. Under the area of -- you have a number of Internet-intensive institutions which are highly significant dealing with standards and the domain name system. For example. At the other end of that you have -- this is a primary role, lies not within Internet agencies but within the mainstream governance agents -- organizations of Government departments and the private sector and NGOs. The Internet plays a part in them. That's --
The other issue I think is the different gradations of intervention which there are in Internet Governance from laws and regulations and standards at one end of the -- that particular continuum, that is intrusive interventions which seek to direct the course of things, as a policy cord nation, social -- coordination, social norms are the other, the way in which society works without being directed by institutions to do so. So if you would that's kind of a general introduction to the theme.
In the particular workshop here we want to look at -- IGF wanted to look at some of the -- ISD wanted to look at the experiences and what it implies for the broader direction of public policy discourse, and we're going to start with a contribution from Raul Zambrano from the UN development programme. He'll set the scene by talking about the challenges of engaging a broader -- broader constituency than governments and democracy in general. Then we've got -- how many contributors? Then? From different actors? We have Byron Holland from the authority. We have Alun Michael from the U.K. Parliament. We have Alice Munyua from this country and this -- here. Alice is the icon of the member of the IGF, so we'll call it. And they can talk in turnabout the U.K. and East African experiences, and do we have anyone else? And a remote participant who will also come in at that stage.
So we'll have that first and some discussion around that and then Ben Akoh from ISD will introduce some work that ISD has been doing to develop toolkits which it is hoped will help to take forward the relationship between the Internet sector, the ICT sector and other areas of public policy in the future.
Okay. So with that I'll start by asking Raul Zambrano to talk about the challenges of engaging broader constituencies in governance and democracy.
>> Thank you very much, David. Take, for example, climate change. Climate is going to affect all of us. We need policies on the national level to attack climate change. So the question is how do we go from a global issue to have a national policy, which is Internet, and here I think the -- there are issues because it's going to affect all the countries and they need to be. How does this work?
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>> -- in Eastern Europe, and when you go and talk to the people who are in charge of this, they'll tell you on the one hand they're having a hard time passing laws to critical invention approve. (no audio) -- there's a mechanism, governance, who then approve some sort of agreement. It goes back to local, and then it has to be on the agenda of that country. So that's how it works. It's a loop, goes global, and then we have somehow taken it past legislation and implement that. Mostly development countries are good only on passing laws and not very good on implementation. So that is interns governance. I work on the governance area. Governance is complicated issue. We call it Democratic governance, not (off mic) governance. Why? Because governance in the EU has participation. People are part and parcel of policy making processes. So such things as conventions and other things passed by people should be consulted, should be part and participate in the process.
Now, participation has five levels, I remind you, and usually we only do two, which is awareness raising and consultation. We never do representation, partnerships and audits, so the three top layers which are the most sophisticated levels of participation are not done. So you can see, for example, consultation, where I can tell you and inform you and maybe ask a question and then I assume that's the other story, and then we pass along, where in theory I could actually involve you as orders of the policy and then ask you to -- with me, with Government of the other parties, the policy, and then check what happened if the policy isn't working, with implementation, and this requires there is an agenda.
So the Internet. It's been involved -- I was involved in the beginning -- (off mic) this is a long history, but to set a priority for developing country. Think about this. We have countries who are poor who need to cater to both global issues and local issues, so they have to prioritize, and they have to balance the act. There's a capacity issue. They can only do so many things, a resources issue. They can only fund so many things.
So what happens with Internet Governance? We can still create at the local level some (off mic) led by society. That's easy to do. What's difficult to do and I think David will approve this, is passing legislation on this. Why? Because there's many priorities on the agenda. So what we need to do is to mainstream the Internet Governance into the governance issue, from the beginning. So if a country is -- the NBGs, for example, they should factor in Internet and other technologies from the beginning because then is too late to do it. So it's not -- it's not that we have to add another option to the menu of priorities. This cuts across most of the things you're doing, so you should be aware of this. And in this sense it becomes a critical priority for many people.
