Internet Governance Forum
Open Consultations
Geneva, Palais des Nations
22 November 2010
Morning Session
10:00 a.m.
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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Open Consultations of the IGF, in Geneva. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>>MARKUS KUMMER: Good morning, dear colleagues. Can we get started? Not everybody has arrived yet, but we have to get started at one point.
And the Webcasting is or is not yet quite ready, but I think we will get sorted out in the process.
Let me start by apologize on behalf of Mr. Nitin Desai.
He was unable to make it for this meeting, and he asked me to chair the meeting today and tomorrow's MAG meeting on his behalf.
Let me, right at the beginning, also address some more organizational questions.
I had several requests of people who would like to participate in the MAG meeting. I always said that MAG meetings are basically closed based on past decisions of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group. I had yet another query from the coordinator of the Internet Governance Caucus, Civil Society Caucus, and one thing we cannot do is make exceptions ad personam. So we have basically the option of opening the door and throwing the doors open to observers who would like to attend or stick to the basic position that the MAG meeting remains closed.
We don't need to discuss this right now.
My recommendation would be to have it as an open meeting for those who are willing to attend. However, if any single MAG member objects to that, then the default position will prevail, and we will proceed as normal.
So think about this, and let me know when we resume early in the afternoon whether we can hold the MAG meeting as an open meeting or whether we hold it as normal, as a closed meeting.
Let me also take advantage of this opportunity to inform you what I told several of you personally already, that I will quit my present function in January. I had learned a few months back that I reach U.N. retirement age next August, and after some reflection, I came to the conclusion it would not make much sense hanging on till August, which will be shortly before the Nairobi meeting.
Our hosts, our presumptive hosts propose dates end of September. So I will leave at the end of the first cycle, and the new team will be able to take over.
And I take also this opportunity to introduce to you Vincenzo Aquaro. He is the chief of the e-government branch in the Division for Public Administration and Development management in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York. He will be attending our meeting here and also I think, the meeting on the CSTD working group on the IGF.
Let us turn now to the agenda which is projected, I think, on the screen.
We have basically two major blocks on this agenda item. One is the taking stock of the Vilnius meeting, and look at how to improve, what worked well, what worked less well, and make proposals for the future.
And the other one is the MAG questionnaire.
Are there any comments on this proposed agenda?
Yes. I can see Egypt. Please, sir, you have the floor.
>>EGYPT: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and good morning everyone.
I'm speaking on behalf of the government of Egypt.
With regard to the agenda, Mr. Chairman, I don't have a problem with the item of taking stock of the Vilnius meeting; however, before we go for the adoption of the agenda, I would like to seek the following clarifications.
As per our previous working methods, we used to convene three rounds of preparatory processes -- or three rounds of preparatory process for IG meetings. We used to start our first preparatory meeting with an agenda item for a stock taking from the last IGF convening, and then proceed to elaborate on the themes for MAG organization of the next one.
As we all know, the Tunis Agenda requested in item 72, Mr. Chairman, the U.N. Secretary-General to convene the IGF. Similarly, it requested him in item 76 to examine the desirability of the continuation of the forum within five years of its creation, and to make recommendations to the U.N. membership in this regard.
Now the IGF has been convening successfully for five years, and the desirability of the continuation has been examined by the U.N. Secretary-General who submitted the report with recommendations to the General Assembly.
Such a report is in front of the General Assembly, which is considering the extension and the way forward for the forum.
On the other hand, it is necessary to realize here that the ECOSOC adopted in July its resolution 2/2010 which invited the chair of one of the ECOSOC's commission -- namely, the Commission on Science and Technology for Development -- to establish a working group to deal with the improvements needed for the IGF based on the main concerns and inference made during the formal consultation held in Sharm El Sheikh meeting.
I believe we need to consider all these elements, Mr. Chairman, before we adopt the agenda of our meeting today in order to be sufficiently aware of the purpose of the meeting and its direction.
The second point of clarification I'm seeking, Mr. Chairman, is on the invitation according to which we are meeting today. Is it an invitation from the U.N. Secretary-General after we concluded the five years initial term of the forum? Is it an invitation from you, Mr. Chairman, as the chair of the open consultation? And if this is the case, I would appreciate if you could elaborate on the purpose of this particular open consultation of today since we are not yet, from the legal and actual point of view, into the second phase of the IGF.
I'm raising these points, Mr. Chairman, so as to set similarly the agenda of the meeting of MAG.
According to the statement of 5 May 2010 by the U.N. Secretary-General, the membership of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group, which is entrusted with the assisting in the preparation for the annual meeting of the IGF, has been renewed. It is clear to me that the legal status of MAG and the capacity for its members were renewed to serve in assisting the preparation of the annual meeting, which is not there or decided yet.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, frankly speaking, I do not any that we can, in a U.N. meeting, believing that the one of today is so, adopt an agenda that includes an anticipating item. And I am referring here to the current agenda item 3, suggestion for the 2011 IGF meeting, provided the IGF mandate be extended.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Egypt, for your pertinent remarks.
There are quite a few points you raised. One of them related to the mandate of the MAG. Based on past practice, my interpretation would be that the mandate includes the stock taking bit of the meeting in Vilnius.
You're right, we are in limbo as regards the next meeting; that is the paragraph 3. My suggestion, therefore, would be to simply delete the third agenda item and stay, keep to the ones we have.
I think it makes sense for this group here, which is basically an extended MAG, to take stock, and also to look forward in case there are improvements.
Yes, we are all aware that there are other processes under way, but I would say this kind of process is more a micro process looking at the nitty-gritty of what worked well, what worked less well, whereas the General Assembly process is much more of a political process that looks at the broad question and the CSTD process is somewhere in between. But I don't see any dichotomy in these three processes. And I think the discussions we have here, at least I would hope so, can actually enrich the discussions on Wednesday in the working group convened by the chairman of the CSTD.
After all, it is you, the people here in this room, who are most closely involved in preparing the past meetings, and I think to discuss among ourselves these issues would enrich the CSTD process.
With this amendment, would we have agreement with Egypt, agree then to adopt the agenda without the third agenda item, or are there other participants who would like to take the floor on this issue?
Yes, please.
Could you -- Actually, one thing I should have said right at the beginning is we have real-time transcription. I will say a few more words on that, but our scribes are not sitting here in the room. They do that remotely. They are sitting in California. They rely on the Webcast to see what they get, but they cannot see you and identify you as they can when they sit in the room. So it is important that when you take the floor that you say very clearly who you are and what your affiliation is.
Yes, please, the gentleman in the first row. Please, you have the floor, sir.
>>ANDREY SHCHERBOVICH: Andrey Shcherbovich, State University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
I would like to refer to the third point of the agenda, that I came here with the belief of the necessity and the vital point of continuation of the IGF meetings of the next five years.
The best way is to make a preparation for adoption of the continuation of the IGF. I don't think we have another way.
I think it is -- Of course it is the General Assembly's perspective, but as our point of view, I think some people can confirm this, that we need that IGF will be extended for another period.
For this, I'm in favor of the third point of the agenda.
Thank you very much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you.
Well, let's not prolong the discussion on this. I think point 2 and 3 are very closely related anyway. When people say what worked less well, they normally make suggestions on how to improve on one particular point.
Egypt made a very legal point of view, and the distinguished delegate from Egypt was right in this matter, that it is, in a way, strange that you have an agenda item which depends on some future decision.
So my suggestion is let's delete agenda item 3, and let's base ourselves on that. And I tend to think that we have an agreement on this so that we can proceed.
Do I see heads nodding? So I can take it that the agenda is adopted as amended, without agenda item 3.
Let me now start the discussion before actually going into this as we come to the end of a cycle. We thought it could be fun to look back at all the five meetings, and we have prepared some tag clouds of each meeting.
And each slide is based on the transcripts of each main session, from Athens to Vilnius.
The words in this cloud, they represent the frequency of words used in the transcripts of all main sessions of the IGF meetings. Each slide contains between 60 to 75 of the most significant common words spoken in the meeting, leaving out the sort of filler words like "and" or "to do" or whatever.
And the larger the size of the word, the more frequent the word was used, and colors are here simply for decoration. They don't have any particular meaning.
And if you look at the very first slide, which is shown up here, that's the first IGF meeting in Athens, the most frequently used word, not surprisingly, was Internet. It was followed by people, access, countries, information, world, and need.
And as far as geography is concerned, Africa makes its way into the cloud.
Next slide, please.
The Rio meeting, Internet and people are still most used words. Access, need and IGF are also frequently used. Governance appears for the first time in the cloud, and also the IGF itself is more widely used.
And for the first time, language enters the cloud as well as stakeholders.
Now let's look at Hyderabad. There we have Internet, IGF, people, issues, are most frequent. Then we have more technical issues, such as IPv4 and IPv6 appearing, and cooperation and infrastructure enter the cloud.
Sharm El Sheikh, next slide, not surprisingly again, the IGF features prominently as we had the special, the formal consultation on the IGF itself. Multistakeholder is first seen to be used frequently in the meeting, in an equal amount stakeholder and also WSIS appears, and social media.
And now Vilnius, and there again, we have Internet, IGF, and people are still most frequently used, but development gained a lot of ground in Vilnius, and cloud computing is a new issue.
And the last slide shows all the five years combined. It's almost completely raw with just the 50 most common words in the English language being omitted, and over the five years the most frequent words were Internet, IGF, people and access.
Other significant words: Information, development, governance, and security. And then we have think and need, presumably because people are thinking a lot, and they were thinking a lot about the need for promoting the Internet.
And finally, also, important, and again presumably people attached importance to the Internet and current state of the Internet and its future development.
Now, all in all, this may not be for a scientific analysis of the past five years, but I think it nevertheless sums up nicely at a glance our discussions. And thank you, Kyle, for producing the slides.
Let me also say a few words about more logistical arrangements.
First of all, let me say a few words on the real-time transcription. I already said that this time they are not in the room here, partly to save money, and also partly to allow them to be back home for Thanksgiving. But we have made use of the services of the team of Quicktext since April of 2005, and it was the first time, if I'm not mistaken, that this kind of service was used for a meeting under the U.N. flag.
That means every word spoken in open consultations since then is archived on our Web site, and every word spoken in a main session in the IGF meeting is also archived. And we received many positive reactions for introducing real-time transcription as it offers unprecedented transparency of proceedings.
It also helps people with hearing disabilities, and it makes it easier for those who are not of English mother tongue to follow the discussions.
Since Hyderabad in 2008, we use real-time text streaming; that is, the text as it appears here in the room at the same time is Webcast live. And we use this method because it is development friendly, as it uses less bandwidth than a video Webcast.
Of course, we did not invent this real-time transcription, nor were we the first to use it. I first saw it in an ICANN meeting in July 2004, and we moved, then, to recruit Laura and Teri. And they are the ones we have to thank first and foremost. They have been doing this real-time transcription on Internet-related issues, so they are really the gold standard in this matter.
[ Applause ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: I was just going to say give them a hand, yes.
I hope this applause makes it easier for them to stay awake at -- what is it? Half past 1:00 or so in California.
And this real-time transcription is, of course, not only important for people in the room, but apart from the Webcast, it's one of the two pillars that helped us facilitate remote participation.
