FINISHED COPY
NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014
ISTANBUL, TURKEY
"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR
ENHANCED MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"
03 SEPTEMBER 2014
2:30
WS180
CROWDSOURCED IDEAS FOR IG:NETMUNDIAL BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE
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This is the output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. 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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>> RICARDO POPPI: We had around NETMundial in Brazil all debates for the conference itself, but especially the experience we had with the public consultation for the Arena NETMundial. Presenting myself, my name is Ricardo Poppi. I work for the Ministry of Social Participation in Brazil, that is the general Secretariat of Republic Presidency.
We are responsible to provide the means of social participation, political participation in the Government.
And we organised the Arena NETMundial in Sao Paulo in parallel with the conference, and we will talk a little bit about that.
We invited to this panel to help us to tell the story, we invited Daniel Fink, that is remote. He worked at the organisation of NETMundial. Now he is working in ICANN. He will tell a little bit about the start of the participation on the draft of the NETMundial.
We invited.Fabricio Solagna, that is remote. He works at the project and helped with us to provide the public consultation, and he will talk a little bit about that.
We invited Joana on my left side here, who helped us in the point of view of Civil Society, helped us to provide the consultation in the organisation. We have here Rodrigo from ICANN. We invited him to tell a little bit about the consultations that ICANN has made and idea and talk about social participation in the Internet Governance as general.
I think it's important for us to approach that. Finally, Renata Avila, that is our remote moderator, and I will ask her to talk a little bit about who she is from WebWeWant, that is an important campaign about the appropriation of Internet.
She had a fundamental role in helping us organising the Arena NETMundial. The main panels and the, how can I say, dependency activities we had around the Internet Mundial was almost like more than 20 independent activities. She had a WebWeWant, and she had an important role in that.
Okay. With no more presentations, I will ask Daniel to tell, to make a speech about the contributions on NETMundial draft. Daniel, can you hear us?
>> DANIEL FINK: Yes. Hello, good afternoon. Can you hear me?
>> RICARDO POPPI: Switch the presentation. Yes, almost perfect.
>> DANIEL FINK: Thank you. I'm speaking from Brazil, Sao Paulo. Let me share with you participation. I hope you can see. It's not very clear, but I hope you can see the screen with the events in the room. You see the contributions from people. This is the first draft. You see the contributions. It drew much more than we expected.
The second part of public participation was around comments for the first draft. Some modifications had to be made. We have some presentations. I'm sure Fabricio can give more details. You can contact us. You can see exactly how it works.
You can see the contribution.
On the roadmap, you can see the roadmap. We can see what is the most relevant discussions perhaps. The paragraph, we see a lot of comments. This is the roadmap. Some people explained, some did not. There are some challenging problems. There were challenges for us, how you can develop some mock‑up and start to solve the problems. Perhaps other features could be added.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you, Daniel. Congratulations for the work. The analysis is very, very interesting for us to see the map, how the contributions and the teams, congratulations for the work of the team.
I will now speak a little bit about the other participation process that were around NETMundial. I please ask to put the second presentation on line.
That was about the Arena NETMundial consultation. We will do that with Fabricio, who will start then, Fabricio, a little presentation. Fabricio, we will start the presentation. We are waiting for people in the room, staff to put the presentation online, the second presentation, the second slides. They are not on the Web, not necessarily to be on the Webex. Yes, exactly.
So we will start when the presentation comes. The idea of the Arena NETMundial was a conference in parallel, an action in parallel with the main conference. It is not a thing that comes out of the blue. It is something that the General Secretariat is using to organise in parallel with normally a shift of states meetings.
We did that in the conference Rio+20. The main conference was happening in one side of Rio de Janeiro, and on the other side of Rio de Janeiro we helped organise an action, a conference of the people where many debates and social participation for the main conference were taking place.
We always do that with our regional block. Every time the chief of the states of Marco Civil meets, we meet. Social participation, that usually sends a document to the main conference of Marco Civil, so it's an example that we used to make and Arena NETMundial was inspired on this.
So what we did, how we did that, I think this is important to mention. We had the idea, but we were not so sure how and who we need to involve on the panels and everything.
So we started to talk. We talked with Sergei, our multistakeholder organisation in Brazil. We talked to local municipality Government of Sao Paulo. We talked with Civil Society, cyber activists. And we organised a series of open meetings in Sao Paulo. It was open by social networks, come to help organise Arena NETMundial.
Then we scheduled time, and we were there presenting the ideas so far, and people contribute. Then we work the idea, one week or two weeks later meeting again, presenting the ideas so far, and so on.
We keep these meetings running for two months, before the Arena. We started in February. The Arena was in April. Can you go one slide, please? It's not working? Okay, one slide, please. It works for me? No, okay. (chuckles).
