The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, thank you very much. Sorry for the technical inconveniences. Technology is like that. Sometimes it's available, sometimes it's not. So the room looks really big. And I have a large group of friends which is fantastic and thank you very much for being with us this session. This session will be moderated by myself and my friend Dustin Philips from ICANNWiki and we are doing some projects together and we will let you know about them.
The purpose of this dialogue is to think about if the capacity buildings activities that we organize are truly multistakeholder, truly multicultural. We think that maybe we are doing multistakeholder things just by inviting other stakeholders, but sometimes we may think about how far we go with that idea. If we reach our objective and if this is really what we want to achieve with the public that we are trying to target our activities. So before going presenting our panelists, I will give the floor to my dear friend Dustin who will let us know the general purpose of the session.
>> DUSTIN PHILIPS: So since the IGF was created back in 2006, we've seen a large proliferation of capacity‑building and debate spaces and I think that these have been effective in building a multistakeholder model and increasing multicultural and multilingual involvement in Internet governance but I think it's worth evaluating how effective we are in doing this. So the purpose of this workshop, like Olga said, is just to exchange our ideas and experiences and get a dialogue going to see how we can improve it in the future to make it more multicultural and multilingual initial to multistakeholder. Because I think they're two of the hardest aspects to tackle. So with that I will hand it back over to Olga and let her introduce our esteemed panel.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Just to let you know. Dustin and Jackie, they are leading a very interesting project which is ICANNWiki. It's like Wikipedia and focus on terms about ICANN. They are doing very nice things with sketches, how do you say in English? Caricatures about us. And so you can upload your profile there or your company profile there. So they're doing a great job. And we are partnering with them producing Spanish content. And they are working on Chinese content and Swahili and Portuguese content. And myself I am director of the south of Internet governance it's a project we are trying to bring more people to these dialogue spaces and we try to be able to multistakeholder for as much as possible we have been organized the school nine years the next year. So as I said group of friends I have, I will go in order. Lee Hibbard, Jackie, Alfredo Reyes Krafft, it's a law firm. Mikhail Komarov from the university of ‑‑ high school of economics from Moscow. Tijani Ben Jemaa. You don't have a mic.
>> I am vice chair ‑‑
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Tijani is from Tunisia and lives in France.
>> I am the chair of the working capacity group at large.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: This why I want your perspective about it. Julio Cesar Vega Gomez. Renata Aquino Ribero, she is an academic from Brazil university.
>> And I also belong to research collective called EI.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: And we have Marcel Leonardi he's Brazilian. So I have some questions for our panelists that I already sent to them. But this is just a start of our dialogue. I would like to start with Marcel, Julio Cesar, Fred and Cintya. Your work is more oriented towards business and companies. So I don't know if ‑‑ I have organized many, many conferences in my life. And once we invite ‑‑ and I will be totally honest with you. When you invite a company to do presentations, you always have the fear that it will be just a brochure and how can you really ‑‑ and also you work for a company and you have to sell services and products which is totally understandable. So how you can be really when you do capacity building or when you do a presentation in a program of training people, how can you really try to be towards the content and towards the multistakeholder from the general perspective and try to move a little bit aside from the real purpose of the company, which is the profits and having a good performance of the company. So we'll start with Marcel since he's by my side.
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: Thanks for having me, Olga. It's a pleasure to be here. I guess there are two points I would like to address in response to that. The first is we have to remember is this multistakeholder judge general, people don't necessarily remain one stakeholder category forever. They start off in community, they of go off to society, there's not necessarily a way in which for example people are always labeled a specific sector and we have to be aware of that because there's a limited set of people who would be interested in Internet governance from the get‑go. I think it's very important to remember that because lots of them result particularly come from academia for example and we happen to be in the private sector but be there forever and that goes a long way as well. As in regards to your specific question for example how companies actually took will this thing. Google has always believed in the multistakeholder model. We have to remember the Internet was created with this bottom‑up approach in the first place. What we try to do in these capacity buildings or even when we talk to other companies in general is to try to highlight the importance of the model in general. And it's a tough battle sometimes. I mean the new start‑up on the block, for example, they don't necessarily care immediately about Internet governance. In the long run they realize the open nature of the Internet is what allows them to exist in the first place. That's when they slowly start getting the importance of it. In these scenarios is to showcase how important it is to be engaged in these sorts of debates. As for capacity building programs themselves, as I mentioned usually what happens is you see companies for example explaining why they are interested in a particular issue and how the only way to actually tackle the issue is the multistakeholder approach. It's very rare that companies in this day and age remain connected the old way of discussing problems like going directly to legislators and discussing these things. I guess that's part of the point I wanted to make in this first round.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Before I give the floor to our colleagues, does Google have capacity building initiative that you can share with us?
