IGF 2023 – Day 0 – Event #54 Creating Eco-friendly Policy System for Emerging Technology – RAW

>> BOSEN LILY LIU:  Thank you all so much for being here.

Good morning.

Good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are.

Please kindly allow us a couple of more minutes to fix some last‑minute technical issues, so we'll start as soon as possible.

Thank you so much.

>> BOSEN LILY LIU:  OK, great.

Thank you so much for your kind patience and sorry about the wait.

We're going to get started.

We're going to invite our fantastic leader Doris who will introduce herself and get the session started.

Doris, the floor is yours.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Hello, everybody.

Unfortunately I'm unable to put my video on because of technical issues.

I'm happy to be here with you in this session.

My name is Doris Mwikali.

So do we have a menti on?

I can see the menti is on.

You can use the card that is on the screen.

Next slide, please.

You can also use the coder over there to look on the phone.

What are the top three technologies you spend your most time on?

You can share your responses there.

I can see people online sharing their responses.

You can use the code directly or go to menti.com and share your answers.

I can see social media apps, web site, media apps.

Waiting for responses.

Google, WhatsApp, email, great.

Internet, social media apps, WhatsApp.

Nobody uses Tik‑Tok, Instagram?

Oh, I can see Instagram.

Web site WhatsApp.

I can see the responses on the chat.

Uses WhatsApp, Google, Tik‑Tok, and twitter.

Data analysis, simulation, and ChatGPT.

Engineer here, very common.

I think we can move on to the next question so people can still be working on both questions.

And our next question is, what stage of the technology lifecycle do you consider to be the most impactful to the environment?

Oh, great, this is a very interesting question.

So we have ‑‑ seven people, and we have four choices:  Maturity, innovation, growth, and decline.

And you're using the same menti.

Comment using the code or you can use the code on the screen to join in general answers with us, and I'm so sorry that my video is not on, but I'm very enthusiastic about your answers to these questions, very excited.

So do we have any responses, or is that complete?

So I think if you keep the menti on and share with future insights and can always circle back to see some of the interesting insights that you have shared asked on menti so keep the link on with you and also use the code if you have any insights that you want to share during the conversation.

We're going to move to the next part of this session because we are running a bit behind time, and the second part of this will be the keynote from Teodoro, so I'm just going to stop here and let him take on.

Give us a few minutes as we connect here.

>> TEODORO PEARCE MAURY:  Guests, partners, and participants ‑‑ (audio difficulties)



all the participants are joining us ‑‑ (audio difficulties)



 ‑‑ 

>> Dear guests, partners, and participants, first of all, allow me to thank the Internet Governance Forum for letting us host this workshop alongside our partner, IT U and the digital policy lab at the University of Melbourne in Australia, which I would also like to extend my gratitude to, and, of course, all the participants that are joining us, thank you for supporting this event.

It is really my pleasure to be here amongst you today to share some thoughts and ideas on the importance of promoting eco‑friendly emerging technologies and the critical role of higher education in supporting so.

I do need to stress that technology is advancing at an impressive pace at the present moment.

We have witnessed the rise of technologies, (?) On which our agent has widely published, artificial intelligence, same we've just released a publication on the impact of artificial intelligence in education, block chain, taking a prominent role in society and we can expect for them to continue to do this in the foreseeable future.

This world is upon us.

We believe this to be a positive sign as innovation continues to express itself in new tools that undoubtfully can help us in the future.

Nonetheless, we do not believe this innovation must come at the cost of our planet.

Therefore, we have the obligation to guide the bright minds of the future not to only be environmentally conscious, but to also push beyond and try to be regionality, but also preserve what we have and also reclaim spaces that have been lost in our fight against climate change.

For this very reason, we have identified some key areas of focus for, as we say, winning higher education to achieve this vision in the coming future.

First of all, fostering a global consciousness.

We must keep trying to allocate values such as global citizenship, ecological awareness, empathy, and resilience to highlight higher interconnectedness and the importance of our shared world.

This set of values must permeate the whole educational journey of the individual and the group.

Second, seek new partnerships.

Higher education has tried to seek a new model of partnerships, governments, private sector, higher education institutions, and, of course, a wide range of stakeholders need to come together and create innovation clusters not only centered in research and development, but also focused on training of education professionals and on bridging the gap to access to technological knowledge and resources to rethink them and create better solutions for our planet.

And last but not least, probably the most important contribution of higher education is the push for new policies.

Innovation is not exclusive to technology.

And our policymakers have to look for new ways to respond to the demands and problems that will appear due to the velocity in which new technologies are emerging and their impact on our societies and our citizens.

Policy must be prepared for these new realities and not befall behind it.

I would like to finalise these short opening remarks by highlighting the theme of this 18th IGF empowering all people.

If we look at the far‑reaching capacity that young people, women, and many underrepresented groups can play in the process of educating, creating, implementing, and using eco‑friendly technologies, we know that we should move from the mentality of leaving no one behind to letting everyone taking the pilot seat.

It is time for everyone to be a main driver of a sustainable future and to join efforts to explore the foundation for eco‑friendly technologies to be just accessible and ethical.

You can count on UNESCO in our commitment to do so.

I wish you all a great work shop to start this exploreasion.

Sincerely, thanks for your attention.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Such a good start to today.

To build on that, we'll be going to the next part of the session by presenting nations current work on technologies and economic efficiency.

So getting back to that particular session to build on a good foundation before we have a chance to join in and sharing their insights about this very important topic.

We are looking forward to a very interesting presentation and great discussion from all of you.

Thank you.

The first presentation will be from Lily.

>> BOSEN LILY LIU:  Thank you so much, Doris, and highlighting the importance of creating initiatives through the role of higher education and beyond.

Higher education is really the bridge that connects not only to other levels of education through, for example, instituting and imbedding the environmental concept into the educational system but more importantly, the bridge from knowledge to practices in the actual field to the industry, specifically to what we're talking about today, to innovative industries.

With that being said, the foundation of any of a granular process starts with where innovation happens, and with that being said, it is my great honour to share with everyone an ITU technical report that we published in 2021 within the framework for the artificial intelligence framework project.

The technical reports, it's a global guideline on the friendly criteria for AI and other emerging technologies, and it is also my honour today to be here with two of the coauthors of this global guideline, professor Volkmer, in what we want to achieve in environmental efficiency.

If I may start, I would like to first present quickly about the goal of the report is really the focus on SDG13, and it's important to find some commonalities within the field of the industries and to evolve different stakeholders to work towards a common goal, finding a middle ground, balancing the interest, to a place where everyone should be somewhat comfortable understanding that little compromises in their practices can contribute greatly to SDG13.

And the scope of this ITU‑AI environmental efficiency project is a very global project.

It covers all five different regions of the UN, and the time frame, overall, for this project was from May 2020 all the way until 2022, December, with this particular report being produced from November to September with some consultation activities and expert brain storming and working, involving stakeholders from different, you know, industries and finding what are some of the dimensions that should be touched upon.

And the framework of the report starts with having very basic yet necessary information identifying what it actually means by AI and what it means by emerging technology and actually finding the link between those identified technologies to environmental efficiency factors through an adjusted model of lifecycle assessment of product with three stages of environmental impact.

Upon knowledge, based on technology and the knowledge on lifecycle assessment, we further provide a both long term and short‑term strategies in responding or calling for policymakers and calling for industry leaders and calling for just general, you know, citizens and participating in the process of greening innovation towards a greater benefit of SDG13 with the consideration of what works at the individual level and local level to serve the best.

With that being said, if I may share briefly the very key identification of AI and emerging technology, we would say that the way we define it is that emerging technologies is a really broad term.

It covers, you know, some of the very trendy like AI like ChatGPT, 3D printing, this and that, and at the same time it also leaves room for different countries, different institutions and communities to identify what are the most commonly‑applied technology at that moment.

For some it may be data.

The technology is, let's say, to be identified in understanding their specific applications in the 16 do Maine, and the 16 do mains have very high relevance to SDG overall with infrastructure, industry, and energy.

And upon that process of identifying emerging technology and what it actually means, the process of linking AI and other emerging technologies with environmental efficiency started.

As you can see the very traditional model of lifecycle assessment, what you're seeing on the left, involves five different stages.

Well, when we conducted this knowledge at ITU, we decided to actually simplify it to three main stages, which includes material, usage, and end of life.

And materials is basically anything that comes within your raw material extraction, design, manufacturing, and when it moves to usage, the responsibility is not only on the private sector that actually implemented or designed it but also on the individuals who have those very daily interactions, with the understanding of operation, the consumption, the maintenance and repair that people can relate to that relate to the first menti question addressed.

And then the third stage is end of life, which includes the construction, transport, water waste, disposal, recycling, and recycling, there is more than just tossing into a bin that someone will take care of whatsoever.

It actually highly refers to reuse, recovery, recycling, and remanufacturing, which some of our experts will be addressing later on.

Now, without going really further into all the technologies of the do mains, I would like to share very briefly the guidelines recommendasions provided.

The first one, very importantly, we need to have an evidence‑based approach.

Having data collection strategy before implementing any kinds of recommendasion at policy level, at private sector level, at an individual level is very important to address local needs and ensure, you know, that decision‑making is based on the evidence, and second, we recommended actions to be implemented in all three environmental stages for major emerging technologies and, third, in terms of possible actions, it's not just from a technological perspective or an environmental perspective, but rather a technical environmental perspective blending in this mentality from the very beginning of designing this technology.

And fourth, the guideline includes some very general recommendasions for different stakeholders working in different industries to relate to AI and other emerging technologies.

So to respond to the evidence‑based approach, we have designed several instruments, specifically three generic survey templates targeting different groups of people in understanding where they stand, where they should go moving forward with this eco‑friendly emerging technology.

So for the general citizens who's unrelated in any way to technology, there are seven questions, and in order to get more or less a valid response, we would hope to have around 500 to 1,000 citizens and informations to be collected include awareness, perception, their known practices to actually enable coming technology use and the different knowledge among citizens regarding environmental pollution and healthy relation to such environmental pollution.

And the second set of survey is targeting policymakers specifically, and if we're looking at a global scope, once again, it will be, you know, around 100 to 500 policymakers with 10 specific questions understanding the existing policy.

It's where it stands now in terms of its implementasion, including both the actual practices as well as the recent challenges of the effectiveness of current policy and what are some policy areas that can be useful to address those current concerns?

And the third one specifically targeted the private sector, the industry that are highly in charge of, you know, delivering those technology to respond to national development plans as well as to individuals, and there are about 11 questions, and the same, we're aiming at the same number of executives and hoping that the information can reflect, you know, some of the proactive level measurements, some of the new climate‑friendly technologies they are implementing or are in design and some of the sustainable energy solution in implementation as well as their current strategy to minimize waste either as their own choice or enforced by their state or their country.

