The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. 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.
Due to this, names can be misspelled. For the purpose of punctuality the presenters at this session were: Ms. Marilyn Cade (coordinator, moderator and presenter), Mr. Mark Buell, Ms. Ellen Strickland, Ms. Sorina Teleanu and Ms. Anja Gengo
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>> MARILYN CADE: My name is Marilyn Marilyn Cade, I want to welcome all of you to a substantive session ‑‑ I was asked by the MAG Chair earlier in the year to help to coordinate and organize the substantive dialogue. And I'm going to say a few words about the process that we undertook, but also a little bit about the history because there are some new IGF initiatives and there are some quite mature IGF initiatives in terms.
Number of years they have existed. When we walked out of Tunis with the text in hand called the Tunis Agenda, we had a Paragraph which called on the UN Secretary General of the United Nations to convene a Forum for the purposes of to examine and develop public policy issues related to the Internet. We have a quite substantial agenda defined in Paragraph 72 of the Tunis Agenda that defines the functions and purpose of the IGF itself. And we have a reference to the importance of the involvement at the national and regional level as well.
We didn't have a roadmap for what the IGF itself was going to look like, and we were very privileged that the Government of Greece offered to host the first IGF which set a date and a goal, and we somehow managed to create a Secretariat which didn't exist before and to hold the first IGF in Athens, Greece. Beginning in 2006, I began organizing half‑day preparatory sessions in the United States to create awareness about what the IGF was so that there would be somebody from the United States who would attend the first IGF. It began to happen in other countries as well. It happened in Europe, Africa, but there was no firm thing as a designation as a national or regional IGF. But out of the national organization engagements, the bottom up organic growth of the national and regional IGFs has emerged and we went from having none in 2006 because we had our first IGF to now having a substantial number which you are going to see, and great diversity in the national and regional IGFs. We weren't holding the substantive dialogue several years ago. They have taken many different flavors. We experimented with having two 90 minute sessions, one substantive, one more about procedures. We have done a number of things, and I would say we need to revisit how we are going to maximize interaction at both the coordinator level and at the thematic level but also think about what our advice as coordinators or individuals who are involved as the Chair of organizing national initiative or a participant that's heavily involved, what are the kinds of recommendations that we would make to the Secretariat and to the MAG and the community at large about further support that will support the functioning of the national regional IGFs and help to grow more. So the agenda was developed out of a consultative process including Forums that some of you were able to attend. We have not had the turnout into the coordinators calls and that's one of the things toward the end of the session we will talk about either better ways to continue to communicate across the coordinators.
The second thing we did, we agreed to do a survey, and that survey tells us quite a bit about what is going on so we are going to review the survey. In the survey, we identified the themes that the coordinators nominated to be addressed in the session. And interestingly enough, the themes that were chosen were Janis, please, okay, the themes chosen were Connecting the Next Billion, and focusing on improving and increasing the interaction and reflection from the national regional IGFs into the IGF and from the IGF back into the national and regional IGFs.
Our survey actually addressed that question, I think, quite substantially and we are going to hear from the team leaders who did the analysis. The development of the survey was done with a survey development group and then a survey analysis that were drawn from volunteers. I want to at this point give special recognition to Anja Ganko, the Secretariat of support and I need to turn around and recognize you and the woman that just walked in the door, Serena, who supported me last year in working with the national and regional IGFs and so fell in love with the opportunity that she took special leave from her job this year and returned to work at the Secretariat to help at the IGF overall but also to help us and has played a large role into helping to analyze the survey results working with Anja. At this point I would like to open the floor to comments from, I'm going to give Janis, our MAG Chair the option. I want to do quick one minute introductions from all of you so we know who is in the room from the national and regional IGFs, and perhaps I will do that first, Janis so you know who is with us and then I would like to welcome comments. May I do that? Thank you. Let me start first of all, Mark, you and Ellen, your name, your formal affiliation, and then if you are with one of the national or regional IGFs and what your function is there.
>> MARK BUELL: My name is Mark Buell, Senior Communications Adviser for the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, which is the registry for the dossier Top Level Domain, and the coordinator of the Canadian IGF.
>> ELLEN STRICKLAND: Ellen Strickland, Program Director Internet New Zealand as well as Civil Society charity and I am project lead for NetHui, which is the New Zealand Internet Governance event.
>> MARILYN CADE: I want to mention, Marilyn speaking again, we are going to be handing out a sign in sheet which is asking for the same kind of information, please print your email address because some of you write as though you are a medical doctor, and we were having difficulty making sure we have email addresses correct. We want to update the coordinator's list so you will see, and the second point is one of the real examples I think of the diversity and innovation in the national and regional IGFs, you have already heard two very different titles for the coordinator's roles. Thank you.
>> DAVID VYORST: My name is David Vyorst. I'm co‑Chair IGF USA, Executive Director, ISOC DC. Relation digital strategies.
>> ALBERTO PEREZ: I'm Alberto Perez working a Government agency in charge of promoting Internet, I'm here representing IGF Spain.
>> FLAVIO WAGER: I'm Flavio Wagner, member of the board of TGIBR. I'm not directly responsible for the national IGF in Brazil, but we have been organizing the national IGF for five years.
>> I'm Silvia from the ICT for federation of the industry of Internet Latin America. I'm also Vice President of WITSA, a MAG member, and since last August I'm part of the ecosystem of the IGF regional Latin America. Thank you.
>> I'm Lianna Galstyan from Armenia, board member and public relationship of ISOC Armenia. And committee of Armenia IGF which is a new initiative.
>> Although I picked up the compliments, thank you, Marilyn. My name is Anja and fellow Secretariat based in Geneva.
>> MIKE NELSON: Mike Nelson, CloudFlare, Washington, D.C., I'm on the MAG and involved in IGF‑USA, have been for several years.
>> MACTAR SECK: My name is Mactar Seck, Economic Commission for Africa. African IGF, we have IGF Union. And also as the UN process in Africa.
>> MARY UDUMA: Mary Uduma from Nigeria. I'm the governor of Nigeria IGF, and I Chair the local MAG in IGF. I am also the dot NG. I have just retired as the President of the board, but I'm still working with the organization that manages the dot NG. Thank you.
>> Hi, Sayeed Navi, Afghanistan. I work for the Government, but I'm not representing Government here, I'm representing Civil Society. It's relatively new initiative in the country, and I'm also pleased to say we are hosting a remote participation for IGF for the first time in Afghanistan and they are probably in another workshop, not here right now.
>> Hi, I'm Shane Hughes. I'm the Vice Chair of the IGF‑USA with David and I'm also with the group called American Enterprise Institute as a visiting fellow working on global Internet strategy.
>> FLAVIO COSTA: Flavio Costa from Albania. ICT Department, Ministry of Energy and Industry, and I'm planning to create an IGF in Albania too.
>> MARILYN CADE: Especially for your willingness to contribute to the survey in an advanced way. Thank you.
>> LAURA HUTCHISON: Laura Hutchison, U.K. country code and Secretariat for the UKIGF.
>> MARK CARVELL: Good morning, everybody. Thank you, Marilyn for introducing and convening this session and the team. My name is Mark Carvell. I'm with the U.K. Government, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport which leads on Internet Governance policy. I'm a member of the MAG and I'm also a member of the steering committee for the UKIGF. Similar to the U.S. experience which you recounted, Marilyn, from the very start, the U.K. Government thought it was very important to have a preparatory process for U.K. stakeholders to gear up for this new experiment in governance, the IGF, and working closely with Nominet on that so we have been very much partners in developing UKIGF.
The U.K. Internet Minister, Ed Vasey who can't be at this global IGF, he has been at the previous four IGFs has always been very active in the U.K. IGF. And that's a sign of how closely we want to be engaged and want to support the UKIGF. I should also mention the Commonwealth IGF which is a Forum we have convened in the past within the context of the global IGF and we have actually a Commonwealth Open Forum tomorrow at 11:00 for those stakeholder colleagues that are here. And there is a possibility which is starting to develop to hold a standalone Commonwealth IGF in India next year. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Hello, my name is Sandra Hoferichter. I am Secretary General the EuroDIG, based in Germany.
>> I'm Mal Broedner, co‑convener of the Washington, D.C. of the Internet Society and I have been involved in the Washington, D.C., IGF, U.S.A.
>> JOHN MORE: John More, also a co‑convener of the D.C. chapter of the Internet Society and I have been active in D.C. chapter for many years.
>> LEO ADJAKPA: Leo Adjakpa, business consultant AFICTA.
>> ARNOLD VANRHIJN: Arnold Vanrhijn, Ministry of Economic Affairs, I also organizing our national IGF.
>> Aaron Buscar, I have been participating and active in IGF‑USA since the very beginning. We have been sponsoring the global IGF and IGF‑USA since the very beginning as well. And we are very glad to see how well they are both doing.
>> We could probably go on, at one point we introduced scenario stories at the IGF‑USA and Iran made the first field visit that a national IGF had and another colleague of Snae Tues were here when we did a partnership between Russian IGF and IGF‑USA, so as we talk about innovations and ideas of sharing, I just wanted to think about some of the history that has emerged and initiatives that some of you may have done like that.
>> GILFORD HAPANYENGWI: Good morning, I'm Gilford Hapanyengwi from Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe IGF. I am the current Chairman of IGF, three months old, not me, but the IGF. I'm also responsible for the Dutch AC, Dutch CW. Thank you.
>> Good morning, Cristina Monte. I work at the European Commission in DG connect in a team that deals with Internet Governance and the European Commission is also a partner of EuroDIG. Thank you.
>> HUGO CORDOVA: I'm Hugo Cordova, European Parliament, the Secretariat, and we have big delegation this year.
>> GARLAND McCOY: I'm Garland McCoy with the Technology Education Institute and I have been involved since Rio in the IGF, and I think from the beginning with the IGF‑USA and very committed all along on the Connecting the Next Billion initiatives or global connect, so work in that particular area.
>> (No English translation).
>> MARILYN CADE: We will take any other introductions when they arrive, but I would like now to recognize that we have been joined by Janis Karklins the MAG Chair and I would like to welcome him and ask him to Chair Janis has been a strong supporter of the growth of the national, and when we convened a small and formal meeting in Paris during the MAG meeting came and joined us during the lunch period to hear further thoughts and I know he has ideas and thinking about the importance of the national regional IGF. So to you, Chair.
>> JANIS KARLINS: Thank you very much, and thank you for inviting me to the meeting. Let me step back a little bit and start with ten years ago when the first IGF was convened in Athens. And so we were very happy to be together, and clearly it demonstrated how valuable the multistakeholder dialogue was. And since then I am more than pleased to know that there are more than 30 national regional IGF initiatives that have been established basically on all continents except one. This is Antarctica, but otherwise, it is almost everywhere.
And the mere fact of existence of those national and regional initiatives proves that this dialogue is absolutely necessary to prepare decision making process, but whether at national or regional level. So then IGF experienced some, let's say, difficulties after certain period of time and the Commission for Science and Technology for Development at rest issue and established the Working Group on improvements of IGF. And the working group produced recommendations, and one of the recommendations is or was to make sure that the global IGF becomes more relevant to all stakeholders at national and regional level. And that IGF should produce something more tangible for the benefit of everyone.
So putting these two recommendations together last year, we, in the MAG, when we discussed this, we thought that it would be very useful maybe to engage with the national regional initiatives and kind of create a loop where activities of national, regional IGFs would feed in IGF, global IGF, and so we developed proposal to address the theme of policy menu for next billion on line.
And I'm very grateful to all of the national regional IGF initiatives for taking up and contributing the outcome of your discussions to the document which will be discussed today and will be presented at the main, to the main session I think the day after or tomorrow or today in the afternoon, yes. Of course, one can argue that this was kind of imposed on regional and national IGFs, the team, and I think that we should maybe look at other alternatives how to sort of assign a topic or two.
So I would prefer one, but nevertheless, and I think that your meeting today would be maybe the best venue to talk about this team, and if you could, if you support this idea of continuation of linking national, regional IGFs on one topic, so then your meeting today would be maybe the best opportunity to talk about this potential theme and come up with a proposal. Then we could endorse and carry this intersessional work throughout the year and that would be your theme and your contribution, and we could sort of accommodate that within the program of IGF 2016.
And I am very confident saying that because co‑facilitators yesterday were absolutely clear that the probability that high level meeting will not extend or would not extend the mandate of IGF is almost non‑existent. So, therefore, never say hop before jumping, but we can be fairly confident that there will be IGF 2016, 17, 18, 19, 20, and up to 25. So, therefore, I would encourage you maybe to analyze your experience of this year, tell us what did work, what didn't, what type of interaction you would like to see or how process should be shaped if you are in agreement that this should be continued, and how that result should be fed in the next year's IGF. So that type of reflection and advice from your meeting today would be extremely helpful for the MAG thinking about next year's program and creating this cooperation mechanism which certainly is completely volunteer and not imposed so that all of us, we can benefit from experiences and our knowledge.
>> MARILYN CADE: I'm going to respond to the MAG Chair by referencing something that is in our agenda and taking credit for the fact that actually during our survey, Janis and with the reflection of the input of many of the coordinators, if you look down toward the last two bullets, one of the things that we are going to talk about is the theme, it was identified, I wouldn't have called it the theme. I would have called it a topic, but in our survey, the theme of creating this feedback loop, this reflection from the IGF into the national and regional IGFs and from the national and regional IGFs into the IGF was one of the two topics that received the most interest of discussion here as well as identifying following up on the meeting we had, informal discussion we had in Paris, how to double the number of the national IGFs by the 2016. There are many challenges that the national and regional IGFs face that we are also going to talk about or reflecting back to the Secretariat and the MAG on what additional support can be given to address those challenges.
And I think what I have seen is actually a great enthusiasm about contributing to the intersessional work and the results of our survey which we are going to go through now show that there is a very strong linkage already with organizing of workshops, participation in dynamic coalitions, contributing to Connecting the Next Billion, but it's not visible, it's not as visible as we would like to see it. But I welcome your comments and I wonder if you might take questions from ‑‑
>> JANIS KARLINS: When you think about the theme, like this year basically the theme was access. What are policies in different parts of the world to increase access? So I would encourage also to think in terms of substantive themes that would be where we could share our knowledge and experiences on something which would be development oriented or let's say rights based orientation or something rather than process orientation.