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: Yes. Both internally we have employees dedicated to that, myself included and we do support lots of programs across the world. So not only directly funding to these programs but also being at conferences and being open to dialogue. The learning process is important. Another thing I would like to address quickly is companies benefit a lot from this kind of dialogue in the sense that when society comes through and tells you you're not getting things right, that's very beneficial for us in the sense that we can learn from these findings there's always room to get better and better.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Marcel. Julio, yesterday we had a very, very good open forum that was organized by Infotec and ‑‑
>> JULIO CESAR VEGA GOMEZ: Mexican Internet Association.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: So it was very interesting. And what I really got as a very, very interesting outcome is that fantastic relationship in between government, the private sector and also academia because there were people from academia in the room that you mentioned were experts. So I would like to know your perspective from the association, it was difficult, it was easy, how difficult it is for business association to go to the government and go to the academia and cover this fantastic corporation we also saw yesterday in your open forum and if you can comment about the fantastic study that you did to improve the shoe industry in Mexico, which is remarkable.
>> JULIO CESAR VEGA GOMEZ: Thank you, Olga. Let me explain what we do. We are the Mexican ‑‑ we used to be the Mexican Internet association until the 1st of December. The association will be 17 years old in a couple of ‑‑ next week, actually. We are mainly association of the private sector. We have over 230 members. But we also have government agencies as members. We don't work with them as authorities, but as members. And that dialogue is very, very useful for companies and for the government as well.
Well, we have a number of projects with specifically with the ministry of economy here in Mexico. One of projects is how to bring to a traditional sector, which is the shoe industry in Mexico, specifically here in Jalisco, how to bring them tools to do electronic commerce. They are facing problem with shoes coming from Asia and they have no answers to face this crisis that they already have since about five years ago.
So first of all, when we choose to do a project, we have discuss it within the membership and sometimes that's quite difficult. We have companies from different nationalities, and we have companies from different sizes. We have small and medium enterprises, but we have as well companies as big as Google, for example, or Facebook or the ISP in Mexico.
Well, once we reach this agreement between the membership, we go to the government and propose them, these kind of projects in order to have two ways of help from them. One is the feedback that they could bring us. And the other one in the specific case in the ministry of economy is resources. Money. That project that you just mentioned will be a three‑years project, more or less. And the outcome that we are looking for is more competitive industry, shoe industry here in Mexico. And after this first project we would like to bring these tools to another sectors like clothes and some other industries. This is more or less what we do with these kind of production, the association. It's difficult for me, too. And well, later on if you want we can ‑‑
>> OLGA CAVALLI: How difficult it was to achieve the corporation? Did it take time? Patience, or it just came out as an easygoing thing?
>> JULIO CESAR VEGA GOMEZ: I guess we all know the answer. It's not easy. But we have a very good background. We have done these projects with the ministry since probably 10 years ago. So the results of all these projects are quite good. It's probably not the best to hear from me. But we are quite professionals and we hear all the stakeholders involved in the specific project, in this case, for example, the shoe industry. But in some other cases could be the senator the congress or the academia or any other stakeholder that could bring feedback and to enrich the results.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Julio. Alfredo, you have an expensive experience in the bank industry. You're an expert in cyber security and now you're leading your own law firm. But you're usually ‑‑ I give it to you mine ‑‑ you're invited to many events and you participate in many capacity‑building programs. How do you see the, for example, when you were in the bank industry and you had to make a presentation, how could you focus from a general perspective or just not to be so much biased by your role in trying to be more open? What's your perspective about this?
>> ALFREDO REYES KRAFFT: Thank you, Olga. A few years ago I was working in a very big bank in financial institution in the world. And they this bank have a great variety of participants, bank participants. And, well, in the bank we create dialogue. There are a lot of banks, bank in China, bank in Europe, bank in the United States. And it's very important because the disagreements arise in the table. We ‑‑ we have a lot of process. And we have a big openings and transparency of dialogue process. And with that we increase the credibility of the resource and the process of the dialogue. Multistakeholder dialogue contain the networks relationships and sheer understanding of implementation of a lot of recommendations about the capabilities to increase the democracy in the company. It's a lot of work, but with excellent results.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Tell me, you're an expert in cyber security and that's an issue that involves many stakeholders. So when you had to work on that issue in an audience or in capacity building, how would you tackle the different stakeholders that were related to that in relation with your banking experience or role?
>> ALFREDO REYES KRAFFT: It's interesting. When you call not expert in technology, you have a barrier in this ‑‑ it's important in Internet we have a lot terms and it translate, it's not difficult. If you putting in the shoes of the other side, you can understand. And you can have more communication.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I will make a little bit change in the questions that I sent you so don't panic. I'm looking at Belisario and Lee here. He is the training of cyber security in Latin‑America, he does a fantastic job with the organization of American states and all their programs are they have remote participation, they are online with different languages, and I really commend you for that and I would like for you to share the fantastic experience we had in April in your venue organizing there the Internet governance with fantastic infrastructure for remote participation that allowed almost 25,000 people to follow us remotely. And also some new experiences like remote had in Barbados was organized totally spontaneously. And that's thank you to your effort in having that infrastructure. So based on your experience, you're an internation organization or regional international organization, you have gathered the private sector, you have gathered the experts in government, you gather also civil society and academia. So I think that you have captured the multistakeholder spirit from the very beginning. Would you tell us your experience based on these activities that you do and if it was easy, how have you managed to achieve that.
