FINISHED - 2014 09 03 - WS95 - Working Together Initiatives To Map And Frame Internet Governance - Room 1

FINISHED TRANSCRIPT



NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE

INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2014

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

"CONNECTING CONTINENTS FOR

ENHANCED MULTI‑STAKEHOLDER INTERNET GOVERNANCE"



03 SEPTEMBER 2014

11:00

WS 95

WORKING TOGETHER: INITIATIVES TO MAP & FRAME INTERNET GOVERNANCE

 





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This is the output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings.  Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.  It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.  

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>> LEA KASPAR:  Sorry if we are starting a little bit late.  It seems to be the IGF way.

My name is Lea Kasper.  I work with Global Internet Policy Organisation based in the UK, and I will be moderating this workshop.

We are all working together.  Initiatives to map and frame Internet Governance.  I want to thank everyone who has participated in the workshop and I hope we come up with interesting discussions.  This is a roundtable so everyone is very welcome to join.  It is not going to be a super structured discussion in terms of panelists and if you want the floor, please just raise your hand and I'll let you speak.  

To give you a bit of background about this workshop and what we're hoping to do here, the idea to organize this came about through Samantha Dickenson and myself after having participated in a mapping exercise of trying to map Internet policy in terms of related policy issues and mechanisms of where these were being addressed to CTDF.  

Now, apart from that that is our personal interest where we thought this is a cool thing to do, this false actually within a much broader context of growing demands for improvements to the overall Internet Governance Ecosystem and the renewed interest in certain function that has been around in this space since practically the WSIS, which is to analyze and monitor ongoing policy developments in this field.  Maybe this is helpful to conceptualize it within the IGF framework as well.  The IGF was originally meant to perform this function, but for a number of reasons this has never happened.

Now, over the last couple of years, with grown demands to reform the system this has come about as a renewed demand and it has come up on the agenda of the Al conference, and it is now coming up within the NET initiative that was launched last week, I think.

So within that, maybe just say a few things.  What this function entails and how it could be institutionalized is something that's being discussed elsewhere and we're not going the talk about that here.  There is a workshop tomorrow that is at 2:30 to talk about institutionalizing what Bill Drake and I have called the Clearinghouse function, and you're all welcome to participate there.  

What this workshop is meant to do is look at what is already out there, well, optimize outcomes.  And people that are trying to better understand the system.  Look at what the issues are and where they're being discussed.  What we've tried to do here is gather people who are working on similar initiatives and gathered them here to see what they have been doing and whether there is ‑‑ whether they think there is value in collaborating between these initiatives and to streamline efforts and, well, optimize outcomes.

How we're going to structure it, I would like to go around the table and give word to ‑‑ give time to people who have been working on similar initiatives to present what they have been doing, and I would also ask them to perhaps reflect on the potential value of collaboration and what they think how that could happen.

And I would like to start with Samantha here.  After we go around that first round, I'm just going to open up for discussion and see what other people who think, and please feel free to let me know if you want to speak.

So, Samantha, if you could say a few words about the mapping initiative within the ‑‑ that started within the CSTD working operating house corporation, and we'll take it from there.

>>SANDY D.:  Hi.  I'm Sandy Dickenson.  I'm one of the co‑organizers of this workshop, but I'm also now working for the IGF secretariat, so I will speak once and then be quiet.  

Larry and I were observers to the working house incorporation.

So there was a need to try and make some sense out of that 700 pages.  So the idea was to turn it into some sort of matrix, some spreadsheet that would collect similar information together to enable the working group to better analyze and act on it.

What was interesting in that process is ‑‑ so we're as observers were very privileged to be able to participate so fully.  We ended up with 24 categories.  If we were starting from scratch as us we would not have used those 24 categories but what we had to do was work with the material we had.  So we ended up with 24 categories that, you know f we were going to move this forward, we wouldn't do it this way.  We would do it a different way.  But we had to work with what the working group had received.  We got very enthused by the project.  New information to add it to.  Ways that you can keep it updated constantly, and what would enable you not just to do what the working group had planned, which was to see where are the gaps in cooperation between stakeholders and between governance and finalized exit but you could enable everyone to be able to go oh, look, I'm interested in the topic X where in my region in my Country or in my stakeholder brief can I go to discuss this.  

So it could be a really valuable tool.  I have really, really excited and we wanted it to move forward beyond the working group.  I think we should go straight to Nevie after I have spoken so you can talk about where it is now.  That is how you make sure that this information doesn't die.  It is not just a project one of ex static but that can be built on so that is where we wanted to start discussing with other initiatives that were similar to see how we can ensure that people can build on each other's work, communicate with each other and find synergies.

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thanks.

Mary, would you be happy to perhaps say a few words about where the initiative is now within the CSTD.  Thank you.

>> MARY:  Yes, thank you very much for the opportunity.  And good morning to everybody.

First of all, I'd like to express the Secretariat's gratitude to Samantha and Lea for doing an amazing job on voluntary basis in regards with the collection of inputs and putting them together and categorizing them into that spreadsheet of broad focus and under them I believe that you had over 400 mechanisms and issues.  Yeah, that's right.