With all those, hopefully we'll eventually following those global guidelines, we will have somewhat of an idea of where a country or where a community stands in terms of moving forward with creating eco‑friendly technology policyings and also eco‑friendly policy systems to further incentivise the greening technology process, which a lot of this information eventually can be retrieved back to education because the earlier our kids can start in understanding those awareness and those concepts, the design, the better that they can have this awareness into their actions, either at individual, institutional, or national level into their future.

I wouldn't go really into the contextualisation part.

I know we are short on time but the whole idea of the general survey is really targeting all the relevant stakeholders.

Well, some of the contextualized questions, it's really important to identify the emerging technology in that context and the environmental responses towards it.

So I would say that there are some simple recommendasions ‑‑ sorry, there are some simple ‑‑ woops, OK, there are some simple recommendasions on AI, and there are some simple actions for different applications, so when we drafted the report, we basically divided that for certain technologies, we have recommendasions for the three stages, material use and end of life.

And for some of the very generic ones that touch upon or cut across different emerging technologies, we have some key themes, for example, consumption, for example, recycling.

I wouldn't go into details.

I will share the link of the global guideline so if you want to read it later, there will be more information on it.

And in terms of the very general recommendasion for stakeholders, we have divided it into development, deployment, business and market and regulations policies and standards which also cut across the different process of technology, and we try as much as we can not to provide too many recommendasions, it would be overwhelming, but somewhere to start with, for example, for regulations, policies, and standards, echoing back to what was just mentioned, the multistakeholder engagement and engaging in new partnership models can support with this process of, you know, greening innovation and for business and market, you know, a lot of innovation ‑‑ although they're just really emerging and popping up really fast or go away really fast it's important to have those long‑term financing and strategies to support with the greening process and also an incentive.

With that being said, I will end right here, and I would give the floor to Ingrid to actually discuss some of the initiatives and the actions that have been taking place upon conclusion of this guideline but a new start for action.

Ingrid, the floor is yours.

>> INGRID VOLKMER:  One of our projects, what I want to talk about today is a glimpse into our research.

This is a project that's currently being undertaken, and we are looking at the very different approaches to AI policy across countries, across the Global North and the Global South, and the reason is that as you know AI is a globalized technology.

It will be a gamechanger in many ways, and that is why we feel new policy approaches are needed especially when thinking about AI environment, reduction of emissions, carbon neutrality, et cetera.

Why AI is often portrayed as not being very energy‑intensive, the technological context, the eco‑systems around AI, not carbon neutral, and they are producing a lot of emissions, and so it is really important to take a full look at this new picture and this new reality we are seeing and think about in a creative way perhaps about policy frameworks around environment carbon neutrality in a new AI world.

So far, we basically talk about generative AI and the implications on education, the implications on public politics, the implications on journalism, but AI and specifically generative AI will be also a game changer in creating new technologies and new eco‑systems, so that is another reason why digital policy around environment and climate in context of AI is specifically needed.

And I'll go to my first slide.

So in this study, we are looking, as I said, across the world, and what I can do here is only portray a few of these insights.

So what is really interesting is that AI policies or AI strategies by governments or nations started ‑‑ excuse me ‑‑ in 2017.

But in very different ways.

AI, and as we see also other technology monopolies operate around the world and create monopolies and create globalised eco‑systems, policies are still national territorial, looking at national practices.

So the first generation national strategies around AI were basically around the definition of national regulator e motives and themes of AI.

The developmental plan was created, and AI was seen as the driver of the industry, educational skills, standard setting, ethical nonsense security becoming a virtual AI tech country in 1995.

Similar in Singapore, similar in Canada.

But again, very nuanced differences we see here in united Arab Emirites.

Develop skill sets of workforces, integrate AI into medical and security services, and so on.

But there are also countries in the Global South that already in 2017‑18 started to look at AI as a policy, into a policy strategy, so in Mexico, AI was meant to increase the competitiveness of companies and inclusion, driving the data and digital infrastructure, supporting cybersecurity, ethics, research, and so on.

In India, 2018, national AI strategy was meant to support healthcare, agriculture, et cetera nobody talked about AI at that time, which of course had to do with the technology status of AI at the time.

A second AI strategy do main, if you'd like, began in 2019, where this focused on enhancing security and prediction of human dignity.

That is where AI was already seen Arizona a human‑centric AI, creating diversity, inclusion, and sustainability in Japan.

In Canada, artificial intelligence and data, it was passed to manage the risk and information disclosure around AI systems, et cetera, et cetera, you see this on this slide.

But then what was really interesting, there was a shift in 2020 ‑‑ 2022, sorry, in Germany, when the G7 digital ministers met, and what they were creating was not so much reproducing this sovereignty approach to AI governance or the national approach to AI governance in an intergovernmental way, what we also see at UNESCO and others, what they started saying is we are living in the reality of international digital data spaces, and that was a big shift away from this paradigm of the sovereign territorial regulation of AI and other technologies or intergovernmental regulations.

Now, we are looking at, according to the G7 digital ministers into an international data space and I feel this is a paradigm shift that we need to take on board more.

What they say is is the stakeholders from private sectors, academia, we would seek a better way to harness digital technologies for net zero resource effective economy and digital eco‑system recognising the importance of holistic measurement of all impacts of digitalisation on the environment and increase energy and resource efficiency, and tailor communication networks, and this is one of the most coherent lists of all sorts of environmental issues that need to be addressed in AI policies.

But they have been brought up through this perspective of international data spaces.

We normally in digital policy frameworks don't talk about international data spaces.

This is the first time, and this is a really important shift in these debates, and I would argue that this shift needs not to be taken on to meet the challenges of the future so it is this holistic data space, international data spaces, but we also need to look at a holistic planetary environment in context of AI and environment policy so it's no longer, you know, Global North/Global South being divided by environmental policies, but we need to look at both Global South and north, in Nigeria, the e waste from the US is being sent from the US to Nigeria, being burned, and all the smoke and fumes, they go up into the air and into the atmosphere for all of us.

We can't look at this in the sovereign space anymore and the idea of the digital data spaces is a really good approach for policy frameworks perhaps to link this much closer to a holistic perspective or implications on a planetary, interconnected, interdependent environment and that is also really important and can address the growing magnitude of a related international data space and its implications on the planetary environment which is not possible in the frameworks we have today.

What we are seeing today is really a fragmentasion of policy debates around AI and environment, so there are intergovernmental organisations that address specific growth sectors, for example, OACD.

There are others that measure and look at carbon footprints, et cetera, but these are all interconnected ‑‑ or disconnected, rather, debates, fragmented debates, and we need holistic approach to this as well.

Furthermore, data spaces should also look at households, and it's not sufficient ‑‑ the metrics we are having which are looking at predictions of the future developments of certain technologies of drones, of mobile phones, of all these other devices.

But as we've heard in the earlier speech by Lily Liu, we need to look at this holistic technological environment and eco‑system as well here, and we need to look at the Global North and south at the same time.

This idea of a digital data space as a holistic is imperative to solving the problems we are having today.

A final note on this, we know that Google, Facebook, and Meta, et cetera, they are aiming to reach carbon neutrality through different means, through carbon offsets or through using solar power, but there are numerous other data centres, smaller data centres, which are not operating along those lines, and those are the data centre issue needs to be addressed as well on a global scale and not just a national scale.

And just to show you some of the issues, countries of the Global South having this space.

Here are some examples from Nigeria.

Nigeria is aware of the importance of AI, its benefit to the economy.

They are producing all sorts of national centres for AI robotics, but in terms of energy, AI has been considered as a major way of enhancing renewables, but at the same time, the country has massive electricity problems.

So these are really ‑‑ really these imbalances we are seeing if we are looking across Global North and Global South in a planetary perspective, and we be can interpret these policy frameworks perhaps in a new way.

This is an example for argentina.

I will just skip this but it's similar and reflects this specific country perspectives and the imbalances within a country and also the relation of energy and data centres to the energy grids which are often like in the case of Argentina, with fuel and only 12 percent of energy consumption coming from renewable energy sources in the national grid so these are issues that also have to be addressed.

Similarly, in India, these imbalance is on a national scale but I think it's time to produce a global map perhaps of these national perceptions of planetary holistic AI climate issues and policies.

Thank you.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much, Ingrid and Liu, for your presentations.

We are going to have a 10‑minute discussion.

We're going to be giving insights in terms of what are the insights on these presentations.

So our first one will be Ola.

If Ola will take the Mike and give us some of the reactions she has from this presentation in terms of the recommendasions and in terms of the foundation from this session to the last session.

We look forward to hearing your reactions on these two amazing presentations.

Thank you.

>> OIA:  Thank you very much.

Can you hear me?

Thank you very much for the two presentations.

I'm going to be talking from the private sector perspective.

I have my background in financial and risk management within the energy centre, and I have been interested in energy transition and sustainability and all the emerging innovations that would hopefully get us to net zero some day soon.

So with regards to the two presentations that we've listened to today, I'm going to be looking at some, you know, the pros and cons of AI and emerging technology from a private sector perspective.

We all know like you've said in the presentation that AI and other emerging technologies have come to destruct the way we have worked and the way companies have worked, and especially with the need to get to net zero.

Companies have been looking for different innovative ways to, you know, develop their clean energy strategy, and it has, therefore, redefined the way the different organisations work.

The innovation has driven clean technology and renewable energy companies have been able to use a lot of data, which they have been able to garner together from using AI to make decisions and to meet their strategies, and also the emerging technologies and AI has also helped with helping with pin points of the customer service, so the companies have used the pin points to create new and value‑added business models that has leaked into customer satisfaction to date, and that has helped them with profitability and also meeting their net zero strategy.

One very important area that we need to emphasize is also the fact that investors have been very interested in what companies are doing with their money and how it affects the environment and there has been quite a few reporting guidelines that have come out.

Companies are now required to report on the environmental impact of their activities, and with the use of AI and emerging technologies, companies have had to state what the impact is.

And with that requirement, they are therefore obliged to make sure that any negative externalities to the environment is quickly curbed.

And investors have been asking a lot of questions on the impact of the company's activity on the environment.

Just in September, the task force on nature and biodiversity decided that companies have to now report on the impact of their activities on nature and biodiversity.

It gained with the use of AI and other emerging technologies, company can ‑‑ companies would now find it easier to capture those issues and to do something about those issues quickly before those impacts, those negative externalities, before they get out of hand.

These emerging technologies also have helped with job creation because there have been quite a number of (?) That have been created in the area of AI and other technologies that were mentioned earlier, and this has boost income and also GPT.

What the AI and other technologies have also done is promote diversity, equity, and inclusion so there's been talent creation and retention.

What we know is that AI will continue to improve and AI companies will also continue to embrace the circular economy, so materials will be reused.

There will be recycling of machines, and we hope that this would create sustainable companies in the future.

There's still some disadvantages today with the emerging technologies.

They are very energy‑intensive like was mentioned earlier, but different data centres do use a lot of different technologies, so we expect that government regulations would come in to ‑‑ government would come in to regulate these data centres, and we also understand that there's been quite a bit of brainwashing, you know, where companies may state what they are doing with helping the environmental impacts but that is not ‑‑ that hasn't really been effective.