>> BELISARIO CONTRERAS: Thank you. The service of our member states and all of you.
Principal we want to highlight experience that we have with organizing the school of governance this was a unique experience and I ‑‑ the main purpose for that activity was actually to open the doors for different actors. When one of the main challenge to do in Washington, when everyone was making jokes ‑‑ this is the house of the Americans and the Americas is all Latin‑America, this is more south. The university organized picture that they put North America as the south. So just want to point out it was a really nice event and we learn a lot from all attendants. Bringing multistakeholder participation this is something we have discussed is not a journey. And it will be always pieces missing. I don't want to say that we have been affected because maybe we have not been as effective as we wish. We always try to encourage to include private sectors, civil society, the community, academia, because as we have mentioned yesterday, they bring legitimacy to all the processes that we do. International policy, everything that brings transparency to everything that we do. Of course it's really ‑‑ there might be people that could feel excluded and that's natural. But we need to live with. From us we are again we are international servants. That's something that we need to and other organizations we need to recognize and we need to work and that's our main job to make sure that we are at the service of all our member states. Make sure we're going to do our job, we need to do it the best way possible and the best way possible is to make sure that all the actors are involved.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I have a more difficult question now. I've been with my government for more than 16 years. How easy it is to convince governments to be multistakeholder?
>> BELISARIO CONTRERAS: It's not about convincing. For us when we go to a country, I don't want to point out a specific country, I think they are realizing themselves right now, especially with Internet‑related issues, that they need to include other actors. First because we're now living in a different age. Before all this space, all the economy, all the society was in the physical world and it could be controlled by states. Army, police, everything and you can somehow control something. But right now the digital age, the Internet, it's actually, how can I put it? I don't want to say owned. But it's I want to find the right word. It's ‑‑ it's actually difficult in Spanish. But most of the participants of the Internet, let's put it. Most of the participation of the Internet is by private and civil society actors. Because not owners. But most of the participation that you see, the participation, it's more the participation from not government. So right now what we see is that government acknowledge they have acknowledged that of course it's difficult to make those matters and to work with them. It's not that we going to change the way that they have been working on other topics. But they I think they recognize that.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: So you succeeded. I commend you for that.
Lee, I would like to let you know that I'm a frequent participant and we receive a very interesting document in the Los Angeles meeting in 2014 from the council of Europe about human rights. And many people said what is this human rights related to. Why should we ‑‑ and I know that your work in that field is very, very important and lately we received a new document that was very, very important and shared with al the government just for you to know if you're not involved in ICANN processes it's 170‑plus governments and several organizations, so what's your experience, how easy was to convince the council of Europe in producing that document for ICANN? Was it your idea, something the council thought could be useful? What was the process behind producing that document which is very important?
>> LEE HIBBARD: Thank you. I think you have to understand that the council of Europe is one actor among many in ICANN. I don't know whether people know about ICANN. But it was quite a difficult entry because it's not the same space as France with a government officials and some civil society representatives, maybe some private sector, rather limited. So we entered a very naughty stakeholder space.
I think one thing has to be made clear is many government officials in many areas of work in their jobs all across the world, multistakeholder dialogue is not something very understood, maybe not practiced. It's quite unique to the Internet space. Isn't it? Let's be clear. So going into ICANN we had to work with all the governments together but we were also working with the other communities, the non‑commercial, et cetera. All those different communities. So it was very important for us to put forward a human rights approach to ICANN. It's very technical issue, the devil is in the details. There are human rights issues. And to this day we'll still dispute whether human rights is really for ICANN. I think that's a discussion ongoing. But clearly you can look at this report that you're referring to is about community, top level domains, the power of a domain name. The power of a domain name to have a space in which people conjugate, assembly. You know there's a discussion about bringing people's eyeballs into a space and keeping them there for reasons of advertising. How is that understand regarding freedom of expression. These communities can conjugate under those top‑level domains and that's important for communities, that's important for assembly and freedom of expression and other issues issues of privacy, et cetera. So it has been a challenge to be part of a multistakeholder approach. One thing has to be made clear is that governments, I don't think governments are fully still fully aware of what the real extent of multistakeholder is. In the book decisions are made ‑‑ multistakeholder for me in an intergovernmental setting is about creating a robust process to the point of decision making, decision shaping so that everybody's voice is heard. When it comes to governments doing that job they look back see has it been multistakeholder. Has it brought together all the voices which matter but it has been challenging but we're trying to raise awareness in that respect.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: How easy was it to make the decision in your organization? I know it's a lot of effort from your side in producing that and I really commend you for that. How easy was it in the organization to move forward?