The ECOSOC decided in its resolution of this year that this work may be further continued by the CSTD secretariat, and we examined in the secretariat very carefully the mandate that we have on this mapping and the mandate analysis that we have is to review the identified international public policy issues pertaining to the internet, least where there are existing international mechanisms addressing this these issues, identify the status of the mechanisms, if any, whether they are addressing the issues and attempt to identify gaps in order to see what type of recommendations may be required.  So there are different parts in this mandate that we have carefully reviewed and thought through, what is the best way to continue that work of course there are also political sensitivities that need to be taken into account what we have decided to do in the secretariat in the panel of commission in late November, they will discuss this issue in the CSTD commission in late November, last week of November, in fact, is that we build on the work that was previously carried out through the correspondence group and we would produce a more elaborated database which contains information on the status of those mechanisms and possible gaps if we arrive there also we have to find a very solid criteria in which to analyze the mechanisms and also the scope ‑‑ the scope is international but does that include also regional we are building to form an objective review.  So this is the work that has been done until now, so it's still at its initial phase and the time frame that we have is relatively short.  So that is why we are going to do it as a desk review and base it on the existing reality of Internet Governance architect, basically.

There are three that I would like to point out are three issues.  As secretariat continues at this work it does not have to start at zero.  We have the identified over 400 issues and mechanisms.  We don't have the state confined for those but we recognize them and we take them as basis for our work.

Secondly, I've agreed to the work to say in its final report.  It's common to be a leading process and it will always be sec tear yet to the next page and then it is up to the intersessional panel beside how to take it forward but we have to recognize that new issues and new mechanisms arrive at every year.  This cannot be something that would be completed.  

Lastly, for news for all things, so that the work couldn't be forgotten after the session or the next.  

Allstate called us at the moment to understand what is the government.  What are the best and most effective ways to participate in it and so on and so forth so hopefully we can produce something that would serve later for the purpose of information finding.  One possibility to convert the database into some other kind of thing.  

Thank you.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thank you very much.  That's very interesting to hear about the finding.  I would like to kind of take off the point about perhaps creating online platform and ask my colleagues Deborah and John perhaps to say a few words about if you're happy to say a few words about what ABC is doing and then willing to say a few words from you and John about the flier that has just been handed out Internet Governance.

>>DEBORAH B:  I will figure out if we can actually project the work in progress on the screen in front of you.  But essentially we had started to build a mapping of different Internet Governance processes in a static version just to help society and the association for communications and Lea and John here jointly worked on this project and we started a mapping just to be able to better navigate different governance processes and found that we constantly had to update it and so we started to think about how we can make a dynamic map that could be updated and linked to different information such as location, agenda, outcome documents and then showed the relationship between them.  So the static map started to develop in something that you're starting to see on the screen.  Is this the one?  I think this is the one that you can actually interact with, but the static one is coming up, as well.

So we started to think about in addition to the different events which you see here, how we can filter them using tags and different themes to actually help guide someone through the process.  So if you wanted to focus on could you tag the meetings and see what meetings are coming up, what the outcomes could be, what the preparatory process is and link all the information in.  So we worked with, actually a Turkish artist, so I'm not sure if he is here all night, he developed this into a dynamic map and the data will be in it.  It's a work in progress, as I said, and it will be at lunch, I think, on Friday on the Alternate Internet Governance forum.

And I will turn over to Joana now who can give more information.  

>> JOHANNA:  It is hard to visualize there, but as Deborah mentioned, the processes here was to take that timeline with all the processes and try to make it interactive as a database.  So the idea, it is still a work in progress, but the ideas is you can go to one event, one process like the IGF, and go to one of the meetings, and they have all the documents, or ITU meeting then you have the agenda.  Yeah, it's hard to see here, but the idea is to have the agenda, the discussion documents, the previous process that lead to a particular meeting, so we are creating integrity with processes, events, meetings, and issues to be discussed in each, and then trying to connect.  What is the relation with one event or one process to another in this map.  The idea is that it is going to be collaborative.  We're going to come and present ‑‑ give this document of a particular process or relationships, suggest relationship, so curated and update the platform.  This platform still do not uploaded to that address of the flyer because are launching on Friday, but to be online for comments, and the comments can be related to labels and how to do tags or what kind of information we cant segregate in the database to make the visualization more reachable.

I think that's it.

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thanks, Johanna.

So I've been working on this project with Deborah and Joana and what we've learned in thinking about how you can make information useful, how to actually started was we were trying to build a strategy to engage and just give a context of how that is live and how we thought this was a valuable process and not just be static.  We had trouble to find out what priority it tees are and doing that we started about thinking within Internet Governance what are the processes that exist.  We group them in a separate columns and build a taxonomy of issues.  I would like to stick to that taxonomy challenge here.  That was something that is also relevant for the CSTD is doing and the mapping that Samantha and I worked with one of the issues that was contentious was how do you actually group Internet policy related issues.  So of that list of 400 that we initially received, that's not really helpful.  So if we have a massive list, that doesn't really help you think how to engage and map priorities.

So what happened in the that was between working with members and not apparently.  So having that conversation among many more people who bet very much useful.  I know Patrick here has worked a little bit about how taxonomies issues in Internet Governance.

Would you be happy to say a few words about that and kind of what you did.  Sorry to put you on the spot.  Not really sorry.

>>Patrick:  No, it's totally fair, Lea.  And I apologize.  Lea had actually invited me in April to join this workshop and she just reminded me today that I never responded to her, so I just responded 30 minutes ago positively, so I suppose I brought this on myself.  

