Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
September 30, 2011 - 14:30
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. 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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>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: If you can please take your seats. So we're now opening the "taking stock" session this afternoon, and before launching formally the discussion, I give the floor to Mr. Joseph Kihanya, communication legal expert at the national communication Secretariat of Kenya that is going to chair this meeting.
>>JOSEPH KIHANYA: Thank you, Bertrand. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I have the privilege and honor to chair this very important session on the last day of the IGF in Nairobi, and I take this opportunity to thank all the delegates for being with us through to this very moment.
Our session is titled "Taking Stock on the Way Forward." It's an important session. It is going to examine realistically the current status of the IGF.
This is in light of what has happened over the last week, and obviously over the past five years, this being the sixth year that the IGF is underway, and in doing this, I anticipate that we shall have as robust a debate within the traditions of IGF, and perhaps in preparing ourselves for this meeting, three questions might suffice for us.
And the first one is: Has the IGF 2011 contributed to the Development Agenda, and how can IGF in 2012 better serve the Development Agenda.
The second question we may examine is: Has the IGF 2011 contributed to capacity building and how can efforts to build capacity be continued in IGF -- between IGF 2011 and IGF 2012, which I think some of you may be aware will be in Baku. I'm told it's called the land of fire, from one of --
And the third question will be: Given the recommendations that have come from CSTD and ECOSOC, how should the IGF 2012 be organized?
Let us reflect on these even as we hear from the presenters, and I wish to hand it over now to the moderators for this session, and that's Bertrand de la Chapelle, and Mme. Anriette Esterhuysen. Thank you very much.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
We have this afternoon a 1 1/2 hour session that basically has two big blocks.
One is focused on the two first questions that were posted on the Web site dealing with how well this IGF has handled and integrated the question of development, and the other one is more looking forward at the organization for next year.
On the panel, we have a certain number of speakers. Ms. Maimouna Diop was the ICT director of the ministry of post and telecommunications and ICT of Senegal.
Nii Quaynor was the chairman of the national I.T. agency in Ghana who will speak on behalf of Minister Haruna Idrissu, who is the Minister of Communications of Ghana who unfortunately couldn't join us.
Luis Magalhaes was the president of the Knowledge Society Agency at the ministry of science, technology, and higher education of Portugal.
We have Vint Cerf, who is the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google; Markus Kummer, Vice President of ISOC; Shane Tews, Vice President, Global Public Policy and Government Relations, from VeriSign; Jeanette Hofmann, senior researcher at the London School of Economics; and Wolfgang Kleinwachter, professor at the University of Aarhus will join us momentarily.
Without further ado, I pass the mic to my co-moderator, Anriette Esterhuysen, for the first block on the development part.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you very much, Bertrand.
The inclusion of developing country people, issues, stakeholders, and concerns has been a challenge for the IGF, and in the preparatory process for this IGF, it has emerged as a challenge that we, as an IGF community, decided we needed to address.
So I want to start by asking you, participants, moderators of sessions, moderators of workshops, organizers of works, to give your assessment of the extent to which we've succeeded in doing that.
And I'd like you to reflect on four different modalities: Participation; secondly, issues, were developing country issues and concerns raised; thirdly, process, does the process change, are developing country issues concerns -- proposes, for example, the IBSA proposal -- treated differently? Were they given the kind of recognition that they needed?
And then finally, the fourth area, influence.
Do you get a sense yet that we are getting to a point where developing country actors are being able to influence dialogue and debate within the IGF?
And the way we're going to do this is I'm first going to open it to session moderators, main session and others, anyone who wants to speak, and then our panel is going to reflect and react.
I want to start, though, with an opening input from our -- the main session on critical Internet resources.
So Jeanette Hofmann is going to give her reflection and response to my questions, and then we'll open it for all the other issues.
So we're starting with some kind of reflection on critical Internet resources because it is such -- it's not the only issue, but it's one of the key issues. So Jeanette, do you want to get us going?
>>JEANETTE HOFMANN: Thank you, Anriette.
Yeah, in the main session on the management of critical Internet resources, we addressed the IBSA proposal, which is about adding an organization to this landscape, an intergovernmental organization, in fact.
It's -- in the -- during the session, there was a lot of criticism about this proposal, and while I was listening to this, I thought we need to understand that particularly multistakeholder processes require a set of skills and resources that not every participant brings in an equal way to the table here.
For example, when we think of intergovernmental processes, we think of statements being prepared beforehand and then read aloud by representatives of countries on behalf of those countries, as opposed to what we are doing here where we do individual statements or we express personal opinions as contributions to real-life discussions.
This is a completely different way of exchanging views, and it requires different capabilities and skills.
And personally, I can understand that not everybody feels equally comfortable to participate in this kind of setting. So one of the thoughts that came out for me of the main session on critical Internet resources is that perhaps we need to explore the space in between multilateral procedures and institutions and multistakeholder institutions.
We need to explore the skills, the resources, and also the opportunities that lie in between, so that those who don't feel comfortable in this environment feel better about being heard and being able to effectively participate. Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you, Jeanette. And panelists, if any one of you feel a burning need to react before we get more inputs, then do so. Just keep your interventions short.
>>MAIMOUNA DIOP: Thank you. I will speak in French.
With regards to participation on the level of Africa, I think that the outcome here is very positive. We had regional forums, which were organized in four countries, four regions in Africa, out of a total of five. In western Africa, Eastern Africa, southern and central African regions.