I understand that it is important to discuss about challenges that national, regional initiatives may face, and certainly to share those experiences among coordinators of these initiatives, but for the broader public, it is more substance that is of great interest. So one thing that comes to mind, for instance, is local content, how to insure that local content is created and because that is another side of the coin of bringing more people on line.
It's not just to give them computer and access. So if there is no content, most probably they will go once and second time they won't, or education, the skills, literacy, making sure that everyone knows that the first entry on search engine not necessarily is absolute truth, and then so on. So plenty of topics that we could think about.
>> MARILYN CADE: We have Janis with us. I don't think he is able to stay the entire time. The next thing we will do is go through the survey. I will take a queue. I should just say one thing, you are probably terribly curious why there are so many people attending from IGF‑USA. Obviously it's because they need to supervise me, right, or I'm trying to set a new standard of encouraging you to bring all of your participants as well. I will start with Mary and then go to Mike. Do I have anyone else?
>> MARY UDUMA: My name is Mary Uduma again for the record, I'm from Nigeria IGF. I want to thank Janis. He remotely participated in our Nigeria IGF and made a presentation on connecting. We talked on connecting the next 50 million Nigerians online, and the issues that there are there. Are we trying to formalize this relationship? Are we going to, is this process going to formalize the relationship, the linkages between the MAG, is IGF, the regional, national and down the line?
>> MARILYN CADE: Actually, I'm going to preempt the MAG Chair on that question, Mary. And because we will talk more about this. The MAG Chair, let's do this, the thematic topics and other kinds of things because I think this is more a Secretariat question.
>> All right. Thank you.
>> JANIS KARLINS: From systemic point of view, I don't know if there is a need, we can think about it. But technically or legally speaking, there is no link between at least for the moment between global IGF, which is convened by you and Secretary General and National Initiatives. So we are creating that link now. We need to see how it works, whether that is useful or not, and if that is useful, so we may think about kind of association or coalition or whatever with a kind of formalized relationship if that is needed and helpful.
>> MICHAEL NELSON: Mike Nelson with CloudFlare in Washington. As a member of the MAG, I felt one of the most useful things coming out of the regional and national IGFs have been proposals based on sessions that were held in the regional and national IGFs. It's great to see when people have brought a new topic into the process and they have identified great speakers. Sometimes you can even watch the session and see how good it was.
But we don't see enough of that in my mind. I'm just wondering whether anybody in the room thinks there is a way to encourage more of that sort of feeding process. It's a little bit like the Ted X talks that feed into the Ted Conference. It would be a great way to maybe feature, the local groups could highlight two or three amazing sessions that were new and different and encourage people to feed that into the global IGF. Any thoughts on how we might encourage that, Janis?
>> JANIS KARLINS: I think these drills we need to look for and share that information and it's certainly in every part of the world we have something that others may not have because of number of circumstances and as I tend to say the beauty of Internet is we do not know in which garage which kid is working on something that in five years will become a billion user application.
So the same applies here, we don't know. And information sharing and that's why this network of national regional IGFs is in my view, very, very helpful.
>> There are also amazing things that might be going on in Government agency offices that the rest of the world could learn from as well. This brings up the second point, which is is there a way we can get more resources so that the IGF can do more with this incredibly rich content that's being generated here at the IGF and in some cases at the IGF regional ones because we have got a lot of great material. As professor I have used some of it, but not everybody knows that some of the best sessions on these topics are here.
>> JANIS KARLINS: I think that conditions now are much better than they used to be months ago because IGF Secretariat has hired a web master, a person who is dedicated to work exclusively on IGF website. You know that there was some time ago financial crisis and the IGF website was let's say maintained to fulfill their minimum requirements. And the community initiative was proposed and friends of IGF created I wouldn't say alternative side, but the audio visual site and collected rich material and put it in a searchable way.
I think that now our task is to find a way avoiding all, let's say, legal limitations that exist because of the affiliation with United Nations which is highly regulated environment to cooperate or to incorporate or link both websites and certainly improve the IGF website. So I believe that in next IGF we will clearly see improvements in that respect as well.
>> Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: Let me build on that. I want to go to Arnold next. Some of the things that our survey, which was focused on process and procedures so we wouldn't take up the time on that did identify the kinds of ideas that the Secretariat might be able to offer to the national and regional IGFs which would be the kind of tactical support, et cetera, so we will talk about that later and Mike may get that question answered and if not the transcript will answer it. I will go to Arnold and then to Mark because I'm building a cue and then I have someone in the back.
>> ARNOLD VANRHIJN: Thank you Marilyn and thank you, Janis, for your explanation. Indeed, there is a lot of work ahead of us to strengthen this interaction between national, European and regional and the global IGF is not only about seeking themes where we with strengthen this relationship, but it's also about processes. I think in particular there is a special role for the MAG to stir up this interaction. I think MAG members should know what national IGFs are looking for in their preparation for the global IGF. To name a concrete example, the Netherlands IGF special, the special year of celebrating ten year IGF thought, well, we should have a very thrilled program going forward to Brazil.
So the program was really linked to hot topics, policy topics like Internet of Things, online platforms, privacy as an enabler of economic growth, and I attended the MAG meeting, very valuable MAG meetings we had and as an oftener, I tried to, through the MAG, tried to get this link with the global IGF. So we proposed, well, I proposed some workshops and finally we got a good result, I must say.
And Internet of Things in relationship to ethics, this is something we are now discussing here in Brazil. It is the responsibility of the national IGF to have a good preparation for the global IGF. On the other hand, there is also responsibility of the MAG members to see where there is discussions going on in the different countries. And so my strong wish is that national IGFs around the world should seek contact with the MAG members in the preparation for the global IGF to get this linkage, to let them know this is really what we are discussing in our country, and this is really important to follow up.
So this is what my thoughts are to get better interaction, and I would like to know what your reaction is on this.
>> JANIS KARLINS: I understand where you are coming from. Word of caution is I think that the national and regional IGFs first and foremost should address issues of importance at the national and regional level, not that much look at global because these are not subsidiaries of global IGFs, vice versa. These are national IGFs which then may want to feed something to the global. This is go kind of inverse equation if you wish.
But certainly we would like to hear as much as we can from experiences at national regional level. I think that there is also a question whether IGF, the global IGF should continue to be organized in a way as it is, and this, I think, will be responsibility of the MAG in the first meeting of the next cycle to see whether we will continue with the completely bottom up process as it is now with a call for proposals, then receiving this year I think we were very privileged to have more than 400 proposals and we had the daunting task to select 120 best proposals following very clearly defined methodology.
But that is a random, still it does not maybe 100% reflect the, maybe the whole, all desires or wishes of countries or organizations or companies. So we need to look for right balance in that respect. So hopefully we will find one. But certainly not, I don't see that global IGF should dictate anything to national, regional IGFs, that's for sure.
>> MARILYN CADE: I have three questions. I see you in the back. I first of all have Mark and then I have, I see the microphone, so can we get the microphone to Mark?
>> JANIS KARLINS: Please go ahead.
>> MARILYN CADE: We will go to Garland.
>> JANIS KARLINS: You have the microphone, just charge ahead.
>> MARILYN CADE: No, no. Excuse me.
>> GARLAND McCOY: Okay. I will go ahead very briefly. First of all, very supportive of this proposal that we help identify key themes that will help the MAG, I'm sure, to have input from the national and regional IGFs in that regard. So supportive of that proposal. That's very helpful, and certainly from my perspective as a MAG member that's important contribution that the MAG should help deliver through input from the national and regional IGFs.
With regard to a theme or topic for the interaction of national and regional IGFs to contribute to the global IGF, certainly support that as a way forward. We think that's very important. As to how we would in the U.K. would approach that, we would have a process whereby we convene our steering committee to reflect on this IGF in its entirety, and then consider as one of an agenda, as an Agenda Item, if you like, what can the UKIGF contribute to in terms of developing a theme intersessionally.
So we will need to have that kind of step to be taken. And then we could submit something to that which takes into account discussions today, certainly, and but in addition what is going to happen at this IGF and ongoing themes and further work to be done as a result of this global IGF in its entirety. So that's how I see the steps for us to take to contribute to identifying that topic or two topics, if we identify two.
>> JANIS KARLINS: Ideally, if that would be known already now, if not, but certainly we need to put kind of a cap into terms of time because this year we were a bit late with identification of the team, and as a result some national IGFs have taken place already by the time the theme was identified or programming have been already advanced sufficiently that it was difficult to squeeze in a theme.
So but, again, I would really love to see proposal coming out from this group because that will be a theme or topic which will unite all national regional initiatives in the run up to the next IGF.
>> MARILYN CADE: Sorry, David, I have closed the cue and I need to take the two speakers because we need to move on and thank the Chair. I'm going to reverse the order because Sandra is a coordinator and I appreciate you being here, but let me take Sandra's question first and then take yours unless we can deal with it later, but I have closed the cue because we need to move onto the rest of the program. Sandra.
>> JANIS KARLINS: That was a nice way to say off you go. I'm joking!
>> MARILYN CADE: As much as I love having the MAG Chair here, gosh!
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you Marilyn. I want to underline what has been said by the previous speaker and give you an update. At Europe we also at the moment looking possibilities how to better interlink the nationals with the sub regional and regional and then feed into the global. We know this is a difficult task because there are two less resources and I don't mean financial resources, I also meantime, time to travel, time to participate, to organize. So we are looking into ways how to as a regional IGF, how to actually offer sort of the service or make national IGF sometimes easier to organize their nationals, national events, and to foster this development. We will look into this option a little bit further by the Open Forum on Friday this week so everybody is invited to come and discuss this with us. There might be possibilities like we had a sub-regional IGF this year along with Europe, EuroDIG, the eastern dialogue on Internet Governance was created. We decided or we moved forward in terms of that now we have a joint call for proposal. So we are trying to bundle the resources from this call for proposals. The submitter can either choose if they want to submit their topic under the discussion of the Eastern European focus or on the EuroDIG. So this is one way how we tried to align the processes to streamline it a little bit more.
We will look into options how we can cooperate and this time also with national IGFs. We were also thinking about defining themes. I think the intersessional work Connecting the Next Billion introduced by the global IGF this year is also a very good step ahead, how we can actually work on a topic over the year. We will look into options as well, and see if this is a model for Europe.
And we could think although knowing that every national IGF has different conditions and you can put the process on top of them. I mean, it has to come from, it really has to come from a bottom up perspective. We might think about that the region could actually coordinate themselves the way it works for them, and then bring up the proposals and bring up the results to the global IGF. So this is actually the time line. These are the issues we want to look for the let's say next five years in the respect of the global IGF will we are pretty sure continue.
Thank you very much.
>> JANIS KARLINS: Thank you. My comment is let's keep it light, as light as possible at least at the beginning while we are sure that things work properly.
>> MARILYN CADE: Garland, you are the last speaker, and I welcome you staying with us, Janis, but we will move forward. I will say that some of the ideas that have been mentioned here are also reflected in the survey. So when you see, you will receive the survey and the write-up, you will see reflection of that as well. Garland, you get the last word.
>> GARLAND McCOY: Just real quick, I have been with the program for ten years now, and the quick question I had was whether you thought it was time to look at expanding, particularly the stakeholders and the non‑ICT areas so that with the Internet as ubiquitous and at least at one level, obviously I'm committed to Connecting the Next Billion, but at one level ubiquitous and there are so many financial institutions, resort hotels, commerce that's done on this platform that perhaps bringing in more stakeholders that understand, there is not an education process that needs to take place. They understand how important the Internet is to their line of work to join us in Connecting the Next Billion in this policy work in becoming disciples, if you will, in the various policy and areas we want to pursue.
So just enlarging the participation base just a bit. If that's a worthy ‑‑
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Fully agree. That has been discussed in the MAG and this is our objective to attract other industries to IGF in order to learn from their experiences. So if you remember, for instance, maybe half a year ago, there was information that one flying air cast was hacked and honestly no one would like to be on an aircraft which is hacked so the airline industry or the aviation industry certainly has experienced to share when it comes to cybersecurity. And that would clearly enrich our discussion and our understanding about the complexities. So automobile industry is another example, banking goes without saying, everything is online. Long answer to your short question is yes.
>> MARILYN CADE: Would you all join me in giving a round of applause and thanking our MAG Chair, but before you do that I want to say something about what a terrific contribution that Janis has made to enabling our success. I first met Janis Karklins when he was the President of the preparatory, the second preparatory process during the WSIS, and in the first preparatory process, stakeholders were not allowed in the room, and I had the opportunity to convince my boss I worked at AT&T at the time, that it was worth his paying for me to fly to Geneva to hang out in the coffee shop and buy coffee for the Government negotiators.
Through Janis' leadership really, he really helped a great deal in his role in helping to open up and recognize the importance of bringing stakeholders in, and you have been a real champion in that. Janis has also contributed significantly to the fact that we have been so fortunate as to have the U.N. co‑facilitators come and join us. So do join me in thanking our MAG Chair.
(Applause).
>>JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you for your kind words. You made me feel uncomfortable.
>> MARILYN CADE: Very welcome. I'm going to readjust the schedule just a bit. I want to invite now to come and join us here at the front table. Chengetai Masango who is our Secretariat. If I may, Chengetai.
While he is coming to join us at the front, I will give you a brief introduction, most of you know Chengetai Masango, but what you don't know is Chengetai runs a year‑round business that most of you would, which has so many moving parts that it's really amazing. Each year we deliver a bottom up approach to planning and organizing the annual event. He also supports and engages with the national and regional IGFs and he does that with a very minimal staff and with the volunteer help and the help of a very small part‑time resource to some consulting support and to some fellows.
I have to tell you guys that when I was the Vice President of health services at AT&T computer systems, I don't think I could have run my business by relying on volunteers and reporting to a group as creative as the MAG is and working with the UN. So I think we have a great deal to say thanks about to our executive Secretariat. I wanted him to come and talk to you a little bit and take a few questions before we move on about the national regional figures because he is really our resource to access to the staff I mentioned to you before, and to access overall to the IGF.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much, Marilyn, for those too kind words. You make me feel uncomfortable at the beginning, not at the end.