So we believe that government regulations would come in to help with that.

Also, in terms of the incentives, again, government policy should be an incentive.

There should be support from financial institutions and funding agencies to help with the development of this technology and the ability to control the environmental impact.

We saw from the Africa Climate Summit that just concluded in Nairobi.

Quite a number of institutions have committed quite some substantial forms to help the country get to net zero.

Substantial amount ‑‑ substantial part of those farms will be spent on developing technologies that will help them to get to net zero.

We believe also that the government should create institutional changes that will help with data security, data privacy, and data ownership.

And government should also build knowledge.

They should build capacity and understanding.

Those are my comments.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much for your insights and sharing on private sector.

And I know that we are short on time, so we are going to be moving on to the responses from the other responses, and we'll have an opportunity for the audience to ask questions in terms of this important discussion and hear the reactions of what interventions by our panelists and also the reactions from the two presentations from our presenters.

So the next to speak would be Abby.

As Abby gives reactions to the presentation, I would also like to ask the question that given her passion on energy and the economy and perspectives, (?) If she could just wrap up those two questions, that would be amazing.

Abby, you have the floor.

>> ABBY space ASE KUN:  Thank you so much, Doris, for giving me the floor.

I represent Future Perspectives, a nonprofit organisation that inspires the youth to spear head in terms of ‑‑ (?) ‑‑ in championing education, reform, and propelling investments and innovation.

Obviously, there are some modern issues that we have like high reaction or climate change.

Obviously, we know that being able to address these present challenges requires a multifaceted approach and we believe as advocates, our organisation needs to foster societies, or organisations need to foster a collaborative system that values knowledge‑sharing.

We also believe that the government businesses, foundations, universities, and other key stakeholders to design interventions geared at deliverable systemic, sustainable impact.

From our perspective, you know, some of the ways that we've seen that we can help to impact policy at the community level is by having spaces to facilitate meeting for inclusive dilodge as well as platforms to spot light innovation.

We believe capacity enhancements to drive youth leadership and action is really important.

Obviously, also providing our youth the opportunity to be able to communicate on key issues is really important.

Shaping your naratives and shaping your innovativors through immersive storytelling.

Again, coming from the youth perspective, we believe that these are opportunities that civil society and foundations can really help ‑‑ these policies that can support eco‑friendly technology.

And also we believe that the youth, you know, have to be prominently woven into global conversations and that their participation and activism would not only create a profound impact for the government, not just Africa, but the global world needs.

We know to have a seat at the table and their collective power and also equipping them with the necessary knowledge, skills, and tools, we obviously need to unleash, you know, really great policies and technology on innovation will really, really yearns for.

So we believe that the civil society and, you know, foundations as a whole, they play a really critical role too as well, you know, from (?) As well, ensuring that we provide this ‑‑ for this creed as well as bringing in the marginaliseked communities as Lily had mentioned, that they are integrated into those conversations because they're the ones feeling the brunt of the issues at stake, and they are the ones also coming up with the solutions to make sure that they have a seat at the table to help ensure that those solutions that are coming into play are coming from those people who are really affected by the current (?).

Thank you.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much Abby for sharing your thoughts on creating environmental friends and policies.

Also having interventions from the private sector and having interventions from the civil society.

What is the role of educators in ensuring that our eco‑system and process ‑‑ so the floor is yours.

>> YONGJING WANG:  Thank you, Doris.

Thank you for having me here.

I'm Yongjing Wang, I'm a school at the University of birmingham, engineering in the UK.

I'm not just university academic, I'm also a practicing engineer being involved in international programs, in particular, in the area of robots and automation and digital technologies to support circular economy so I'm more speaking perhaps from two perspectives from my two roles.

One will be about from a university's point of view.

The second will be about from the technical and technology development point of view.

So from the university's point of view, I think if we're looking at the question of how universities can be deeply involved and contribute to the E. Coli friendly emerging technologies in the area of AI and other areas, I think actually many universities already are deeply involved.

In particular, in, for example, like here in the UK, we are being responsible engineers is part of our teaching module.

It's actually in the core of the teaching.

And in many other countries, there are similar schemes, so I feel that based on my experience with how to motivate for universities to support eco‑friendly development is to have both internal and external factors ready to create such an environment.

For the internal factors, basically we're looking at do we have the right people in the universities and in the higher education sector to deliver the eco‑friendly emerging technologies.

We as practicing engineers are already responsible engineers.

We are aware of what is happening, what are considered important to the long‑term sustainable development goals.

So that is about internal factor.

About the external factor, actually a key ‑‑ actually, I think that is the key difference.

For example, for some universities, for some engineering or technology degrees, we are actually bounded by the requirement by professional engineering bodies.

So professional engineering bodies can request being responsible and being considerate in terms of engineering and innovation and AI.

And how these technologies can affect our environment.

Actually, the training of this awareness and the training of being responsible and being considerate is raised by the professional engineering bodies.

And in some countries, they are raised by a government.

So we have that requirement, and that is a key reason for many universities to be active.

And another key external factor is for many leading universities, in particular those research‑intensive universities, many research directions are ‑‑ can be affected by research councils and research funding bodies, and that means what is the position of eco‑friendly development in those research councils in those research funding bodies?

And that could affect how deep the university can be involved.

So I feel in terms of what we can do in the future, those are after hearing the two presentations.

I feel actually it is just the beginning.

It's just the beginning of something.

And I feel actually the eco‑friendly development of emerging AI technologies can separate it into two areas.

One is more about itself.

How AI tools, what is the environmental efficiency?

What is the environment impact of AI tools and techniques?

That would be one area.

And the other area is how we can use AI tools to achieve circular economy so these two are very different topics, and we need two different measurement systems for these two topics, and then we can think about how these measurement systems can affect the internal factors and external factors, and that would create a much greater boost to the eco‑development or being responsible in terms of AI development.

Thank you.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much for sharing your innovations.

(?)

next we'll give an opportunity to open the floor to the people that have joined us from around the world to just respond, one, either key insights from the two presentations or any reactions we have from the insights that have been shared from an academic prospective and also a practicing engineer perspective, a private sector perspective, and also the perspective of the role of a civil society.

If anybody has any responses or opportunity to interact and be part of this session, you can just raise your hand, and I will give you an opportunity to ask the question or just share your insights, either your background, your context or where you're joining us from your part of the world, this is your opportunity to do so.

So just raise your hand, and I'll be able to give you the opportunity to do so.

You can't see my face, but I'm very eager to see all of your responses from the interventions and the presentations.

Please do feel encouraged to do so.

You can just raise your hand, introduce yourself, tell us where you're joining from, and ask us a question.

Or share your insights.

Either or both.

>> BOSEN LILY LIU:  Thank you so much, Doris, and it's so nice to hear from academia, practicing, and in the private sector to work on energy together.

If I may add, meanwhile waiting for questions from our participants, this is really the importance of engaging the global self.

A lot of times when we look at the evolvement of the environmental policies in relation to technology, it's almost by default that we go to Global North where a lot of innovations take place, and there are ice breakers into certain industries through innovation.

However, the impact is global.

It's very, very important that we understand the Global South's perspective on where they stand in interpreting such designs, in supporting such consequences, and interpreting what kind of benefit and what kind of risks it can bring to their actually very high achieving SDG13 figures.

A very shocking moment throughout my work is when I look at the SDG13 progress comparing with other SDGs.

It's almost like the Africa area is red, meaning it's, you know, less invest in uninterested areas, where SDG13, there's a lot of green, which means they're actually really advanced.

Looking at those policies especially with the Global North participants, is there something that by engaging the Global South stakeholders that we can learn from them, that we can have an equal conversation, that we can flip the traditional model of having this, you know, shared responsibility and actually involve them in their experiences to protect the environment, in their experiences to use innovation effectively and in understanding more or less a global demand on where innovation can go and should go for the better good instead of, you know, for the h from the material stage where there's a lot of, you know, natural resource involved to the usage stage where, you know, sometimes infrastructure is not even there to the recycling stage where sometimes certain places in the world are considered the trash hub for those electronic devices.

Can we rethink this model to create a more eco‑world?

Thank you so much.

Back to you, Doris, and see if there's any participants who would want to get engaged.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much Lily for sharing your insights and how this all relates to the SDG, how we should all have a collective action to us to ensure that we have more equality and (?) Within the Global North and the Global South so I think that's a very important point to have in mind.

Once again, our guests not only to ask questions or to react to the presentations given but also to share their aspirations in terms of this particular important conversation.

So as we wait for the audience to raise up their hands and share those interventions, I would also like to give two minutes to our respondents, and also Ingrid who shared her presentation with us, to share any aspirations we have in terms we can move forward, any concrete steps on what happens after this particular session.

What is your call to action in terms of policy creation?

Just basically a summary of this session or some of the key insights that you have as part of this session.

So we're going to start with Ingrid, and then move to Abby and then to Yong.

OIA had to leave to another meeting so we won't hear her insights, so ‑‑ but thank you.

>> We are at the beginning of something new, perhaps, and we have to start thinking fresh in this environment.

And that's something that relates to education as we have heard from Lily and others that also relates to training of young generations, but that also relates to how we phrase and frame digital policies around environment and climate, and I feel that for too long we are so glued to this idea of the sovereign national perspective on regulating digital sites and regulating social media and regulating misinformation as we see governments trying to do today, but these approaches often fail because we are living in a new globalised fluid data world where we need new approaches and I think to look at the environment that clearly shows that national territorial approaches have reached their limitasions, and we might need to think about something like digital or equal sovereignty, perhaps, a new idea of sovereignty where it comes through clearly that we are thinking about a new planetary perspectives and safe guarding the planet and not just countries, Global North, Global South, but we need to look and develop models that help us understand such a holistic perspective.

Thank you.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much, Ingrid, for sharing your insights on empowering people through education and also the importance of having like ‑‑ yes, young people through education.

So I want to give the next opportunity to Abby to share her two minutes or less interventions on this conclusion of the insights.

Thank you, Abby.

>> ABBY space ASE KUN:  (Audio difficulties).

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Abby, you're breaking up.

Can't hear you clearly.

>> Can you hear me now?

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Yes, perfect.

>> I want to agree with Ingrid when you look at it from the young people perspective.

It's a very holistic world right now where it doesn't matter if you're in Nigeria or you could be in Australia.

Technology has really helped to integrate people together.

So I think we need to do the same thing in our approach with young people in terms of making sure that, you know, like Ingrid said, it's not a sovereignty divide, a Global North or a Global South but seeing how we can integrate everyone together and have a holistic approach as we start to look at emerging technologies that can support, you know, obviously individual countries, really at the end of the day are looking at it from a holistic perspective as to how to support the world and the planet, and then going from that perspective so that's one of the things that we're going to be working at, at future perspectives, is really bringing the young people together from all parts of the world to see how we can learn from each other and create these.

