The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> CALDERARO ANDREA: Hello, good morning, everybody. Welcome to the session titled Bridging Silos in Global Digitalization.
Thank you for being with us today despite the early time of the day in the last day of the IGF and, yeah, thanks to the speakers to be here. I hope that the early morning session didn't prevent you to sing last night at the music night. And, yes, I'm Calderaro Andrea, initiative with a program funded by the European Commission to support various form of international cooperation efforts, a program established in 2018 and then mostly in the context of the about to be launched the UN open‑ended working group in the context of the general assembly first committee to support negotiations around the state responsible behavior for ensuring safety and security of the cyber domain and I'd like to think the cyber creating a role in what cyber diplomacy ‑‑ what we refer today as cyber diplomacy. But the story is that of course negotiation international cooperation in the cyber and digital domain have not started in 2018. It's something of course we all know well started way before that. Some might refer also the negotiations around the establishment of ICANN as an early form of international cooperation, discussion around how to make the technical layer of the Internet functioning in the best ways possible. And after that we did have the launch of the World Summit on Information Society 2003 and 2005 where it was a platform created exactly to negotiate a form of governance of the Internet, which was supposed to be the best model of governance in the context of the Internet. Exactly beyond the negotiations referring specifically on the technical layer of the Internet.
Then we had a boost of other ‑‑ preparation of other international cooperation efforts. We did have them launch the online coalition that was launched exactly right after the Arab spring discussing bringing together first discussing what rights supposed to mean in the context of the Internet and here we are. More and more to get to this stage where the impression is that we do have now a healthy international cooperation effort because we have plenty of options to platform tools to negotiate various aspects of the Internet. But there might be a problem. The problem is that the impression is that the this event, the risk that's an open question we have here for today jeopardize effort created of course inclusive environment but the risk is that created silos, silos of competences, perspectives on what international cooperation in the cyber domain really entails and, yeah, and then actually right in these days we have two group of people here, communities, one is excited or concerned because of the negotiations that will happen in New York again around the open‑ended working group, discussion, negotiation and another topic of moment is the negotiations happening in Geneva, discussing whether there will be even another IGF. And already the fact that there are these two moments happening pretty much at the same time, it's ‑‑ it showcase how communities very much, negotiations happen in parallel and community to disburse their energy and bridging their competences to ensure a holistic and more effective way to approach the functioning of the Internet from a governance and technical perspective. That is my ‑‑ the reason why we are here today. So in the next one hour we are supposed to understand whether or not and how eventually we need to bridge silos in digital and global digital cooperation. I'm going to have this discussion, kickoff this discussion with a line of speakers here. We do have Madeleine Carr university college of London, Elonnal Hickok, Verena Ferrari association for progressive communication and Konstantinos Komaitis. This is a Q&A session format. We'll start collect ago first round of reaction around specific issues I have been mentioning so far and then I will have a second round of questions for you.
So I would ‑‑ yeah, let's start with Madeleine. What do you think? What's your impression? You have been around. You have been focusing a lot on the day‑to‑day implementation of the evolution of international cooperation specifically in the cybersecurity domain but you have been also following IGF and other forms of international cooperation for a while. So are we operating in silos or? Please, the floor is yours.
>> ELONNAL HICKOK: Thank you, Andrea Calderaro. I think it's a really timely topic and it's a good opportunity for us to revisit this. I was thinking about it over the course of the last few days while I was enjoying this IGF that in those early IGFs in my experience were quite a bit more focused on technical dimensions and there was a lot more of the technical community at these meetings. For me it was a great opportunity to learn more about the technical dimensions of Internet Governance and over time we saw this growing focus and understanding that technology is not simply technical. It is political and economic and it has social implications and human rights implications and that happened actually over time at the IGF. But now I feel there's a real lack of technical sessions, and I think that's representative of the conversation more generally, that there's a kind of ‑‑ I mean, this space has expanded so much in the last 20 years, and the breadth of what we need to cover and discuss has grown so much that in some ways it's not surprising that there's a kind of splinting of events and communities to an extent, but I guess if I had to say what is the most risky silo that I see, it's that, again, we're not engaging probably with the technical community. And I don't count policy advisors from big tech companies as the technical community. So those people are often on these panels, but that is not the technical community, and I think that's a really important point. I saw there was a lightning talk yesterday on human rights. Some researchers have done a study, an analysis of ‑‑ what do we call them? You know, human rights statements, human rights online statements. And they have done a study of them. They found ‑‑ there were 321 of these that have come out of these kind of processes over the last 20 or 30 years, and that in itself, why we have so many of those is something we need to reflect on ourselves because why do we keep creating these instead of collaborating? So it's kind of those two things, I think, and an overemphasis on some issues where we keep recreating and recreating these documents and statements and an under engagement with that community that is now to me once again off somewhere else working quite separately.
