The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Hello. So, welcome to this early morning session. I am pretty happy to see you all here. I was wondering, we had a lot of people signing up for the session, but with the badging and finding the room, it was not so easy. For the record, my name is Sandra Hoferichter. I am the coordinator of the European Summer School on Internet Governance, which was the first summer school which started this formal to teach Internet Governance. And we, together with colleagues from other summer schools, organized sessions already in the past IGFs, and especially in Guadalajara, there was an important meeting because this was the point where various School on Internet Governance organizers decided to form a Dynamic Coalition on Internet Governance. We found the Dynamic Coalition may be the best platform for schools on Internet Governance to collaborate to work together. We think that it's important that these schools form kind of a network because we share all the same value. But so far the collaboration was rather informal, schools learn from each other, but we believe this could be improved a little bit. We could help as a group, as a Dynamic Coalition group, we could help setting up curricula so also other schools around the globe could emerge and can do their courses based on these curriculums. We also believe that we could help to set up a pool of global experts so that not the same people are flying all over the world, but we are convinced that there are many people in the regions which can actually act or participate as a faculty member in one of these schools.
We also believe we could add some value for the alumnis to create a network of alumni on all Schools on Internet Governance, and maybe go one step further, offer a database where all alumnis can sign up, can upload their references, and this could be possibly a source for employees to look at people who have gone through one of these courses, have these kind of qualifications, and search for people they would like to employ for their company or would do a project with.
So these are some very first and quite a lot ideas.
What we have done so far -- and this was agreed in Guadalajara last year -- Avri is actually one of the faculty members who participated, I think, in most of the schools. Avri, could you please say in which schools you have been active so far?
>> AVRIA DORIA: Currently I am active in both the European one and the African one. At some point I did go to the south. I did attend one -- I think the very first of the Arab ones, which was in Egypt, but I think it hasn't been part of the history, and I think that's about it. I've never done the Asian and haven't done many of the others, so only those. But I have been doing the European since it was founded.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you, Avri.
So this was just a very short introduction. The purpose of this session, actually, today, please understand it really as a working session. We have this document here. We have sent the link to some of the organizers. How could I actually share that link? Or maybe you can -- it's too difficult. If you Google the link. What do you have to Google to find it, is a Satish?
>> You can use DC-SIG in Google and get to this link.
>> Okay. It's a public link, then. Wonderful. So maybe you can open -- yes, please.
>> Can we have a self-introduction?
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: That was my next purpose.
While you are trying to find that document so you can all look at it, I would also like to start with a tour of the table so that we get an understanding for who is in the room. I would like to start with Satish.
>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Sandra. I am Satish Babu. I represent two Schools of Internet Governance, one is the India School of Internet Governance. Currently we have done two versions at '16 and '17. The second is the Asian Pacific School of Internet Governance, which is both a school and a network, as was mentioned earlier.
Thank you.
>> GUNELA ASTBRINK: Hello. I am Gunela Astbrink from the Asia Pacific SIG, and this year an APSIG fellow. Thank you.
>> PATRICIA VARGAS-LEON: Good morning, everyone. My name is Patricia. I am a PhD candidate at Syracuse University, and I come on behalf and representation of the Southeast School on Internet Governance. Thank you.
>> Good morning. My name is Rhinum. I am a participant of the European Summer School.
>> JACQUELINE EGGENSCHWILER: Good morning, everyone. My name is Jacqueline Eggenschwiler. I am an alumni of the European Summer School on Internet Governance, which I attended this year.
>> Good morning. my name is Rosen Bergen, and I am a University (?) and represent (?).
>> Hello. Good morning. I am (?). I am from Arab Internet Cooperative.
>> Hi. Good morning. I am with ICANN. I am part of the global stakeholder engagement team at ICANN. And I have also been involved in the Middle East School on Internet Governance, which actually started as a sort of Arab School back in 2009, before the IGF that took place in Sharm el Sheikh. It was one of the prep events. we stopped for a few years, then it has been revamped as a Middle East School to cover also other non-Arab countries in the Middle East, like Eastern, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Pakistan. Thanks.
>> AVRI DORIA: I already spoke, but my name is Avri Doria, and I didn't give my name the last time I spoke.
>> Hello. My name is Natalia. I work at Brazilian Initiative of School of Internet Governance.
>> Hi. I am Diego. I work as an advisor to the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee. I have been a student in the last European Summer School with Sandra et cetera. I took part in the South School of Internet Governance in 2010 when Avri was there. Together with Natalia and our colleagues, we are part of the staff that put together the Brazilian Internet Governance School.
>> SEBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Sebastien Bachollet from France. Still waiting to be a student in one of those schools. But I participate as a speaker or teacher, whatever name you want to give to it, in India, organized by Satish. There is a project going on or starting just now about doing one in France, and I try to support the people who want to push for that, as they are not here, I will be their voice here today. Thank you.
>> ANNE-MARIE JOLY: I am Anne-Marie Joly, and from France. So that's all.
