The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MICHAEL OGHIA: Hey, if anybody is here for the YCI meeting, can you just come to the central table? It will be easier to talk to everyone. And if you're not here for the YCI meeting, can I please ask you to make your way out because we only have an hour and we have other things to do, too.
Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for attending this session. And if, so, this is the start of the annual general meeting of the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance. For those, if you don't know what the YCIG is, basically, the YCIG is an international ‑‑ well, first of all, it's a recognized dynamic coalition of the IGF for youth to come together and coordinate and, you know, really advocate for youth‑related issues, whether that be something related directly to youth or whether that be for youth perspectives. My name is Michael Oghia, I was one of the internal steering committee members for this year, and basically, what happened was, after the last meeting that we had, which was in Guadalajara at IGF 2016, we basically coalesced around one central issue we needed to address. And that was the fact that we had to update our charter. Our charter was severely out of date, and there was a lot of things about it that we needed to edit, we needed to update. So, what happened, is we opened up ‑‑ basically, the YCIG opened up nominations for an internal steering committee since none of us were actually elected, and there were five people, including myself, that were appointed to this internal steering committee to basically do two things. One was to oversee the charter revision process and the second one was basically to make sure that the YCIG fulfills its required ‑‑ fulfills basically the requirements of being a dynamic coalition, which includes submitting a midterm report, organizing the session at the end of the year, et cetera.
And liaising with the IGF Secretariat, which is will the part of what we do. So, there were four other members with myself, but unfortunately, only one of them is here at the IGF, and, but they're, I guess, in another session. So, basically, the most ‑‑ I don't have a presentation or anything. But the most, really, the biggest thing that we've done this year as the YCIG is update our charter. It took about four months, but we finally got it approved and ratified and while, you know, of course it's open to amendments over time, but the fact is that we at least have a working document now ‑‑ I'm sorry, we have a much better document to work with now.
And, something that was really exciting is that we had our first election, our first steering committee election. So now we can at least have a much more formal structure going forward in terms of, who is our leadership? What is our leadership? How do we hold them accountable?
Well, that was basically a look back. To be honest, the YCIG, there's a lot of things we needed to look at but we can do that towards the end of the session. That was basically one of the highlights was our charter, coordinating ‑‑ obviously, a couple other big things we've done in case you're not aware of them. One is that on the YCIG website, there is a getting involved, which can be just a hub of how to participate in internet governance. If you go to the YCIG website, which, let me just, which is just, YGIGweb.wordpress.com. And we still, we don't have a domain, do we, David?
>> DAVID: Yeah, we do have. It will be youthCIG.org.
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: Okay. So if you go to the getting involved guide, that is basically a step by step guide of how to engage in different processes in different organizations, different fora, et cetera. And aside from that, we updated the IGF ABCs list which is also on the website which provides a step by step guide of how to participate in the internet governance forum. It was translated also into Spanish, thanks to Israel for that, as well as in Portuguese. I think Lua did that. I don't think he's here right now. So, thank you for that. And lastly, with that said, we have a couple people that just wanted to address the YCIG real quick because they need to go.
And because, well, you know, we got ‑‑ for instance, and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a bit, but we have four newly elected steering committee members. I'll introduce that in a second. But one of the issues that we had, for instance, is that nobody from eastern Europe wanted to actually run for the position. So just goes to show how eastern and southeastern European outreach is definitely something we should do more of specifically in the coming year. So with that said, I want to introduce one of our members ‑‑ oh, yeah, Lua, thank you very much for the Portuguese translation of ABCs IGF. So, first of all, I want to introduce Sonya Herring who is going to talk a little bit about the SDIG, the southeastern European dialogue, and if you could just leave it to like three to five minutes, just got to get through.
>> SU SONIA HERRING: Yeah, so, hi, everyone. And hello to old members, welcome to new members. Like Michael said, I'm Su Sonia Herring. I'm on the newly elected committee of southeastern European dialogue on the internet governance. And shortly, I want to talk about the two capacity building programs we have. One is youths ‑‑ SEEDIG youth school, the second one is the SEEDIG fellowship. They both started this year at the meeting that took place in Macedonia in May earlier, and the 2018 meeting will be in Sylvania. The exact dates aren't announced yet, but it will be held in May and the capacity building programs will continue. So I especially want to talk about youth school, but also you could consider the fellowship as well.