I think one of the positive things I've seen come out though is this ‑‑ again, there's many of these, but these policy repositories where we see, you know, this kind of collection or collation of policies put together in one place so that actors are not having to start from square one with what's always very very complex policy development.
Yeah, I'll leave it there, Andrea.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Super. Thank you, Madeleine. I already have so many questions for you but I'll keep that for you later. We'll continue to collect the, again, reaction to this first comment that I had before. So Konstantinos Komaitis, please.
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Thanks, Andrea, and good morning, everyone. It was a rough night. So I'm going to look a little bit about collaboration in a different way, for sure from where I am sitting and the work that I'm doing and what I'm observing, collaboration has changed, especially compared to the early days of either being here at the IGF or the way we were talking and understanding the Internet. And in many ways, of course, this is inescapable, right? The world is very different compared to what it was 20 years ago. The technology and the Internet itself is very different to what it was 20 years ago and we have new institutes, new challenges that we need to deal with. But I think that one of the things that for me it's really striking is that collaboration now feels forced. It feels much more calculated. And the problem with that is that collaboration sits at the heart of what we're all doing. It really sits at the heart of the Internet. The Internet is a by‑product of collaboration. It is this idea that we keep on beating the drum over the past 20 years multistakeholder. It's really about collaborative governance. It's about bringing people together from different backgrounds to try to figure out some very complex problems. And the way the Internet they managed to do that on the Internet was because it was a shared goal. They had a very specific question in front of them, right? Create a communications network that can withstand destruction. That was it.
Now, how do you get there? It is your problem, but once you have the shared goal, then ‑‑ and you all agree that this is where we want to go, you start to compromise, we don't have a shared goal anymore. You know, especially in the context of states and the way they participate in this conversations in the past few years, we see a very much different approach and a very much different understanding even to what the Internet is, and by that I mean even what global reach means or interoperability means or openness means. So once you start coming from all these different angles and you don't have this common understanding inevitably you are at a point where collaboration becomes very difficult. And if you have know of course the political landscape which is constantly changing and it's creating challenges, the fact that governments really now are seeing the Internet either as a weapon or as a means to exert some sort of control, then those layered a so much pressure into this idea of collaboration that you end up having it fragmented, that you end up duplicating, and we see this in realtime within the UN system. We are hearing discussing the WSIS process and review after 20 years and at the same time that we're discussing the WSIS review, we have the implementation of the global digital compact, which practically touches on the same issues. So ‑‑ and we keep saying, right, we were telling the UN do not create duplicative processes. This is not helpful because a lot of communities, especially civil society and civil society from the global majority countries cannot participate in all those things. So if you really want to talk about collaboration, you need to streamline and you need to simplify yet again we are finding ourself exactly where we were not supposed to be so we need to take a step back and really think what is it that we're trying to do? What is that shared goal that we want to reach and once we get that we need to rethink the processes and paths that will get us there. And I'll stop.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Thank you, Konstantinos Komaitis.
Elonnal Hickok.
>> ELONNAL HICKOK: My name is Elonnal Hickok and I'm with the Global Initiative. We're a multistakeholder initiative bringing together companies civil society and investors towards responsible business conduct. And to perhaps build on what Konstantinos Komaitis was saying, when I think about and reflect on the digital state and cooperation at the international level, of course it faces issues of operating in silos, a lack of capacity, a need for knowledge sharing, but I think these are issues that have already existed and I think it's important to recognize that we are seeing a number of really concerning trends across different cooperation spaces happening at the international level. And I'll just call out a couple of these.