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: Hi. Chris Buckridge. I was a fellow from the European Summer School awhile back and was a speaker there and a couple times subsequently at the European Summer school. I work at the RIPE NCC, the European registry, and I coordinate involvement in a number of other regional and increasingly subregional and by the sound of it even international summer school initiatives. Very interested in that.
>> (?) I have heard so much about the summer school, so I wanted to see what it's more about.
>> Good morning, all. I am from the forthcoming first School of Internet Governance that will be part of ICANN, and I am partly participant and partial organizer with the two years with the Indian School of Internet Governance and the African Internet Governance in, I believe, Pretoria. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: So thank you very much. This tells us that we have quite good geographic diversity on the table. I now only ask Avri to represent the African School because Anriette cannot be in the room today. I think that's important.
I would like to open the floor and invite you if you had a chance to look at this document so far if you have any comments on this already, if there are no comments, maybe Avri can quickly take us through this document, what's in there, and we have some comments afterwards, but first, are there any comments or questions already? I have seen some people edit it already, edit, for instance, their name as signatories, for instance, Olga Cavalli from the South School on Internet Governance, and Eduardo from the North American School confirmed already that they will be the signing people. But please, I open the floor for questions and comments on this.
Diego?
>> DIEGO: Sandra, this is just a kind request for better guidance for us to get to the document. It was not possible to get browsing it on Google. If you could just perhaps -- what we have to type?
>> (Off microphone).
>> DIEGO: I am here, but it's not there, actually.
>> (Off microphone)
>> DIEGO: Okay. I will give you my mail then.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Is anyone still searching for the document hasn't found it?
>> So Sandra, what is displayed there is your computer?
>> The point is this is not my computer. If I switch on my computer, I will get all your email addresses and send it --
>> There's no problem. We can just shorten the link there, and place it on the screen, and then people would have access so it will be easy. So you go to bit.ly or something.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER:
It's there. You copied it. Just one second.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: So this is the short link now. Http://bit.ly/2CJkPs 5.
>> Diego: It worked fine, thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: You got it?
>> Yeah.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Anyone still having problems?
>> There is another short one because I did another one while you were at it, which is v.dg, another one of the shorteners, and it's/dcssig.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Oh, cool.
Okay, maybe I will go a little bit into deep how the process is to form a Dynamic Coalition on Internet Governance.
On the Web site of the IGF, you will find a list of requirements. Dynamic Coalition requires a mailing list, a contact person, a Web site, and a work plan. These are actually the things you should have in place if you want to start a Dynamic Coalition and be part of this community
So what we did for moment -- but I am not sure this is really needed anymore if we form a Dynamic Coalition today, which I hope. What we did so far, we did a temporary mailing list called DCSIG planning or DCSIG.eu, but this was just a vehicle unless we have an official mailing list which has the extension from the Internet Governance Forum, intgov.org, and I think it would be more feasible to use that one. furthermore, because we start without big resources, we could offer to host a temporary space on EUROSSIG.eu, and to give you an example of how this could look like because our organization has already supported the Dynamic Coalition on Things of Internet Governance, so this is the Web site we are hosting for this Dynamic Coalition, and we included a little wiki. This part you can see here on the screen is a wiki. We found wiki is a very good tool for collaboration. We could imagine -- though this is subject for discussion -- we could imagine we could also set up such a workspace on either temporary on a Web site of the European Summer School, or we could, if you have some funds available, also create a new Web site from the start.
I think such a joint workspace is really important because if you collaborate with each other, I mean, you have to have the system which is publicly available but where you can store some documents and so on and so forth.
Know that I hope you all have this link open, I open the floor for comments and questions on the draft initial statement and work plan.
Satish, please.
>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Sandra. Satish for the record.
One of the things that we, in Asia Pacific, have been discussing after the last India SIG was that sometimes there is a need for quality control in the SIGs, and now currently there is no process that everybody follows. There's no guideline, good practices. Nothing of this sort exists.
Now, one of the reasons why the quality can at times be kind of compromised is because maybe people don't know what or how certain things should be done. Now, we don't want to impose on individual country schools that we should audit the program or such things may be difficult, but good practices, a set of good practices may be helpful for everybody concerned so that everybody is aware that what should be done and shouldn't be done. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: It's Sandra speaking. Let me ask you a question, Satish. How could you imagine this quality control could function? And do you think that this Dynamic Coalition could be the place for this kind of quality control?
>> SATISH BABU: We would be imposing on some of the country SIGs in that case. Now, the fine balance that we have to achieve, without, you know, imposing on them, can we improve their quality? If so, then it will be a good thing to do, and especially a guideline is a known way of a process of doing that. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Any other comments or questions? Yes, please.