>> LEE HIBBARD: Don't forget, we're 10 years on from the society which ended in 2005 which adopted texts, makes it easy for us to pick it up because it's written down. It's a recognized document across the world. You pick it up, you start to apply it. We applied it and then we then started to use the word multistakeholder in the text that we were drafting with governments which were then adopted. So it's a recognition when you start using words which are recognizing texts, it conflates and everybody starts using them and then you have greater and greater legitimacy and it becomes stronger. So it becomes easier with more time to be multistakeholder, not more difficult. But it has its limits. At least in an intergovernmental context.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: So based on your comment we would say that there is some mature process after these 10 years of talking and discussing. Any building capacity activity is focused in the multistakeholder environments help maturing these ideas. And I would like to now give the floor to Renata, Tijani and Mikhail. You three have the languages, also you are more academic oriented as per your activities. So I would like to know your perspectives about the difficulties of producing capacity building in other languages, especially perhaps even writing in different scripts like Arabic and Russian. And how you see this multicultural, multistakeholder capacity building in this process of evolving like Lee was seeing in the last years, which is your experience. I would start with the ladies, Renata. Do you have a mic?
>> RENATA AQUINO RIBEIRO: Renata: Thank you, yes. The panelists here have brought many interesting aspects of the multistakeholder dialogue. And when it comes to multistakeholder capacity building, not only it follow Portuguese, I even have here my follow Portuguese, which is our newcomers mentors badges. So folks who are new to the IGF can ask questions in that language. Not one of the most spoken languages of the world, let alone in Latin‑America, only Brazil speaks Portuguese. And couple that with the fact that in civil society we have actors, as Marcel put it so well, which have multiple caps. For instance, I do a lot of capacity building in engineering courses. So I do a lot of programs for women in technology. So we speak Portuguese and we speak programming languages. So that, to bring that all together in a multistakeholder setting for a dialogue that would really represent capacity building in a way that they feel empowered is very, very hard.
So tactics I think that we can use are bringing building bridges. So we try to build bridges to other efforts in capacity building which are global or which do have this stalk group dialogue. So for instance one of the groups that I work with is the pie ladies group. They do try to exchange knowledge on the topics that they investigate with programming groups from all over the world. And for successful capacity building in Internet governance we also have to have identification. So the school of Internet governance was to me a fantastic experience because I could see for the first time my identification as a global self actor. Many of the issues we have in the north and South America are issues, the Middle Eastern region has, the issues that Southeast Asia has. So it really made a lot of sense to me. And I keep on trying to bring this idea of regional and global links into our work in Internet governance. And for that we have also to understand that folks are different. Languages are different, cultures are different and their points of view on the world is very different. This is something incredibly good because we can only learn from this richness, from this diversity and we have to embrace it. We have to let it flourish in the Internet governance dialogue and I think spaces like the IGF help us model our capacity building efforts, our multistakeholder dialogue in that sense.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I would like to stress the fact that Renata has a Facebook page in Portuguese which is a language that I love. And she always is updating the website. And she posts all the time a lot of information and pictures and everything. So that's a good tool.
Tijani. Tijani is first of all a good friend of mine and also he's active in ICANN, but not in the governmental advisor committee as I am. He is active in the at‑large advisor committee which gathers the perspectives of the users of the Internet and also he's involved in capacity building within ICANN and other activities that we are going. Would you share your comments with us. How do you see the effectiveness of this capacity buildings from ICANN and the challenges of other participants that speak other languages, especially content in Arabic and you speak French also.
>> TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Thank you. In ICANN we are very diverse. At large we had mainly three languages. Spanish, English and French. So this is something that help us. So every activity that ‑‑ before when we started it was all in English and it was a problem. Not everyone or not everyone community are able to follow the capacity‑building program. Now we have interpretation on all our webinars without exception. And also our webinars allow courses on ICANN learn, IT is multilingual. You can choose the language you want and you will follow the lesson in this language. So I can say that now at ICANN we don't have a big problem of language in the capacity building. And we try to be diverse. All the ‑‑ and the program is chosen by all our values and we try to make it accessible to everyone. This is something that ‑‑ we even don't think about it.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Tijani. There was a time the first ICANN ten years ago, only English. People going back and forth saying what is this and everyone is speaking English like crazy. But we requested many years translation and finally we have a fantastic translation. And I will go back again towards translation and remote participation.
Mikhail, another language barrier and different script. And also you organize a workshop every which is very good and we have it right after this session. Which is your experience after all these years and specially how relevant is the content that you can get in Cyrillic in your own language in Russian from Internet governance from a multistakeholder perspective.
