Advancing digital citizenship aspects in children's online /Internet experiences - Contributing to Internet Governance for Development

IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
15 SEPTEMBER 10
SESSION 127
1130
ADVANCING DIGITAL CITIZENSHIP ASPECTS IN CHILDREN'S ONLINE/INTERNET EXPERIENCES - CONTRIBUTING TO THE INTERNET GOVERNANCE FOR DEVELOPMENT


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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. 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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>> MARILYN CADE: I think we're going to get started.  My name is Marilyn Cade and I've acted as the organiser and catalyst for putting the workshop together and would I like to give you a couple minutes overview I'm standing back here because you're going to be facing that way eventually.  You have all been in workshops perhaps now so you're aware of the fact that our conversations and dialogue will be real-time transcribed and there will be a transcript available on the IGF web site that you will have as a resource to go back to or even to forward to people who you think may also be interested in this topic.  So I just want to mention that to all of you.  We are also being Webcast and one of our speakers will be joining us remotely, Bessie Pang.  I'm just going to do a couple of quick overview explanations of what led to the creation of the workshop, introduce the Co-Moderators and turn the session over to the Co-Moderators.
We hope we will have active remote participation and we have a remote participation facilitator here with us today who I will introduce now and that's Keith Davidson.  And Keith is a long-standing colleague and supporter of the IGF from New Zealand and previous Executive Director from -- let me tell you about what led to the creation of the workshop last year in Sharm I worked with others to put together a workshop on child safety and we decided coming out of that workshop one of our panelists was Liz Butterfield the Executive Director and managing Director of Hector's World.  And the conversation in that workshop which was a three-hour workshop kept coming around to the next evolution to address the topics of child safety.  And we kept talking in the early part of the year about the need to begin to look at digital citizenship.
So this workshop focuses on digital citizenship.  A more holistic look at child safety and the surrounding opportunities and I'll leave it at that because one of the things the Co-Moderators will introduce the topic and explain more about it.  Let me introduce the paper you have in front of you.  You have a paper that has the overview of the workshop and the speaking order and names of the panelists and now I'll introduce your Co-Moderators.  Today we will be co--moderated by Anne Collier and she's the editor of family news be online and NetSafe and also Martin Cocker from New Zealand and if it's becoming to look like New Zealand is taking over the world, let's all vote for that, I'm going to let them introduce their panelists and when they do that, each of the panelists will give you a three to four-second -- I mean, I'm talking short introduction of themselves because we're going to spend our time on hearing from them and then you'll have a chance to ask them lots of questions.
The first hour of the session is going to be hearing from the panelists, the second hour is hearing from you and so start planning now let me turn it over to our Co-Moderators.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Great.  Thank you all for being here it's fantastic I think we are all pioneers together because this is the latest iteration of online safety and I'll explain that in a minute.  
We passed out a little handout here that's kind of -- you can follow along because this is a PowerPoint-free session.  So getting a sense of definition about digital citizenship.  It's a big term and we're going to get more concrete as we go along.  We're going to have case studies and this is a very international conversation.  And we hope you'll join inasmuch as possible.  This is also a multi-age presentation.  And workshop.  Because we have a youth panel of respondents here, a fantastic group of young people from the UK.  Representing ChildNet in London.  We thank you for being here with us, they are Alissa, Alice and Carla.  And they are -- I'm not saying this respectively but they are 18, 16 and 14 of age and they know more than all of us put together I'm sure.  Each one of them.  
So just a little bit about digital citizenship at the conceptual level.  
This past year I had the honour of co-chairing the Online Safety and Technology Working Group which was formed by a US Federal law called the protecting children in the 21st Century Act.  The law required us to send a report to Congress with findings and recommendations concerning children's online safety after a year of discussion.  We submitted our report:  Youth safety on a living Internet this past June.  
One of our recommendations, one of more than two dozen was to promote digital citizenship in preK through 12 education that would be from early childhood straight through high school as a national priority.  We wrote:  We need to recognize that by far the most common online risk to children stems from their own actions and those of their peers.  And that many of these risks are not new.  
It is the delivery mechanisms which are new.  
While technology can be used to amplify or facilitate bullying, for example, and harassment will not be tolerated -- it is not -- technology is not the cause of the problem.  In addition to sending a message that bullying and harass will not be tolerated, work needs to be done starting in kindergarten or earlier on digital citizenship.  Or rather, a renewed effort to teach good citizenship online and offline encouraging children to respect themselves and others.  
This baseline online safety education cannot take place in a vacuum.  We're only a -- or only a single sphere of youth activity including Internet activity but most promote movement toward greater civility among peers as well as among adults.  
The Government can't legislate civility.  But it can encourage it.  This will not be easy to attain but like cutting down on other social ills it can be accomplished through awareness raising over time.  
The reason why our Working Group made that recommendation to Congress is that digital citizenship is protective.  We know from research published in the journal archives of pediatrics that youth that engage on online aggressive behavior by making rude comments or frequently embarrassing others are more than twice as likely to report online victimization.  
But let's start with the basics.  How do we define digital citizenship.  I'm just going to throw some stuff out there and maybe we can arrive at a little bit of consensus today.  
Because of the Internet, the media environment that we all work in and function in is increasingly user driven and social or behavioral.  So personal behavior is a fundamental character.  Mapping to what the research has shown to be the most common online risk for youth, harassment and bullying.  
The most basic definition of digital citizenship then gets at behavior.  Also if we want widespread adoption, it's imperative that we not overcomplicate this.  An educator at State University of New York wrote:  The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one another.  
This was echoed by two professors of psychology at Williams College in Massachusetts writing in New York Times on cyber bullying they wrote our research on child development makes clear that there's only one way to truly combat bullying as an essential part of school curriculum we have to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right.  
But let me back up for a moment and this is on your sheet and offer a bit of context on the risk of spectrum the research in the US has shown that the online risk spectrum increasingly matches the real world spectrum.  Because the Web increasingly mirrors all of human life learning, sociality, creative, et cetera to address the full risk spectrum we felt the need to have a taxonomy of online safety physical separation and legal for identity safety so this becomes to suggest what the rights of digital citizenship are.  Freedom from physical and emotional harm.  Freedom from unwanted or negative social academic and professional legal consequences that could affect you for a lifetime.  Freedom from theft of identity, property and intellectual property and I have learned from our younger panelists that we need to add the freedom of full responsibility access.
I think what we're getting here is youth agency online as well as offline.  
As for the responsibilities of digital citizenship you know we talk about rights and responsibilities when we talk about citizenship.  Citizenship the digital kind overlaps with media literacy.  Because media are behavioral or social now and citizenship we're talking about here is in media.  So they are melting into each other.  Media, literacy and digital citizenship.  
So the responsibilities of citizenship are full constructive engagement in participatory media in society are:  Active critical thinking and ethical choices about the content and impact of what one sees, says and produces on one's self, others and one's community.  This is protective to all involved in social web activity and we are not excluding mobile phones here.  The same activity is happening on mobile phones it's happening on MP3 players and game consoles and game handhelds and all digital devices now it's not exclusive to the Web.  
So finally where does digital citizenship fit into online risk prevention?  
A group of us advocates, researchers and risk prevention practitioners in the US have adopted the public health field's levels of prevention.  It's a model that they use for prevention in substance abuse as well as disease prevention in our country and I'm sure elsewhere.  It's pretty basic.  It's like a triangle.  You have primary, secondary and tertiary.  Because we know from the research that not all youth are equally at risk online but all need to understand the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, we see digital citizenship as part of baseline or primary universal online safety instruction.  
That one will stick.  At home and at school.  Is the mic working?  
Is it on?  Hello?  Hello?  Should I just talk loud?  Okay.  So a little bit more about the primary level is citizenship taught through all grade levels and throughout the curriculum wherever appropriate.  Online and offline home and school.  
The secondary level is more specialised or targeted prevention.  Mentoring and support for specific risky behaviors such as bullying, self destructive behavior, you know, the whole spectrum and sometimes that behavior is reenforced online.  
So secondary is also situational.  It utilizes teachable moments when incidents occur in school such as bullying, sexting, YouTube, whatever, just conflict in general or it might be a unit in health class where students might learn about the law putting over sexually information of miners.  This risk behaviors already disrupting their lives so the risk prevention specialist social service workers and mental health care practitioners who work with at-risk youth they need training in social media to reach out and work with the young people who are already their patients and clients.  
So that kind of lays the groundwork.  And now I would like Martin to maybe get a little more concrete.  