Knowing the situation in the northern African region, it's understandable that a regional forum was not organized, but in the future I think that will change, probably. All the more so since they were -- they were the organizer of the forum in 2009.
Now, on the issues themselves, we noted, when it came to African participation, that the issue of access was taken on board, as well as the issue of culture. The issue of languages.
And this enabled various African countries and various African regions to establish a dialogue. Not only amongst governors but also a dialogue open to all stakeholders. So this was a very receptive platform open to all of the African countries to enable them to participate in discussion, share the concerns when it comes to the Internet, starting with access, going to security, the management of critical resources, emerging issues, in particular cloud computing, et cetera.
On the process itself, allow me to say that we really appreciated the way in which the forum has taken place in regions. About 20 African countries who had national fora, and then we had regional fora before coming to the international one.
On the influence, now, I think that when you take a look at participation -- well, unfortunately we don't have all of the statistics now, but if you try to take stock, which is what we're doing now, and the -- take stock in 2014 towards 2015, I think we will see the participation and the influence the kind of forum it can have and the positive influence it has in Africa.
Please allow me to conclude that today, this morning, there's been a creation of an African forum for Internet governance which is going to be helpful to all countries to really move towards governance of the Internet. Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you, may immune a. Any other reactions? And please keep your interventions very short. Otherwise, I'll have to stop you.
Can I get one -- can I get another comment, a few more comments from the floor before we come back to the panel? Sorry, Vint.
>>VINT CERF: What if I said no? Sorry. Go ahead.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Well, that's quite convincing. No, you obviously want to respond. Go for it.
>>VINT CERF: No. Just a brief observation.
This is -- I have missed a couple of IGFs, and in this one, I noticed that there were provisions made for remote participation, and I thought that was an important contribution to participation.
I am -- almost wonder whether we could use some of those methods even here, while we're meeting face to face.
At Google, when questions are desired, sometimes people would feel more comfortable sending the questions in in text form, so if we had the ability to do that from here, maybe that would be a reasonable accommodation for people that don't want to stand up and -- with a microphone.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks for that suggestion, Vint, and I suggest you come back to that, Bertrand, on the session who on how to organize future IGFs. Anyone else want to comment on some of the other themes, security openness and privacy, for example? Do you feel that developing company actors and issues emerged in those sessions?
Lee, do you want to comment? Just remember to introduce yourselves and very, very brief.
>>LEE HIBBARD: Yes. Thank you very much. Lee Hibbard from the Council of Europe and I was the co-moderator of the main session yesterday on security, openness, and privacy.
I haven't had time to reflect on the event yesterday. There's just been a short time between then.
I haven't had time to look at the transcript, so I'm giving you my immediate thoughts, so I hope those could be seen like that and not -- it's not a comprehensive view yet I can give you.
Participation, there were -- there were developing countries in that room. They were there. Some of them spoke, for example, and made some important comments, I think, but I think they could be more vocal, personally speaking.
And, you know, I think it depends on the subject, and if the subject gets carried away on a particular topic, it can steer towards other countries and other regions of the world very quickly.
So I think more time needs to be spent in shaping -- in preparation, through the MAG meetings, for example, about what are the issues for different parts of the world.
So I think it's an attention to the process and the planning rather than the on-the-spot dialogue in the room when we're all together. We can easily get diverted onto certain tracks.
I think there is recognition -- in terms of process, I think there is recognition -- (audio cutting in and out) --
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Whether there is enough dialogue on those issues, I don't know.
I can see overall, I think we need to be more attentative to that potential, and I think we need to do that in advance of the meetings.
Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: And I see a hand over here.
>>STUART HAMILTON: Stuart Hamilton from the International Federation of Library Association and Institutions, and on the subjects of participation of developing countries, this week IFLA with APC and Electronic Information for Libraries, my colleague, who is over on the far side of the room, we held a meeting which had a very strong look at the role of libraries in developing countries to bring access to information and hook them up with policymakers for better programs.
As a result of this, we will be moving forward to form a dynamic coalition for public access and libraries within the IGF, and we hope that IFLA, with its members in over 150 countries, can begin to bring more of our members from developing countries into the process. We have a lot of capacity to host remote hubs, for example, and to bring people in in that way. So I'm hoping that should see more people from our community get engaged from developing countries.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks very much for that, Stuart.
And reaction, maybe, from emerging issues? No? Anyone else with any reflection to share?
Sebastian.
>>SEBASTIAN BELLAGAMBA: Thank you. I am Sebastian Bellagamba with the Internet society.
I co-moderated the main session on emerging issues with Jeff Brueggeman from AT&T, and I don't want to make any kind of compilation of what happened in the region -- in the session, sorry, but what happened in the -- with respect to developing country participation, I would like to point some facts.
Half of our work panel were people that come from developing countries. At least we just, as moderators of the panel, of the session, we tried to emphasize on developing issues a lot, and I think we accomplished that.
And I will say the participation from the audience was mostly from developing countries persons.
So I would say that, in my perspective, we had a good participation from developing countries, but I would defer to the audience for judgment.
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>> Integrating and developing country participation and influence in the IGF.
Anyone who disagrees?