>> In line with Satish, it seems like some blueprint or some guidelines, which is basic, and flexibility also because the content is different. Also, in the Asia Pacific or some other region also we should dissect from the Asian Pacific to Nepal, these kind of differences on the advancement of technology. So we should think or rethink on the school also, not only like the (?) but we should do seven, eight, nine likewise. The advancements, like south Asian and east Asian, there is is vast difference, so how can we think on these kind of things? Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you.
Chris, please.
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: Hi. Thank you. so this is the first involvement I have had with this group, so this is the first time I am seeing this document, which looks very good and I think has a lot of good points in the action plan. There is, I know, work going on in a couple of areas on this. I know I had some meetings at the last ICANN meeting around trying to develop not necessarily a standard curriculum, but at least a curriculum that could be shared by people in different contexts.
I think one thing -- so as RIPE NCC, covering a service region which is 76 countries and wanting to contribute to various schools that are happening there, being a regional expert, for want of a better word, in IP address-related things, we would be looking at whole the process scales, basically. As you get more and more national-level schools, subregional schools, there's sort of that question of how do you make sure you can actually get people to all of these as a sort of faculty member.
One of the things we have done in the last year, last 12 months particularly, is looking at participating remotely, so being able to do remote contributions either via live video or via recorded video, and I think that's very much a work in progress. I think it's certainly not as good as having people there on the ground, but I think at the same time, it's something that has to be understood as a little different, that there are probably different ways of doing presentations to make them work in a remote context than if you were there in person. And possibly that's something that this group could look at is sort of sharing information, sharing ways of using and integrating remote participation and video content or livestreamed content into the sessions. In a way that's the most useful, most beneficial for the students. That would be basically something I would like to see discussed in this group.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Just one question. Have you made already experiences with remote participation on these kind of trainings that you were doing?
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: We have certainly done some summer schools where we had remote participation, the Balkan summer School, that was a livestream, and I believe the last (?) I am not sure if that was live or prerecorded. Prerecorded. Okay. As I say, I think those have been -- they've allowed us to participate but maybe haven't been quick as successful as we would have hoped, and I think that's because we are still working out exactly how those sorts of things work.
The other thing, though, is the RIPE NCC has been doing a number of webinars and have been doing that in technical subs, but just recently we've done just before EuroDIG and last week before IGF, we've done webinars on Internet Governance. That's primarily for our membership, so it's a very specific technical community group, I guess, and the focus there has been to say what does Internet Governance mean to you? Why should you be interested in the IGF or EuroDIG? I think we are developing those webinars that could be useful in terms of how do you make content that works even for a school like this?
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: And a follow-up question to you, Chris. Are you talking about faculty participating remotely, or are you also talking about the fellows participating remotely?
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: At this point, I am just talking about faculty.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Avri, you raised your hand?
>> AVRI DORIA: Yeah, just quickly -- I did include -- I don't know if that's adequate. It's hard to see on there. I did include under look at models for teaching the various topics, then I went comma, and then just made the suggested change, inclusion remote instruction. I don't know if that covers the whole bailiwick, but --
>> CHRIS BUCKRIDGE: It's certainly fine by me. As I say, it's an issue that we're particularly interested in at the moment because, as I say, we are trying to work out how this scales when we are seeing more and more at the national and regional level.
>> AVRI DORIA: Especially sometimes for someone teaching one of what I will call the core courses, the IP, you know, et cetera, if they are only teaching one course, perhaps travel to a distant place gets very expensive for the school or the teacher, and if we had good methods -- the other problem, though,ing do we have the bandwidth to be able to do a reliable remote teaching?
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Glen, you raised your hand?
>> I totally agree with the idea of providing the remote access. I think we have to understand looking at best practice, from my experience working with IEEE, we have thousands of people taking the online webinars, and what's very important, the number one question that we get all the time is: Can I get a certificate? And that particularly is of interest. What we find is people from India especially. And I am not sure why that is, but that is the relevant case. I think what we have to acknowledge is if we are going to provide online instruction, curated material, that kind of mentoring that comes with it, to take into consideration some kind of process of acknowledgment. And we've seen it with a lot of different Coursera and different places, you can audit the course for free, but if you want a piece of paper, it's going to cost you $25. Not sure how this will work out, but I think we should consider the whole feature as how do we acknowledge these people so they are doing building blocks on material, and it's all part of the, I guess, the academic roadmap that people have.
>> Just to respond quickly, we've actually seen, I think, also in online courses the sort of people wanting to have a certificate to show that they've done it and be able to use that going forward.
But just in this context, just to be clear about the point I was making, I think this -- I am looking at sort of remote as part of -- and maybe a small part of -- the face-to-face actual sessions. Because I mean, I do think that the -- and particularly from my experience at the European one, the networking and the sort of connections that you get to make with people there is really one of the major benefits of these schools. It's just, yeah, maybe can't always be everyone everywhere.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: I think Satish was next, and then Glen, do you have a follow-up question? Then Satish.
>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Sandra. Satish. I would like that we spend some time also on -- it's good to discuss the action-oriented parts, but also something on the governance of the Dynamic Coalition.