>> MARILYN CADE: It's a ploy I use so we get more from you.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: But I do work with a lot of great people, and this year it's been Anya who has been mostly dealing with the regional and national IGFs, so I think we should give her a hand of applause too. They did? We'll do it again. We can do it twice.
(Applause).
We feel that the regional and national IGF initiatives are very, very important, especially since this is a bottom up process, and good governance begins at home, and we are now trying to integrate more the views between the two so we are not acting separately, which, I think we have done, you have done the initiatives and also with the intersessional work and I would like to thank you all very much for contributing to that, and also communicating with us and sending in your reports, et cetera.
We also have our fellowship program which I'm sure you know about where we try and invite people from Developing Countries to come and work at the IGF Secretariat, and Anya is one of them so that when they go back, it helps encourage more of this integration and communication between the regional and national IGFs, and as soon as ‑‑ I will just say as soon as IGF is finished, I will also be sending an email out to all of you for nominations for the next round of fellows, especially for 2016.
What else would I like to say? We used to have regular meetings of the regional and national IGFs, and I think we should really try and have those again. I think they were very, very helpful, and at least we can coordinate and also see the requirements for becoming a national and regional IGF initiative and a whole host of other things because there is a lot of things that we can coordinate to and make, you know, the IGF process a much stronger process. I’ll stop there. Thank you very much.
>> MARILYN CADE: So Chengetai, I want to thank you on behalf of the coordinators for the terrific support that you also gave us in doing our survey, and I'm going to, we are going to talk about the survey in a bit. I don't expect you to stay for it, but I want to say that through the survey as you know, we included questions about what kind of resources that the secretary could provide to the national and regional IGF's. And one of the things we uncovered is that although the Secretariat is very willing to provide WebEx and also audio conferencing to assist, that awareness was not fully understood by some of the national and regional IGFs. So some of our learning about, you know, even though there is, and the fact that there is a designated contact, Anya, for the national and regional IGFs those kind of minor improvements are the kind of things that will come out of this.
We did used to, have actually, Chengetai and I launched the first coordinators meeting several years ago. Those fell away and one of the questions was would you like to resume those and we got a resounding yes to that. So we will be coming back on that. I will take two questions for Chengetai and then we need to move on with the program. Anybody have a burning question? So we have been benefited in the past at the IGF‑USA by having the physical presence of the Secretariat, and I know that you have been able to attend some of the national and regional IGFs, you have also participated remotely.
Given the fact you have a very, very busy schedule, I really do understand that it's difficult for you to spend a lot of time on the road, so to speak, but looking ahead, I think we would like to ask you after our meeting today, we would like to come back to you and talk more about also the visibility of the Secretariat and you and others during the actual physical and national IGFs and regional IGFs because that's an important linkage as well.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: I'm always willing to come and support the regional and national IGFs, but there is a few things to do, and time management is one of them, but, yes, we can talk about it, and see how best, especially for 2016, how best we can do that. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you for joining us.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: I almost got away. I talk on behalf of IGF Secretariat in Africa Secretariat. We had a good relationship with the IGF Secretariat last year you attended to this meeting in Nigeria. We appreciate it. I think we need to work more together with the IGF Secretariat in Geneva to be present in the sub regional IGF in Africa. We need more emphasis as sub regional IGF. The sub regional IGF is regulated between Africa. Your presence is highly appreciated but now we need your presence and your support for the sub regional IGF. I think my colleague, Maria, has something to say about it, but she ran the IGF for West Africa.
>> MARILYN CADE: Yes.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: I would also like to mention the summer schools that are sometimes attached. We talked about C‑DAC, the African Summer School. So going forward we think these are very important and we should work together to see ways in how we can help support these summer schools, especially for the capacity building effort to help people more proactively engage in the Internet Governance discourse.
>> MARILYN CADE: We are going to go on with the program. You are very welcome to stay. I'm going to readjust the agenda because we have substantive discussions and we have the review of the survey and I think if I may consult with my two co‑moderators let's go with the substantive discussion on WSIS+10 if you don't mind and then we will do Connecting the Next Billion because we have expert speakers here and then we will review the survey because we can review the survey with you in a written report. Is that okay with everyone if we do that switch? Okay.
We are going to talk about WSIS+10 first, and let me just mention that during the development of the MAG discussion, and there are several MAG members here, I made the proposal that we have a substantive session about, on the consultation on the WSIS+10 review, the MAG supported that and all of you were able to attend and participate in that very unusual session yesterday morning because we did have the active listening of the two UN co‑facilitators and their staff.
But drawing out of that several of the national and regional IGFs also held their own sessions where they also took up WSIS+10, and I'm going to ask a few of the folks who led that or moderated that session within their national IGF to just share a few views with us both about the idea of bringing such a, I might say, obscure global topic into your national or regional IGF, and how you experienced the response to this since as I was reminded by Ambassador Fonseca when I came here, that WSIS+10 and the exception of the IGF may be very much on the minds of the MAG, but majority at of the attendees do not know or care about what WSIS+10 is, but we brought it to some of them at the national level. I will kick off with Peter Dengai because I know he ended up chairing the town hall session that we held in the IGF‑USA.
We were somewhat probably favored by our proximity to New York and the fact that I was able to invite attendants in an active listening mode of a staff person from one of the co‑facilitators' staff, but Peter Chaired the WSIS+10 session at IGF‑USA. Can I see a show of hands of others? I believe, Sandra there was also, and I know that the African IGF also had a session on WSIS+10.
So if I could start with Peter and then come to here and then to you Ellen and to Mark. Thank you.
>> PETER THRUSH: Good morning. I missed the first part of the session. I had the great pleasure of participating in the USA‑IGF in Washington this year, a tribute to David who is here who's part of the organizing community. The whole day was chaired brilliantly by Shane. I was asked to take the moderating role of the session on the WSIS+10. We ended up with six speakers. We started with former Ambassador David Gross, the leader of the United States delegation at the time of the WSIS and we did move forward through Civil Society speaker Matthew Shears from CDT Laura Denadis, Marilyn, help me, who else did we have? A full range of views taking us through, explaining, recognizing always that with any issue like this there are people in the room who knew nothing about it and for whom the acronym was new and others including several of us who had been there and fought the fight in the trenches.
So we worked our way forward from what the event was and spent most of the time looking at, well, some of the time looking at a time line because at that stage we were, the process was just kicking off the co‑facilitators had just been appointed and we were explaining what the mission was was to try and explain the importance of this particular topic to the community, and how they could participate including what the actual time points in the process were for interventions by companies by Civil Society, by governance. So Marion was another speaker in the back there.
So I'm not sure whether I can say much more. It was a very well attended session. I think we had a completely full room, standing room only, 85 to 90 people in a room about the size of this. Lots of questions afterward and as Marilyn pointed out, we had one of the un DESA staff that were able to carry on lobbying which led to the K2 facilitators and congratulations to Marilyn to the since yesterday resulting as it did in the ability to input the views of the multi‑stakeholder community into the multilateral process. I think that's a nice significant step.
>> MARILYN CADE: So I'm going to go on with, so who is the next speaker on WSIS+10 and then we can take questions from the floor. Who is the next speaker on WSIS+10? Sandra? No.
>> I'm going to talk about the WSIS+10 in Africa. At the UNECS, UNECA, we organized this year's review and we invited 40 African Governments attended the meeting. And before the meeting, UNECA undertook a study for the ten‑year review to discuss dealings at the review meeting. And this was very interesting, but the study provided the progress made by African country during their tenures and also identify gap.
And the review identified also four additional action lines or priority area during 2015, and we can highlight if we have sub dealings or discussions for additional areas we found for African country. And during the meeting, we have more from the Government because it is UNECA is a United Nations organization, UN process working more with the Government. And we bring this WSIS discussion during the African IGF.
It is a very interesting discussion because we have the participation of the Civil Society and a lot of people from private sector and also some Government, African Government and it was very interesting debate, and we also have a discussion on the no white paper to see how the priority for Africa are included. And we have priority identified beyond 2015 and the discussion we had during this meeting, and this white paper integrate all needs for Africa beyond 2015. I think it's a very good experience to have this proximity between WSIS+10 and IGF. It's very important.
Yesterday during the WSIS+10 discussions there was one proposal from one participant to have together IGF and WSIS in order to give more opportunity to the Civil Society to know about WSIS. Because the problem we have in Africa, in IGF, we don't have too many Governments involved in the IGF process, but WSIS process all Government has, that's why I think to organize together for back to back at the regional level.
WSIS+10 review and IGF is very important is what I want to say about what we do, what we did in Africa on WSIS+10 and African IGF. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: I point out a similarity of how that was handled in the United States. Marion Gordon who is somewhere in the room, Marion. Marion Gordon from the United States coordinates the WSIS stakeholder engagement, and so it was actually a parallel process, very broadly, within the United States, but Marion then participated and helped to contribute to the WSIS session, both as an expert speaker and bringing the, and reflecting the broader consultation that was going on.
So to me it was very, you know, done in a different way, and with one Government, and one country, but reflecting the same linkage as well. Let me go on to Marion, please.
>> MARION GORDON: Thank you Marilyn. What struck me in Washington, D.C., when we had this conversation at the U.S. IGF, IGF U.S. is that it teamed so appreciated by the parties that were at the IGF. For us to have any sort of success, we have to talk to one another. I know that for you who have been following the fortunes of WSIS UNDESA was in the meeting and remarked during the meeting that if only they could get the message out similarly in other countries. So this isn't to take the mic to tell you just how fabulous we are, but rather to just say this is a model that seemed to be appreciated by the participants of the IGF, and further was appreciated by the leadership of the UN in terms of trying to throw the net wide to get really important feedback at critical moments. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Another take‑away that I would take out of this is we need to be, I know Anya is not here but it will be in the transcript and we can capture it, this idea of so how do we create these linkages for other national and regional coordinators so they can reach into UNDESA and reach into bringing an outside resource into perhaps stimulate interest in this kind of engagement. Ellen, if I may go to net UE approach.
>> ELLEN STRICKLAND: It's always interesting to share and I echo some of the same sentiments that we this year actually had a similar approach so that Internet had separate process with foreign affairs where we had a consultation group that we brought together of Civil Society and interested actors and had a meeting and an email list that helped inform the session that happened at NetHUI and the key contact at foreign affairs was the facilitator for the net hue I session.
What I want to share is it was interesting to us, we put it in one of the smaller rooms. We have done a lot of work to sort of do capacity building and education within NetHUI and the plenary sessions and help people understand the international context over the last five years, but sessions dedicated to international Internet Governance have historically been poorly attended. It's something that in a bottom up national environment there was no interest in. You get a handful of people who are already engaged and that this year was the first time we had a full room.
And a lot of people who had nothing to do with UN processes or WSIS that it started being through involved in Government processes through NetHUI for a few years had started having questions about how to works about how the UN and intergovernmental and internationally, so we had an excellent session which was really helpful to be fed in by the preparatory process with stakeholders and having foreign affairs look, talk about the overarching process, getting engagement from the community, so partly just understanding WSIS and WSIS+10 and the broader international, but also we talked about specific action items and how they relate to New Zealand and what sort of how the process goes from here and what inputs opportunities for people.
So, yes, we were really pleased with it, and I think the main take away for me is the importance of having national and local initiatives for people to develop understanding and engage with the concept of international Internet Governance.
>> MARILYN CADE: I will go to Mark and come back to others so would your take away be that through this consultation and engagement, you influenced the decisions and the actions that your Government would take in New York?
>> MARK CARVELL: I believe our Government is very open and supportive of multistakeholder approaches, and so there absolutely was influence from these processes into preparation and how they are engaging now and through to December, and, you know, to their credit, the New Zealand Government actually believes that's the right way to go about it and saw the progress and NetHUI as the right way to be part of the WSIS preparation process and for them to get what they need to engage properly in the process.
So in October of 2015, we partnered with the Canadian commission for UNESCO and worked closely with our foreign affairs department to hold an intersessional consultation WSIS+10. We convened a group of 30 Canadians in an open facilitated discussion on WSIS+10 guided by the zero draft which was out at the time. And really the goal was to identify what are Canadian's priorities within the WSIS+10 process and what role can Canadians role in ICT. A significant portion of that focused on Connecting the Next Billion.
The resulting outcome document from that we actually submitted to the, to the WSIS+10 process as a comment on the zero draft, and it's actually available on the WSIS+10 website. It was an interesting experience to draw 30 diverse stakeholders to talk about something that for the most part we don't talk about very much in Canada, and I think it was a great learning experience for those in attendance, for us and our Government partners and foreign affairs.
>> MARILYN CADE: Do I have someone else to talk about how you discussed WSIS+10 at your national initiative? Arnold, did you, yes.
>> If you asked a man or a woman in the street what do you think of WSIS, they would say what the hell is is this kind of terrorist organization or so? No. No. We just started to explain at our national IGF really what WSIS is. It was my task to do that, and so I started thinking what is the easiest way to get this bridge to our stakeholders. So I talked about a global digital agenda, in particular to bridge the digital divide. We have our own national digital agenda. There is a European digital agenda. There are other countries working hard on their own dimming tall agenda but WSIS is all about a global digital agenda, and so that was the first step. The second step was to explain what is really behind it. Yes, we talk about Human Rights, we talk about how to create more trust in the ICT infrastructure.
We are talking about capacity building, how can we work together with our partners? We call our stakeholders partners from the Government point of view. And so I also mentioned concrete example. We organized a workshop in Kenya how to combat spam and we really came across with the suggestion or the proposal that if you have to combat crime, you should work together with the expertise which is all around us with the expert from the tech community, the private sector.
That's what we call the public private partnerships. That's what we see in the Netherlands as the way forward to combat these cybercrime and other issues. So that landed very well in Kenya, and this is food for thought which I think can be elaborated a little bit more. Human Rights in the Netherlands is a very important issue. I saw some sparkling eyes in the room. We had about 150 participants, and they approached me and wanted to help as well to try to bridge the digital divide because we have our freedom on line coalition. It was initiated together with the United States in The Hague a couple of years ago, and the main task is also to help understand other countries and stakeholders that the Human Rights off line is equal to Human Rights on line. So by explaining more about what WSIS is, and, of course, the link with new mandate we hope to get in December.