It's breaking, pardon that. So let's go. What I told you now, it's an action the General Secretariat is using to do ‑‑ it can go. Oh, it's upside ‑‑ okay. Our talking about that, open meetings with Civil Society, crowdsource, all the schedule of the Arena, we opened an online spreadsheet. People suggested names and teams, and everybody that were in the meetings suggested teams and names. And then we cross section the schedule. We got great support from Internet Governance community, people that are at this table, Renata Avila, people that are not here, people that are around Internet Governance community.
We had a close partnership with municipality. We had a close partnership with CGI.BR. It was very important.
Next, please.
The roles of our partners, important to open this. The municipality was very important for logistics and proposing some activities that connected with what they were doing in Sao Paulo municipal Government.
It was very important. They participated in some panels. They proposed self‑organised activities for the people of the city to participate.
So it was a social participation opportunity for people in the local Government either. Next. I can use? Thank you.
Okay. Too much here, CGI.BR, stakeholder, organisation in Brazil for Internet Governance, networking and network, networking, because CGI was very important to help us to connect us with people from Internet Governance.
We are not very connected with those people. CGI helped that, talk to this guy, to that person, to that girl. And then we formed this crowdsourced community, that community that helped to crowdsource the arena. It was very important. In network, because CGI was responsible for installing the wi‑fi network, that worked very well in the Arena space.
Another partnership, Kenexa Globus is an action that happens in Brazil since 2011. It's very interesting because it has the idea of connecting what is happening on the ground, on the debate, with the debates that is going on online.
We used this design, this design that inspired us in Arena. It is a very well‑known activist that is social network activist that is Marcel Blanco. He had a very important role in that, in helping us with the design and production.
Finally, WebWeWant was very important to help us to provide grants for the activities, self‑organised activities. In one of the Civil Society meetings was, people were unanimous asking about this space. Okay, you are organising a social participation action, and how can we really participate with our activities, proposing activities of our agenda.
That was very strong. And then we decided that those opportunities, that we needed to open a call for activities, and WebWeWant was a very important partner on that. It helped us with providing grants that helped to, more activities to come to our call. That was very important.
Another thing, our challenge on Arena was how to connect the panels of, the discussions panels in Arena with the main conference, with NETMundial itself, and how to connect the public consultation that we were opening for providing information, providing organisation to Arena NETMundial, how could we connect this public consultation with the help and with the main conference either. The public consultation appeared for the first time on my speech here.
You have on the table, I distributed some reports about that, very detailed reports about the results, about the methodology. I invite everybody that didn't get one of those reports to get it.
We addressed those challenges. We are going to talk a little bit about that, and about the consultation itself. We think that the consultation for NETMundial itself was going very well. People were given a very good opportunity to contribute with the draft, as Daniel showed us. It was a very important experience. But our goal with Arena and with public consultation for Arena were how can we connect a very big crowd, how can we connect thousands of people on this Internet Governance debate.
That was the challenge that was complementary with the challenge of the NETMundial itself. It was not a competing strategy. It was really, it showed that. It showed us that it was very complementary with the NETMundial.
I remember, I'm seeing Glace here, I remember the first time we presented the idea in Internet CGI.BR, the stakeholder organisation in Brazil, I think we matched this feeling very well. Everybody understood that the action we were going to take was a complementary action to spread the news, to spread the mobilization about and not to compete with the process of the consultation of the process, regular process of NETMundial itself.
So said that, our challenge was how to make that thousands of people could contribute to this debate.
I think we answered that in part. And that is what Fabricio can explain to us a little bit more. Fabricio, can you hear us?
>> FABRICIO SOLAGNA: Hello, are you here? Hello. Okay. I'm working in, I'm talking from Brazil. I thank you for the opportunity to talk a little bit about the consultation process and our experience.
I believe the NETMundial Arena consultation was Internet issue. I think the environment of digital participation in Brazil could give the population to understand the issues of the Internet, and to cooperate on the agenda and review.
My point of view that NETMundial participation was a result from the process as Ricardo said. We have consultation, but we are connected to NETMundial conference, just through helping and offering the opportunity for people to make proposals and offering the opportunity, a method for participation, to approve at the same time.
I'd like to change to the next slide, please. I will show the base consultation. I don't know if the next slide is arriving to be presented. No? Oh, okay. So yes, this slide. We asked people three open questions, to submit ideas for proposals. We asked people what kind of Internet they would like, what they would like the future of the network and what things should decide Internet Governance.
We asked three open questions. People said yes by themselves, and at the same time people could vote on the best proposals that they choose by these interesting ‑‑ you can see that the question, the proposals are presented. These terms are chosen in random methodology. And after people choose one or another, the others are presented.
If the users would like to submit a different idea, they have a little space above the proposals to submit a proposal.
This methodology is based on our ideas, on the first principles, by methods of practical opening. So these produced a big database, and permit people to evaluate two proposals in turns.
So this helped the people evaluate these ideas and not to read a 100, 200. Just choose two of them, can do consultation more quickly, and using the process, so people catch the methodology.