First of all, is there a kind of loose membership or affiliation that is expected, especially from national SIGs, as the member from Nepal spoke, the diversity that exists between these SIGs is pretty considerable. Some of them are very small, some very large, and budgets vary considerably. Do we expect there's a direct link in terms of membership in the Dynamic Coalition? so the governance of the Dynamic Coalition, how it's going to be, because it's very difficult to get people face to face. I think we should spend some time on that as well. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you, Satish. I just opened a Web site on Dynamic Coalitions. I understood for any Dynamic Coalition, people are invited and can join. There is no membership -- correct me if I'm wrong, but anyone can join at any time, that's my understanding.
I think what is important or what might also be a challenge here is that you have a core group of people who are really driving it forward and who are really doing the work, and probably we could agree on something today and will find out in half a year it didn't work out. So I think this is something which has to grow and which you cannot impose from the start.
Furthermore, regarding the collaboration work, I think a lot you can do on a mailing list. Maybe here and there a call during the year might be useful. If it's possible to form specific teams who look into a specific topic -- for instance, one team could look at faculty, which is around globally, and try to set up an expert database. Another team could look at different curriculums and make an assessment, compare where are the similarities, where are the differences, and maybe create what has been demanded here already, create a sort of blueprint which you can take if you want to start with a summer school and adapt it according to your local needs.
Another team could look into universities. And we had some experience, on a very low level, and Wolfgang Kleinwachter was President of the University of Aarhus. We had two or three years the opportunity to get a certificate or to get university credits. When participating in the summer school, doing a report afterwards, then doing a follow-up course at the university, you could gain some credits. We didn't follow up on this, but I am interested to hear if there are experiences in other regions on this matter, as Glen mentioned, this could really be something we have to explore further.
Avri, and then Jacqueline, please.
>> AVRI DORIA: Thanks. Avri speaking. There are two comments I want to make. One is about Dynamic Coalitions. At the moment, they are very bottom-up in terms of determining their governance, but there's also been a Dynamic Coalition coordinating group created where basically a participant from each of the Dynamic Coalitions has been participating, and they've been sort of trying to standardize some of the practices when all of the Dynamic Coalitions can agree to it, things like the openness of mailing lists and how opposing opinions are treated and respected within groups. So there's a certain amount of the Dynamic Coalition figures out for itself how it wants to do it, but the IGF it self- through working with the MAG, has been imposing a -- self-imposing, and it's sort of the Dynamic Coalitions came up with it, they go to the MAG, the MAG says yeah, great idea, and then it becomes sort of a thing. So I just wanted to let people know that, and that sort of determines the fact that it is open to everyone and so on.
And I think meeting at the annual IGF is good. Meeting elsewhere becomes problematic because that's regionally oriented in almost any other meeting.
On the certification, is one of the ones that concerns me. Certainly any of them can give out their own certificate. It just takes a printer. Any of them can work a relationship with a local University and get credit. That's up to the relationship between them and the university. But if we talk about there being any sort of standardized certificate, that becomes more of a problem.
I know one of the things that's concerned me in terms of looking at the schools is while I acknowledge all of the schools need to do their own local content and what matters to them locally, on a local basis, I think there are things that belong in a core curriculum where one can say yes, you've gotten a basis in Internet Governance that's more global than local. And I've seen a real disparity between what you can expect people coming out of one school to know. So that's one of the things that made me think that perhaps there's something worthwhile in a DC that the local content has to always be up to the locality to determine what's important for Internet Governance in that region. But a core basic curriculum of foundational subjects, perhaps not every school does all of them, but that that sort of needs to be better understood so that when somebody says I've done a School of Internet Governance program, to an employer, to a working group, to a whatever, it has a certain meaning that's semi-consistent. And that's one of the concerns I've always had, especially as we get more and more of these schools they all should be recognized, but they all should be somewhat consistent at a core curriculum basis, I think.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Avri, I absolutely agree with you, and this is actually the reason why this idea was born to form such a Dynamic Coalition, to produce these -- because we are working on a kind of trust mark. SIG became a global trust mark thing, and we should all work in the same direction to fill this trust mark with the trust it should actually gain.
Are there any other comments or questions? And please feel free to add your comments to this document. This is an open working document. You can add your name if you want to sign, if you can add your thoughts, you can do comments, or you are very much welcome to do this.
Jacqueline.
>> JACQUELINE EGGENSCHWILER: So actually, building on Avri's comments and more generally, would it make sense to engage in a little bit of outreach to bring, for example, entities such as ICANN, which have a learning platform, and which I think Betsy Andrews is working on certification programs as well, would it make sense to engage in a bit of outreach and see whether or not synergies between these entities could be leveraged? And maybe that would be a venue or possibility to look into a certification because that would be a fairly global basis, and it would have certain thresholds or standards which would have to met, maybe just an idea.
Also in terms of platform recruitments as well, maybe do some outreach activities to see where synergies can be realized.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Any other comments or questions? Sebastien?