You saw lots of people say this is important to we are going to support you. We have our own ideas to help you. So this will get a follow up in the year future. Just, this is our experience we had.
>> The Secretariat for the Asia‑Pacific regional IGF. I guess on the topic, we did have a session at the regional IGF earlier in Macao. I personal wasn't there so I'm reading a little bit from the report. I think the session was, went through, of course, some of the background information, but also I think one of the highlights of it was that in previous preparations, well, one of the highlights is about preparations towards the WSIS+10 in the Asia‑Pacific region. We used to have more substantive input into the process in the past, but this particular time around, for example, the Asia‑Pacific telecommunity, the APT didn't really have a platform for I guess synthesizing the input from the Asia‑Pacific region. I guess that's one of the push that the community needs to come together further. In the past there has been a Tokyo declaration of 2003, Taiwan 2005. We are missing that going into WSIS+10.
Another thing that was highlighted was from the Civil Society and the lack of space for the input leading up to the, to WSIS+10, and especially I guess I would invite some of the items about Net Neutrality, freedom of expression, those things, but one of the things that was interesting I think was brought up also is the concept, whether they are compatible or confusing between the multilateral discussion and multistakeholder concept, and that occupied a good chunk of the time of discussion there.
And that's, I think, some of the conclusions leading up to it is, I guess, from the Asia‑Pacific to at least going forward to continue what was done better in the last round to have more substantive input into the processes, that kind of session. I don't know whether my colleagues want to add to it because I wasn't in the room at that time. No? Okay. That was what happened from the Asia‑Pacific regional IGF.
>> MARILYN CADE: I think I saw somebody in the very back of the room and then I want to come up to McCain and I will come to you if I may. Maybe you would stand up so we could see you.
>> I'm Christiana Gonzalez. I work for APC, and I am representative of Civil Society for the LAC‑IGF. And on this topic of WSIS+10, we couldn't debate in the regional IGF, but the main problem was that WSIS+10 discussion was not very concrete for Latin Americans. So they could not see how all of this discussion on Wisconsin plus 10 were going to affect their daily use of Internet. So I think the main role that global IGF could play on this was to make all of those international and global discussions more close to regional realities. So my colleague here is also from the Latin America committee.
>> MARILYN CADE: I do have a question for everyone in just a minute. Let me come back to you, please, and then I will come to Silvia, and I have a question for all of you. If we can get the microphone for you. While we are getting the microphone, I will tell you that originally our room was set up in an open square, but I think we got preempted.
>> I would like to come back to the discussion we had dealing with WSIS review in Africa. Additionally to the level action line we identified four topics to discuss and to propose for the WSIS in 2015. The first the linkage between the WSIS action line and Sustainable Development Goal. We found to sustain the ICT, we need to promote technology and innovation. It's very important for African country and for developing country.
We focus more on how to use technology and innovation to sustainable development for Africa. Also we link this WSIS+10 and the Conference we organize in the final thing for development outcome, we organize in July last year and we found we should have one topic on financing and WSIS mobilization, how to mobilize, to finalize in Africa. It's very important thing we discuss.
Also we are member of the partnership for ICT measurement, but we should expand more to the statistic side, how to promote on ICT sector is another pillar, and the last one is also the issue of cybersecurity in Africa. We have a lot of attacks. We have another in Mali and terrorism use ICT, and we need to look at cybersecurity to another side, how to protect our citizen, and what is for additional output, you would like to discuss dealings of WSIS+20, plus dealings of WSIS beyond 2015. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: So I'm actually very familiar with the impact that the national IGF, the IGF USA has on reaching the U.S. Government because they are very, they have many, many representatives who are on the steering committee and actively engaged. So I know the answer for the IGF‑USA and one of the Co‑Chairs is still here. But my question to you is do you know whether or not your Government filed comments into the UN on WSIS+10 and do you know what the comments are? Silvia.
>> Yes, not too many. Well, the WSIS process in Latin America and the Caribbean is taken under the UN area for cooperation and development which is ECLAC and they have Secretariat and the Governments and the Civil Society and the private sector work together.
It's a very, very good example, even the region is not the best region in many senses. In this area, we are working together. And there is a very good community and it's open, open to everybody. So my point is you have to make it happen whether it is WSIS, whether it is IGF, both together, you have to make it happen. We cannot complain anymore. We have to make it. It's up to us.
And in the case of IGF and WSIS+10 we had the ministerial meeting of e LAC in Mexico and before that the ICF LAC was made and the topics were similar to ICF as well, so this is the point of Latin America, make it happen. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: Yes, Yousef, I think.
>> Thanks. Speaking as the Chairman of the preparatory process for the Finish National IGF, the Finish Internet Forum. I'm a very good description of the way people understand WSIS or they don't understand it. We didn't have this year at our event a session on WSIS+10 for a few reasons. I will list them. We have had WSIS on the agenda of the national IGF pretty much every year since we started in 2010.
Firstly, we had the event already in February, and for various reasons one of them being that we have national parliamentary elections in April. So there wasn't much to discuss at that stage. Also I'm coordinating our national multistakeholder WSIS activities and that same group then decided to hold, to organize the national IGF and we are pretty much the same stakeholders doing it. So we consider the national IGF not to be a once a year event, but instead a process.
So we have, we have a distribution list of the participants. I'm on Twitter. We have an email, Luke a short list of about 50 people who are active and so we can, whenever we feel like there is a need to discuss from the Government side, just to be clear I'm with the Foreign Ministry. So we call for a meeting of the IGF organizers or for a meeting of the WSIS stakeholders and we discuss these issues.
And just as an example, when we got the first zero draft, we had the following Monday, I think, meeting to discuss it, and to do the finished input. So we wrote and we had a video bridge to the Secretariat to go through it with the former colleague who used to work with us and now is with the CSTD. So we had a timely, very good discussion amongst stakeholders who are interested so it's not just about the annual event. It's about the process throughout the year. Thanks.
>> MARILYN CADE: Flavio, we need to get you a microphone. Flavio.
I will do Flavio, come back to you and then I will make a suggestion, a proposal.
>> So responding to your question about proposal from the Brazilian Government was availed to the UN and they invited the Brazilian Internet steering committee for a consultation. So I would say since it is already a multistakeholder committee, we had representatives from different stakeholder groups invited to this consultation meeting with the President Ministry of External affairs which was responsible for preparing the submission and filing it to the UN.
So it was not an open consultation with the society. It was more or less a consultation with other ministers and CGI. CGI itself also filed submission. We set up Working Group within side CGIBR. And we had several meetings and prepared submission that we submitted. We did not have a session on WSIS+10 during our national IGF. We just gave some information to the attendees on that, but there was not really a discussion on that. And I fear as already mentioned here that those more complex international themes would not be, would not attract too many attendees to a session. So mostly discussions during the national IGF are more related to the things that are more concrete to the attendees in Brazil.
>> MARILYN CADE: Several of the national regional IGFs ended up with messages, messages from EuroDIG, et cetera. As a matter of fact, very interesting you will see in the survey that a growing number of the initiatives now have a formal, it's not an outcome, but a formal output of some kind or another. Did any of you know CGIWR did, did any of you as national or regional IGFs submit comments as stakeholders into the WSIS+10 process? Not as the Government, but as a stakeholder? You did, I think, Mark, right? And I think you guys did, Silvia.
One of the things I'm thinking about is I think we are missing the exchange of information about what each of you, each of us are doing in these kinds of areas that would be perhaps inspirational or, you know, would be good to know that another national initiative has done a review on WSIS+10, they did a webinar to build awareness.
We, in the United States, we are inundated with, in Washington, D.C., with all of these additional opportunities to learn about things, think tanks, et cetera. So we can't be seen as the role model for what works in educating people about these very complex topics. But I'm thinking when we come to the later in our session that maybe we would want to think about having a kind of a one or two topics that are the hot list that the coordinators would want to reach out to each other and share information and ideas on like heads up, you can submit a stakeholder comment into the UN system, and here is why it's important. And here is somebody else who is doing it so that you might be able to share information with them.
I want to take one more comment and then move onto our discussion about Connecting the Next Billion and explain what's going to happen later this afternoon, but talk about what you said about Connecting the Next Billion. And I believe I had a comment in the back.
>> Yes, just a comment on the difference with ELAC and LAC IGF. ELAC is an interministerial meeting. So Civil Society and stakeholders are only allowed to participate as observers and only one representative of each sector. So we recognize the effort of ELAC on discussing WSIS+10 and doing the link between the global discussions and the regional one, but it is different having ministerial meeting and a regional stakeholder IGF.
>> MARILYN CADE: Terrific. So I think we are ready to go to talking about Connecting the Next Billion. Yes? I want to turn this over to the to co‑moderators for that session, Ellen and Mark, and what we have done is start with, start with the list of those who have submitted written comments into the intersessional work. Let me put in context what's going to happen later this afternoon to make sure you are aware of the session and the linkage between the two.
So the Ambassador Janis Karklins mentioned something to all of you called the CSTD, Commission on Science and Technology for Development Working Group work on improvements for the IGF. That was approved by the UN General Assembly in 2012 as a result of a two‑year working initiative under the auspices of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development. And for the first time, the CSTD undertook a multi‑stakeholder Working Group which was an intergovernmental process of 20 Governments with five IGOs as observers and five plus five plus five, five technical community, five business community and five Civil Society who worked together to develop this recommendation for improvements to the IGF.
Now, this recommendation came out of a critical period when during the previous authorization extension at the UN there were many, many concerns expressed by certain Member States that the IGF was a talk shop. It was not creating outputs. It wasn't widely known. There were very few national and regional IGFs at the time. We had a funding challenge at that time because of the five‑year period, and so really what happened when the UN General Assembly approved the recommendations to the IGF that had come up organically developed, first of all, their representatives that came from the community, and several of the Government representatives on that working group were from the MAG or very actively engaged in the IGF.
So there was not a complete vacuum of understanding and experience. But the thing to understand is that it is really, really important to begin to better understand how we are communicating into the rest of the world about what we are doing. So we agreed at the MAG, our interpretation of the call to action to increase the outputs, and to do something concretely about a universally important theme, the MAG identified the theme policy options for Connecting the Next Billion.
The invitation to the community from the MAG was that anyone could contribute to developing the policy options. The national and regional IGFs on their own organically began to contribute, and so we actually have had a very strong contribution without a mandate, but on a voluntary basis recognizing the invitation and stepping up to it. And I think that's something that's really important and I particularly appreciated Mark Carvel's comments this morning that inviting us to propose a theme for next year and the MAG Chair hoping we would do that today ignored the fact that we are all bound by our own need to consult at the national level or the regional level about what our priorities are, but I think the illustration of the interest in contributing into the intersessional work was pretty remarkable. Let me turn this to you and Ellen, Mark.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks, in fact, there were ten National Initiatives that contributed to the Connecting the Next Billion initiative and five regional initiatives that contributed. So at this point I would like to call on those initiatives that did contribute to come forward and speak for a few minutes about the process and the content of what they developed.
Maybe starting with I think Zimbabwe is in the room. I think that would be a good place to start.
>> ZIMBABWE: It's difficult to start. You want me to ‑‑ I'm sorry?
>> MODERATOR: If you could give a two to three minute update on your submission to Connecting the Next Billion.
>> ZIMBABWE: Right. The person submitted was different from me. It was our Secretariat, but I will actually just give a very quick one. With us, we are still really evolving in as far as the setting up of the national backbone is concerned. But we are actually at a fairly advanced stage, I think, in terms of the connection of the national backbone because obviously that is what premises the issue of Connecting the Next Billion. We have got a situation where in as far as our mobile is concerned, our mobile infrastructure is concerned, it's actually been improving, increasing, but improving, increasing quite significantly over the last few years. We have connectivity, which is fairly, fairly high.
We are premising our connections around that infrastructure which has actually been developed. I would need to actually go ahead and look at the actual submission which we actually made for me to make sure that my responses are actually telling with what was actually submitted, but otherwise, that's the premise of what we have in the country at the moment.
>> MARILYN CADE: I think it was pretty impressive, I think it was great you started at the end of the alphabet instead of the beginning, but I think it was impressive that for a brand new national IGF, that you stepped up to making a submission. So congratulations on that.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I think there are a few people who have to run out of the room very soon including two that actually submitted a contribution, Mary and Sandra. Actually we have four or five people arm wrestle for the mic. Maybe we can go with Mary first.
>> Okay. Thank you very much. We answered most of the questions that was, most of the questions submitted, forwarded to us. How would you define the issue of Connecting the Next Billion, and we looked at, we said there are people, we are ‑‑ environment is the mobile environment. And so many people are online through the mobile devices.
And but there are a lot that are not because not all of the people are using Smart mobile devices. So we still have to get others coming into the Internet space. So and how you ‑‑ have you observed any national or regional specifically regarding connectivity. Our broadband roadmap is there and we are hoping that the broadband roadmap when it is on will have a lot of connectivity. Especially those in the rural area and the unconnected people, those are the ones that we are looking at.
And policies, we have policies and we have what we call smart cities, smart states and we also have what we call the Government policy on ICT that would help us get 50% broadband by 2017. So and we also are looking at the agencies that are involved. We have the national communication, the national communications commission, and the national information technology development agency, and some of the funds, the universal access provisioning fund that are available to be able to get to the unconnected and unreached areas.
So we are doing that. We have school access as well. We have what we call knowledge access centers, and we are trying to reach villages. For instance, in 2015 my village had dropped about 20 computers with Internet access and with eLearning and so people are doing that. And so those are the things we are doing. And we have the ‑‑ trying to drop satellites to be able to reach the unreached.
In your opinion what works well in developing the policies? There was consultation. So many people, the stakeholders were brought together and we actually made input into it. What was the experience with implementation? And we had a challenge of right‑of‑way, those that are given the backbone connectivity, they had challenge of right‑of‑way and that's a big challenge for us and double taxation is also a big challenge. Did you experience any unintended consequences of policy development, intervention? Good or bad. The introduction of the policy has exposed the fact that there is human capital.
We don't have the skill set. So a lot of capacity building needs to be done to get it going. And we also, the access, where we have affordability we don't have accessibility. When we have accessibility we don't have affordability. So those are things that we also find that they are challenges to us.