And we made considerable efforts to improve remote participation since our first meeting.
Obviously, first and foremost, we need an impeccable Internet infrastructure that allows us to Webcast and stream the text live. And in Vilnius, we had seven main sessions and 109 other official meetings, workshop, open forums, the dynamic coalitions meetings, et cetera. And from all these meetings, we produced video Webcasts and live text streaming.
All in all, we delivered more than 460 hours of live Webcasts, 230 video casts and 230 text streaming.
Just as a comparison, the three-week plenipotentiary of the ITU delivered, according to the Secretary-General's closing statement, 200 hours of live broadcast Webcast. So we had more than twice as much from our four-day meeting.
And with the working group on remote participation in Hyderabad, for the first time we promoted remote hubs. That is places where people gathered to watch together the Webcasts. And this proved a very effective method of enhancing remote participation.
In Vilnius, we had remote hubs, 27 of them in developing countries. All in all, we had more than 1300 people participating in these remote hubs.
Marilia and Ginger cannot be here with us today but they made a tremendous effort in bringing this together, in training remote operators and in helping us with all this remote participation, and I would like to thank both of them for their efforts and all their colleagues who assisted.
[ Applause ]
>>MARKUS KUMMER: This applause is also very well deserved.
Now, this figure of 1300 remote participants only relates to people who participated in these hubs. They don't include individual remote participants as this is difficult to assess whether they are people who just visit the Web site for five minutes. Many of the visits were also from Vilnius itself. The participants in Vilnius visited our Web site, checked what was happening in other rooms. So we only count what -- the remote participants who were gathered in these remote hubs. And if you can see the overall statistics that includes the remote hub participants, then we have an overall total of 2,740 people, and of which nearly half -- that is, 1,327 or 48% -- were in developing country.
Among the physical participants, people who were present in Vilnius, we had 22% from developing countries. We had participants from 106 countries, and it is worth noting that 93% of the world's Internet users come from these 106 countries that were present in Vilnius.
Yes, there are many countries that did not have a presence in Vilnius, but that is easy to explain by the fact they have very limited access to the Internet, and they may be less interested in arcane issues of Internet governance. What they may be more interested in are issues such as bridging the digital divide and more developmental issues.
But nevertheless, I think with remote participation, we had a significant impact, and we also had very positive feedback from these remote hubs.
You may recall that Raquel Gatto who was part of this working group on remote participation in Vilnius, she read out a spontaneous reaction we had received from a remote hub in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I would like to read out some of the quotes of what the people in Bangladesh said.
"We never had such an opportunity in the past to witness and participate in this forum."
"Though we all participate remotely, clarity of Webcast made us feel in Vilnius."
"The Bangladesh hub represented a broad stakeholder participation from government, regulatory, telecom, educational institutions, service providers, and civil society."
"Some high level senior officials attended the hub and most of us felt very happy to see them all in one room, sharing their views in an open setup."
I think that was a very nice testimony of a developing country that had embraced this multistakeholder approach.
Bangladesh was also represented in Vilnius with M.P.s and civil society people. They had the presence at the meeting itself, but they also had this remote hub to connect with people back home.
Another, I would like to show a picture. This is the remote hub in Bujumbura. This was helped to set up by Jean-Paul Nkurunziza. You may remember him. He was a fellow with our Secretariat. He was here at the meetings last February, May and June. He went home in August, and he helped set up a remote hub. And he wrote to us they had about 25 people who were some university college who participated throughout four days of the meeting, and they included also all stakeholders, including government officials. And I think that was also the first time they had discussions on Internet governance in Burundi.
Let me conclude this introduction with a few words on human and financial resources. We have repeatedly pointed out that we are not part of the regular U.N. budget but we are financed through voluntary contribution. And I would like to take this opportunity to thank our donors for their generosity. They are all listed on our Web site. We do realize it is not easy to find spare cash in times like these, and spare cash doesn't grow on trees.
We have learned to make ends meet and operate with limited resources. That is we have two regular staff. Apart from myself, Chengetai was supposed to sit next to me but has disappeared, I suppose attending some kind of urgency, and we have been able to rely on interns, fellows, also volunteers and consultants, some of them accompanied us throughout the years and they are present here, and I would like to thank them personally.
Avri sitting there in the corner; Seiiti who is still, I think, at registration; and also Kyle who showed us slides; Bernard also deserves to be mentioned. He was a fellow with us last year, and he helped us since on a voluntary basis, and he was very actively involved in the remote participation. And he actually also branched out and helped EuroDIG on remote participation.
In the past two years, we received gradually more financial contributions and then we felt it was necessary to spend -- increase the funds on financing attendants from developing countries, and we spent roughly 20% of our budget on financing travel and per diem for our consultation meetings, as well as the annual meeting itself.
Now, with this, I would like to introduce the first agenda item. That is, taking stock of the Vilnius meeting, what worked well and what worked less well.
We had very limited responses. We have produced a synthesis paper.
Maybe, Kyle, can you show the paper also on our screen?
We had tried to print out a few copies but our photocopying machine didn't work, so -- and we assumed that we all --
Oh, we have some copies. Okay. There are some copies available in the back of the room.
But we have received, I think, two more contributions in the very last days. They are not included in the synthesis paper.
On the taking stock of Vilnius, we had only two contributions that are reflected. The last one we received from Baher from ICANN, I think at the weekend, and that is -- will be put up on our Web site but it is not reflected in the paper.
And on this agenda item, I can basically be very short.
On the whole, we had very positive feedback as regards the meeting.
We had some negative feedback on what worked less well. I was tempted to say like every year, there was complaints that we had too many meetings, but that is basically always the same story.
We have a tremendous demand for workshop space, and it is difficult to say no when you have good proposals there, but one proposal said we should create more open spaces for ad hoc meeting, and I think that reflects comments made in previous years.
We received many positive remarks on the remote participation.
And then some of the negative comments related to some organizational aspects such as shuttle services, availability of low-cost food, also of noise spillover from the different workshop rooms, and then also on the quality of the real-time transcriptions from the workshops.
Let me say a few words on these comments. I would not like this meeting to go too much into these details.
I think our hosts, our Lithuanian hosts, deserve every praise we can give them for having provided an excellent infrastructure, and especially an Internet infrastructure for a very, very demanding meeting.
It is -- if you have seen the cables, I think Patrick can explain how complex it is to organize the Internet, and it functioned well.
We did not have any glitches whatsoever. So I think they really deserve the praise.
And we piled new demands as we went along. "So now we have to do this, we have to do that, we have to do more."
And they did it all, so we really cannot thank them enough for doing all this.
Certain things worked less well.
Some of the comments made somehow anticipated that the Lithuanian government would provide hospitality such as we had experienced at the meetings in India and in Egypt. However, we cannot ask any host country to provide more than what is the standard U.N. template.
We have a standard template for host country agreements, and of course a host country can do more, and I think in India and in Egypt we were fortunate that for various reasons, but I think mainly also based on cultural traditions prevailing in these countries, that the respective governments felt they had to be very hospitable and provide free lunch.
We cannot ask for that, and the Lithuanian government, all we said is, "You have to provide food that is available at moderate prices and make sure that people don't have to queue too much."
Now, there is, it seems, interpretation what is moderate in terms of pricing and what is not, but as I said, we have to thank our Lithuanian hosts.
One word also on the noise spillover.
Yes, if you are in an exhibition hall, it is very difficult to make it soundproof.
One little trick we should have broadcast a little bit more was actually the microphones had plugs for the earphones, and if you had an earphone plugged in, into the microphone, then it was perfectly tolerable, but I was not aware of that until the last day, and it certainly would have helped, had we communicated this more broadly.
But the, honestly, WSIS in Geneva in 2003 was not that different. It was also in the big Palexpo exhibition hall and that is perfectly acceptable. Not everybody has a hall with seven meetings which are self-contained rooms, so that is something one has to live with.
Lastly, the quality of the transcriptions from the workshops.
We knew that this would not be as high-quality transcriptions as the main sessions because they were done remotely. Otherwise, it would have been far too expensive if you have somebody sitting in each room.
And also, it was not the scribes we are used to. It was a different team. That was not a decision we took; that was U.N. public procurement. They have their own procedures and they opted for a different offer.
This is all, I think, I have to say to introduce this item. I think I spoke for too much in any case.
Now, before going into the nitty-gritty of the "what worked well or what worked less well," I am told there is a general statement from the European Union, and there may also be other statements, general statements, so please if you have a general statement, comment now. Otherwise, we then go directly into the agenda item, what worked well, what worked less well.
But please, the Europe Union.
>>EUROPEAN UNION: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. My name is Elizabeth Markot, for the record.
Mr. Chairman, first and foremost, we would like to express our gratitude to the government of Lithuania for hosting the 5th meeting of the Internet Governance Forum. The number of 1,461 participants in Vilnius and the number of persons participating remotely demonstrate once again that the nonbinding multistakeholder approach of the IGF which is enshrined in the Tunis Agenda is well-supported by stakeholders worldwide.
Furthermore, we would like to draw attention to the increased participation of youth and parliamentarians this year.
The active participation of these groups should be further encouraged.
We would like to emphasize the youth support for the IGF, giving higher priority to development, through including a main session in the Vilnius program on Internet governance for development.
The participation of stakeholders from developing countries and the inclusion of development as a main theme at the IGF are essential for its continued success.
We consider it also important, therefore, to build on the significant advances made in Vilnius, in extending outreach in its discussions in particular to stakeholders in developing countries, through establishing a global network of regional hubs for remote participation.
Mr. Chairman, we have taken note of the requests ahead of these consultations to express views regarding the Multistakeholder Advisory Group. In this context, we would like to emphasize the important contribution and positive impact of the MAG, which is comprised of representatives of all Internet stakeholder communities in all the world's regions, in giving advice with regard to the organization of the IGF meetings held to date.
We believe that it is essential that a multistakeholder process such as the IGF is based on a preparatory process that also fully embraces the multistakeholder approach.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Kenya for having formulated the offer to host the next IGF meeting, as well as Azerbaijan for proposing the subsequent venue.
The EU remains fully committed to contributing to the continued success of the IGF, in facilitating dialogue, the promotion of best practice, and enhanced cooperation in the global information economy. Thank you very much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: European Union, thank you very much.
Are there other general statements or can we then go directly into the discussion of the agenda item what worked well, what worked less well?
Who would like to take the floor?
Well, if nobody has to say anything, then we can go to discussion --
Yes. Please. Yes.
>>MARTIN BOYLE: Thank you, Chair.
My fault for sitting over in the corner, but at least there's a power supply over here.
I think I would certainly concur with the other statements that have been made that Vilnius was remarkable by the quality, as well as the quantity, of the participation, and I think I was particularly impressed this year by the level, the quality of the dialogue in the -- particularly the workshops.
Very many more workshops were focused on dialogue rather than talking to the audience, and I think that is probably a very good lesson for us for the future, that we look very much more towards workshops and perhaps also plenary sessions that are aimed at involving the audience rather than just keeping them amused.
And in fact, on that case, I think one or two of the plenary sessions were rather heavily engineered, and that was a bit of a barrier to other people, apart from those already identified, getting involved in the discussion. I think that is something we do need to be very careful of in the future.