>> SEBASTIAN BACHOLLET: Thank you. Sebastian Bachollet. I think listening to the discussion, at the same time, we don't want to have something decided by the few people, that everything must be the same with the same curricula doing the same courses. We need to give some space or freedom for creation.
What I think would be useful is to have maybe in president one already well established to have a point of contact to allow people who want to start a new school in one place to know where they can go and how they can participate in the Dynamic Coalition, but also who can help them to -- I don't know if we create a curricula for France, where I can send it for feedback, not send everywhere in the world waiting for feedback, but can we send it to two or three people who are very well known in helping these type of things, or a subgroup of the Dynamic Coalition. It could be useful to spread this SIG without too much work for some people, but at the same time, some good advice, and it's like Satish said, good practice would be a good way to start some work also on that.
Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Questions, comments? If not, I would have a specific question, for instance, to Satish or to one of the people who recently started a new SIG. How did you experience the start? I know in India the great opportunity was used to have the ICANN meeting in India and it was just done before. I also notice strengths and weaknesses. On one hand you have the experts in the country. On the other hand, you are depending on their availability, and this kind of mixes the curriculum. What would have helped you, looking back now, to two years of experience on doing summer schools?
>> SATISH BABU: Thank you, Sandra. Satish here.
Yeah, the first, we got -- one of the big problems that we had was that we required government approval to make it so-called official. That opportunity came when ICANN came here. And also, of course, to get speakers. Sandra, yourself, Sebastien, Glen, many people, several people here were actually speakers, and also we had some participants. So the ICANN meeting did help.
The second time there was no ICANN meeting, so we were forced to do it from scratch. What we did was wrote to all our speakers from the first round whether they would be willing to participate, and we said we would pay you the difference of the fare from Abu Dhabi where the ICANN meeting was happening. So we tried to go with the same group, basically. And those people who volunteered for the second round, like Sebastien, for example, we felt that it's a good practice to use the same people. Others may not feel that, but we felt that.
The curriculum was 50% to 60% global topics, standard invariant topics. Part of it was local content, and the remaining was (?). We felt we should be able to bring in participants from out of the country as well. our model is a semiregional model where first round we in a lot of international participants. Second round there was no funding because all the international participants came for the ICANN meeting, so they came for this also. Second round, there was no funding but still people came. We had about ten people that did come, but mostly south Asia countries around.
So in summary, the second -- although the first we got started with the ICANN meeting, the second round we did go the natural way, which is to start from ground up and work on it. We did borrow -- our speakers are heavily oriented towards ICANN. That could be considered as a weakness maybe. But not only ICANN, but heavily kind of oriented towards ICANN. Participants were international. The speakers are international. Most of us are international. The local speakers are less in number. That is the kind of model we have.
And the Asia Pacific has helped us to formulate a content. APSIG has an open content policy on the curriculum. we have actually used their content as well. Yeah, so that's basically it.
So we did both the shortcut way and the hard way.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you, Satish. It's Sandra speaking. A follow-up question. You said you had to wait for governmental approval for the second round. Is it still depending on government, or are you free and able to do now?
>> SATISH BABU: The government approval is -- for example, we do not have an IGF in India. It is a shame. The government said no. They had some historical issues with IGF in India, and therefore, there's no Indian IGF, although India has been the host to IGF itself.
Another government approval, actually, makes the SIG kind of semi-official, although the government has no control over the curriculum or -- everything is decided by us. And who is we? Who is the governance people of the SIG? It's actually three Internet Society chapters the second time. The first time was two Internet Society chapters. We are try to go bring in more of them. The next round will be four or five Internet Society chapters. We are part of ILG's ILO. We did have support from ICANN and a bunch of other organizations. The last one, a couple months back, was about 12 organizations supporting the event, including the central and local government. The local government is not the only source of funding. Heavily funded, but we have raised funds from other sources as well. Government label is useful for a bunch of other reasons, even to get speakers internally it is useful. But right now we are confident that we can run even without the government support, and that may be a direction that we are heading.
Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you for sharing these insights.
There is a gentleman in the back of the room, would you kindly introduce yourself? We had a round the table at the beginning.
>> Sure. My name is Sayed. You asked about the experiences. Satish shared about the School on Internet Governance. We had a School on Internet Governance in Afghanistan last year in April. That was the first school. But how we got motivated to hold that event, it all started when we partnered with inSIG, where three participants got there and got their training. we partnered with Pakistan School of Internet Governance, five individuals went there and got their trainings. And a number of other of our colleagues, they went to ICANN and APRIGFs and APNIC meetings, trainings, and workshops.