I think it is a better platform for public policy issues and helps start the process. At the same time as the voting process, the users have means to vote, and the methodology brought many ideas in the same time without bias. These methodologies helped to manage the open questions, open proposals and many votes at the same time.
The second proposal I think at the top of the list, people know the best ideas given by people. So the results were very impressive. We received almost 280,000 votes and about 300 proposals.
Proposals are relevant, and discussion was very positive. We received proposals about connection quality, network, access. We choose ideas, and in a face‑to‑face meeting, our first in Sao Paulo. This was a number of methodologies, the first and best ideas. They formulate for the conference the audience. I think this is the best way is how to get consultation on the matter of the Internet. This was a face‑to‑face meeting.
The process gives opportunity for people to participate in the decision process and take part in the process and formulate an agenda of the Internet issues.
I think that these can easily incorporate in discussion in how to produce better policies. It is an opportunity to gather together advocates for debate. The best recommendations can permit a big discussion on the site about these issues.
I recommend that the deliberation process of the Internet are going on in Brazil and mainly on Internet issues like discussions.
These are my remarks about that. I'd like to thank everyone. I am here to discuss our view about these methodologies, these consultations. Thank you.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you, Fabricio. As social participation and crowds participations inspired us on this panel, it's our main theme. I will pass the word to Rodrigo, who will talk a little about what ICANN is doing in this matter.
>> RODRIGO de la PARRA: Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. First of all, I would like to thank Ricardo for the kind invitation to participate in this very interesting panel.
Of course, I'm going to share some of the public participation processes that ICANN has been doing since it was first created in 1998, so 16 years ago.
But before that, perhaps I want to take this time to congratulate the efforts behind the scenes of all of the organisation of the NETMundial.
Some of you might have attended the meeting itself, and you were able to witness the success of the meeting. But some of you that were not able to come or participate remotely, you have been hearing in the last couple days, there were some sessions around the NETMundial. And you were able to think how everybody thinks very highly about the NETMundial, about the success of the NETMundial.
But you haven't really seen what was behind the scenes or what was the effort behind this very ambitious meeting of having to produce two very broad outcomes, right? The principles for Internet Governance, how ambitious sounds like that, isn't it, and the second part, a roadmap, which also is very ambitious, and both things were achieved.
They are very ambitious because all of the efforts behind that were multistakeholder. You have been hearing also about how there were some committees, multistakeholder committees that were organised in the meeting, and the meeting itself, the discussions were also in that fashion.
But in this session, I think it's important to take some time and reflect on how things were done, and also try to use this experience perhaps for future meetings or future exercises or in multistakeholder dialogues.
So it's not only, you know, what happened behind the scenes, but also a very reflection of the core of multistakeholderism. So also it has been repeatedly said in many of the workshops and sessions of this IGF how everybody talks very highly about multistakeholderism, and everybody will agree at the very top level that this is without any question the way that we should deal with Internet Governance issues.
How do we really make it happen? And what does it really mean to be multistakeholder? Is it only to have a couple of different stakeholder groups in our organisations and just handing them or informing them about our activities?
I think the real multistakeholderism is about systematic participation of every stakeholder group in all of the decision‑making processes of X or Y organisation. It depends, some organisations are not really about making decisions, but how do you include them in the whole process and how you make them participate.
So this is what we are talking about, a platform for participation. That is what really enables people and organisations to work in a multistakeholder environment in a very practical way.
And before showing them the ICANN experience, I want to mention two other layers below this. If we find multistakeholderism as a part, universally accepted good thing, then we are talking about with the emphasis here in this meeting of public participation, having the necessary tools, the necessary people, the team, how to deal with all of the different comments or input coming from many different stakeholders.
And I need to say that, for the NETMundial, was also more complicated. In ICANN we already have the ability to analyze different comments. But as you can see from the previous presentations, they were about to create categories. They receive the bulk of hundreds of comments coming from many different people. They managed to put them in buckets and then try to analyze them in that fashion also with all the stakeholders.
But then, perhaps a lower level is start of engagement. We have multistakeholderism, we have public participation layer, and then we need to engage people; how do we make them participate, to become part of multistakeholder efforts. That is not necessarily an easy task.
When we talk about multistakeholder models, we are giving for granted that everybody should be seated in the table. But are they aware? Are they aware that they can be seated in the table? How should we approach them and make them part of these efforts? At the very lower, lowest level is perhaps the most important thing, which is capacity‑building.
Let's say, for example, I come here for the first time to the IGF, and I hear all these things about how I can make a difference in making decisions about the Internet. But what if I don't really know what things work in the Internet, how to, you know, all of the different technical aspects I need to consider, etcetera.
We need to work on those as well, capacity‑building engagement. And this time I'm very happy that we can be discussing public participation and crowdsourcing ideas.