Our website is SEEDIG.net. You can find the details there. Our website had been recently hacked, so it's just renovating. There might be a few things missing but feel free to come up to me during the session or after and you can ask me in person or contact me with your email, social media, et cetera. So, yeah, just like Michael said, we didn't have a candidate from the region, so we'd really like to increase the participation of the region and I think SEEDIG's youth school is a great opportunity to do this. Also normally the annual meeting is just one day a year. From now on, in 2018, it will be two, maybe three days, and one of the days will be dedicated to the capacity building programs. So, again, I encourage everyone to apply.
Also, the region isn't strictly Europe. So, like, Turkey is in it and Georgia and Armenia, southeast Europe and the neighboring countries. Also, I'd like to speak very shortly about youth IGF Turkey as well. There was another member of the IGF youth but she had to leave early. We had the third IGF Turkey in eastern Europe this year. It was the most bottom up, inclusive, and transparent one ever because before we didn't have a budget to implement certain things and thankfully, this year we had and we were able to start a travel fund and we were able to bring youth participants from other parts of Turkey and not just Istanbul and the capital, Ankara. We talked about many topics. We formed the program via open calls and feedback from the community. And what else?
I won't get into much detail. Our address is IGFturkey.org. Also, that's the last I didn't tell you, but it's two more sentences. We'll be publishing a good practice guide on European youth in Internet Governance Forums, possible it will be in the first month of 2018. So in January, it will be available as digital copies. It is European youth IGF good practices but we all have so much in common, I think everyone can benefit from it.
So, yeah. Thank you for coming here and participating and looking forward to continuing the discussion. Thank you, again.
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: Thank you, Sonya
(applause)
And for all of you, the work that you do, especially in the regions, promote to youth involvement. I'm ‑‑ one thing I forgot to mention is that if anybody here is not a member of the YCIG, it's not a complicated process to become one. All you have to do is subscribe to our Google group and be between the ages of 13 and 35. That was what we finally came to very rough consensus on as being our definition of youth, specifically because one of the challenges we face ‑‑ and sorry if I'm repeating myself if anybody was in the morning session, but basically, you know, every region has its own issues, its own challenges, and their own ways of functioning down to the granular level of the national and even the subregional approaches. So the fact is as an international kind of coordinating body we have a huge amount of challenges to overcome, especially when it comes to, how to engage youth, what exactly do we want to be, do we want to be a platform? Do we want to have a central message? These kind of things are difficult.
One of those that we found was even defining youth. Defining our definition of youth, which was really and truly why we even engaged in the charter revision process to begin with. We wanted to update that language. But, we eventually settled on 13 to 35. It's the broadest range that we could come up with. Thirteen because that's the year, the age whenever you're allowed to use platforms legally speaking such as Facebook, Twitter, whatever. And then 35 because that was the maximum level that the African Union described as being youth, so we wanted to be as inclusive to the various descriptions as we could be. So with that said, was there anybody here from youth observatory? Lua? Did you want to present something that you did, something the Youth Observatory did? You can if you want to, yeah. Just take two to three minutes. Oh.
>> Yeah, Israel is our senior youth because we have like a different strict age. We have like 30, but if you're after 30, you can be like a senior. You can participate, but you can vote and be a part ‑‑
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: Of course and if you're under the age of 13, if you're 12 or under or 36 and over, you can be an observer, which all that means is that as an observer, you can still be on the mailing list and everything but you don't have the right to vote. So, that's the biggest difference. All of that is covered in the charter. So, without further ado, Lua, did you want to say a few words about something you're working on?
>> LUA FERGUS: My name is Lua. I'm from Brazil. I'm part of the youth of Sartori which is a project of special interest group within ISOC and we've been working for the last two years and we've been working also in being at this far to have our voice heard and also working on capacity building in our countries. We have members in all the Latin American and Caribbean countries so we've been doing some capacity building schools. We've been creating local content. We've been doing workshops at Universities and high schools.
So, just today, we've been selected to our new directors because our directors we change during two years, so there are elections yesterday. So, I guess having more work for the next two years, and objective right now is to get worldwide. So, if you want to join us, just go to, if you're an ISOC member, you can subscribe to be a youth special interest at the website of ISOC and you can see more about our job.