My last point before I -- my opening statement, is how the Internet, Internet Governance, is linked to Human Rights. There are two counts here. What I hear here is the Article 19 argument, (off mic) suppression. That's what we hear. There are 30 articles in the convention, 30 or more, and they have (off mic) rights, which are not political rights. But we never discuss this. It's a right to enjoyment, it's a right to house, it's a right to health and education. We never discuss this. But the Internet allows us to deliver those goods and rights to people, so it's bigger than freedom of expression, and we could (off mic), because then politicians will see that there's (off mic) what they do all over the place, economic, social, political, with Human Rights and with political. And that's an important point and I want to emphasize this again. This is a cross-cutting issue.
If you see one Human Rights thing, one Human Rights Article, it's critical -- in the meeting we can discuss this, openness is part of the private security. That's important. But also important for developing countries is how do we tackle the critical development issues that we face in poor countries, and it's not the Internet. It's people who are starving, those who have bad health. And if I make that connection, then we have a good ground to pass --
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>> -- bring it to our national or regional environments, and while the global one is somewhat prescriptive, even though it's a multistakeholder environment, it's somewhat prescriptive in terms of what the themes are. In the Canadian context we said we were leaders in the multistakeholder model. Let's see what comes up from the ground in terms of generating the themes.
So I think that was one key element we felt strongly about as we went forward with hosting our first one, and that is what do Canadians want to talk about? Obviously in our business we certainly have our thoughts on what it should be, but what do Canadians want to talk about? What are the themes of relevance when it comes to the Internet and Internet Governance in particular that they want to surface and talk about in a multistakeholder environment. So that was the key approach.
I'll just give you a high level of how we did it, and then come back to each step in a fairly brief way. Because we had a multi-stage way of attacking this issue, first in late 2009, so we're over a year in the planning of this before we delivered it, we put out a survey that was Canada-wide, statistically relevant, 1700 people, crosscutting against geography sections, different stakeholder groups (no audio) in November of last year, we opened up an on-line forum to continue to engage those folks and expand it to our member base -- pardon me, CIRA is a membership driven organization so we put it out to all of our members and allowed more input there. And from all of those exercises, working with ISD and another partner MNET, we developed discussion papers that really started to teas out the themes and drill down into them, and we put those discussion papers out and made them public in the lead-up to the national event that we had.
And it was a one-day event in February of this past year -- or February 2011, rather, and we brought together all kinds of stakeholder groups to our event, which was held in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, and it was an all-day event where we discussed many of the themes that came up. It was a true multistakeholder event where people could speak from the floor.
And just as an aside there, I thought it was very interesting, we who work and live and breathe in this world take it for granted, but when you actually take it back to the general population, even those very interested in Internet issues, they're quite amazed that they can just get up and say their piece or ask questions. So it was really invigorating to see how people who are not regularly exposed to the multistakeholder model suddenly got very passionate about it. You could literally see it happen from the floor.
At that national event we explored the themes, we had different types of speakers, panelists, politicians. We had in our bureaucracy the assistant deputy minister sort of --
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>> -- drill down a little bit more on the steps. I'll make it brief because I know there's many speakers and we'll take some questions, if you want.
I think one of the key elements here for us with the second stage where we did small regional consultations, and that really allowed us to drill down into the stakeholder groups, get people who don't often come out to multistakeholder events but are expert in their domains and get a Round Table that had all the different participatory groups, so we started that exchange regionally.
And one of the unintended consequences, and obviously unintended benefits, is suddenly you put people who all had a passion or interest in Internet-related or Internet Governance issues in a room who often would never cross paths otherwise. They started to form their own networks, and I --
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>> -- how do we keep this going. For the feedback for the event --
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>> -- that was a real challenge for us. We reached out and I think, you know, the phrase you can you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. Making it more generic as opposed to technology, and hosting events -- as opposed to hosting them ourselves, piggybacking them on other centric events so we can draw from that seed and grow it. And we also know the day we headed the national event the day was heavy. We need to simplify it and streamline it. So in a quick nutshell that was the process, some of the pros, some of the cons, lessons learned and take aways we had to make next year's event, which would be held in the spring, again, a better event. Thanks.