That can really change the trajectory of where we are today.

Thank you.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much, Abby, on building on the interventions from Ingrid.

Now, Yong will be giving his last interventions on his complete insights about this topic.

>> YONGJING WANG:  Thank you, Doris and everyone.

I feel actually the discussion today really highlights the importance of engagement.

For a discussion like this, this needs to happen to a wider group of people and having a wider engagement and to involve key stakeholders and to get stakeholders sitting together, we need to have the innovativors, the policymakers, the industrial partners and players, in particular, the sector leading of the nations involved in the discussion, and this would make great, more aligned information flow.

And I think many discussions we have had today and also is not widely received by some key stakeholders in the area.

And second is, I agree with Ingrid's point about this challenge in regulating challenges in terms of the international data exchange, and that could not be solved with just one nation or several nations' effort.

But I also want to highlight that this problem is coupled with many national challenges as well.

For example, the data production, the data regulatory molds or any policy in any way can be crossed with the IP protection and with control requirement.

And in many cases, the challenges to the policy about data would require actually an update to how we can protect IP, Intellectual Property, and how the ESCO control could be applied to many countries.

But I feel that if we step back and look at from the human beings historical perspective, AI is not as actually helpful as we thought.

If we look at the technology development in history, every outcome has positive and negative impacts, so all the way from nuclear technology to plastic, to even robots.

Robots and labor.

What is the relationship between robots and labor and don't forgot robot was created nearly half a century ago and started to be used nearly half a century ago.

So we've already had very good lessons in the past of dealing with the relationship with technology and our society.

In many ways, I feel we need to be creative in terms of finding solutions, looking for solutions, but also I think we also need to take across the siplingary approach, what lessons we have learned in the past and what tools we have.

As human beings, we have experience with and these would be applied to the use of AI for eco‑friendly development.

Thank you.

>> DORIS MWIKALI:  Thank you so much for sharing your insights in terms of a multidisciplinary approach, the need for showing that we have a key focus on this challenge from a historical challenge and how we can go about it.

At this juncture, we don't have any questions or any reactions from the audience.

I think because we're running a bit out of time, it would be time for us to complete this fantastic conversation, and just listening to all the insights, the key things that stand out to me is the need not to just have these conversations between people that are already practitioners in terms of effective policies but have intergenerational education and ownership of that policy creation, and showing the secret society, private sector, young people, and people working on the construction of these new technologies.

I think the next key point is the need to have education as a foundational basis of this particular creation of effective policies, whether that is in the funding of new research, in terms of ensuring you have evidence‑based process, or that is educating the next generation of young people for them to be able to effectively interact with these technologies and I think what came out very strongly is that we need to have ‑‑ it needs to be collective action.

It's not one particular player that's going to be able to create effective policies.

It has to be collective action from every stakeholder, on this collective action as we had on this particular session, private sector, secret society, and academics.

So I think these are the key issues that came up in this session.

I think it's been fantastic for me to moderate and listen in on all the amazing work that our partnerships and respondents are doing, and also from the two presentations that we had that are very key, concrete, and pragmatic recommendasionos what we can do moving forward.

So with that, I think it's been fantastic.

In Nairobi, it's literally 4 a.m. in the morning.

It's been amazing being with you.

It's a very good start to my Sunday.

And unfortunately I did not have my video on, but you all have that old picture of mine from 2020.

I was trying to smile through the pandemic.

It's been fantastic having all of you here and thank you for joining us from whatever part of the world you're joining us from, and I'm hoping all of you have a fantastic time during this particular summit discussing imaginative technologies, intimate, and how the work can best be spawned to advance technology, to progress, and not bring us back behind.

So thank you and have a fantastic morning, wherever you are from.

Have a great day.

>> BOSEN LILY LIU:  Thank you all.

Enjoy IGF.

>> YONGJING WANG:  Thank you all.

Bye‑bye.

Internet Governance Forum 2023 digital Commons for Digital Sovereignty

October 8, 2023

room 3

>> We are ready to start.

Thank you very much, everyone, for coming here and welcome to Day 0 of the IGF Kyoto2023.

I am Luca Belli.

I will moderate this session.

We have a very good selection of speakers today.

We will start with Renata Mielli who is the coordinator of the Brazilion Internet Steering Committee, CGI, ministry of science and technology of Brazil.

Unfortunately, she could not join us because she was our remote speaker, and she had a last‑minute problem.

We will have Lea space Gimpel, that is AI and country Policy Lead, Digital Public Goods Alliance, Germy.

And Anita Gurumurthy, from India, and Franziska Putz, from Wikimedia, and of course Carlos Baca, the general coordinator from C IT SAC, Mexico.

Some years ago, we felt there was interesting discussions at the IGF but few discussions on the digital commons, and so we started to have this revolutionary Day 0 event on Internet commons, something since 2018, if I'm not mistaken, yes, and during these five years from Anriette and other friends from APC, we have tried to feed this discussion about digital commons, Internet commons, and their relation with several topics every year.

The topic of this year is digital sovereignty, and I would like to just spend a couple of minutes to introduce the debate so that people understand what we are speaking about when we speak about digital commons, and what we want to speak about when we speak about digital sovereignty.

On the digital commons part, it is very important to understand that we are not only speaking about a type of resource.

We are speaking about the type of management, a type of governance, actually.

It's a governance that links the resource with the community.

It's a way of management of digital resources.

It is something that is alternative to traditional way of managing states and markets, and it is complementary.

It is a very good example.

We will see a lot of examples but a very good example in which I work is community networks, which are local networks built by unconnected communities to create their own connectivity, and so to manage connectivity, local sources, local content and needs for the community is a very good example of even how digital resources can be built and managed by local communities.

And this actually brings us to a very core pillar of what we can see as digital sovereignty, which is not digital sovereignty in terms of authoritarian control, censorship or social country.

Digital sovereignty is something I've been working on a lot the past years, especially in the context of the Greeks group of countries, South Africa, where it is evident that social control is not only one part of digital sovereignty.

There is another pillar, that is about understanding the technology, developing the technology, and regulating the technology.

None of this is controversial.

None of this is controlling people.

It's understanding how technology works to be able to develop it not only being a consumer but also a producer of technology.

It's very much a question of self‑determinasion as we are speaking with Anriette a lot, and being able to regulate it.

If you're a state, you can regulate it.

If you're a local community that develops its own community network, you define norms, and naturally, I want to stress this point because if we read on commons, Eleanor anStrom won a Pullitzer on this.

It's surprising that this management system is very performing, works very well as long as you have a governance.

You have rules including rules that define how to deal when people try to abuse the commons or disrespect the common governance rate.

To understand how this plays out with the commission networks, and also Wikipedia, and other type of initiatives, and also how states are starting to understand this, which is very important because the commons by themselves may be very fragile, may not be able ‑‑ a commons movement alone may not be able to ‑‑ it's very good that state try to understand and foster this system and protect it.

I will give the floor to Anriette for her initial introduction.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Thank you everyone for being here.

We've been working with this concept the last few years, and what we are really trying to do is identify what it is that is broken in Internet governance, and Vincent always said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and I said to him, but it is broken and I think that's the challenge we're dealing with in Internet governance.

We have models that try to increase more transparency.

We have ‑‑ we're trying to create paradigms that are not shaped by control.

We're trying to prevent abuse of power by governments, abuse of power by corporations, but we're actually failing and then when we have something like the global digital compact which illustrates how you might put fantastic new principles, emphasize Human Rights, emphasize digital inclusion or access, but you're placing those inclusions on top of the approach to fundamentalal Internet governance, which is flawed.

That's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to find something that can really change how we think about what the Internet is, what its essential character and nature is, to establish it as a commons, and based on that, then explore what are the different legal explanations of governing a commons.

Every year, we explore the different aspects of that.

Personally, I believe fundamentally if we don't grapple with this and shift the paradigm at this level, we will always be working with multi‑ stakeholder processes as a label but not in fact as a transformative approach to making governance more inclusive, and I think finally, the really important here is not the sovereignty of states.

It's all about self‑determinasion.

It's about giving people more control.

It's about giving communities and content creators more control so it is in fact really striving towards fundamental shifts in how we think about the Internet and how we hope to one day govern it.

>> LUCA BELLI:  Excellent.

We see there are a lot of variants that interact.

We have a different range of stakeholders represented here today and also to have a very good feminine representation of stakeholders which is always something we have to strive to do and to implement, not only gender balance but also doing it with concrete deeds, and we are also very happy to have Renata Mielli, who is now working for the Brazilian government, and she has been working a lot on these kind of issues from a civil society perspective for many years, and it's very interesting in kind of thinking it's evolving in the new Brazilian administration that as you may already know is very different from the previous one and many extents, in a very positive way.

So let's see what is the current thinking at the Brazilian government and the CGI that Renata represents in her double hat.

>> RENATA MIELLI:  Thank you.

Thanks, Luca, for inviting me to participate in this session.

I think it is very important for us to talk about sovereignty and Internet, and I would like to thanks for being here to talk about this.

We are living in a world where the Internet, digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and the development of infrastructure, are sacred to economical growth in our countries.

In this digital era, there is a particular element that makes them functional, data.

Without a substantial amount of data, none of these technologies makes sense, and I think if we talk about sovereignty, digital sovereignty, we have to talk about data.

Countries that have the capacity to produce these technologies and data and who create and achieve regulatory frameworks to harness this digital system for the public good will be able to assume leadership positions in the world and reduce their dependence on others.

However, in recent years, these goals have seemed distant for many countries in the south due to deepening technology asymmetries.

These disparities are not only concentrate in a few countries but also in a handful of companies.

Leading to the prevention of digital development.

Of course, we are talking about the big techs that are concentrating on the ‑‑ all of our lives in economics and everything.

In this scenario, what can we do?

What kind of policies can we develop to enable our countries to achieve digital sovereignty?

We need to become technological creators like Luca said.

Technological consumers.

We must understand how technology can be used to benefit our society with the perspective that it can empower countries but they can empower also people in reducing the problems if they have these goals in mind.

An example, address real issues in communities.

This is an important challenge that is related to the development and encouragement of the use of existent services, such as passenger transportation and traffic engineering.

And stating the importance of having our own solutions for these services, which can free us from dependence on applications like Uber and Waze is crucial.

This is because the use of these platforms collects essential data for the development of public services in public policies, which are controlled by international private companies.

In Brazil, for example, would have some who develop his own applications for transportation, and this is very important to start something in more global risk in Brazil.

Having achieved solutions for these types of services helps develop the digital economy chain and can bring more empowerment to the service providers associated with them.

They can develop fair economic arraignments such as achieving models, for example.

To achieve this, we must strengthen our national industrious universities and research centres, but also reinforce the whole of the state.

Our strongest state that ‑‑ we need the public policies that bolster tech and structure in both the private and public sectors.

Clearing goals for innovation and reduction of dependence.

Device and technology usage.

Promote the use of technology and digital services while regulating the activities of big tech firms and data usage.