What we did back in 2016 is we partnered with APSIG in particular. Professor Kilna Chung was the first person who asked us to do it. otherwise we were not thinking of doing it. So there was a lot of support from APSIG, a lot of support from IN-SIG, the local or national schools in that region that happened helped us a lot. So after that, we were able to run our own School on Internet Governance entirely on our own. I wouldn't say entirely on our own because we did have five remote speakers. And will Is I would say we were unfortunate in the political situation we are in, nobody wants to travel to Afghanistan as easily as they would come probably to Geneva. But then again, we had the Internet facilities we used for remote participation, but it wasn't easy. Having a 2-megabyte or 5-megabyte connection at one location for, you know, seven or eight hours of time consistently requires a lot of electricity, and having electricity in that part of the world consistently for eight hours is not, again, an easy job.
So our experience is in terms of resources, in terms of support, we received a lot of support from the regional events and organizations in that region. In terms of financial supporting, we were fortunate that we got a lot of funding from private corporations within the country. We were able to partner -- our venue was a university, so we partnered with the university. We partnered with private organizations. Our speakers came from Telecom Regulatory Authority. Our speakers were from the Ministry of Communications. Our speakers were from technical community. There were developers, local language support, local content developers.
The reason I am excited is because -- is that we did it, and we are continuing in that path. We are planning on the second year of School on Internet Governance in the country, even though I was expecting a lot of financial support from I would say global or regional institutions, which we were unfortunate in that case, but again, the model that we were able to develop is that we can reach out to local people, local partners, and talk to them. And we were also very fortunate in finding local experts.
When we talk about Internet Governance, it's not something that you can probably read a book and learn everything about Internet Governance. There's everything in it, local content, font development and like cybersecurity, privacy, and all these issues. And there are local experts available in the country. It's just you have to go and identify and partner with them. That partnership we realized was very critical in our case.
In terms of government status, just like Satish mentioned, we did have that problem, but the reason that IGF -- national IGF are slightly different than schools, that helped us a lot because we had to -- the government slightly got threatened because they thought that we will be criticizing them in the school. But we made sure that this is a school only and not an IGF and not a lot of discussions will trigger because of this.
Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you for this comment. There is really a difference between an IGF and the school, and sometimes I also had a feeling this is mixed up.
Just one follow-up question. What would have helped you when starting the school, and where do you think a Dynamic Coalition could help you or could help other ones who want to start? What would have helped you in your case especially?
>> Something that helped us a lot was the program agenda that developed -- that was developed by the APSIG. That set us in the right direction on what to do and what to expect in terms of logistics, in terms of the actual agenda itself. And also, another thing that could have helped was at least a few speakers from that region who could actually come. And that adds a lot of value to that local event. That local event does not become a local event only. Because there's a number of events that happen in a country, but if someone comes from the outside and it gets a lot of attention from the university students. It gets a lot of attention from young professionals who are working in that field. Then they will feel committed in terms of attending that event or a few sessions of that event. Can
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Patricia?
>> PATRICIA VARGAS-LEON: Hello again. This is Patricia speaking for the South School on Internet Governance. The school is about to be ten years old. Actually, it's not new. every year is a completely different process because the school is held in a different country each year. Although initially, it started as funded by the private sector, Argentinean initiative, over the years the government became an important actor. Although no government approval is required, they don't approve of the sessions or the content, they became sensitive to the issues of Internet Governance, and now they are important actors in terms of funding and logistics.
The school brings together around 200 fellows, gender differentiated 50 and 50. We try to get men and women. Most of them are funded. The funding, again, every year is a different process trying to get the private sector and the governments. We have had 25,000 people online from 89 countries during the last two years. And in terms of curricula, we try to cover global topics and bring people from all over the world. And also, include 50 and 50 global and local topics. We have done our best effort to achieve that. And the reason why the school has so many fellows and has become so important in the last few years responds basically to the particular needs of the Latin American context, where we need to create knowledge about the Internet Governance debate and the Internet Governance multistakeholder model. And we have had the satisfaction that after celebrating sessions of the school in many countries, these countries created the very first time a local ISOC chapter, local IGF meetings, and they are creating new schools and new curriculums related to Internet Governance.
Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you very much, Patricia.
I am sorry, I know you are from Sri Lanka, but I don't know your name.
>> I am (?) from Sri Lanka. We had our first SIG last year, so actually, it was a combined event with the IGF, national IGF. We took it as a strategy plan to conduct two events together because, as a country, with small geography, so we believe that it will be a good idea to conduct two events together.
So first of all, ISOC Sri Lanka, the one who hosts the whole SIG and IGF, before that, APSIG and Indian SIG has supported us to create this event as had happened. Our language was a problem because we have -- in Sri Lanka, we use three languages. English is common language. Sinhala is a majority, and the minority is Tamil. so we had issues. Again, we had a few participants from community of (?) so we had to use other techniques as well to communicate with them within the SIG. So we had support from ICANN and Ministry of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure for the funding of lecturers, and our content created from the dip low Foundation content, APSIG content, and with the India-SIG content.
Next year we have a plan, we have almost planned out next year, to have six different schools for different target audiences with different target audiences' preferences, topics on their preferences, and to conduct one general SIG with the IGF because we are promoting IGF through the SIG. Get the people into the IGF through SIG. So we are using this as strategic concept.