And Konstantinos Komaitis alluded to some of these. So, one, I think we're seeing a breakdown of consensus in spaces where we used to have consensus. An example of this is the U.S. calling a vote in the CSTD meeting in April on issues around gender SDGs and diversity equity and inclusion. I think another concerning trend is we're starting to see compromises in the name of reaching consensus. We saw this around the negotiations in the UN cybercrime treaty where from the perspective of civil society we saw a number of compromises around due process, human rights, freedom of expression, and privy, and we were told by governments that these were needed to reach consensus on a text and they were concerned about actually a lower standard being reached if we didn't make these compromises.
I think we're also starting to see a failure of existing cooperation models to be truly responsive and inclusive and indicative of this is reactions from governments towards more State centric models of Internet Governance, moves towards data localization, national control over infrastructure and governance reflecting very real concerns about country's ability to have their own ecosystem for AI, control over that I data, et cetera, but I think it does indicate a failure of existing cooperation models.
I think we're also starting to see countries play by different rules, establishing parallel norms bypassing traditional multi lateral channels et cetera and we have to be aware that these different rules are ‑‑ these different tactics are being used in these spaces. And I think we're also in Konstantinos Komaitis you noted the proliferation of parallel and often overlapping international digital processes particularly in the space of Artificial Intelligence. We have just so many different efforts around AI trying to set principles and standards and norms and they're not necessarily speaking to each other.
And lastly, I think all of this is happening in the context of closing Civic space where civil society is facing a lack of funding. It's facing a lack of capacity. It's engaging these different processes, but it's also facing a lot of pressure and how it shows up in these spaces, and that's really putting pressure on the ability of these to be inclusive and truly multistakeholder. So I'll just stop there seeing at the international level and cooperation spaces.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Veronica, your comments?
>> VERENA FERRARI: Hi everyone, good morning. My name is Verena Ferrari. Thanks for the invitation. Question quickly ABC is an international civil society organization. We are also a network of members and organizations from civil society and activists mainly from the global south. ABC has been engaging in many of the processes we have been mentioning. For example, the GDC, WSIS, cyber related processes, and bringing human rights gender and social justice perspectives. So yeah just to echo what my colleagues said, we are seeing this siloed processes, for example, in the areas of digital rights, AI, cybersecurity and also connected with responses to technology facilitated gender based violence. Topics that are deeply connected but treated separately basically. So in some cases this leads to fragmentations and actually limited protections to human rights and gender equality. So if he we look at for example AI governance. We are conducting research now about how like frameworks at addressing most topics. So what we are seeing in this preliminary research is many AI frameworks mention issues of nondiscrimination, fairness but few engage with the gender harms of AI, for example, connected with deep fakes. So it's good to see the recent statement on AI addressing DFGBE addressing one of the risks of these type of technologist. But DFGBE frameworks often are not addressing the emerging risk of AI and we see a similar dissection, for example, in cybersecurity related discussions. ABC follows the open working group the process that you mentioned the diversity committee at UN and we see really few references for example to human rights perspectives and there is a lot of already ‑‑ language in many of the countries that participate in these negotiations, therefore really good statement on human rights approaches to cybersecurity but it's still difficult to see that being pushed at the first committee. Civil society, ABC and other organizations, we are trying to bring these human rights and gender perspectives to those spaces. And then I can develop a bit more on that. But yeah, this disconnection as we see it leads to duplicated and inconsistent efforts with no share mandates of the spaces. Sometimes even contradictory norms developed across different forums and we see weakened language in connection with human rights and gender in particular.
Elonnal Hickok already touched on this but ‑‑ and Konstantinos Komaitis too but we see also consultation from civil society. It's connected with this ability to engage and follow all these different processes how difficult that is for us and mainly coming from the global south. So we still see the IGF, ABC still sees the IGF as a key space to connect all of these spaces and spaces as ‑‑ we are part of the network also for that collaboration and even as Madeleine Carr was saying dialogue with stakeholders, technical community.
And just to finalize about this lack of coordination among different sectors. So civil society tends to address this multiple processes we have to follow these and we tend to work in coalitions. I think we can do better in terms of working with the private sector on certain issues but for example the civil society worked closely with some companies and G and I in relation to cybercrime convention trying to bring human rights perspectives there and ABC and ‑‑ connecting different coalitions, right, also civil society. So I think we can do better in that sense. We're already doing that, working in collaboration to address these challenges in terms of following so many processes.
So I'll stop here for now but happy to continue the conversation.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: I have two fingers for all of you really. I mean, the impression is that we actually this first reaction shows us how to look at the cake from different angles. It showcases that we still are operating in silos even people sitting on this table, they are passionate about experience and passionate about what they're doing.