Pureitize cybersecurity.

Develop strong cybersecurity policies including data protection standards and policies for that flow.

On the other hand, we need to address the challenges related to the connectivity for all people.

Achieving digital sovereignty is the landscape that will be a complex journey, but by implementing these strategies and policies, we can work towards a future where our countries have a greater control over their digital destinies.

Another topic for discussion of digital sovereignty is we wish to include cultural diversity.

The Internet in Brazil recently hosted the first Internet Governance Forum bringing together Portuguese‑speaking countries bringing together multilanguage on the Internet.

This become more relevant at a time when artificial intelligence emerging into a new stage in the development of digital economy.

This is because the models need to be fit with a large volume of data, and most of it is available in English.

This is not only a language issue but also the topic that language is related to a culture and identity.

We need to challenge seeking large language models in Portuguese and the other languages to achieve a strong position in AI models.

This is a matter of course of digital sovereignty too.

And to finish my presentation, I would like to bring some ‑‑ an example of digital initiative we have received in Brazil that for me design what we are trying to say about using our own solution for the digital Internet.

I'm going to talk about Pix payment system introduced in 2020.

A payment system that was developed in Brazil and has since become the most popular payment method.

It is user‑friendly and most importantly transactions are tax‑free.

The introduction of these services has had a significant impact on commerce particularly for small and personal business as it has made transactions more cost effective.

Additionally, it has reduced the data concentration in the hands of major international financial companies such as visa and MasterCard.

Nowadays, we have around 70% of Brazilian people connected on the Internet, and this is the same number of people that use the Pix to do translations on the Internet because you only have to have a bank account and a cellular phone, a cell phone, and a connection to do some transaction with Pix, and this is important to democratize payment access on the Internet.

This is only an example of something in Brazil, and it's an example of attack on sovereignty, but there are a lot of ones that we can talk about later, and I think this is some principle, some points to start the discussion about how important it is to our countries be more in creativity and be in more creativity and produce their own technology solutions.

Thank you very much, Luca, for the space.

>> LUCA BELLI:  Alright, thank you very much for this.

Indeed, it is something that very few ‑‑ a couple of points that I wanted to stress about what Renata was mentioning, and a key course for this conversation.

First of all, the fact that it is interesting to understand and to discuss digital commons and what digital commons and digital sovereignty as sort of a counter narrative to a very kind of concentrated digital eco‑system that we all know that we are witnessing now and over the past decade, especially.

Digital commons are very interesting because they are antithetical to the logical value of accumulation and even sort of dependency creation, structural dependency creation that large corporations try to build on their eco‑systems, and the second point that Renata was mentioning, and something we've been discussing a lot, is also exists some elements that may be driven by local communities, like community networks, and I think we will speak a lot about this with Carlos and will have an entire session on digital sovereignty and networks on Thursday.

But it's also something that the state has a role to play in, and the fact that the State can also foster some example of digital sovereignty, like the Pix in Brazil.

In India, you have UPI, which is a single online payment system which is a public digital infrastructure.

That allows to be independent or at least strategically autonomous from large tech corporations, and no one here has anything against large tech corporations, but the fact that one is totally dependent from anyone is never something that one would advise to a friend, so it's always good to think about strategical autonomy, and to start to understand ‑‑ this conception of good digital sovereignty in terms of understanding the technology, being able to develop it and regulate it, is essential to being strategically autonomous.

Speaking about public goods, I think no one better than our next speaker, about speaking about the digital public goods alliances ‑‑ sorry ‑‑ 

>> Before Lea starts, I want to welcome the online participants.

There are not many of them.

I don't know who they are.

Maybe they're on a boat in the Pacific somewhere because if they're anywhere else, they have no business being awake but we do have around 15, maybe 12 minus the tech team.

So welcome, and please use the chat.

I'm monitoring the chat, and thanks for being with us.

>> LUCA BELLI:  Fantastic.

Thank you very much, and welcome to the online participants.

Not only the participants here.

We have Lea Gimpe, AI & country policy lead, digital public goods alliance.

>> LEA GIMPEL:  Thank you very much Luca and this panel for being part of this discussion.

I think Pix was already mentioned but digital public infrastructure is definitely something in digital public goods but 1st I'll start telling you about the digital public goods and alliance and the infrastructure to use all the buzz words here.

So digital public goods alliance is a multi‑ stakeholder alliance as endorsed by the United Nations to help the discoverability investment and use of digital public goods, especially for low and middle income countries to help attain sustainable development.

What are digital public goods?

Basically, in 2019 and 20, stakeholders from the private sector and the public sector, as well as civil society and everyone else to promote open‑source software, open content, open data, open standards and open AI models to help reduce fragmentasion in the digital eco‑system and ensure more efficiency, and that is essentially also the definition, that the use for digital public goods.

And what they all have in common is that they are open source.

They do no harm, and they are focused on reaching the sustainability development goals.

Five categories of products.

So just to repeat, open source software, open AI models, open content, open data, and the digital public goods alliance basically does two things.

First of all, we advocate for this concept and help especially middle income countries to use digital public goods for their public service delivery, and secondly, also maintains a DPG standard and registry.

The standard is a set of indicators to assess any given product that can be considered a digital public good.

We have a submission on our web site where as a product developer can apply for a DPG label.

It's basically like an insurance for donors and government and others, that these products are vetted to be open sourced according to several standards and to help attain the FTGs.

You can actually go through our web site and also map to the sustainability goals.

If you are interested, for instance, in education and making sure that no one is left behind there, you can go to the registry fee and find all the open source software and all the other componentings such as educational resources and see which ones are registered to fit its purpose.

The second part, I would like to shed a bit of light on the evolving topics in the DPG system.

One has been the infrastructure.

Pix from a DPG, it's not digital public goods at the moment.

We hope it will be in the future.

It's not open source but it's basically a means to help give countries sovereignty over their own infrastructure, and that is also what DPGs are made for, so that you as a country, as an implementer, can use DPGs yourself, adapt them, adopt them, extend them if you want and also choose a vendor if you would like to work with all the implements of it.

You can go to another vendor and build your infrastructure.

At the same time as a country you also have the possibility to develop your own vendor E. Coli system to create jobs, for instance, to help implement products, that are either developed in your own country or that you adopt as a country, a huge DPG, such as IHS2 which is a management police station platform.

Coming back to public infrastructure, basically, it's four really basic components of the country's architecture, so to say.

It's payment systems such as Pix.

It's digital identity.

It's civil registry fees and data exchange.

As the digital public goods alliance, a number of products fill out as a prospect of being open sourced and being adoptable by everyone.

Products, for instance, these are tools you can use to build your own public digital infrastructure.

They are not a tiny open source project but they actually have police stations already under their belts, so a lot of it is working in a specific country and one is not.

What is the main purpose of the digital public goods alliance is to help exchange country experiences.

Basically have other countries develop this kind of product and develop their own contrail over their digital currency as Renata said it so nicely.

As a second part I want to quickly elaborate on open source AI and AI systems as digital public goods because OOBSZ given the current dynamics that's a huge topic for us at DPG as well because we figure probably the DPG standard needs to evolve for AI to fit better and given the dynamics around generative AI.

Here I think one of the main challenges is the concentration of powers that we see in the current ecosystem.

As the digital public goods alliance, we would like to come to democratizing AI in several ways.

There's the use of AI.

There's the democratizing of the development of the artificial intelligence.

It's not ‑‑ and also democratizing the benefits and governance of artificial intelligence systems.

At DPGA, the overlap between responsible openness because obviously not every AI system is fit for being released in the public do main completely but we need to have safe guards around this as well.

In our community, the development is an approach that we can say is a creative approach to the development of the AI systems, which means that we basically break down an AI system, its main components being data, being models, and being a training coach and look at all of these components independently and define which of these should be open or closed or in between in order for the product to be considered DPG.

Because it's not a black and white debate but there's something between being completely open or being closed and proprietary.

Since data was mentioned, just to give you a little sneak peek, so to say for the data component, we are actually allowing the mostly  leeway when it comes to openness.

What we basically define is a way to be aspirational openness, for instance, having some data sets on the model on the original data set or to have hosted access to the AI training data, which will help in combination of the models that is mostly open including model weights, architecture, and such and the codes that needs to be open sourced to ensure that the benefits of both open source, of being transparent and really usable, being extensible is still part ‑‑ or can be realised by AIDPGs.

If you have any opinion on that, happy to elaborate either in the session or later on afterwards, and in a nut shell, the work that the DPGA does, countries have digital sovereignty at its heart because we believe that the countries need to have control over their own digital infrastructure in order to deliver digital services at scale and cater to their populations.

Thanks.

>> LUCA BELLI:  Thank you very much, Lea.

Actually, it's very interesting.

I think the work of the alliance is very interesting because it aims at mapping what exists and creating a repository of what exists.

That is something already very beneficial because there are not many organisations that do so around the world.

Although many people are interested in this, you don't know where to look at to understand what exists already.

And the other point you stressed I really like and I think it's very interesting for the conversation of today and other conversations we'll have along this week.

It's the connection between digital sovereignty and AI, actually another piece of very directed advertisement.

We will present another book on AI sovereignty, transparency and connectivity on day 2.

A part of it is precisely dedicated when it comes to how digital sovereignty can be baked into the conception of AI sovereignty and the kind of layered approach that you need to have because if we only look at regulation of AI as risk, it's important, but you run the risk to only look at the tree and not the forest.

You have to look at all the layers from that data to compute, and we will speak about everything on day 2 at 5:30, if you are interested.

Plus there will be free copies of the books.

But after this very direct advertisement, I think now it's time to open for some comments and reactions because we already have some interesting comments from the online attendants.

If you have any comments, we can have five to ten minutes to have some initial reactions from the audience and also from the participants online.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I have a comment from Timothy Holborn from Australia.

I forgot the Australians are awake.

Like a typical south African, I over look the Australians.

He is raising a very important point about the supply chains and the ecosystems of creating digital public goods.

He's saying there needs to be recognition of the labor and the effort of people who bulk the comments and can benefit directly.

Our systems need to support inforgs or personal self hood systems where personal agents can make use of permissive commons, common artifacts that may be about a relationship between two people.

In other words, he's actually adding to the complexity of this ecosystem.

He says he wonders how policy now seeks to support personal ontology management.

I wonder if you're an academic, Timothy.

For me, the question that this brings up as well, which I hope that the other speakers can allings address, is how do you recognise the role of public sector, of the state, without creating a new paradigm of top‑down control.

How do you mobilize the public sector and the role of the state to protect the commons without it actually taking over and capturing the commons?

Corporate capture and state capture, how do we avoid that.

Any other comments from the room.

You can stand at the Mike.

>> LUCA BELLI:  We have two comments here, three.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Just line up at the Mikes.

>> LUCA BELLI:  Four.

Let's take just four, and then we will proceed with the next segment.

Yes, if I can ask you to introduce yourself for the transcript also so we know who you are, and then we can proceed, yes.