The way that we have been thinking about this is in a very similar and complementary way to the excellent work that has been done here with this mapping exercise.  About a year ago Vint Cerf, Max Senges and I got together and very frustrated the outcome of WICKIT.  We left this conference had had 89 countries that were grouped together and signed the treaty and 55 others that did not, and the alliances with those countries were kind of odd.  And the kind of issues when we looked at it, it just didn't really quite make sense to us.  We heard a lot of things when we were in Dubai of the WICKIT that were really troubling.  

So, for example, the question of spam.  In Africa, in particular, was something that is very important to the African policy makers, and yet the Western world largely poo-pooed it and said, hey, this is not an issue that you should be worried about, and that heightened the tensions and created a lot more separation between us.  It was also the case with security, and there is a few other topics.

So we sort of stepped back and tried to make sense of it.  In an effort to try to explain why we sort of viscerally felt that certain things were inappropriate for a treaty, but didn't really know how to explain we, of course, went to the layered model, which is the engineer's way of looking at the Internet.  And there is no way to look at the layered model if you're worth your salt without making some modifications and changes to it.  And, so, we took ‑‑ well, one version of the layered model, the infrastructure layer, the logical layer, and the content layer and added a knew, what we call a social layer at the top that deals with questions of trust and identity, and tried to see what are the institutions?  What are the policy groups?  Whether they be NGOs, UN institutions or other organizations that are addressing these questions, and how do you overlay what those institutions are to the layered model.

And we looked at, for example, the ITU.  We were very comfortable with the work that the ITU does in infrastructure.  It has had 150 year history in dealing with infrastructure questions and it does so very effectively, but we are very frustrated viscerally and I think this probably makes sense also intellectually with some of the work that the ITU was doing in the upper layer in the upper stack.  Questions of content, questions of social identity and privacy.

These are not in the ITU sweet spot and yet they were very much at the forefront of the policy discussions that took place in Dubai.

So when you look at the map if you assume that this layer model makes any sense and you kind of try to overlay some of the organizations on top of it you really see some significant holes.  There is quite a lot of good work in the infrastructure there.  IT does fantastic work there.  If you go up to the logical layer there is ICANN and good organizations that are doing multistakeholder work but there is a real gap that comes to content and when it comes to the social areas of trust and identity.

In groups like the UN HR counsel in UNESCO are doing some work there but there is a hole.  So this we found to be very useful and complementary to this type of analysis because this looks at things from our perspective as a way to sort of see where the discussions are taking place and where are organisations that are doing them but what we're trying to answer in the work that we did was to ask the question of whether the organisations that are there hosting these particulars events are the right organizations to be hosting them at all.

And we think there is a lot of opportunity to continue to look at that and to continue to bring up and to essentially stand up in the organisations in some of these areas, particularly in the upper stack, because if that doesn't happen we're going to have organizes that are sort of down in the lower stack, the IGFs, the ICANNs, they are very well established infrastructure and going to be dealing with topics that are in the upper stack and it is going to feel very awkward.

Anyhow that is the paper that we wrote over the course of the last year and that is our contribution to the tax on au me and I think there is a lot of opportunity for these two ideas to come together at some point.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thanks for that.  I know, for instance, Google has also been working with the ITU on stats but there is some useful information there and something also to think about when we think about kind of taking it to the next level visualizing data and taking it up and kind of how that could be made more user friendly and that note that gives me a segue to introduce Preetam, Preetam from the ITU, if you could say maybe a few words about your reflections on the topic.

>> PREETAM MALOOR:  Thank you, and thank you, Lea, in inviting me.

I am Preetam Maloor from the ITU.  I am an advisor in the general secretariat.  I will quickly touch upon the issue in general.  So clearly it is an important effort.  It is a very difficult effort and can only be achieved by collaboration.  So that is very clear.

There is this engineering side of my brain that is kicking me, telling me to intervene here, because I still can't understand the scoping of the problem.  So I just quickly typed down a few points.

So, obviously the first thing you need to talk about what other topics you're looking at, and that depends on what your definition of Internet Governance is.    If you take the narrow view, it's, of course, critical Internet resources, and you heard the debate again and again.  If you take the broader view, it's the full spectrum of Internet Governance, as defined by the VSIS text, the VSIS outcome, outcome documents, the various action lines, and I keep going back to this DIPLO diagram, the railroad diagram that they had.  Uwan is here.  He can probably show you that if he has it.  But it's a beautiful diagram and critical internet resources is just one small part of it.  You have agenda, taxation, infrastructure, accessibility for people with disabilities.  You have ACCESS, which is completely different.  Security.  Privacy.  Many, many issues½.Í

So the second question is how wide are you spreading your net here?  What are you focusing on?  And whom are you taking to, then?  So if you're taking the broader definition of Internet Governance, it's not just a few agencies.  I think there are 35 agencies, many UN bodies.  All of them ‑‑ and I'm only talking about my community, the IGO community here, all of them have some work under many, many different categories.  For example, we had the WSIS+10 high level event at ITU this year co‑hosted by ‑‑ co‑organized by ITU, UNISCO, UNDP, many, many different agencies.  UN Woman.  So many of them were there taking care of their own action line.  It essentially shows that each of them act as a facilitator for many of these topics here.