This year, we published a book which is available in English, Portuguese and Spanish, so we can all download the PDF, which is in our website. I can't remember right now, but if you go to Google and put youth observatory website, you can find us. That's it. Thank you
(applause)
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: Thank you very much, Lua. And so, really, something that I've been looking very, very forward to, and without very further ado, first, I want to, it is with great pleasure that I can actually now in front of all of you dissolve the interim steering committee and finally transition to our first post charter elected steering committee who is being represented today by Nadia, on my left, who is representing the western Europe and others group, as well as Israel, who is representing the Latin America Caribbean group.
So, with that said, I will hand the floor over to them and get off the stage because I am no longer important
(applause)
>> NADIA: So, first of all, I would like to thank all of you for coming here today, and very importantly, Michael for all his hard work over the time he's been with YSIG and all the effort that has gone into organizing not only the statutes but also involving people to get involved with YSIG, involving people to run for elections, and he was also a member of the election committee and worked with the election committee to organize this entire deal. So, we are very grateful for his hard work and also all the other people in YSIG.
So, on behalf of the steering committee, we are very excited to forge ahead. We have exciting news. As digital nomads, we are in different places all across the world where we can engage with each other through an online platform, bringing together all the different activities, all the different ideas and thoughts that people present throughout the world. So, we are very excited to do that. So, first of all, I think I'll introduce myself. My name is Nadia Chakya. I'm a recent graduate from the college of Europe, where I got my masters in European interdisciplinary studies with the focus on U.S. global actor but specifically information warfare, specifically on the strategic narratives of global actors.
I was the former Vice President of communications of the international not for profit young European leadership, and I have worked primarily with youth policies in ensuring that young people are trained and connected to policy makers to ensure that their ideas and their thoughts are being presented on an international scale in international forums, and are being trained to ensure that their voice is presented in such a way that policy makers have to listen to us. And that you feel confident in the skills that you have and in the ideas that you want to present.
So, then I give my, the microphone to Israel, who will present himself.
>> ISRAEL ROSAS: Thank you, Nadia. And thank you, Mike, for all of the hard work during the interim committee work, and also during the election committee work. You have a really good follow‑up. My name is Israel Rosas, for the record. I'm currently working in the international digital strategy in the office of the president of Mexico. I'm acting here in my individual capacity, however. I'm a representative on behalf of Mexico as former ‑‑ country, and a member also of the ‑‑ chapter. In Mexico, I'm also working with an organization focused on outreach with law students in the University of Mexico, and I'm very confident that we, as a coalition, could give all of the results.
Today, in the morning, I was present in dynamic coalition coordination session. There are a lot of interesting work of dynamic coalitions inside IGF community. We have unique opportunity to show to the IGF community but also to the external people what are the main topics of interest for young people. And also, what are all the opportunity areas to enhance and strengthen the corporation. We know that we as young people have different backgrounds of we have people citing economical organizations, but also in private sector. So, we have to work together to ensure that our voice will be heard. I'm confident that we can build bridges with our dear fellows from the youth observatory, but also with all the regions in the world.
Currently, I'm part of the youth observatory. 2018 will be my last year as an active member as I'll be 21 and I'll be an observer, so I'm very, very confident that we could gift a lot of results. So, counts with my support, with all my expertise, if any, to facilitate our work here in the dynamic coalition. Thank you.
>> NADIA: Thank you, unfortunately, James and Krishna were unable to attend. So how the steering committee works is we represent the five regional groups of the UN. So the African group is represented by James, a Ugandan practitioner and youth activist. Since 2011, he has been working for global voices online. He also hosts a huge entertainment show aimed at building the capacity of youth on all fronts and was elected as royal society associate fellow because of his work to support and educate young people about internet youths. He has also been featured on TV shows to discuss stories that have been receiving interest on social media in Uganda.
Also on the steering committee is ‑‑ that's a good question. I am terrible with pronouncing last names. Krishna Kumar.
>> Krishna was present in Geneva earlier this week but had to leave early. He graduated from the University of Berlin with a master's degree in public policy. He also holds a master's in engineering. He got engaged through the Internet Society program. The following year he was elected for the internet society chapter, responsible for organizing events and keeping the local community updated on the key issues of privacy, data protection, and internet governance. He has held several scholarships and awards in the Internet Governance field. Professionally, he was worked for four years as a media strategist and consultant, two years at the media group, and two years at the A.G.’s media group.
So, that's the introduction of Krishna and thank you.