Madeleine Carr, you touched a really important point. Most of the times the negotiatory community does not have the technical understanding on the issues that are supposed to negotiate. Been talking this for years really and the point is that the issue is still very much there. Of course has to do because of the fact that a negotiatory body of diplomats they rotate all the time. So it takes a lot of time for them to catch up on the topic and so on. Lack of institutional knowledge of what has happened before that also is a kind of a weakness. So how are we going to be able to solve that? I mean of course that solution is yeah we have to bridge silos, how diplomatic community needs to engage with the technical community. After so many years that's still not the case? What's your reflection on that? And again you have been involved in cybersecurity communications but very much involved in the IGF in the community. Do you see a development or actually things are going even worse?
>> MADELEINE CARR: Sadly I'd have to say I think it's getting worse, and I don't put the blame of this on any particular community because I think by and large the technical community can lack understanding of diplomacy of policy processes that makes it very difficult for them to feed in useful advice, and the diplomatic community, for all the reasons you mentioned, can have a lack of understanding of these very rapidly changing technical elements of Internet Governance or cybersecurity or AI. So it's perhaps not surprising that they struggle to communicate together but what I think we've observed is that although we understand that these are very much ‑‑
(Feedback).
>> MADELEINE CARR: Is that me?
That these are very much global issues. We, again, back to our comfort zones of our own communities. So the technical community somehow retreats ‑‑ the technical community finds it frustrating they provide very good advice and they don't see it followed and the policy community or the diplomatic community feels, you know, they're getting unusable advice and I ‑‑ the only sort of recommendations that I can sort of offer in this space is that we develop greater respect for both of those communities within them. So I think we could learn a lot from looking, for example, at how certs and C certs, these very technical communities work in a very apolitical way. They really are able to go over the top or under or around geo politics to collaborate in a highly effective way and I think there's a lot to be learned from how they do that. I think that ‑‑ but geo politics is there. And that's what diplomats understand and how they work. But I also think we could focus more on these practices, these long established practices of science diplomacy of allowing academics or technical communities to collaborate across these difficult geo political lines because we have an awful lot to gain by doing that and I think as an educator, academic, I have to say that universities have a lot to answer to here as well because by and large we're educating people still in these very narrow silos. You can do a degree in international relations if you aspire to be a diplomat you never have to learn anything technical along that ‑‑ I work in a computer science department it's shocking how little they are taught about the technology they have develop, have very little understanding of the social political economic implications of what they do. I mean, we can work on that at the education level but we also have to have a willingness in those communities to go into uncomfortable places where we don't know all the answers where we will have to ask and ask again nor information we may not be able to absorb. I think it's absolutely fundamental that we bring those two worlds closer into conversation.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Super. Very much similar to the question that I had for Madeleine Carr, Konstantinos Komaitis, you have been involved in lots of negotiations around the technical aspects of the verification layers of the Internet and referring to the IGF and so on. You have really been at the center of those conversations and you have not been very much engaged exactly in the classic more traditional cyber diplomatic plat formats. That's exactly where the silo is really. And I'm not sure whether you really cared about the cyber diplomatic engagement and ‑‑ because of course you are focused so much into there but so the impression is because of the a lack of knowledge in unilateral platform most of the actual really important things happen exactly in the negotiations and looking at what Madeleine Carr was saying about geo politics of these things these might have actually long‑term complications more longer term complications than have been in the UN context than the classic cyber diplomacy. You have been very much following all of this. I'm referring of course to other parts China negotiating some products compared to exactly. So I think you have a good overview on that and create an approach to what's going on there.
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: It's ‑‑ sorry, I remember the first time I attended an IGF meeting that was bang in 2012 and I was not welcomed. I can tell you that much. I was a policy person and everybody was like what are you doing here? I mean, you are just here to talk about policy stuff. That's only going to confuse us and we are here to create technology. And in many ways it really goes back to the original comment that I made. These communities at least in the beginning they were very much operating. I remember the question that they were always asking was what is good for the Internet going back to this idea of a shared goal, right? It's very easy to answer it when you create technology, frankly. You can all get behind what is good for the Internet and work together and try to figure it out outside of politics, outside of idealogies, outside of all those things that tend to complicate things.