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>> ALICE MUNYUA: -- begin by identifying what are the local critical Internet Governance issues within the national context in each of the six African countries, (off mic) and those are subjected to discussions and validation at next face-to-face meeting, our one-day face-to-face meeting, and the national IGF then formed a building block for the East African IGF so each country then for its three critical issues at the national level that need to be considered at the regional level, more often than not the issues are similar, you know, a little different but mostly similar. In 2008 the most important issues were -- was access to broadband, and that's about the time that these African countries had begun to invest in the fiberoptic cable, and there was quite a lot of concern concerning affordable access to broadband. There was the issue of local content (off mic), you know, gender and ICTs.
In 2009 again similar issues but the issue of critical Internet resources came up quite strongly, focusing mainly on the (off mic) and the delegation of (off mic) simply because two of the countries were going through the delegation process and that is still to date, in the 2011 East African IGF.
In terms of the stakeholders, we've managed to pretty much include nearly all stakeholders, and this was by working very hard to create a sense of ownership, inviting Government and industry and the technical community to support the national IGFs at the national level, and so that's why each regional IGF has been supported both financially and in terms of process by Government --
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>> ALICE MUNYUA: -- by IGF going to be held in Tanzania and the 6th one in Brunig in 2013.
One of the issues we considered right at the beginning in 2008 is the fact that we acknowledge the global IGF has limitations in terms of it cannot make decisions, it's not a decision-making process. Most of the East African stakeholders felt we needed to makes ours different and didn't want to be impacted or influenced by the global IGF, and so most of this, at least East Africans are key to make something out of the regional IGF. This year's IGF was actually calling for institutionalization of the process, of the forum itself. How that is going to be, you know -- how that is going to be discussed, I think it's going to be a long discussion because it's quite difficult to begin to institutionalize a process like this, and so it's going to be something that is going to be discussed and we'd like to see how that turns out, because the more we call for institutionalization, the more the likelihood that it might end up being a Government-only process, with the likelihood of it being perhaps supported by the East African community, which then becomes, you know, a challenge in terms of (off mic) part and parcel of the process and the bottom-up approach as well. So not sure how those discussions are going to go, so we are looking forward to that in our next year's African IGF.
We've done pretty well with the voting stakeholders. One of the regions we --
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>> ALICE MUNYUA: -- some -- we also decided from the very beginning in 2008 that we would make sure that we would take one specific issue and run it through research, so while mow -- you know, rather than having policy briefs we would take one issue and the first one was research or strengthening (off mic) in East African, an issue that was identified in 2009. We've concluded that research and have shared it with the East African (off mic) and some of them are actually -- may implement some of the policy recommendation that are included in that report by Government. Another research conducted, in the context of the East African is women in (off mic) want to extend that research to the five East African countries, we've only managed to Kenya, we want to extend that, as an East African IGF country outcome.
This year we also had children as an additional stakeholder, you know, a session on -- for children and with children. It was looking at, you know -- mostly access issues, skills development and also (off mic) also cybersecurity and protection of children on-line.
Now, in terms -- I think the challenge for us has been, you know, ensuring that we have an equal role for the various stakeholders, and specific again -- the (off mic) holder model is pretty new for our governments, and it's seen how the role of governments in this process because we can't really do without governments. It is -- there are important stakeholders and we have to come up with a way of engaging with them, taking into consideration the value they bring and the way they work.
I think I'll stop there and -- thank you.
>> Okay. Thank you very much, Alice, and again, that was some really interesting experience that the national IDS is building blocks. So the structure enables you to come forward and the importance of making efforts to involve all stakeholder groups including governments and the value that comes with that. And the challenges that arise from, say, the -- on the one hand, the desire to ensure that the (off mic) has influence and on the other the risks that institutionalizes it and it loses some of its character. So going from east to south, and I didn't announce it at the start, we have Raul Echeberria, who is from LACNIC, the regional industry from the Latin American Caribbean region, the south American IGF.
>> RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you. We have started to -- sorry for my voice. A bit affected after three years of IGF.