The U.K. had its largest ever delegation of parliamentarians in Vilnius. We had six. And from the parliamentarians, we did get a very, very positive feedback and the feedback was in particular on the engagements with younger people and on issues like protection of individuals and addressing and helping people with disabilities.
There was a suggestion that the content industry was very weakly represented in Vilnius, and in fact, through the IGF, and perhaps that was an area where we could look for trying to improve participation in any future meeting.
The U.K. also had a youth delegation, children from the ages of 14 to 18, who were involved in a number of workshops and also did have the opportunity to speak in some of the plenaries.
For both the young people participation and for parliamentarians, these are things that we would like to look at developing, because in particular for young people, helping them get involved in the discussion is not just straightforward putting them in the room, there's a lot of work needed to help them think about the issues in advance and also to help them be flexible to the things, the comments that are being made by other people.
And finally, yes, I suppose I've got to say what worked less well.
You've already addressed it for me.
I think one of the big problems in several of the sessions in the workshops was, indeed, the acoustics. I'm ashamed that I did not realize that I could have plugged some earphones in.
Thank you, Chair.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Martin. Well, you were not the only one there.
The gentleman in the front row asked for the floor. Yes, please.
>>ANDREY SHCHERBOVICH: Just a couple of general comments.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Please --
>>ANDREY SHCHERBOVICH: Andrey Shcherbovich, Higher School of Economics, Moscow.
So the first one is that I would like to thank the government of Lithuania for such a perfect meeting.
From my point of view, the organization of this meeting was quite fine. I would like not to stress negative comments on this organization. I'd like to -- from my point of view, I'd like to stress that it was a wide range of topics raised in the workshops. Some of them are very important, some of them are related to different aspects of Internet governance organized by different institutions, and so this is a very good trend which could be extended to continue it.
To involve more and more aspects not of -- just for technical aspects for Internet governance but on aspects related to Internet governance relation to the different humanitarian aspects of -- to involvement of the different groups of peoples in this process and Internets -- and impact on them.
So this is the first general comments -- comment.
The second one is we need more participation of the academic community, of different scientific institutions, to collaborate with scientific projects in Internet governance to provide more expert base and base of knowledge on Internet governance.
Thank you very much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much.
I recognize our next speaker as Portugal and then ETNO, then ICC/BASIS, then Finland.
Portugal, please.
>>PORTUGAL: Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Well, I have some comments to do.
Well, I'm (saying name) from Portugal, from the Knowledge Society Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology, and Higher Education.
Well, what I think that I felt, at least in Vilnius, is a deeper knowledge and understanding of a number of issues that the stakeholders had the same levels of awareness of Internet governance.
I felt new and better relationships between the stakeholders, and IGF continued to foster debate, dialogue, the sharing of best practices, sharing understanding and development of solutions.
One of the things that I realized that really worked well was the roundtable room setup of the meeting rooms. That was a very good idea, and I felt that everybody felt that they were engaged in the discussion. We now realize that the spreading of the IGF model to regional and national IGF processes is the basics for the change of the paradigm in regions and countries, and actually they have the potential to become preparatory meetings of the open consultations for the global IGF.
There is something that is missing in these meetings. I think that media are aware of these meetings, so I think that something must be done to raise the participation and awareness of media.
And finally, I think that we -- we have to have better discussions on the role of the Internet governance for development, not only for developing countries but for both developed and developing countries. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. Yes. ETNO, please.
>>ETNO: Thank you and good morning, everyone.
For the record, I'm Konstantin Kladouras, and these are the comments of the Association of European Telecommunication Network Operators, and we would like to join others in thanking the government of Lithuania and the people of Lithuania for hosting the 5th IGF.
We would also like to deeply thank you, Mr. Kummer, and the IGF Secretariat, Mr. Desai, and the MAG members and in general all those who contributed to the organization 5th IGF meeting.
As an overall impression, we would say that the Vilnius IGF was a success and that the planning was certainly smoother due to all the previous experience gained from Athens, Rio, Hyderabad, and Sharm.
Two things that made a difference this year were remote participation and the rise of regional and national IGFs.
Let us come now to analyzing the 5th IGF meeting by starting with what worked well.
The overplanning for the Vilnius meeting was completed much sooner compared to other years. We had an almost final program and schedule before the summer holidays. The May and June planning sessions, instead of the traditional open consultations, helped a lot in this direction, as well as the early call for workshops and the convening groups.
As a suggestion for future IGFs, we could have three preparatory meetings for each IGF cycle, a taking stock consultation, and two planning sessions open to all interested stakeholders.
The format of the Vilnius meeting, with main sessions, workshops, and other meetings, worked well in general.
Regarding the main sessions, most of them worked very well. We think that the format of the managing critical Internet resources session, with a few focused topics and two moderators who are experts is still the most successful format.
Almost all main sessions should follow this format.
In this respect, we did not understand why the access and diversity session in Vilnius gained by having a panel, and we found the security, privacy, and openness session overpacked with topics for discussion.
For the next meeting, we suggest that -- and that applies to all main sessions -- to have less topics and more focus.
As for the new Internet governance for development session, or IG4D, as we call it, we regret it should have been a workshop as it was in the previous years, instead of a main session.
We still strongly believe that development is the most important element of Internet governance, and it should remain as a cross-cutting theme in all sessions. But we do not see IG4D remaining as a vertical main theme.
Overrule, the previous main themes, vertical or horizontal are still broad enough, and relevant, to allow any suggestion.
As a suggestion, perhaps it would be more helpful to have two emerging issues sessions in future IGFs. This way we can have enough flexibility to adjust to Internet governance developments instead of trying to label new main sessions or identify new main themes that are not really new vertical themes.
Like in the past we had Internet governance in light of WSIS principles or IG4D.
Coming now to the setting the scene and regional perspective sessions, again, they were very useful and we think that the new format in the first case, a separate orientation for newcomers and in the second bringing together the various regional perspectives on each of the main IGF topics, was very successful.
And we also recognize the effort to have a shorter opening ceremony and opening sessions.
We still think that besides a formal opening part, the rest of the opening session should be short, with a few key addresses instead of a questionable line-up of speakers.
Given want opportunity, we would like to request more transparency regarding the selection of speakers for the opening or closing session, and a clarification as to the criteria used for selection.
For future IGFs, we suggest that the opening session and the setting the scene is combined in one three-hour slot while the regional perspectives takes a separate three-hour slot.
We believe that the separate three-hour regional perspectives session is well-justified, given the rise of the regional and national IGFs.
This year, there was a true effort to better linkage the main sessions with workshops, to Prussia for workshops to merge, to keep workshops at a reasonable number, still high in our view, and to have more discussions.
This should continue, and improve in the future.
As for the other meetings, we're glad that in Vilnius there was enough time and space for the regional and national IGFs.
All meetings benefitted from true possibility for remote participation. We were very glad to see Webcasts, remote moderators as a prerequisite, training for remote moderators, remote hubs. All these were greatly appreciated and thanks to all those who made remote participation possible.
I'm sorry they're not here, some of them.
After all, the IGF should be a meeting not only for those who can afford to attend the meetings. However, despite the availability of extensive remote responsibilities, in some cases in Vilnius we did not see enough remote interaction.
We do not know if this was due to inadequate time for remote participation or due to lack of interest from remote participants. In both cases, WSIS should search what went wrong.
And we also appreciated live transcription in almost all meetings, not just in the main room, and if possible, we recommend a brief training session for transcribers for the IGF, as it was the case for remote moderators, so that they can get acquainted with the IGF terminology and names.
Of course changes or, rather, adjustments will be necessary for the next IGFs in order to reflect the experience gained.
And a few things that did not work well.
We did not want to go into detail. You mentioned some logistical issues, but what we want to stress for future meetings is that proper attention is given to the venue and that it is clear what is expected from the host country and the participants to know in advance what the cost of participating in the IGF is.
And we strongly believe that for any future IGF, all logistical requests regarding the convening of an IGF meeting should be described in a requirements or specifications development, if you want, to be produced by the IGF Secretariat.
That document should clearly describe what is expected from the host country, with chapters such as venue, and in that chapter we could have subchapters like meeting rooms, facilities, infrastructure, et cetera. A chapter for accommodation. Another for travel and visa. Another for local transportation, safety and security, other local responsibilities such as the reception, the food options, the coffee breaks, et cetera.
In addition, future host countries should file a candidacy file, which will provide answers to the requirements document or will commit to provide what is required. That way, planning will be separated into two things: Logistics and substance.
Concluding, despite a few logistical problems, we think that the Vilnius IGF was a success, and that the IGF deserves to continue as it brings together all stakeholders and gives them the opportunity to discuss all-important Internet governance-related issues, something that no other forum or organization neither does nor can do.
And we look forward to the next IGF, should the mandate of the IGF be extended in December.
Thank you for your attention.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much. Allow me to make some off-the-cuff comments on your thoughtful statement.
The opening ceremony, this is one area where there is some politics involved and which -- where the host country has very much say.
We understand that participants feel they should be as short as possible, but you will also have to understand that the host country will have to accommodate some friends of the government, some friendly countries, some foreign dignitaries who will not come to the meeting unless they are given a speaking slot. And we have always tried to keep it as short as possible, but then in the end, we have always found we ended up with too many speakers. So this is basically something which is outside the realm of the sheer sort of planning it takes on a political dimension and many last-minute decisions.
The other remark on remote participation and remote interaction, I found that is very relevant, and we have certainly improved. We have learned also with the remote moderators, but quite often the remote participants are, in a way, too shy or then, also, too slow to ask for the floor. Is but I certainly agree more effort needs to be made to bring in the remote participants in the sense as equals.
Last comment, what you said on the -- all the guidelines, we do all that. We have -- Basically the United Nations has a standard template of host country agreement. But we cannot ask for more than what is standard. I saw some reports, for instance, assessing the Copenhagen meeting. Then questions come up such as people had to wait in the cold. Maybe they should have a coffee stall there. But the U.N. cannot ask the host country to provide for free coffee. This is up to the host country to see how they do it. But what we can suggest is make sure coffee is available when people are waiting in the cold. And we pay considerable amount of energy on the planning on these logistical elements, and we are assisted again by some very experienced senior retired U.N. colleagues who have been in this business for the past 30 or 40 years.
Omar is not here today, but he has been at each IGF meeting. He has the experience of many U.N. meetings, the same with Daniel. We have planning missions beforehand.
In any case, however careful you plan something, there's always something that goes wrong. And in the end, you end up having to improvise. But, I mean, your suggestions are extremely well taken. And each time you learn something.
And you made the comment right at the beginning that basically, based on past experience, the Vilnius meeting certainly improved. But these remarks, just to explain a little bit how this works.
Now, the other speaker, which is the -- ICC basis, then Finland, United States, ICANN. I recognize Emily and UNESCO. But let's take it in the order. There is also somebody back there.
Okay.
ICC/BASIS.