That's all, thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you very much. You just mentioned an important point that sometimes a school needs special direction, and I know our friends from Brazil are going in that direction. You are offering especially courses for lawyer, maybe you could explore a little bit on that?
>> My name is Riano from Brazil. I work one of the projects that we have advisory team is to produce a national Internet Governance school.
We started in 2013 with our national school, and what happened in Brazil is that we realized that many sectors -- different sectors of society started to demand Internet Governance courses. Or to debate specific issues related to Internet Governance that we could address in the Internet Governance School. What surprised us most was that one of the actors that most demand Internet Governance courses, and right now they are demanding quite a lot, are the government. Different sectors from government demanding general courses on Internet Governance, or some of them specific courses on Internet Governance.
Well, a part of our intensive course on Internet Governance, which is quite like the model South School and the School of Internet Governance that happens in mine is we have a specific Internet Governance course on law and the challenges of Internet and law and regulation. That is addressed to lawyers, to people from the judiciary, and judges. And because we started doing this law course in 2015, now we are -- we have different arrangements with organizations that are devoted to produce courses for the formation of judges in Brazil. We have a huge demand from different states on this specific kind of course, to the specific target.
And, well, there's another thing I would like to add is we realized a few years ago that many countries in South America started to have their own Internet Governance schools, and I don't know, if I was to produce the first Internet Governance school in my country, that would be great to get in contact with the different countries who had already started, who experienced difficulties of implementing Internet Governance schools, and when we were starting Brazil, we didn't have, I mean, contact of people who had already started in different South American countries. I don't know in -- Argentina, I think that they had already had a south School of Internet Governance in 2009 or 2010, I don't know, but I didn't have contact of who were involved and who I could speak to then. I would like to give an idea that we could have a list of people of who are working on implementing Internet Governance schools in their country for, I mean, those who wish to start an initiative could get in touch. For us in Brazil, that would be a pleasure to have. I mean, we could even separate a place for an international student Spanish language that could understand Portuguese, for example. I mean, for a government or an organization who has plans to have their Internet Governance school. And also to do meetings that we -- Brazil would be open to that then.
This is the idea. I don't know if --
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you very much. I have two more hands raised. One is the gentleman over there, then the lady. Maybe you introduce yourself because you haven't been in the room from the beginning.
>> Thank you. This is Babu from Nepal.
Starting School of Internet Governance in Nepal for the first time next month, and last -- this year we had started Nepal IGF as well. And what was the experience of Nepal IGF is that people are really interested to know these things. And during Nepal IGF, around 14 organizations were collaborating the event, and up coming Nepal School of Internet Governance as well, we have partnership with university, we have partnership with Internet access organizations, Internet Society Nepal, and other stakeholders.
We have much issue with government structures. Government is very cooperative with us because we have certain level of confidence with departments of technology, and several are helping design the event. What I found specifically was developing the curriculum and developing the resource pool, that is very important thing. People are knowing the technical side or policy side at independent level, but they are not well versed with each others' contribution and the whole dynamics of Internet Governance as such in School of Internet Governance. There should be a certain level of demarcation between Internet Governance Forum and the School of Internet Governance, and sometimes as we have already discussed, there are misunderstandings, and people are interested to have another forum. So I have been talking about that thing. We should separate that this is not a forum; it's a school. It's more in terms of capacity building rather than discussing open ideas. That is that way.
And on another part of funding, which is very important, we are trying to develop locally sustainable model of these schools rather than depending on some big international corporations or international organizations. Though significantly, ISOC global and ICANN also contributing, and even APNIC is also very supportive in that way.
Our more focus is on developing our own model and engaging more stakeholders in that process. And it's good we are having a good institution in that process. Thank you very much.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you. And the lady in the back?
>> CAROLINA AGUERRE: Hi, Sandra. This is Carolina Aguerre. I am sorry I couldn't come on time, but I am on the Steering Committee for GigaNet, and we were organizing as well. And I have to leave afterwards. I really wanted to be here.
So it's a pleasure to listen to the different kind of initiatives, and I just wanted to raise the comment that we have organized last year in Buenos Aires, it's a mobile home on Internet Governance. I want to raise the issue how do SIGs and academic programs related with Internet Governance can sort of relate? Because this is a program that is similar in the kind of format. It's a concentrated six-day course. You need to have a grad degree in any kind of discipline to participate. The idea is largely to generate capacities for policymakers, but also for postgraduate students that particularly in Latin America, they don't have special courses or disciplines that are addressing these issues, and maybe they are taking a master's or a doctoral program in international relations or computer science or whatever.
So I wanted to present the idea, it's an initiative that has a strong academic focus and background, but for policymakers and scholars, and how can this relate with SIG discussions more broadly and fit into the general Internet Governance discussions in local and/or regional contexts. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you very much. I think this was very good to hear the different perspectives in this room today. We have ten minutes left, and I would like to use the last ten minutes for some practical questions to really get this Dynamic Coalition started.