>> MARTIN COCKER: Thank you, all right.  So we're here to talk about digital citizenship as a new framework for digital safety and that's predicated on the concept of you want two things first thing you want to protect people from harm.  That's fairly obvious and I think the key point of difference is you also want to give people the maximum opportunity to benefit from digital society.  
We have to start off with being realistic the strategies are having little tangible effect.  
The research tells us like protective technologies like filters are bypassed by young people and educational programmes change what young people say and not what they actually do.  
And there are lots of reasons why the existing programmes are not particularly effective.  But basically the strategies that have been transplanted from other areas we often hear that eSafety is like water safety or road safety or such like and it's the same old issues.  Through a new platform.  Stranger danger exposure.  
But the truth is that Digital Age changed everything.  So we hear that all the time.  But we know it changed education.  We know it changed business.  It's changed Government participation so why would we think it didn't change safety strategies?  
To be feared why eSafety strategies is effective is probably a workshop in itself we don't want to go into too much detail on that I think the research is starting to show we need to have a fresh look of how we do eSafety so I'll leave it at that but I would say it's very difficult to protect people from something when they are immersed in it.  That's probably the best way to summarize what the problem is.  
So young people are getting an increasing array of devices.  They are participating and contributing not just consuming but perhaps the most important thing to understand is that this so-called digital natives, young people, they do not think in terms of online and offline.  They are simply plugged in all the time.  
So what do we do?  In New Zealand we developed a guided detect programme based under the digital citizenship framework and the idea was that through this moon wide protect we would develop digital citizens and the first thing we needed to ask ourselves in New Zealand is what is a digital citizen.  And it's an intersection of three different things firstly we have some ideas in New Zealand in what we think makes up a New Zealand citizen in terms of competencies I'll read these out.  We hope New Zealanders have the following values, excellence, curiosity, diversity, equity, community participation, ecological sustainability.  Our country is green we like that one.  And integrity.  
On top of that we have some competencies we expect from New Zealanders and we think of this what might be successful in the Digital Age thinking using language managing self relating to others participating and contributing.  
So that's New Zealand's idea on how we will create good capable citizens.  
So we have the competencies of the citizen and then we combine that with digital skills the ability to use technology.  
And then a third subset being media literacy and digital safety skills when those three things intersect what you get is a digital citizen, somebody capable of making the most from digital opportunities and who contributes positively to a digital society.  
What's important about this guide programme it reflects the way a young person's needs change as they grow so a combination of what people have learned, how they are guided and what we use to protect them or keep them safe, the mix of those three things will change over time.  When somebody enters school they have very few learning schools and we have to offer them protection but we must also begin immediately teaching them the skills that they need to keep them safe so NetSafe has a very early product that introduces safety concepts and the education material reflects online safety in brisk managing terms so targeting very young children, five, six, seven years old but it accepts even the youngest of children make decisions that affect their safety.  
All of our educational material focuses on making the right choice when faced with a challenge but also for the right reasons.  That's the differentiator.  
When a young person is faced with a challenge we want them to make the right choice not because we told them they have to do that but because they choose that choice for themselves.  By the time somebody is about 13 or 14 years old in New Zealand the portion of that safety equation or safety mix that's made up of protective technologies is almost zero and the trick is understanding how and why the value of those particular measures diminishes.  They go through technologies like filters, and also young people take risks and they do that because that's what young people do and research tells you young people have to take risks they have to do that to face a challenge and grow and learn as people by the time they leave school hopefully we have taught them what to do to stay safe because once they leave school we can't apply the safety guidance parts of the equation.
I just want to change places completely for a moment and tell how this framework fits with the cyber sector model people ask us about this a lot everybody has a role in creating a digital society and supporting digital citizens I've obviously talked about the role that schools play but clearly law enforcement has a role protecting citizens online the industry provides tools in the environment for people to be successful and Government regulates to create a more digital society and New Zealand multiple stakeholder contribution reflects how we do this.  We have an independent NGO it's an organisation -- the members are education, law enforcement, Government, IT industry, et cetera.  
The Government then legitimizes NetSafe as a national service organisation but funding it and appointing it as a partner to governmental agencies.  
NetSafe is part of a wider national programme in New Zealand saying that the company benefits from digital opportunities our mandate is to help all New Zealanders navigate through the Digital Age so we are not specifically a child protection agency some of our members are child protection agencies and it's part of what we do but it's only a part of what we do.  
Anyway what it creates that -- that membership start programme creates an organisation that's consistent despite political ups and downs we have those even in New Zealand or personnel changes in the organisation I might be the first but not the last Executive Director it doesn't get hijacked by a particular interest group and it provides proportional responses we have heard about those in the last few days to technology challenges and importantly it's connected to and trusted by the very organisations that we need to contribute to making New Zealand a lot safer for us the digital citizenship framework was a logical extension of the way we work.  And it's been very positively received hence our membership.  Okay.  That's it from my side.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: I would like to introduce our fellow panelists now.  I'll just go straight down the line.  We have David Miles from family online safety institute which is based in both London and Washington.  Remotely we have Bessie Pang.  Can we hear her now?  Can you hear us, Bessie?  
Yeah, because there's no -- it is on?  So Bessie joins us from Canada, right, Marilyn?  She is with POLCYB or POLCYB which is an organisation that promotes collaboration between industry and law enforcement.  
And next to Dave we have Jeff Brueggeman of AT & T in the States.  And Nevine Tewfik who is from Cairo, Egypt with the Cyber Peace Initiative and next to her is Mohamed Fathy.  Am I saying that correctly.  And he, too is from the Cyber Peace Initiative.  And then finally, last but not least is William Drake from ChildNet international which is based in London so it's so great to have you all here.  Why don't we start with Dave.  

>> DAVID MILES:  Thank you, Anne.  So today I would like to touch on three questions.  What is -- what does FOSI see as the parts of digital citizenship?  I think it's worth breaking it down a little bit in broad terms what's the state of family online safety generally around the world and lastly what does that tell us about digital citizenship.  To give you some context, FOSI is an industry funded not-for-profit organisation as Anne said with offices in Washington D.C. and in London and we have been around for about ten years right from the formative stages of the Internet and we have around 30 members, many of whom are in the room today and they include people like Microsoft, AT & T, Google and Facebook.  So really interesting cross section of the industry.  We have been a strong advocate for a move towards digital citizenship in our conferences over the last few years and we believe there are six core components to building a culture of ability to be online the first is Government importance.
Very important if it's -- the if the Government isn't behind this it's hard to implement the next is properly resourced law enforcement often a challenge in developing countries.  And good self directed industry to promote these kinds of things, tech savvy teachers are important.  Empowered parents and also resilient kids and that's really teaching kids to develop and make decisions online for themselves and take responsibility for their actions and actually there's a lot of evidence to indicate that peer conformity and pressure is really one of the powerful factors in the way that youngsters keep themselves safe and it's often discounted.  
So what is the state of global family online safety and what does it tell us about digital citizenship?  
In July of this year FOSI launched a portal called the Global Resource and Information Directory or GRID it's taken about two years to develop and you would think that something like this existed already but it doesn't and it's aimed at professionals and tracks the education, research and legislation landscape of over 200 countries and indeed the active organisations in those environments.  
Around 20% of the content has never been seen in English before and this is a point that I'll talk about for a little while.  
So what does GRID tell us having had trained teams of lawyers and researchers doing this work?  Well the first thing is there's far more going on than we sometimes give credit for it's amazing particularly in Africa South America what's actually going on and how little it's got publicity the same thing in the Middle East and Asia.  
Also the key role of industry in developing many countries is often discounted.  They are major players in developing countries.  They have the money, they have the ability and technology to provide infrastructure.  They are often behind most of the key ICT development activities in those countries.  And that muss not be ignored.  
But also there's another factor we see in country profiles and it's very stark and that's family online safety and debates like digital citizenship are relatively unimportant for many countries.  Their priorities are often around poverty, disease, lack of literacy, human trafficking, child labour and just a whole load more of bigger priorities than what we're talking about today.  That doesn't mean it's not important.  Absolutely not.  
So the next billion people have to get through all of those hurdles just to get access to the Internet and I think we need to think about that sometimes.  
I was listening in a workshop earlier on and one of the countries we have profiled is India and a gentleman said something really interesting which set me back which is India which I would class as a really developing economy and the kind of thing you see in the Economist and BusinessWeek every few weeks only 5% of Indians speak English so we really do have to calibrate sometimes what kind of Internet we've got.  I think the other encouraging thing and IGF is a part of that and you'll see a fragmentation of the Internet you see things like dot Arab dot China.  All of these things indicate the Internet will become much more fragmented you'll see it on appliances for example things like Apple, they are closed applications in many ways so the very openness of the Internet will change and the appliances that access it are going to change considerably.  
Now, you know some people, net neutrality people or people that are into innovation and technology people would want to resist some of that because of the tremendous innovation that's brought us to where we are today but I would have to say that I think the upside is that if you take top line domain fragmentation, I feel these cultures can now own content and have an incentive to create their own content you are seeing that in the 5th of July in Cairo I was there for one of their conferences and they launched Almanac, which is their Arab Internet Safety Portal and it's all in air back and it's for the Arab world and a terrific solution and an example for when you give people non-English capacities they really develop it and get behind that content.  
What GRID also shows us is that many governments are actually using online safety as part of a wider pretext to filter what their citizens see.  Actually technology is getting cleverer and that's actually more possible and we see that in a lot of countries I won't take a view on that but it's definitely happening and becoming more and more prevalent and that feeds into this fact that we have one world but we're going to start to have many more Internets.  
And finally-- and it's really very solitary when you look at places like Africa in particular but many of these citizens that we talk about don't even have basic human rights or through religious discrimination or through gender they are isolated from their communities and that's very prevalent so that's a very noticeable thing within GRID so citizenship offline as well as online has many challenges ahead and I thought I would really put that global perspective about what we have seen in terms of the way forward.  Thank you.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thanks, Dave.  If I could just say one thing about Apple.  It does seem sort of like it's own separate closed system but my 13-year-old has already jail breaked his iPod Touch.  So it's -- you know with the help of young people these systems aren't as closed as they were intended to be always.  Bessie, can you hear me?  It's your turn.  Do we have her?  
Can you say something, Bessie?  Uh-oh.  She dropped.  
She dropped off.  Bessie?  I think we can hear you now.  Bessie?  
Okay.  All right.  Jeff Brueggeman.  Feel free you all if you want to introduce yourselves a little bit more.

