The session was started with a presentation on the survey that was conducted majorly among youths of various regions in understanding their challenges and issues of youth leadership and their efforts of voicing the issues.
The presentation highlighted the findings and the current gaps in between the perspectives of developed and developing nation’s youth.
The findings of the report are:
- Youth Gaps
- More Engagement needed
- More Fellowship
- Focused Coaching and mentoring programs
- Next generation policy in Internet Organization
- More collaboration from all sides
- Diversity
We highlighted the youth involvement in Internet governance processes, as they are the next generation of leaders and the most vulnerable group. The challenges faced by youth leadership in Internet governance are at times sidelined.
Especially, with the lack of proper guidelines youth suffer the consequences of nepotism and favoritism, internet politics and ultimately fail to understand the overall concept of the multistakeholder process.
In this process of getting youth on the table there needs to be visibility and identification of youth related issues and further need to work on creating a bridge to create an understating in facilitating the process. Youth have to be reach in a more simplified and easy ways of identifying their commonality in creating that interest.
A lot of issues were covered which primarily focused on the basic intervention of getting the youth on the table and their challenges. The issues that were discussed were:
1. Why youth should be involved?
2. What should be the interventions?
3. How can they start the IG process?
One of the speaker highlighted the need to look at the abusive content, child pornography, inappropriate content, and safety of children and get support for funding initiatives and engage different stakeholders to tackle the problems of online child porn issues. Especially, talking about grassroots level initiative there is no funding for Internet governance initiatives. A lot of students in the Philippines are only concerned when the Internet is slow, and they have problems connecting to it. The issues have to be targeted in terms of their interest and concerned that can be an effective way of engagement.
Likewise, issues were pointed out that Internet governance of itself is a hard subject. In Brazil, they are so proud of multistakeholders but it is hard to engage Brazilian youth in the subject itself. For example, a father would not be able to explain to his child how to use a mobile phone; they do not know how to restrict it. The generations ahead need to learn. It is important to let young people know that they are the main users of the Internet, and that they are expected to have years of experience in Internet governance. Influencing youth and the general public on issues of Internet governance is a major challenge as is linking it to their daily life.
Similarly, in most of the cases issues of e-government are associated with political issues, digital issues, and policies that the government bring forth, affect every individual’s life. Associating those with Internet governance helps a lot in terms of attracting interest from either the youth or the general public.
One of the participants also highlighted that her peers are not interested in learning about Internet governance and cybersecurity. She said that the Internet of Things is happening, and information is solved but people are choosing to overlook the breaches of privacy for the sake of continuing to use the devices and platforms we want.
The session was closed by asking the audience to use capacity resources in starting up forums and blogs, and talking about Internet governance issues, starting not stopping whatever they can do to engage proper communication with in the community in collaboration and commitment for change.