    And I just saw this diagram here, this flyer here.  I have to go and visit the website.  I apologize.  I haven't seen the netgov map here, but it's on my to‑do list first thing tonight.  But it has the UN processes on the left.  It has the ITU processes on the right, which is very interesting, because ITU is the oldest UN agency.  They are Celebrating 150th year next year.  So separating these processes is quite interesting.  I see CSTD here, which is ‑‑ CSTD is serviced by UNCTAD, and UNCTAD has many, many other processes, including great indicators that they do.  So clearly this has to be looked into in a lot of depth and there are regional organisations, of course.  In Europe you have council of Europe.  You have the Britbanks which just announced the $100 billion effort.   If you look at the chart that they publish, there are at least six or seven points which are on ICTs.  Primarily focused on ICTs.  This is showing that you are giving it a lot of importance.

You have many different regions.  Again I'm talking only about ideals.  So it's a problem much more complex and much more difficult than a few other organisations here and there.  It is very, very complicated.  So again, you need to look at the outcome of this exercise, then it might look like the mid‑2000, so probably late 2000.  I saw these diagrams of social networks, beautiful graphs, absolutely amazing on the screen.  You need to figure out what is the use of this.  Is it being used to define the mandates of organisation?  Is it for information only.  So there are many, many issues which need to be solved at all.  We contributed and we think it has a lot of potential

Thanks.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thanks.  You give me a nice segue into the next speaker as well.

Jovana, if you're happy to continue and give us a few words on what Diplo has been doing in this file.  

>> JOVANA KRIVOKAPIC:  Thank you, Lea.  You may display the PowerPoint to show the diagram with the three dimension.  Thank you.

Well, what resonates with our experience, we have to be really realistic and handle when it comes to the complexity of tasks you are facing and I'm speaking about 15 years of experience on a classifying Internet Governance field.  We started 15 years ago when we had to deliver the first course on Internet Governance.  We had to map it and we created a quite well known building in the construction and different tools for visualization with the governance.  And since then, what we have been doing is basically realizing how complex the exercise is and I have two examples.  Not only on the level of gathering information but also on conceptual logical level.  How to create classification approach.  Here I will make one cover.  In 2004, ten years ago, I delivered presentation on this issue at the IT meeting on Internet Governance and one of the conveyors of the meeting I call it taxonomy of Internet Governance he came to me and said, Jovana, it is a misnomer it sounds like.  And then I went to the encyclopedia and not Wikipedia and realized taxonomy and applies to biology.  It means classifying things.

Therefore, after that comment I have been very careful in using ‑‑ I dropped using taxonomy and I am using more classification.  This is just one point for terminology precision that we should use.

Now what I can share from this thing is of experience we had more or less 2000 students who attended the course.  There are a few reflections.  One is to combine three possible methodologies.  One is, let's say, academic conceptual.  We have been doing within different initiatives.  We sit together, the few of us and okay, what are the issues.  Let us put them together.  We created this five baskets approach in 1999 when we started.  That was the type of exercise.

The first approach is valid top down order deductive approach.

The second approach which I have found extremely valuable is based on the reflection from the people in this text.  I'm referring to our Internet Governance book and our courses.  Students attend the courses and say, well, it doesn't make sense.  That is really cybersecurity fit here in this basket.  When you have thousand students reflecting on the text that is really the most valuable thing.

This is the second feedback we have been use to go fine tune now our classification.  The third one is the latest is data mining.  We have started to use this three years ago, there for what you are trying to see how this classification with five baskets.  Five basket is an infrastructure, economic, socioculture and development.  How do they fit with the metrics?  We are blessed with these great transcripts.  Does it fit with 1999.

This is another extremely valuable source.  Proximity of the word we now realize that five basket approach which is simple and manageable cannot sustain the latest development.  We have to extend it.  This is the news with two more baskets.  One is cybersecurity and the other is human rights.  There will be seven baskets building which we'll have to design.

Therefore, this is sort of process:  harnessing expertise of many, many people coming from different policies, doing automatic data mining, and doing some sort of academic exercise of mapping.

Now in this exercise what we noticed and it is very important for the future is that every issue has at least five, if not more, policy perspectives.  It is example of population.  It has to be updated.   Even quantification one has to be careful with quantifications but we divide the different aspects of the pop you lie and assign them to different baskets.  This is extremely important because issues are not just ‑‑ they don't go only to one classification, classification group.

And in that exercise what was then done it is a bit complicated but it should be conveyed with what the line ‑‑ what are the issues and topics, where are they discussed and who are the actors.  And the intersection, if you can visualize the Rubic’s Cube, you have how, how do they address it.  They discuss, they analyze and their decisions on this issue.  Therefore, that is dynamic is the key, and this is the dynamics when you get complexity of the whole Internet Governance.

We always say you are like the real Rubic’s and you shouldn't solve it because that would be difficult and not good for internet governance but we shouldn't stop trying to solve it.  To make some sort of less noise, and that's one point.

Here is, for example, what we are planning to focus in 2015 on interplay with cybersecurity human rights and in order to friendly business regulations to our activities have also similar approach.  Therefore multi discipline approach to cybersecurity.  That is another field.  This is a challenge that all of us are facing a little bit different professional cultures with relatively algorithm approach in IT culture and I have professional background both in IT and diplomacy and some things are not quite the complex line between A and B are and diplomacy.  