>> As Michael mentioned beforehand, we don't have a representative of the eastern European group, however, we'd love to still engage people to come join us and tell us what you're doing and how you would like us to get involved in these actions. I've worked with European Union in the European neighborhood so please feel free if there's any of those areas you'd like so discuss with me or any of the other steering committee. Don't hesitate to reach out. That being said, I'd like to benefit a brief overview of our YSIG admission in 2018. So what YSIG strive is to enable more people to join the discussion and overcome obstacles to do so. This includes monetary but also experience and network related challenges. The principle that all dynamic coalitions work on is open membership, open mailing lists, and open archives.
So, it's very easy to sign up to our mailing list. Any person can become a member between the age of 13 and 35. Otherwise, you can join as an observer and our open archives ensure of the transparency you need to know what has been going on within the Board and also all the activities that have been going on throughout the year. What we want to do is empower youth who want to actively participate in IGF international activities and initiative. And we aim to support the IGF by helping youth representation at the IGF, multistakeholder advisory group, and the IGF Secretariat. And to ensure that we as young people are equal footing with other stakeholders in internet government discussions, negotiations, strategies, and processes. So there's a lot of things and a variety of things we are capable of doing in supporting your activities, connecting you with people and providing training.
This is something we seek to encourage and foster. That being said, there have been some ideas that have been floating around about any ideas that YSIG could do for 2018, but I would like to open the floor and ask you, what are the things that you would be interested that YSIG is going to promote and help you engage with in the upcoming year? And if you have any ideas, any suggestions, let us know now and it's something we can work on. But please if you don't have anything now, you can post it on the mailing list directly and there's a whole community of YSIG online that wasn't able to be present today that will be able to give you comments on the variety of different activities that you were interested in doing.
>> KATIE WATSON: So, I'm Katie. I'm a youth at IGF fellow for ISOC, and this is something we talked about at the morning session and talked about yesterday in the afternoon session. But, there is, we think, a need for youth to be kind of mentored from the beginning of the program and then after the program, so if there's a way to create a mentorship program within the IGF so that before you even get here, you can connect with somebody who is more experienced in this field and has been to IGF before and can show you the ropes so that would be very helpful. But then also there's so many youth organizations that have been doing work and if there's a way for there to be a mentorship program within those programs, within preexisting programs, that would be awesome. Because I know for me personally coming for the first time there's so much you don't know and you don't know the right questions all the time about, what sessions should I be going to? Who should I be talking to? How can I network appropriately?
And having another youth with more experience would be really helpful. And also just having some sort of network between all of the youth organizations would be really helpful as well. Just make sure that we're not duplicating efforts, especially when we, if there's already existing programs that are doing the kind of work that we want to do when we go back home and take these initiatives home, it would be so useful to just tap into them.
>> Thank you, Katie. Yeah, we need to strengthen our communication with all the youth initiatives already present. And about the mentoring program, perhaps we could propose something in order to facilitate the work. We know also the Secretariat is very short in resources, but we could help them with this issue. Thank you. Anyone else?
>> SU SONIA HERRING: I am Su Sonia Herring, for the record. I think there's a need out there for some kind of mentoring but I also think that starting very structured programs is very time consuming and since pretty much everyone is volunteering with these initiatives, both for the YSIG and the national and regional ones, I think we could also implement that type of mentoring without a super structured program that would possibly waste valuable time. But having maybe a clear list of participants and organizing and coordinating it through the mailing list openly, because there are even in this room, there are some of us who coming to the IGF for the second time, third time, and there are new comers, and it should be easy enough to informally bring people together in addition to the readily online sources we have. But of course it should be out in the mailing list to voting, especially for people who aren't here right now.
>> This is Yanislee speaking. Actually, my comment is similar to Sonya. In this group, a lot of us may not know, there are a lot of members. Actually, we only have the mailing list but don't necessarily know who is on that. I think that could be improved if we had all the meshes, where they're from, what they're doing. That might involve a little administrative work for the committee and also updating the website, maybe, but I think that would be helpful that we can search the members or at least know who to talk to and also, actually, the mentorship program, we could easily do a buddies within ourselves as well. If we can coordinate ourselves, who is going this time, and also within the mailing list, we can talk a little bit more before we come so I think that would be helpful as well. Thank you.
>> I'm Sandra and also youth at IGF fellow from ISOC. I think one thing we were also talking about amongst ourselves was panel diversity, that it would be nice to see more young people involved in panels because I think that would encourage us to be part of more panels.
