IGF 2016 - Day 2 - Room 4 - WS 84: YOUTH IN IG: CAPACITY BUILDING VERSUS POLICY DISCUSSION

 

The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record. 

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>> DAVID NG:  Hi, everyone.  We are about to start because the previous session just ended and this location is a bit far.  So we would wait for two more minutes to start this session.  This is workshop 84, Youth in IG: Capacity Building versus Policy Discussion.  So we will start in two minutes of time.  Thank you.

(Pause.)

>> DAVID NG:  Hello, everyone.  Thanks for joining with us for this workshop.  This workshop is Workshop 84 talking about Youth in IG: Capacity Building versus Policy Discussion.

On that, although the topic talks about, this is multi-inclusive for the whole purpose of capacity building for youth and also the policy discussion.  For this session we can see we have more youth initiative to engage youth in Internet Governance such as the youth programme launched last year during the IGF meetings.  We can see in the regions we have different group works, we are engaging youth regionally.  In this workshop, as I mentioned previously in discussing the approach, which approach of youth engagement is the better way.

Of course, for the two ways of capacity building and also policy discussion, it is a mutually exclusive discussion.  We would like to discuss which is the best way for engaging youth in discussion.  First I will go through the agenda of today to make everyone familiar with what we are doing for this one and a half hours.  Can you move forward the Power Point?  Thank you.

First we have the analysts from different youth initiatives to share about their work in the region.  We have 20 minutes for sharing.  About a few minutes for even panelist to share their work.  We have free discussion after that.  We welcome everyone from the floor to speak and go to the mic, grab the mic to speak on how you think about the two different topics.  Topic one is on what is the best practice of youth engagement in Internet Governance and how can we enhance collaboration among different initiatives, as I mentioned.  We have more initiatives about youth engagement nowadays.  I see there is room for cooperation and collaboration.  In a sense, once you hear your voice and your ideas on how we can do it better.

And on the second topic, talk about how we can do better to engage youth in IGF.  Right now in IGF we experience this discussion.  We need to think about how we can better engage with youth.  Especially I saw that many youth around the table joining this session.  I welcome everyone for further discussion.

I think we are ready for the sharing.  And firstly I would like to tank the speakers for sharing with us.  We have the Youth Authority and we have Martin from network of European digital youth.  We have (Ya Shu) from the German.  We have Jianne, the Ambassador from Ava.  Horn is from the Internet Governance Academy, and a remote participation from Uganda, who is Jonathan from the Youth Foundation.  We have Olga from the GAC of ICANN and also South School of Internet Governance.  We have ICANN members Rodrigo joining us with for the panelists.

First we want to start with Adela to share with her work on Youth Authority.  Adela.

>> ADELA GOBERNA:  Thank you guys for inviting me here.  I'm within the Youth Observatory.  I would like to stress I'm speaking in my personal capacity.

The first question, what is engagement?  What is youth engagement?  The problem I see with engagement is not the young people being engaged with the topic I itself but finding space, when the space we already have to have them engaged in speaking there.  Nowadays the questions, we are going through what structures or if the young people should be a stakeholder itself, which I don't actually fine it is the right discussion.  It leads to the right point.

I think the problem we are having nowadays, it is actually having the old school stakeholder engaging these young people in order to speak their minds and continue their work within a frame where they can speak.  In that sense that's why the Youth Observatory initiative began since lots of young people were involved in the youth at IGF forum last year.  They didn't feel they had the opportunity to engage with the stakeholders that represent them.  So what should we do?  Inside the stakeholder bring in the organisation, but the discussion is being turned to the other side.  We are speaking about should young people be a stakeholder?  I think that's the way of leaving them apart from actually discussing policy, from actually making them part of the policy and start targeting them.  That's the thing we need to avoid.  So the whole point about this is to start discussing about how can the stakeholder that we know, academia, private sector, civil society, call it whatever you want, kind of make them part of the stakeholder that they are and make them part of the position that this stakeholder has.

I think the main problem and issue we need to tackle right now is how we turn the discussion to the other side of the table.  We need to make young people realise they need to be part of the stakeholders to be engaged in the discussions, but not be engaged with the topic.  I find it interesting that the question is youth engagement in Internet Governance which is huge.  I mean, we are talking about youth engagement with the events of Internet Governance or within the topics of Internet Governance which I think most of the people are already engaged with Internet Governance as a topic, but not engaged in the structures we've got that make Internet Governance.

So the Youth Observatory, the organisation I volunteer from time to time contrasts, kind of tries to tackle these ideas and puts the focus on that and kind of makes people understand we don't need new stakeholders, but we need the old stakeholders to kind of understand they need new people, or other people who have different positions to be part of them and kind of make a new perspective pop up within them.

So thank you.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you, Adela. We need to make youth stakeholders as part of the discussion and we agree on this.  Right now we have Martin from the rural perspective.

>> MARTIN FISCHER:  Hello?  My name is Martin from the European Digital Youth.  For the last two years we have been running a project called the European Youth IGF where we bring together young people and youth delegates to the IGF from Netherlands, Germany, Austria and from Turkey.

Two of these countries we institutionalised the first YouthIGF ever.

I just wanted to share the principles that we set out for this project in order to engage young people in a qualitative way.  I think these also show case a couple of problems that we saw in youth participation and Internet Governance.

Six principles.  First one, co-decision making and comanagement.  We want young people involved in all decision making and administrative processes.  Young people can take part in any position and take budgetary control and they are part of the project and not merely observers.  We want multi-stakeholder events, not just events for young people that engage with other target groups that we want to meet.  They are educational for everybody there.

Young people set the agenda.  So when we host a YouthIGF we rely on a format called Bar Camp.  Young people set up the agenda and set out the topics for workshops, get the time slots, hosts sessions.  We have experts they can engage with in these settings.

We want no cost for participation.  So young people engaged in the process should not have to cover any of the costs themselves.  We found some generous support from the European Union in order to do so.  So participation should not have extra burden for the young people that take the time to do so.

We also want continuous engagement.  That is why we ran it over two years in order to make sure that the young people will also continue to stay in these processes.  That doesn't necessarily mean young people need to go to every IGF that is coming, of course.  Usually the first IGF is overburdening, very full.  It is a huge impression and that's why it is important that afterwards we give possibilities to also engage in other initiatives or return.