>> JEFF BRUEGGEMAN:  Okay.  Thanks, Anne.  I'm with AT & T so I wanted to provide kind of a real world perspective on what we're seeing in terms of how children in particular are using the Internet and some of this has been touched on already and what are the implications of that for digital citizenship.  And first I guess I would like to say I really like that term and I like the concepts we're discussing for a couple of reasons.  One is I think it assumes that children need to be online.  And need to be using the Internet.  And will benefit from it.  And that's a great starting point and I also think it encompasses the range of issues that are being presented for and implications of children using the Internet beyond maybe just the traditional view of just online safety as the kind of core principle.  
And I think just to recap some of what we have already started to talk about, you know, the first thing where I start from is that the Internet is the future of education for our children both directly in the classroom more and more being incorporated and also whether it's doing homework, learning about new things, increasingly new innovative games and applications that help for learning you know I have a ten-year-old daughter just using the Internet all the time for new experiences.  
So we all want our children to be online.  At the same time there are a lot of challenges.  As Martin said, more and more devices are accessing the Internet.  Pretty much every gaming device can now have an Internet connection whereas five years ago you could think about a computer in the kitchen you know fixed computer as the way to kind of monitor and control your child's Internet usage they are off on their own in many different environments now with live access to the Internet and they are using the Internet for more and more services and applications.  They are communicating with each other.  They are creating content at a very young age and all of these have implications.  
And I like your term amplifying.  I think the Internet amplifies all of the benefits of all of the resources and information they get.  But it also means the stakes are higher in terms of the content that they are exposed to.  The content that they are creating and the potential for social issues in terms of communicating using the Internet, as well.  
So what can we do?  I think we see some innovative things happening out there.  When we look at what's happening with children themselves, I think things like Hector's World are a great example of using the technology and the Internet as an actual learning tool for safety and for digital citizenship more broadly whether it's learning about the technology or learning about some of the risks and learning how to as you said manage the risks and the information I'm increasingly hopeful that the education in the schools will both -- when I have seen with my daughter's school is they combine technology training with concepts of online safety.  So I think that starts to wrap in the idea that you want them using it.  You want to teach them the good things but you can incorporate the trending at the same time and that may be more effective than something that's just treated as a separate don't do drugs kind of a message.

And then I think there's some interesting concepts out there about using youth to actually help become the trainers of technology for those in society.  And I think that can actually foster a great digital citizenship kind of concept.  And Anne I think in the report that you mentioned, one of the ideas was kind of a digital literacy corps where you can get maybe college age kids to help train the children but we work with a group called Want Economy that gets high school kids to help train those that aren't connected to the Internet so that's using younger children to help get older folks connected and then maybe reward them with a laptop so I think that's another part of citizenship.  Children if anything are much better at the technology part of things and they can use that to help realise the benefits of the technology that they use instinctively every day.

As far as helping parents I think because of the range of devices and the services I think that's made a real challenge frankly for parents and how to deal with their children being online and what we're trying to do is to really make it easier.  
That's really the message that we keep hearing from parents.  
So we're trying to create a portal where they can go to one place.  And get everything from what are the range of tools that are available to background information.  To interactive forums where they can start to discuss concern to get help.  
So really what you want to do is encourage the parents to engage more.  But I think there's a greater need to try to make the tools even more sophisticated and more simple for them to use because you have now got your children off doing so many different things on the Internet.  
So that's a continuing challenge.  But I think I see a lot of progress there and I think some of the same innovation that we see with new applications and things are now being applied to parental controls.  I think it's being viewed as kind of a market need that needs to be fulfilled.  So I think there's a lot of positive things happening in that area.  
And I think education and training for parents is something that we support.  And you know I think it will continue to be an important part of this as well.  
And then finally I know Bessie was going to talk about law enforcement but I think there's also a real need to help continue to train law enforcement and -- in how to conduct effective investigations of the real bad guys and the child predators and there's types because I think one of the reasons for some overreaching in terms of blocking content and those types of things is the feeling that those types of law enforcement efforts aren't being effective so I think the more we can make those law enforcement able to do their job the more we'll be able to head off some of the other proposals that might be overreaching.  
And then I guess I would like to close by just saying I think there's a real benefit to the type of international discussion we're having.  The work that FOSI is employing and GRID together it helps to share best practices and we'll hear about the great work the Cyber Peace Initiative is doing for example helping to spread the word on great things that are happening creating a cultural globally both in terms of parents and governments we're going to look at these issues but the more we can spread the concept of digital citizenship, you're really creating the next generation of Internet users that are going to I think be much better prepared.  So I think this is a great part of a larger discussion that we'll have -- it will have a good benefit.  And I see Bessie.  So maybe we'll be able to hear from her.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thanks so much, Jeff.  Bessie, do you want to try?  We see you.  But we don't hear you.  Okay.  
Thank you so much for trying.  
Nevine Tewfik will be talking and Mohamed will be talking about the amazing work in Egypt.