>> Audience: Definitely.

I am Alexander boboseN.

I am a coordinator at the Brazilian homeless movement.

Very glad to see this table.

I would like to share with the audience here that we launched recently a booklet on digital sovereignty led by social movements, which I think is completely related to thinking of this so‑called new commons, right, this community‑based governance of commons core resources, right.

Having a dream, one day we will see networks or social movements will be on the main sessions of Internet Governance Forum, not to show case the initiatives but to draw classes for digital governance.

My question is related to digital public goods and digital public infrastructure, actually.

Because Pix, for instance, was funded ‑‑ was an initiative that came out of Brazilian central bank from its own technology.

The French central development are developing their own digital infrastructure like a repository for carbon emissions to support ESG.

And so one that is not considered as digital public infrastructure.

How did you come up with digital ID, payment methods, texts or content‑sharing data platforms as the digital public infrastructure partakers, I don't think that's enough.

I'd like to hear a bit more on that.

Thank you very much.

>> LUCA BELLI:  We can take all the comments and have some quick replies and go on.

>> Audience: Thank you.

I am johan from also Brazil and an advisor and an NGO.

It has actually a great huge connection with what Alishanda said because one of the main things that I missed in the presentations was we were talking about digital identity, having more control over data, et cetera, and technological development as a whole but we have an issue also with physical infrastructure from it, like the way I'm talking about data centicism, satellites.

We have data showing Amazon, for instance.

I would like to know more of your view on these issues and maybe a glimpse of what's the state's role of promoting these initiatives.

And also, how to see the role of the state implementing community‑based solutions for sovereignty.

I think the homeless movement in Brazil is a great example of that.

But yeah, maybe hearing some comments on those two topics.

Thank you very much.

>> Audience: I am Osta the cofounder of the OPI institute.

Two friends on the panel.

Two quick questions.

One is, Lea, maybe this is for you.

When we think about digital public infrastructure, so much has been built for instance and we've learned the lessons from that.

How do we think about interoperatability.

Talking to each other.

India is trying to export or build digital public infrastructure over different parts of the world, and then how do we really think about those solidarities, and then moving from solidarities is also the idea of commons.

We have so many mechanisms but they are happening in isolated boundaries of the nation state because there's no way for this data to talk to one another.

So the state‑run sovereignty sort of goes antithetical to the infrastructure being built and also the notion of commons.

>> Audience: Hi, everyone.

My name is Al, and I work for the Torah project which might be a digital public good and a piece of infrastructure that's been around almost two decades now, and I'm curious what people think about how we fund the existence of digital public goods once they are in the world, and if we're really thinking about the antithesis of value hoarding and big tech and, you know, digital products that make money, essentially, how do we make sure that these things exist once they are used in the world and millions of people?

I see a lot of amazing projects fighting over scraps, essentially, in this funding landscape, and I think it's complicated.

There are some cool things that are happening, but I'd love to hear more about what the panel thinks about how we keep these things alive once they exist and what kind of money we make that happen with.

Thanks.

>> Audience: Hi, everyone.

My name is Sharpa, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne.

My question comes from research during my stay in Australia.

I realise the principle of self‑determinasion as we all understand that one of the core principles of international law and legal system stands on.

I think it's very differently interpreted based on on which direction you go, and I'm surprised Australia doesn't have one, and because of which the indigenous people over there cannot protect their right even if they want to, including their data, and I thought that that's the kind of problem that existed in many countries, including India because I came to know that, you know, there was this one particular company that was going to take data of like poor people telling them oh, you are getting like, you know, it's your data, you're getting participated but then how are they going to control that data?

My question is when we talk about digital commons, we are ‑‑ if we continue with this practice, I think it will soon become a tune of exploitasion.

So I think the concept ‑‑ before we move on to discussing digital commons, we need to talk about data determinasion.

Otherwise it's a digital gap in the new era of colonization, I believe.

>> LUCA BELLI:  A lot of interesting comments.

Maybe a quick round of replies from anyone on the panel, and then we proceed with the next segment of panelists which actually many of them will plug into the comments that have been shared.

One more question.

One more question online.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN: 

>> Are you able to hear me?

Wonderful.

Look, I've been working for a very long period of time to create open standards and technology to support freedom of thought and rule of law.

As we might break away from these environments where we had employment papers, there are certain things to know to walk into a court of law and say, your honour, peacefully, I would like to resolve this dispute.

These are things what you call identity were produced to create.

But the underlying infrastructure to make sure that people can store all this information and operate their own artificial intelligence agencies so that the microphones and censors aren't going outside of your house but certainly have a role with your door locks, your life, and your children and everything else.

So how ‑‑ what's the maybe different ideology ‑‑ it's much like the United Nations' agreement speak about freedom of religion.

Some people may well want to be defined by their wallets.

But other people want to be defined by what they do.

So to do that, we need to create a lot of infrastructure, commons infrastructure, and commons may be the common relationship between two people which is based upon agreements between those two people, even when the relationship between two people or more than two people change.

So how are we building the infrastructure to support their Human Rights?

At least there's an option through these different models where the artificial intelligence agent that is your prosthetic self in society has a minirelationship with you as a human being, not someone else who wants to make use of you as a natural resource for profit and/or mitigating any risks that may occur, if indeed our public institutions do not want to make a distinction between good people and bad ones.

So there's a different sort of structure to what is able to be made possible.

Also I will add life's language models are different than to programming, encoding language and languages, and building what is called in psychology personal Ontology.

I wanted to highlight that and I wanted to highlight the volume of work is significant, and I'm currently working through the idea of producing through the 110 chapters or so in Internet society, some basic foundational framework to be able to support things like digital prisons ‑‑ because I think we need an alternative to Facebook, to support the native refugees, to support the native people whose future is unknown unless we can get the knowledge in that evidentiary sense to a court of law where peaceful decisions are able to be made.

I hope that helps.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Thanks, Timothy.

And if anyone is online or want to log in, Timothy has posted some very useful links in the Zoom chat.

Anybody want to respond to ‑‑ Renata?

>> RENATA MIELLI:  Let me start with the basics of the definition of DPI that I put forward.

Our main guiding point here is infrastructure ‑‑ that is why we land at these four.

Obviously there are other important parts of a country's digital stakes that need to be in place in order to run it safe and securely but we believe by focusing on these four components, we actually able an informed discussion and really help guide also resources, and letting out our basic components.

Others have broader definitions but here is the real thing on the DPI definition.

I think another useful approach to think of for DPI, an initiative is developing, so basically defining the core ability for specific services and pieces of the country's stakes and such the need for digital governance.

Some of them would fall into our definition of digital public infrastructure, ID, smaller components, and that's the main definition or the differentiation so to say.

Society versus sectoral use cases.

For sectors you obviously have sectors of information that need to be in place.

In terms of the question of interoperability and having a product that speak to each other.

As a DPGA, we are committed to open source so what we want to see is that technologies not only develop themselveses but in an ideal scenario, it's shared experiences, and to seize components based on interoperability standards, open standards, et cetera, to help these different components can speak to each other and be adoptive.

So basically what we want to see less of are these bilateral agreements that some countries currently do in order to share their technologies to avoid sharing their technology within a public do main as a commons and others to adopt it.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  I'll respond quickly.

You go first, Renata.

>> RENATA MIELLI:  I always forgot.

Just a word, I completely agree with Alishandi, when he said we have to have more social movement speaking for himselves, for themselveses, in this kind of panel, and I agree to when he says the Pix is not a digital common technology because it's not open source, and there is a lot of things.

But it's a public policy that effectually democratizes the commercialisation and has an importance to go to the sovereignty and in Brazil, we have lived in the last six years under governments that did not have any agenda of sovereignty, and much less in the digital terms.

So we have to start from the beginning and there are a lot of to do, and we are talking about in this moment about how can we face the challenge to have a policy to data centres in our country?

We are discussing this in this moment in the ministry of science and technology.

How can we discuss initiatives to have our sovereignty of our data, and this is not simple, and this is something we would have to achieve in the long term.

It's not a policy that we have the results in the short term, but we are we have this compromise to face this challenge and see what we can do about this.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Just quickly on the question about interoperability.

Additionally, I think digital infrastructure is actually a very useful new concept that is existing or emerging in our Internet Governance space, and I think it's a good opportunity to look at collaboration between different stakeholders, between communities, civil society, businesses, organisations, and government actually working together to define common definitions but also principles on which to regulate where there's a need for regulation and to be interoperable.

I must say in Africa, we have a digital policy framework.

Members have adopted a very high‑level framework on data policy which actually enables data sovereignty without data localisation in a way that would restrict trade or harm freedom of expression.

I think the India open sourced identity system is also a good example but you need frameworks, principles, and collaboration, so I think this interoperability also has a political and a political will component that we cannot ‑‑ and a component of collaboration, and just finally on regulation for more community‑based ownership.

I think currently our whole regulatory paradigm in Internet governance is shaped by big companies and trying to create some kind of level playing field in the European digital services, digital markets, and that is a good response but we also need regulation that enables diversity and that creates more open markets that are more open to community initiatives to smaller players, so I think we ‑‑ well, finally, I just do think we can use this DPI discussion as a way of trying to rethink some of the rats ruts that we have fallen into with our approaches to Internet governance.

>> LUCA BELLI:  Just a quick comment before we float to Anita, just to help the participants to also have a little bit more clarity because we are speaking about a lot of different things now, and just to put, again, the discussion into at least three main pillars that are emerging here.

The digital commons are really about resources and communities that self‑govern a specific resource, which can be a digital resource.

The public goods or public infrastructures that have different points of overlaps with digital commons, but oversee our role of the government and the public entity fostering, thinking about them, and being promoting them like Pix, if you want.

They brought overlap, and they have a role in protecting the digital commons, and the digital commons can help enormously the initial development of digital infrastructures and both represent two very good examples of how you can reclaim digital sovereignty, meaning not being dependent from the ecosystems and infrastructures that large tech corporations that usually are very few and very concentrated develop and through which they technically regulate the digital development of the world.

The comment was made about AI and compute is a very good one, and that is a very good point, and we analyse here the fact that there are basically three large corporations that provides cloud computing for AI to the entire world.

We can name them because there is not shaming.

It's just naming.

AWS, and cloud.

There is a bit of emerging Chinese, think giants like Alibaba, but otherwise you have basically 70% of the market concentrated and three cloud providers that define cloud computing for AI in the world.

So that is something that needs to be tackled.

I'm very happy to hear ‑‑ actually, I think one of the best things that the Brazilian government did was reopen the program to promote the development of semiconductors in Brazil.

It was something that the previous government wanted to sell, it was the only production of semiconductors in Latin America.

It was really not strategic to sell it.

We will speak about all of this maybe today and for sure on Tuesday.

Now, let's give the floor to Anita because a lot of what we say about digital public infrastructure and digital public goods comes from India over the past 10 years.

So Anita.

>> AN IT A GURUMURTHY:  We only have 20 minutes.