>>JOY LIDDICOAT: Thank you. Joy Liddicoat, speaking as somebody who spoke as a panelist on the main session on IG4D and also in the emerging issues stream. I think one of the things we saw in terms of participation were some interesting perspectives from Nigeria, from a range of developing countries, and those were very important and considered issues. However, I think it would be a mistake to think that a single voice from a particular country is sufficient in terms of representing views of developing countries. And in fact I think it's important to have more and more diverse views from within developing countries. We have been keeping a tab on the number of women, for example, who have been raising issues specifically around gender and development.
And also to move beyond access and development is infrastructure and linking access development and rights and how those are inextricably linked to the rule of law in developing countries where I think we still would agree we have some way to go.
So I think perhaps an ear of critique rather than skepticism but I also think we need to have concrete measures to assure diversity, a multiplicity of voices from within developing countries.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks for that, Joy.
Panel, can I take more? Do you want to react, Nii? We will come back to you just now.
>>MR. NII QUAYNOR: Thanks very much for the opportunity. I am speaking on behalf of the Minister, who regrets he is unable to be here, but he also said it was the first time he participated in IGF in the early part, and he had to return.
(Audio cutting in and out)
Contacts and also as a member of Parliament, the increased participation of parliamentarians at IGF he believes will improve policy development in our countries. And so it is serving the development agenda and, therefore, not only the Internet a catalyst for change but a catalyst for development.
Regarding the process, he really likes to emphasize the "take IGF home" as a very unusual thing, because he participated in the country IGF meeting in Ghana. And he recognized that it brought more people into the process of developing policy in the country.
Now, as to the other things, we would like to participate in all of them, but it's very, very important that the nations themselves begin to adopt this, and he noted that the national I.T. agency in developing its industry forum is beginning to practice the multistakeholder process and, therefore, the issues that you are discussing here will eventually get into the mainstream part of (indiscernible) in Ghana. Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks very much for that, Nii. And I think also the Minister's comments emphasize how the IGF has evolved as a process more than an event.
So a hand over here first, and then there, and then two more. Over there. And then we will go back to the panel.
>>KATIM TOURAY: Yeah, thanks very much.
I'm beginning to feel that we're --
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>> We can actually pass it on also to policymakers in various different kinds of organizations, regions, and also bodies.
Thank you very much.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks. Remember now to only address the question (indiscernible) of country code (audio cutting in and out). We will be looking at formats and processes later.
I am going to take 2 more speakers and then hand move to the panel. Only use this microphone. It seems to work better this way.
>> That the countries from ASAN, which is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, doesn't appear to be represented here, whether ministerially or the commissioners from the Human Rights Commission. So I feel are Europeans and Africans.
And also, I find that the standards in some of the workshops differ greatly. So this morning, for example, the session on the parliamentarians, I was rather shocked to hear the chairperson say there is no agenda for this session and the MPs were allowed to just say basically whatever they wanted, which is weird.
And also I popped into the youth sessions and I found that they were very like, you know, white, kind of. It didn't feel like there was any room for Asian youth or something like that.
So I think in terms of the participation, I don't know how you are going to actually get a broader representation.
And finally, I find it quite surprising that we're talking about policies implementation and all of that but we don't seem to have a panel on the judiciary, the police, the prosecutors. So perhaps for the next IGF.
Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: That's the kind of substantive response I would like on participation.
I am going to take one more and I am going to take a woman. Sorry, she did have her hand up earlier.
>>BERYL AIDI: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Beryl. I am from the Kenyan Human Rights Commission.
I just wanted to say that as one person who is coming from the hose country, I was a bit disappointed to see that even the host country itself is not very well represented. And I was just wondering how this happened. You go to many forums -- actually, I thought for a moment I was in Europe or something like that. And so I think in terms of participation there needs to be better communication, perhaps, and better coordination with host country so they can ensure they have as many of their citizens participating as much as possible.
Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks very much, BERYL. I believe the microphones work again so people can talk from their desks.
The last word is going to go to Honorable Rege.
>>JAMES REGE: Thank you, I just wanted to inform the previous speaker that there were quite a number of Kenyans participating in the -- in this forum.
Thank you. Thank you, Chair.
Chair, I was moderating this morning in in the Members of Parliament meeting.
Following the successful ministerial meeting on Monday and the subsequent meeting of Members of Parliament which we had this morning that I'm saying I moderated, it became very clear that participation of Members of Parliament should be encouraged as much as possible. And this is so because members of Parliament surely provide the linkage between the IGF resolutions and citizens. And that cannot go without emphasis.
It is understood that ICT is the sustainer of GDP in any country. And GDP, who manages the GDP? Legislators. So legislators should tag along IGF stakeholders in whatever they resolve with regard to new technologies in dealing with measures like cybercrime, cloud computing, anything that is new that requires -- that requires legislation or approval or regulation. Otherwise, we'll just be a rubber stamp in the legislation.
That's all I wanted to. Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thanks, Honorable Rege.
In fact, I think the link between governance and development is a very important one that we often don't address.
Okay. To close this part of the session, and I apologize for the interruptions, I am going to ask the panel to reflect and to respond to my questions. And I will just repeat them, which is do you feel that participation, in terms of actors, in terms of issues, in terms of influence and presence, and also the process, how we, as an IGF, deal with developing country participation issues and proposals.
And you don't all have to respond. But I have Vint. Vint, why don't you start.
>>VINT CERF: Thank you. Now they do. I don't know. This is a very strange thing.
Is Harry Potter in the room?
[ Laughter ]
>>VINT CERF: So a couple of thoughts immediately. First of all, we can't have everyone in the world who is interested in IGF come to IGF. We know that's mechanically not possible and we know that not everyone in the world is interested in IGF.