>> NEVINE TEWFIK:  Thank you so much.  Actually what I would like to share with you is the case study of Egypt because we have been experimenting with the past few years with all of these concepts of safety, digital citizenship.  So I would like to take you with a journey maybe with me and Mohamed about how we move from issues of access to issues of safety and now we're trying to work on issues with digital citizenship.  I come from a country of over 80 million citizens.  So a huge population.  Maybe 85 now I think.  
We have about 40,000 schools.  And 16 million students in primary, preparatory and secondary -- different grades in those schools.  We have a new challenge.  Our first challenge was actually the challenge of access.  This was the first priority we worked on of course.  To allow all of these students and young people in our country because we have actually a young population of over half of the overall population of Egypt.  Our population is quite young in age.  
So our first task was actually to work on access.  And this was the first part or the first phase of our journey.  And our work was mainly to develop different kinds of initiatives to avail ICT and the Internet to the population.  And this started maybe in 1999.  And it's going on until today.  So we were very keen on working for ubiquitous access everywhere and anywhere for the citizenship as well as using ICT for development because we felt and we are confident that ICT has a huge potential to offer or to facilitate some of the challenges that are facing Egypt.  So we had a number of ICT4D or ICT 4 Education project being developed by the information and technology sector.  However we were always competing with very pressing challenges in Egypt the challenges of poverty, unemployment, health issues, et cetera and we looked at our -- looked at our sector as a facilitator.
We were there, the sector is here to help maybe solve some of these problems or facilitate the work of other sectors such as the Ministry or the sector of the educational sector and the health sector so the first phase in our journey maybe to digital citizenship was first to avail the technology and the Internet.  So now we have about 21 Internet subscribers, million Internet subscribers and in mobile penetration we have 58 mobile phone subscribers so the numbers are increasing tremendously and obviously the sector is doing developing quite fast.  
Three years ago we realised that one of the pressing issues that we have to work on of course parallel with access and ICT4D is the issue of safety.  And this is when we created the Cyber Peace Initiative it's a joint project between the Minister of Communication and Suzanne Mubarak's National Peace Movement in addition to Private Sector companies including Microsoft sitting here and Cisco, Intel and other international organisations.  
Our interest was actually to harness ICT for young people.  That was our concern.  We had also many of the principles of digital citizenship in mind.  And that's why from the very beginning, we thought that maybe the three pillars that we have to work on for young people are empowerment, safety and innovation.  
The three pillars that are not actually -- actually we cannot separate one from the other.  
Throughout the three years we worked on the three pillars and maybe Mohamed will develop more or will elaborate more on what the young people have done along these lines.  But I would like to stress that we felt the need throughout the two last years to maybe focus consciously on the safety message.  So this was an actual choice that we made.  Because we felt that the society needs to know more about what are the Internet risks, what are the safety issues, what parents should do, what young people should do.  There was sort of a vacuum in the knowledge concerning the safety issues.  There were very little efforts.  So we felt that it was the time to focus a little bit of our message consciously to create a momentum in the society and this is where we took some very proactive steps.  
The first one was the creation of the Internet Safety Youth Group what we call NetMN and Mohamed is the coordinator of that so this is a group of young people dedicated to work on safety and in addition to that to empowerment and innovation but mainly the first task is safety the second group we created and we felt it was a necessity was the Parents Internet Safety Group and we have another separate coordinator for the parents.  With the parents, the challenge was a big different.  We focused a lot on the safety and digital citizenship the NetTK on all of these issues but maybe not so much on empowerment now we are trying to work on the empowerment part as well and the third group we felt was a real need was the educators Internet Safety Focus Group so we felt these were really the triangle if we want to have real trickle down effect or reach our 16 million students, then we need these three works to work in coordination the first group we have created also to work on the issue of safety and empowerment is a national group.
What we call now the eSafety National Working Group.  And this group actually includes representatives from different entities in the country that are concerned with safety issues.  Starting from Government entities, Minister of Interior, Minister of Justice, Minister of Communications, Family and Population to the Private Sector to ISPs and to a number of NGOs, as well.  We felt that there is a need also to have a dialogue and to synergize all of the efforts that were done in this respect.  
So far we have been actually working and as I said focusing on the safety message.  Together with some efforts in the empowerment.  
And we felt, also, recently that it's very important to start working maybe broadening Our perspective now maybe our audience is a little bit ready to accept a broader message.  
And we're starting to work on different other concepts of the digital citizenship.  
One of the main challenging concepts that we are keen to work on is the issue of media literacy and that's why at the IGF of 2009 in Sharm El Sheikh we had a workshop with the Council to look at different media content in a critical way and what to do about that.  However this is a very challenging work that we have actually in the next phase.  Challenging maybe with respect to educators in particular.  And here I have to say that the ancestor of the Cyber Peace Initiative is something we call the Egyptian Education Initiative.  That's part of the World Economic Forum Global Education Initiative and in the Egyptian Education Initiative we worked actually with 2,000 preparatory schools to introduce not only access but digital literacy, a different type of management for schools, peer-to-peer work among educators.
And we were also working on how to turn the school into a community network of knowledge.  
So the digital literacy process started in the Egyptian Education Initiative.  
We also included in the training of teachers the Web 2.0 of course tools and the different Private Sector, the public-private partnership we had availed different types of training for educators.  Including different types of training that have critical thinking and peer-to-peer work.  
The Egyptian Education Initiative has reached to about 2200 schools with a large number of educators.  And now what we are trying to do is to build on this momentum that was created by the Egyptian Education Initiative.  
I think this is quite a challenge because it requires a reformulation of the curriculum.  And it requires also a special training for teachers to understand or to internalize all of the principles of the digital citizenship.  
So this is something we -- a challenge that we have in front of us that we are thinking and considering and we are thinking how to do that.  I think also part of the challenge is the fact that digital citizenship is really multi-disciplinary so one of the one of the questions we have to raise is who are the teachers we need to address?  Are they the IT teachers or maybe teachers who are working on civic education or what exactly?  These are all questions that we need to set with our educators group.  
One of -- another actually challenge that we have but maybe it was more -- it was easier to handle was actually to avail material about digital citizenship in Arabic.  And I think Dave has mentioned our Arab Internet Safety Portal.  There are some brochures here about it.  
What we did was actually to take some literature about digital citizenship and translate it and provide it on the Arab Internet safety so in a way trying to socialize people, introduce these new concepts and it was quite helpful and I think this is a step forward.  
But another challenge is also how to tackle the issue of digital citizenship within our larger eSafety National Working Group.  Is digital citizenship a concept that we can tackle with the Minister of Interior for instance, the Ministry of Justice?  And how can we do that?  What is the -- Ministry of justice what is the language we have to use we have to be very practical actually otherwise we lose our members.  
With the -- the parents, the youth and the educators we felt a very important message also that relates to the digital citizenship concept is to create some kind of a dialogue among these three groups and we have done that through different channels, forums, one of them was actually to hold a particular forum about safety where the three groups were represented and where they had a chance to discuss with different consultants.  They happened to come from the European Commission issues related to safety, risks, opportunities and all of these issues.  
It was quite a successful experience because I think it was a step forward towards creating a dialogue between the three groups that we had in our project.  
Finally I would like Mohamed to share with you what is happening with the youth Internet Safety Focus Group.  I think this is one of our most successful experiences where you can find really different elements of the empowerment and safety and innovation combined.  Thank you.  

>> MOHAMED FATHY:  Thanks, Nevine for making my job easier giving the holistic vision about the Egyptian experience especially in the youth empowerment and the creation of national teams working on the subject.  
First I will be more specific.  Speaking about the -- where we initially created the Cyber Peace Initiative from December of 2011 up until now but first let me give you some figures about the youth activities and ICT indicators in Egypt so that you can be familiar with what we started from.  
Over the past decade, Egypt has seen tremendous growth in the use of Information and Communication Technologies.  As most revolutionary change young people have been in the Vanguard as learners, educators, innovators, social networkers, engineers, health care workers, bankers, administrators, scientists and artists, business people and  entrepreneurs, as well.  
It's been fortunate in being able to call on the talent, creativity and vision of many of those young people.  Egypt has a young population of diverse skills as Nevine mentioned actually half of our population are under the age of 25 so we have major challenges trying to address all of those numbers in an -- and in effective messages trying to build up on what we have.  
Over the last decade also Egypt has witnessed a giant leap in the number of Internet users from 200,000 users in 2000 and in the late '90s to 21 million in 2010.  
Actually 6.3 million of them are under the age of 20 years old.  And 3 million under the age of 17.  
With the huge number of youth using the Internet with things like the situations like 50% of them are not using the Internet effectively so we try to tackle these kinds of needs.  
We found that they are even committing some cyber crimes without knowing that this is a crime.  So it was like essential to start forming our national group who will focus on the Internet safety.  
An interesting number, also, is it indicates how much people how much youth in Egypt are focused and are involved in social networking platforms that Facebook users in Egypt have reached 4 million.  2.4 of them are males.  1.5 of them are females.  So it's like a huge increase with like penetration of 5.1%.  And penetration in comparison to the online population is 24%.  
So it's like striking numbers make us more determined to establish our Internet Safety Focus Group.  
In 2007 we created the Net-Aman team.  The Net-Aman is referred to the Internet for world net and this is the word for safety by creating the team with the help of ChildNet international we created the team of 11 founders who created the whole network after that we gave them like intense training for about six months.  During those six months we conducted three training sessions for them and then they conducted research on the usage of Internet between young ages.  
So we came up with the results that most of them are using the Internet from home.  And that -- they lack the supervision from parents.  So then we started the communication between the three groups as Nevine mentioned before.  
When we speak about empowerment, our whole model is based on empowerment along with the two other elements that Nevine mentioned which is safety and creativity.  But when we speak about empowerment, we need to identify what is empowerment.  
We see it as attitudinal, structural and cultural process.  Whereby young people can gain ability, authority and agency to make decisions and implement change in their own lives and the lives of other people.  
Including youth and others.  Youth empowerment for us is open and addressed as a gateway to intergenerational equity and civil engagement.  Because youth empowerment and personal growth are so important for young people to learn, the process should be encouraged and understood.  One of the most common and beneficial ways to encourage personal growth and empowerment is to give young adults increased responsibilities in their lives.  
This is actually what we did we created a team and we made every one of them like a Project Manager.  He has specific responsibilities he has a whole Government to manage with minor supervision from the team members.  The structure of the team comes like that we have the programme supervisors which is me, Nevine and other coordinators.  We have the co-founders, the initial team who created all of this the young people coming from diversified background the people of geographical distribution and then you have the focus team members and then we have after that the affiliates.  
The core team members are responsible for specific tasks.  For example you have now -- we have now outreach in seven govern rates in Egypt.  We have around 250 young trainers, young qualified trainers.  I would say so.  Because all of them says the initial and the basic qualifications in order to be able to address like a large number of people with confidence and being able to disseminate the message effectively.  
In the seven govern rates we have a kind of structure where we have in each govern rates what we call core team members five core team members in the govern rates who supervise the members of the core teams and the core team members in the governs are supervised by the co-founders.  We have seven govern rates now.  We like in the last nine months we reached around 50,000 of direct beneficials and I would say the number would be doubled if we consider that media and that outreach going through media and TV programmes.  
So it was like I would say like a success being able to do that in like a short time.  And we didn't stop there.  Actually we started to use our media channels in order to do this.  
What I want to mention, as well is those team members are self managed.  In a way that we are giving them the tasks.  And we are giving them the freedom in how to implement that task.  
So the innovation in doing the task is totally up to the team members.  With like supervision to correct the mistakes if it happens occasionally.  
The key elements of what I'm saying, the process actually we went through.  We tackled a lot of concepts that is related to the digital citizenship.  Like for example capacity building for example and also the media -- the ICT literacy the Internet etiquette.  The key elements for the success of our project I would say that we made them responsible we made them like project managers.  Each one of them have specific responsibility to handle.  We ask them to make contribution to the content creation the curriculum that we are conducting right now is a part of the programme supervisors that we contributed to and the other part is from the users themselves so the trainers themselves have the freedom to suggest content and after giving it the proper revision and approval by experts by using it so they feel like empowered and want to make more successes.
Also I think the keyword is that we are flexible in adapting the innovative approaches.  For example, we are creating like games.  We are conducting awareness sessions inside the schools.  IT clubs.  Universities.  And other channels of dissemination.  
We are coming up with innovative approaches like games maybe actually some interactive procedures to make the audience interact.  More than that.  
And the important thing is that one young leader is able to handle like 300 of these inside a room like this.  This is very difficult because they are not ready.  
So we have to go through a process of teaching them how to -- presentation skills, soft skills, how to be able to handle like a large number of people without being -- in young universities it's not easier.  In a school it's much easier in universities everyone can speak and if you are not speaking something interesting and to like an interest of large number, it won't succeed.  The session won't succeed.  It was a challenge for us and we overcome that by like preparing them effectively.  
I would also like to mention that capacity building we did it come prices ICT skills personal and communication skills peace related skills and Internet safety tutorials where youth are made aware of the potential hazards and risks to their safety online and encouraged to come up with solutions to those source problems.  
And finally the training of trainers.  The whole model is based on the TOT model actually we have the founders who are training other people and then which is a focus team.  And then they are training the affiliates so we are creating a kind of cascading model.  We are reaching out to our community by increasing the number.  
A question I would like to hear now making like 250 people of young people committed and motivated, very difficult.  Because they are not being paid.  They are doing all of that on like a voluntary basis.  
So I would say that empowerment is one of the answers to that.  They feel empowered.  They feel that the -- they gain skills.  Like for example I can recall one of the comments I heard from one of the young people that through like one year he has changed tremendously.  He has become someone else.  This will help him or her to get more jobs, communicate in an effective way in society.  
Another thing that I want also to highlight is the difficulty in finding the right calibers in order to get to 250 young people who have basic skills before giving them any specialised training, it was very difficult to identify people who are ready.  
We have so many as Nevine mentioned, we have like half our population are youth.  But they are not equipped with basic skills that allow us to use or build upon.  So we had like very strict selection criteria.  We hold like interviews in order to select like five we have to interview like 200.  So it's intense.  And we have a structure for the interviews.  Every one of the interviews are being made by one of the supervisors and three of the co-founders.  So it's not our choice only.  It's the choice of the people who are trained, as well.  
One of the difficulties, as well is the communication.  It's very difficult to communicate to like around 250 people using phone calls and e-mails only.  
We need to create our own information, management information system.  So that each trainer of those 250 will be -- will have like his own page with tasks and responsibilities.  We are now creating this system in order to be able to manage this various network of young people.  And I'm also happy to mention that this kind of information system is being developed by young people themselves.  By the engineers in our network.  So it's impressive.  And we very much honour and respect what they are doing right now.  
I would also like to highlight the word motivation.  Because it makes everything possible.  
I believe in that.  And I believe very much in if youth lacks the motivation, nothing will happen.  All that happens because they were motivated.  They have a specific goal to go.  And to implement.  And achieve.  
So the motivation was very important.  And the motivation cannot come from the supervisor only.  It comes from the co-founders.  And from the team members in the focus teams and from the affiliates.  So in order to have this kind of spirit, it's very difficult but it can be maintained through structures and systems.  
In relation to what I said to the digital citizenship, I believe that the journey we have been taking includes all kinds of digital citizenship concepts like for example digital etiquette where we are actually telling them or educating them about the electronic standard or procedures.  
Digital communication.  All of our communication with them is digital now so we are adopting this.  Digital literacy, they are being told some of the basic ICT skills and our partners are helping us in doing that effectively.  
Digital access.  And I would say also the digital citizenship security, which is the main focus of our programme.  
My final comment would be our main topic is Internet safety.  But the model we created can carry different messages, as well.  So Internet safety is the main.  But we can also use that model to build up and use -- speak about different pop topics, as well.  Thank you very much.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thanks so much, Mohamed.  It's a very impressive case study.  And I think that the challenges and questions are really universal.  You're not alone in those challenges and questions.  
I think we're going to have Bessie patched in in a second.  So the booth is helping us.  We're going to go from the mic to Bessie.  