The last point of these principles would be what I call informed representation.  So far, it is important that the youth delegates own feedback with the local communities.  They are engaged through these Bar Camps but also with local organisations, we have host organisations for each of them.  So they have contact to the local youth and feed back the information they get in the forums but also carry the local voices from youth into IGF itself.

Thank you.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you, Martin, for sharing the six main points of youth engagement.  It is very useful and how we can inform the participation for the youth to engage in the process.

Followed by we have Joachim from the Youth Centre.  Thank you.

>> JOACHIM KINDT:  Thank you, David, for inviting me.  I'm bringing more, a little bit more of the institutionalized perspectives.  I'm working for the German Safe Internet Centre.  I'm the spokesman.  I'm also part of the Insafe Network which is the umbrella body of the European Union where all 31, 28 Member States plus three more states are taking part of.

When I was thinking of how we were starting our project and opening to youth panels, actually it goes back to 2008 when in the safe Internet programme for the first time ever the European Union clearly fixed that we have to implement the voice of the young people into our work.  I make it very quick quotation because it is very interesting to read it and it is still today where we are many years later.  It is still the right thing where we should start.  The programmes, I quote the programme strongly encourages the awareness notes and the Safe Internet Centres to involve children and young people in their work by establishing youth panels, youth forums in their countries where young people can express their views and exchange knowledge and experience concerning the use of the online technologies.

Children will also be asked to contribute to the policy development and design of awareness raising actions, materials.

So if you are thinking about this, that was a very early start.  But these were the guidelines for us.  Okay, now, the world is different.  We are no longer a world of adults and experts.  Now we've got the voice of the youth.  A lot of things, of course, has changed.  Within the framework of Insafe and the individual Safe Internet Centres, today almost all the Member States and all the countries in Europe got some sort of youth involvement or they even have their own youth panels.

So there we got the guidelines which were very instructive for us, but I would like to make a brief remark on a personal level that for me personally I am very grateful to the IGF because the first time ever I saw how people, young people stood up and showing their voice, that was not within the framework of the European Union.  They got these great guidelines.  But that was here at the IGF.  Everybody who is a pedagogue or a teacher, he knows that you get the best results if you can reach, of course, the brain, but at the same time the heart and the emotion.  That was exactly what was happening to me here at the IGF.

So I went back to Germany and we started immediately to build up youth panels.  So since 2009, 2010 we got youth panels and we also got children panels for children at the age from 6 to 12.  Of course, in the context of children panels, that is a special issue.  We cannot talk of political discussion, but nevertheless it is very good to have both sides of the coin.

What are we doing now?  What is the youth panel, the German youth panel doing?  What did we do so far?  Of course, we are very much, the youth panels, we go with them and we are opening booths at one of the biggest fairs across Europe, games com.  It is the question of visibility.  We go outside, we do marketing, we make communication.  The big step also was initiated by Insafe, The Web We Want process.  Web we want is a situation where for the first time no experts were writing online educative issues, but it was a peer to peer approach.  The first book ever produced in Europe with a peer to peer approach.

We are having the youth conference web days.  We are, of course, having the safer Internet days.  Our young people are going to IGF.  Like Martin said before, of course they don't have to go to every IGF or every EuroDig, but we think it is not a question of visibility but in the other direction.  They have to get the spirit that their issues are not a question of national perspective; that it's a global perspective, of course.

As I'm not a pedagogue and not a teacher, for me personally it was very important, the communication aspect.  So therefore, we, it is just recently that we are working on this.  But we try to implement a pool of young people and if we got the Safer Internet Centre, got an approach by the media, by the press or by journalists, we think before, of course, the adult was going there.  And went to the TV station and the press articles, but now we think of that we are cohosting the adult with the young person.  We are even doing the press conferences with the young people who are the experts.

So, to come to my final remark, so far I think coming from this long way of the safer Internet programme to the better Internet for kids programme, we did a lot of good work on capacity building, but if you ask me -- David, when you sent me the title of the workshop I was a little bit irritated at first sight because I thought why capacity building versus policy discussion?  That was irritating to me.  I didn't really understand at first sight the contradictory part of it.

I must be honest that now thinking of coming to this project, I think you are right because I honestly have to respond if I think if we, capacity building, yes, we did a good job.  We can do it better, but did we or do we have a design how to implement young people's voice into the political discussion?  I would say so far not.  And I think the six points Martin mentioned, they are the absolute good guideline where we have to go.

So thank you for inviting.  Yeah.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you and really a good recap of what we are discussing today, of course we are doing capacity building for the youth engagement discussion and you mentioned it is important to send our children to some of the IGF to experience a real you discussion process.  As well as also how we can really make the real policy in a sense, as Martin also mentioned in his six principles.

We have Jianne followed by Haoran to talk about the Asia region work.

>> JIANNE SORIANO:  Hi, everyone, I'm from Net Mission Hong Kong.  So Net Mission programme is a programme that brings together university students in Hong Kong to promote digital inclusion, Internet Governance and have policy discussions.  Every year we recruit University students from Hong Kong.  Mostly not from IT background, including myself.  And we train them when it comes to Internet Governance issues.  After the training process we have trainings.  And then in those trainings we select a few of them to go to conferences like IGF and ICANN and API IGF.  We also have projects that target younger people like Net-Y programme which is for high school, and Hong Kong IGF and some of the participants are also here.

As Ambassador, we also organise the YouthIGF that focuses on youth engagement in Asia-Pacific region.  It is also annually.

We have organised eight IGFs so far.  The latest one was in Taipei.  The IGF also is held in parallel with the Asia-Pacific regional Internet Governance forum.  Even if we have separate workshops and programmes, we still integrate the workshops with the Asia-Pacific regional IGF workshops, which is I think is really important for the youth to engage in the main conference.  In the Y-IGF we focus on role play discussions and also have interactive sessions like the simulations.

And for ICANN conference we organise the model or mock ICANN meeting which we moderate these workshops with local participants from the host country and we have also initiated a local IGF which is the Hong Kong Y-IGF this year.  It is a three-day camp that recruits high school students.  In that camp they do things like they made promotional video about child online safety, which they had to do under like three hours.  And then they also have to come up with solutions to link ICT with Sustainable Development Goals.  We held a one day discussion on topics like human rights and privacy and security.