(Audio dropped)
In two directions. One is gathering input that can be taken from country to region and reason.
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>>NII QUAYNOR: -- but more as what it does for us at the country level, because that is where we get to really see the benefits and the values and the influence of the good work that is done through the region and through the global IGF. In that regard, maybe more material, you know, that are produced from the individual participants, the organizations here, that can help us expand our own processes in the countries beyond just Internet governance. In fact, it would be much, much more beneficial output.
>>WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Okay. Thank you. I think it's important not only to have the diversity of participants, it's also very important to have the diversity of viewpoints, and I think here this IGF has made a big step forward. I was in many sessions where a speaker immediately, you know, got response, you know, from other people in the room who had a different approach, and this is the beauty that, you know, this -- to be confronted with a broad range of viewpoints. That helps you to understand better the issue. Thank you.
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Thank you both on that. Very important. Markus, you are the final remarks on this.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes, I would also like to emphasize the importance of national and regional IGFs. I attended several of them and I noticed that the people from the same cultural backgrounds speak with each other, there are not this (indiscernible) Jeanette has identified at the beginning of the session and beyond Internet governance, these national regional IGFs that have heard back from participants, they are a great contribution to enhancing a multistakeholder participatory democracies in (indiscernible) cooperation. Remote participation is, of course, important and the regional --
[scribes have static and feedback. Indiscernible audio]
-- of developing country participation. And again, apologies and with this, I'm handing over to my co-moderator.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Anriette.
The second part is dealing with more issues regarding how to move forward in the perspective of 2012.
I think there's a general agreement that this IGF has brilliantly inaugurated the second wave of five years, and in particular, it is likely that there's no better place than Kenya to have the annual watering hole where all the IG animals can at least for a period of the year --
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-- peacefully. In this respect, this IGF, from what I heard, has enabled a deepening down -- or deepening of the interaction of people during the workshops, more in-depth interaction, from everything I hear.
And in that context, when we were preparing the session, the question that came as a driver for the second part is a very simple question, which is: How to make the IGF more effective and impactful.
And in this respect and in the objective of having as much impact as possible, I'd like to hand over immediately to Vint Cerf, who may have an interesting suggestion for IGF next year.
>>VINT CERF: So thank you very much, Bertrand.
This idea stems from comments that were made earlier about metrics. There are lots of things that we can learn if we can measure them, and one possibility is that we go to the trouble of getting metrics of the state of the Internet into the discussion, in advance of an IGF.
For example, how penetrant has IPv6 been over the course of the previous year? How many of the domain name systems have implemented DNSSEC?
There are a variety of, I would say, quantitative and technical measures that will tell us something about the system that we're trying to cope with.
But we could extend those metrics in other dimensions.
One question is whether or not participation in IGF is relevant. People will come if there is relevance from their point of view to being here.
People will come and participate if there's relevance to the output. And I think there's some work to be done to try to gather information on -- and metrics of how effective the IGF has been over the course of the previous time.
If we identify things that we believe should happen, maybe we should be reporting on whether they did or they didn't happen at the next IGF in order to -- and if they didn't happen, we might ask why.
But this notion of gathering a sense of progress in some quantitative way I think would be helpful.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Vint.
And maybe at a later time in the discussion, you may also come back to the suggestion of having this subroutine rule.
>>VINT CERF: I'm sorry. I thought that you would find that too facetious.
Ladies and gentlemen, those of you who were at the opening session noticed that the same words were repeated frequently. The same people were introduced. The same congratulatory -- so I suggest to you as a programmer that we declare at the beginning that the first speaker generates all of that text about, you know, welcome and congratulations and naming all the people, and we label that "subroutine opening remarks" and then everyone who stands up to speak will simply invoke subroutine opening remarks. It only takes three words or two. And then we go on to something substantive.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much. So this session has already produced an outcome, you see?
Yeah. Jeanette, you want to --
>>JEANETTE HOFMANN: Yes. Speaking of outcomes, I'd like to address one point that came out of one of the IGF improvement workshops.
We discussed there also the issue of outcomes, and our moderator, Bertrand, made the really good point that all the IGFs produce an enormous amount of data that are completely underused, and that got me thinking. I thought what we really need is some form of creative data mining that allows us to better see what we produce here, and also make it transferable to people who don't attend IGF meetings.
This data mining doesn't need to be necessarily based on language or words. It would also be good to have some form of graphic representation of what we do.
So I've started talking to various people here who are either in this business or might be able to support such an effort.
So if you are interested, please get back to me. I will definitely try to pursue this.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Jeanette. Actually it was -- you jumped the gun and it is the first question that we wanted to address, which is exactly: Given the amount of information that is available that has been recorded, it can be the transcript, it can be the books, it can be the biographies, it can be just the agenda, it can be links to organizations, this information is available on the Web site. However, by lack of resources, the Secretariat didn't have the possibility to exploit it as much as possible, and the idea that emerged was to potentially make the data, all the information, accessible so that other actors could use it.
I think Markus had a point regarding the potential management and the cost implications of making this data accessible and the possible cooperations with other actors.
Do you want to make a point on that?
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Mine works, yes.