>> BESSIE PANG:  Okay -- okay.  
Okay.  You got me on the video?  Okay.  Can you hear me now?  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Yes, can you hear us?  

>> BESSIE PANG:  I'll start the presentation.  Okay.  So hello everybody over there.  I'm the Executive Director for the Society for the Policing of Cyberspace.  And I hope that it's working fine with the audio.  
So first of all, I would like to introduce what we do.  And following on what David Miles was mentioning earlier from FOSI about the law enforcement, industry and Government working together.  And that's what all we're about.  The Society for the Policing of Cyberspace is about pulling those partnerships together on an international level.  
So what -- that is our main mission.  Our goals are to establish permanent networking internationally with the law enforcement, industry, Government and academia, as well.  
And we also have the other arm with the public dealing with the public education.  
And that also interests non-English communities especially in Vancouver and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, et cetera.  But internationally we also reach out to outside countries.  
So why do we need collaboration?  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Bessie, could you stay close to the mic.  You're fading in and out.

>> BESSIE PANG:  Okay.  Is that better now.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Yes, much better.

>> BESSIE PANG:  So why do we need the collaboration internationally?  It's because we need to share information on trends, best practices and new trends in other parts of the world which might not be seen in own part of the world and vice versa and the law enforcement really needs to get the support from industry.  And the industry needs the sharing from law enforcement to -- with regards to information and with regards to resources.  So lots of what we do at POLCYB has to do with providing the opportunity for that kind of sharing through conferences, through our quarterly meetings and international conferences we get outside of North America to go to other countries and we look a lot at legislation, as well.  
So we do a lot with looking at different countries.  Different jurisdictions of course have different legislation.  And that is one major hurdle that law enforcement will have to jump over all the time.  It's when the investigation which cross over international boundaries.  
And so what we have as some of our major initiatives, one major one is to establish -- is to develop a portal within POLCYB.  So that one is a trusted community portal.  That's what we call it.  And only POLCYB members, registered members, can have access to this just because of the information on what they do in investigations and technology, what are the new technologies, new technological solutions, best practices, policies, so forth.  That are within our portal.  The industry and law enforcement and Government agencies can all share those informations.  
The other key area is the whose who directory on portal.  That's all under development.  But one other hurdle is to have access to the right person, to the right contact.  Especially if they are on the other side of the world.  
And language issues is also a problem, too.  
So knowing who they are dealing with is very important.  
So we look at prevention, detection and combat of cybercrime.  
So we don't do -- like POLCYB itself doesn't deal with investigations itself.  We do get requests from the public as well as from law enforcement agencies and from the industry especially corporate security as to who they should contact for investigation.  And we pass on their files.  
So as an example we have a female contacts us from India.  And she has -- someone has hacked into her e-mails and had access to her photos, as well -- so the person was actually from Canada.  She wasn't having much help from the local law enforcement.  
So somehow she found us on the web site and we passed on the information to our law enforcement partners in Canada.  And that was so the files could transfer.  
So that's what we do.  We reach out.  
So that's about all I want to say for now and I'll answer questions later.  Thank you.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thanks, Bessie, now we'll move on to ChildNet.  

>> WILL GARDNER: Hi, everybody.  A little bit of musical chairs.  I've actually upgraded chairs which is really nice much more comfortable.

>> ANNE COLLIER: First class.

>> WILL GARDNER: Yeah, it's good.  I'm from ChildNet international just a brief background we're a children's charity we're based in the UK and our mission is to help make the Internet a great and safe place for children and we work with different organisations, different sectors in the UK and around the world.  And I guess we're -- to put it sort of in a practical reality, we go to schools.  We have an education team and Pip is here from our education team today.  And we go and we talk to the children and we talk to the teachers, we talk to the parents.  And we're talking about the Internet in a positive way but equipping them in a similar way that Mohamed was just outlining.  So it's a positive conversation.  And I'll talk about citizenship in a minute.  But citizenship lends itself to a very good platform to have this positive conversation which includes the likes of safety and security and your own values moving into the digital arena.