>> MIKHAIL KOMAROV: Thank you very much. I would like to say a few words about multistakeholder approach first. Because I think the thing is when we are talking about the Internet, last year we got special institute responsible for the Internet development in Russia which consists of several hundreds of top experts from the whole country advising and developing business in Russian. Second began several years ago as a result of work, of head of our higher chamber of parliament, council of federation was introduced special all Russian Internet security class in each public school every year. So we have it every year ‑‑ first of all it was one date every year but after that now it's a period from the end of October the 1st or 2nd of November. So what I would like to say about this experience, that under these circumstances with this main goal to share information, share knowledge with kids, with students at schools, we got extremely state experience in terms of multistakeholder approach. Because government, politicians, different representations from government, they participate and they know what they share their experience with kids in particular schools. So they make and record video as well companies and private sectors, and a special set of classes in terms of Internet security we got some classes from our Russian Google and so on. So we've got ‑‑ actual producing content. And also civil society experts actually who are coming directly to different schools and just kids about the Internet themselves.
Second what I wanted to say that is that if you're talking about capacity building, we're talking about treating ‑‑ who are going to bring their knowledge back to their countries. In Russia and other countries we are talking about word of mouth. So that's the key engine which helps actually to distribute contents, which helps to distribute ideas and knowledge. It's word of mouth. So when we explain to our friends, when we explain to our colleagues, explain to someone else knowledge we got, immediately it's a topic being topic so we get immediately hundred, thousand requests from search engines for some local content. At that point of my talk. So word of mouth together means the support from media. Is an engine. In terms of making into being popular. But from my experience this year, first time, I organized round table at the university ‑‑ I mean first time in terms of let's see in terms of number of participants. It was not closed to them but it was open event where we might have students to come and discuss actually IGF problems ‑‑ I mean IGF problems I mean from the Russian perspective. So what kind of problems we got in Russia and so on. And the thing is three years ago, four years ago, every year I share my experience from participation IGF is my students so year by year I see actually, I see that students are changing in terms of their knowledge and their focus on Internet governance as let's say a problem of the future, of the current time as well. I mean problem because Internet governance, it's probably data governance as well. Now they start understanding how powerful the mechanism of governing the data protection and so on. And these started generating content, I mean producing some posts, producing some articles, participating in different events, because they started understanding that actually it's important topic. So starting from the word of mouth, continuing with some experts' positions, continuing with media supporting Internet development and supporting some let's say highlighting some topics, there are you know IGF became more popular definitely as a topic itself in Russia. And so we got much more materials now available in Russian, even though we have those materials available from the United Nations, Russian is official language there, right? And I'm quite happy that IGF game more useful in terms of that approach. And so if you ask me who is going to, I don't know, translate the materials, who is going to bring the knowledge to Russian community, to Russian society of Internet users, I would say ambassadors who are trained at special capacity building events, special schools as you organize as well, right? Because any way it starts is word of mouth and we cannot avoid the process. But we can just stimulate it by providing additional webinars, providing additional information and it's about people itself, as themselves produce the content as interested. So first you should make being interested in the topic. That's it.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Mikhail. We should do something in Russian. Jackie, Dustin. Based on your experience in ICANNWiki, I encourage you to go on ICANNWiki, it's an interesting website with lots of information. I would like to know if you do some revision of the content that people put on line, do you have curation of the content? How do you face the fact that some companies are facing the impact does it have impact on the content?
>> DUSTIN PHILIPS: Sure. So Olga introduced the project at the beginning of the session. I just want to elaborate just a little about what we do. We basically have a Wikipedia style website that focuses on ICANN and Internet governance at large. And what we noticed when we were attending some of the ICANN sessions is there was simultaneous interpretation, but when people went home there weren't many resources for them to understand some of the deeper concepts spoken about at the conference. So this is sort of about when we were attended ICANN in Morocco. We guide them through the process of contributing to the website. And the very nature a wiki is it's very democratic in the way that it's built. And so when you ask about curation, that's something don't rely on too much because we want to offer a mirror of the multistakeholder process by a site and thus the information built from the bottom up. So we only curate in the sense that we look for key components of neutrality, making sure that articles and information is fully referenced, that no one is writing anything with a marketing spin or bias. And then everyone is sort of employing the values of the site, which includes things like radical trust.