Just a small caveat, I'm not an expert on India.

My location is in India and I certainly like to speak on those experiences but I thought I would do what we've been working on for awhile which is the connections between the digital commons and digital sovereignty and conceptually with some thoughts.

As Luca mentioned, the whole idea of the national commons and the management of the national commons is not a new phenomenon.

However, the management of the national commons has had to deal with systems for different things, you know, maybe lakes, maybe mountains, grasslands.

They've all been localiseked.

So when you're looking at digital, you're talking about a certain idea of scale and the context of the integrity of the commons for that scale and I think historically for 20 years going beyond Internet commons, we've had rules, systems, protocols, the open software movements, and now of course the data and the layers of digital intelligence that are getting built on top of these commons for which systems don't exist.

Common systems don't exist.

And these pertain very much to texual data, which is language and other forms of data, including IT data, which we see in LLM models but not only.

Also foundational AI counts in all of these social knowledge commons.

Of course the governance is key and conditionalities become vital.

This is not only because we have to have rules for how to access, who will access and use, but also to avert the pollution of the commons, which is a very, very important thing.

So what is sovereignty?

Sovereignty is self‑determinasion, connects the idea of the commons with two things.

One with the process of commoning.

So the commons are only as important as commoning.

There's no importance of having a pristine lake out there that is not of use to human kind.

Commoning, the act of creating preserving the commons prudently.

The second is sovereignty connects as self‑determinasion, as one of our friends pointed out, connects also to the whole process of comuneitizing.

Comuneitizing is quite evident.

You cannot have a community that creates a resource and cares for it but is divorced from the uses and benefits that derives from the resource which is exactly how it is with the regime of data, with the factor of the regime of data.

We seem to create and create and no one seems to care for it and someone else seems to benefit from it.

So it's very central to the commons, and I think that enabling a collaborative regime of access use benefit sharing and governance that is about relevant models of democracy, appropriate for the resource and the consideration.

So commoning and comuneitizeasion of the nature pertain to the nature of the resource and cannot be some generic set of principles that are going to be homogeneously applied.

Any development of commoning, so that some people don't capture access.

The option value of data and the quest for infinet aftermarkets has led to data hoarding with consequences for the digital economy.

I think suffice it to say that all of us understand what it means and in order to make sure that comuneitizeasion and commoning are not divorced or decoupled, policy needs to ensure distribution of justice.

It's a very tricky role of the state because the commons has always been certainly through crony capitalism, you know, being very conveniently exploited by the state for certain purposes.

So the challenges that face us essentially link to one of openness.

That does not necessarily lead to commoning.

And second challenge that we are confronted with is the highly dissented imaginaries of communities that do not recognise public goods in the role of sharing public goods and the commons.

We get into endless hair splitting about is this commons, public goods, DPIs, etc.? 

I think it is important to ecinize that it is not possible for instance, low‑income neighborhoods that manage their own slum communities in India in a place like Bombay.

Where it is not possible for them to have their water supply, own Internet systems because the commons of their housing has to be managed in relation to the public goods that are provisioned by the government.

So public goods in relation to the commons are not just a kind of privilege but they are part of the duty of the state to provide which is why the example of Pix or UPI in India become very, very vital.

So I think these relationships between self‑determinasion, sovereignty, commons, and public goods have to always be kept in mind because it's a process of fine‑tuning, calibrating how these relationships will actually work.

We have in the realm of data enumerable principles, (?) These have been critiqued for some kinds of limitasions, you know, for instance that they do facility greater data sharing but do not pay attention to the credentials, sharing and reuse.

We also have a criticism that the fair‑use principles like, you know, let's actually have federated systems, I'll give you your privacy but I will take your data.

That's the larger model.

Such approaches enable private sector actors to engage in free riding.

So there has been in the realm of, you know, academia and practice the whole idea of the care principles, and these are originally developed from indigenous data resources, connecting back to the nagoya principles of the convention of biological diversity and these of course connect to data ecosystems and their collective benefits, collective control of data systems, and reuse principles that actually inherit the collective benefit.

Those principles are very important because they do push for communeitizeasion, self‑determinasion, and communeitizeasion.

There's one more vital connection between commons community and commons sovereignty, and that is not only linked to sovereignty as knowledge but sovereignty also as embodiment, and this comes from feminist thinking, and here I think we really need to understand that the resource governance questions around data or AI cannot really look at the commons as some kind of dematerialized abstract idea but as an idea that's extremely particulariseked and embodied.

That is a very vital connection that is not easy because you're dealing with a resource.

You're dealing with principles of territory.

You're dealing with principles of knowledge, and you're dealing with principles of embodiment.

So, again, there's a lot of complexity in the commons of data.

I would like to wrap up with a couple of comments.

One is that sovereignty is implicated not only in the terms of which human bodies are dematerialized into a resource for human capitalism but equally when they get rematerialized into a large language model or rematerialized into the form of a basic AI model, we really have to look at how this has material impacts on our ability and means to choose our life course, which is called the equal to of autonomy.

Self‑determinasion is not only about the management of the resource but self‑determinasion is also about the accountability to the human beings who are part of the commoning.

So this is really important.

Finally to address my issue around openness and its limits and also the whole question of what is to be done to govern the systems of commons and what are the institution systems of governance.

A few points.

I think that digital resources, you know, like data bank or look and see the bank with informational data bases where there are certain pooling of seeds that farmers do.

You might have a biodiversity registered.

These really require some kind of state support.

I think you really need to endorse these.

You need to support these, and you also need to creates standards and protocols which are public goods, and finally, I think that the provisioning of the public goods as I said is really the duty of the state in the digital era.

It cannot be wished away.

And I think the elephant in the room is really not just the governance of the commons but the governance of the non‑commons which basically means governance of the capitalist systems, regulation of the capitalist systems that poach the commons.

Thank you.

[applause]

>> LUCA BELLI:  Thank you, Anita, for this fantastic overview.

How all of this information interacts from the individual to the community to the state and also something that we analyse in other work.

When there is no individual community or state sovereignty, there is a corporate digital sovereignty.

As the Romans already said thousands of years ago.

In the real society, there is regguleasion.

If you don't have community doing it or the state doing it, there will be someone else doing it, some private acting or doing.

That is very much something we have to keep in mind.

Something that actually is very good to create a connection between what is your saying the individuals and the community create value that then is hovered by corporations, is I think comes from the next speaker from Wikipedia, because we have seen a lot of latest generative AI being generated by Hoover.

Please give, the floor is yours.

>> FRANZIS KA:  I'm part of the global advocacy team from the Wikimedia foundation.

I love that I'm following this speaker because there's very thought‑provoking concepts and there's a saying within the Wikimedia community that Wikipedia shouldn't work in theory no matter our feelings on the commons.

As we near the end of this session, I want to make sure everybody is awake and alive.

Can you please raise your hand if you have visited Wikipedia, read an article on Wikipedia before.

This is what I like to see and hope to see.

Keep your hands up.

If you have edited Wikipedia before?

Alright, I was assuming this was going to be a biased sample but this makes me really happy that in this room we have a lot of hands raised.

Thank you.

Everybody again raise your hands if you already knew it was possible to edit Wikipedia.

Absolutely beautiful.

So like I said, this is a very biased sample in this room but I still like to ask because one of the greatest challenges that my team ‑‑ and I have two wonderful colleagues sitting right here if you want to wave your hands so people can fall into after.

So reluctant.

One of the biggest challenges that we find is that most people actually aren't familiar with how Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects work, and when I say people, I also mean government officials, legislators, very influential policymakers, and I think that's because we're relics of the early Internet days.

And by "we" I mean Wikimedia projects, and also any project dedicated to the idea of both free access to knowledge and maybe more importantly to this idea of communal ownership and creation of information resources and technology otherwise known as the digital commons in this room.

And that lack of awareness is maybe understandable because we're 20‑plus years into those early web 2.0 days and the Internet looks really different right now and as do the conversations about how to regulate it, how to shape it, and who gets to participate in these processes.

The world heavily relies on one top of dominant online service, as we've heard from this panel, and that is for‑profit and advertisement‑driven.

In my experience when I start talking to people that work at Wikipedia, a shared Uber or something.

When they were my age they had teachers telling them not to use Wikipedia in the classroom.

They still can't believe when I tell them that it is an online space they can be part of creating.

It seems absent in many of our policy and governance discussions as well.

Instead, these discussions reflect an anxiety about how to deal with commercial interests as well as the ability of bad actors to amplify harmful content online, and those are important tommix that we definitely need to come up with solutions for but there's a lack of proactive action that's being taken to promote a positive vision of the Internet.

Instead I think we're really focused on what we want to prevent but we could also be talking about what we want to create together.

If Luca has been plugging all of his books I will do the same to plug a workshop that we're running on Wednesday to talk about proactive visions of the Internet so please come find us if you want to participate.

But this kind of anxiety that's dominating these conversations is also very much part of the conversations taking place around emerging technologies like AI.

Most AI governance discussings are working on making sure this field also isn't captured by commercial interests, again heard on the panel, and that it doesn't amplify racial biases and inequalities.

Again, that's a good thing.

I think that Wikipedia and other players in the free‑knowledge movement, such as those that support the commons are uniquely positioned at this time to raise the values of participation and also to share concrete learnings in these conversations about the governance of emerging technologies and what that might look like from a more bottom‑up perspective.

Let's take Wikipedia and AI as a case study.

Just top of my head, Luca definitely didn't ask me to do that.

We know that Wikimedia is not known for producing any kind of revolutionary game‑changing technology.

If you've read a Wikipedia article you have probably noticed we're using the same software as back in 2002.

That's also kind of the point.

We're still here.

We're still providing a public good.

We're not stealing your data as part of that, selling your data, or asking you for money or putting your content behind K walls.

There's more than 300,000 volunteers aroundlet world just to give you a sense of the scale who are working on creating this public interest infrastructure, which is being read around 6,000 times a second and exists across 300 languages.

So I think it's fair to say that our model even if our software is really old, our model is resilient, and we have been committed to creating freely‑accessible information through processes that are participatory, transparent, and also open to everyone.

And this commitment is what shapes how we think about emerging technologies like AI.

These are tools that must have people's interests and participation at their core.

So technologies like AI are going to support human rightlies and inevitably the public interest when they support the work that humans do on our platforms instead of replacing that work.

Wikipedia volunteers have long used AI tools and box to scale their own activities, and those are important like detecting vandalism or translating content.

When these tools are built by the foundation, then we do so in consultation with the very people using it.

We want to know if editors are trying to combat a disinformation challenge that they're seeing across a particular language project or a particular topic, then we want to know exactly what those challenges are and how we're going to end up helping them.

They are obviously our strongest partners in considering the context‑specific effects of AI like on these small language communities, as an example.

Any AI tool that we develop is also going to be open source and transparent so that others can use those tools and improve them.

So whether you're editing an article about the digital commons or trains or whatever floats your boat or working on AI, our models are always going to be the same.