Here is the visualization of our observation.  What it is going to do basically to help the user at the bottom of the screen to make sense of this.  Both who are the players and how is it performed.  We have been working very hard at the Geneva Internet platform long through this process data mining system is ready.  You can hear the analysis of the language arrive every next morning.  We are publishing for yesterday we publish open speeches.  We notice that there is high level of optimism and relatively low level of realism in the speeches that were delivered.

This is the map that was covered the Internet Governance, in Geneva we calculated there is approximately 52% of Internet Governance issues covered by processes centered in Geneva.

But one visualization.  Well, you can find close to 500 visualization, but if you have been trying to reduce this complexity to an understandable way for Diplomats and other involvements in this processes and what really matters.

We do a lot of data mining and we do a lot of exact systems but what matters is the context.  Context is the key.  And sometimes we underestimate the relevance of the policy context discussion how it is.

In brief, congratulations for this initiative.  We can contribute with this 15 years of experience with the level of data.  Today we will discuss six additional Internet Governance book which is based on this technology.  You're welcome to join us at 5:30 and go through the Turkish version of the book as well.

We have to use the automation matters, data mining and other tools, but be always aware of the relevance of the context, and that the policy cannot be quantified.  The policy is much more than quantification.

That's what I will say, more or less, more from my side.

Thank you.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thanks very much, Jovana.  And I would like to give the word now to Markus Kummer from the Internet Society.  Perhaps he wants to share their efforts and experience in this field.

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you.  Yes, it is an interesting discussion, and I think one thing that is clear is there is a complex issue.

I have not seen this approach first, but mapping dominance has been distributed and it looks very interesting and it is in a way sort of easy to follow at this event driven.  And we all to go events.

The Internet Society has taken for years you may have seen it, I think you should have worked with the organizers before to show the chart, but it doesn't really matter.  We have tried to visualize the Internet ecosystem, but again it looks in the end very complex, we just call it by the charts, but it's also one possible approach, but again, it doesn't make it simpler.

If they divided it into a pie into six pieces, three on the left are more the technical pieces and three on the right are more the societal pieces so there is a part of the pie that is naming in the dressing that involves obviously organisation such as ICANN, IRS, IANA and the cc's then another piece of the pies are standard development.  That is W3C ITF and IAB and so on.  

Then we have shared global services operation.  That includes the root service t network operators, the Internet exchange points, the GTLEs, the cc's.  Then the more social parts of the pie, we have one piece, it's the users and this, I think, may be the most important part of the pie.  That includes individuals, also businesses, governments, organisations, service operators.  So we are all Internet users.

Then there is a piece of the pie that is devoted to education and capacity building.  There again, we have governments but we also have organisations such as NGOs like the Internet Society.  And the last piece is local national regional global policy development.  There again, governments, regional IGOs, global IGOs, also non‑governmental organisations.

This is a complex that corresponds to a complex architecture.  The Internet has evolved as a distributed technology and its governance is equally distributed.  And it is understandable that governments, especially Developing Countries can be touched on that in an early workshop on capacity building, I find it difficult to find their way around and they call for attempts to guide them to make life simpler for them.

And like Patrick who was in Dubai, all of a sudden emerged into a big problem.  We had also thought spam disappeared from the landscaping in the IGF context we looked a bit fairly high up on the agenda the very first meeting in Athens, then we had the OCD explain packet in a way it was explained how you can deal with spam from no particular interest to deal with it in the IGF context but yet obviously collectively overlooked the many Developing Countries found it was a problem.  So as Internet Society we also thought we have to do something and we devoted some time in developing workshops on spam.  So there is practice forum on spam precisely to show there are solutions around and that led to think that there is maybe need to explain better how the Internet works and we have actually a collaborative stewardship framework in place which is maybe not well understood and which needs bet every explaining.

We published a paper that is posted on the Internet Society remember site towards the beginning of the process that has not yet be concluded and the original working title been also taxonomy but I think we moved away from that term and we moved to make the stewardship framework.  But we essentially take as our starting point no real gaps.  There is always something there.  This something will not be well known, will not be sufficiently known or may not be known sufficiently well.  But there is virtually any aspect made to be corrected.  There is some small organisation doing some work getting back to spam now all of the organisations, they're not known to a broad public, so clearly there is much merit in this exercise at this point I give effort to make it clearer of where to go and who does what and enhanced visibility of some of these organisations and maybe also upgrade and strengthen.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thanks, Markus.

I think what is interesting about spam is looking at this issue, there seems to be kind of two ways that people go about it.  One is one we want to get a broad overview of everything that is happening and see how different things interact and there are more issue driven demands to see how policies and specific issue are developing and how to engage in a specific policy.  And I think there is value in both.  It seems that users and activists that I work with respond much better to the issue based approach.  So it is like the hook to get them involved and to see where things are happening.  It is almost that issues are more natural to kind of way of engaging in the processes and different actors.

Maybe interesting to notice in this ‑‑ on this point is that I've been looking at how this similar, let's say, movement, has happened with the climate change sector and what has happened there is that they started out by saying let's build this one stop shop for climate change policies and to map everything put it in one place and it turned out that and where they are now, this is a field that has existed and where this has been happening for the last ten years.  They already went through a process of trying and testing and I don't think we're there yet and I think this is a beginning that we can see how this can evolve and how we can do better.  

But what has happened in the climate change field is they ended up as saying this actually makes more sense to have this issue based approach and have people that are experts looking at different well issues that are relevant for their specific type of work.