So back to the idea of creating content that resonates with people who don't speak English, the event in Marrakech led us to a few stakeholders who wanted to develop home‑grown events in east Africa, specifically we had stakeholders from Cameroon, Tanzania and Kenya who came forward and said we really want to do exactly what you're doing here in Marrakech and we want to do it in our homes and we want the resource that you have, which we consider to be valuable to the ICANN community to be in our own language which is Swahili. So the edit event we held in Marrakech coordinated with the stakeholders and held a few events not only in Kenya but in Tanzania. And we I think have built a long‑term relationship with these stakeholders and we have basically given them the platform with which to develop the content they want to develop and we have taken a step back and said this is yours now. This is not ours and we're not telling you how or what you should focus on. And that's something I'm really excited about, because I do believe as a few of the panelists here have alluded to, content is developed by the people of their region needs to be a priority. And so I guess I will conclude by having a call to action, which is if any of you in this room would like to develop content in your own language, we would love to speak with you. Because we have a developing site in Portuguese. We have Spanish of course, which we've been collaborating with Olga and Swahili and Chinese. If any of you have a language you would like to work on, we can set that up for you and get started. Thank you.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I will put you in contact with the person who was talking to me. I leave the panel with two questions I would like your brief comments. Remote or on‑site. Paid or free. Have that in mind. I will go to the audience now. Do we have questions or comments about this issue or questions to our panelists?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Addressing this last issue that Olga put in the end, we're part of a university in Brazil so at my university has developed a very interesting platform for distance learning. Also some experiences ‑‑ and we have this characteristic of being essentially a public and free learning institution. So I think we could ‑‑ and that would be easy for us to answer on that case. That would be free content. I would like to bring the issue of multiculturality here. We talked a lot about multi lingualism, of course it's difficult, I think the multicultural component is also interesting. Strangely enough I'm going to bring an experience from Russia and not from Brazil. I've been invited twice now to the international summer school of cyber law. The experience is very interesting. Language is a first barrier but it's a barrier that we can overcome. Then comes the issue of multiculturalty. For example, I caught myself between a Belgian friend taking for granted that a data breach was understanding for the others. There's no such thing as Russian law. Knowing that Brazilian doesn't have that institute also. So multicultural issues are also a very important component. It's not that language is not a barrier, but these differences sometimes, if we can't overcome the language barrier and still not get anywhere because of these cultural differences hinder us from getting there.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, Olga. Congratulations for this very nice workshop. I would like to remark that we are talking about multicultural and this also means multilanguage, we are talking only in English here. I don't see so much diversity on the panel, for example. I don't see different people in the panel. We don't have even translation here. So my colleague doesn't understand nothing about that. She's what's up because you're talking about cultures, multilanguage but only in English. It's only a remark to think about how we can organize this kind of workshop later.
We have a lot of initiatives about these kinds of things. For example, we have maybe from 15 years ago one community named community ene, the letter in Spanish a special letter in Spanish, and people from Latin‑America and Spain. So this kind of effort has been in the community from a long time ago and I think it's very good that we have this kind of issues here in the IGF. Thank you.
>> This was Carlos from Ecuador. I was a member for seven years and at the beginning the workshops didn't even have transcribing. So we have achieved that. All the main sessions have translation, but step by step.
Any other comments from the audience? Questions? Comments?
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, I'm from Georgia. I have questions about creating of agenda, about creating fear agenda. A nation for a IGF. For Julio and for our friend from Russia. Thank you.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I'm sorry. I'm not sure if I got the question. How to create the agenda of national IGFs? How would you give input to building an agenda from national IGF. I know you have a dialogue in Mexico. Have you interact with those that are organizing?
>> A group is multistakeholder group Mexicans will participate as an association, but there are other members of this group from government, from some other private sector organizations, from civil society and some not many others but some other actors. So what we did is we bring some of our concerns to this group in order to discuss if some specific issues, some specific item would be suitable for the agenda. After that this group proposed this specific topics to the office of the national digital strategy. And later they talk to the United Nations and did this this kind of topics. So that's what we did months ago to have an agenda with this concerns that we have from this specific groups, from the specific sectors. Civil society, private sector, governments, et cetera.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. To be honest what I want to indicate first of all I'm not a member of organizing Russian IGF I know there are members of that committee here on site. At the venue. But what I know actually for sure that actually similar to what describe there is first the multistakeholder group, set a topics whichever discussed is different participants, representatives from ICANN as well because ICANN support IGF in Russia, governmental structures because government supports activity as well and we have also government as a stakeholder presented there. But what I would like to say is my personal opinion, I don't know probably correct me or probably someone will correct me, I will say that IGF, at least in Russia, probably let's see more focused on establishing connection between private sector and government than between government, private sector and civil society. Because as I explained before, civil society understand word of mouth, but not those official events where they don't know the topics they want. So it's an issue. So that's why I would say that national IGF it's more that connection but not the connection between the civil society. Thank you.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Julio and Mikhail. Any more comments from the audience?
>> AUDIENCE: I just wanted to get back a bit to interventions and tie that together with national initiatives in the comments you made on site and online. When we are talking about discussing Internet governance, the first I think temptation is to try and reproduce dialogues that have already happened. To try and follow along the line of things which are very ‑‑ I would even say predictable. How to build a stakeholder dialogue, in terms of equality, how can the technical community communicate itself. Of course we need to build a basis. But we can go over that. So today on public university's of Brazil, we have for the post‑doctorate, we have a volunteer for examples doctor scholar and building my project. So I have to learn once more how to build a project, how to build a course from scratch, and we should do that all the time. We should be open to build new projects from zero, from scratch. We are here now discussing and there are people online on the remote participation room of IGF. There is transcribing. Are these people understanding us? Are you putting comments on the virtual room? Are you voicing your thoughts? You can do it. Do you want to put a comment on the virtual room in Spanish? You can do it. We don't have translation in Spanish, but the record is there. And the records will help us build more. So I think we need to have this dimension. And again all the content, I would put instead of paid versus free, I would put easily accessible. So all the content is accessible for IGF. These documents will be here, this transcript will be here. All your questions will be accessible 10 years from now. So we need to think about this when we are building an agenda, building capacity building program and building a national identity. Building a ICANN wiki project in Portuguese and in Spanish so we should take a step back and reflect on it.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Do we have comments from remote? Any. I will go to the panel now. With two questions that I would like you to refer very briefly. You are one of the organizers of URD. Remote or on‑site? Paid or free? Why am I asking paid or free? When we started with the school of Internet governance they said you're not charging? You're not getting money from the students? No. We give fellowships. But why. You need the money. Well we will try to get the money from other actors that perhaps have more funds than the students that we want them to be included. And we were told we were crazy but it worked. And I come from a country that all the universities, public universities are free. But not only free for Argentinians, we have a very important group of regional students that public from the public university in Argentina which I think is fantastic. Just your personal opinion. If someone has to pay, does it mean that the pay for training and it's on‑site or remote, do people really profit from remote or do you give it more value if you pay? Internet governance or any training. It's better when you pay you value more or you take it for free and you don't value it. What's your take on it?