With that, if we can show some slides that I brought to show you about the public consultation processes in ICANN. To all of you that are not familiar with ICANN processes, let me tell that you one of the ingredients that we have in a multistakeholder model, and we think this should happen and be embedded to the concept itself, is we have a bottom‑up approach to decision‑making.
That means that proposals of the different policies or outputs, outcome ICANN produces are, come from the community itself. ICANN of course is a decision‑making body. We have operational responsibilities. We have a whole structure to deal with public consultation process. Of course, we have rules and we have some well‑established, from a long time ago, established by the community, set of principles or rules to carry out our decisions.
That entails very deep and serious public consultation process in every step of the way. Perhaps you have heard about the new GLT programme which we recently launched. That programme was discussed in the community for about 7 to 8 years.
Of course, if you see the final output, it is what we call the applicant guidebook. You can see how, why didn't you write this in let's say six months or only one year? The reason is that we took our time as a community, because there were significant concerns from many different stakeholder groups in our community.
The community itself needed to address them all. There was a concern coming from governments. There were concerns coming from Civil Society. There were concerns coming from the private sector. And all of them, all of those voices needed to be heard.
I'm showing you a slide of a special section that we have which is actually called public comment in our ICANN Web site. This is a snapshot of this. Thank you very much.
So, and here we describe on one hand what are the different subjects, what we are holding discussions in ICANN, and of course which are open to public consultation procedure or public comment. Here is just one example about the two character domain names.
We of course show when the public comment is open and when we are expecting to close it. But we have another section to explain to new people that are new to the community how the public comment works, because we are expecting not only people from our community to comment on that, but also we are expecting actually a public to take part, to take part on this. These are a couple of examples.
Perhaps this is one very important of one public consultation process that we are currently having. We already had some, more than three or four sessions around this. We are running two tracks on key topics for ICANN. One of them is the transition of the IANA stewardship process, as you have heard. The other one is about enhancing ICANN accountability.
This is how it looks like in reality. You will go into this Web site. You will find the topic and the enhancing ICANN accountability. We have it in different languages, as you can see, to ease the participation from different stakeholders.
We provide a brief overview, history of how things have been evolving, because this is like a lively process. If you step in the process at this time, you will find out that activities have been happening since March.
If you want to engage now, then you need to know what has been going on. This is important also as a public participation tool.
Then so here is another view of also the commence of enhancing accountability in the chronological index of that. So who sent it, you can actually click on the link and see what these people submitted to the Web site. This is public, and this can help you to also create an opinion of how you can participate and make a difference.
Let me see what I have. Okay. And then we also, once the public comment period is closed, we produce a report to share. It doesn't provide any value added from the staff. It's only a report of what we have been hearing coming from the community, and this is more or less how it looks like.
This is another hot topic, which is misuse.
Well, this is a complex slide. But we also use this to try to explain in a very graphic way how we are going to, as a community, work the public consultation process about the IANA transition. Right?
There was back then what we called the steering group, which then changed to the coordination group, but it shows different steps in the process.
If you can see how many times the process goes back to the community and then goes back and the process gets input again, so these cycles show the iterations that any particular process should have, but particularly this one, that is seeking for further advice from outside of our community.
I think, well, this is another map of the different events we were trying to map, as key to attend, and try to get those communities to also become involved.
In summary, let me tell you some numbers, right? So that you can see how important the open process, consultation processes are critical for ICANN and of course to a practical multistakeholder model.
We have now a team open process for comments at the moment. In 2014, to date we already had, we have concluded 22. In the last three years in average there were 60, 60 public consultation processes.
So, it usually works in the same way as a standard. We have a policy development process as well which includes this public comment periods of 20 days. Then they go back to the community.
Sometimes they will come back with some further information. But sometimes we don't need a second review, because a community didn't come back with anything, so we will just make one.
All of this is, as I mentioned, is regulated or it's norm or established by ICANN bylaws, so it's made also in a very transparent way.
With that, I'll conclude. And once again I thank you very much for your invitation. I also have to congratulate you for the idea of having this practical capacity‑building workshops when people can really know about how to operationalize in real practice the multistakeholderism.
Thank you very much.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you, Rodrigo. We are about to open to our impressions. But I think it's important, Joana, that participated in this crowdsourcing process of the Arena and the consultation, to do some remarks about that.
I ask after that Renata do some remarks either.
>> JOANA VARON: Hi, hello, everyone. Thanks, Ricardo, for the invitation. I'll be very brief. So crowdsource ideas here as well, how many of you were in NETMundial in Brazil? Not so good. How many of you submitted comments during the process? Good. The thing that I think was amazing for NETMundial and Arena Mundial is that afterwards, we have a database of comments, of ideas that even outside the meeting can be used.