Can I have a show of hands, who is part of any Dynamic Coalition within the IGF, who was worked within a Dynamic Coalition? So Avri, Satish, and you, and Rhina. okay. The question is procedural wise, do you have any -- never started a Dynamic Coalition. Probably what we have to do is find agreement in this room that we want to do this and then inform the IGF Secretariat. Avri, do you have some guidance on that?
>> AVRI DORIA: That's pretty much it. The one thing we need that we don't have yet, we have lots of civil society people that are confirmed as interested. We need at least two other of the stakeholder groups to have some confirmed people. So what we needed was a write-up kind of like this one as to why, what you are going to do, who is coordinating -- you know, who is the point of contact, and at least three stakeholder groups' worth of people. We are very rich in civil society folks. You know. But we haven't gotten many of the technical community people to say yes, they are confirmed as supporting it, even though some of those people are here. But their names aren't confirmed. And likewise on the business sector. And we don't even have any suggestions of government names.
At that point, once those people have sort of put their names down in saying yeah, we are behind the idea, then yes, we deliver it to Chengetai or to Eleanora and go from there. and that's pretty much what it takes.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: And question, and then we get this mailing list from the IGF, the official mailing list?
>> AVRI DORIA: We can have our own, or we can have -- it doesn't say that we have to have one from them. The regulation is that we have to have the Secretariat -- a member of the Secretariat -- on the list just to monitor it. It is easiest to have a list maintained by the IGF, so I would suggest that we do that once we have a Dynamic Coalition.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: That would be also my proposal, to have an official mailing list from the IGF.
So since we have ICANN as technical community and RIPE in the room, maybe you can confirm that you will be part of this so then we have at least resolved this community. ICANN, I guess at the moment I have Nigel Hickson in here, but any other name from ICANN can be added?
>> I can speak for others. I know Adam Peak, for example, is very interested in this as well. He couldn't ascend the session because he is part of another session, but he is very interested in the process.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: I would also like to ask you in the room, if you want to be part of this Dynamic Coalition, and if you want to be on the mailing list, either leave your business card with us, with me, or type your email address and your name in this open Google Doc so that we can get you onto the list. That's really important. And then once we have done this official start and we have this mailing list, we will summarize. We have to summarize this session anyway and do a report on this session. But based on this report and on what has been said during today and also based on this document, which is still open -- I mean, this is a rolling document. This is nothing which is going to be closed by today and then that's it. That's an open rolling document. We will start from there and start a discussion on the mailing list.
Another question to DIC members, how is this done in financial terms? I know the Dynamic Coalition -- Internet of Things, we do get sometimes some private-sector money to have a meeting at the EuroDIG or somewhere in between the year, or to host a Web site. How is this organized in others? On a voluntary basis?
>> AVRI DORIA: It's up to the Dynamic Coalition if it's going to fund raise, then for how it's going to fund-raise, for what it's going to fund-raise, for whom. There is -- as far as I know, and I am pretty sure I am right about it, there is no funding coming from IGF or Dynamic Coalitions, only the support of the mailing list.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Question?
>> Yes, I just wanted to comment about the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability, and it historically, because of Andrea Sachs working with the ITU, there is Secretariat function that is based at the ITU, so there is a very strong connection in that particular Dynamic Coalition.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: And is there kind of an in-kind funding that they support this -- or that they facilitate the Secretariat actually?
>> Yes, yes, so that funding for the Secretariat is on an ongoing informal basis.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: That's very good to hear.
For the moment, if nobody objects, a non-for-profit association in Germany would continue to be the driving force to get this Dynamic Coalition started. We offer to offer some space on the EuroSSIG Web site. Once we have funding, we could start with an independent Web site. That should be the aim. But for the moment, if nobody objects, then please raise your hand now. If we have objections to that, we would start on EuroSSIG.eu with the aim to move it to an independent space as soon as possible. Possibly not on a platform such as Google. I would prefer to have our own URL and Web site.
Okay. To Sebastien, yes, last comment?
>> SEBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Not a comment; I have a question. there is somewhere a second meeting of the SIGs, what is in link with this? Is it something that's maybe better to attend for future SIGs, or it's just for the current ones, just to tell us what is the aim of the next meeting about that. Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Satish, maybe you can say some words about it.
>> SATISH BABU: Thanks for bringing that up, and thank you, Sandra. Satish here.
This is the all-SIGs meeting of APSIG. APSIG is the Asia Pacific regional SIG. It runs a SIG school, but it also has a networking component there, and this part is actually about bringing together all the national, subregional SIGs in Asia Pacific together. And we are having this meeting at 10:30 today in room 18, the basement.
Thank you.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Okay. Then I would like to ask everyone who commits to this Dynamic Coalition to -- where can we do a picture? Outside the door. It's bigger. Then we have something to start off with a picture, and I think that's always a good thing to do.