So what Net Mission has done in the Asia-Pacific region is to engage youth in not only Internet Governance but also give them a platform to do the organisation, the decision making of how they should run a youth programme and not just having older people to do that but having younger people to do these organisations and while we are not directly involved in policy discussions but we have the power to do decision making processes and I guess I would say for myself, I have been in the API IGF multi-stakeholder steering group as the first young person.  Things like that enables youth to be part of a decision making process of a bigger things that happen in the Asia-Pacific region.  Thank you.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you, Jianne.  You have a very good case on how youth can initiate the programmes by themselves and also taking part in the API IGF is an important input from youth, how we shape the programme.

Followed by also I have got Haoran Huang on IGF.

>> HAORAN HUANG:  Thank you, David.  And hello, everyone.  I'm Haoran Huang from Beijing University, I'm a post-graduate student specializing in Internet Governance in day-by-day studies and research.  As well as the participants and maybe the only one from mainland of China to join the Asia-Pacific Internet Governance Academy, APIGA for short.  It is my pleasure to share my experience here.

Even though I'm majoring in IT before here I do not have the reality feelings of Internet Governance.  This is a first time event hosted by ICANN, Korean Internet and security agency and others.  It is a five-day event heard at the university this summer.  After that I come back with three things.  The first is the thematic feelings towards Internet Governance.  The speakers spend all day with us and we gained basic knowledge on how the international Internet organisations work, such as ICANN and IGF.

And what is the topics they are talking about now?

Second is the reality feelings.  Net Mission has the mock conference there, too.  With this we know how to make our worries and how to join the discussion in ICANN.  This could also apply to IGF.  Third is making, already make a lot of friends there.  Some of them have already been very active in ICANN and IGF.  In these Internet Governance events.  After PICA, I feel confident I can apply for ICANN 57.  Well, I joined the USC GS as a member as well as the IGF Community Working Group, we call CCWG, working stream 2.  At this time I also come as ISOC IGF Fellow to be here.  I will continue to join these events in the future and share, after that I will share my experience with more friends around me and also encourage them also to join this capacity building programme.

So since David as well as our good friend from Net Mission, I thank you for making this happen and because it is definitely very important.  And besides this, today I would like to discuss more about how to engage young people not only in to the capacity building programme but also as making a voice to be heard at these policymaking platforms.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you, Haoran.  You gave us your experience in participating in the ICANN discussions, including joining the CCWG group and also GNSO.  It is really engaging the discussion of Internet Governance and policymaking right now.  Thanks for sharing your experience.  We look forward to hearing more from you in the discussion.

After that we have Olga from ICANN and also Internet Governance.  Olga?

>> OLGA CAVALLI:  Thank you very much.  I am not young anymore but I am young in spirit which is what matters always.

I commend you for the fantastic work you are doing.  Honestly I'm impress, Jianne and all of you from different parts of the world, you made a difference in the last two IGFs.  I'm sure that this will make the difference for the whole Internet and the whole community from now on.  So my congratulations for your fantastic work.

I was thinking about what we were talking about today, and I realised that we have been running a programme that it was not meant for young people, but it has been used by young people, which is the south school of Internet Governance in Latin America.  We don't have an age limit for the programme, but it is mainly applied to the fellowships, really given to young people.  Mostly, I would say 90-something percent are very, very young professionals.  The programme has been enhancing the participation of Latin Americans in the Internet Governance processes, whether it is IGF, and regional IGFs as well.

So if you are interested in applying, you can pass by our booth.  I have some brochures here.  Our next school will be in Rio de Janiero 3 to 7 April.  We grant scholarships to all our students.  We don't charge to anybody.  We offer two types of fellowship, one with accommodation and the whole training and lunch and coffee breaks and the other one without accommodation, depending on the  need.  We granted 180 fellowships in the last school in April in Washington.  So we have no limits from where you come from.  The only limit we have, we cannot pay tickets, we don't have that much money as other organisations, but if you have funding for the ticket, you may participate.

We also offer remote participation.  And in the last school that was organised in the organisation of American states venue, we got in the five days programme 25,000 remote participants from 89 countries.  And there was a spontaneous hub organised by the ISOC Barbados that gathers 60 people all together in a room in a University that follows all the programme and made questions and made comments.

So it was not meant only for youth, but it has been really focused on youth and I think we have been successful in bringing this group to this meeting.

And about your involvement in policy, this reminds me one of the things that I do, which is the increasing women in all the leadership positions in organises, ICANN, ISOC, ITF and all that, and women in general in going towards engineering careers, which I am an engineer.

We are not many.  So this reminds me somehow how we are going to try to get involved more women in these spaces.  I think that some parallel thoughts we can have in how to involve more youth.  When I was young like you, I thought that I would get everything by my merits.  Everything.  Because I was tough and I was focused and I was trying to do hard work.  And that doesn't always happen.  Sometimes other things happen, which is part of the life we have to live in and we have to understand.

So when I was young, I was totally against quotas.  That is horrible.  For me, I will get everything because I am a hard worker and I'm focused and I want to do that and I'm determined.  That is not always the case.

So I think that sometimes quotas are useful, and especially for women.  Maybe for youth.  You may have that in mind.  And it is proof that diverse group of people produce the best outcome.  It is not all young people, not all men, not all women, not old people.  Having youth in the group is fantastic.  Also having women and men and people with experience.

So this is something that you should look at and I will give you two examples.  In the province of Buenos Aires, the biggest State of Argentina, which is the size of Spain, for example, just to compare the size and the amount of people that live there.  They have a new law that they require 50 percent of women in the legislative bodies.  And also I would like to remark the confirmation of the Cabinet of Mr. Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, is 50 percent men, 50 percent women.  They asked him why?  He said it is 2015!  You can have that in made.  Adela made a very good point.  Not only stakeholders of youth because you will be isolated.  You have to mix.  You have to bring your views.  You are the natives of this technology.  I am not.  I was born and I read from books.  Any students look a as me as I come from another world.  Yes, I had books and photocopies.  I had no Internet when I started.  I am here with you and you have a fantastic opportunity to get engaged in policy work.