I'll share a brief experience that we have in between, when the consultation process of NETMundial ended, and we were preparing as Civil Society to go to the meeting itself, because the meeting itself also had a very novel way of procedures and interactions on the floor that is very different from any diplomatical norm or diplomatical meeting, in which the different stakeholders groups have to take a line to talk in the mic. So the line for Civil Society we needed to organise, to be sure that our points would be delivered.
So there was this pre‑meeting with many Civil Society organisations, and to prepare for that meeting, we needed to be able to reach some consensus on what to say in the mic and in what order.
So the database of comments was vital for being able to organise ourselves. What we did was to take all the comments the Civil Society posed in the platform, and then, and also looking at the paragraphs that were more polemical, and look, Civil Society people comment in this paragraph in this direction, these are alternatives to deal with a particular issue according to what everybody has said.
So in that meeting we didn't departure. We could say look, part of Civil Society already talked that this issue is important, and this issue can be addressed either in this way or another. So we already had a concrete thing to work on.
It went quite well. We managed to have our points which were delivered in the floor, and this experience by itself, I think, was very remarkable.
On the other hand, we still miss knowledge on how to deal with all these comments. And that happened in Brazil even with Marco Civil process which was also collaborative, but how to make the final document reflect all the comments and how to visualize that, in this way, in the sense that I think that the database that we create can be not just NETMundial was organised in a very brief period of time, so even though we have the statistics, another layer of analysis, linguistic analysis and so on could have done.
So we are creating those databases. And it is an opportunity for technologies or people that know how to deal with softwares that do language analysis to try to collect and analyze and see, look, many many people talked about surveillance; why is it not that much in the final document? Things like that.
We start to have concrete things for the step forward. I think that just this final step might have been not completely perfect, also because of lack of time to analyze all the comments in the last round.
And even the transcriptions of the meeting itself can be used as a database for things like that.
Then, to close, the Arena, the experiences in Arena Mundial, NETMundial, they should feed the processes for the next IGF that is going to be in Brazil. IGF is almost ten years old. But I think that the processes and the format have remained pretty much the same.
Maybe it's time for change, and for using all those tools, and making things more interactive with the broader community, as Arena NETMundial did. It was a huge effort to try to translate all these acronyms of Internet Governance, to be able to get a final input that was pretty good, and freedom of expression and privacy. So regular users can care about this.
We are still very closed in our own world of the Internet Governance. So I think all this technology, all these technologies that can facilitate and include more people, and that on my take should be taken into account, for instance, for IGF in Brazil.
And finally, just a complaint that I have to file is that it's super amazing that this process of openness, of using new tools, of innovation happened with NETMundial, and ICANN also does that with its internal procedures. But out of, NETMundial initiative was launched with ICANN without any consultation, without any transparency, nothing. A leak was needed for the World Economic Forum to finally publish something about it.
That we think that this was a very valid experience, and we need to set a standard to not withdraw the process and go back to things that are closed and not participative ‑‑ and not go back to things that are closed and not participative. Otherwise things get more difficult. That's it, thank you.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you, Joana. Renata?
>> RENATA AVILA: I want to talk about, just limit my exposition about the experience of NETMundial. One thing that never happened at NETMundial was to have a room like this room at this moment.
It was very very loud, interactive, everyone moving, everyone talking to each other, everyone really, really hungry of knowledge, you know? And really wanting to do things, rather than talk about things, and rather to talk about the same things.
And it was also something that was different was the diversity of the participants. It was, when I think of a multistakeholder model, I do not think of a room full of men in dark suits or highly educated people.
What I see is something very very different, that is full inclusion of different people with different concerns and different approaches to things, because there are many things that we do not see from our privileged position.
One of the things, I listed the things that made the Arena NETMundial different. One was the reduction of a very important barrier. A very bad mistake that we make in this space is the English‑only approach.
Like NETMundial process was great, yes, but it was only in English. By that you exclude all the people who didn't have the chance to learn English as a second language, and who is not English speaker. So the added barrier of English as language in the collaborative process of this document was eliminated by the process that Participa.BR design in the local language of people, because first you cannot call collaborative process a collaborative process if you impose one language only, only because of the lack of time or simplicity or so on.
That was very important.
The second important characteristic of Arena NETMundial was the space. When you open a space, a physical space, that is accessible to people, people go and engage.
If I think for example of this venue, this venue is a very exclusive convention centre. It is Internet Governance Forum, and all the conferences around these topics were taking place in more approachable places like cultural centres, where there are lots of people circulating, at universities.
When we combine our efforts with the spaces where the different people are already at, and open, and people can somehow hold those accountable of the things that we are doing, I think that the picture changes a lot. And the key role of the state and the local state to offer that unique amazing space and infrastructure to make the things happen really made a difference, because yes, we can create a very nice platform. I did a study in this. I think a big mistake that we do is we fall in love with the technology, and we forget very basic techniques to engage people that do not, have nothing to do with technology.