>> I'm sure we will all agree that it's better when it's free. I'm being a bit cheeky. I think the thing which I wanted to underline, everyone is assuming that the multistakeholder dialogue and capacity is understood and we all agree. It's not. Just way before we get to that discussion, I mean, we have to write down these words. There's no definition of multistakeholder dialogue. It's not written in the constitution of Argentina, for example. It's not written in your laws, probably. It's not recognized in your court system. Judges in the courts, do they refer to multistakeholder dialogue in their decisions which involve the Internet? Probably not. So no where is it written down and understood that this is a notion as it becomes part of the custom of the country, part of the reasoning of the court system, part of the policy making of the government, part of the whole democracy in general terms. So when it's not written down, it's perhaps not fully understood. We understand it here or we're trying to understand it here. So first of all I think to have full recognition as to what paid or unpaid, et cetera, we have to understand that this, it's still discretionary arbitrary, it's not fully understood. The European IGF, it's in its 10th year, it's financed by a number of small donations across different actors. It supports an organized on a multistakeholder basis. People come, hundreds of people come every year to the event and they come on their own expenses. So ‑‑
>> Remote participation?
>> People come on site to the event, they pay for themselves. There's no real financing of the participants. There is a little bit of financing for young people. That's part of the process of trying to build capacity. That's a very important part. But in general people come for free because it's part of their job or because their passionate about it. With regards to remote or on‑site, remote is a challenge, it's still difficult, you're not really there. You're not really touching the people in the room. It's very hard to have a dialogue. You can ask a question, the question may or may not be answered. It's very important to have it but I think it has its limitations. On‑site is better but of course it costs money.
>> Of course. So people don't pay to go but they have to finance their traveling.
>> People do pay.
>> You don't request a fee.
>> No.
>> But people have their own hotels and travel. But they don't pay a fee. Because there are meetings that request a fee also in this field.
I will go to this side of the room. Marcel. Free or paid? Remote or on‑site?
>> MARCEL LEONARDI: I think there's room for everything. It's a question of human nature. People who pay a dollar for a song will listen to it several times, people get it for free they ignore it and it lies there on their hard drives forever. Sometimes the abundance of things leads people to ignore things. That aside, free when possible and with funding whenever possible. For example, Google is proud to be one of the sponsors of the youth in IGF program, bringing these young people to events like this. But on the capacity part of things, for example, I got interested for example when courses were offered back in 2007 and 2008. I took an interest in the international side of things, saw an importance of the IGF and I think I slightly disagree in the sense of it not being a culture. Of course it's not the same of IGF, but we can see several examples around the world where public hearings had took place inviting multistakeholder actors to be part of the process. Decisions eventually made by court and congress but we do see that approach being fostered on and on. Just to give two quick examples. Brazil has been the boiler plate example legislation has been in this level and ended up being done by congress. No question about it. And now for example the Brazilian supreme court is opening up more and more public hearings on topics that are very thorny. For example, the whole idea of blocking apps or the whole idea of streaming rights and public performance rights in streaming this kind of situation. I think there's room for both, but as Renata said, the most important thing is how accessible all of this content ends up being. The fact that they have livestreaming, the fact that we have all of these options now is incredible for anybody who wants to jump in and learn more about these things.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Marcel. Dustin, what do you think? Free? Paid? Remote, on‑site?
>> DUSTIN PHILIPS: Well, I mean, free is best because if we're charging a fee, then that automatically is going to eliminate some of the stakeholders that wouldn't normally be able to attend. But I would go further to say that we need to do more to fund the travel and the expenses that bring in even a larger, more diverse group of people. I myself have benefitted from a few of those. At the south school and at a fellowship. But also when I go ICANN, the perspective that I get from the fellows that would not be able to attend without that sponsorship, the perspective that I get from them is so unique, I think that if the more of that that we can bring into these discussion spaces will be immensely beneficial for Internet governance in general. And I would hate to lose out on that.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Dustin. I will skip Renata because she already had some comments and we don't have much time. Julio, remote or on site or paid and free?