We've got in 2008, in LACNIC, we have idea of organizing what we name it as a stakeholder -- stakeholders assembly, just for providing reports to different stakeholders organized in the region. But they are evolving and once -- we have committed the participation of a good number of stakeholders from the region, they will evolve, as we decided to organize a preparatory meeting of IGF. And it was organizing two organizations of civil society, APC, the major organization, and (off mic) NGO from Brazil.
It was a -- the discussion was really very good. It was successful. And after that meeting we organized a consultation, a discussion, over the Internet for one month, and due to the success of that meeting we repeated that manage, and this year we organized the fourth preparatory meeting of IGF, and it has become one of the most important meetings in the region. It has the attention of all the stakeholders at the moment. We have a participation of more than 100 people independently of the place of the original which organized the meeting, also with important participation. And this year we -- since we organized a consultation before the meeting in order to know where they -- the priorities for the community, and so the session that was elaborated based on the priorities defined in the consultation.
The discussion was very intense, very productive. The format of the meeting was from the point of view of the themes. It was a similar structure than ICF -- IGF, the global IGF. There is more interesting in this meeting, I think, that's next year, it will be a more popular meeting yet.
But it is not the only experience. I wanted to share something else with you, that for the first time this year the donors for this meeting decided to put some more money -- a few more money for -- giving some fellowships to the participants of the regional IGF to attend the global IGF, so the condition was that the people that applied for those fellowships would have been people that never attended IGF before. And so we -- we had three people, and that is -- we have three people that participated in the IGF for the first time that participated in that original meeting. This is because the regional meetings are a way to engage more people in the discussion, but also for bringing more people -- new people into the global IGF. So we have not had more than 100 people in -- in the IGF -- in no one of the six meetings that have been organized until now, even in the IGF that was organized in Brazil, while the participation of Latin Americans were bigger than in other parts of the world, it was not more than 100 people. So it is important because it shows that the regional meetings become more important for the discussion in the region than the global IGF itself.
But it is not the only experience that we have had in the multistakeholder dialogue. As a consequence of all this process that started with the preparatory meetings that there was a few years ago, many things have changed, I think, in the world, and, for example, some process that -- in Latin America that used to be (off mic) process now has been open and having participation of other stakeholders. There is one person that I name as ELAC. That is the -- that is a conference that is organized every three years, when it is agreed the action plan for the betterment of society, and it is a ministerial meeting. In the beginning it was just a governmental meeting, but as a consequence of the impact that had been produced by the (off mic) multistakeholders now were because it became an open process for the participation of other stakeholders, and it has been also a very positive experience, and now there is a (off mic) of this process of dealing with the processes that are being made in -- regarding the actual plan between meetings, and the civil society, private sector and Internet community have now participation in this (off mic), for this experience. And it is not an isolated experience because I think this is also a consequence of the process of WSIS and IGF, that is also producing the dialogues in other environments. Thank you. Thank you very much.
>> Thank you very much, Raul, in particular -- for raising this question about the regional IGFs become more important than the global IGFs for the reason, I think it's a strong point chasing through. We'll make an attempt now to connect to a remote participant, and if we are successful we'll hear from Nahmsath Yabouri, who is from Togo in West Africa. He's not actually in Togo himself. He's in Bangui in the Central African Republic, and so can we see whether it's possible to connect?
(off mic)
>> Thank you very much, Nahmsath, for taking time out of your travel.
>> (off mic)
>> And in particular raising the different scenario of an NGO-based forum. Sound will not continue to repeat. That's okay. Will be Alun Michael, he's a member of the British Parliament and a former minister in the U.K. He's been very engaged in these issues for a very long time. Now from the very early days of the IGF and is the most active, I think, member of the British Parliament in this field. So could you talk about the U.K. experience, please?
>> >> ALUN MICHAEL: Yes, I'd like to start by saying that I think the East African example is an excellent one and I was privileged to be at the first meeting of the East African IGF, and I think that were made me realise was that this isn't the (off mic) some countries being ahead of others. There's an enormous amount we can learn from each other and it was a quite inspiring event.