The thing however they never understood was effectively what they were also doing was some form of diplomacy, right? I mean, the way especially if you attend an IGF meeting and you start, you know, you're having all these conversations that are based on back and forths and thousands of e‑mails in mailing lists and then you have the ‑‑ then you go there and through consensus you end up creating a protocol it is a different form of negotiation. These communities have evolved as well over the years and I think they have learned it often the hard way that they can no longer operate in silos. And there are different levels of that. The idea for instance is we see increasing number of governments participating and we see actually governments even leaning to that community in order to get some answers. A very famous gaze was the Finnish government was having a very intense debate about Network Neutrality and they literally went to the IGF and put it in front of them. They said listen this is the question we have. From a technical perspective we don't know what to do, tell us what to do. The IGF community came together and had a conversation and figured it out. ICANN is a very different, again, structure altogether. It has a governmental advisor committee which literally consists of almost all governments of the world and it has gone through its own phases of how much should get involved, what sort of influence it needs to have. Occasionally it goes through waves of too much too little until you find the middle and that is inevitable. But you need to foster those spaces no matter how uncomfortable they are in order to be able and get where you want to get, because right now, again, we need to face some very harsh realities and these communities need to face them as well, the fact that everyone now is interested in the Internet. And occasionally, one of the things that I have observed and I was literally having this conversation with Madeleine Carr before we started was governments do not really understand how the Internet works. I mean, they pretty much take it for granted. It is this thing that works. So the United States which inevitably has spent a lot of years fostering the Internet through early days and a very robust private sector only China has literally spent a lot of time understanding the Internet and they had to do that because they had to make some really tough choices. Meaning they wanted to take what they could take from the current architecture of the Internet, the globalness in order to create companies that are globally competitive and throw them out and scale but at the same time they needed to understand the technology in order to be able and restrict it. The information coming into the country was not something that could upset the idealogies of the CPV. They have created a an elaborate system that is able right now to filter effectively what they don't want in but at the same time be able to communicate with the global network when they want to. And in order to do that, you really need to study it. I cannot think of any other country that has actually done that. And this is where we need this interaction of policymakers and the companies to come together. Really a friend an Indian friend of mine and former colleague who is an engineer has told me, you know, we're discussing about the Internet and the future of the Internet and he said to me you cannot shoot the Internet dead, right? It's not going to take a bullet to kill the Internet. The Internet will go ‑‑ if you want to kill it, it will be killed through a thousand cuts. And I believe that if you don't understand how it works, those thousand cuts are done inadvertently and unintentionally most of the cases, but you really, whether you want to regulate something and you go into the architecture, whether you weaponize it, whether you do whatever you want, unless you do not spend time understanding how it works, you risk of actually undermining a lot of what you want to preserve ultimately especially if you're a democratic country.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Super, yes. And it's true that I mean IGF has served kind of this role probably is the place the platform where this knowledge building really very much happen. Where technical community supposed to engage with the ‑‑ what civil society we know the multistakeholder pretty much. Elonnal Hickok, you're following very much the WCs, WC's plus 20. Yeah, what is your view on that? Do you think the implementation of the WSIS would solve this issue? What's missing there? Or how the ‑‑ we can ensure that multistakeholder community very much translate this knowledge building into concrete action that happens elsewhere?
>> ELONNAL HICKOK: Yeah, thanks for that question. I think maybe to start with I want to pick up on a little bit about what Madeleine Carr was saying because it sounded like you were starting to articulate different components, ingredients that need to come together to make cooperation happen, to build these silos across different stakeholder communities to build the trust, right? And so I heard you talk about the need for translation role, talk about trust. I think also we need accountability, right? So when we're taking inputs from different stakeholders in these processes, there needs to be accountability for how those inputs are used and incorporated. I think we need to address power imbalances. Also (feedback)
>> ELONNAL HICKOK: Are not coming to the table. Versus companies governments etc. Then we need to have a robust clear process for participation and actually the Sao Paolo can be used to facilitate engagement in the multistakeholder process and I think civil society has really been encouraging the use and the application of the Sao Paolo within the GDC as a standard to help facilitate multistakeholderism and I think on the question about WSIS+ 20 and its ability to bring together different knowledge, I think WSIS is a unique process and that it was created with a people centered vision to achieve development in the SDGs and it has an international framework around WSIS action lines that is then implemented at the national level, at the regional and national level and it also establishes the IGF. And I think something that's unique about the IGF is just the structure. So we have this annual large international event but also have intersession analysis. We've got judicial tracks, parliamentary tracks and regional IGFs and national level IGFs and all of those actually create a very robust framework for taking in different stakeholder inputs creating spaces to build and bridge those silos and then bringing it up from a national community level up into the international level. Now, how effective that has been sure can be a question. But I think the existence of that structure is really important and I haven't seen something about actually being imposed or put in place by other forums, processes that have been established, and so I think as we're in WSIS+ 20 and the renewal of the mandate of the IGF is up for question civil society has been advocates for a permanent mandate for the IGF and for funding, adequate funding for the IGF to continue and for support for the national and regional IGFs to make it a holistic ecosystem that it can be very much a central processing form to bring together different policy priorities, different stakeholders, et cetera.