Can you think of unresolved issues? We said there is issue with respect to multiple taxation is now resolved, right‑of‑way not resolved. Those are the things. List proposed steps for further multistakeholder dialogue. We are going to continue with the IGF and we will also contribute what we do at the end of the year, we give our report to the Government. And some of them, they are really accepted. Thank you. I'm speaking too long so I should stop.
>> MODERATOR: That's great. Thank you, Mary. I would actually like to recognize Memou Bargash and call on him to speak about their contribution of Connecting the Next Billion.
>> Thank you. This year's IGF USA, Connecting the Next Billion featured very prominently on the agenda we invited our undersecretary of State to deliver remarks. Efforts to connect the next billions online. And that in that regard, we are looking to partnering with all interested stakeholders, development agencies, multilateral development banks to find ways to foster whether it's innovative technological solutions, public‑private partnerships, policy reforms, financing, funds, grants, to help key emerging markets, Developing Countries with some of the questions that they are facing on how they connect the rest of their population.
I'm proud to say at the IGF‑USA and based on our consultations there which included, of course, the closing session and then also the plenary that followed with a number of industry and NGOs and others on how we should best as the U.S. stakeholder community partner and help other countries in thinking about international connectivity. After all of those consultations we had at the IGF‑USA we decided and recently launched a major new diplomatic effort called global connect. It was launched a month ago and it shows the critical role that the IGF has in international Internet policy making that we basically decided to move forward with our major initiative that was also previewed by the Secretary of State.
Global connect is a new effort and it's supported by a number of folks in the Government and industry where, and it's basically recognizing that we have a shared responsibility to try to bring 1.5 billion people online by 2020. This was an international net trick we decreed to at the ITU plenipotentiary and through global connect we hope to give effect to our universal desire to see more ICT technologies available to everyone in the world.
We are partnering with the all multilateral development banks, particularly the World Bank to think about how to prioritize digital access. We have increased funding in funding organizations, overseas private investment corporation to do more in terms of broadband access and digital. We are also trying to showcase and encourage some of the innovative industry solutions to provide connectivity to remote areas. Some of it you can see in the tent outside we have here. But we are very excited about this new effort, and we are looking forward to continuing the conversations here in Brazil about next steps for global connect and using the IGF as a preeminent venue for fostering these types of discussions with all stakeholders. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. It's also a very interesting initiative, I have been on the site and did some digging into it, and it's actually quite fascinating to see almost a multistakeholder, so many parties involved in development in the digital age. It's quite fascinating. Thank you. Sandra.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you. The topic of Connecting the Next Billion came when the EuroDIG programming process was already underway, but we were lucky enough to put it into the agenda and it was dedicated a whole workshop which was under the lead of the Council of Europe and co‑supported by the civic people and by the European Commission, and for the content part I would like to hand over to Lee because he has to leave the room soon because he was leading that workshop.
>> LEE HIBBARD: Thank you, Sandra. Hello. Everybody. Just to say that I will also be in the main session this afternoon on policy options. I will actually be moderating part of the session. So I hope to see you there, and if you can come to the front, I will try to bring you into that discussion. We had a good discussion in the EuroDIG. It's quite clear that there is a very high level of broad band access in Europe, it seems, over 400 million users have access to the Internet.
Saying that, there are still some discrepancies about different parts of the population. We spoke about differences between rural and urban access. The aging population. We discussed differences between, well, questions of skills became a good discussion. The fact is access is one thing but access to what, according to what skill set. There are some issues regarding the amount of skills.
And, of course, we talked about the logical layer, the infrastructure layer, the difference about how to get the infrastructure going the rollout of broadband there are strategies at the European Union level which are moving forward which is encouraging questions of access, but, of course, not one size fits all regarding how to do it, public‑private partnerships, et cetera. So there is also a local flavor that has to be respected and so it can't be driven from a top down approach. It was quite clear, but it's not a top down approach. It's a mixed approach. So it was a good discussion and I think we are still learning on how to do, how to make access really a reality. In some countries, there were some good examples of lessons learned.
For example, in Slovenia and in Latvia, Latvia spoke about without wishing to disturb competition they were rolling out more public access points and in doing so that was reducing the demand for 3G, mobile 3G so there is a correlation that could be said between public access points and, you know, access by mobile. So there are interesting examples of how, you know, different actions by the Government and access to, you know, just a normal subscription can affect how you access the Internet.
So I hope to see you all in the room in the main hall this afternoon. Thank you.
>> Thank you, Lee. To add from my point of view, we made a very short survey among all European National IGFs and I was asking for the three hot topics that have been discussed over the year. To be frank, it was not on the hot topics of the national agenda Connecting the Next Billion. So I think it was a topic to be discussed on a regional level or maybe sub regional and also on the global level, but for the national agenda, this was not on the hot topics.
It was said before in this room on national level you are rather discuss concrete concerns or issues. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. The discussion on connecting to what I find is a fascinating one. We had that discussion in Canada as well. We spent a fair amount of time defining access versus defining meaningful access. And meaningful access has a very different connotation than does just the binary, are you connected to the Internet or are you not. So I think that's very interesting. Is there anyone else in the room from a national or regional initiative? Yes, please.
>> JULIAN CASABUENAS: Good morning. My name is Julian Casabuenas. I work as Director in Colombia, and we had the opportunity of participating in the national IGF meeting in the end of September, and also to contribute to the document of policy options for Connecting the Next Billion. And we had the opportunity to collect all of the inputs from our regional meeting. We have a couple of sessions that were oriented in reduce poverty through the use of ICTs. So our report was very much taking all of these inputs.
The ones that I want to highlight are referred to facilitate extension of access in rural areas of the municipalities, for example, through the deployment of wireless community networks that can be operated by the community, and the Internet can be provided by broadband links with those municipalities.
We see opportunities in countries like Colombia where digital agendas that favor the promotion of the subject at national levels, ICT meets with different approaches for women, people with disabilities, it is also important to offer more advanced skills. Current and relevant initiatives of public access to ICTs like in Colombia it's called Puntos, and development of ICTs training in a more advanced and basic literacy training.
Also be content producers with new skills in our own and local language that promote cultural diversity, and the penetration of mobile telephony to extend access in areas that is not yet covered. We also highlight the importance of sharing experiences with Civil Society organizations in methodologies of appropriation in telecenters, and in the case of Colombia, we exchange these experiences that show that connectivity policies shall be accompanied by a component of ICT appropriation in order to take advantage of this infrastructure more efficiently that demonstrates with multiple multistakeholder can bring this initiatives to have more success.
And the points that multistakeholder cooperation is needed, we during the national meeting, we get into these points, the recognition that financial resources are limited and the multistakeholder cooperation is needed to implement projects relevant to Connecting the Next Billion. That includes the production of local content, relevant to local communities, and strategies that use ICTs to solve these local problems.
The recognition of gender gaps, generational, and ethnic, and in rural context, and urban. The recognition of who we are as Internet users, also the production of differentiated statistics and impact analysis. Especially on the issue of mobile Internet access geographically differentiated.
Digital agendas that recognize that there are diverse strategies and massive digital literacy initiatives take into account the social gaps and the recognition of the reasons for the exclusion and finally appropriation of ICT strategies that address the needs and characteristics of women and disabled and elderly.
Regarding the list of proposed steps for further multistakeholder dialogue and actions, we believe that multistakeholder actions are needed to extend the impact of ICTs in reducing the extreme poverty in countries like Colombia, participate in spaces like the IGF at local, regional and local level that support the implementation of policies that contribute to the stability of Internet as an agent for development and reduction of the digital divide. The ICT appropriation link to access is very important to increase the impact of Government initiatives and reduce the digital divide. Working together to promote the production of software and local contents with social focus.
Improvement of education through the use of ICTs, facilitation of access to online financial services to reduce the digital divide, and it's key to continue and encourage public Internet access strategies and not let them for the opportunities posed by mobile Internet access, because these spaces are an opportunity for vulnerable communities linked to the information, linked to the Information Society.
Work together to expand access in rural areas and communities not connected, promoting among others the community wireless networks and to connect schools and libraries to broadband, reduce or eliminate taxes related to Internet access and devices needed to deploy infrastructure and work to reduce gender gaps and ICTs. That was like the points that we want to share with you as a highlights of the discussions.
And a final comment, we have regarding the discussions in WSIS+10 have to mention that we had the opportunity to make comments from the Colombian Internet Governance group, the Government share the document zero draft with us, and as a group of Colombian Internet Governance group we were able to make our inputs as well. Thank you.
>> CHAIR: Thank you. We will go to Brazil in the front row. I believe there is a mic right behind you.
>> BRAZIL: Yes, just a brief report, Brazilian national IGF did not submit contribution to the Connecting the Next Billion effort. This is, of course, a subject of due to the size of the country, the poverty we have, the digital divide we have among different groups and society, different regions in the country. So we have already organized five additions of the national IGFs and universality and digital inclusion are always one of the main subjects and always subject of one of the breakout sessions we organize. And we have the tradition to always have outcomes from the national IGFs.
We always propose recommendations in a bottom up way, the different breakout sessions prepare recommendations that are then reported to the final plenary and then approved by the final plenary and these recommendations are in many cases proposed policy, public policies and recommendations are sent to different ministries also to the CGI, BR if appropriate, so we have this tradition in Brazil and this subject is always present in our discussions.
>> MODERATOR: Excellent. Thank you. We will go to the third row. McCain, if we could get a mic back there and then front row.
>> Thank you very much, Mr. Moderator. My name is McCain Fei, Secretariat of the African IGF. I would just like to give a brief report on the Connecting the Next Billion session we organized in September. We had the following six recommendations. Connecting the Next Billion should be viewed as a program project by countries and stakeholders and as such should be approached using the program project best practices and methodologies.
And in this context the Ministries of Communications and IT should review their ICT and broadband policy plans through enhanced multistakeholder cooperation. Because we believe that this should be done not only by Government or by the private sector, but the Civil Society and technical community should also be involved.
There is also need to have effective monitoring and variation of the programs using online real time for reporting. The open data model, local content development, eLearning initiative and other should also be used to boost the demand because we believe that doing the pipes only will not serve purpose and we should have the demand also, that's why the content is very important.
And the universal with provision funds should also be used because we have regulators connecting money and this should be used to agenda infrastructure into the underserved areas, and enable access and affordability. The power grid capacity also should be reduced to be able to make sure that we have power everywhere to be able to bring in about Internet. Finally the African Union was requested a continental free Internet platform in cooperation with the telecommunications agencies and other stakeholders that preserves the identity and unique cultural heritage of Africa. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. Please.
>> SPAIN: IGF Spain. Unfortunately in our case, we could not submit a position on this very relevant topic mainly due to the fact that there is no full coordination between how the agenda for this meeting is made and an hour that has different timing but we could not deal with it, but since we were working for this session, we have received several inputs from some of the stakeholders, both public and private highlighting that in the case of IGF Spain, we can have coordinated approach for some areas that have to be covered in which we share the same language and a lot of cultural features with those areas.
So we are in a good position to increase local content and to change best practice without the barrier of language. So I wanted to highlight how this global IGF will fit back into our next sessions, and also how it can be relevant that we cooperate among different National Initiatives where we see there are specific advantages for this cooperation. So I have been hearing with a lot of interest to all that has been said by our Colombian colleague and we should outreach and get to be more in contact with other Latin American IGFs and see if we can involve common shareholders because there are, for example, corporation agencies or international companies that are active in both sides of the Atlantic and that we could try to set up some actions covering this area, so this could be a good use of cooperation among national IGFs so we will try to look in this direction. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Excellent idea. We have two more comments, I think. And after that we will move to the next item on the agenda, but Afghanistan and next.
>> AFGHANISTAN: I'm an entrepreneur based in Kabul, Afghanistan. We have specific challenges that are different in other countries. I have shared this in the meeting yesterday, workshop. One MBPS Internet costs 300 U.S. dollars in Afghanistan. It's less than a dollar in Japan, and Japan is a very rich country. Afghanistan is the poorest country.
This, I think, is one of the greatest problems we need to address. There could be similar countries like Afghanistan, the least Developed Countries who might have problems like this. If we are thinking about Connecting the Next Billion, Afghanistan being a country of 30 million people, we need to be at the core of the agenda because it's impossible for us to connect the 30 million Afghans to Internet when the cost is $300. It's extremely unaffordable for businesses to buy such Internet.
The other issue we are facing is with the local content. We are a non-English speaking country. People do not understand the technology which is available in English or any other language, which the locals do not speak. We need to localize apps and content so people can see the benefits of connecting to the Internet, even if it's $10 per MBPS, they need to see there are some benefits and they will then embrace it.
The third problem we are facing is with the policies and regulatory environment, awareness creation. We should be able to create an awareness locally in Afghanistan among the population. They are using Facebook, some providers would do like free Facebook in their mobile phones but Facebook is at all of the Internet. It's a good tool for us to connect with each other, create awareness on different social and political issues, but still, we need more of the Internet to be available to our citizens in Afghanistan.
We are thinking of two initiatives in Afghanistan, what is the national IGF and what is the regional IGF which would be a Central South Asian IGF. So that we can connect with the rest of the region and be part of the regional programs initiatives and an active participant of the global development in Afghanistan. That's where we need your support, advice. We need speakers. We need advisers. We need supporters.
So I'm just requesting that if you have time later, let's discuss about that.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. The gentleman from Asia Pacific.
>> EDMON CHUNG: My name is Edmon Chung with Asia Pacific IGF and Connecting the Next Billion is one of the biggest topics for us. In fact, we believe in including Afghanistan that the next billion is likely coming, and majority of that is coming from the Asia‑Pacific region, if you look at India, China, Afghanistan and many of the areas in Asia‑Pacific.
So this year especially we did put, have a submission to the intersessional which leads into the next billion discussion, and in terms of the, first of all, in terms of the process, this year we did a pretty, I guess, a new trial. We actually created a synthesis document that is kind of as an output from the APR IGF, this is one of the first times and hopefully in the future we will create that too. And just looking at the document itself, it's obviously posted publicly and it's also part of the input itself. There is 12 specific points on synthesizing the discussions from the region. Out of the 12 points three of them specifically talks about bringing the next billion online.