>>ICC /BASIS: Ayesha Hassan, on behalf of the International Chamber of Commerce and its BASIS, Business Action to Support the Information Society. On behalf of the members of ICC and its BASIS initiative, we join others in the congratulating Lithuania, the host country for the IGF 2010, on a most successful event. The warm welcome and efforts of the organizing team were greatly appreciated. We'd also like to express our special thanks and recognition to Mr. Nitin Desai, the chair of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group, for his leadership and guidance, and to you, Mr. Kummer, chair, and your talented team for their tireless efforts and support. We look forward to working with all stakeholders to prepare another successful IGF in Nairobi, Kenya in September 2011.
IGF 2010, Developing the Future Together, successfully built upon the productive experiences of Sharm El Sheikh, Hyderabad, Rio and Athens. There was a strong business presence, which demonstrates the importance of the IGF for business. It successfully brought together an extensive range of leaders and experts from the many communities interested in Internet governance. It provided a unique opportunity to have open discussions on a wide variety of issues and brought together many stakeholders who otherwise do not have opportunities to engage with each other, both formally in sessions as well as informally.
A major value add for all is the constructive exchange of best practices and considerations of the best policy approaches and options that in turn resonate in policy discussions and decisions around the world and at national and regional levels. We also think it is important to recognize, as others have, the emergence of many new national IGF initiatives and the strengthening of regional events catalyzed by the global IGF, which was evident at this year's IGF.
A striking accomplishment this year was the tremendous effort to include participants from around the world through the extensive remote hubs, as you've kindly given us the statistics regarding developing country participants and the remote participants. It's really quite striking.
This expanded remote participation, Webcast, real-time transcription for not only main sessions but also for the workshops and open forums we believe was a clear improvement this year.
Clearly, multistakeholder participation in the development of the agenda throughout the preparations for this year's IGF was part of its success as well.
I'd like to also make a few comments about the sessions themselves.
I'd like to support the input that our colleague from ETNO has just provided on the overall schedule and the early call for workshops and how well that worked this year. That was an excellent effort and I believe had a direct impact on participation and allowed people to prepare for this IGF effectively.
We also support the approach regarding the Internet Governance for Development session. It was an excellent attempt to try that as a main session this year. We believe that it is a very important set of cross-cutting issues and will be better suited to a workshop in the program next year.
We heard a lot of positive feedback about the depth of discussions and the interactive nature generally of the workshops and the open forums. We also believe that continued vigilance about the number of workshops, efforts to consolidate, ensuring that workshops do have a range of stakeholder representativity in terms of views and people in the speaker positions as well as participation would be helpful.
Finally, we would like to also continue to encourage that if we do consolidate workshops that we also ensure that appropriate space is available for the workshops. Some of those that were very popular had trouble having all the people who wanted to be in the room actually be able to be in the room this year.
With that, chair, I'll stop, and I look forward to continuing to participate in this discussion.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Next speaker is Finland, please.
>>FINLAND: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And for the record, I am Mervi Kultamaa, Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland.
I would also like to thank the host country, Lithuania, and the IGF Secretariat for all the hard work which was put into the organization of another successful IGF.
We had a meeting of the informal Finnish multistakeholder working group last Thursday in Helsinki, and I quickly go through some of the points which were raised in that meeting.
In general, we were satisfied on the substance of the fifth IGF. The main themes are well established, and the discussion on many of the topics under those themes has really progressed during the past five years. And besides a cross-cutting theme, the handling of the IGF4D as a separate main theme was also welcomed.
The idea that some of the workshops are meant to prepare and feed into the main sessions was supported. It was noted that in terms of timing, there continues to be a bit of overlap in the organization of workshops on similar themes, which was already mentioned here.
The sessions on national initiative were very interesting, but it was noted that the agenda might become too full if each country wanted to organization their own events to tell about the national initiatives. Perhaps the regional and national experiences could be discussed in one single event, or even that there would be a report which would analyze the progress of different national and regional initiatives under each of the main themes.
This would facilitate a link between national and regional initiative and global IGF, but of course it would require resources.
In our national meeting, it was also felt that there is a need to get more information on the substance of the intended discussion to be able to better prepare for the IGF.
Perhaps the organizers of the workshops could prepare some kind of a background note on the intended content and objectives of the event.
Now, there is a workshop proposal available for us made well in advance, but perhaps it could be updated later on in view for the participants to prepare themselves better.
Finally, we discussed if there could be any more tangible result coming out of the IGF meetings without changing the nature of IGF as an open multistakeholder discussion forum. And in that respect, there was a suggestion to look into what Brazil has done on the core values of Internet and see if that could be taken as one of the topics of discussion in the future.
And also, perhaps a strengthened link between the IGF and the CSTD could help those issues discussed in the IGF to receive for attention in the U.N. decision-making level.
And just to conclude, Mr. Chairman, Finland continues to believe in the IGF as one of the main successes of WSIS, which is also reflected in our financial support.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much for this, and certainly thank you very much also for your continued financial support.
The next three speakers are United States, Kenya, and then ICANN, and they will be followed by UNESCO, ACP, and Sweden.
United States, please.
>>UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Thank you. My name is Craig Riley. I am representing the United States government.
We note that the overwhelming support of stakeholders to the IGF, distributed systems like the Internet require distributed action, and no single institution, document, arrangement, or instrument could suffice in addressing the needs of our networked world.
The United States encourages the widest possible participation of all stakeholders and note that nearly 50% of Vilnius participants were from the developing world. And remote participation made it possible for many more to participate.
An important achievement of the IGF has been the establishment of multistakeholder dialogue as a norm. Prior to the IGF, a venue did not exist in which governments, the private sector, the technical community, and civil society could gather to discuss the future of the Internet. And as the past five years have demonstrated, such dialogue is imperative.
When the international community is meeting to exchange information and build capacity to foster sustainability, robustness, security, stability, and development of the Internet, this must happen in a multistakeholder manner, a task that only the IGF can perform.
The multistakeholder IGF model has delivered progress on challenging policy issues such as critical Internet resources and the internationalization of the Internet, and it is now driving a greater focus on the development goals of access and affordability.
The result of discussion at the IGF provide a comprehensive and influential portrait of the views held by key Internet stakeholders from around the globe and from different sectors. These views are offered without the constraints of legally binding negotiations.
The Multistakeholder Advisory Group plays a crucial role in setting the agenda and workshop themes of the IGF. Specifically because of its makeup, the Multistakeholder Advisory Group can consult with a wide range of stakeholders and identify the most critical and relevant Internet governance issues for the given year.
With this input, the MAG can formulate an agenda that reflect the dynamism of the Internet.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much.
Kenya, please.
>>KENYA: (Speaking off mic.)
Sorry, I am Mike Katundu from Kenya, and I am here representing the Kenyan government.
I would like to join the others who congratulated the government of the Republic of Lithuania for a well-organized meeting.
The fifth IGF I should say was one of the well-organized IGF meetings, and particularly I would like to also thank Markus and his team, his able team for the work well done.
The choice of workshops was one of the best works done because the workshops included a number of topics; among them, very informative workshops for the developing countries. And by extension, the fifth IGF saw -- it was quite well attended by large numbers of participants from developing countries, among them there were parliamentarians from East Africa, and for this we thank Nominet for the support they extended to ensure that the parliamentarians from the East African region were able to the attend and participate actively in this important forum.
We also had quite an extensive number of youth participating in both the workshops and also in the main session. And also to appreciate was the Internet governance for development theme. It went a long way to educating most of the participants. And again, just so to underscore the participants from the developing countries participated heavily from the well-thought themes within the workshops and also for the main session.
Many of us also noticed that the participants from developing countries were quite active in the various workshops and also in the main session, unlike in a number of other past IGF forums.
And going forward, I think it's important that we continue to consult among ourselves in advance and ensure that the workshops are quite inclusive, and also the main session is also well linked with the themes, the thematics of the workshops. And also ensure that the forums anticipate the new and emerging technologies, not forget to mention one of the workshops which was very informative, the cloud computing. It brought about a number of issues which various countries, among them also developing countries, need to start thinking about in terms of issues of cybersecurity, issues of contracting, among others.
Going forward, I would like to welcome all of you to Nairobi. Hopefully next year. And I would like to believe that the Nairobi forum will take into consideration a number of issues which are being raised in this forum towards ensuring that the sixth IGF is even much more better organized and also informative and educative and hopefully since it will be organized within an African region, it is our hope that we are going to get support and ensure that various representatives from developing countries also participate. Hopefully, this time around, 70% of participants could be drawn from developing countries, or we continue to face various kind of challenges and to ensure that they participate actively in this forum.
Thank you very much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Michael, and I'm sure Kenya will be an excellent host and the meeting will be, as always, the best ever.
Next speaker is ICANN. Baher, please.
>>ICANN: Thank you, chairman. I am Baher Esmat, and I am representing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN.
I'd like to join others in congratulating the government of Lithuania on a successful IGF meeting in Vilnius. I'd also like to thank Mr. Desai, the chair of the MAG, as well as Mr. Kummer and the entire Secretariat for an outstanding job they have been doing over the past five years.
Going straight to our comments on the taking stock and what went well this year in Vilnius, on the program, we think that the designation of feeder workshops made the link between workshops and main sessions more tangible. We also believe that background reports on workshops and best practice forums were useful not only for the information they provide but also in guiding participants through the quite extensive agenda of the meeting. As others have highlighted that remote participation was one of the key success outcomes or points of the meeting this year, implementing the motion of remote hubs made it even more successful. I personally have received very positive feedback from participants from Palestine and Pakistan who took part in the IGF meeting this year through remote hubs.
On topic areas, we witnessed more depth and breadth in topics discussed. For example, the workshop on CIR showed more maturity in discussions compared to past IGFs.
There seems to be more experience gained and knowledge shared in developmental aspect of Internet governance as well. So this meeting -- I mean the meeting this year had a dedicated session on developmental issues and we think this is a good practice that needs to continue in future meetings.
Also, the youth participation this year was yet another successful -- or another success for the meeting. And the -- dedicating a session for regional IGF perspectives helped make the bridges between those initiatives and the global IGF. And again, this is a practice that we wish to see in future IGFs.
On what went less well, I think this was covered by other participants, particularly in relation to technical support needed for remote participation tools. And for future IGFs, again on topic areas, we think one area that may help bring more participation from developing countries could be in relation to innovation and entrepreneurship and the cyberspace. I come from a country where the government, together with the private sector, strive to inspire more innovation and Internet businesses. So maybe by bringing experts from developing and developed countries to the IGF and have a discussion on how to help entrepreneurs to come to the Internet and to make more contribution, investment in this place, maybe this will help developing countries in this particular area, and will also encourage participation from those countries.
Last but not least, we would like to reiterate our support to the continuation of the IGF while also hoping to see the next meeting take place in Kenya in 2011.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: And the next speaker is UNESCO, followed by ACP, and then Sweden.
UNESCO.
>>UNESCO: Thank you, Chairman. (saying name) from UNESCO.
First of all, I would like to join all the other stakeholders to congratulate the Vilnius government for the successful IGF in Vilnius.
Also, I would like to thank Mr. Nitin and Mr. Kummer and your team for outstanding work to deliver all this success. Particularly, I want to thank the work team and all those who volunteered to work on the remote participation, which really turned out a big success for this year.
From the -- Actually, I witnessed continuous improvement of the IGF discussions since the first year in Athens. From the outset, UNESCO has been an active contributor to the IGF, which we have always supported as an essential platform for multistakeholder discussions.