And it is the combination that is the powerful thing that made Arena NETMundial process successful, things like involving key youth groups, computer clubs to join us, things like, for example, there is not so many spaces in Brazil for feminist hackers to present an audience of thousands of thousands, what they think that the Internet should be, for example.
Or there is not so many spaces for radical investigative journalists to present how the Internet made possible for them to publish their findings and ideas and fight corruption. Things like that, we had the chance to have at Arena Mundial.
Topics like that were not discussed at the other venue, because it's too sensitive, it's too political, it's too fragile, the consensus that you can reach in a diplomatic like of meeting. But we are discussing the other open space.
It was a matter of timing, because if processes like Arena NETMundial would have taken place in different countries in advance, the input of those could have set the general process.
I think that is the failing, that is the fix that we need to work on.
The third thing that I think that it was very valuable was the connectors. Imagine to have the inventor of the Web hanging out and sharing with the people, with young people who would otherwise not have the money or time to travel abroad and see him at a technology conference.
Imagine to have the most famous musician of Brazil, the same, singing for the participants and hanging out with them and telling the importance of an open Web for the future of music.
Imagine the most remarkable activist publishing the novel revelations engaging directly with Brazilian youth, trying to fix the problem of surveillance.
That happened, and that didn't happen because of money. That didn't happen because of a fancy invitation. That happened because of solidarity.
I think that this space, this frank conversation also was possible because of not only the leadership and the open process that led Arena Mundial we encountered, but there is a sense of urgency not only among Brazilian youth but in youth in many parts of the world.
This, whenever these connections can happen, I think that we should facilitate them. That is happening in here as well, like without any funding, without any official space in the programme, without any connection with the local authorities here, the university in Istanbul is organising the Internet Governance Forum, that is following a similar approach that Arena Mundial and offering the same space.
I think if we can really, if we are really ambitious and we want to change a passive, half empty room to a truly engaging process, to protect and defend the Internet as we know it, and to take the steps of create an even better Internet, I think that we should not only allocate resources, but make sure that this space is open more and more and more around the world.
So yes, so that's my ‑‑ I think we should nurture our presence with creativity and imagination. It is not lack of resources what I see here. It is lack of a different approach to solve the same problems.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you very much. I invite everybody to start transforming this half‑empty room in a place for us to exchange impressions, experiences about our challenges and involving great, great amount of people in this debate of Internet Governance.
We started 15 minutes late. So maybe we can advance a little bit, if our staff let us do that. Let's discuss. Microphone. Can you help us with the microphone, please? Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: A small comment, maybe. I missed the beginning part. So maybe this was addressed. I think in order to provide ‑‑
>> RICARDO POPPI: Can you present yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, of course. My name is Sari, Turkish National Council for Science and Technology I work for. My comments are on behalf of myself. That would be good to ‑‑ I think awareness is a very important aspect, when you are trying to get people's attention.
So trying to find, trying to make the people interested, like how they were interested in wikipedia and large wikipedia was established, in order to talk about Internet Governance with all of the stakeholders, we should first get their attention. And maybe this should be included in some way, I don't know how, to the educational system, and how, the importance of those four privacy issues, maybe the Government itself.
I think awareness is, and creating the awareness is a very important aspect. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. I come from the Brazilian Government, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I was involved in the preparation of NETMundial from day one.
I was personally very glad to see the kind of experiment we have in organisation, in organising NETMundial and in achieving an outcome that was, the one that was expected, with some not exactly addressing all the elements we had initially sought, because the call emanated from the President was that NETMundial could lead to an outcome that would be embraced by everyone, that could in a way reflect the consensus of the global community, including national governments.
And we know that there were some alliances in that regard that disassociated themselves from the outcomes, which only shows the challenge it is to organise such an event and in such a short time frame.
I think both NETMundial and Mundial Arena that was organised by, in parallel, trying to innovate, to organise and to also ventilate, give opportunity for Brazilian society, not just those that would be there at the venue also to express themselves, I think those were both experiments that had this very clear notion of being bottom‑up inclusive, transparent.
I think they both showed the way that can be done; of course, that there are many improvements to be made, but I think the both experiences were very valid, not trying to direct, to guide or to play a role in which people do not feel free, but to let people express themselves, try to organise, as Joana said, in some cases, because in order to organise a dialogue which indicates that there are already some trends and ask for people to comment on those, but basically letting people participate.
NETMundial had a different, because it was a global nature also involving governments, and the Arena was for more internal nature, but both were very valid experiences. I think those were valid experiences.
With regard to language, I think there was an attempt to address the language, because in the venue there was translation. I think you are referring to the fact that maybe the contributions, on the documents, there was not translation. I think that is part of the difficulty to deliver this. At the UN, we do this.
But this entails days, weeks, for translation. So we lose flexibility. We lose the necessary speed. But I think that is also one part that should be better, because we want this kind of experience will be truly inclusive. This is an aspect of the inclusivity that should be addressed.