And so also the overarching note is talking about, you know, the next billion people coming online and especially a comparative analysis of what was done before. The gentleman mentioned about the cost, and one of the key aspects is to have affordable accessibility. The other part which is substantive is what many others have mentioned as well and we summarized it as digital literacy. We also follow up on that is many talked about the language, local content, local language issues.
We also identified that in multiple sessions. In fact, there were five workshops altogether that were talking about different aspects of this including the mobile side, including the content side, including agenda, bridging the gender divide, but also on identifier, internationalized email addresses, Internationalized Domain Names, and the acceptance of that in the Internet both technically and in terms of awareness.
So this is, and one interesting thing that was also highlighted is that also the need for non‑textual content. We are talking about reaching out to the next billion non‑textual content may be very important because videos or images are much easier to convey sort of information in many way, especially grass or infographics and those types of items and videos.
And then another item that is very important and also included in the synthesis document is open access and spectrum, open spectrum for Wi‑Fi and, you know, other types of access which leads into the issue of having spectrum licenses and a more open environment for spectrum licenses and those kinds of things.
So I think that's, those are some of the more substantive or I guess highlights from the input. Again, I point to the synthesis document which we are quite, I guess we are quite proud of that we are able to put it together and in terms of that process, what happened was that all of the workshops that were received get, was kind of funneled into the synthesis document before the APR IGF event actually happened at the APR IGF every day over the four‑day period, we had town hall meetings to talk about the text and also talk about, you know, the substantive items to be put onto the synthesis document.
Coming out of the event, there was a one month period where we collect, further collected comments online until it was finally finalized which is the synthesis document that was then submitted into as input into the intersessional. So that's, you know, this is definitely a very big topic for Asia‑Pacific, and I think we did hopefully we have substantive input into the process, but also the sharing of learning and comparative studies is going to be very important for this, for our region move forward and actually connect the next billion to the Internet. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Very good. Thank you. I think we are going to wrap this up after one more comment, Sharon had her hand up.
>> SHARON BIRCH: Sharon Birch of IGF‑USA and like the MAG we had the challenge of having so many that wanted to participate, choosing to stay on track and it's interesting to hear the challenges that the other IGFs are having. And as just the proximity to New York we would happy to carry these messages' we go into December with the WSIS+10.
>> MODERATOR: Very good.
Thank you. I think we will conclude our discussion on Connecting the Next Billion there, and I will turn it over to my colleague, Ellen, to lead the next session.
>> ELLEN STRICKLAND: Thanks, Mark. The next Agenda Item is looking at reflecting views into the IGF processes, and reflecting from the IGF international and regional initiative processes. So we are interested in having thoughts about, also reflections about what you have done and also thoughts about going forward and how we might improve that thinking about preparation, the event itself, and follow‑up as well for both your own event and how it relates to this, to the IGF.
I know this is an area personally for NetHUI that we have, you know, look to the IGF in the process as we are doing our own process, but we also still find challenges in terms of reflecting views here through at the IGF for us, for example, one of the issues it's a long way to travel and getting people here to participate and engage in the IGF itself, and make sure that the sort of messages and content comes through is a real challenge for us.
So we are interested to hear ideas about reflections on your experience as well as thoughts for the future.
>> Laura. Do we have a mic?
>> LAURA HITCHISON: I wanted to pick up on Mark's suggestion he made in the opening remarks and I think the idea of reaching out to regional IGFs for topics makes sense and we have a network where we have a lot of in depth discussions so I think there is a network that could be usefully relied on. Also from our experience of running a workshop, the requirements for the panel to be global and balanced absolutely makes sense. The struggle from our side is I don't have the contacts to know who would be an expert on a particular topic from a region that isn't my own.
If the workshops were organized on a topic basis, so six regionals suggest topics they could work on a workshop it would make sense then that you have global representation on a panel. Also, Ellen mentioned now about travel restrictions and difficulty in traveling. I don't know there is any opportunity to maybe use the regional national network for remote hubs or online hubs as I think we are meant to call them, to make sure that there is a network of integration from the IGF to reach back out to the regional nationals. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. Those are some very practical ideas for sure. Yes.
>> MACTAR SECK: Thank you. My name is Mactar Seck of the African IGF. Our planning took us five months from planning to implementation and for the structure you had an organizing committee of ten members coming from Government and the private sector. We, the experts who are interpreting were chosen suggested by organizing committee members, and also when we put up the program on the website some people asked if they could also be panelists.
So we checked and as much as there was place to accommodate expert on the preliminary list, we picked them. We had a meeting three days, one day for para‑Conference meetings which were organized by organizations who had a stake in IGF. And just pre‑Conference meetings were essentially done to prepare the main meetings which will be spanning into two days.
We had 14 plenary sessions, and all of the sub teams of the IGF was reviewed and discussed in the meeting. We have challenges in funding. But the main funding came from economic commission for Africa, that is a UN regional commission, the African Union which was the host of the meeting.
We had also sponsors from international organizations and NGOs, especially ATC, ICANN, ISOC, AFRINIC and UNESCO. The meeting was conducted in two languages, English and French with simultaneous interpretation to various language groups to take part. And African IGF was preceded this year by the African School on Internet Governance which was organized by APC and the net PAC agency that enabled us to have a good gender balance during the meeting because the African School of Internet Governance had brought a lot of community participants.
So that is a nutshell what I had to say for the time being. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much for sharing that. It's interesting that some things were included. Could I just ask focusing on the links with the IGF, do you have any suggestions for your IGF initiative engaging with the IGF as a whole?
>> Yes, in fact, I always participate in the MAG meetings, not as a MAG member, but as an international organization, a UN organization, and in this connection, we take a part in the discussion informing the MAG main team, the IGF main team and the sub teams also because we are part of the discussion list and several of are members of the MAG and part of your set up. So I have set up a discussion list where we always circle what is decided and discussed at the MAG so that we get our African views and we input connectivity to, into the MAG decisions. That's why every year we decide to review all of the MAG sub teams in our meetings before coming to the global level. So that we can have input at the African level like the Connecting the Next Billion had issues on cybersecurity, we had issues on Internet rights. So we have a report on all of the sub teams which are discussed here today. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. I think also some of you are sharing about your event. I just wanted to clarify that we do have the survey on the national and regional IGF initiatives that was collected where it's a collection of many of the details you shared, and that we will be doing that presentation and having a chance to have a discussion about that probably after this Agenda Item.
>> MARILYN CADE: The survey, in the survey many of you made specific comments but I wanted to mention again in some ad hoc which some of us have been present, we have also talked about ‑‑ I'm going to use a term that is emerging around the IG space, but the idea of creating more of an observatory focused on the national and regional IGFs at the Secretariat, similar to what's being done with the DiploFoundation on hot topics on Internet Governance where we would design an approach that would be available on the Secretariat space, so it's neutral space, but it would be a way for us to come up with some of the areas where we think sharing of information, whether it's sharing of a list of experts in, expert speakers in an area or other kinds of information that we begin to build the, I do not mean to use the word best practices here, but maybe case examples of things that are being done.
A number of the, and I think there is a mix, what I'm hearing is a mix of things that might be standardized on the process and procedure side to offload a new initiative. So I will give you an example. You are required to track multistakeholder participation and report on it in your report. You should also be tracking gender and report on it in your report.
But unless you capture that information automatically in your registration process, it becomes onerous to try to, for you to gather it, and to backtrack and find it. So, you know, thinking about the kinds of things that you might want to put forward as recommendations where something could be, I use the term lightly, you know, a template, a standard, a downloadable registration package, things of that nature that we might look to the Secretariat to help to put together and make available versus an observatory where people could share content, information, they could share examples of a workshop they did in one area that they think would be applicable to sister initiative, when we did scenario stories in the United States, and Shane was here and was very active in that, we did scenario stories in the United States.
I learned about the use of scenario stories by coming to the Netherlands and participating in a Conference that, and an initiative that had been sponsored by the Dutch Government, took it to the IGF‑USA and then we took it to Russia, but there was no real way to, and then we actually did a round table in Ghana ‑‑ I'm sorry, in Kenya where several of the national and regional IGFs came and participated but we have no place to store that information.
And I just use that as an example to say, perhaps we should be thinking, Laura, about, you know, reflecting and then reflecting on process and procedures, one thing, but then also reflecting on themes, issues, and thinking about a space that is sort of designed, if I could say this, by inputs from the national and regional coordinators.
Then the final thing I wanted to say is we had decided, there was an idea that we would do a booth at the IGF and use it as a way to create visibility and we missed that, but we did talk about the IGF of at this meeting forming a group, a small group that might be interested in carrying forward on planning for a booth for IGF 2016, but perhaps we should also be thinking about planning for visibility for the national and regional IGFs in a separate meeting that is held always at the MAG consultations.
And perhaps it's, you know, we do it in a way that we make sure that you have a dedicated time, many of you are MAG members, others need to be in those consultations as McCain was saying, but maybe we go some ideas of saying, okay, we will do it by the way as much as possible at a time that's reasonable for remote participation for those that are not there.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you Marilyn and it was wonderful to hear Chengetai Masango's remark of the importance he seize in that. And this Agenda Item we are looking at IGF processes and how we reflect back and forth with initiatives, but this relationship between us and initiatives and the opportunity that presents and best practice and sharing is really important. We have another speaker at the back. Do you have a microphone?
>> PORTUGAL: I'm from the governmental side. Anna Nev and I would like to share here with you, well, I think a new idea about engagement. Well, it's very difficult for us to engage our stakeholders in Portugal. Whenever we talk about Internet Governance, well, nobody understands us. So we have these sessions about digital inclusion, but all in all, Internet Governance as a whole, they cannot perceive that.
So I think it will be very interesting if each stakeholder, I mean, if business, Civil Society, the technical community, from the IGF community that are very active here if they could engage with their peers, for instance, in Portugal, to make them aware of what their concerns are and why they are so engaged in Internet Governance.
So if, for instance, APC could engage with the Civil Society in Portugal to make them understand why they are here, why they are so concerned or why they are so excited about ideas, movements, processes, I think it will be so good because they speak the same language. They are, so they are the peers, and the same occurs with the businesses and the technical community. So here in Portugal, this initiative is really led by the Government unfortunately. It's top down. I love it to be a bottom up, but I think that in that way, in this way, I think it's a new way to see things and this community that we have here that is so rich, I think it could be really useful for the national and regional initiatives. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. We need a mic up in the front. Thanks.
>> DAVID VYORST: I'm David Vyorst. I helped to organize the IGF‑USA. A few observations about our experiences that might be useful, we have a lot of natural advantages that we take for granted. For example, our interface with the MAG, you know, Marilyn is the founder and the self-titled chief catalyst Mike Nelson is active, and there is dozens of other people that just have such deep institutional knowledge that finding experts doesn't even come up, but we should maybe list that and share that and contribute that to a resource hub.
We send out a general survey at the beginning of the planning process to the community at large. We have a steering committee and we have open meetings that anybody is invited to. The challenge is always kind of taking democratic inputs and filtering them into a working process. And, you know, we are still learning and we are getting there.
One of our shortcomings, I think, we take a lot of criticism because it's really, I wouldn't say it's Washington, D.C. centric, and I think the criticisms aren't completely justified but it occurs in Washington, D.C. We really need to have satellite participation from other locations in the United States and we will work on that. One of the things that we do that might be applicable or might, you might be able to expand or work out on at the closing ceremony of the IGF‑USA we have each panel session organizer present key take-aways.
I think if weed key take aways from all of the regional and National Initiatives at the global IGF, it would interest great better, give everybody a better sense and actual experience not just of the process, but of the content of what people are talking about at the other ones. And then there is other creative ideas we would like to pursue down the road once we get more stable. We would like to make video highlights of key take aways and share those globally, and we would like to, you know, we take our deep integration into the MAG for granted.
We would like to share our initiative with other initiatives in any way possible.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. That's very practical good thoughts. Any other comments about the links between the IGF and initiatives. Yes, in the middle at the back.
>> Hi, Huang Buenos from Colombia. I think that for us this year I can see a better interaction among the regional and national processes. I think that being able to be in this kind of sessions, it's a sign that I appreciate, and also promote the participation through the surveys in different topics to find out how different regions and national are addressing these issues. It's a good, I think it's a good exercise. So also it's important for national or regional IGFs to see that their inputs are taken into consideration for the global discussions. So if we are able to share these results from the national and regional to be placed here, that's very positive. It's a challenge to improve these inputs from local and regional discussions into the global IGF, but I think that having this space is a step forward.
>> MARILYN CADE: So I'm going to announce a failure to deliver something that I think would have been a really useful, and it was neither my fault nor Mark's fault. I came up with the idea of a social networking event or coffee, and Mark offered to sponsor it and then we were unable to make it happen. But I don't want to lose track of that because I think that something which was why I wanted you to have an open square, so that you would become more familiar with each other. I tend to know most of the national and regional coordinators by face, and there is a number of reasons for that. I cheat because I meet some of the representatives like Arnold and Mark and Anna at ICANN meetings so I get to extrapolate or I meet them at a WSIS meeting or a CSTD meeting.
But I think one thing we might do and I'm looking at the Secretariat and hoping they don't cringe, I think we really ought to come up with not just our booth plan for next year where in order to do a booth, and I'm going to propose that we think about a double booth, we are going to have to staff it, we are going to have to have materials in it so hearing something I want you to think about. Over the lunch time slot, the IGF support association is meeting and I see Edmund here as well. Edmund and I are both on the executive committee of the IGF SA. And part of the mission of the IGF support association is to raise funds to support the Secretariat, but also the national and regional IGFs.
And this year although we just got started last year, we just got incorporated, we gave five financial sponsorships of $3,500 to five regional IGFs, and we gave 15, $2,000 USD grants to, of sponsorship to national IGFs. In our plan for next year is the ability to provide individual funding. We both didn't raise the funds, but we didn't have a process. So one of the things that occurs to me coming out of the survey is the challenge that particularly the national IGFs from Developing Countries or those that are in, have decided to locality their country in some really difficult to reach place, though I'm sure that was a state decision, right? That perhaps proposal to the IGF SA that in addition to the sponsorship of the event, that there should be a small travel fund as well so that each of the national IGFs from Developing Countries could have a designated attendee.