The second thing I just wanted to respond to was Raul Zambrano, comments about governance, because I think it's absolutely crucial to the way that we do things to understand the issue of governance, and I couldn't agree more with the points that you made. I mean, if anybody thought governance was unimportant, I think the collapse of the banks has demonstrated, because that's absolutely and crucially an issue of governance. I'm actually a cooperative in labour, and cooperative governments is something that's very little understood in the administrations of the world. It's harder work, because it's better in terms of participation and better in terms of outcome, and not something from the -- that's something from the local, whether it's engaging people at a village or town level, right the way through that we do things at the international level.
And I think also it's worth -- I agree very strongly about the point about the balanced approach to rights, making sure that we look at all of people's rights. And the big danger in all of this is that politics is driven by events. Politicians have the pressure of the media in the current debate, and the challenge, really, is to get evidence into the hands of non-techy legislators and to show business and Government that this sort of cooperative governance approach is actually a better way to do things. It's not about disempowering them. It's about getting a balance into the way we do things. So that's the first thing I wanted to underlie.
The second thing is the engagement of Parliamentarians. We need people to be basing their decisions in evidence and in principles, so that's where for instance the council of Europe work is so important. But I think the IGF needs a greater engagement of members of Parliament. We've had up to four MPs -- predesigned IGFs this year. My colleague, Eric Joyce, who is here today, and we have the minister present, so that's okay. But I do think that we need a better way of dealing with Parliamentary engagement, if we're going to provide the whole (off mic) about they're engaging, in, into international and national institutions. I think this time the innovation is a high level. On Monday, had an enormous beneficial effect and I hope we can recommend that in the future because what that did was to draw in the number of ministers -- was to draw in the number of ministers and Parliamentarians who perhaps wouldn't have been here.
The other thing is we were talking about the possibility on Day 2 you might have a Parliamentary sessions for legislators but not in the way of going to have a silo on their own, but in the sense of saying can we frame the discussion and perhaps pose questionses, the wider discussion of the IGF during the week so we can have the wider family of the IGF. I think there are ways we can improve things.
The other is the Commonwealth engagement, where we had a session earlier today which was exchanging views within Commonwealth, which goes from very developed to developing countries, and again there's so much to learn from each other that I think these are ways in which we can enhance the value of the IGF, and certainly we at the U.K. have an enormous amount that we are learning from others, as in this session here today.
Secondly, as far as the U.K.'s experience is concerned, like that of others, we started by looking at the IGF on the first occasion in Athens as being actually a talking shop and saying, well, where is this going? We then established the U.K. IGF. We took the general IGF themes and we brought all the partners together to try to work through those themes and say, what are our shared messages into the IGF process?
We also started, courtesy of (off mic) best practice, which I know others have now copied, which is can we bring best practice, an example of best practice to these -- to the IGF, and if anybody hasn't had an invitation, we're putting on a presentation on what came out of this year's awards at the -- at the Tribe Hotel at 7:30 this evening, so if anybody doesn't have an invitation, please see me afterwards. I'd be delighted to see you there.
So that's from our experience, the partnership -- but the other thing I wanted to mention was the question of how you engage Parliamentarians. Again, working with colleagues across party and developing an all-party group, which covers Internet and ICT issues and finding a better way to do things so getting a team of members of Parliament, who have debate with colleagues and with others. And I think you said the Web site has just gone up, which is www.pictfor.com, which is the first stage of making sure that this stuff goes on-line as well so we can share it with others.
And the point there is to cover a group of members of Parliament, not necessarily IT experts or techies, but who are engaged with Parliament in the relationship between Parliament and industry so that we're better informed. And the things that we're doing at the moment, we've started a chief executives forum so that we get the senior people in industry and Parliament around a table about every six weeks, and we've lifted the level of debate quite considerably. More MPs getting involved, more CEOs therefore people taking more serious decisions in industry. We're trying to take this reporting procedure into Parliament. It's been left to a small number of people who have taken an interest over the years, and we've been (off mic) not accounting back to Parliament.