Again, I commend you for the fantastic difference that you are making in this IGF.  Thank you very much.  I have to leave because I have to be present in another session.  Thank you again for inviting me.  I'm very honoured with that.  That you can.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you, Olga, you made a point of different stakeholders, not just stand alone as youth.  Also referring to the statement that youth are part of the stakeholders, but we stand alone to take all the merits and credits.  And also about we want to engage both men and women in our discussions and agenda issues, which is a concern not only for youth but all stakeholders.  Thanks for making these remarks.

Right now we also have Rodrigo to speak a bit.  Thank you.

>> RODRIGO DE LA PARRA:  Hello, David.  This is Rodrigo de La Parra from ICANN.  Thank you very much for the invitation.  Very much appreciated.  Yes, so first of all congratulations.  This is a great initiative I think you are making headway.  I remember in the last IGF someone stood up and said well, we only don't want to be heard, but we want to have a seat at the table and discuss substantive issues.  And you are doing that now.  But you are also doing a lot of things.

And let me share with you what it is we are doing in ICANN with the youth.  We have a lot of initiatives that we are doing for you.  Why are we doing it?  And one of the live examples that we have and has been just described:  How quickly one of you got immersed in ICANN policy development process.  Because it is not only having young people working at ICANN or engaged in ICANN.  We want them to be involved in the policy development process.  Because that really is at the core of ICANN.  This is what we do and this is where we need your voice.

So in order to do that, ICANN is not a very easy place to work and to collaborate.  Actually it is quite complicated.  That is why we have built different programmes to help you, in this case the youth but also all stakeholders so that they can contribute to this policy development process.

We call this capacity building.  We need to build capacity in all stakeholders, in all regions so that they can really come and work with ICANN.

We have, I think I am going to divide this explanation into two.  We have global initiatives, which are applicable to everybody.  But we also have some regional activities that we are doing in a different regional offices.

I'm going to offer you examples of my colleagues in the Asia-Pacific hub, the APIC home and also in the LAC region, since we are already here.

In the global initiatives we have two programmes, one is the fellowship programme.  This programme started in 2007.  And this programme is not only about supporting financially people to go to the ICANN meetings.  But also it creates a sense of community and it helps you and guides you throughout the way both by my colleagues on staff, but also with other people like you.  Young people, maybe you will become a mentor to another Fellow and they will grow.  It is an amazing programme.  Each of the ICANN meetings we have, by the way, three meetings per year.  We will take these meetings from region to region.

So, for example, next year we are starting in March and we will be in Europe in Copenhagen.  Then we will go to during the summer, in June, we will be in South Africa in Johannesburg.  Then we will conclude in Abu Dhabi to conclude that one.  Then we will come to San Juan and in Panama and Barcelona.  We are rotating every year.

And for every meeting, we offer for the fellowship programme around 60 slots for fellowships.  These are not addressed particularly to young people.  These are for everybody.  But most of them are young people.  But we do have one programme which is and has been designed exclusively for young people, which is called the next generation or the next gen programme for ICANN.  We are getting old in the ICANN community.  So it was about time that we more or less started to renovate the people, because the Internet will, you know, need the young and spirited, full stamina young people.

But also there is this task of conveying the message that we do not need to, or we have to be very careful not to give the Internet for granted.  I believe young people may have, potentially can fall into this temptation because probably if you haven't read a lot or hearing the right conversations, you wouldn't know that there has been a tremendous effort to have what we have now.  So it is not only about accessing high-speed Internet movie in a device of this size.  It wasn't that easy.  One of the principles, or the principles that made this possible are those principles that we will need you to embrace and to continue with these, let's say quote-unquote tradition of having ICANN and having IGFs is particularly important.

So let me share with you quickly two projects or initiatives that we have been doing together with some friends from the Asia-Pacific region.  I think one of them has been mentioned, but it is the APIGA, it is very successful.  You have it in Seoul in 2016, about 30 people from Korea and 20 regional fellowship, and interesting out of 120 applicants.

But it was not just granting them this financial support but there was a prerequisite of 25 hours of online learning about ISOC and ICANN trainings.  It is a very great participation, five-day structure, with focus of course in ICANN topics.

Another great project that happened just in our previous mention about, there was an outreach with local academia in collaboration with Net Mission.  I believe that was also mentioned.  That was also a great programme with students from local universities.  That is actually a very good way of engaging because if we do that together with the ICANN meetings, you have the chance of bringing these folks to participate and to see what an ICANN meeting looks like in real life.  Those are two examples of what we are doing in the Asia-Pacific.  And just to conclude, I'm going to share something that we are doing in the LAC region.  We started helping the youth observatory in LAC.  We helped them and they helped us in many respects.  So we now created in our Web site a full list of all of the initiatives and regional initiatives that deal with Internet Governance of some sort, creating mechanisms, dialogues, IGFs, et cetera.  They helped us to build this database which is available in our regional Web site of ICANNLAC.org.  We started that and one of the people working at the observatory approached us with this very nice project.  It is called primary Internet Governance, or governance primer.  Short course of one day only for young people.  It is packed and ready to sell and go to other countries.  They started in Brazil.  It was very successful.  In just six months they replicated this experience in two more countries.  They had one in Buenos Aires and the next one in Uruguay.  And we are already planning to have the next one in Mexico next year, because they already have, like I said, a template of this event.  It is about outreach and engaging people and teaching basic stuff of Internet Governance.  That is working really well.

Also we were invited to contribute during the LAC IGF in Latin America and the Caribbean.  We had one day prior before this event started, one day exclusively directed to young people.  Actually, even more younger people were involved.  This, I believe, was high school students involved or engaged.  They were really ask asking the right questions.  So this is it for me.  Thank you very much.

>> DAVID NG:  Thank you, Rodrigo.  You mentioned a bit on the work of how IGF is doing on capacity building.  I think it is very appreciated, the work you are doing especially on the fellowship programme and some of the activities that has cooperation and collaboration from that community.  For example, the APIGA and it is great to see how we run the whole Internet in a sense is multistakeholder collaborations, for the whole thing.  So thanks for sharing your experience and we are looking forward to more collaboration on how you do that engagement work.