Well, yes. There are plenty of good proposals around. There have been writings since the beginning but most of them are not resource-neutral, and if we can look for collaboration with actors from within the IGF, and what is the IGF? I always used to say we all are the IGF, it's not just the Secretariat which is, as you know, very thinly manned and may I take this opportunity to pay tribute to Chengetai who was on his very own for the past seven months so set up a big conference like that.
[Applause]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Which is a huge job. I know that from experience.
And that having said that, if we all consider ourselves as the IGF and look at it more like a collaborative effort where we all chip in, then I think we can achieve something. You cannot just burden it all on the Secretariat. I think it would be good, people come forward and say, "We assume responsibility for this, we assume responsibility for that," like Jeanette did, take an initiative, go around, find sponsors, find business that is interested in pursuing this, and this I think is a very good initiative and the Internet Society certainly looking into the possibility of helping to contribute.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Vint?
>>VINT CERF: Two thoughts. First of all, if we can figure out what it is that we want and we can confine it in some way to say, "Would you like to sponsor this particular thing," that's often a very good way of getting support from other organizations. At Google, we have things called fusion tables. We have mechanisms for presenting analytic information in graphical form and it's freely available.
So Jeanette, you and I will follow up on that.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you. To close this first topic, I would encourage people who may have ideas about how to have a sort of open data approach to this to maybe raise their hand in the open state -- unless Alun, do you have a very specific comment on this point or --
>>ALUN MICHAEL: It's really, firstly, I think we should reflect on the -- this week has shown the robustness of the IGF model and we should celebrate that.
I'd like to thank James Rege for running the parliamentarian session this morning. They were small in number, but views from the floor as well underlined a general view that we need to promote more engagement of members of parliament, and there were suggestions of how to do so, some of which have been discussed with parliamentarians earlier in the week and I just want to quickly summarize those.
Firstly, that the high-level meeting on Monday worked because it brought ministers and parliamentarians here, but the process was important. That is, there was a response from representatives, from Vint and various others in that session. So there was a response to the points raised from the wider IGF family.
Secondly, that we think we need a different sort of session for MPs. This morning, one didn't work and suggest that there should be something on the Tuesday morning, which would give the opportunity for MPs to raise concerns and issues, and for those concerns to then be responded to by the wider IGF family as a whole in the relevant subsequent seconds -- sessions.
Service said from the floor that our role surely must be to raise general public concerns rather than to come here as experts.
The fourth point was to ask MPs, in considering that input, to focus on the IGF themes for the year.
The fifth point picks up on Vint Cerf's point again of encouraging the engagement of MPs in national and regional IGF processes. And also to feed into the medium of parliamentary organizations, commonwealth parliamentary association and international parliamentary union, and finally, that we need the early replacement of Markus Kummer and Nitin Desai with people of equal capacity to nurture the democratic processes of the IGF. They have been shown to be robust this week, but you can't do without that expert democratic nurturing which we have enjoyed for the last five years.
[Applause]
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you. For the scribes, this was Alun Michael, another demonstration that nobody beats a British parliamentarian to take the floor when he can.
Just a note of procedure here that I may not have made clear enough in the beginning.
As you know, we have a very short session. There is no way on earth that all the good ideas that we all have and that you all have can be expressed in this session in how to make the next IGF better.
So you know that there is a traditional stock taking session that takes place after the IGF that gives the full-time for contribution, so what we decided -- and I should have been clearer -- to organize this session and make it as useful as possible is to actually focus on a few questions to drive a sort of capture and open the floor afterwards to statements that are focused as much as possible on how to discuss this forward.
The three points and the three questions -- the first one was this notion of using the data available.
The idea is, those who are interested in this, either in helping, providing expertise to make the data that exists more usable by other actors than the Secretariat, or to make applications and use of this data, should try together -- and I think Jeanette volunteered very nicely to be a focal point for this.
The second question is the following.
And there is a third one.
The second question is: It has been very clear during this IGF that a certain number of organizations of actors are sometimes working in parallel on the same topic or with the same kind of approach. A typical example was the fact that in the last year, without naming them, a large number of organizations, either intergovernmental organizations or civil society groups or even business, has initiated thinking about principles for the Internet.
The purpose is not to discuss this.
The question that I'm raising here is: How should all those organizations build on what they've exchanged this week to work between now and next year to coordinate, articulate, merge or not, and produce an input into the IGF next year.
May I ask Wolfgang to maybe make a first contribution on that and then I will open the floor on that topic.
>>WOLFGANG KLEINWACHTER: Yes. I think what I observed in this year's IGF was that we have reached probably a new level for -- of interaction among intergovernmental organizations and the broader community in a multistakeholder environment.
But we have two formulations in the Tunis Agenda which sometimes is confusing or sometimes is seen as a contradiction.
One formulation is multilateral, and the other one is multistakeholder.
Multilateral, the understanding is this is the multilateral treaty system among governments. This is where the governments are among themselves.
Multistakeholder is where the governments are just one part of the family, so various stakeholders -- government, civil society, private sector, technical community.
And what we have experienced here in the workshop on Tuesday morning was an interesting case that an intergovernmental organization, the Council of Europe, with 47 member states, which have just a couple of days before the IGF adopted a ministerial declaration on Internet governance principles, came to the IGF, presented it to the stakeholders, to private sector, civil society, technical community, and stimulated a discussion about it.