So with the support of the speaker we will be intending to have a debate in the House of Commons, a three-hour debate when we get back, in which Eric and myself will report back on the experience at the U.K. delegation here in Nairobi. The minister will reply to the debate and therefore he'll be reporting from a Government point of view and we'll also be looking at the other issues that are bothering industry around IT. So it's lifting up the agenda of the Parliamentary discussion.
There are other things that I could say, but to keep it brief, can I mention that I think, again, the question is how you can get this partnership approach at every level, in relation to Internet-related crime and nuisance, for instance, we've had two regional bodies within the U.K., (off mic) Wales and the Yorkshire business crime centre, which have discovered that we're wrong to think that the Internet is so big, so all pervasive, so international that you can't do things at a broad local level, and they've brought people to go in a way that's informed within the U.K. to look at how to prevent bad things happening. And that sort of engagement is absolutely crucial.
Perhaps I could say as a former (off mic) it's environment as well. I think we discovered that engaging young people is quite challenging. I think the answer is that it isn't just enough to open the door and say, please join in the debate. We've been very pleased, and there are people here who you might like to talk to from Chardnes in the U.K., who for the past three years have been bringing young people who have been debating among themselves to come and tell Parliamentarians in the U.K. what they think. And a group of them have come to the IGF and I think they've made quite a considerable can impact where they've spoken, and I think this is something that we need to nurture and encourage over time.
And my final point is this: The IGF is a process, not an event, so whether it's the events at a regional level (off mic) right to say as time goes on, the regional and national will be more important than the international. That will be a good thing. The IGF process is not an event, so this week and the discussions we've had, I think it's been a particularly good week for all of us, should inform and inspire what we do outside the IGF itself but not be an end in itself. It should be enabling us to go further and not to come to conclusions but to go away and find our own way of reaching our own conclusions in the right place, which is the right place for individual countries or individual regions where there's a link between their countries and the region. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much, Alun. I think making picking out particularly the importance of engagement of the Internet process (off mic) with the (off mic) entry process and political decision-making. The engagement, partnerships at the local level, that we don't just stop at global, regional and national. And the process with (off mic).
Now, trying to move on, and we don't have that much of it left. Ben Akoh is desperate to introduce his toolkit that ISD is developing. But are there any responses people would like to make to the contributions we have heard? Which I think we've had really interesting points to make. Yes.
>> TOWELA JERE: Good afternoon, my name is Towela Jere, and I'm a co-convener of the Southern African IGF. Thank you very much for your presentations. I think very useful and very insightful information. I just have a few comments, and this is mostly directed at Alice, based on the information you gave about East Africa IGF. I wanted to know when the national IGFs are planning their events. Is there some kind of a template or process template that you give them that guides the national process or is every country pretty much left to decide how they do the nationals themselves? And then further, I also wanted to know the recommendations that emerge from the East African IGF, where do they go as far as, you know, getting implementation, and then do you have a process to actually check if or how the previous recommendations have actually been implemented by the various actors? And then lastly I wanted to also know from your perspective what has been the benefit of involving (off mic) in the IGF. Thank you. For involving the Nigerians.
>> Is there anyone else who would like to raise a point for the panel to respond to? Okay. Alice, I think that's for you, and it's also quite a good introduction to the toolkit use as well.
>> ALICE MUNYUA: okay. In terms of the national processes, we -- we have a very -- very basic framework, and what we advise is that the process must be multistakeholder in nature, it must get together the various stakeholder groups, the key ones, Government, society, industry and the technical community, and that's to ensure that the discussions around what the critical issues at the national level are a multistakeholder process in itself. And I think that's the only, you know -- the only framework we've provided, but then everybody is left to do their own.
The other one is we do not -- there's no one responsible at the regional level to provide any funding for the national processes, and the expectation is that since the IGF itself is a multistakeholder firm that all stakeholders must contribute financially at the national level to ensuring that these are national IGF. And so that's the other thing we encourage, that it's a national process and all the national institutions and individuals and stakeholders contribute towards ensuring that it does take place.