So I know there are a couple of other people here who are working on similar initiatives and I would like to kind of invite them to talk.

Maybe, Bogdan, would you be happy to say a few words.  Introduce yourself and say what you are doing.

Thank you.  

>> BOGDAN MANOLEA:  Sure.  My name is Bogdan Manolea. I am the executive director of the Association for Technology and Internet.  Short ApTI in Romania.  And I thought it would be interesting to tell you about a project we are involved in.  The project is called mapping.  You can find the project.  It is a U funded project by the commission.  You can find it by mappingtheinternet.eu; however, the purpose is not to map the whole Internet, although that would be a very interesting idea, but mapping is an acronym.  It stands for managing alternatives for privacy, property and Internet Governance.  This is a project led by the University in Netherlands, and there are 16 members, most of them Universities, a few NGOs and businesses, and also DIPLO is one of the other members of the project.

Now, one specific part of the project you might be interested in is what we call in the project a policy observatory, which is policy watch that needs to deal with three topics that essential to our project, that is privacy, copyright and Internet Governance.  And when we are talking about Internet Governance is, of course, Internet Governance in a narrow sense because otherwise it could be impossible for us to cover all the ‑‑ everything that has happened at the one level.

So the mapping project started in March this year.  We started the work on the policy observatory like ‑‑ so the actual work started like two months ago, and the objectives of those observatory are, first of all, overview of the policy matters.  We are only focusing on policies and we are mainly focusing on the countries that are were we have partners in the mapping project which are like 12 or 13.

So the objective observers to want this overview and the second want to send up monthly comparison tables on key issues related to policies, but we're aim to go do that in an open way so in order to allow the free use of the information that we have produced, so if anyone has another idea how to use and it how to do it, these are exercises from our colleagues from Diplo who have shown an interest who would be able to do that.  Yeah.  So this would be great.

If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  One interesting thing and we kind of discussed at all is how these different projects are being funded because some of these are projects that happened and others are well funded and are likely to go on for years.  I think it is important if you have those smaller projects to not lose them in the sea all of these initiatives.  It would be good to have some experiences that they've had in others.

Ben Wagner, would you be happy to continue, if I could tempt you.

>> BEN WAGNER:  Sure.  So my name is Ben Wagner, and once upon a time I ran something called the Internet Policy Observatory at the University of Pennsylvania.  I am now in Berlin and running a separate project, but just a few observations the project itself and also the context on some of these discussions.

So I think it is very hard to disassociate the topics that are being discussed here from the actual politics of them, so the suggestions for example that any changes in the IGFs agenda over the last ten years have somehow contributed to Wicket not want to go discuss spam I think it is likely unlikely.  Another topic would have been found.  As a political agenda behind all of this.  

So I think it is important when we're considering the mapping of different con text and what we're doing here is a mapping of the mapping.  So a map.  Is to consider what is being mapped and also why are these things relevant to either the communities or board of public.

Who is involved in them, who is not involved in them, and what power structures and dynamics have per pit waited a result of that

It is extraordinarily one‑sided debate when you simply look at things and judge them as either objectively there or not there without trying to work out what the politicians are behind it.

Simple relevancy criteria there, so there is fantastic nice funky graphics that we have already seen from Joana and others.  A simple test from that would be to look at newspaper articles in large newspapers covering these topics as a main criteria for relevance.  If you can't find a newspaper article and I will challenge you to find one in a large newspaper like the New York Times, then it might be that nobody cares and that might be also not necessarily a bad thing.  So, trying to understand why these groups are relevant and not just the one component.  The other component is representation which tells you lots about the power structures.  So there was a meeting this morning of the Hay conference of cyberspace where they were trying to explain why they were trying to organize a conference in cyberspace and as part of that meeting they had criticisms from people from access that suggesting it was bad representation at the last conference.

Now they indicated, of course of course, that they would try to remedy and it would be better at the next Hey conference built would it be interesting to see what is actually in a purely content sense the representation.

IGF have tended to not be awful at that.  Anybody one that wants to attend an IGF is able to do so.  That is a helpful way of garnering representation.  So that is for the people that are is funding to come here.  There is a large layer of power related issues and I would encourage a closer look at that in the mapping process and also a more open discussion about where the funding for these mapping projects come from, what structures and requirements were made for the mapping projects beforehand and what expectations came out of them.

When I look at half a dozen policy observers to I see different policy agendas behind them that they're pushing certain things to become more relevant and there are reasons for that.  Will is no some people have a more critical agenda, some people have a less critical, and that shows.  So when certain groups are now closer to the world economic forum and others are close to the IGF and others are close to a third they all map in certain ways and those maps produce certain results.  So you can't say this space is not as the last hour of this conversation may have suggested.  It is not that deep.  There is far more and I think that needs to be discussed otherwise we'll be talking around shadows.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  You haven't really told us about the observatory, about the projects.

>> BEN WAGNER:  To be more specific about it, it was attempting to, on the one hand, to report research around the world, specifically in global South countries.  It was looking at relevant issues.  We were looking both at Internet Governance and Internet foreign policy issues.  I can't speak for the project now because I'm not part of it but in the way that I understood the project it was an interesting and useful way of essentially reconvening what could be considered Internet Governance and what could be considered foreign policies of the Internet bringing communities that weren't part of those conversations and trying to push them to engage with debates that otherwise they might really not care about that much.