We also work in the policy space.  We are on the UK Council for Child Internet Safety.  And we work in a advisory capacity with other organisations in different sectors.  
I've got just three points that I wanted to make for this session.  One was about citizenship -- digital citizenship involving rights and responsibilities.  But also participation.  And participation by the user.  And with that link I want to introduce the Youth IGF Project that we have been running.  We have three young people today with us we have Alice, Carla and Alissa at the front here who will be engaging in the conversation, discussion that we have as soon as I finish talking.  And the background behind this project was last year we were lucky enough to be able to get funding to record children's voice and take it to the IGF in Egypt and we were able to bring two young people and they were able to talk with the young people from Egypt and there was a very, very interesting workshop that they had where they were portraying their thoughts.
The IGF is a multistakeholder discussion and children and young people are a key stakeholder.  So the project is essentially based around bringing this voice to the table this year we've been lucky enough to get funding again for this project and we brought eight young people here to Vilnius and rather than have a workshop of our own the young people have been seated around different workshops so their voice will be heard by a larger number of people.  That's the idea.  So they are here to talk.  But they are also here to take messages away so they will writing a blog and taking pictures.  You've probably seen the camera flashing during the session.  And they are also keen to do interviews with participants here to hear what their thoughts are and their views are on particular things and then they will be posting that up onto a site which can then be communicated to a range of young people back in the UK and beyond.
So the first point there is about participation the second point has been spoken about already quite a bit and it's been access and education.  We've heard about the benefits of the Internet and there's a recognition of that and if you look in terms of children's rights, the children's rights if you think of their rights to education, participation, freedom of expression, access to media, you can see how technology is woven into these different themes.  
There's been a big push for access in the UK.  There's been a couple of big programmes.  One was a programme called the Home Access Programme which was a large amount of money by the previous Government 300 million pounds a sort of amount of money which I think those days have passed sort of governmentally speaking to try to get children and households access to the Internet and technology who haven't had it previously.  So it's a huge and ambitious project and we were fortunate enough to be able to provide some resource to when people get access to this technology, there's a resource there which explains to them what the benefits of the technology is and what the potential risks are and what steps you can do to keep safe.  And that was answering some direct questions we were getting from parents.  When they receive the technology, they do want to hear about the risks and do want to know what they can do about it but some of the parents are saying:
You need to tell us what the benefits are of this technology.  We can see the benefits to our children.  That's very clear.  But we need that communicated to us and that relates very much to the digital citizenship conversation.  How can you engage and participate and benefit as well as staying safe and secure online.  There's a new programme called Race Online 2012.  London is holding the Olympics in the year 2012.  The mission is to get the remaining parts of the population that have not gone online to get them online.  It's a very ambitious project the we have in the UK 40 million Internet user 30 million of those use it daily 10 million are not Internet user and 4 million of those are from the more vulnerable part of the UK society.  
So there's a big challenge that we need to try to engage in and the way they are selling it is there's economic benefit in getting online you will miss job advertisements you will save yourself 560 pounds a year if you're online by virtue of being able to shop smarter and all of the rest of it.  
The last point I wanted to make was about collaboration we've heard of that a little bit I think Martin said everyone has a role to play in digital citizenship.  And we're talking about parents and teachers and children and industry.  
And there is a degree of some -- we're here at a multistakeholder conversation.  We were hearing about the Working Group in Egypt.  And technology group in the US.  And in the UK we have our Council for Internet Safety.  
It's really important that we are able to work together as a multistakeholder group so we're able to share our experience and our knowledge.  And if we are providing messages and I think it's important for all of these different sectors to have messages on hand there's a level of consistency between them so we don't end up confusing the audiences we're trying to reach.  And it enhances the credibility of the message.  
So I think that's a key thing for us to do.  
So those are three points I wanted to make.  
But I did also want to bring in the young people briefly just so they can share some reflections around the theme of digital citizenship.  And I just -- the first one I wanted to ask was around was well what is your experience what are your thoughts and what's your experience around education on this theme?  

>> ALICE TOOMER McALPINE:  Hi.  I'm Alice, and 18.  I got involved through an organisation called Radio Waves.  They are a youth journalist project so they teach young people how to use the equipment how to do interviews, things like that go to events and report on them.  And the reason why I think this is relevant to digital citizenship is because I found that the informal learning environment of Radio Waves is -- has actually been more beneficial to me than school or college.  And my experience of ICT in school and college I can't really remember it so that's probably kind of shows you know that it's not actually that helpful.  
So I actually can't remember learning anything about the Internet in particular.  Most of it we did Word based and things like that.  Even though obviously I learned how to use the Internet myself and through my friends and family.  But having the resources that were available through Radio Waves actually helped me to develop kind of my own identity online so I have my own page where I can put my own stories and blogs and thoughts so I think that's something which should be looked into more and hopefully made more available to everybody else.  Because from what I've heard about big projects in Egypt, which is similar to the Radio Waves projects giving young people more power and things like that doesn't sound like they are available to everybody which is the same of ours obviously because of obvious reasons like funding and things like that.
But if that could be somehow integrated into formal education so say everybody has half a day off a week or whatever go out to do that thing, then I think that would really help a lot of young people to kind of find themselves online and offline.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: How did you figure out what was appropriate to post?  As you were sort of developing a profile online, did you figure it out through your community, your peer community or some kind of lesson or curriculum.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  Yeah it was a mixture.  So an element of a school setting where obviously you will be sat down and they will tell you how to use the web site and they will tell you what's appropriate and what's not.  But there's also an element of trust so they will treat you like adults and expect.  So they will tell you what they expect from you.  But I think most people know what's appropriate and know what's not.  It's just whether they are going to get away with it or whether it's going to be looked at.  
So I think once you give people the freedom to kind of say what they need to say, tell them what's appropriate, then that's when people kind of come into their own and they can analyze what's appropriate and what's not themselves.  

>> WILL GARDNER: Can I ask another question to the group when we talk about digital citizenship we were talking about rights and responsibilities.  On the responsibility theme, what do you see as your role in -- as being a digital citizen, what is your role to others.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  Well, I think that all of us have a role in helping each other.  Because I know for a fact at home that I help my mom with a everything -- like most things on the Internet.  Because she just doesn't have a clue really.  And -- but she also helps me and my siblings.  So it's sort of a two-way thing really.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Do we have any -- we would love to have comments, questions from the audience.  Questions for Alissa, Alice and Carla?  Any of the panelists of course.  But some of us are more interesting than others.  

>> RAJESH CHHARIA:  Thank you very much.  Rajesh Chharia from India.  I'm the president of the ISP Association of India as well as the Chairman of the Cyber Initiative of India which consists of 150 cyber cafes all over India a small correction in India there are 15% -- 15% English speaking not 5%.

>> ANNE COLLIER: 15 only 15.

>> RAJESH CHHARIA:  Yeah and that's into the metro cities but slowly, slowly we are progressing towards the rural area from which -- from where the call centres are very much progressing very high.  
A comment.  Our Government has taken a lot of initiative in terms of the broadband penetration.  Especially targeting the youth, 18 plus.  And that's one of the reasons we have come out with the National Knowledge Network to which we are connecting all of the schools, colleges, universities, and specialised colleges with this network.  So that they should get the Internet access easily.  
Apart from that our regulator has come out with a national broadband plan in which we are targeting the 70% rural of India.  
We have seen the success of the mobile in India, 15 million mobile connections every month which is larger than the population of Lithuania.  And to today we have 680 million mobile connectivity and our target for 2015 is 1 billion.  So as for broadband we are right now lagging behind in broadband.  9 million broadband connection.  But yet by 2015 we are targeting around 250 broadband connections, also.  Because already the 3G and BWA is into the rural area.  
Major challenge what we are facing right now from the Internet because India has got a mixed experience with the high income group low income and middle income group our parents are educated and some parents are illiterate, also, but they want their children to be more educated and Internet savvy and PC savvy the challenges we are facing what illiterate parents are facing a lot but not allowing their kids to go near to the Internet one is the pornographic.

>> ANNE COLLIER: What is it.

>> RAJESH CHHARIA:  Pornographic is the biggest challenge.  Another is the cybersecurity.  And especially the cybercrime in terms of finance which is happening right now.  And third, the Indian problem is the content.  Because we have got 22 different languages.  And the developing content in all of the regional languages is the biggest challenge.  
Our Government is very mysterious about the broadband.  That's one of the reasons the Indian Government has mandated that by 2011 December all the service providers have to be connected with the IPv6 and the IPv6 network has to be rolled out.  
We have experienced the success of our largest rural area network by the ticketing through the Internet.  
What we are claiming is that the moment -- at the moment every local self governance application is going on the Internet the corruption will go down and Internet will be the biggest tool in curbing the corruption from India.  We have a very large target in terms of IT and the digital citizenship.  And we assure -- we are sure that the way our Government as well as the industry is progressing towards a development very soon we will find that India will emerge as a super broadband user in terms like the same what we are doing right now in mobile.  Thank you.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thank you so much.  

>> LARRY MAGID:  Thank you I want to go back to the kids and following up on Anne's question.  I'm curious the difference between what adults tell you need to do to be safe and what you and your peers truly from your own experience and your own sense of the net think you need to do to be safe or to be productive or healthy and just for those of us who go around talking sometimes to kids I think we need to learn more from you in terms of not so much what we tell you but what you can tell us from your own experiences about what it means to be not only a digital citizen but a safe and productive citizen.  

>> ANNE COLLIER:  So was the question what's the difference with what adults tell you about Internet safety.

>> LARRY MAGID:  Among yourselves what you think is important in terms of whether it's safety citizenship or just kind of hang out online.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  Well probably the difference is probably just that the main things that young people probably focus on when they are speaking to each other is to do with things -- your information being shared maybe through Internet working sites like pictures and different information and finding out how to make certain things private because maybe you don't want the adults to see what you're doing which is probably one of the main things.  
And the kind of things that maybe schools and education and adults would be focusing on will maybe be more general whereas we just focus on if something happens and that's when you're going to react to it that makes sense rather than forward planning the things which might happen.  
And a lot of things which maybe the adults will be focusing on more is what you can access.  Whereas we don't care what we can access.  We just know that if we don't want to see something we will either click it off or just not go on that web site.  We don't -- you know it doesn't really effect us if it's there.  It's just knowing whether to look at it or not.  I think.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Here is a question here.  