I'd like also, I'm sorry to take so long, but to very briefly touch on NETMundial initiative that was mentioned by Joana. Just to say that as being part of the Brazilian Government, we feel a part of this movement that has led to the initiative, not that we have ourselves been part of the drafting team that has prepared the documents, but because this emanates from NETMundial in a way, and also to my knowledge, the idea about an initiative that would follow up on NETMundial and try to operationalize some of those conclusions emanated from a meeting between Fadi and my President, so in a way the Brazilian Government is supportive.
Nonetheless indeed it was made clear by the Professor who was the chair of NETMundial, and was present in Geneva for the launch of the initiative, that we would, our concern would only be that anything that follows on the tracks of NETMundial would make sure that the same characteristics that we made a tremendous effort to instill in NETMundial process, that that should also be followed.
That should be bottom‑up, inclusive, transparent, that we would be concerned of any kind of proposal that would come up with the name of NETMundial without having those characteristics.
But we are confident, and I think there is a, we have seen, in the context of the meeting organised on day zero, there was present by WF and by ICANN, I think everyone is hearing what everyone is saying are the concerns, and the intention is to come up with something that adds up, add value to what we are doing. This is our, our participation is based on the presumption, that is there is something that is coming up in addition to what we have been doing, support for what we have been doing, not in competition or in contradiction with this.
And retaining this bottom‑up, inclusive and transparent nature, which was something very dear to us all, because this was a collective work, and we would like very much to see it retained in everything that will follow up on the tracks of NETMundial. Thank you very much.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you, Bengito. Microphone, please.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Hartmut, executive secretary of CGI in Brazil. I was very strongly involved in this conference. I only like to underline that we have a different approach for the participation. I received a lot of criticism that it was not an open conference. Because it was a multistakeholder conference, we needed to have limitation in the participation.
So we have 800 seats in the room, and we gave up 200 for the Government, 200 for the Civil Society, 200 for the academia, and technical, and 200 for the business, to avoid that one of the groups have the majority.
This was the view, if every Forum in IGF we can discuss is not a question of how many of each society, but if you have a decision‑making process as we used during NETMundial, the idea was to reach principles in the roadmap, we need to avoid that one sector can have the majority.
We respect very strongly the division or the splitting of the space. The space was limited. It was not a stadium, not a big place we can have 50,000 people. So we invite 800 people. We received a request for over 1,000. We maintained a balance between all the participants. We have 180 journalists internationally participating.
It was a very open, transparent bottom‑up multistakeholder, balanced, equal footing conference. I'd like to see other conferences in the same style. We would like to invite you to Brazil for IGF next year. We will try to use some of the good examples that we learned together in NETMundial to do it in IGF. Nina, I like you, I see that you are very very happy with the idea (chuckles).
Please, welcome, come over.
(applause).
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'd like to come back to Arena NETMundial. I actually went there. I have a very inquisitive nature. My original training is that of international relations and diplomacy.
Among other things, I wanted to know how it was actually working, because in many meetings, when you go, you see a kind of place like not only NETMundial, but I wanted to know if this was the citizen initiative or a Government initiative.
So I arrived the day before. I arrived at NETMundial and I go to the cultural centre all by myself, to go and see if the people who are setting it up were citizens or they were Government officials.
Actually, they were citizens. And I helped myself. Anybody who was there who was willing to participate was welcome to participate. I remember that I put my hand in stretching some of the canopy around, and it was nice.
Then during the Arena NETMundial I went back again. It was more relaxed. It was more spontaneous. So after making that speech, I just wanted to come and hide and people are like, oh, you should come and say something. So I just want to put a stamp of approval on what has been said, that yes, this was a citizen initiative, and it did happen.
I've tweeted some of my thoughts. The fact that Internet is really valid, this is something that being an African, we can learn. Before I was born, we have been having summits of African heads of states. And we have not had citizen participation alongside.
I think this is one thing that the Internet can do for us as Africans, not just in the framework of Internet Governance, but in general citizen engagement in policy processes.
I have published about two years ago a research study on the use of social media and Internet for citizen engagement in public policy processes. I think that this is one lesson we have to learn.
Of course, we are excited because of the work up going there, and we will be happy to come back again every time, and have some nice time in Brazil. Thank you. Invitation accepted. (chuckles).
>> RENATA AVILA: Before, I want to jump in and say that we would very much like the Brazil as a state, the Brazilian Government to, I mean it would be amazing, as Nina said, in Africa and in Latin America, we can really start a south‑south collaboration, a south‑south collaborative process to share the technical capacity.
Like for example, if the office does an exchange programme with Kenya, with Nigeria or South Africa, if then the capacities are shared with Guatemala and other countries where this is really missing, I think that will be amazing, if you as a state take the leadership forward, and we start working together and making the processes in those countries that they are not engaging more participatory.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Ambassador, invitation accepted or not?