And that, of course, requires both resources, so part of that was funded and that wasn't always the easiest negotiation but it was an important one.  And the other side of that is to make sure that when you're bringing people into debates and engaging them you also take their position seriously.  It's very easy in order for these debates to tell people this is the lower of the internet, this is how it works now please listen and accept our judgments of how wonder rouse the networks work and how brilliant they will be for the economy.

This is not typically the locals call the communities they have with these networks.  As a result of which it is not always helpful even to link them up and engage with them simply because that engagement itself brings with it the whole baggage of ideas, agendas, suggestions, problems, difficulties.

A lot of the project, at least as I try to understand it, is to listen and understand not just what the issues are that are popping up every day but also what the understanding of communities around the world of the Internet and the stuff that they care about and that's why I'll be spending the next two days at the Internet un governance forum rather than the Internet Governance Forum simply because it seems far more relevant to my perspective of local concerns of local people that are doing important things in Turkey.  So to get that to happen is a challenge in the context of a lot of the IGF issues.

If you want to know more about this wonderous forum there is a stand outside and you can go to I think it is iuf.alternative.org or just put Internet Ungovernance Forum into your search engine of choice and hope it is not filtered out.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  Thank you, Ben, for your contribution.

I saw a hand raised there.

>>AUDIENCE:  My name is Hans Petter from the community of Germany.  I am a board member here, but I'm also going to speak as a European activist on some of the issues you mentioned.

I see ‑‑ I like the way that several ideas popping up about the technical or the practical approach to map the things, but then again, I am ‑‑ I want to add something what Ben said that if you want to base the whole thing on issue based questions, if you want to share the work and if you have power questions coming up, by introducing the infrastructure we are discussing today here I think the most important thing is to remember us to also work result orientated and therefore I really would like to ‑‑ I mean, I would like to see this database or even a Vicki run by maybe a body like the United Nations.  I imagine the United Nations of the 21st century using the key and making a conference also, because let's be honest, the moody stakeholder approach we share here because we come from the Internet, is one way to do it.  How NGOs or integrated in the United Nations work or let's give me a European example.

On the European level, Wickmedia Germany started free knowledge advocacy group which is now going to be shared by other Wickmedia chapters, European chapters.

Then also we have 34 organisations civil rights organisation on A tree the European digital rights initiative, but then again t money and there's another organisation which has a lot of money and it's called ‑‑ it has the ‑‑ yeah.  It has the balls to call itself European Internet foundation and it's there since 2000 and it is an enter coupe on the European parliament means there is an official and an in official way to do it.

This is an ‑‑ it's a group for parliamentarians on the grouping level for European parliament and also for Civil Society and for business.  These groups don't speak for the European Union or the European parliament but they are very closely connected.  The official one is paid by the European parliament.  The unofficials are paid by the companies paying that.  And there is one since 2000 which has the balls to call itself European Internet Foundation, which is basically all Internet companies or related companies, businesses, who want to lobby in Brussels.  You can see that the multistakeholder approach in Brussels is divided by a very poor but very passionate European digital rights initiative with 34 European initiatives and on the other hand, the Internet companies.

So the reality, the reality of multistakeholder reality is we leave this conference slightly different and I think we have to accept that because resolve orientated means we wants to see results not only on the infrastructure level, which is the technical backbone, that is what we as an organisation and the Internet Society are controlling, but all the other aspects the colleague just mentioned: legal line, economic line, socioculture line, and also the human rights line.

These are questions going far beyond nerdism.  This is not a nerd talk anymore.  This is essential human beings of aspects of life and culture are touched and therefore we need to open up and we have ‑‑ and therefore, I hope that this idea of mapping and framing gives us the idea of a data base or a Wiki or something where we can work together but on a shared idea.  Meaning, for example, I'm pretty keen on making this time in Brussles an intergroup and I'm pretty ‑‑ have a lot of parliamentarians supporting it already, that we get an intergroup on the European parliamentarian which is not sponsored by any company which is an official one, and Civil Society interests companies and parliamentarians on a European level can talk about social, cultural and development aspects, and also human rights aspect.  Because ‑‑ I want to finish with one example, which is a crack, also, in this assembly here in Istanbul, net neutrality verses zero rating.

As a little example, but an important example, because it shows that our unity we have as the people coming from the Internet is breaking up.  Because, on the one hand, zero rating is a business decision, and on the other hand net neutrality is a principal we held high.  So this is one example where we need to find the human rights level to know what we agree on a global scale and where are our cultural differences.

I think it is a very naive point, viewpoint to think that they are going to change and act contrary to their core business model.  And to end, I just want to say, touch upon what Nathan said about peer privacy.  And I think that will also frame how important this issue S when you use something like Gmail for example, you're not just making the decision that it is okay for Google to read your private messages, right, and to monetize those, you're also making that decision for everyone who Emails you.  You're saying it is okay for Google to read all of their messages as well.  If you're using a custom domain they may not even know that Google is going to do that.

In this sense it's like secondhand smoke.  The decision doesn't just affect you, it also affects those around you and if we take this further it affects democracy our fundamental freedoms which privacy is one and it affects our democracies going forward so this is not a trivial issue either.  And if we are going to create all turns tiffs this has come up a few times, they have to be convenient.  They have to be great user experiences.  We have to actually meet user needs.  Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I wish there was a distributed social network I could use.  No one does that ever.  Right.  Apart from maybe a few people who live in their parents basements with no natural day lights and spend their time in front of a computer with pizza and soda and I don't like that stereotype either because that is not what developers and engineers are.