The forum provided an important channel for exchange of opinions, ideas, and concerns. It provides inspiration and ideas to improve Internet governance.
UNESCO acknowledges the achievement of IGF discussions for structure which was shaped around what needs to be done to ensure that the Internet does expand in a way that its potential and power can be harnessed for sustainable social and economic development.
And in this aspect, UNESCO particularly was able to highlight important human dimensions of Internet governance during discussions, such as privacy issue, freedom of expression, linguistic diversity, local content, increased access and accessibility, inclusion and disability, information and media literacy.
As we can see from the charts, the most frequently used words, we can see more and more words used by -- in discussion turned out to be within this dimension.
And further, UNESCO also acknowledges the significant role of IGF in stimulating international networking and the creation of partnerships. For example, through the former, UNESCO has collaborated with governments, with civil society, private sector and academia and explored synergies with different stakeholders. Some collaborations were formalized, such as partnership with ICANN in strengthening multilingualism. And also we have been involved in creating dynamic coalition on freedom of expression on Internet which played an active role in creating a multistakeholder partnership and will be very useful to deliver the further capacity-building activities.
And one more thing that we observed the success of the IGF is for this year, in Vilnius, we did see improvement of participation from developing country.
From the other perspective, we wish -- it's also important to get the regional strengthened. We feel the regional IGF should be an integral part of the IGF process. We wish to see a mechanism of linking and feeding the local and regional IGF into IGF to be developed. These links need to be further enhanced to ensure that the same nature of neutrality, same quality of discussion and same principle of multistakeholder to be applied.
And thematically, we wish that in the future discussions, the following things to be highlighted.
First one is net neutrality. Second one is social networking. Third one is mobile Internet Wi-Fi. Fourthly, we wish to see the role of journalism, the media, to be discussed in the Internet era.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: The next speaker is Anriette from the Association for Progressive Communications. Please.
>>APC: Thank you, Markus. APC will submit a longer assessment. I will just present a few points.
I want to echo the thanks to all who have worked on this, but I think particularly to the Secretariat team and to Markus's leadership and the MAG, and the host country as well.
I think it was a really successful, well-organized event.
With regard to our stock taking, we feel that participation was good; however, participation of developing countries really still needs to be enhanced. And we recommend that it's factored into the planning for the next IGF from the outset.
And that includes participation of all stakeholder groups: Civil society, business and government.
And with regard to remote participation, it is getting better and better. We recommend that we start thinking of it as enhanced participation rather than remote participation. And that means are found to include participants who are not physically there more at the level of setting the agenda in the preparatory process. And one of our recommendations, in fact, is that some of the preparatory meetings can take place virtually in their entirety.
I want to comment particularly on the development agenda, and we wouldn't share the perspective of ETNO that it be a workshop. We really commend the MAG and the Secretariat for introducing it as a main session. It's a complex issue, but if we don't start, we'll never get there.
And we believe that we're really just beginning to scratch the surface.
So to integrate development more effectively, we need more participation. I've addressed that.
But we also need to introduce it substantively in our thinking at the IGF.
Internet governance for development is more than development of Internet governance or Internet governance in developing countries. It is actually about how Internet policy impacts on and responds to social, economic, and human development issues. And in that sense, I would agree that it's relevant to developing countries and developed countries.
But these impacts can be positive or negative, and to explore them, the IGF should be facilitating more dialogue between the Internet community and development policymakers and practitioners, many of whom are not currently engaged with the Internet governance and -- with the IGF, but more generally even in their own countries of Internet governance and policy.
So we think that to consolidate this development agenda in the IGF effectively, the IGF should also begin to engage what is meant by "development" and to discuss the notion of sustainable development, which really looks at development impacts at the social and human level, the cultural level, and also impacts on the natural environment.
We felt that this was a theme -- sustainable development and environmental sustainability were not really that effectively addressed this year.
We do think that constructing main sessions as forums where outcomes of workshops can be discussed could be more effective. And if the -- for example, if the main session on IG for development came at the end of the event, it would be possible for a variety of workshops, ranging from cloud computing to social networking to access to bring to the main session the issues around development that they had addressed.
With regard to access, we feel that there was some important omissions. There was no discussion, really, of spectrum and the role of spectrum regulation, issues of digital migration that are on the horizon, and that are relevant for the access arena.
So we feel that -- it would be good if that could be discussed.
Similarly the implications of mobile Internet and net neutrality, but I think UNESCO has mentioned that.
Then just a few comments on human rights. We felt there was good discussion on human rights. APC and IT for Change and the Internet -- the Coalition for Internet Rights and Principles, and another NGO called Center for Internet in Society organized a pre-event where we had Frank La Rue, the special rapporteur, as a speaker. And we felt this was very useful. It allowed participants in the IGF to spend time before the event to engage the issue in greater depth. And in fact, we recommend the pre-event format. I know other actors are also using it for various issues.
We do think, however, that we need to deepen the focus of human rights in the IGF, and we think there are two ways in which that can be done. The one is to include more human rights experts and professionals, and the other is through capacity building. Because human rights and Internet governance is fairly complex and it involves an understanding of rights framework, as well as a whole range of -- of legislation and regulation in the Internet and communications field.
So building more capacity building opportunities or workshops that have more of a learning orientation could be useful as well.
We were interested that there was quite a strong focus on accountability and transparency in Internet governance. I think there were only two workshops on that, but the issue of transparency and accountability came up in various forums, so we are wondering if that might not become a theme that could be addressed in a more holistic way in the future.
I think that is more or less it. We agree with the previous speakers about the -- the national and regional IGFs, and we think that some work needs to be done to -- however, to ensure that the national and regional IGFs also adhere to the WSIS principles effectively.
So the IGF obviously can just encourage that, but in our assessment, not all the regional and national IGFs were as inclusive as -- as they could have been. Obviously it varies from region to region and country to country.
With regard to -- oh, I want to highlight one other event, actually.
Nominet organized a roundtable on MP for members of Parliaments, and we found this a very useful format as well, so I think that's something else that -- in fact, we're not sure but it looks like participation of members of Parliaments was even greater in Vilnius than it has been in prior IGFs.
And we found the roundtable a very good example of how an informal discussion can, in fact, indirectly begin to influence the thinking of policymakers.
I will leave it at that. I think, you know, we -- we have some recommendations on workshops and workshop formats which we'll table separately, but the one I will mention, because I think in Vilnius there were simply too many workshops where speakers took up the entire time span of the workshop and there was just not sufficient time for discussion.
This is partly a result of the merging of different workshops where the merging process just becomes combining panels, rather than redesigning them, and we really do recommend that -- that the Secretariat considers, and the MAG, how to be -- how to encourage more discipline on behalf of workshop organizers, to ensure that there's sufficient time for discussion with participants and not just panelist after panelist.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Many thanks, Anriette, for your useful comments.
Just a word on your last recommendation. I can assure you we do our best. I mean, it is very much part of the guidelines. There should not be more than five -- four or five panelists and sufficient time should be left for discussion.
Some workshop proposals had, I think, up to 13 panelists for us for a 90-minute session, so we tried to explain to them, "This will not allow for discussion" but imposing discipline, I can assure you, is not an easy task. But we did our best, and I wish my successors good luck in enforcing discipline.
Next speaker is Sweden and we have also ISOC and Emily. I'm not sure whether Bertrand actually asked for the floor or -- you asked for the floor on behalf of -- Kenya, again, and Jeff.
And the UNESCO flag is -- did you ask for the floor again or -- okay. Sweden is the next speaker, please. Sweden.
>>SWEDEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am Anders Johansson representing the Swedish government.
We would like to congratulate Lithuania for their very good hosting of the 5th IGF.
IGF was, once again, a successful meeting thanks to all organizers.
We also want to express the importance of the MAG, because of its contribution and positive impact on organization of the meetings held until now.
The nature of MAG gathering competencies from a great diversity of constituencies we strongly believe is a success factor for the IGF.
We also consider it important to continue to facilitate remote participation and continue to foster youth participation.
Not at least, remote participation by young people could be promoted by even stronger remote ICT facilities.
I also want to express some concerns on problems about active remote participation we experienced in the last meeting.
I was myself involved in organizing a workshop with the five Nordic countries in Europe and many organizations from these countries in a workshop.
And we also had a remote participating panel in Stockholm, a panel with young people, but due to limited technological support in the workshop room, like equipment and staff support, our remote youth panel in Stockholm could, unfortunately, not take part in the workshop discussions.
I think, and I strongly believe, we need to develop an even stronger support of using technology to improve remote active participation, also, in the workshops.
Having said that, we fully understand the limited human and financial resources that we have in IGF. We also recognize the increased participation of youth in this year's IGF. And we believe that the active participation of young people in the workshops in the forthcoming IGFs should be further encouraged.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much.
The next speaker is ISOC. Please, yes.
>>ISOC: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
ISOC too would like to thank the government of Lithuania for hosting the very successful 2010 IGF and to all those who contributed to its success.
In particular, it was encouraging to see the expanding participation, especially by governments, as shown in the statistics presented earlier.
I hope this continually improving participation will be noted by the United Nations enhanced cooperation discussions.
Increased participation by the public sector includes the improved participation by parliamentarians.
Making change locally requires that the political level participates and is aware of the importance and the subtlety of these issues. The Nominet roundtable with parliamentarians was a positive contribution to encouraging dialogue with parliamentarians and I hope that will be continued.
There was also an improved focus of discussions, we felt, this year.
There may still have been too many workshops, but at least the interconnection between the workshops and the main sessions was better.
The main sessions themselves, I think, still need work to encourage open dialogue. I'm really not sure what more we can do to make that happen, but perhaps it's an issue for the stakeholder groups to try to prepare in advance, as ISOC does for our members and our ambassadors.
Discussions should be kept as open as possible, because the open expression of views is vital to the IGF's success.
I'd note also the importance of having the stakeholders taking responsibility for the shape of the IGF. The open MAG planning sessions for 2010 contributed to that, I believe. But I also note the efforts that some organizations and stakeholders have made to involve youth, parliamentarians, and developing country participants.
The Internet Society contributes significantly through our ambassadors program.
I think that program brings in interested and active participants from around the world.
This year, they contributed significantly to the debate in a range of the workshops, and also to the remote participation, and I'd encourage others to help expand participations with similar programs.
Remote participation certainly continues to improve, thanks to contributions from Cisco, but also the efforts made by the scribes and remote moderators. We really are learning and need to expand those efforts.
The increasing number of remote hubs is also interesting, I think, and I'd like to hear more from them about how effective those were, and that -- I'd like to hear suggestions of how we can help to contribute to their success.
Finally, I'd like to draw attention to the voluntary and organic growth of national and regional IGFs.
It's impressive how these continue to spread, despite the lack of any formal framework or support. We need to recognize this more fully in the program, and I would like to associate with the excellent ideas that have already come from previous speakers.
The Internet Society hopes there will be a positive outcome from the U.N. process now going on in New York. It's important to recognize the important contributions the IGF has made to the global understanding of Internet governance, and to the practice of multistakeholder dialogue in national, regional, and international organizations.