>> AUDIENCE: No, it's very welcome, the suggestion; it's duly taken. We will certainly try to do it. Actually, we are already doing it in our region. We, Brazil, we are the chair, Vice Chair of the regional group. Guatemala is already invited within the initiative on Internet Governance. We are trying to strengthen this initiative.
But I understand there is an interest in expanding this to more south‑south configuration. The only comment is that this, I think in the case of Brazil, we are very keen to indicate that this kind of action is not only taken by the Government but in the context of the Brazil committee, which is the multistakeholder that will be more than prepared to explore ways for south‑south cooperation.
As Government, we will be very proud in order to participate in the context of the initiative in that regard.
>> RICARDO POPPI: We have five minutes, considering the time that we are getting back from the beginning. Let's discuss a little bit more. I think I have something to address to Nina. She asked specifically about Participa.BR, what is this kind of project.
It is not so simple, Nana. It's a mixed project. But now it's, the governance of the project is made by Brazilian Government, General Secretariat.
But the construction of the project involves lots of people from Civil Society, including some consultants that works in free software communities. Even Fabricio that was speaking to us here is a consultant and brings experiences to Participa, and including the way we developed the technologies that is in relation with free software communities and in a working manner, all the decisions of the project, all everything that we are doing is online in this very moment, updated online.
So it's a matter of work that is very open and transparent. But the governance is from General Secretariat.
There is a will, very clear, and we discussed that a lot, and we intend to fulfill that in a short moment to make another proposal of the governance of that, to involve in a committee with Civil Society participation that will make the governance of the participation, social participation policy of Brazilian Government, will include the governance of Participa.BR in participative manner.
It is something that is our goal, including it's a detail, but not a small detail, that we are dot BR domain. We are not a gov BR domain, G‑O‑V Government domain.
So it's pointing to a Civil Society and Government together project, not just a Government project ruled by Government. Even the technology that we use is very adapted to that. It is a social network with communities that can be managed in a decentralized way, so everything points to this national participation policy, and the technology, all those things, the politics and technologies are pointing to the same way.
Question? Last question? Then we finish. Rodrigo already could not wait.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Yasim. I'm participating here as World Foundation in this event, though I wear a dozen other hats. My question is more about how ‑‑ I've been managing a community that is multistakeholder since 2002. We have 450 people. We start at 80. We are 450. But I have ministers, international agencies, NGOs, all kind of people.
It took me a lot of ‑‑ it's online. It is not like these processes that are live. It is online. But it took me a lot of work to be able to maintain the space where Government will remain at least the Government people, even ministers, high level people will remain listening.
And there are small tricks like moderating the pace of the discussion, because when two techies get together to discuss something, 50 E‑mails in two hours, so you have to ‑‑ these guys go home, they are not going to turn the computer on until next Monday. They are not going to read this. So you have to manage these things.
Participation, for example, the members are on the individual behalf. When they talk, they are not talking as Government. They are talking their opinion, although they are in the Government. But the rule says, we don't make that the archives, though everybody wants everything open, and I love open, but the archives are closed so they can talk. I'm talking about a lot of tricks that I use in the virtual environment to, because otherwise one month after you only have three NGO people or activities that send 50 things a day, and nobody is listening to them.
How, in your experience in this, I'm interested to listen how in real environments, what are the things you are able to manage to really, because in my case, my interest was that Government remains. Otherwise I will have only the three same people we know talking about everything we agree. But the one we want to influence are not there anymore.
How do you manage that problem? That is more or less my question.
>> RICARDO POPPI: Thank you. I think that is the question that goes directly to the point of what the main challenge of participation, how the participation can change the process, and how it can have people from Government involved sufficiently to make that happen.
We tension that every day, when we do things very wide open, and some people even in Civil Society, not only in Government, cannot speak some things because of the sensitivity of that. We don't have an answer for that.
What we try to do is to mix process. When we go to a public consultation in Participa.BR, everything that is there is wide, completely open. But we are starting to engage Government officials in using version of the same technology, but it's a version so they can make discussions without fearing the use of what they are saying in everything. They can make the sensitive discussions, but still in the process of, how can I say, I don't think it's the right way, acculturation, because it makes, even if it is not open, it makes it open, like a sub open manner, how can I say, but with colleagues, the other colleagues.
So I think it's, for me it depends on the topics of everyone. But for us, that works with social participation using the open and centralized environment, for us, it's possible to get to a work, to a matter, where all the subjects can be addressed in this way.
But we cannot do this from tonight, because it's a matter of cultural change, that the whole society needs time to fulfill. But the strategy is simplifying, because we don't have time, but we can follow the discussion after this workshop, and I'm available for that.
But simplifying, the answer is mixing process, open process with process that gives people this security.
Thank you, everybody. Sorry for the late, but I think we all enjoyed it. Thank you very much. We will discuss later.
(applause).
(end of session at 4:20)
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This is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings. 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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