IGF 2019 Youth Participation at the IGF

Information

Session

DC:

Youth Coalition on Internet Governance

Round Table - Circle - 90 Min

Theme:

Description:

Throughout the year, Youth come together to learn together, discuss together and build together on issues that need to be addressed at local, regional and international levels.

YouthDIG, SEEDIG, YouthIGF’s, summer schools, winter schools, ICANN meetings and more. Youth come together to present their thoughts and visions for the future.

These events provide opportunities for young people to access the internet governance sector and are today representing their communities’ views, understanding and vision.

The three policy questions associated to this sessions will be:

- Which issues do you want to highlight as priority keypoints at the IGF to global stakeholders?

- How can we improve involvement and return rates of youth at the IGF?

- Which challenges do youth face to attend and participate at the IGF?

While speaking, we will be modelling the issues in an online map. You can see the map here:

https://www.plectica.com/maps/NWOCE4EK0

After the interventions, we will have an hour to discuss the issues presented and the three policy questions. We will continue to update and use the map as an overview of where our issues from the different regions overlap and to use it as a tool for you and the people in the audience to address the policy questions and seee if we can improve participation for IGF 2020.

At the end of the session we will take the YCIG youth photo, please tell your networks that we will be taking this photo to remind the IGF how big and important our stakeholder group is!

Organizers:

Nadia Tjahja, Youth Coalition on Internet Governance/Sunium

Speakers:

Nadia Tjahja, Youth Coalition on Internet Governance/Sunium (WEOG) (Moderator)
Virginija Balciunaite, Youth Coalition on Internet Governance (EEG) (Co-Moderator)

Uffa Modey, Digital Grassroots (Remote Speaker)
Ellen Kusuma, Indonesian YouthIGF (Remote Speaker)
Marko Paloki, SEEDIG Ambassador
Jan Dohnal, YouthDIG participant
Elisabeth Schauermann, YouthIGF Summit 2019

SDGs:

GOAL 10: Reduced Inequalities
GOAL 17: Partnerships for the Goals

Report

1. Key Policy Questions and Expectations:

- Which issues do you want to highlight as priority keypoints at the IGF to global stakeholders?

- How can we improve involvement and return rates of youth at the IGF?

- Which challenges do youth face to attend and participate at the IGF?

2. Discussion Areas:

During this session the YCIG Steering Committee presented their activities of the past two years and its progress to increase engaged youth participation at the Internet Governance Forum before opening the floor to speakers from the different regions to address the three policy questions and then taking comments from the room.

The speakers addressed their concerns regarding the concept of “Internet Governance” and how this can be explained to audiences. This is important as an outreach exercise both to foster interest in youth in schools and raising awareness on policies that affect them but also to investors to explain why they should be sponsoring youth to organise or participate internet governance events and projects.

Many agreed that participation at the IGF is limited due to visa and funding restrictions, but also raised their concerns that navigating and integrating in the IGF ecosystem is difficult. Although remote participation provides access, there is difficulty with accessing the platform. There were many YCIG members trying to connect from countries such as the Maldives, Burundi, and Kurdistan who were unable to participate because remote participation on mobile devices didn’t function.

Furthermore, there was a large request for YouthIGF processes to be more transparent so that there is better support available.

One of the speakers raised the issue that there is an “absence of inspiration platform for youth so that they can have aspirations to become stakeholders” and that youth should not be considered as a symbol.

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IGF 2019 Youth Participation at the IGF

Information