>> BUD PERRY:  I'm Bud Perry from AD Service in Rushcliffe.  If I may expand on that point one frequent one is what you get to when you're being told from adults what to look at on stuff on the Internet is people pertaining to be people they are not on things like forums and on social networks and things.  And while you are often told not to -- keep an eye out for them and not to go on forums and things because of the dangers associated with these people if you are ever directed to if you do use forums which sorts of ones are safe which ones to look out for as -- or what sort of things to look out for to see if a forum is safe and if they are appropriate -- if there are appropriate moderators and things on there.  
And also I think there needs to be a lot more awareness with youth as to the permanency of things put on the Internet.  That if you put something on the Internet, it stays there for even after you delete social networking account or anything because of various Web sites and systems in place on the Internet, it's going to stay there.  
More awareness needs to be put into this and into making -- promoting young people to change their privacy settings.  
Perhaps a good way to demonstrate how things you put into the Internet stay there and how easily accessible they are perhaps some lessons why these are taught or throughout whatever medium they are taught perhaps through a demonstration with either volunteer -- if that will cause issues or any volunteers with someone who is either a -- who has already volunteered to let them be used and in a practical demonstration.  And that's all.  Thank you.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thank you.  We've got several hands.  
You go, Martin, you know who to pick.  

>> MARTIN COCKER: It's up to you.

>> Thank you.  I'm Ati Suria (phonetic) from from China Network.  We are talking about like on Internet the literacy, education and the role of educators.  There's a case in Thailand, as well, that Ministry of Education funded one project just recently like two months ago a lot.  It's called -- the project is called CyberScout.  And so they train kids, children and youth on how to use the Internet properly.  And one of the workshops that they do actually is -- it's a main focus of this programme is that the -- they train these children on how to support comments on web forums or any blocked codes that they consider a threat to national security.  
So when we are talking about education, it makes me think of that power in the relationship.  When I was a kid when the teacher said the word behave, it always reminded me like behave and in parenthesis to his or her norms.  And in the case -- and I heard that in the case of EU -- you talked about the laws, innovation, empowerment and safety in Thailand as like social norms, core values three pillars that we can say of our nation which is very strong recently is that it's three things, three pillars, well the nation the religion and the monarchy.  
So anything that parents or say the Ministry of Education or the Government consider are going to be a trap to any of these pillars is a business going against our social norms.  So the -- the training show the children and youth to spot the comments that is going to be against national security.  It's going to be a threat.  And then the training indicates to report back to the officers, to the Government officers.  
So I mean this is also the question is how to really make sure that I mean the core values of the Internet affect the openness, the open possibilities, innovation, whatsoever, it's really protected.  And how to really make sure that Internet education is not really becoming an Internet reeducation.  Thank you.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Interesting.  Thanks.  There was a hand over here.  He's being efficient.  

>> CLOTIDLE FONSECA:  Thank you.  First of all, thank you very much for all of the participants.  I have a lot of good information about best practices.  I'm from Costa Rica.  I am the vice Minister of science and technology of Costa Rica.  I want to share with you that our country started the Digital Literacy Programme in '86-87 under the President Arias, Nobel Peace Prize presidency in the year.  
The person who was in charge of the programme, she's now the Minister of Science and Technology.  For the first time in our history we have a woman as a President.  Same as Lithuania.  The Time magazine last week has identified that female leaders in the world and both Presidents were in this history and in interview in Time magazine.  
So we're a programme of -- our programme of digital literacy right now we have four months in the Government.  And we are supporting new strategies and new models based on best practices.  To increase the implementation of strategies directed to prevent online threats, to coordinate actions for relevant stakeholders from the private and public sectors.  To ensure children and young people that they can access to the Internet safely.  
Right now we are working in coordination with ITU in a very specific strategy that will be launched on October.  And it includes with the support of the ITU the participation of some NGOs working strong with the Government.  This is a kind of public-private partnership that we need to develop in this area.  
And I just want to tell you that the leadership under this kind of -- these kind of issues is very important for countries in the Latin American context.  
There is a new era of connectivity in our countries.  We are just like ten years after the European and developed countries context.  
So a lot of problems that you have at least ten years working on we are just beginning to deal with.  Thank you very much.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: I think that having been involved for ten years is good and bad.  You know, latecomers -- I shouldn't say latecomers can leapfrog some of our mistakes and start in a very positive way and we happy maybe this discussion about digital citizenship is useful for that.  So you may have a serious advantage over some of us.  

>> MARSALI HANCOCK:  I'm Marsali Hancock with the Internet Keepsake Coalition.  And I'm hoping to throw out ideas for next year's conversation with IGF and I'm hoping to hear more about this topic next year is helping to implement the public health approach we talk about law enforcement because we have baseline horrible things that can happen out there but several years ago we were working with the Harvard Berkman Task Force the researchers challenged us to say for the first time in the history of mankind we can actually identify and detect much earlier youth at risk and youth experiencing challenges so what can we do the adults around youth using digital technology being able to better detect so over the last ten months we have been working with Harvard centre for media and child health and how can we integrate homeschool policies and health care education initiatives to include the digital citizenship environment so here is a quick example we had a teacher who picked up a cell phone and -- he picked a -- he was 13 it was a picture of his genitals.
It was child pornography and another student that had handguns and gang pair fell nail I can't though he hasn't done anything illegal yet a student is being groomed by a local gang to violent behavior so rather than waiting until that student is 16 and has committed a crime and then try to intervene three years earlier there was that opportunity the other teacher picked up a cell phone the screensaver was child pornography because it was a picture of private parts of a young boy at the school and helping that school navigate that experience from before and after and creating their own strategies for prevention and detection and intervention.  But from the public health folks we keep hearing why don't we hear more from the Internet safety education curriculum, more about detection.  There's very little in our conversation from all of us including on the panel around detection and intervention.
So I'm hoping we can work together collectively to look at that detection and intervention strategy at the local community level.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Thank you very much.  That's an important point.  

>> PRISCILLA AKWARA:  Thank you.  Priscilla from UNICEF New York.  And I would like to thank you all for this panel.  Very interesting and very informative.  I have a question for the Cyber Peace Initiative.  
My question is actually in reference to the intervention of the young women on the right corner of the room.  And I would like to know if actually according to your experience Nevine and Mohamed, do you think that the perception of risk by the Egyptian youth is similar to the perception of risk by kids in western countries let's say generally?  Would you say the fresh hold sometimes of what's a risk is lower or higher according to cultural differences, religious differences or just socioeconomic differences and thank you so much for being here so we can hear from this region of the world, as well.  Thank you.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Musical chairs again.  

>> MOHAMED FATHY:  Actually I would say that the first time when ChildNet came and helped us forming our young group, the curriculum afterwards needs to be modified in order to tailor the needs of our society and respond to the needs of our people.  So I would say the threats, the actions is different.  I would say something like cyber bullying is less identified in our society than in those societies.  Maybe the risks that most of our people, most of our youth face the most imagined risks is that personal protection somehow the child protection, as well.  But not as large -- we don't have like many incidents like that happening in --

>> ANNE COLLIER: You mean against adults or against peers.

>> MOHAMED FATHY:  Actually against peers and themselves, yeah.  I mean we have like kind of statistics, international statistics saying that parents might be the suspect or the one who is harming the children, something like that.  
This is like in Egypt it's less.  We can say that it is like happening frequently.  
Personal protection and the protection that -- how to protect yourself.  And like kind of playing cards and stealing money, it's introduced in Egypt rather than other issues for example.  
So it is different.  I would say it is different.  And it is different because of the cultural differences between societies.  
I think Nevine can elaborate more.

>> NEVINE TEWFIK:  I would agree with Mohamed definitely that there are differences.  And I always mention the example of our workshop, the workshop I had with Marsali this is an example not just from Egypt but from the Arab region in Bahrain where we had actually to write down a list of risks that we thought educators in Bahrain and parents in Bahrain would identify as key.  And we realise that there is a gap between what the parents and the educators in Bahrain were considering as risks and what we had on our list.  
This is an example from Bahrain but from Egypt I think we also have different issues.  Although until now I still say we need better research methodology to make sure that our findings are correct.  
One of the hypothesis we have is that more and more people, young people, are finding in the virtual world some kind of safety valve or a gateway to the pressure of society.  The problems of society.  
I cannot label this really as a risk.  But I think there are some psychological and social issues that are very connected to that.  And we need to be very sensitive to that.  The identities that the young people are creating online are sometimes completely different from their identities in real life.  
We find big contradictions what young girls wouldn't say face to face in society they would say it virtually and we hear a lot of stories, case studies, anecdotes about that.  Even stories portrayed in movies.  And I think it's very important for us to conduct really a good research on what are the risks that we confront in our society.  As Mohamed said, I don't think cyber bullying is the main issue.  I think that we have issues of people using the Internet, young people using the Internet to sometimes defame each other, reputational issues.  
They use it as a threatening tool.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Which is a form of cyber bullying in some definitions.