And I think, you know, we then need to begin to make sure that we are creating the identity that when we are in the meetings that we know each other's faces. So let's start thinking about how we do that. So I have one final thing for you to think about. I Chair the outreach and communications work at the IGF SA, and I would like you to help me think about a four‑page meet the national and regional IGFs, and I would like to try to do that in the next two weeks so that it could be provided in time for the New York high level event, and I have an idea in mind which will not take a lot of work from you, but it will take a little bit of work, so we could have a, you know, a world map and then little synthesis of what is going on in each region about the national and regional IGFs.
I think you would find it useful. I think the broader community would find it useful. I think we could use it in the, at the UN, but I think it would also help you then to know who your colleagues are, perhaps, in an adjacent country. And that's not, I don't know that that's reflection, but I think if the rest of the 2000 attendees here also had a piece of paper and something online in order to get to know you, that that would also be helpful. So I just throw that out.
>> MODERATOR: Thanks Marilyn. I think practical suggestions to divert, but one of the things we found useful is having those little colored flags that you attach to your badge that you see at conferences that say newcomer or something like that, that we could have one at our stand and then you know people who are involved with the national regional initiative and you can say oh, which one are you involved with.
I'm aware we only have 30 something ‑‑ we have a remote participant. We have that and then we have one more, two more in this session, and then we will move onto the next session. Remote participant, Please.
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Thank you, Chair, we have a comment from Nicarue that says Government engagement. Most of the Internet Governance related events I have attended always speaks of Government capture which often comes out as offensive. In multistakeholder model and in the definition of Internet Governance, Government is considered one of the stakeholders.
In Africa what is often the highest spender and also the implementer of policies so if the issue of capture is addressed and not attributed often to Government, perhaps there will be more involvement in possible buy in. ITU happens to offer them this which is why there is a greater participation and involvement.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for that comment. I think one of the strengths we have heard here is we have quite a lot of Government involved with the initiatives, which is great to see. So as I said, we will wrap up this item, and suggest we move onto to the survey before doing closing. We have two final comments. Could get a mic to the gentleman from the Netherlands.
>> ARNOLD VANRHIJN: Thank you, Ellen. My name is Arnold Vanrhijn from the Netherlands Government.
Well for the transcript, Arnold Vanrhijn. Difficult name, but it sounds like the River Rhine. I would to share how the Netherlands prepare the IGF and how we do our work, link our work with the initiatives. We are organized, we are organizing the IGF, that is the Dutch Government in conjunction with the ccTLD, the Dutch ccTLD called SIDN for.NL and the national platform for the Information Society called ECP.
So this is truly an example of public‑private partnership. It is funded by the Dutch Government as well as SIDN, the Dutch ccTLD registry. Our work starts when we go back. We will have a meeting in February, debriefing what we learned from the IGF.
How did we do our work ourselves? What could be improved? What could be the themes for the next IGF? This meeting will be held in February, and then after that we will reach out to our stakeholders to get their involvement. We will organize a young IGF where youngsters can say what they want. We had a very truly wonderful experience with such young audience and they came up this year with ten recommendations which we took with us to the IGF in Brazil.
Then we will have our meeting before the global IGF. I would stress to the other national IGFs, I see sometimes they have their meetings after the global IGF to have that one before the IGF to get truly a well prepared meeting. This year it was a special year so we thought we will have a special meeting of our national IGF, and we had, as I explained earlier before, some hot topics like Internet of Things, select privacy as innovation, but also some new funny internet SO's to spark the debate and not be so serious. One of them was a test with a mine drone how to lift a drone with your brains.
We had an example during our global cyberspace Conference in April this year, it was truly a success, where Vint Cerf lifted indeed a drone. And another funny thing was that auction, we asked people in the room how much information, personal information would you like to give away on the Internet? Your personal information like your banking account, your PIN code, whatever, the winner got a Smart watch which will get tracked on what you are doing every day. So it was really a success. This is in short what our experience was.
Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Sylvia will be the last for this Agenda Item.
>> SYLVIA CADENA: Sylvia Cadena from APNIC. I help a little with the APR‑IGF MSG and volunteered and failed terribly to help with the survey this year. I would like to make a couple of comments regarding this session and the operational issues around this regional and national IGFs for next year, sessions for next year, and I really think that it takes a lot of time to get ideas like the pins for badges or having to go actually work happen. So I would really encourage this group to try to be a little bit more practical on what operational decisions can be made and what the committee that can be put forward to make this ideas reality.
Organizing a booth is not that complicated actually, so it is just a question of who sent the request to the IGF Secretariat on time, and then organize a roster to have people manning the booth during those days. So it is, it should not be impossible to organize or a coffee for people to gather or address the issues around the survey. So I really think there are many operational questions that are making this collaboration really hard, and I really encourage this group to take the operational bits a little bit more seriously. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you Sylvia. I promised Mary a quick last word.
>> Just a suggestion, with what we are doing now, I think by the time we are coming for the next IGF, there should be a sort of summary of what others have done, and we will bring it up as part of the publication. I don't know whether it's possible or not. In our own case we do the youth IGF, and our youth IGF is mainly hands on.
The first time we taught them how to, you know, what they are going to gain from the Internet, second was getting, 2015 it was entrepreneurship, there were people that have succeeded in doing eCommerce, eBusiness, eJob, anything that one successful in doing and they were really very, very happy by the time we ended. So it was a practical thing for the youth, and we asked them what they want for the IGF, what are their own submission, and at the end of the day, they made a report.
So we do it the first day. The second day we do our full IGF. And before we come into IGF, we do have consultation. We start early enough because we do a feedback when we are ending IGF so we have some ideas of what the theme and what people want to discuss that will be of benefit for Nigeria that's what we do. And even at the sub regional level, that's what we do as well. So those are the things I want to say. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. And we will wrap up there. I just have to add personally, I would love to see the initiatives involved in feeding in more youth input. I know we have had a youth IGF event in New Zealand. It's wonderful to see the ISOC Ambassadors here but it's mostly people from the host country in terms of young people and I think there is real opportunity there for us to bring the voices and messages and some of the youth of the world to the IGF.
I will hand off now back to Mark and the group who will present the survey, and before we go on to wrap up and think about next steps.
>> MARK CARVELL: I think we should bring Serena up to the front. She will be with us presenting the survey. So the four of us will be presenting the results of the survey Marilyn had mentioned earlier. I'm actually just going to start right in. We have only got 20, 25 minutes to go through it, so we will get to it as quickly as we can. Marilyn is going to lead off with some of the context and methodology.
>> MARILYN CADE: The survey is actually a decision that you all took, those of you who participated in some earlier calls, so I want you to think of this as a first step at a survey. It is gathering some information. We did not use professional help in either designing the survey or in analyzing the survey, but we have bigger plans next year because Edmund and I are going to raise enough money at the IGF support association to be able to use a little professional assistance and also to make it easier for you.
But there is some important information in this survey and I really want us to, you know, think of it as it is, it's I guess when I was in, at AT&T computer systems, AT&T labs would have called this our beta. We haven't even gotten to ‑‑ I don't think it's an alpha. It's much more than that. So I'm going to do two thinks very quickly. I will talk about who was included in this, who wasn't and how you fix that for the next round, and then, so right now on the IGF website, there are 13 regional/sub regional IGFs and there are about 30 national IGFs, but a number of new IGFs were launched this year.
And because some of you have not completed submitting your identifying information to the Secretariat, you may not have been included in this. I am only aware of this gap because IGF SA funded some new initiatives, and we didn't get surveys back from you. So don't think of this as a bad thing. Think of it as an opportunity, but I'm passing around right now a couple of pieces of paper I want you to look at and then rush to me, and if your name, if the name of your national initiative is not included on this page, then just write it in and see me afterward.
Our goal is to be as inclusive as possible, but you do have to contact the Secretariat, not somebody else, to get your initiative listed. You don't have to complete your report, but you have to have your contact, working website, email, et cetera. And it's really important. Let me say that in spite of the fact that you all are extremely busy, we got 25 returned responses. We did have to kind of contact some of you 17 times, but we got 25 returned responses.
That is phenomenal. So let me let you guys kick off on explaining the consent here.
>> Hi, everyone, thank you for the introduction. We will go right to it because we don't have much time left. I hope you. So we start with basically the profile of the respondents as you hopefully can see in the chart. We had the majority of initiatives responding from Europe, then North America, Asia‑Pacific, South America. We had responses from all regions. Not too many but the responses were useful for the analyzation and you will see throughout the presentation.
One of the questions is in the survey was about the way in which initiatives are hosted, and we asked actually the initiatives were asked to respond on that. And we got quite a diversity of answers on this. Some initiatives indicated that they have the organizing group which also acts as a host. There are also cases of initiatives who have a Secretariat in place in addition to the organizing group which basically deals with the program and these kind of programming issues. And where the Secretariat, it is hosted by a governmental entity sometimes, other times by private sector entity such, and there are also cases of initiatives that have independent Secretariat as in not associated with a Government or non‑governmental entity.
We had one example of a regional initiative who indicated that it is hosted by an intergovernmental organization. We had examples of initiatives hosted in Government, private company partnerships, and we had also responses from initiatives seeing that they have a host for the annual meeting, not for the organizational process as such, and this host is decided on a year by year basis after a public call. So, again, it makes it quite clear that there is no one size fits all model for the way in which initiatives are hosted.
Now, moving forward, there were a couple of questions about how initiatives are funded and how they are transparent with regards to the way in which they are funded. When it comes to the funding sources, initiatives were asked to indicate where they receive their sponsorship and as you can see in the chart, most of them have a combination of sources, both from the host of the annual meeting and voluntary financial contributions and in kind support from both the sponsors in the annual meeting.
And there were also cases of initiatives who actually indicated that most of their funding is done by the organization who hosts the annual meeting, so not really having additional sponsors in addition to that. Moving forward, there were some non‑compulsory questions in the survey asking initiatives to kindly indicate the sources of their sponsorship in interprets of the exact entities, and initiatives responded to this, but this helped us build this chart which says where the initiatives get their sponsorship.
As you can see, most of them are funded by not‑for‑profit NGOs in the national Internet organization, and then Governments also contributed initiatives, and then the rest from private sector and academia as sponsors for the initiatives. And we also got some examples of in kind support received by initiatives like venue for the meeting, catering, hosting of online content like the website initiative, web streaming, Internet connection, remote participation platforms, all of these were examples of in kind support that initiatives are receiving.
Now, moving forward, initiatives were to indicate whether they published a budget, and this was quite a surprise for us because as you can see 44% of the initiative indicated that they do not publish the budget. Maybe next year we can ask about the reason for that because no one actually answered that question so maybe we can make that compulsory and see what is the reason for that.
The next question related to the one before was about published lists of the sources of financial sponsorship. This is a bit different because the majority of the initiative indicated that they do publish or intend to publish the list of sources, some with amounts, some without the amounts for each sponsor. And 35% of the initiatives said that they do not publish this kind of information.
And one more, another question was about the organizational structure, how the initiatives are organizing their planning process and who is basically leading the process. This chart might look complicated but I will try to go through it. 65% of responding initiative indicated they have a steering group or committee which supervises the planning process and with regard to the dimension of the committee these would vary from initial to initiative. We have initiatives with a small steering committee and some other initiatives with quite large steering committee like 100 persons or more.
The next type of organizational structure was the program committee, then a logistical committee, and we also had initiatives who indicated that they employ other organizational structures such as contracted organizing support or consultant advise or technical support or some other related things, but we also had examples of initiatives who indicated that they use a combination of organizational structures from the list we had in the survey.
For example, there was one national initiative who has a steering group. They have also a program committee and a logistical committee, so three things in one initiative, and the there is also an example of a regional initiative who has a Secretariat dealing with logistical process but when the program is built, this is built by the whole community in about a month. So, again, there is no one size fits all model for the organizational structure, just a combination of entities.
And I will pass it onto my colleague.
>> So one other question that was related to the organizational structure was for all of the initiatives to reply to us whether they require a multistakeholder makeup of the organizational structure and based on collective responses, 87% of you were affirmative, so said that you do require a multistakeholder makeup while the 13% of you replied negative. When it comes about whether your initiatives track the gender balance and support the youth in your organizational structures as well as persons with disabilities, 65% of you ‑‑ I'm sorry. I'm not good in multitasking.
65% of you said that you do track and you include women in the organizational structure while 35% of you said that you don't. When it comes about inclusive of youth in organizational structure, 55% of you were affirmative while 48% of you said that you don't include them. And when it comes about persons with disabilities in organizational structure, this is a very important information for the Secretariat to work on it during the next year because 83% of you were negative which that's a huge number. That is something we will all probably work on this after this IGF.
When it comes about the time that you need for your planning phase, most of you said you take more than six months to plan your event. 43% of you. Eight of you needed not more than six months so 35% of you while we had the smallest percentage taking three to four months only one initiative gave that response.
While you are planning your initiatives, we were wondering whether the different kinds of consultations when planning. 87% of you said you do, which is a good number for us, but 13% said that, 1%, right, I can say that they were negative, but when we were analyzing the surveys, some of the answers were not very clear, although it was a mandatory question, but we didn't get the clear answer. So but we are very satisfied with the number of 87%.
I will stop here. Mark will take over from here.
>> MARK CARVELL: I'm going to speak to the questions that really attempted to get at what the actual national and regional IGF events look like, and while there is much that is common among all of the initiatives that responds, the real beauty of the national regional initiatives is that each take on a different flavor to reflect the unique needs and priorities of their host country or region as Serena said there is no one size fits all model.
And the results of the survey certainly show that. It's quite clear. They certainly tell the story, particularly from the structures of the events that are held that each IGF while it has a lot in common with its cousins around the globe, they are all unique and interesting in their own way. So when asked how the initiatives capture and document their initiative, the vast majority, nine out of ten responded that they use written reports by rapporteurs. Two‑thirds had indicated that they also use a webcast to document and capture the initiative, and an additional two‑thirds identified social media as a modality for capturing and documenting the event.
Interestingly only 30% of survey respondents that they ‑‑ indicated that they use transcripts to capture the event. As to what as to what social media platforms were used, Facebook and Twitter were far and away the most commonly used among survey respondents, with just one respondent indicating that they used Linked In. And that's not necessarily surprising to those of us who are active in the social media world.