We have to move beyond allowing engineers and developers and technical people to hide behind I don't want to care about ethics, I don't want to care about the ramifications of what I do.  We have to care.  Because the stuff that we do as a direct influence on fundamental freedoms and on democracy.  We have to care.  We don't have the luxury of saying I just want to play with my toys anymore.  If we're going to create alternatives, those alternatives have to be designed led.

People wake up and say I want to share my photos with my friends, right.  Let's build a great solution for that happens to be private by default.  We have to do this.  We have to build great alternative products and that is how we're going to win this battle because it's a battle that is being fought in the consumer market and I'm very sure we can win it but first we have to understand will is a problem and next we have to do something about it.

Thank you.  

>>AUDIENCE:  A bit difficult to come after that.  I think you're absolutely right.  One of the biggest challenges in creating alternative solutions is to meet the user needs and user interests because we all want to be where the others are.  We want to make sure that when we communicate we actually find our friends out there.  They find what we are communicating that was the case with Email starting, with texting, with the social media and so on.  That is one of the conditions.

So if we want to create alternatives it needs to meet exactly the same needs that the users have.  So that is something that we will have to ‑‑ where we also have to listen to the users at different levels.

I would like to just comment on what the moderators tried to talk us to talk a little bit as well and that is the role of IGF and Grene was mentioning it a little bit before.  I think we have to remember that the continue net governance forum is an advisory group of secretary.  We don't have any decision power or something like that.  This is my seventh Internet Governance Forum and I've heard a lot of discussions over the years and I can see there is progression but I can also see a lot of redundancy and what is actually really important is what Grene suggested and that we have an in between the forest and we actually take action and we make a concrete recommendations for the ‑‑ I mean higher up in the power structure where it actually matters.  Where the decision power is and where things matter.  At one point that we actually get together and get all this good experiences, good at vice, best practices together in some way or another and that somebody actually take charge and find the funding because it also costs money.

Then at another level we will actually communicate those good advises and good insights that we share from different stakeholders.

Thank you.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  I'll add quickly, send us an Email and we'll think about how we continue practically because I don't want this to end here.  I think you should name the Email address later on so people know where to mail to.

Two things, alternative product.  Yes, they are out there.  A lot of alternative products already are being built.  Like alternative for what is said which is completely private, et cetera, et cetera.  We need to get them out there and I think that IGF can and have to play a role in that.

Second thing is, we have to get the end user involved.  We really need to do that and to get the end user involved we have to unite them.  Frankly, in this IGF there is no end user.  Not in the way I mean.  Everybody here is already involved is already in some sort of level concerned about this problem.  The end user is concerned but doesn't act on it.  We need to get them involved.  We need to ask them what do I have to do to get you worried about your privacy in the way that I am.  And then we know what kind of products we need.

>>AUDIENCE:  A lot has been said already and I want to pick up on the point that was made in the role of governance and the role of regulators and legislation.  Indeed I think that is also very important.  I also agree with the previous speakers that we cannot just trust market forces to turn out for the better so there is also definitely a role for regulators in government.  In the EU there is a new proposal for a general data protection regulation with massive fines for not complying with the rules on data protection and privacy.  While I think that it is necessary, I also think we shouldn't put too much faith in the ability of politician answer, regulators and lawyers like myself to come up with rules that actually can work in practice.

So while legislation is important and I think there is also an important role there for the IGF to take that on a global level and avoid the legislation being split between different countries because companies will go to the Country with the least resistance and they will leave the countries with the highest levels of privacy protection and law because it hampers and hinders them in innovation.  So I think this should be a global consents and a global level of privacy, protection, but even then I think we need to have the discussion that we are having here, how can we involve end users.  How can we bring together different types of stakeholders, different types of expertise, technicians, lawyers, business, et cetera, and together come up with practical solutions for this problem.  And look forward to working with you on that towards the next IGF next year.  

>> LEA KASPAR:  And yet we'll just do a quick ‑‑ and then I would like the one that is started with ending it.  The end users.

>> AUDIENCE:  Well, I personally have faith in technology and obviously a practical solution is alternative enterprises like you suggested.  Social enterprises.  And establishing an effective regulatory framework even you're advising us not to rely a lot on regulation because that's probably a long track but we have to be realistic as well about what we can achieve in terms of finding immediate solutions to, you know t users of the current, you know, business models.

I know that social enterprise is a great initiative, but I think is a long shot to find positions to services that are being used by people all around the world.  You can't claim that a social and that is why I think regulation should be definitely ‑‑

(Internet difficulty)

>> LEA KASPAR:  Part of what Samantha and I are talking about where we could put together, like, a  mailing list or something where we can exchange information further for those who are interested to kind of keep working on this and exchanging information.

Perhaps interesting to note, last year there was a similar initiative to pull different existing initiatives in cybersecurity and they already went through this process, so it would be interesting to look at how they did that.

And, thanks.  I would like to thank everyone for participating in this workshop.  We're at the end of our session.  I don't know if there are any other remarks.  Speak now or hold your peace forever.

All right.  Well, thank you very much.  Again, I hope to see you around later today.



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This is the output of the real‑time captioning taken during the IGF 2014 Istanbul, Turkey, meetings.  Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.  It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.  

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