>> NEVINE TEWFIK:  Yeah maybe it's cyber bullying.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Would you say that there's a cultural phenomenon there in terms of developing an alternate identity?  I wonder how prevalent that is?  I would love to ask Carla and Alissa and Alice about that, if that's an issue in the UK.  
Do you know people in your peer groups who are different online.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  I'm different online.  I'm actually Cole online.

>> ANNE COLLIER: You have another personality, Martin.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  Yeah, some of my friends are quite a lot different online than they are actually in like real life.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Different in terms of are they more out there?  Are they more nasty?  Are they entirely --

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  Some of my friends are like quite shy.  But then on like Facebook and things like that, they are more open about things and they are more like out there.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: So there's a sense of -- that disinhibition that anonymity sort of helps them.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  Yeah.

>> AUDIENCE:  I work for ChildNet I'm in educational offices so I don't know if I classify as a young person but I'm out in schools quite often and I work with our network panel and one of the things I find from schools but also from sessions that we had last year with our Youth IGF Project based in the UK we had young gals opening saying I'm a totally different person online I dress up and put up photos and put on extra makeup to get that attention but we also had a young boy who was incredibly shy who said it gave me the confidence to talk to girls on the playground I can't but to be able to talk to people without intimidation it was an excellent tool not looking at it as a bullying side of things but launching to how they would have a voice and talk to people that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise.

>> ANNE COLLIER: That's what we're seeing in the US, too it can cut either way in Egypt is it considered to be more public online or is it a positive.

>> NEVINE TEWFIK:  It's not being more public but sometimes it's acting in a completely different way value-wise from what this person is in reality.

>> MARTIN COCKER: But are both of those cases really role play people trying to find their identity?  Do those identities manifest themselves in the real world at all, do you know, the people you know?  

>> ANNE COLLIER: We need a mic over here.  

>> I think it can work either way in terms of what you say about role play because on the one hand you can get people who may have a vibrant personality but don't know how to show it in real life like you said in talking to girls quite shy then the other side like you say some people might end up saying things they don't actually believe in because they have the opportunity to say it without any consequences.  But one of the things that I've been speaking about with some people over the past few days is that actually real life and the virtual world I think are becoming more similar because if you look like the social networking sites like personally I used to use MySpace and now I use Facebook and on MySpace it was very common to have a different name and your profile wouldn't necessarily be your interests and hobbies it might be a quote from a book or something like that whereas now it's more kind of like this is me this is what I do in real life and you're more likely to have your friends that you actually know rather than just people that you've met online.
So I think it is moving more towards real life.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: It's very interesting.  Because MySpace and Facebook in our country have kind of cross crossed.  And they are very different tools.  MySpace is kind of a self expression tool.  Identity exploration, all of that.  Whereas Facebook is more sort of a social utility.  It's just a utility.  And it's so interesting to see how that's what's sort of taking off in the world.  That has -- is approaching 600 million users.  

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  What I found with Internet identities and things is some people who find it -- in my friendship groups who find it quite difficult to talk to people use the Internet to find people -- like-minded individuals.  And discuss topics which interest them.  
But have -- again there are negative sides to it, as well in a school quite near to mine is someone who made a Facebook profile under the name of something like Truth Speak which they used to spread malicious rumors and every day they would post something different which some of them would have just enough factual basing for them to be some level of believability but then use hyperbole to make it a complete lie which would then effect the victim.  And it would seem to be someone different each day.  
And for weeks it did get quite a lot of hits.  Until we could find out who it was and the whole school was outraged of who this person could be and why they were doing this but eventually they stopped I don't know whether it was because they were getting -- things were getting discovered or not but they never found who did it in the end.

>> ANNE COLLIER: I would love to come back around.  We're wrapping it up here.  Back to digital citizenship.  In this latest discussion about identity and publicity and privacy and in social networking sites, is there something related to digital citizenship there?  I would love to ask the young people if they feel that this idea, this concept of rights and responsibilities as well as engagement and access are useful.  
Are we moving in the right direction with online safety in moving it in this sort of positive empowering direction?  I would love to know if you have any an answer to that.  Or anybody.  Anybody.  

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  It's not enough anymore to teach about Internet safety.  This is crucial.  But we believe that education about the Internet and new technologies needs to be more wide ranging.  Those receiving the education today will be helping to shape the future development and growth of these technologies.  And so it is vital that they properly understand the landscape in which they are operating and will be building.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Excellent.  Thank you so much.  Anybody else?  We have a few minutes.  Do you want to change the subject, Larry?  No, you're welcome to.

>> LARRY MAGID:  Not to change it.  Larry Magid, with Connect Faithfully.  One of the things that I'm hearing from the young people here and also from the adult panelists is a very positive message that overwhelmingly we are moving forward again not to protect people from bad things but to encourage digital citizenship.  Yet when you look at the press at least in the United States, you keep hearing about used to be predator panic and then it became bullying panic and now we have sexting panic and now predator -- it just goes on and on and on and I'm wondering what is it going to take -- this is really a continuation of this conversation what is it going to take to change the conversation globally among the media and stakeholders to really understand that young people today for the most part seem to be thriving online and we have a small minority a very small minority of endangered young people who have variety of problems for is a variety of reasons and when will we get to the point of -- stop worrying about the dangers and start celebrating this opportunity for young people?  

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  I think obviously it will be very hard to get the media to say something very positive at all.  So maybe we should be focusing more on how young people see what they are going to be doing on the Internet.  Whether that's going to be beneficial to them or whether it's going to be a risk or a safety issue.  
And I think the main thing is just to try to encourage the community kind of basis of the Internet and the fact that what we have all kind of said is we need to speak to our friends about Internet issues more than anyone else really.  
So if that's just promoted and just kind of to keep open discussion and positive things being said to the people who are using the Internet, then hopefully the way they see it is going to reflect what happens.  

>> MARTIN COCKER: I would also like to say that in New Zealand where we have almost a micro climate compared to some of the other numbers people are talking about here the Internet is well received in the media because when something goes wrong in the Internet there's only a number of people you can call one of whom is me so we can control the actual message that goes out so I think we, the cyber safety industry has a big role to play in that because we have been of a long time screaming:  Danger and fear and so forth.  And so the media have had sort of easy print, you know.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Small is beautiful in a way.

>> YOUTH PANELIST:  There was an incident in school in our area, too the reaction is not even just in the media sometimes but even the e-mails that went out among the parents and I think giving parents some sense that they can better understand and manage what their children are doing will help to diffuse some of the fear, as well.  That's an important part of this.

>> ANNE COLLIER: I think diffusing fear is a huge goal especially in the United States we have.  And it's going to be interesting to see how well we do with that.  I think there are other countries that have done a much better job.  

>> MARILYN CADE: I'm Marilyn Cade.  I guess I would say I've heard a different message, as well.  And that is that actually there's a lot more work that's needed to be able to take some of the concepts that may have been developed in New Zealand or in Egypt and elsewhere.  And move them into the mobile world.  And move them into the emerging economies where vast numbers of people are coming online.  India is adding 12 to 14 million a month mobile users.  15 million.  China is adding 8 to 9 million.  And you know, many of those folks today are maybe using voice but will be using the Internet and using hand held devices.  And what I've heard most of you talking about is actually a programmatic look at an ecosystem and different kinds of activities, sharing, developing resources and then leveraging them and then taking them out to youth and asking youth to also develop the materials and the mentoring.

So maybe that's my question to you all is how do you see digital citizenship scaling in a vastly mobile world.  And in dealing with really rapidly growing populations of new users.

>> ANNE COLLIER: Well, I do -- yeah, I think it might be.  But clearly the Internet is becoming more mobile all the time.  It's everywhere.  It's on multiple devices.  More every year it seems.  And the SmartPhone install base is growing very rapidly in many countries there's banking on cell phones I'm sure more in Indian than in the United States.  So I think what that all spells because of the ubiquity of the Internet multi-device multimedia multi-everything what we're talking about is developing the filter between children's ears that's something my co-Director Larry Magid coined I think back in the late '90s but that's what it comes down to really.  Is developing that software that goes with them everywhere.  And is -- it proves with use -- it improves with use and it's extremely mobile and everybody is born with it.  
And so we've got -- I think digital citizenship really speaks to that more than almost any other online safety measure that we can take is teaching children to be able to function as well in community and personally in any space anywhere on any device.  

>> I also think there's a common theme whether it's the Working Group in the US or Cyber Peace Initiative multistakeholder which I know gets talked about a lot here but really everyone wants to provide a safe environment for children.  So whether it's -- the broader the engagement, the more it will scale.  There's a lot of interest there.  It's just kind of channel that into some real activities.  

>> ANNE COLLIER: Anybody else?  It's been a fantastic session.  Thank you, all, for participating so much.  
(Applause)

(Session ended at 1336)

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