The IGF has had impacts and it will continue to have impacts if it is allowed to continue and evolve.
We appreciate the generous offer from Kenya to host the 2011 IGF and wish them well for a successful 6th IGF.
I can assure you that the Internet Society looks forward to continuing participation in the open, inclusive, transparent IGF process, if the mandate is renewed.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And for the scribes, that was Bill Graham, and may I remind speakers, please announce your name before you take the microphones. The scribes may not be able to see you from a distance but they can hear you when you say your name.
The next speaker is Emily Taylor. Please, Emily.
>>EMILY TAYLOR: Thank you, chair. Emily Taylor. I'm making these remarks on behalf of auDA, the Australian domain administrator. AuDA thanks the host country, Lithuania, for organizing an outstanding meeting this year.
And in reviewing what went well at the Vilnius meeting, we refer to the consultations undertaken by the U.N. Secretary-General during 2009 and the steps taken at the Vilnius meeting to address issues raised in those consultations.
Throughout the last five years, the IGF has demonstrated its ability to introduce incremental evolutionary improvements without any external intervention, but through a process of reflection on what worked, what didn't work so well, from the perspective of multistakeholders.
During the Secretary-General's consultation in 2009, the five issues mentioned most frequently were to improve participation from developing countries, improve remote participation, support local and regional IGF meetings, increase the priority given to development, review the MAG membership role and ways of working.
In response to these comments, the following improvements were introduced during 2010.
There was a 320% growth in remote hubs from 2009 to 2010, and those remote hubs, as you've referred to, chair, included small island developing states, least-developed countries, and transition countries.
As you informed us earlier, there was a remote moderator for each main session and feeder workshop at the Vilnius meeting, and all preparatory meetings during 2010.
Some workshops included presentations from remote participants.
The remote participation tools included live transcripts, video link and audio link which catered to variable bandwidth and connectivity.
This combination of tools gave participants a sense of being in the same space as the meeting itself, as the feedback from Bangladesh remote hub noted.
The main session devoted to development placed the issue front and center at the 2010 IGF.
And the MAG sent out a questionnaire asking for stakeholder input on its membership role and ways of working.
In addition, there were improved linkages between feeder workshops and main sessions and inclusion of regional and national IGFs in the program, as other speakers today have noted.
These initiatives, taken in the short space of one year, show that the current structure of the lightweight Secretariat supported by voluntary funding and the Multistakeholder Advisory Group is flexible, adaptive, and responsive to feedback.
auDA wishes to highlight Nitin Desai, Markus Kummer, and your team with the Secretariat. Thank you for your contributions to the success of the IGF over the past five years. auDA supports the continuation of the IGF in its current form, which has proven a success formula. Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. The next speaker is Bertrand. Please.
>>INTERNATIONAL DIPLOMATIC ACADEMY: Good morning. My name is Bertrand de la Chapelle, and I speak today on behalf of the International Diplomatic Academy that I recently joined after leaving my position as the special envoy for the Information Society.
I'd like to produce brief comments regarding the experience in Vilnius in the broader context.
First of all, I join...(dropped audio)... unfortunately we have to repeat over and over again how good this thing is functioning and it is in a certain way a pity that we have to repeat it so much, because it actually was clear from the consult in Sharm El Sheikh that brought an overwhelming support for the continuation of this structure.
Very quickly, the Vilnius meeting confirmed the three fundamental principles and the validity of the three fundamental principles upon which the IGF is being built.
The first one is openness, the second one is self-organization, and the third one is a flexible relationship to the U.N.
I had the privilege to produce a document for the book that was edited this year for the IGF, and those elements are deeply detailed.
I think these principles have proven again and again in the last five years how useful they are.
In this respect, the Vilnius meeting had a few characteristics that are worth highlighting.
As was said before, the discussions were more mature on some issues. IPv6 was a particular example where in the course of the last four years the understanding of the issue has considerably grown.
The second element is the meeting and the session on cloud computing was extremely, extremely enlightening, and this is one of the cases where a panel format is appropriate.
I personally developed a much better understanding of the issues, and I think that was the case for a lot of other people.
And in that respect, the IGF has proven that this flexible format is much more able to pick up emerging issues than most international processes. So this should be -- this should be....(dropped audio).
Likewise, the issues around the governance of social media considerably involve and it was....(dropped audio)...a very good opportunity....(dropped audio)...foundation was done on some of the principles that could underpin global regimes for social media and social networks.
Likewise, as was mentioned before, human rights and the various dimensions of implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its applicability to the Internet clearly emerged as a major topic, and I think this is a great value of the IGF.
Altogether, the IGF in Vilnius again proved that it was both a tool for synchronizing the understanding of the different actors, but also to make connections among them.
That was most about substance.
In the case of structure, a few quick comments.
To support everything that has been said about remote participation, that was remarkable.
The national and regional IGFs are leading to an Internet governance network today that is developing on its own, and honestly if we needed any other proof of the value of the process, this would be one.
The other thing is that the dynamic coalition on rights and principles, in spite of some objections by people, has done remarkable work in highlighting the applicability of some principles that are already in international documents, and so we may not be all aware of that, but work is going inter-sessionally and people are presenting the progress of their work.
Finally, as Anriette mentioned, the notion that there are satellite events that come before is making it even more a watering hole for all the people interested in those topics, and I'll come back later when we discuss the MAG and the role of the MAG in the notion of feeder workshops.
But as a conclusion, I would like to share a few frustrations. And in particular, two.
The first frustration was that in Vilnius, I was extremely surprised that the very countries and the very actors who complained that some topics are not addressed by the IGF and who basically make it one of the main criticisms against the IGF didn't bother to use the sessions that were devoted to those topics to raise them.
In particular, on the critical Internet resources and the so-famous universal -- sorry, unilateral control of the critical Internet resources by one government.
If you look at the transcript, wouldn't you be extremely surprised that there was no debate? And that the very countries that keep hashing again and again that these topics are not being addressed, they didn't raise their voice?
That's a frustration. This is what didn't go well.
The second thing is, we're getting the participation of developing countries. This is a misrepresentation of reality.
Let's be frank. First of all, the IGF, given the numbers that are being given, certainly doesn't pale in comparison with many of the international processes that I've attend is as a French representative.
Quite on the contrary, because of the remote participation, because of the availability of transcript, because of the fellowship programs and so on, the participation of developing countries, governments, and other stakeholders is beyond comprehension with any other process I've participated in.
And without mentioning any specific institution here, some of the dedicated groups that are devoted to Internet issues actually had participations of 40 people, half of which were coming from Europe.
And so it is disingenuous at best to use this argument to consider that the Internet Governance Forum is not open to developing countries. Even more so. When actually the very actors who raise this criticism do not bother to come to some of the meetings where they can come.
And I take, in particular, the criteria of participation in this meeting where there is no obstruction regarding participation of representations of developing countries from missions in Geneva, there is no obstruction in the financial dimension or whatever. If they care about this, they would be highly welcome to participate.
And so as a conclusion, I think we need to help the IGF progress and address the real issues that we can deal with together, and not be bogged down on assumptions and arguments that are actually not valid.
As a matter of fact, the IGF has been a process that is extremely beneficial for the U.N. system, because it is providing the template and the laboratory for the major issue that the U.N. system is facing, which is involving other stakeholders, and I think it is extremely useful for DESA (phonetic) that this process progresses and moves forward because it is the best tool that the U.N. system can use in an environment where honestly processes have a tendency to go to what is now called mini-literalism, and so the IGF is one of the tools that strengthen the U.N., instead of weakening it.
Thank you, and apologies for having been so long.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. And with your indulgence, I would now like to let our remote participants, Rafik Dammak, who presumably sits in Tokyo, and Kyle, could you read out his contribution, please? Inclusion.
>>RAFIK DAMMAK: So Rafik Dammak, coordinator of the youth coalition on Internet governance.
Thank you again for adding youth/children theme at the IGF Vilnius and improving more youth workshops which allowed in the same -- same (inaudible) to have adults and young speakers in the same panel.
There's a strong need to improve young speakers' and experts' presence in main sessions and all workshops.
Youth absence from main sessions need to be fixed and improved. Thanks also to organizations and countries which brought young participants to the IGF, but we hope that other organizations which express support for youth bring more young people and participate actively in the IGF and providing funding and fellowships for that matter. Regards, Rafik.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Rafik. And the next speaker is Michael, please. Kenya. Then Jeff Brueggeman.
>>KENYA: Thank you, Chairman. My name is Waudo Siganga from the Computer Society of Kenya.
First, I would like, on behalf of the private sector from Africa, to reinforce the appreciation expressed by my colleagues from the ICC/BASIS to the organizers of the meeting in Vilnius and the IGF Secretariat for holding such a successful meeting last September.
There are many things that we feel worked well in Vilnius and should be retained or reinforced at future IGF meetings.
Amongst these things that worked well, for example, we feel the inclusion of a separate IG4D session was an important step in making the IGF meeting more pertinent to participants from the developing countries.
We agree that IG4D is an important cross-cutting theme, but at the same time it is important to reinforce its importance by retaining it as a main session in future meetings.
The second thing we can say worked well was the remote participation hubs. Certainly the reports we received from the -- regarding the hub in Nairobi, just like what you have mentioned about Rwanda indicated that it was well attended and it went a long way in meeting -- helping to meet the WSIS aspirations of inclusivity and participation by all.
There are a couple of -- of areas where we noted perhaps there could be a little bit of improvement, a little bit of improvement could be useful.
On the substantive part of the meeting, we felt that there could have been more merging of workshops, better merging of workshops to make them more compact and reduce duplication, and we have some examples of those, perhaps, that we could discuss later.
The second thing is that many of the regional meetings were held at the same time, which we felt denied a chance for people to attend the meetings of other regions and learning from them.
So there's some chance or a possibility, perhaps, there could be a way to find (inaudible) -- to have regional meetings at separate times for the different regions.
On the administrative part of the meeting, we found that visas provided a major challenge for potential participants, but particularly those from developing countries, and this issue needs to get -- should get greater attention in future; particularly, when the IGF meetings are held in countries who have limited diplomatic presence around the world.
Finally, as we anticipate the next IGF meeting in Nairobi, I would like to add my weight to the welcome extended by my government colleague here Michael, and I look forward to seeing all of you in Nairobi next near.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you. My apologies for the name confusion but it's due to the name plates.
Next speaker. Jeff, Jeff Brueggeman from AT&T, please.
>>AT&T: Thank you. I would like to add my thanks to the organizers for a very successful IGF meeting, and I would also like to thank Nitin Desai and Markus Kummer for their strong leadership in develop a process and a working development that has been consistently successful in making the IGF a valuable experience for participants. In addition to taking stock of this year's IGF's meeting in comparison to prior meetings, it's helpful to take stock more broadly and consider the accomplishments of the IGF as the product of its unique multistakeholder format.
First, the impressive statistics on direct participation, remote participation, and developing country participation are a reflection of a sustained commitment to broad participation on the part of the IGF Secretariat and the community.
This level of sustained growth that has been achieved does not happen by accident but through hard work and consistent efforts on the part of many volunteers.