And that again is also the challenge, because again, as I think we all know, the multistakeholder is pretty new way of doing things for most countries, and it depends on the level and the strength the various stakeholder groups. In Kenya, for example, we have a very strong multistakeholder (off mic) and Uganda have the same and Tanzania (off mic) have to depend a lot on the Government and industry and less on society. So I think those are the two areas that we -- we've -- we have, taken as a principle in terms of the multistakeholder model being -- being implemented at the national level.
In terms of recommendations, it's always in the form of a report that is then submitted to governance and to other stakeholder groups, and that sometimes -- in sudden -- the example they gave is the realization -- or one of the concerns that was raised in 2009 regarding, you know, the perception that East African cities were weak.
And so that's -- when you trace that recommendation, for example, you see that we took it all the way to the point of having research that then informs police and currently informing the Rwanda delegation and process and also informing the discussions with the (off mic) the delegation process.
The other recommendations are now being taken seriously by the various stakeholders. I know for Kenya (off mic) some of those recommendations seriously. You note for example we've taken some of the issues that are identified at the national level in Kenya all the way to the global level, you know, the four areas of Internet (off mic) and broadband, and that we'll take back some of those recommendations are going to be implemented by the various institutions.
In terms of benefits, I think it's been a very, very beneficial, and I think the most important one is actually the multistakeholder model itself, in terms of encouraging all stakeholders to think seriously about contributing this new governance process. I think that's it. Thank you.
>> ALUN MICHAEL: If I can comment on the question of the benefit from Parliamentarians. The simple fact is that the Internet is important for every aspect of life of every one of our constituents, whether they're on-line or not, it's affecting everyone. So how can we understand the decisions we have to take, whether they be social or economic or human or Government or legislative, without understanding it in the context of the 21st century ways of communicating and the ways the human interaction takes place. Everything from privacy to security that comes up in every discussion is at the heart of decisions that are being taken by Parliamentarians. So there are three options. One, you leave it to techies and allow experts to tell you what's needed.
The second alternative is to receive briefings or research papers, or the third thing is to be a part of the partnership, and to my mind the third option is the only one worth seriously considering. So it seems to me that Parliamentarians have to be involved in this process. The question is, how do you engage them and engage them in a way that is worthwhile so that they will say, hmmm, that's worthwhile, I'll come again, because it's informing the heart of my activities as a representative of the people.
>> DAVID: Thank you. Just one -- just one thing Alice said there, and maybe it's speculation for us. There's been a lot of discussion in the IGF over the years about whether it could or should make recommendations or (off mic) to make recommendations, but of course the constraints are not at a global level, don't necessarily apply at a national or regional level so there's much more scope for diversity there in terms of outcome documents. Can I ask Ben to give a brief sketch of the toolkit project, where that's going and probably invite people to comment either now or later. Thanks.
>> BEN AKOH: Thank you, David. I think one of the things -- I feel the things that are (off mic) discussion and comments I've been hearing so far is the fact that evidence is quite key and important in shaping how national policy dialogue happens, and especially from the Kenyan IGF, or East African IGF perspective, going into research now as a form of showing evidence is a key part of the process. And based on that, I think that's one of the key lessons that we learned from looking at the IGF processes that we've been involved in in Canada as well as in West Africa, at a broad regional level but also at a specific national country level. And there are two things that I have in mind so far is the fact that evidence is important, and consent is another part. Consent in terms of how the decisions that are made these levels, at these IGFs, would actually affect the people within the country or the jurisdiction.
And so a number of tools have emerge so far that we thought we want to be able to put together that -- in such a way that policy makers or actors within this policy dialogue space can begin to use, and I thought to present those -- a few of those tools that we've seen and have used or have emerge, mostly from some of the things that you all talked about today and from some of the things that we've also implemented in the countries.
They are focused around these two broad themes, of evidence and consent, and so four tools that we've seen so far that I'd like to share with you and maybe get your comments in terms of maybe how you've used them in your countries and perhaps how we could enhance them so that it becomes a tool that other national processes can use, regional institution -- regional gatherings can also use, would be useful. First one is mapping the broad policy landscape. We thought it was important for us to be able to document the policies that are already in place within a country, or a region, the issues that may warrant attention for policy formulation and reform as well as the stakeholders that are involved in the process. So that was -- that's one tool that we have found very useful. Just a broad policy map and landscape. It provides evidence.