>> Andrea Calderaro: Super. Thank you. And Veronica, we are talking about issues, topics, communities but any international cooperation to be a real cooperation must be inclusive of all parts of the world in equal matters. And, yes, been working a lot from Argentina and APC is an organization that been very much advocating for human rights from a global south ‑‑ global majority perspective. So what's missing? Or maybe it's not nothing missing. The question is do you still see something missing to be sure that these communities integrate these negotiations? It's not the case is an issue ‑‑ of course take resources aside there's a matter of capacities or the platforms available out there are not designed in the way to be inclusive enough.
>> VERONICA: Thanks, Andrea for the question. I would say a bit of all of that. But, yeah, APC when engaging in the spaces, we advocate for certain approaches but in general also is about the processes are built, right? So we advocate for inclusion and participation in this international cooperation and government spaces because basically this lack of inclusiveness in international cooperation what ‑‑ lead to norms, development and implementation that can actually reflect and even exacerbate inequalities, right? For example we follow this cybersecurity process at the UN and in the case of cyber norms what we say is basically the lack of communication of diverse stakeholders but even groups from the global south, civil society organization groups can actually result in cyber norms that don't provide necessarily protections for these groups and you can even exacerbate marginalization and can lead to, for example, criminalization of a speech. Human rights organizations we have seen this in the discussions connected with the cybercrime convention but also see a lot of national laws that tend to do this, exacerbate this discrimination and even silence speech of activists and human rights organizations and when engaging in the spaces, for example in the cyber related processes, a lot of engaging of civil society it's about making the case of why nonstate actors are important. Civil society in terms of cyber norms brings human rights and gender perspectives but also what we see in the spaces is if we can some language on those issues connected with gender has been more and more discussed in cybersecurity related discussions and this is one of our priorities but if we have some references to that that tend to be more connected with the participation of women and ‑‑ or some mentions to gender but this problem actually addresses the complexities and different experiences of for example women from rural areas from the rural south and other groups. So pushing for intersectionalities even more we know it's challenging to have this language in these spaces. It's important that civil society is part of this conversation to bring these lived experiences of the groups in general we work with at the national and regional levels and we represent. Participation and inclusiveness is one of our priorities when we engage in governance processes. As you were saying there are like many challenges. So challenges at the level of the processes themselves, of the processes connected with how difficult it is to get ‑‑ how the process is to be participation of nonstate actors. It's also the how difficult it is to navigate those spaces to find information to have timely information to have reasonable dead lines to inputs. Also to have Madeleine was saying this so feedback on your inputs is like civil society provide input and difficult to see how that is actually reflected on the text and sometimes we only have the opportunity to make a two minute statement in a session if we have the chance. It's good for example in the cyber related processes that we have state champion participation of stakeholders and in particular civil society but this process themselves have several challenges for participation. Then there is the issue of, of course, capacity of civil society. I'm talking about civil society because I work with civil society. We said it in the previous round of interventions in this context of issue of funding of course is a challenge in terms of the operation of the organizations themselves, the capacity to sustain the engagement in these spaces, the capacity to build technical capacity, meaningful inputs. But then we have the travel costs to attend these spaces and now we are having also safety concerns about attending certain processes in certain parts of the world. We are revising which are the processes we can continue actually follow because of safety issues. So yeah, there are many challenges in terms of participation from the processes themselves but also the context civil society is now operating, right? So yeah I'll stop here.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Fantastic. Thank you.
We do have now a few minutes of Q&A. Any in the room would like to have a say? It's a big group. It's just the room is too big but any questions? Comments? Reactions? Frustrations?