Followed by we will close the panel for sharing of experience.  We allow to open the floor to discuss.  For this I will pace the mic to Bianca to moderate the debate.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  Right now is the open mic debate.  You heard all the panelists of where they stand, and everything that they do, which is super interesting.  We would like to open the floor for panelists as well as anyone sitting on the side on giving us some thoughts on two specific topics.

So the first 20 minutes will be devoted for what is the best practice of youth engagement in Internet Governance?  And particularly on this I have heard a few speakers say that how to include youth as, not as a separate stakeholder group but as a whole.  And how do we engage them in policy discussion better?  So I think this is one of the important things that we can discuss in the first 20 minutes.  There are so many initiatives all across the world.  How can we enhance cooperation among different initiatives?  That would be also interesting.  There is some overlap and there is some that is quite different and some very specific to regions.  That would be quite interesting RFA so I will open up the floor, if you are interested to talk.  Put up your hand and yes, we will pass on the mic.

I'll start with Sonia.  Please identify yourself at the mic.

>> SONIA LIVINGSTONE:  Thank you.  Sonia Livingstone from the London School of Economics.  Is this working?  I feel I have heard good practice about involving young people.  I don't think I have heard any good practice about hearing and acting on the results of what young people have to say.  Maybe I can be really specific and ask the man from ICANN, which particular issues on the ICANN agenda do you think you could be most interested in?  Can you think of any ways in which ICANN has acted differently as a result of youth participation?  Can I ask Joachim the same thing?  If I think about the European Union and the data protection, I can't see that young people have been consulted about their feelings.  Good practice, good practice in stakeholders acting on the input of young people, I have yet to hear that in this session.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  I'll pass the mic to Joachim and then pass the mic.

>> JOACHIM KINDT:  Thank you for asking this question.  It is very important.  It is results oriented not just for the sake of doing it.  There is value in renewing generationally.

It is soon to say how really the impact has been with the next generation programme.  Because we only started this about two years ago.  But I think it is changing things in the communities.  Helping having new blood coming in with new ideas and new ways of solving problems.  I'm sure our colleague that just told us that joined NCUC next to people who have been working for ICANN during the last ten years can tell us a little bit about his experience.  I think just the mere fact that he is there, it is changing the chemistry within that group and the ideas that the young can have.

It is still early to say, I believe at this stage, but I do think they are making a difference already.

>> Sonia, thank you for your question.  You know we are more an education programme.  So while getting down to the point how do we work on the concrete level, we are writing -- well, we are giving materials, writing books.  Very practical handbooks for implementing into the curricula.  So if I think how we published a work on data protection.  You said you can't see how the voice of young people is involved in the complicated process of legislation.  Of data protection, we can not really intrude in this, but on the real pedagogical level, I would say yes.  The way is like this.  We got the experts which are basically most of the time still adults.  This I have to confess, but then we got the youth panelists as a very good consultancy.  We got these meetings and we are working together.  The final thing is never, like before, it has been only a product which is going to the teachers and the curricula, which was only a product by adults.  That is now changed.  We have this consultancy process by youth and young people.  I would say yes, there is a first step of involvement, but it is not the end of the line.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  Thank you.  We will have a remote participant and then him and then yourself and we'll pass on to that.

>> I'm the remote moderator.  We have a question from our founder president of the Society in IGF Pakistan and the Coordinator for the YouthIGF Pakistan 2015.  I will read out his message.  Youth community needs secure, reliable and civil society, frequently conducted forums.  We are concerned with recognition at the international forums but unfortunately we are always neglected.  The youth community from developing or under-developed Countries interested in physical participation at global and regional forums and events were not working, but they do not have sufficient resources.  Although our youth community has financial constraints they take small steps in initiatives but the contributions are mostly neglected.  We need unbiased recognition at global forums.  Our voice is not loud but we hope the YouthIGF platform will support us and allow us to be heard.  We request issues and policies, policies for next generation and support to resolve the day-to-day problems threats faced in the region of our countries or online. 

Thank you.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  I wanted to remind everyone.  It is such a short open mic section, restrict your comments to be very brief.

>> My name is Gustavo, from a Brazilian research group focusing on Internet law and governance.  Over the last three years I worked in engaging young people in universities with IG.  In this IGF I represented my group in the first session and since then talked with many young people who would like to do something similar, engaging their community through a research group of their own.  We are now creating a group through 2017 to incentivize the creation of such groups and hopefully we can, after one year of debate, experiences with who knows, present a panel in the next IGF about this topic.

So if you want to be part of in group, if you think that this proposal is interesting to you, even if you are a student, then please talk to me.  I will be hereafter this session and it will be a pleasure to discuss this topic with you.  That's all.

>> Thank you.  It's great to see other initiatives coming out of IGF and how we can collaborate among people.  So I will now move to.

>> AUDIENCE:  My name is (indiscernible) I'm from the German Centre For Child Protection on the Internet.  I have a question for the stakeholders from ICANN and other organisations in the room.  From the discussion we had so far, one could get the impression that youth are just a homogeneous group, but with reference to Sonia's studies and research, we all know that they are as heterogeneous as any other group.  There are differences due to their nationality, due to gender, to age, to your knowledge, skills, competences, to anything.

So how could we ensure that youth that take part in Internet Governance, represent all these different voices?  I don't think it is the voice of the youth.  It is many voices and it is also related to the question of what is most interesting for young people?  I don't think we would get unique answer if we ask all the young people here in the room that this is the most interesting aspect that we would like to be engaged.  How could we all take that effort to ensure that all the voices of young people are heard in the process?

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  Does anyone want to address that?  I can address that later.  Is there anyone who wants to address that specific question?

No?

>> AUDIENCE:  It might be too difficult.