The second tool is mapping the ICT landscape specifically, and that actually involves a data analysis and roles of the communities -- of the ICT players within the community itself in terms of their spread, their demographics and the trend of usage of ICTs over a period of time. We found that that is also useful in order to document what the state of policy for ICTs are within a specific area.
The third consent -- excuse me, evidence tool that we have found is a simple on-line survey of any database survey, and we've used the survey methodology quite extensively in Canada, in West Africa, as well as at the national level in countries like Togo, where we've been able to elicit a number of key issues that people thought were relevant for either the country level or the region.
The fourth tool is an expert's Round Table, and this particular tool is more of an undocumented place where you actually get high-level experts into a room and just freely talk about anything that relates to the policy you're trying to discuss, and because it is high-level, you didn't want anybody to be committed based on what they were going to say. So you made it as undocumented as possible, right, unofficial as possible. Perhaps the only thing that emerges from that process is just a statement that the whole group agrees to.
So those are some of the four evidence-based tools that we've used and implemented in one way or the other at the IGFs or national -- at both the national and regional level IGF processes that we've been involved in. The consent-based tools, those are the tools that helps us to gather the consent of the different stakeholders involved, for instance, documenting all of those things that I've talked about earlier, creating what we've called a background paper. Barren had talked about a background area earlier within the Canadian space, and that seems to be a using tool that sets sort of like a baseline of the policies situation within a particular space, and it helps if it's someone that has a good understanding of the policy landscape that -- that documents that, that actually writes that. So it's important that we -- when we think about consent within policy framework, that someone that has that skill is documenting that process.
The second tool within the consent place is the multistakeholder event itself, which I think we've all talked about. I think everyone has engaged in it in one form or another. I won't spend time on that. The important is work groups and workshops that has happened where city consultations were had in very small settings with very pointed and targeted questions discussed within such a focused group. It's very useful for evidence as well as concept.
The second to the last tool I'm going to talk about is perhaps a tool that was discussed by the person from Togo, a scenarios process, and basically it's for people to gather around using a number of data indicate way ahead of time in the future what are the possible scenarios of the Internet and what are its implications on our lives. I mean, you could frame the question in any way, but the framing of the question must come as a result of evidence. And then from that process you begin to back-cast. So in other words, for us to be able to attain this possible future, what other steps that we need to take from now in order to reach that.
Now, this is a process -- a methodology that has been used in a wide variety of areas, particularly in the environmental field, but we find relevance within the ICT field for this particular pool.
Last tool I want to bring up is the on-line discussion board and (off mic) list, and I find the Kenyan situation very, very interesting, that prior to the national face-to-face forum they would have an actual on-line discussion for -- they would pick up themes, dialogue questions and fully moderated discussions and have the broad stakeholder groups dialogue those questions so that reaching a face-to-face meeting it would be a short meeting, it's a lot more efficient. It's validating the discussions that have been had already. So these were a few of the tools that I thought we could discuss and maybe get your feedback as to whether these are useful within your context, how can we enhance them based our experiences, you know, and what could we do with them (off mic) documenting this set of process. Thank you.
>> DAVID: Ben, you took us right up to school bell time. Are there -- pore home who would like to feed back directly into that now, in the whole group, or if you prefer to talk to Ben separately, please do. So is there anybody who would like to make a comment direct to the whole group now? In that case, Ben stand at the door, like a vicar at the end of church and chat with people as they go out. Thank you to all the people for attending. Thank you especially to the panelists who said some really, really interesting things, and it's been very -- it's been very interesting for me and I've made a lot of notes here. I hope it's been useful to you as well. Thank you to the panelists. Thank you to those of you who are here and have a very nice evening doing whatever it is you do. Thank you.
(Applause)
>> BEN AKOH: Just to quickly announce that there is a two-page document right by the door, if you want to take a copy, I describe some of the tools I just talked about, on your way out. Thank you.
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