Yes, please. I would matter of time just a very short question and short answers, please. It's just because they're going to turn off the microphone right away at 10:00 sharp.
Hi.
>> Good morning. Thank you for this. I'm just wondering is there a reflection what happens in the micro perspective as well as in the micro perspective of assisting a project in between two countries and about interoperability and the different silos that is in a municipality and the most people that have been interviewed just with the word interoperability, everyone directs to their colleagues in the technical space. And one of the main challenges has been the organization of interoperability layer according to interoperability framework. So I can see what is the difference you are talking with one group of stakeholders on the refer now this is too technical but really probably in the organizations. I'm wonder being your comment, Madeline about what universities can do in perspective meanwhile to have a more holistic perspective. I've seen like different kinds of programs that you can have some electives but as well here in this space different programs that are more technicians trying to understand more the geo political but as well as some diplomacy but as well as some other workshops for the groups. Any other way to tackle this challenge to meet together?
>> MADELEINE CARR: Thank you for that. And apologies for looking back there. I just needed to read because the audio is not there.
Yes, I mean, look, universities particularly in the UK where I work now, I mean, these are a thousand years old and they have developed in a very particular way which is in these very narrow disciplines. That has very little bearing on the problems that we're trying to solve now and of course we always need specialists. We rely on those people, but much more there's a very widespread understanding that much more we need people who have a breadth of knowledge of at least an understanding of how other disciplines work. When the students come to our universities, they understand that. They know that. But the universities have not adapted and this comes down to the most ludicrous things like funding models between departments. If I have a student from your department on my class where does the money go? I mean these are literally the conversations that happen at university has ‑‑ I think universities have lost contact with their mission and that's why we have these problems. So this is just a very slow process of introducing to these quite ossified institutions that are not facilitating the education that people want and need anymore and that is going to have to change, but I mean, I'm doing my part. I work in a department of computer science and I'm an international relations academic, but it is a real problem, a real problem.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: So you managed to bridge the silos as a scholar in a computer science department.
>> MADELEINE CARR: Yeah. And I would say that my computer science colleagues are very receptive because they're also interested in geo politics ‑‑ not all of them, but some of them are interested in that and they enjoy working together with people from other disciplines.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: Super. I think we are unfortunately running out of time. Just 30 seconds conclusive remarks any of you if you would like to add anything? Or no?
>> ELONNAL HICKOK: It's important to recognize the importance of bodies like the freedom G and I networks like APC in facilitating a lot of the knowledge sharing and the capacity building that needs to happen so the different stakeholders can talk to each other, they can have a bylaw with each other, they might not all be on the same position but there's perspective sharing so then they show up in these spaces with a little bit more understanding, maybe coordination where it makes sense. So while you've got these core processes happening at the international level, there's a whole kind of ring of networks and bodies doing a lot of important knowledge sharing and capacity building.
>> KONSTANTINOS KOMAITIS: Just very quickly to what Elonnal Hickok said and given we are here at the national and regional IGFs are also places where a lot of work and collaboration and bridging silos can happen in a really effective way because they also address the localities, right, and the local problems that are so core to the conversations that we're doing and they have become perhaps the main thing in ‑‑ the main challenge in many ways of how even governments respond at the international level. So we need to lean into the expertise that exists and this expertise again is multidisciplinary at the national and local level and regional level to be able to be able to address those issues and bridge those silos.
>> ANDREA CALDERARO: I fully agree. L & I has organized a very great session at the IGF Africa three weeks ago and it's true that I feel like there's another kind of risk of growing silos because regional IGF detached from what's going on here in the global IGF. That is another silo actually to invest some energy as you will say. So at the moment I'm being in regional IGF for years, I have been back now and with the idea that meetings have changed over so many years actually the impression is there's not occasion, fortunately.
So anyway, the session is time ‑‑ is up, unfortunately. I'm not sure whether we have managed to bridge any silos today, unfortunately, but I think already the fact that we are not giving things for granted and we have sessions like this one that help us to reflect on the fact that there are silos out there. There is an ITU, a process in a couple of weeks but also UN process happening in New York at the same time to acknowledge that there's I don't understand why these things happen at the same time I think is already kind of an important take home point and so to be continued. We'll organize another session on that at the next IGF, if there will be another IGF.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
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