>> I can say how we address it in our project.  Our project, for once we also try to work with quotas and try to reach as diverse young people as possible.  So a lot of impetus, a lot of focus was put on involving very diverse groups.  We worked with hacker spaces, with disadvantaged youth groups in order to reach as many people as possible.  However, people interested in Internet policy usually tend to be more homogeneous than, of course maybe I would like.  However, we also let the youth delegates pick their own topics that they want to focus on and specialize in and become experts in their own field.  I'm on the panel rather than the youth representatives because I deal with the project.  One of our is talking on section torsion in another panelist.  They are passionate about these points, but maybe not passionate about youth participation themselves.  This is more about a gateway.  Once young people are in the forum, then they are there, it is on a very different level.  I also wanted to reply to Ms. Livingstone briefly, but I forgot!

(Chuckles.)

>> What was the question again?

>> AUDIENCE:  (Speaker away from microphone.)

>> MARTIN FISCHER:  Because we have a very good example from our German group, because there in Germany, I think, is one of the first YouthIGFs that recognizes youth as an independent stakeholder.  That means they are on the steering panel and have access to their own panel, they can have a Delegate on each session panel.  Young people can have a direct will impact on those discussions.  They are policymakers, not necessarily the discussions, if you see IG as afield where the discussion is held, that leads hopefully to impactful policy and evidence based policies and young people can certainly contribute in that process.  Thanks.

>> AUDIENCE:  I'll comment briefly.  I feel like young people are same but different.  That is an interesting way of seeing it.  We are all, I need a lot of training.  There are things I don't understand, so many stakeholder groups are already there.

But there are different parts of the different people have different caps.  I even heard a discussion today where the youth have haven't chose their own cap.  They could be civil society, they want to get into private sector but want to participate here as civil society.  Part of it is also the awareness.  Other stakeholder groups, as you say, be it government or other things, whether they are willing to engage youth as a group and not to look at them separately as some of the panelists said, integrate them.  I think that's my two cents, very quickly.  So I want to pass on the mic, so the lady in the back?  She raised her hand and back to Raymond.  Yeah, yourself, okay.

>> AUDIENCE:  Hi, okay.  My name is Veronica from the YouthIGF programme.  And from the Youth Observatory.  We started, I wanted to share a little bit of a story of a group of people that started this YouthIGF programme from Latin America that we speak Spanish, okay, and have this experience finished with the initiative that I wanted to share with you.

Our discussions started how we start to be involved in Internet Governance issues and how we start learning about this.  And we, the most of us said that we didn't know anything about Internet.  And this was the first time we see how Internet works, who were the actors, the principal actors on the Internet.

It was all very interesting to share our stories to learn together about that.  And what that was our problem, mainly our problem because our Universities, there are no courses regarding to Internet, regarding on how this works.  So we see that there is a lot of courses, there's a lack of courses and education.  I don't know if this happens in other areas on the continent.  Maybe I see that there are a lot of initiatives in Asia which is very great for us also in Europe.  However, in Latin America this is getting, I don't know where.  So that is why we thought that one of the main things we can do is to be the connection between partners at ICANN that have a lot of content already worked, and our universities, our partners are friends that doesn't know anything.  That is why we started a programme called Ambassadors of the Internet?  Our Universities.  My friends are going to be like all these days in this, in Palcco talking to you.  They have our cards, like this one.  I don't know how to ...

(Laughter.)

>> ANA NEVES:  Yes, we have a web page.  This is an initiative.  We are starting to launch it.  If I see that there are a lot of youth programmes already working on these topics, we are so open to hear about your experience and try to help us, each other and do the better, because yes, there is a lady saying that maybe here in the youth we are not representing all the people from our country, but this is just a way to engage youth people in this process of policymaking, of thinking.  So we just want to have the help from UN and support.  Thank you very much.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  Thank you.  Another thing I want to mention, you don't really need to restrict it to have a collaboration right now.  It can happen beyond in room.  It can happen beyond in IGF.  Go around and network with more people at the end and then we can get more outcome out of this.  Now passing to Raymond.

>> RAYMOND: Thank you.  I really appreciate all the people here because we sit for a long time to discuss youth participation.  In my view I want to express one point, why youth participation is important.  I remember reading one phrase:  ICT is possibly the most powerful tool in this era to solve problems, but itself is not a solution.  Maybe we should use ICT to solve the problem that Martin can't.  Youth can do it because woe don't work.  We are still in the schools, we may think of a lot of problems that don't involve money.  That is why I think a lot of people here have been doing great work in involving people to educate, learn more about IG.  But I want to address one point.  What is the purpose that we have to involve youth?  What do we mean by participation?  Do we only consult the opinions?  We also want them to be involved in policymaking.  That's why I really appreciate the question that that lady involved.  Any real concrete result, because Hong Kong contacts, I come from Hong Kong and Net Mission like Jianne.  Before joining this programme, I have never heard of anything about Internet Governance in Hong Kong, never.  There is no consultation, no policymaking.  In my view if we really want youth participation in the youth governance, not only do we have to educate them, but also we may have to lobby the government to have real committee or some institution that the youth can join in and speak the voice.  So I like the German model.  I think that the Asia-Pacific model is still very starting point.  And that is why I think in part of youth participation, that should fit with the local context.

One more point is, if you are interested in some youth engagement training materials you may also approach to me that we have to make some YouthIGF toolkit because I would like in Hong Kong, before joining this programme I never heard of you have youth IG or something like that.  That's why we want to educate.  Thank you very much.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO:  Thank you.  Moving to the lady in the back.

>> AUDIENCE:  Hello, everyone.  My name is Ivy.  I'm from Ghana.  I came as an ISOC Ambassador.  Can I see by hands how many of us are not working as ICT professionals or taking up ICT courses?  Can I see by hand any of us?

(Pause.)

>> AUDIENCE:  Okay.  You bear with me that those who showed their hands, they are not actively into ICT career or doing ICT courses.  That means most of us who are here are maybe aware of in based on, or maybe because we are involved in ICT courses or taking up ICT career, and all that.

We had an Internet Governance forum in August in Ghana.  One of the outcomes that some of us proposed were that people are not aware of this Internet Governance.  And during the zero of this meeting we had a youth discussion group and in our group we had young people as at the age of 12 and 11.  And they had a lot of good contributions to make.  And some of them pointed out that they are not aware.  All that they do with the Internet is social media, Facebook, or what's app.  They suggested that they think the Internet can be used to do a lot of things, but they are not aware.  So as we are here, I would advocate that if we leave here, we do not just go and sit in the comfort zones.  We have a lot of work to do.  We need to reach out to our colleagues.  There are a lot of youth activist groups who are not ICT related.  We need to reach out to them.  Internet Governance is about multi-stakeholder involvement, multi-stakeholder discussions.  They have a lot of contributions to make.  We don't have to go and be in our own small cubicle doing IT jobs.  We need to reach out and make them understand that we need their contributions to develop Internet Governance.