So this was an interesting interaction with the aim, you know, probably to broaden the understanding not only of the declaration which was adopted by the ministers, but to enter into a Phase II that now this intergovernmental organization is considered, you know, to -- on top of this interorganizational declaration, to work towards a framework of commitments where also other stakeholders commit themselves to these principles or to more enhanced or advanced principles. I think this is a new form of interaction where it becomes clear that there is a core business for governments. Governments have to do something amongst themselves but say do it not in an isolated way, not in a top-down way, but say go forward and look for the comments of the other stakeholders.
The session this morning, you know, when the governmental representative from India introduced the IBSA proposal, I think this was a very exciting new type of interaction that governments are looking now for comments, you know, from the other stakeholders. Go home, you know, think about it and -- you know, and enhance their way of moving forward, you know, to fulfill their responsibility to deal primarily with public policy issues.
So this was a good invitation to other intergovernmental organizations which plan similar things.
We had a long list of intergovernmental initiatives here under discussion from the OECD, from China and Russia, from India, the G8 has proposed something, the OCE, also an intergovernmental organization, is playing something. So this is a unique opportunity not to substitute each other but to come together in a new collaborative way and to enhance the communication.
As was said several times, the intergovernmental treaty system will not disappear, but it is one element embedded in a multistakeholder environment. We have not yet introduced the procedures for the interaction. This has to be done. But here is a place where we can learn how stakeholders work together. We have four years to go and why not come up until the year 2015 with a platform where all stakeholders can agree on a global level on Internet governance principles inspired by governments but inspired also by civil society and private sector members. Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Wolfgang. I have Luis and Maimouna. If you can make it short so that we can have some comments from the room.
>>LUIS MAGALHAES: Thank you. I will be very short and it continues Wolfgang's intervention.
This morning, there was a workshop promoted by OECD where they presented the principles they developed, and in the discussion it came out the suggestion, which I find very good, that having been recognized that there is a lot of superposition and complementarity on the different principles proposals advanced by different organizations, that it would be the proper space for discussing joining them in arriving to a global way of expressing these principles might be the IGF itself. Which I think is a very simple arrangement of solving the multistakeholder proposition, and also something that can be done and produced at the IGF level. So this is one of the points.
The other point I'd like to make is related -- I can do it later.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much. Maimouna.
>>MAIMOUNA DIOP: Thank you very much. To echo what the colleagues said before is the IGF give opportunity to African country which are not able to organize this kind of meeting inside the region and also at the continental level. They give them the opportunity to have a kind of fora where we can bring all the stakeholders, not only the government but the private sector, civil society, and to talk about issues like access.
And to also come back to the first point on the data we have. In Africa, you know the problem of access is here, and we have a lot of problem to have access to the information, access to Internet.
At this time we just have five or seven percent of Internet users in Africa. So we need to strengthen on having the data good but also having a kind of how could we share the data inside African region? And how could you improve a communication between African countries? Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Maimouna.
In this topic, in all the workshops that I attended dealing with principles, in particular, two things were clear. There will be next year a session that will allow this connection of the different initiatives to discuss what has been done during the year, and, second, it seemed interesting for all to spread, in a coordinated manner, a compacted format all the different proposals so that every national or regional IGF and every other organization can know about what the others are doing. This seals to be straightforward.
I would like to ask comments from the floor, very briefly, on two very -- on two very concrete points. Suggestions on how the different actors involved in the drafting of principles, for instance, or other topics could interact and coordinate, and the second element, whether there are other topics that have been addressed like that by different organizations that could have the same kind of treatment, to help build the agenda for next year.
On those two questions, please, only. Yes, and very briefly so we can move to the next question.
>> Thank you. I would just add a word of caution about trying to achieve principles that would be for all people and all countries. Just it has a technical and a social aspect.
If you take a snapshot in time, and I have noticed this in some of the principle formulations, about what you think the Internet is, the technology is already out the door. Moving along, and in fact, you would have to go back and rewrite it.
Socially, some of the conversations I participated in stress the fact that a lot of the social aspects are rooted in local law. And obviously local law, there's many different approaches.
Now, what I would think would be useful would be to have flexibility to just exchange approaches, but not ultimately to say, well, 2015, we are going to have something that's going to be set in stone and that's it, because by that time it would have gone on and been something else.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you.
Yes.
>> Thank you, Bertrand. A concrete --
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Please, say your name for the scribes.
>>JOY LIDDICOAT: Joy Liddicoat from APC.
A concrete suggestion is that perhaps there could be a thematic IGF on the topic of Internet governance principles where those who are specifically interested in this topic or who wish to learn more or contribute their ideas specifically focused, whether that is in a regional context or in multiple other forums. That's one could be create suggestion.
The second is APC is suggesting that human rights be a major theme of the IGF in 2012.
Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Okay. Thank you. So the notion of having a dedicated event for those who are specifically concerned by this potentially could convene by the different actors?
Sorry. I had Ginger, Marilyn, Thomas, and Romulo, and I will close after that.
>>GINGER PAQUE: I am Ginger Paque from DiploFoundation, and I think we have a very concrete best practice performed by the participants of workshop 67, which is precisely on principles, was e-participation principles. And during that session, we used a tool called iEtherPad, which is free. You go online.
We had most of the people who were physically present in the session and our remote participants connected to the site iEtherPad.com, and they were anyone who wanted to, edited the document at the same time. If would you like to go to www.diplo.ietherpad.com slash 19, you can see in different colors all of the edits as the document was built collaboratively. So in less than one hour we have our first working draft of e-participation principles. I suggest you look at the tool and see if this one or something similar might work for you.