>> David from the ISOC organization from the Asia Pacific region. The management program, like organizing similar stuff in the coming year. On top of this, I think it's better to have a chance to meet face‑to‑face properly maybe in like, even in day one for a very short period of time, at least we can recognize each other's faces and for coming like day 2 and day 3, we can talk to each other n so I think this is due for coming years. Maybe just even a lightning session would be enough. Thank you.
>> Hi. I'm Cardu. I'm also an ISOC youth fellow. I think a few things can be kind of improved. At least looking at our program background. Something that could engage more youth in the panels, like Sandra said, would be something that, when you're training to get to the IGF, at least we had some kind of session, some webinars, some stuff like that. We could try to which are the main focuses of these young people that are coming here so that we could be especially tutored and mentored to this focus that we are trying to reach here. And I know that we got for that work with cybersecurity, with accessibility, with new technologies and stuff like that.
And these kind of people, they may not have been able to get their schedule in order to really engage in these kind of issues. And maybe less mandatory sessions and more directive sessions for these kind of people would probably help to engage like that. Another thing that we've been discussing in the last days, it would be something like maybe a youth statement with some few core points that we believe would probably bring more attention for this youth engagement, this youth movement. I mean, we could try to get a written statement. We can deliver this written statement throughout our networks translated to our natural language, try to give them to our local authorities, and also to the international organizations like the UN itself, the other specialized group, not only the IGF but other groups that treat these kinds of subjects among each other, and I think that would be really good.
>> Thank you. Yeah, in fact, it seems very clear that we have diversity, not only in the regional aspect, but also in the background one. So we as youth coalition, we have an ABCs for newbies. We updated it every year. We also have the translation from Spanish, English, and French? Portuguese. Sorry. And the IGF is also intended to show interest topics. I don't know. But perhaps we could strengthen that. So, I'm not taking notes because I'll review the record, but, in order (Israel speaking) to clarify that aspect. Thank you. Anyone else?
>> Yes, hi. My name is Emilia and I actually only wanted it raise the awareness on another youth group that was present today in the IGF and I see a couple of other people here. I don't know if you heard about the copy fighters. It's a group of young people fighting for fair copy right laws and I believe they would be really interested in continuing collaboration in the grounds of what we have discussed so far so maybe if people are interested, we could discuss more at the end. Thank you.
>> ISRAEL: Thank you. Anyone else? Please.
>> HELENA: Hi, I'm Helena, and I'm from Australia. And I'm also one of the youth at ISOC IGF fellows. So I already brought this up previously but I would love if there was a platform online that could relay all the opportunities for youth related to governance because a lot of us have to look through Google links but if you could put that all on your website it would be great for us engaging continuously with the website and also find a lot of opportunities that we might not have heard of. Thanks.
>> ISRAEL: Thank you. Mike, please.
>> MICHAEL OGHIA: It's exciting. So, my name is Michael and I would say one of the key, aside from programming and that sort of thing for the upcoming year, I would suggest that one thing all of us who are either part of the YSIG or want to be a part of the YSIG really need to consider is ensuring that we have sustainable leadership embedded in the YSIG. Because oftentimes, I would say duties that are embedded with being part of dynamic coalition unfortunately fall on a few people to end up doing. And I think it's really not a way to encourage leadership within the community itself, but furthermore, I'm quite frankly a bit worried about whether or not we can really stay relevant as a dynamic coalition and really stay relevant in terms of our impact on whether it be the IGF program or youth programming period because, like I said, it is already difficult enough to coordinate youth at the regional level, much less at the international level. It's practically impossible.
So, the YSIG is not just a glorified mailing list. We do have quite a few mandates, including some of the things that have already been mentioned, such as making sure that, ensuring that youth are represented on panels and in workshops, et cetera. So, this is not something that we can just ‑‑ although it's incredible that we finally have an elected steering committee, it's not something we can expect them to do specifically on their own. They're meant to help lead the group and do things like some of the administrative things like coordinating with the Secretariat and whatnot, but ultimately, if we want the YSIG to be successful, we all have to contribute to it. Especially the people that are not in this room right now, the people that have been involved and engaged before.
So, you know, if we don't represent ourselves, if we don't stand up for ourselves, nobody is going to do it for us. Nobody is going to put us on their panels. We don't need to be put in the corner and say, hey look, it's a youth person. Everybody is happy now. That's not the way it needs to work. And recruiting younger members as well is incredibly important. Because I'm going to be 30 next year and my youthness is definitely running out quickly. So, anyways. (sigh) Five more years.