Secondly, most of our institutions, especially in Ghana, since they have a lot of social clubs and all that.  Do we reach out to them?  They are not even aware.  So when we have to organise national forums, we should send invitations to the adults.  We shouldn't just send invitations.  We should follow up and make sure that they will come.

We might not really get the involvement we need now, but if we start, I believe that we will get them involved to make the Internet Governance a better forum that we want it to be.  Thank you.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Thank you.  Now moving to EMEA.

>> AUDIENCE:  Hello, everyone.  I'm Yolanda from South Africa.  I forgot my question but I'll go with the flow.  Basically what I wanted to ask is involvement of youth in policy discussions.  What do we want to be involved in?  Let's say access, for example.  When we a propose access as the youth, is it any different than just access in general?  I want to know, like this policy discussions, are they youth-specific policy issues that we need to focus on?  If so, I think we need to be much more clear on that.  What I've noticed anyway, in South Africa we don't have a youth coalition, which we might want to start, myself and other people.  How do we narrow down youth specific issues, even with the recent Africa IGF, there was a youth panel.  What we saw from like the government and obviously private sector, oh, it's just the youth.

You find our issues are always on the side line.  Basically coming here I wanted to figure out, are there youth specific issues or not?  Are we just trying to bring about awareness and get people to the table?  So thank you.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: We are running out of time on this topic.  Anyone who wants to make one final intervention on what she mentioned?  I'll choose someone off the table.

>> AUDIENCE:  Are you going to -- go ahead.

So I wanted to only -- I'm from the YouthIGF.  I want to reflect on all the participations that there have been here today.  I think we need to reflect on what is the worth of a voice of a youth voice right now in current days because the worth of a voice is not only to have the voice and have the opportunity to participate in one of the meetings or one of the summits or forums, but actually that voice leads to a change.

I can have a brilliant, magnificent idea how to change the world.  If that voice does not lead to change, that voice is worthless.  We have to change participation.  We are always asking for more spaces.  We can have hundreds of spaces.  This is not a requirement like a quota.  This requirement actually needs to be implemented by all the governments and by private institutions and by civil society.  Otherwise, our velocity never be heard and will never lead to an actual change.  Thank you.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Thank you for that.  I'm sorry, we are moving on to the next question because we have two.

So you know, that is a natural extension is what can we do better to engage youth in IGF.  I wanted to check how many under 30 youth are here.  Can you put up your hand?  Okay.  Me too.  Okay.  Great.

Because we have a room full.  I wanted to ask one question.  How has IGF been for you so far?  Do you feel excluded?  Do you feel included?  What is it that you feel?  I want people to comment first.

>> AUDIENCE:  Hello, everybody.  I'm Juan Pedro from Portugal.  It was exactly what I really wanted to say.  I really have to pick on something that has already been said.  We are bringing very interesting points, interesting initiatives, but then I ask the same question:  There is no more than 25 adult people in the room.  So this is a session towards capacity building, but how can we really build something if there is nobody hearing?  Thank you.

>> AUDIENCE:  Hello.  What I would like to say is that I feel that what you youth people show is not the essential of youth.  I feel that you are sitting here and thinking in the way we adults are driving you and I would like to hear, I am a little disappointed because I don't hear youth voices, real youth voices.  More than you, I know you are University people that work in policymaker issues, but I would like to think or encourage you to think programmes that will include all the youth.  Artists, political movement, more text -- the youth is very wide.  Here I hear just a little bit of your voice.  I'm sorry.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Thank you.  Moving to yourself?

>> AUDIENCE:  Okay.  Hello.  My name is (Anganaya), part of YouthIGF in Brazil.  I'm a University student.

The question about hearing about youth, what we can do, what we have been driving by other people, I want to say it is other people who are here are already working to make some kind of difference, not just because we are part of the IGF conference, but because in our community, in the local place we are interested in making a difference by teaching, by talking and mentoring people in Internet Governance.  For example, myself, I'm part of, I created a Web site with my friends because we felt the necessity of sharing opportunities like YouthIGF and all the incredible opportunities for fellowships and scholarships.

If you think about it, this scholarship, you usually get to be heard or to be known by people who really need that.  We created this Web site and we had the opportunity to share all the scholarships and thing that we know that can help you to develop the skills and the interest, because what I think is that in the universal way we know there is education and it is really kind of technical.  What we need is to prepare you to work in society and actually be part, not just by talking or being part of the programme, but actually by working.

In this scholarship and fellowship programme we feel that people will develop the interest and back in their local homes they will work to spread this knowledge.

What we need from IGF and all the people who are developing programmes like that is sport.  Not just come here and talk and have awesome opportunity, but when we come back home we go to schools or Universities and talk about that.  And we know that this is really hard because of bureaucracy and all the kind of things that we have back home by having opportunity to talk.  So I think this is a kind of solution that we can think by making this project and all the knowledge that we have here, to actually active people.  If we can get all the people who are part of YouthIGF, all these projects to support them and give them materials, and give them mentoring, they will become leaders in their community.  This is what I'm trying to do in the programme I created, I have 75 people from the State of Brazil.  We have awesome results with people who have no financial need, no financial support.  What they do, they go to the school and talk with the DIRECTOR and they ask:  Can I speak here?  Can I talk about opportunities?  If you have been able to do these things, not being mentioned, imagine what we can do having the support of people who are here.

So thank you so much.

(Applause.)

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Thank you.  We want to engage more people who haven't spoken.  So I am going to give it to anyone who can comment on what can we do better to engage youth in IGF.  No one at all?  I want to give it to speakers who haven't spoken.

Okay.  Yeah, go ahead.