Second, as a community we sometimes take for granted the fact that the IGF meeting format and agenda will continue to change and improve each year, and we also have confidence that our input will have an impact on the process and planning for the next IGF meeting.
Again, this does not happen by accident. It's the product of a constructive bottom-up process that gives IGF participants a real voice in shaping the IGF meeting and make it their own.
Third, the substance and policy discussions at the IGF continue to progress and evolve. As others have noted, there was a high level of engagement and constructive dialogue on Internet policy issues which can easily become divisive. And once again, the discussions this year continue to show progress on existing issues and expand to cover emerging issues.
So ultimately, I would like to congratulate all of those who worked hard to make the IGF meeting a success, including many people in the room today. Ultimately, it is our collective cooperation and efforts that have shown the importance of the IGF as a unique multistakeholder process, not just a series of meetings. And I look forward to seeing everyone next year.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you.
Next speaker is Katitza? Yes, Katitza Rodriguez from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Please.
>>EFF: Thank you, chair. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is a civil society, nongovernmental organization with over 30,000 members in 57 countries, which is dedicated to the protection of citizens' civil rights and the creation of balanced copyright laws that enable access to knowledge and foster technology innovation.
EFF works to ensure the government complies with appropriate legal, safe standards when it wants to conduct electronic surveillance or otherwise or obtain user data from third-party providers.
We would like to join all the stakeholders to congratulate the government of Lithuania for the successful IGF meeting 2010 and to the IGF Secretariat for their excellent work toward organization of the meeting.
EFF believe that the IGF provides a great venue for advocacy purposes that allow us to discuss public-policy objectives that deal with high-priority issues at the national, regional, and international area on digital civil rights and access to knowledge.
In this opportunity, we would like to make a remark on the session of security, privacy and openness.
We congratulate the organizers for the effort and vast amount of time invested in putting together the session. We believe the session made a positive step towards dealing with a current important topic like Internet intermediaries limitations of liability that foster freedom of expression on the Internet and technology innovation. This is a theme that was not well addressed in previous meetings at all.
However, what we believe doesn't work well was the fact of putting the three themes together, privacy, security, and openness, in one session. Those topics brought several public policy objectives that need to be dealed in that. By putting them together, there was not enough time to discuss the different public-policy issues that arose from each of these topics. For instance, many issues related to access to knowledge under the openness title were not included in the discussion.
Privacy concerns within the cybersecurity discussions were not well addressed. This is key to cybersecurity arguments from a civil society point of view.
We hope to continue seeing the always-growing remote participation capability to include more voices on the debate. We believe that the transcripts and the video and recording prove to be a very useful tool, not only during the meeting but after the meeting to know what happened on the session.
They were also useful for many workshop organizers to elaborate their workshop reports and be able to provide concrete messages as an outcome of their own workshops based on those transcripts.
Provision of the transcripts after the meeting helped identify those issues that we agree on and where the boundaries are.
Thank you for your attention.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much.
And next speaker is MAG member Nurani Nimpuno who actually has the great honor of being the mother of the youngest participant in Vilnius.
I think he was ten months old. Please correct us.
Please, Nurani.
>>NURANI NIMPUNO: (Speaking off microphone)
>> Microphone, please.
>>NURANI NIMPUNO: My name is still Nurani Nimpuno,and I work for Netnod, which is a technical infrastructure organization based in Sweden.
I would also like to congratulate everyone involved for a successful meeting, and very much thank -- I believe that's very much thanks to everyone involved, many people in this room, but also the chair and the Secretariat. I think they have played a key role in this, and I don't think, as I've said before, the IGF would have evolved into what it has without their help.
And I think the open, inclusive multistakeholder model has proved to be the successful -- the success formula. Many people have said this before me but I think it's worth repeating.
The latest IGF in Vilnius this year is the result of the evolution of the IGF from year to year, and it has not been a static process but an evolutionary one, and I think that is what has made the IGF such a mature and constructive forum.
It was very positive to see the active and well organized remote participation, and I'd like to thank everyone involved in that for the efforts that went into making that work. I know that it was a lot of hard work behind that, and it's not something that just happens automatically.
I'd also like to recognize the success of national and regional IGFs, and that is also linked to this. I don't think anyone can deny the value of these.
I would also like add that I think that Bertrand's point about participants from developing countries was very poignant. I think it is worth recognizing organizations that put actual work into increasing participation from developing countries, and who help fund participants from developing countries to participate in the meetings, rather than just sitting on the outside, criticizing a lack of participation from these countries.
To more detailed comments about the meetings. I think it was very positive to see that the workshops this year were very interactive. Indeed, there were a very few workshops where the panelists talked throughout the whole session but many of the workshops I went to were very lively and interactive. I think the model where the workshops fed into the main session was one that worked very well. I think it made the main session -- the discussions in the main sessions a lot more mature and focused but also more interactive and lively. It was quite -- There was quite a difference between this IGF and some of the first IGFs where you just had a list of panelists talking throughout the whole session.
I received some very good feedback on some of the main sessions and, indeed, the cloud computing one stood out. A lot of people said that that was a very good session; that they learned a lot from, but it was also pleasant to listen to.
As for youth involvement, it's something we talk about I think in each planning meeting, and everyone recognizes that youth should -- youth involvement should increase. And there I'd actually like to point to the UK model where they had a very successful program, not only shipping young people to the IGF, so to speak, but also a whole program with mentorships where they were prepared and, from what I understand, a few young people were selected and also encouraged to talk, speak up at the IGF. And I think we saw that in both the main sessions and some of the workshops that some of the young participants didn't only sit down and listen but they actually participated.
And with that, I would like to again express my support for the continuation of the IGF with its current success formula, and I look forward to the IGF number 6 in Nairobi next year.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Yes. And as I said when introducing you, as regards to youth participation, you are the role model for many coming with your ten-month-old son.
On the youth participation, we should also not forget the net mission initiatives from dot Asia. They had about five or more young people from Hong Kong in Vilnius who participated very actively, which is supported by a training program they have at home, and they select the best people that go through that program to send them to the annual meeting.
Next speak is Jovan Kurbalija from DiploFoundation. And then I have again Andrey Shcherbovich, I hope I pronounced it correctly, from the State University, Moscow. And then Brazil. Is it Hartmut or Alvaro? Alvaro.
Okay. Jovan, please, you are the next speaker.
>>DIPLOFOUNDATION: Thank you, Markus. Its very difficult to add anything to this list of praises, well-deserved praises about the organization of the last IGF, especially to the host country, government of Lithuania, but also Nitin, Markus, and all other stakeholders, if I can use this term again who helped the great success of the IGF.
I found particularly useful Markus's overview of the last five years with excellent graphical representation because it helped us to see IGF in proper perspective, because five years is a long enough period to identify some trends and to compare developments to the period before that, especially the end of the WSIS.
And as we noticed, IGF made quite a few significant breakthroughs, both in the substance in the way how the issues on Internet governance were covered, but also in introducing new innovative types of global governance and modern diplomacy.
Bertrand already mentioned it as an important outcome of the IGF, and it is a dilemma which is discussed worldwide, dilemma how to make global governance broad enough to include as many people who are concerned with the decisions made in the U.N. and other foras and to make it deep enough in order to be effective and to produce some results.
IGF provides quite a few useful inputs in that respect, and they could be summarized in three main points, at least from Diplo perspective, because as you know, we are involved in capacity development and research on modern diplomacy.
First one, which was already mentioned by quite a few speakers, is remote participation. The second one is capacity development. And third one is increased policy coherence, which is one of the main challenges, both on the global level and on national levels; how to increase coherence in covering complex policy issues.
I will reflect briefly on these three points. First on the remote participation, which developed, as it was indicated, gradually. I still remember the first meeting at Diplo with Marilia and Ginger preparing the plan, and then later on that day meeting Markus and developing excellent cooperation between bottom-up initiative and support from the official structure of the IGF Secretariat.
It developed organically, and some we already mentioned, but one should see what went under the bonnet and what level of enthusiasm Ginger, Marilia, Bertrand and others put into making it a great success. And it is really well deserved praise. And as it was already indicated, remote participation achieved a lot, and we should now look for the next steps in the further improvements.
We at Diplo started a summary -- sort of summary process in development of so-called remote participation tool kit out of the practical needs. We are increasingly asked by other policy processes in climate change, migration, to share the experience from Internet Governance Forum and this is the aspect that should be kept in mind, what is happening here in these rooms over the last five years can have a broader impact on the global governance in other areas.
Last year, one aspect in remote participation which was particularly important was introduction of social networking. For the first time, we linked social networking and remote participation.
The second aspect of the innovation in governance and the way how IGF has been conducted is capacity development. And I think in that field the IGF achieved really, really remarkable success and breakthrough through over the last five years.
It is not only when it comes to numbers. I think we have something close to 1,500 participants from developing countries, especially from small developing countries, who participated in various capacity development activities, at least coordinated or delivered by Diplo.
It was not only that quantitative aspect but it was also qualitative aspect. ISOC had excellent program when it comes to IGF ambassadors, and we have (inaudible) attempts to integrate capacity development in process itself. Not just to deliver the course, not just to enable participation in the meeting, but to have the whole process, which includes learning, policy research and policy immersion. This has also attracted interest outside the IG community. We delivered recently presentation at the OECD meeting of donors community on the way how capacity development can be integrated in policy processes.
The third aspect is policy coherence. And here IGF achieved a lot by bringing various different networks and communities around the same table. In discussing human rights, Internet governance, technical issues.
And here again, through osmosis, if I can say, and through smart but not intrusive leadership of the Secretariat, we managed to develop quite a few bridges between different communities.
Those three elements are probably the reasons why IGF was relevant and highly important. And the future of IGF will depend on its relevance.
I know that we focused a lot on discussion on composition on details, but the ultimate criteria for the future of IGF will be its relevance both for Internet community and broader governance community.
And I think we are on the good track, and we should continue our efforts, especially in preparation for the next IGF in Kenya, to develop further those positive elements and probably to foster some new innovations and new approaches in the way how international meetings are organized.
And with that, and with the message that IGF is one experiment in vivo in global governance, I would like once more to thank everybody involved in this process and conclude my statement.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you, Jovan. And for the record, I would like to state how pleased and satisfied we are to cooperate with Diplo in the selection of our fellows. I had mentioned Jean-Paul earlier today, who -- from Rwanda, went back to his own country to set up remote hub. So we have many others. There was member John Walubengo, we had him in 2007. He went back to Kenya, and he is now on the board of AfriNIC. Fuatai Purcell who is involved in the organization of Asia-Pacific IGF, which will take place next spring. So really, they worked with us and go back into their communities and contribute to the discussions on Internet governance.
And apart from that contribution to capacity development, we also develop personal friendship with these colleagues, young colleagues from developing countries, which proves very satisfactory for all sides involved.
I have three more speakers.
Next one is Mr. Andrey Shcherbovich from the State University of Moscow.
>>ANDREY SHCHERBOVICH: Thank you. I have just a few points to raise in response to the previous speakers.
First, that returning from Vilnius, I began to monitor the media coverage of the IGF in local and international media in which I mentioned that in the comments in the Internet itself, I saw that the comments were different on the ground. That most of the comments in the Internet were negative, because it is an opinion that the free Internet shouldn't be governed at all.