>> NADIA: So, on that, so, one of the things that we as a coordination can do is we can get involved as a dynamic coalition in writing papers. We can also get involved with best practice forums. So, if there is a topic, for instance, that you want to lead that you want to then set up a report for that we can present here at the IGF next year, if there's a best practice forum that you as a young person want to get involved with and say, oh, hey. Sorry. I didn't expect that. If you as a young person want to get involved as a best practice forum, these are things that we can help you get access to, but then also, think of these ideas. What topics would you be interested in? What can we all collect on and provide input on? So, with that in mind, please let me know.
>> Hello, everyone. I'm Milesh with the advisory Council of Europe. I think the YSIG should also be more open toward other youth organizations because until now, until this moment, coming to the IGF, I didn't have a clue that this existed and I'm following the internet governance. I see you have an example people from southeast Europe being interested in following up these discussions so I really think the steering committee, congratulations. I hope you do a very good job next year. I think one of the things you maybe consider doing is approaching international organizations which are youth organizations such as scouts or some other organizations that they're widely spread out in the world, or maybe regional organizations such as the European, people advocating for youth because these organizations are very structured so they will for sure be open for collaboration. Because we are a body of young people from 47 member states from the council of Europe, so I will transfer the message but we are also very much open for collaboration and maybe happy to share something about you on our meetings in the Council of Europe. So, there are ways and I really hope this body is more open toward main grassroots organizations in Europe and in the world.
>> NADIA: Thank you very much. Are there any others in the back?
>> Hi, everyone. My name is Robert from Trinidad and Tobego in the Caribbean. I was really happy to see in exists, although I didn't know much about it until more or less today. I was wondering if it's an organization that wants to do a lot more outreach and increase the membership. Because just the fact that I didn't know anything about it. On the schedule, there was nothing in the description of the session, so I wasn't sure if it was something that was meant to be very closed, or you wanted to get more people in, you want to get more members. That's just a point I wanted to raise.
I thought it's really good that you're including under 35s. I turned 30, so I helped me. But also, I think it speaks to our point that I've noticed this week because I think people who are like in my category of like, 30 to 35, we're kind of like stuck in the middle. So we're not really thought of as youth, but also not old enough to be taken seriously by, you know, older senior people. So I think that's a good thing, and I think including and making people in that age feel welcome would be a good selling point for this organization. So, that's it.
>> Nadia: Thank you very much for your comment. Does anyone else want to add some or have any questions? Please go ahead.
>> Yeah, it's David again. I just want to add on the content Michael mentioned about the function of the YSIG. I think personally, I would like to congratulate as an interim, but a real steering committee, being diverse right now. Doing the work. Bade on the discussion in the past years, we do think that a steering committee has the roles of doing the administration and have the coordination, but not like raising the initiative by the steering committee itself. So it really relies on the members in the YSIG group to raise your concerns or even initiate some new initiative from office, and pass it to the steering committee to have the coordination. So, I do encourage every one of us if we have like any new initiative, or some other activities that we want to do together, we can just pass it to the steering committee. And if the collaboration work, we can work it better.
Because there are some good example in the past, for example, some ad hoc we like to recommend to other organizations. So, I think there is some good examples we have in the past and this is a best practice we can follow in the coming days. Thank you.
>> Hi, my name is Alka Poz, organizer of the youth Dutch IGF. And what I noticed in the last three years is that Internet Governance events itself are traveling around the world. And that's a good thing because in that way, you can get more locals involved in these events. But I guess the lack of these is that if an event is in a country or a city itself, locals do not, are not aware of the facts that such an event is in their country city or even in their street. So, I guess for all of us, such an event is in our country or our city or whatever, reach out to more locals and get in touch with Universities to get more people involved and not only a little cluster of youngsters who are lucky enough to travel. Also, we have to make this more sustainable so that everyone can be involved. That's my comment. Thank you.
>> NADIA: Thank you very much.
>> So, good morning. I think it's afternoon, everybody. My name is Brand. Also a fellow from ISOC. The main concern or comment I want to make is on diversity and most probably a little bit on stability. So, I think I've been to one of the sessions about the agenda issues, and looks like we've got a few females in these movements. So, one of the points that was raised was that we should at least encouraged young girls at young age to participate in such events, and also, I see we're talking about increasing the capacity of these movements. We usually talk about Europe and a little bit of China. We tend to skip Africa, like there's nothing happening there.