For streaming platforms used, again, not surprising the most common streaming platform used was WebEx for obvious reasons, with statistically equal amounts of people using You Tube, proprietary website live streaming and Adobe connect. There were six non‑respondents. I'm not taking that as a no that they don't live stream, but just a non‑answer.
The length of the event, I thought this was quite fascinating when we were going through the results. The vast majority of national and regional events are one or two days. Only one initiative indicated that their event is less than one day, and five had indicated that there is three days. On the higher end of the spectrum, the two‑day and the three day generally those relate to events with much higher participation rates and we will get to numbers of attendees at the events, but keep in mind that the longer events generally have a higher participation than the shorter events.
So about three quarters of respondents indicated that they tracked the stakeholder group participating in their IGF. Another two‑thirds tracked gender and youth participation in their IGF, and 39, 40% track whether or not attendees have special needs or a disability. And that's other threw direct, for the most part that's collected by having on the registration form the option to indicate whether or not an attendee will require special assistance when they attend the event.
This is another interesting statistic. Number of participants in the annual event. The majority of them seem to have participation rates of between 100 and 250 individuals. Four initiatives indicated they were quite small with zero to 50 participants. It Peters off a bit as we approach the 500 participant mark, but three initiatives did indicate that they have more than 500 participants at their events. And, again, those appear to be the longer events. The larger events are also a lot more likely to hold multiple sessions, workshops, plenaries, and other types of sessions.
As we talked about, for those that do collect the breakdown of their stakeholder group participants, there is a bit of a challenge because some stakeholder groups are named different things in different parts of the world. So we saw a challenge of academia and technical sector being lumped together by some initiatives, separated by others, so it was hard to do the analysis of this, but it does give you a pretty good idea of the balance of participant groups that attend national, regional IGFs.
Certainly technical sector, Government and private sector are pretty close to each other as a Civil Society. Academia is lower but that could be captured, that would increase likely if the difference in the way the titles for the stakeholder groups were collected, it might be a little higher. But it's interesting to see that for all of the initiatives, there is a reasonably good balance of stakeholder groups that participate.
We had asked the initiatives how many sessions and types of sessions that they have at their event. The majority have between one and five plenary sessions or breakout sessions. 13 in fact have between one and five plenary sessions. Six had between six and nine plenary sessions with another five having between six and nine plenary sessions.
When you get into the next IGF there ten plus, there are three that have more than ten plenary sessions and more than, more than ten breakout sessions. Again, those are the, they correlate to the larger events with the greater participation which is, you know, really a logical conclusion. But it shows the different flavor of the initiatives region by region, country to country.
We asked them what types of sessions they have. 100% of survey respondents have an Opening Session and 96% a very high percentage have plenary sessions but only two‑thirds have only about two‑thirds actually have breakout sessions, which is interesting. My IGF actually only has Opening Sessions and plenary sessions, we don't have breakout sessions, but when I was looking at the results from the survey that we might look into it for our event next year.
We had asked what topics were discussed in workshops and events at the national regional IGFs, and there was some challenges in analyzing the data because it was an open ended question, so instead of presenting it as firm numbers ‑‑ we are on the wrong slide. Instead of presenting it as firm numbers, we pulled together a Word Cloud, and you can see that the most common topics discussed at IGFs were Internet Governance, Human Rights and freedom of expression, critical Internet resources and eCommerce with security, Internet of Things, those things getting a lot less interest.
Whether or not a regional or national IGF included the overarching theme or sub themes from the IGF, three quarters had said yes they do, they do include the overarching themes or sub themes from the IGF. And finally, the event overview section, full 83% of initiatives have outcome or output statements or messages resulting from their event.
With that, I think Marilyn, you are going to do the engagement with the IGF piece.
>> MARILYN CADE: So it's always been very interesting to me since ‑‑ it's been very interesting to me since I see so deep a linkage between the national and regional IGFs into the IGF that there has been this continuing assertion that there is no linkage. And some of you in this room tell me this when you see me. And then I find that you have no time to come to a planning session about the national and regional IGFs because you are so busy doing a workshop or doing another event or doing an Open Forum about your event or speaking.
And so I'm saying, I must be missing something because to me the best example of the integration between the national and regional IGFs includes the human factor, and that is the duality of presence. People who are in multiple places.
So we did ask the question because I was quite concerned that I keep hearing from people, there is no linkage. There is no linkage. And I think one of the things we need to learn more about is what do we want in terms of linkage? The other thing that has been going on since the CSTD Working Group was, improvements was published has been this in the last two meetings, there have been a lot of people going to the microphone and saying well, the national and regional IGFs could do this work and the national and regional IGFs could do that work and the other thing I worry about is, I think, and I'm the MAG Chair also said this. I really question the ability of the national and regional IGFs to take work assignments as opposed to identifying things that are mutually beneficial.
So to me, a good example of what was mutually beneficial was contributing to the Connecting the Next Billion where on a dynamic basis and a voluntary basis a good number of the national and regional IGFs voluntarily contributed and even did, we did a main plenary session. Access is not a topic at IGF‑USA that we can get more than ten people in the room and talk about because access is a very heavily, it's an issue that's dealt with very, very differently there.
But when we did Connecting the Next Billion, we had a plenary session about it. So I'm, you know, I'm thinking what are we thinking about here in terms of calling for linkages and I can't see that far. So let me put my glasses on. So the engagement that we are, the engagement questions that we ask you, we ask just basic questions. That is do you, whoever answered the questionnaire, do you actively follow the IGF planning and activities? Because I would have assumed the percentage would be low. In fact, 92% of the respondents said that they do actively follow the IGF planning and activities.
The 64% of the respondents have MAG members in their region or country that are engaged in their initiative. Now, I actually was disappointed by this, because I, since the job of the MAG member is to be actively engaged, not just in advising on planning the program, but to reflect backward into the community they come from, I think the fact that there is 36%, that's a pretty significant number that for some reason they are not engaged in their national or regional initiative.
And I think that's a question for us to ask. Okay, do MAG members understand that it doesn't mean you have to be on the steering group, but that you need to have some kind of reflection into your national or regional initiative so that there is cross pollination of information? On engagement with the IGF, 60% of the respondents, this is the coordinators, attend the MAG meetings in person or virtually, which is pretty good.
72% in the past, sorry, have participated in the past substantive sessions, and we have had substantive sessions since 2009. So that was pretty good, I thought, and something that we should really continue to think about is how do we better publicize them and schedule them. And one idea might be that we would begin with our substantive session perhaps on day zero when it wouldn't interfere so much with the rest of the program.
On the intersessional activities, this is, remember, participating in intersessional activities is not mandated. It is entirely voluntary. This question I was quite actually quite interested in because we and was quite surprised about because 78% of the initiatives have intersessional activities, 35% have contributed to the IGF intersessional activities which has been a huge amount of work for those of you who have taken it on and 17% participate in the dynamic coalitions. 43% made a submission to the intersessional work on detecting the next billion. So the idea that there is not a strong linkage between the national and regional IGFs, that's not borne out by what the questionnaire said. What may be borne out is the lack of visibility about the fact that the participant is also affiliated with a national or regional IGF, and I liked Laura's idea of a pin or a flag of have a special designation so people begin to recognize you that you are wearing dual hats. The IGF chat leverages, I think, are something for us to take on quite seriously as we look ahead for just the next few minutes.
What you said was your greatest challenges and I really expected you to say your greatest challenge was funding. Funding is a big challenge, but it was number three, participation, inclusiveness, recruiting more participants and more diverse participants, and for some of the national and regional IGFs, the population you have to draw from is going to be very different, but you need at least three of the stakeholder groups.
You are not required to have all five, but it's very true that in some countries, and I know we are talking Afghanistan and I are talking about the idea of, you know, where would we find all five stakeholders and would we be able to get five initially. I thought that was going to be true. There are other African countries where we may get strong turnout from the technical community and Government but not strong turnout from business.
When we think about this I think we need to go nor granularly and think about the idea of what can we do to help, and I thought Anna's suggestion of peer to peer exchanges where business who is actively engaged might do a better job of educating their fellow colleagues through industry associations that there are other National Initiatives and that they should get involved in that.
So we also asked you if you are going to do an annual event in 2016, and there was actually a pretty significant, I thought, positive response. 76% of you said yes, and the remainder said you don't know yet. To me that sounds positive. It sounds like we are going to have a significant number of returning IGF national and regional initiatives.
Let me open this very quickly for questions and then I'm going to do a very quick summing up. I see two right here.
>> Thank you, Mary Duma from Nigeria IGF. Some of the questions were not very, very clear when it came to especially the participation of the, of MAG members in the process, in the local national process. We found out that it was only in 2015 that we had a MAG member in our process and it made a lot of difference because the MAG member was able to understand from global level what the thinking is and translating it to what we are trying to do at the local level.
So if it is for 2015, so before now, I think it was in Istanbul that I raised this that we don't have MAG members in our process, we don't know who is our MAG member. So we are running a process initiative without the global MAG member. That's one of the, so it didn't come out very good because we are just looking at 2015 in my own response was only 2015. Before now, it wasn't, and for that reason, maybe by the time some of the questions are better refined we will be able to give precise response to it. Then the other one we wanted to know why you want us to publish the project. Is it for transparency what we want to get at why did we ask about publishing the project?
We withdraw our budget, we get it, but we report it internally. We don't publish it on the website, on our website. It is not published on our website.
>> MARILYN CADE: Let me answer that. How many of you in this room are the coordinator. Have you read your responsibilities on the website?
>> NIGERIA: On which website?
>> MARILYN CADE: On the IGF website.
>> NIGERIA: We didn't even know there was responsibilities because it was a thing we started doing.
>> MARILYN CADE: That's the reason I asked the question in that way. You actually do.
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We were asking the question in order to look at it from the standpoint of the CSTD report that is requiring improvements in the IGF.
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Now, you get to decide whether or not you published the details of your budget. You were asked do you have a budget, then you were asked do you publish it, then you were asked do you publish the.
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We as coordinators think should be mandatory in order to bear the seal, the seal, you are using the trademark of the IGF. You are listed on the IGF website. You have the halo effect of being listed on a website that is affiliated with the United Nations, right? So there are some criteria. And if you don't publish your reports, some of you have not gotten your reports in from last year in 2014, if you don't publish your report from 2014, what's the answer about when you should be removed from the website? The Secretariat is not going to make that rule.
We are going to make that rule as the coordinators. You are going to have to make that decision, but you also have to ask yourself what kind of standards are we establishing so that there is a value to being a national and regional IGF. And I'm not trying, Mary, to impose them. The present standards come from the work of coordinators between 2007 and 2010 that collaborated on what those standards are. The Secretariat did not require the publication of an annual report.
We voluntarily established that. I think Mark Carvell insisted on it as a matter of fact. It was a joke. So that was the reason, and I took a long time to answer it, but I think you guys need to look at this and say what do you think the standard of practice ought to be. Not today, but when we come back together, what do you think the standard of practice ought to be? I will give you a for instance. Some initiatives have a single source of funding. There is nothing wrong with that as long as they operate in an open and transparent fashion, but I think what we are trying to accomplish is creating a standard of practice and a learning not to say one size fits all. I have some requests that I will work with the staff and the other co‑moderators about. I want to flesh out this idea about the observatory. I want to think about the brand recognition. I want to go back and talk about the possibility of doing the meet the national and regional IGF publication quickly and come back to all of you, but I think the other thing is we are going to take this list and start a new email list, and work on the follow‑up to this particular session as a sub group.
And then we will figure out how to take it out to the broader group of the coordinators. But I need to turn this over to the Secretariat.
>> Thank you very much.
>> I just say a couple of words before we close up. When Marilyn said that we are going to have a session longer than three hours and I was thinking we are going to have empty chairs after one hour. Thank you very much on behalf of the IGF Secretariat. What I can tell you, I have been communicating with the majority of you during the last three months and what I can tell you is that for the IGF Secretariat you are most important outcome but also income because thanks to you, we are sitting in our offices and typing all of the time on our computers know what are happening in the field. We know the numbers. We know what are your challenges and thank you very much for this.
I don't have a lot of criticism for any of your initiatives although you are a bit late with the reports. So please send us your reports. You know all of the criterias. We have some great reports received. Now, last thing, and you are off, I want to thank Marilyn Cade for the coordination, for the work with the IGF Secretariat for the huge help. I had no idea that people exist like you. I don't know how you did this, but thank you very much. You are helping so much, and I'm sure I'm speaking to the behalf of all of you.
(Applause).
Marilyn, would you like to say the magical word?
>> MARILYN CADE: The magical word is next door is the annual meeting of the IGF Support Association. And I would love it if all of you would come whether you are a member of the support association or not at this time, it is a resource to you, because it is the source of the small grants that we are fundraising to be able to provide to the national and regional IGFs. So do come even if you are not a member. We are not serving you food, but we will try to keep the meeting short. It's in room 7.
For countries that are developing new national IGFs, countries who in transparency index rank very high, the transparency in the process of multistakeholder should be I think provided, and I think the dominance of the Governments as a key stakeholder in those countries should be, there should be some sort of a condition that these countries because they list so high in the transparency index because of some corruption or some other incompetency attributes, there should be some conditions on their Government's role in the multistakeholder process.
And someone comments the fact that bottom up, the IGF is a bottom up approach, so it's up to the countries how they manage it. But then again I'm saying I come from a country where democracy is just a label, but operationally and organizational and Governments we are very authoritarian and individual authoritarianism and process authoritarianism is there so the bottom approach is not a successful thing for us to practice.
A couple of suggestions if I could add is if we could bring the dynamic coalition or the Best Practice Forum to the regional level because there will be some areas like access could be something that could be specific to a region or some political economical similar countries and also the awareness could be an issue in some regions and not in the other like you said in the United States. The content development and management, that could be another theme for some of the regional IGFs. So that's it. Thank you very much.
>> MARILYN CADE: We have an important announcement.
>> Yes, just a short announcement. Starting at 11:00 room 4 I am organizing a workshop which is called IGF Initiatives Master Chef. So it is for all of us, national and regional IGF participants, coordinators, panelists, and please welcome to this workshop. We are going to have some interesting suggestions and set out recommendations for preparing for organizing IGFs on national and regional levels. You are all welcome. Tomorrow room 4, starting at 11:00. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you all. We will see you in the room next door.
(Concluded at 12:46).