From here, we have our first draft. It will go up for comments, and we will, online, through only e-participation, come up with a full set of principles. I recommend that you take a look at a best practice.
Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Ginger. I would like just to make a comment. Please, for those of you who have made comments or those who want to make comments on that topic and have not time, please write it down very succinctly and send it for that topic, just like I suggested for Jeanette for the previous one, for that topic send it to Wolfgang or me so we can collate that and maybe make a wrap up.
Marilyn and then I had Thomas and Romulo.
>>MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Bertrand. My name is Marilyn Cade. I am going to make two comments. I will make them quickly.
First of all, IGF USA did a workshop called a plethora of principles and did, in fact, do a side by side comparing four or five principles. Our -- The outcome of that workshop within IGF USA was the idea that more work should be done like this by ourselves and perhaps in combination with others.
Now, here is my second comment. I also moderated the interregional dialogue for the national and regional IGF initiatives, and I am going to, I hope, give credit but use a phrase I heard from one of my civil society colleagues. I think we need to be careful not no overrromanticize the role of regional and national initiatives. We need to remember they are serving a need that is bottom-up in their area, and if we layer a lot of coordination and assign work to them, they will not be able to meet the needs that they are self-designed for.
Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Fair amount of caution.
Thomas, Romulo, and we move to the next one. Thomas Schneider.
>>THOMAS SCHNEIDER: Thank you, Thomas Schneider from OFCOM Swiss government.
Actually, we think it is a good idea, following Wolfgang Kleinwachter and others, if all organizations and entities, and not just from the industrialized countries but also from the developing world and including all stakeholders, would continue the informal discussions that have already started in some workshops here to identify common grounds in these principles, different principles, so that they are --
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: And divergences, I suppose.
>>THOMAS SCHNEIDER: Yeah, and of course taking into account the diversity of cultures and situations and history and backgrounds and so on. And we would actually be happy to join this work and facilitate to the extent possible.
And just a small comment with regard to -- I mean, if we wouldn't try to agree on common issues, there would be no declaration, Universal Declaration on Human Rights, there wouldn't have been a WSIS Declaration of Principles. I think these things are possible as long as we stay on the level of principles. We don't have to go into details.
And, on the other hand, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We have the declaration on human rights. We don't need another declaration on human rights for the Internet, but we might have to adapt these values and principles to the new environment, which is a multistakeholder environment in the 21st century and not in the 20th century.
Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Thomas.
I think there were two and three notes of caution regarding trying to merge too quickly, to go too fast or to find something too universal or re-opening things. Romulo, and we finish on that one.
>>ROMULO NEVES: Thanks, Bertrand. I just like to point out some words of Wolfgang. The IBSA document, even being an ongoing draft document, has been presented. It didn't leak.
So I would like to say we really want to raise the discussion, and not in a top-down, top-bottom, way but we just put a draft document to the discussion. In a way, I think a stop back of the Council of Europe document.
Just having said that, I would like to present or announce that Brazil is willing to present our candidature to 2014 or 2015 to host IGF. I don't know which time we are going to do this, but it is our intention to present our will.
And about Joy proposition to, to the next year, main issue for the IGF, probably Brazil will support it with just one amendment. I'd like to put human rights with technical architectural solutions in composition. I don't know exactly how, but I would like to put this. Thank you.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much.
Anriette, would you want to make a quick intervention?
>>ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: Just a quick addition to Romulo's point. As civil society participant from South Africa, during this IGF we also had discussions with the three governments and they have made a commitment to take forward multistakeholder discussion of these draft proposals at national level. So I just want to commend them for that.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: So we're getting to a last part of the thing. There's a third point that I want to raise very quickly which is the following. The first one was use of -- reuse of data, the second one is how to coordinate in between the IGFs to prepare next year. The third potential improvement immediately is the question that every single person in this room is actually an Ambassador for his own or her own organization into the IGF.
However, when you come back to your organization, you are bringing back information, what you got out of it.
Most of you have to write a report, to make a summary of what happened. And I have heard many times that it is difficult to collate that when you are diving again into your daily job.
One of the suggestions that was made in the last few days was to see whether there is a possibility to have a more systematic reporting that would be done by people from the Secretariat that would be added during that period, and I would like to ask maybe LUIS to explore that a little bit and then open the floor to ask for comments on this idea.
>>LUIS MAGALHAES: Thank you very much. So, indeed, the discussion that was had was that we have actually quite very good, let's say, extensive recordings of what happens at the IGF in terms of transcripts in the main sessions, even with video recording. But the problem is that we would need elements of communication which are more focused and structured.
So the idea would be to somehow develop kind of resource center that distills information from the results of discussions that we have here so that they can be conveyed to the outside in a better way, but by any of the IGF participants.
Somehow, they are developed here in the room, even during this discussion, kind of a Wiki-like approach to develop these sorts of documents. But still, that requires the right platform and right structuring for it to happen.
So I think this is also a road we could explore.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you.
Anybody else on the panel want to make a suggestion or comment on that idea?
Nurani wanted to make a point.
Kieren, given the workshop you organized this morning, would you want to highlight the use of this formalized type of reporting for intraorganization circulation? Nurani.
>>NURANI NIMPUNO: Thank you, Bertrand. Nurani Nimpuno. From Netnod.
I have been asked to keep this short, so I will. I just wanted to share some of the discussions we had in our workshop on Wednesday morning, I think it was, on IGF improvements, how can we get the most out of the of the IGF.