Volunteers work together to create tools that will serve their needs through processes of discussion, debate, and consensus.

Don't get me wrong.

Our model is absolutely not perfect.

At a time when Wikipedia plays an essential role in training almost every large‑language model, we need to be transparent and also proactive about the biases and limitasions of the of open access infrastructure and information processes.

As Luca alluded to, almost every language model out there right now was trained on Wikipedia data and it is almost always the larger source of training data in their data sets.

But as most people I'm sure in this room know, open access does not mean equal access.

Our projects reflect broader structures, power, privilege, and pattern of exclusion as a result and these are going to impact the type of knowledge that's hosted on our projects.

Some examples to think through.

Participation is going to be limited first but to those who have time who speak the right languages that are hosted online and also have a stable Internet connection, which we've heard can come down to physical infrastructure challenges or barriers.

Also your government's policies might influence your ability to write freely about a certain topic, and even if you can contribute, there may be harassment or bullying once you enter our projects.

Our own human rights impact assessment found that underrepresented communities experienced the majority of harassment online which disproportionate affects women, racial and ethnic minorities.

On top of all of that, you have the fun problem of what counts as a reliable source.

Here we're dealing with existing knowledge gaps whose knowledge has been documented in the right way with the right licensing and published in the right journals or newspapers to count as credible.

But we take on our responsibility as a steward for one of the world's largest online platforms by working closely with our volunteer community to address those challenges.

We work to foster a welcoming culture and engage newcomers to our project.

Maybe this is this process of commoning that we heard about.

This includes things like a recently ratified code of conduct and technical features that make it easier to start editing perhaps ancient software.

Also human rights due diligence to understand the impacts our projects have and film knowledge gaps through a variety of forms.

So we're urging those who build large language models to do the same.

Need to keep humans in the loop for their own interests.

It's even been shown that large language models trained on the output of other large language models become measurably worse so they always need knowledge that's been produced by actual humans.

Clear and consistent a tribution is one of the ways these tools should include recognition and reciprocity for the human contributions that they are built on and we also ask that creators of large language models embrace increased transparency in the sources of their training data, how that data is weighed, and the resulting outputs to help us understand and assess the information from their products.

So if there's something that we know from our 20‑plus years is that people are essential to the longevity and integrity of the information system, AI should participate in knowledge, not replace them.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Thanks.

[applause]

.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  We are over time.

We started a little bit late.

There is not another session in this room so if people want to say for another 10 minutes, welcome.

>> Hello, everyone.

I want to take my time so I can be as short as possible.

I want to highlight one of the processes that in our experience is the most ‑‑ or one of the most important thing to actually just say the organisation of the digital common goods.

So we need to understand that it is a process always.

It is not like a place ‑‑ like a process in which we learn every time, every time we are learning and making mistakes.

And capacity‑building is one of these processes in which communities can rethink, analyse, and reflect about their own challenges, and how the technologies can be used for the needs for the dreams, et cetera, and as some people here know, I always talk about the experience we have in doing things and trying to learn from communities.

So when we have another session in the afternoon about community networks, people who are interested in this topic, we can have more conversation on it, and we will also have different panelists, but I will try to focus on this aspect of the community networks.

So all the learnings I am sharing now is from two different training programs.

One is a training program for coordinators of IT networks in America.

ITU, it's a blended program.

It have five online courses, and then boot camp.

We'll be developing this year in Guatemala.

You have not only a training in the style but also in indigenous communities and community communication, we'll have another training in broadcasting, for example.

Another experience that we accompany with other organisations in different parts of the worlds, nationalized community networks, that have been taking place since 2020 in five countries, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, and we have the support from the FCDO from the UK, and we have been coordinating and doing it between APS.

What we have learned in this process these learnings are very close and linked with the community network themselves.

This is important because people learn how to style, operate, maintain, and manage their own network.

So it can be more sustainable over time, is because the people can repair, can know, can do the things that other ways they can't do.

Other ways important is critical thinking about technologies, no.

We say we have a right to be connected.

Some communities, so to think how to take care of this connection, they don't want to have access, you know, free access for everything.

They want to think and reflect about it, and it ‑‑ there's a process in which the selection of the technologies are more linked with the real needs of the communities.

Other thing is the network and community networks are sustained.

Very relatable, the organisational structure of the community.

If the community for example have traditional way, political way of living, they introduce the networking this way of living.

It's like water or other kind of goods.

The local economy is estranged through different process, no, in corporation of the technologies.

It also happened that the communities start thinking about how to load their own content and to strength their own identity through these processes which includes the technologies.

And finally, this knowledge, when we launch these programs, are localized in the community so the community starts to think it is possible to have another way of connecting and to have access.

One thing that is important and we have a lot of mistakes is to think there's only one way to capacity‑building.

No, the capacity‑building needs torvery linked with the ways of learning and the needs of the communities.

So we need to design the capacity‑building for the communities itself, not foreign from the community.

For example, the technology have an experience for everyone, no, if we want to teach electricity for a person in the communities, we must all have ‑‑ how in English?

They have some experience with electricity issues, no?

So they go always beyond a technical training, no?

They always link this technical with other things in their territory.

For example, they think that the computer, like a human body, no, one of the communities say, we can understand it, the communicating parts, like the human body or we can understand the Internet, a close network, like our lake or no?

So there is always a little bit between the community and a ‑‑ and most important, about who can manage, who can deploy, who can coordinate the project through this, they can access the technologies.

And finally, what is the kind of public policies do we need?

What is easier but what is complex at the same time, no?

We need to take in mind that this thing that the training programs and the development of this kind of capacity‑building needs to be particularised and contextualiseked, no.

So one program needs to take the time to decide what another program can develop, and we can implement the training.

So I think this is for me ‑‑ I want to make an NIEVGZ  inviteasion for you.

We have a CITSAC learning repository.

CITSAC.

You can also share your own materials in this space and see you in the other session.

So thank you very much.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Thanks, Baca.

Yes, there's a session at 11:00 on the learning and communication networks.

Can we take two questions before you go?

I don't see anyone ‑‑ is there a question?

No?

Well, I would like to ‑‑I mean, we always do this with this digital commons forum.

We kind of go all over the place.

And Luca, next year, we're going to do it differently, OK.

What I do think the panel to respond to, Luca you can do it as well.

I don't want to do closing remarks but I think maybe if you can come up with something, in this moment of the moment in this particular space, the idea of space, the UN space, we've got the global digital compact hovering.

We've got WSIS plus 20 and all the different work that exists in different spaces, which is making a difference.

There's also the elephant in the room that Anita talked about.

What do you think this community and these processes that we are involved in at the moment in terms of digital governance, Internet governance, what would you like to see emerge?  You know, what can we do differently or do better in this WSIS plus 20GDC moment that we are in?

If your response s let's put our efforts elsewhere and build alternative processes or invest in alternative approaches then please say that.

So just a really quick bite‑sized comment from all of you.

Starting with you, Lea.

>> LEA GIMPEL:  Hello, hello.

Yeah, thanks so much.

So maybe a key take away related to your question is that we really need to centre it around people.

So I really liked the idea of building, regulation building different policies around the commoneering task as well as regarding not only open lists for governments and public services but really empowering people to do so and take on their own destiny, so to say.

So I still believe in these processes, but I think we need to include these prospectives more permanently of the people.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Thanks, Lea.

>> FRANZIS KA:  I would like more shared resources.

I want to know what talking points you guys are using when you're showing up in these types of spaces so the next time we're having conversations, we can make sure we're pushing similar points and I want to have access to more case studies and stories that everybody is experiencing in their context and countries where they're working.

I think that would be the way to lift up each other's works.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  We need a knowledge comments around the Internet as a commons.

>> RENATA MIELLI:  I think we have to convince our government that ‑‑ Hallo?

I think we have to convince our government that investing in digital commons and digital sovereignty is important because the main perception is that it's more easy, and it's more chipper to buy services that are right there, and don't develop our own.

So it's a convincing process.

This is very important for us to initiate this space, I don't know.

Thank you very much.

>> AN IT A:  Thank you.

I think these are times when we have to get real.

I think when Uber is threatening the European union and saying we'll exit, then bye.

I think we need to govern in the way that the commons can be legitimised.

I think the south should be very ‑‑ one of the two experiments in my country in the south of India, they are setting up an ODP platform.

>> CARLOS BACA:  Very quick, I think we need to have more policies that are codesigned by people, no, people who are involved in the communities that have the challenge to live without connectivity, for example, need to be in this conversation in different ways.

It is not always to sit here in naive, but we can learn a lot from them.

And also to try to design public policies that are very linked with the needs of the communities because if not, we will have these big programs in which the community is really not the target of this process.

>> LUCA BELLI:  The final word to sum up.

I think looking at the past five years of Internet commons forum, I think that what we have been successful in is to create an interest on the topic that previously was totally absent from IGF discussions, and that I think is the main challenge we still have because I've experienced this working a lot with community networks or even a lot with digital sovereignty over the past years.

You have this initial proconceptions due to how most people that are in power or everywhere in the world have studied over the past years, so we think for instance that the only way to manage or to have an effective governance is state and markets.

People don't usually even think there might be a third option that is viable, and I think what we have been good at over the past years is to give an example of an option that is viable or exists and, of course, we again cannot think that community networks will defeat Google, right, this would be ridiculous.

But the fact that governments understand that they may be a very good alternative options to foster digital sovereignties, and the government themselveses understand digital sovereignty not only as regimes controlling people but to have communities, individuals, and states understand how technology works, developing it, and being able to effectively regulating it, even to protect human rights of individuals and to protect competition which are essential to democracy, right.

So the fact that we manage to send this message to governments is already a ‑‑ could be a great success.

I'm very sad that today we didn't have one of the speakers I invited, the French ambassador because they have written a very good paper on how digital commons is good for digital sovereignty and it's good to see there are governments already understanding this.

My dream, to use an expression not only of Alishandi, but also Martin Luther king, is that governments are understanding this, and they are understanding it because they see it is a very good example of digital sovereignty from the Global South like India and the Pix in Brazil that are copied by the Global North because they're understanding it is a very good way of being strategically autonomous so I think we have to keep on repeating the message.

As any parent knows, it is good to repeat the message so the children can understand it and they can implement this in their lives.

So sometimes we should think of the government as our children that we somehow have to educate with good examples and I think from this perspective we have been pretty much successful over the past years but of course there is a lot of room for improvement.

Anriette, do you want the final, final word.

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  This is what we should be looking at the plus 20 outcomes.

Anita, your idea about governments investing in this, collaborating with other stakeholder groups, I think that is very concrete and deliverable, and I think we can strive to find a way ‑‑ well, I would hope to find a way in which the UN system can play a role in facilitating that kind of collaboration in this space.

So thanks very much, everyone.

Apologies for going over time, and we wish you all a very good IGF.

[Applause]

>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUYSEN:  Thanks to the online participants, and to the interpreters and to our tech team.