>> AUDIENCE:  I will be briefly actually.  So as for your question, today I don't feel excluded.  I feel that I have been integrated into the IGF.  That said, this is my second IGF.  And in my first IGF I did not feel integrated.  And I can say what helped me integrate.  First, I became part of groups that discussed IG during the year.  There is the Youth Observatory.  It helps people make people feel integrated.  I know that some people are part of the youth from the CGI in Brazil that helped them.  So there are groups that prepare you throughout the year and we contact people you know during the IGF.

Programmes from institutions and the third thing that helped me was that I was assisted by someone very much more experienced than me and Ianata from MAG and having this mentorship helps to understand how the IGF works.  These are the three things that I have seen personally that have a high success rate.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Thank you, that's great.  Who else is a youth who has a mentor?  Not many.  Maybe that's something that we should work on.  I mean, yourself being part of a group, mentors are easier to access, but I mean, if you look at other people who come without -- go ahead.

>> AUDIENCE:  Actually, we don't even need to have very experienced mentors.  People who have been to one or two IGFs can reasonably well mentor younger people.  So it is not like mentors are an extremely rare resource.  They are quite available actually.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Is there anyone who wants to share how they feel included or excluded at this IGF?

>> AUDIENCE:  Thank you so much.  I'm from Nairobi, Kenya.  This is just a comment on the youth should not only be involved in terms of participation, in terms of participation in the process of policy discussions, but they should also be involved in terms of the actualisation of those policies which are not only sit around in a table give discussions, but when it comes to really the actualisation of what we really need to be involved in the same.

Also what has already been said in terms of role models.  We need the role models to be able to mentor us because we are the leaders of today as well as the leaders of tomorrow.  And the will people who supposed to guide us in terms of policy discussions and in terms of also the actualisation of the same in all sectors, whether economic, financial, or social.  Thank you so much.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Great.  And I think that echos the point where earlier we mentioned how to make our participation into tangible actions.  I think that is a great point.  Anyone else who wants to comment on the -- okay, go ahead.

>> HAORAN HUANG:  Okay, thank you.  This is Haoran speaking.  Brief comment.  I want to invite the young people here.  Because I have written most of them as an IGF Fellow.  I want to ask you a question.  Please think about the first time you apply for this event fellowship programme.  We can see we are, there will always be a question that asks you:  Why do we want to apply for this?  Also benefits would you want to take away from this event?

So after this as we can see, we have a very excellent programme.  But after this only limited programme are continuously active participating in the IG event.

Please keep this in mind because your motivation is most important for you to continuously join these sessions.  Thank you.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: That's a really good point.  I see a lot of young people jump off because of University studies or they get work and get too busy.  That is very important.  Raymond, you want to make a I point?

>> AUDIENCE:  I wanted to respond to this lady, I don't know the name.  Hello!

I think, okay, I'm also a University student.  I want to respond to your question.  If you ask for my real feeling, I feel not only should youth be educated but also the other groups including the adults because I attend a workshop and I realise some of the workshops they don't really listen to youth.  I one thing yesterday, he tried so hard to speak, he had to stand in front of the model powerless to get the chance to speak.  I think not only youth, but others.  I appreciate all of you sitting here to hear the youth.  But some of the workshops, it is not the same.  That is my real feeling.  Thanks.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Great.  Thank you.  Anyone else who wants to comment before I wrap up?

>> What I wanted to add, because I think just for me this is only the second IGF.  The first IGF I was at was four years ago.  I see some drastic changes in the amount of youth participation.  I think back then we had been like 20.  Now it is more like 200, which is pretty cool.  I think and Raymond said it also earlier, we are still start sort of in the starting point.  Right now we are at the level that we have representation.  Young people are there but they are not necessarily in the processes. 

One of the big issues is that young people are there one time only in IGF.  We have the culture of it is all about who you know.  I am here because I jumped in for an old colleague.  So you need to get young people into the structures.  I think there is something that we can learn from anti-discrimination work, that is how to be a good ally.  There are a few rules on how to be a good ally, and something we should recognize in the IGF culture.  Number one, we need to acknowledge that a group is disadvantaged or under represented.  Second is that we need to actively listen to them and educate ourselves about them.  The last point, we need to give the floor to young people.  It is great that we had this open mic session for such a long time.  Most of the workshops I attended today had five to ten minutes for questions.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: One final comments?

>> Very quickly.  I wanted to thank everybody for the invaluable feedback.  I think there is a lot of good concepts that we need to go back and reflect on how to improve our programmes.  All of them are useful.  Thanks for that.

>> BIANCA CAROLINE HO: Okay.  So I'm going to wrap up the session because we only have three minute left.  First of all I want to thank everyone on the panel, everyone who spoke up.  I wish more young people on the side could have like stepped up.  So that is something I wish to see next time.  But I understand it is kind of intimidating to speak in front of 80 people on what you think.

So there's a few points that I can summarize from this discussion.  Let us not look at youth separately but as part of the stakeholder group and it is important for stakeholder groups to recognize that youth is part of you.  They can be civil society or government or any other caps that they wish to take, but they are important and you should value their opinions.

The next thing is turning, changing what we have here into tangible actions.  I think that's super important and there are a few things I can already pick out.  Number one, there are different initiatives, research networks or websites, just go and talk to them.  The second thing is obviously network with different people.  Everyone comes from a very different continent.  They have different challenges.  I think that's worth bringing back to your own country and digest that.

And the other thing is mentorship.  I have kind of seen mentorship as quite important and probably next year we need to put more emphasis on that with the organisation of IGF.  You can jump on and organise a mentorship session as well.  You don't need anyone to give you approvals.  The beauty of IGF, it is loosely structured.  Anything you want to do, you can just kind of raise your hand and people will need your help and you need to constantly engage with that, which is kind of difficult given there's a lot of other things that might distract you.  As long as you put your head towards it, I think everyone can get that chance.

So yeah, again I want to say thank you to anyone.  Remember the good ally three rules:  That was talked about by Martin.  I just want us to have more cooperation and success towards next year's IGF.  Thank you.

>> DAVID NG:  Last but not least I want to promote this Friday the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance.  We will talk about how to work collectively on making YouthIGF more appealing.  Thank you for joining us in this session.  Your inputs and all the efforts you have made and in doing the report.  Thanks, everyone, for joining.

(Applause.)

(The session concluded at 1:30 p.m.)