This is the issue that we need to raise the global awareness concerning the Internet governance and the requirement of the Internet governance. That the Internet governance doesn't mean limitation of freedom in the Internet, but it is efforts to better realization of those freedoms and human rights in the Internet.
One thing that illustrates this is the draft charter of the rights and principles in the Internet, in the workshop was discussed in Vilnius.
So this public awareness is very point of higher importance.
Other thing, that on my point of view that the IGF represents quite new form of international diplomacy. It's a multistakeholder diplomacy which reflect a new era of development of the international relations in general and in Internet governance in particular.
Another few words about representation of developing countries and youth representation.
Concerning developing countries, this is, in my opinion, two different points. For example, in Africa, it's very active and high level of representation. So it is just -- Even from Tunis, Tunis Agenda, Tunis is also country of African continent. From Tunis to Sharm El Sheikh 2008 and to Kenya 2011, it's very high representation, but what about other countries like Russia and central Asia? I didn't see some attractive points. But we have Russian IGF. I wish best of luck to the local forum organizers, but I think according to possibilities of Russian Federation, the participation could be higher, and involvement could be better and higher.
As a youth representative, I'd like to stress that I will talk about it later, the evening session, but youth representation is a vital point of Internet governance in general, as well as youth should be represented even in the Multistakeholder Advisory Group.
Thank you. They are all points I would like to stress.
Thank you very much.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Next speaker, and then Brazil. Alvaro from the Brazilian Minister of External Affairs.
Please.
>>BRAZIL: Thank you. Brazil also would like to thank the government of Lithuania for hosting the successful fifth edition of IGF, as well as thank all the participants involved in the preparation meetings, especially Mr. Desai and Mr. Kummer for their wise guidance in this process.
Brazil was able to send to Vilnius a large stakeholder delegation, and all of us agreed about the high level of discussions in the workshops and main sessions of IGF.
Especially the main session of IG4D was able to articulate important concepts and managed to stress that a perspective of development through a people centered Information Society must be the basis for the Internet governance.
Retaining it as a main session seems to be very productive.
Moreover, in the line of what was previously observed today, we also would like to highlight the success of increasing remote participation in Vilnius.
Mr. Chairperson, Brazil strongly supports the continuation of IGF and understands that proposals for its improvements that are being collected by CSTD will be expressed in a nonthreatening environment and through a constructive approach.
This is important because there are very complex issues to be addressed, such alleges the appropriate conditions that allows the representation of different stakeholders from developing countries, which is very different of considering only this issue as a matter of comparing numbers with other forums or capacity-building approach or grants for participation in international meetings.
Regarding the agenda for the future IGF, Brazil would like to echo some statements in the Latin America and Caribbean preparatory process for IGF, where many of the speakers expressed the need for aligning the discussions in IGF with more concrete results.
In this line, and considering that IGF is a nonbinding forum and should continue like this, Brazil gave its contribution by presenting in Vilnius the idea of the ten principles for the governance and use of Internet in Brazil.
These principles were presented as a basis for discussion, and we are glad for having received positive feedback since Vilnius.
We would like once again to invite all stakeholders to consider the idea that the agenda of the next IGFs could focus on discussions about general principles of Internet governance without prejudice of keeping the dynamics and diversity of issues addressed in the many workshop we annually experience in IGF meetings.
Thank you.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much, and I was one of those who was very much impressed with the Brazilian principles, and, indeed, we had a very strong discussion on this issue at the very last session.
Last speaker on the list is Canada. Is it Heather?
>>CANADA: Thank you very much. My name is Heather Dryden. I'm from the Canadian ministry of industry. I just wanted to make a few remarks before we break for lunch.
First of all, Canada would like to thank the Lithuanian hosts of the IGF, which was a clear success, as well as the participants and other organizers of the events that took place in Lithuania.
In addition, we would like to thank Nitin Desai and Markus Kummer for their excellence guidance throughout the five years of the Internet Governance Forum.
In the view of the Canadian government, capacity building should continue to be the overall emphasis or aim for the Internet Governance Forum.
A number of speakers today have referred to the importance of developing country participation and, quite appropriately, pointed to improvements and efforts related to the creation of remote hubs and remote participation.
In fact, there are many successes for the IGF, and these are well-documented.
And they're also well-documented by a range of actors.
It is no single stakeholder group identifying the various successes.
Among those, of course, are the national and regional Internet Governance Forums, which will continue to need support if the global IGF is to continue along the lines that it has for its initial five-year mandate.
Canada sees the Internet Governance Forum as being a valuable place, a way to discuss human rights and freedom of expression, and so we would want to continue discussions on these topics within the Internet Governance Forum.
One particular example that I would like to point to from Vilnius was a workshop that was held by the International Institute for Sustainable Development, along with other organizers, and the focus of this was to draw in experts from other policy areas and link them to the issues of Internet governance, and this is, I think, a useful and important way to invigorate the forum and I would also note that this couldn't have taken place if there were barriers in place to involving other actors from a range of stakeholder groups to hold and to participate in that forum.
So to conclude, Canada would like to thank the Kenyan government for their generous offer to host the Internet Governance Forum in 2011.
Thank you very much, Chairman.
>>MARKUS KUMMER: Thank you very much, and I think we are sort of reaching the end of this morning's discussion.
I'm not trying to sum it up, but nevertheless, I think a sense that there's a large convergence of views that we collectively were on the right path with our piecemeal improvement of the IGF.
There was much support of some of the improvements we have started. At the same time, there is recognition that more needs to be done to make remote participation better by preparing better the remote participants.
Yes, efforts were made, but I think maybe more needs to be made, as Anders from Sweden said.
Also the technical support. I mean, it is very much linked to the training. We can, of course, not force people to participate in the training but the working group may well need to provide more opportunities for people to engage in the training.
There was some clearly strong support for the better linkages with the national and regional meetings. At the same time, some question marks whether there's really need for each of them to be given a slot. Maybe we should give them more space in the main session.
I think one proposal was to give a three-hour slot, to have interaction of the various regional meetings. This may certainly be worthwhile exploring.
We, I think, had a very good session where we the discussion among the organizers of the regional and national meetings to compare notes, and I think this is something that ought to be continued.
The point was also made for the need -- and we discussed precisely what should be the basic criteria for being allowed to call yourself a national or regional IGF-type initiative, and the baseline was it should be multistakeholder and open and inclusive, and the point was made that maybe not all of them were as open and inclusive as should be hoped for.
But this is definitely something we can build on.
There was some support for the roundtable format. I heard also positive remarks on that, that it facilitated interaction and discussion, and that was basically why we set it up.
There was a suggestion to have maybe a virtual planning meeting without having a physical meeting here in Geneva. This is certainly worthwhile exploring.
One thing we have to be careful of is governments on the whole tend to be a little bit more conservative than other stakeholders, but if governments agree to meet virtually, that will be certainly worthwhile exploring.
Strong points were made -- first, Anriette from APC, but now also just Heather pointed out -- the IISD workshop on having linkages with other policy areas, and that was, I think, one of the points that were made previously that the IGF tends to discuss sometimes in isolation from other especially development bodies and organizations such as the IISD, who have been very much involved in sustainable development for many years, I think are an extremely valuable organization to reach out to these other organizations involved in other policy areas.
Let me conclude by asking a very concrete question.
We had already looked at the facilities in Nairobi, and the government of Kenya is proposing hosting the meeting at the United Nations in Nairobi, which is a well-tested meeting facility. I think it must be the biggest in Africa. It's a big U.N. seat. It's actually a very lovely location with nice architecture, open space, and with links with the surrounding parkland, and the facilities are state-of-the-art U.N. facilities.
We would have one big room which seats, I think, about 800 or a thousand participants, which will be a little bit smaller than what we had for the traditional opening ceremony, but we could have overflow in a neighboring room which seats, I think, about 3 or 400 participants, but these rooms cannot be linked.
And we would have, in the end, smaller workshop rooms and I can assure you there will be no noise spillover. They're all separate contained workshop rooms which would seat, depending on the seating arrangements, I think between 40 and 60, if you have it around a hollow square table or in classroom seating, but they're of adequate size and we would have an adequate number of rooms.
But we would be left over with one room which will be too small for the plenary but too big for a workshop room, so we would be faced what do we do with this room.
Do we pick up one workshop that could be given a bigger space, which could be done by the MAG, select maybe a more focused workshop, or one idea that came up to me when I saw the room, what about picking up an idea I was first confronted with at the IGF USA. That is to have scenario discussions.
I attended that meeting, and I noticed the engagement of the participants when you discuss scenarios: Imagine the Internet were to develop this way or that way.
I know the IISD, as I mentioned, they have already worked a lot on scenarios. I think also ISOC worked on scenarios.
I mean, this is something I throw for your consideration. Would that be worth considering?
The MAG could, for instance, then develop these scenarios. What are the discussions we want to have.
My feeling is that we had also this discussion from the beginning on the main sessions.
After each meeting, there was a general feeling, "Well, you have done it and it proved less interesting than they were maybe it beginning, but at the same time, there is a feeling that there is a need for a platform when you can address these broad issues.
So my proposal won't be as radical as to do away with the main session, but rather continue to improve of them, and many comments actually said.
I mean, but the shining example, Jeanette, is the session you moderate with Chris Disspain on critical Internet resources. That, on the whole, has unanimous support as a model type of open dialogue session.
Although I think you said yourself after the Vilnius session it was almost boring. Their was no controversy there. It went so smoothly. But as a model for an open discussion, I think it is an excellent model. Without having a scripted -- whatever, a panel, I think this is something worth building on.
The comment was also made for emerging issues. There may be need for a panel, and the session Patrick had basically his colleagues orchestrated on cloud computing I think received universal praise as a model on how to approach an emerging issue.
But these are sort of my somewhat random thoughts, also based on the on-site exploration of the facilities we have, and I would be interested to hear what you think about the possibility of having a scenario session. My last comment would be -- I set out at the outset, for those who came a bit later, that we had a request for having the MAG meeting as an open meeting. And I see there are not really that many people here. I think it will be possible to do that, but if there are objections from MAG members, then we will not do it.
But I can also tell you we have booked actually our scribes also for the MAG meeting.
So we will have transcription also tomorrow, but the idea was not to make it available simultaneously through Web streaming but have it as an archive where people could comment; if necessary, apply the Chatham House Rule and say this comment was confidential.
But one possibility could be that we basically, instead of separating the Monday and Tuesday proceeding into two separate meetings -- that is open consultations today and MAG tomorrow -- we could just flow the meeting into one; that is, if the MAG agrees to open the doors to observers.
You don't have to give me an answer now. Think about it over lunch, and let me know if there are objections at the beginning of the afternoon session.
And my very last word is a colleague from UNCTAD, Torbjorn Fredriksson, he is the chief of the ICT analysis section, asked if he would have the possibility to introduce his information economy report 2010, and he will do so to those who are interested at quarter to 3:00 in this room, but he will not have interpretation for this. This is an extracurricular activity. He will make the report available, and he will give a short introduction in the information economy report at quarter to 3:00 in this room. Then we resume after that at 3:00 with our meeting.
Enjoy your lunch.
Thank you very much.
[ Lunch Break ]