I don't know what structures do you have there that you're able to connect through Africa so that you can increase the capacity. Also, would be stability. My colleague mentioned something about stability. I think another meeting to propose that for us, having sustainable movement is to also include some mentors training sessions so that they're able to maintain their relationship with a mentee for them to at least not lose the contact and not lose the motivation to keep on doing whatever projects they've been doing. I think that's it for now. I'm still thinking of other points that I might get as we move through the session. Thanks.
>> Nadia: Great. Thank you so much for your comments. I really wish that James was here today. Definitely, he'll be reading the transcript based on today's session and we'll have a discussion based on my notes and the discussion we're having today, but if you would love to get in touch with him and any ideas of how you want to raise the profile of Africa and YSIG to ensure that people in Africa are getting more involved in this, then absolutely, we would love your insights and your help and we can really work on this.
I've heard a lot of very good ideas and I'm kind of really excited that you want to see these things because it means you're really passionate about what you're doing and how you want to get engaged with it and that you're not, in essence, being selfish. That you want to spread that to other people and get other people involved. And that really warms me, to be honest, because now we need to come together and really, we talked about diversity and stability and that's basically the essence of what we're trying to do and ensuring that we, as young specialists are getting engaged on these panels. This is something I mentioned before in the week. Unlike some of the panelists who have a broad scope, a broad mandate, while we're studying, we're really focusing for three to five years on specific topics on really working on the details. We should not allow that these details are being missed on the larger scale and I think we have a really good position here to do this.
So, we talked about recruitment, and this is something that we would love to work on ourselves, but also, we would like to encourage you. So one of the things I would like to do today is to take a group photo that we're going to post on our Facebook group. And I would love for you guys to share this and say, hey, come and join us next year or come and join my event which I'm holding this day or come and join the mailing list. Whatever you feel comfortable with sharing your own thing. Even if you want to promote, we are a group of young people, specialists, that are doing an event next year. Come and see us. This is one thing, trying to engage young people and bringing people in with your community also with us. I heard you about stability and passion building. Face‑to‑face community, despite us all being kind of digital nomads, the face‑to‑face meeting. Perhaps one thing we could consider if people are interested is having the session at the beginning of the week, so after IGF newbie on the first day, day zero, we could have a session like this that people get to come, you can get to know each other. We can ask volunteers to be mentors that you can approach them or to have lunch with if you're lonely. Sitting together, talking things through.
And then also at the end of the session if you're struggling with your program we can ask people from the IGF Secretariat or we can ask people from the other institutions to say hey, what do you recommend. Or specialist in your field, just let us know, what do you require. When we're talking about capacity building and skill sets, connecting, the notion that connecting with other youth forums would be very helpful, knowing what they do and how we can build on top of that would allow us to move forward and make sure that we encompass the skills you need rather than what we think might be useful for a particular person or particular idea we have about people.
So, here is a lot of feedback. This is why we have the mailing list. You'll be able to engage in the mailing list and say, hey, this is what we need. And also participation at IGF especially for young people is primarily dependent upon scholarships and funding that is provided to us. So the people here, we have been extremely blessed by the society that has come together to provide these opportunities for us, and for those people who have been able to find the passion to arrive here on your own, I am very grateful that you have been really engaged to be able to be here.
So, we have to reach out to our mailing list and insure that they also have the opportunity and what you're saying about creating opportunities and making this more public, we hope the next time that we'll have a bigger session because this room needs to be fuller and we need to have bigger rooms for this and I hope we can all engage in this. The last thing I would like to say is please do think about writing a summative paper, report. I think being involved with this practice forum would be an incredible opportunity to say, this is important, and we have this unique position to do this. But we're in the going to write it for you. Apparently I'm setting up a website and we're going to send out recruitment letters and we want to do all these things and we also have different specialties. Let's bring this together to be able to do this. We have a little bit of time left so I would love to take this photo with all of you and thank you so much for your time in coming here today and we're very excited to work with you in the upcoming year. Thank you so much.
(applause)
>> SU SONIA HERRING: Can I make one last announcement? Apart from the transcripts, there will be a live report of the session on Geneva Internet Platform's Digital Watch. So, if anyone wants to share it or take a look at the notes there, a session report will be online today or tomorrow.
(Session was concluded at 6:28 AM CT)