It was a very lively discussion with a diverse range of views present.
I will keep this very short. We discussed diversity of participation and gender program development process, including MAG structure, public consultations, and then also how to capture what comes out of the IGF and amplify the impact of the IGF.
So touch upon some of the things you talked about here. I think there was a general agreement that we need to further improve the inclusiveness of the IGF. We need to make it more accessible. I think we've talked about further improving remote participation, finding new -- mechanisms to include new players, et cetera.
There were different specific practical solutions discussed, but I think there's general agreement that we need to continue to improve this.
I think where we didn't -- where there was maybe more a divergence of views was in the outcome of the IGF. I think we all agreed we could do more to make use of this rich discussion and idea exchange at the IGF, and some were arguing for the IGF to come up with clearer recommendations to be passed on in a more formal manner to other policy-making bodies, but there were also quite a few in the room who thought the IGF already has a very significant input into existing policy processes, but there are certainly things we can do to improve Web site, improve workshop reporting et cetera, making better use of the rich resources that the IGF has.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much.
Kieren, briefly, if you can.
>>KIEREN McCARTHY: Yes, we ran a workshop on participation this morning, and during the course of that, a couple of interesting examples came up of how we are -- all these different organizations like ICANN, IGF, and ITU are influencing one another in the same kind of ecosystem.
So I have three quick examples. There was a young woman who attended who said she had only heard about the IGF because she was on a youth program to the ITU. She went to an ITU meeting. She had never heard of the IGF before. Someone was reporting about the IGF and so she decided she would come along. I thought that was very interesting that that's people feeding through.
The second was how the U.S. government representative shared an e-mail with us that he had received from an ITU senior staffer saying would you mind dropping one of the themes you had for an ITU meeting in 2012 because we have a proposal here for ICT and the empowerment of women. Would you be prepared to drop the one you were putting forward and he said the U.S. government there support that. And his point was that will now take place in an ITU meeting next year, and he is almost certain that will feed through to the IGF, because there will be discussions and people will say we should continue this discussion in a different model.
And then I have a personal example which is mostly between ICANN and the IGF. I know that I set up some of the participation methods in ICANN and I know Markus and I had various discussions and he would say who are you using to do the transcribing, and I told him about Laura in New York and you are using them now. I also remember talking to your head of interpretation, because we couldn't find good interpreters for ICANN meetings, and so he produced a paper for us and introduced me to a bunch of people that we then used as interpreters within ICANN.
So we are a little bit in the same ecosystem and influencing one another in a good way.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much. Bill, and we close this round.
>>BILL SMITH: Bill Smith with PayPal. I would like to invoke Vint's subroutine, so I am thanking everyone.
I am very supportive of something like, Bertrand, you have suggested, and I would suggest we might want to build on the ISOC ambassador program that's used both for ISOC and I believe some are brought here. Potentially bring university students who are expert in political science or other fields, Internet governance is now being taught, bring them to the IGF, and under the direction of the chair and the Secretariat, they would be charged with writing an unbalanced -- or unbiased report. Sorry. This would be a relatively low cost, high quality mechanism, and it would bring the next generation to the table, which I think is especially important because if we're going to do our jobs, which I think should be planning for our grandchildren and their children, we really need to bring our children to the table to help us out.
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you very much.
So we're closing those three subtopics. As you perfectly understand, they were chosen among a myriad of very possible other improvements. We chose them because on each of them, it was possible to start from something that has been noted during workshops to generalize somewhat the problem and to identify a possible way forward. That is not a decision that we take here, but that gives back the capacity for the actors to pick the idea and run with it.
Now, in order to finish this session, there have been many proposals and many discussions and workshops on IGF improvements during this IGF. Very lively discussions.
You know that every year after the IGF, there is a stock taking session, apart from this one, that is a longer -- usually a day or more -- and it will take place normally, I suppose as usual, this year.
You also know that on the question of IGF improvements, the working group of the chair of the CSTD that was established last year was extended and we are lucky enough that Peter Major, who was here, was nominated as the chair of this working group just before the IGF, which allows him to be here as formally the chair of the working group, and I would like to ask him to give us a very, very brief hint at the way he intends to conduct this discussion on IGF improvements and maybe just indicate how this will articulate with the stock taking session that is normally planned, if that is the case.
And then I will open the floor for a few general comments.
The chair has kindly given us a little extension of 10 minutes, given the power outage before, and I also want to ask the people who are doing -- following remote participation if there are any comments that came through the remote participation, and in that case, raise their hand and tell me so that we can take them into account.
So Peter, you have the floor. If you can be as concise as possible to leave a little bit of time for the other actors to make final statements or contributions.
>>PETER MAJOR: Thank you, Bertrand. I'm Peter Major from Hungary. I have been nominated as chair of the --
>>BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: A little bit closer if you can.
>>PETER MAJOR: A little bit closer. Okay.
So I'm Peter Major from Hungary. I have been nominated as chairman of the working group last Friday, so I consider myself very lucky that I could attend this IGF -- or I can participate in this IGF and have a different view of what is going on here.
Let me start by saying a few words about the working group.
It is mandated to give recommendations to ECOSOC, which is a United Nations body, through the CSTD, and ultimately to the General Assembly of the U.N.
The group is multistakeholder in nature. It is composed of 15 member states from the CSTD, the two countries who organize the WSIS, and five IGF organizing countries --
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