>> JULIO CESAR VEGA GOMEZ: There is room for everything and it depend on the seminar or the subject that you do. It could be free or paid or I don't know. I mean, it could be both even. But we have to take into account two things that I really think are very important. The first one is that when you say paid, it's not necessarily paid by the students. Could be paid by sponsors, for example. And believe me, there are ‑‑ it was mentioned at the beginning of the workshop that the companies in several or let's say every time wants to sell you something a good or a service or whatever, that's true in some ways, but it's not entirely true. There are many, many companies that have social product and want to impact the society giving some resources in order to, in order to bring or to share knowledge with the society. So that's one of the reflections that I have when you say paid. Yeah, I mean, everything has a cost, but not necessarily paid by the students.
And the other thing is that we have to take a break and think about the impact of the course or the seminar or the workshop or whatever. And if that impact will be for example, and there are some examples that we have in the association, if the seminar is ‑‑ the audience of the seminar will be the banking industry, well, they have to pay for it. They have to pay. Or these huge companies. If the audience will be small enterprises, university students, that's another a very different audience and somehow we have to have the resources and share the knowledge. No matter how, but we have to share that knowledge and it doesn't matter if we do or not have this money. But the impact is important. So we have to try at least.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Julio. Let's go one by one. Tijani, we don't have much time. Tijani and then Mikhail and the rest.
>> TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Thank you very much. In my country we say that everything that you give with $0 value will have zero value in the head and spirit of the one who is benefiting from it. And I am not asking to make people pay for airfare or for their accommodation. But participation will show the commitment and to help you give better services in the upcoming programs.
As for remote or present, I think there's two types of capacity building with remote participation. There is the capacity building which is assisted which is people are there, they are participating, but the participation. This is something that we try to do at large and at the end we give up. Because if you have limited time for the capacity building program, and if you have a target, if you open it to anyone, because when you open it it is for all at‑large people. You will not be able to finish your program on time. And perhaps it will be diverted. So in this case I don't think that the remote participation is good. But the other kind of capacity building, which is the online courses, yes. This is different.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Tijani. Mikhail, and then Jackie and then we have to close.
>> MIKHAIL KOMAROV: I would like to agree with remote and on‑site participation because yes if it's information distribution then remote participation channel should be open and it should be free. But I also would like to say that we are talking about critical mass of each stakeholders, for each country so the thing is, I am from academia, I like measuring something. We were talking about Internet governance leaders here, right? So what level, depending on the country, depending on the focus of the capacity‑building program. So we should actually introduce different rules and different approaches. As a result payment I would like to say to give you a good example of Google participation in Russia. So they funded actually development of interest in book about Internet. And so they funded that activity and distributed the book free of charge. Right? And so the thing is that is great example, because the first initial goal was to distribute information. So that's why it should be free. But as we also have private sector as a stakeholder and you also have government, we have free events they also can offer scholarships for those who can participate. That's for sure.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: We have Alfredo, Jackie and me and we have to close.
>> ALFREDO REYES KRAFFT: Thank you very much. In Mexico we say if you don't need to pay for it, you can't understand the value. So in my experience the people who pay for education, even if it's just a little amount, with much more knowledge. For example, in the national university of Mexico, the students pay just $0.50. But they know the real price and usually voluntary they pay much more to the university.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much. Jackie, any comments?
>> JACKIE: Yes, I just want to categorically disagree with the concept that you have to pay for something in order to gain value from it. There are many things that I do in my life and many things that other people do in their life that they do without a dollar value hanging over their head. We don't need to commodify information. I believe we need to make it free. I think to equalize the power differentials between corporations and governments, they should fully or partially subsidize scholarships or the presence of fellows at some of these Internet Governance Forums. Because some of these people are being left out of the conversations and some of the people who can't show up are the ones in government corporations.
>> I think the question Alfredo brings up, I don't see that as being the issue. I want to go back to the point. If Internet governance is recognized in different countries, if it's actually written down, if we recognize multistakeholder dialogue and it written down and if it's in different parts, then it becomes something which is legitimate. That's the way it works. If it's legitimate, then it will unlock financing to do things. I have a good example. When it came to trying to finance euro dig, we looked into OACD definition of aid at that time capacity building to finance. And it didn't fall within the definition of that aid. And that means that if it wasn't written down, we couldn't make a case to receive money, to receive financing to help people come and take part in capacity building. So it's really important that it's recognized. And once that is recognized, then down budget lines and it will unlock money for people to take part for free. That's the key to me.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: We don't have much time. I want to thank our distinguished panelists and I want to reflect on the fact that we have differences, different opinions, different experiences, but we all can agree that we are going through a process of being more multistakeholder oriented, more multicultural oriented and we can help our younger generations of being more involved. Thank you very much for being with us today.
[ Applause ]
[ Session concluded at 4:30 ]