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.
***
>> MODERATOR: Let me remind people that the seating at the table is reserved for the NRI coordinators. My name is Marilyn Cade, it's my pleasure to welcome all of you, our NRI coordinators of existing NRI and several are yet to be launched what we call information NRIs. This is a working session of the NRI coordinators or designees. While it is open to observation we will not be taking comments from others as we expect to run out of time. We welcome comments that can be posted to our list and many of you as observers are also active in an NRI so you may be subscribed to our list.
The purpose of this session as I started earlier is a working session. The agenda was developed entirely by the NRIs working virtually. They have taken surveys and votes and consulted on the work of all of their presence here at the IGF and Anja will be covering that a little bit later. We are particularly honored today that we will have three short speakers, and I will wait to introduce them until our third speaker arrives.
And when he arrives, one of the first things we are going to do is have each of the NRI coordinators to take 20 seconds to say the following. My name is, and I am coordinating or the coordinator of, and please get the name of your initiative very, very clear for the transcript. And then we will also hear from anyone who has already announced as the coordinator of an information session. Those are the only introductions that will be made because what we want to do is show to our special guests the diversity of the face and the activities of the NRIs.
And, again, while I welcome the rest of you as observers, I hope you will appreciate the challenges that we face in terms of being able to get through our work. Anja, I am going to turn to you, perhaps, if you would introduce our rapporteurs by name and also our remote moderator. They can just raise their hand so everybody knows who they are.
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you so much for coming again here. Thank you so much for coming and thank you for the main session. Later I will share feedback I received from the colleagues watching us and listening to us. I want to thank specifically to Leanna from the Arminian IGF for being or rapporteurs for this session and for multitasking and I want to thank Abdul from the IGF Chad for helping us to support online participants, I hope we already have online participants.
Thank you. Yes, Marilyn is giving me a reminder. So I also want to thank you for supporting our joint booth. And I want to thank especially to Mary for coordinating everything and kind of acting as an organizer and coordinator every day for it. We will be later sharing the inputs on what we receive there.
(Applause).
>> MODERATOR: If you have not picked up one of our little four page flyers, I know all of you who have been into the booth have, but if you haven't picked one of these up, please do see me later. I think we have a few still left and we want to make sure you get your souvenir and we are just now going to greet our guests and then we will start the formal part of the program.
All right we will go back to the agenda. Let me do introductions of our special guests. Before we do that, we will help him and our MAG Chair and Chengetai but by butting a face to the NRI coordinators. We will have 20 second introductions and I will start on the left‑hand side of Chengetai. 20 seconds per person. Just keep going.
>> LORENA JAUME‑PALASI: Lorena Jaume‑Pulasi, I'm the Secretariat of the German IGF.
>> MARY UDUMA: NIGF, Nigeria IGF as well as West African IGF.
>> YURI TAKAMATSU: Yuri Takamatsu, Japan IGF.
>> MAHEESHWARA BANDARA: Maheeshwara Bandara, Sri Lanka. Chairman, IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Bosnia and Herzegovina.
>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Tracy Hackshaw, translator IGF formation.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Sandra Hoferichter. Secretary‑General of the EuroDIG, European IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Stephon Arumpi, organizer of eight editions of IGF Italy.
>> JUUSO MOISANDER: Juuso Moisander, Finish Internet Forum.
>> AUDIENCE: Sandra southeastern dialect on IGF.
>> ILANA ULLMAN: Armenia IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Uch Sotori, Georgia IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Hulain Cassias Buenos, Colombian IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Latroda, organizer of the Arab IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Hisham Uzied, coordinating IGF. Secretariat based in Egypt.
>> AUDIENCE: Aman Well, from Togo IGF.
>> JOSE EDUARDO ROJAS: Eduardo Rojas, Bolivia IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Carlos Aguira.
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: Asia Pacific regional IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Shane Tus, US IGF Co‑Chair.
>> SONIGITU ASIBONG EKPE: Sonigitu Asibong Ekpe, IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: Tom Goierina, focal point Central Asia IGF.
>> MODERATOR: Central Asia congratulations first IGF. We will hear from Mark and I the ask a show of hands that who hasn't introduced themselves that is an NRI coordinator and I will include you in that.
>> MARK HOVELL: Mark Hovell, member steering committee of the United Kingdom fib.
>> SINDY NUR FITRI: Sindy Nur Fitri, Indonesia IGF. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, Calina, Spanish IGF.
>> MODERATOR: We have one more quite unusual, which is a sub national IGF and I would like you to introduce yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Wizaz Nuo, Nigeria, sub national IGFs.
>> MODERATOR: I will do something why unusual, Zina, although you are still working on announcing that you are going to be information, can I just ask you to announce yourself? We have someone here working on launching the Lebanon IGF.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm thinking of negotiating a local IGF in Lebanon.
>> MODERATOR: Terrific. We have done quite a tour of the world and I think probably now we will go to welcoming comments if I might introduce our guest from New York, from the United Nations, Mr. Juwang Zhu is Director of Division Sustainable Development DESA. DESA is an institutional home of the IGF and we are extremely pleased to have you join us.
>> JUWANG ZHU: Thank you, Marilyn. I think I'm here mostly to do a lot of listening and to bring your voices back to New York to share with the secretary's office. First of all, words of gratitude to Marian. I know they has been working very hard and IGF is your passion. We need this passion and enthusiasm to advance the course of IGF. So words of thanks to Marion and, of course, to MAG Chair Ling who has done a terrific job this year. I'm also looking to acknowledge my colleagues in the IGF Secretariat. Chengetai who has been instrumental in providing support.
I personally feel that this is a great development to see the growth of the national and regional IGF because we feel that you are closer to the ground. You represent the voices of citizens in the field on the ground and we are not as close as you are to them. So you fill a gap, and you pay a tremendously important role to us.
The IGF command by the Secretary‑General is much better, stronger and richer because of your work and because of your contributions. So I want to recognize this. I also am aware that national can vary a lot and some of the national including regional IGF would like to emphasize the fact that you are independent you represent the constituents at a country level and we acknowledge that fact and we work together with the understanding that you are contributing to the IGF, however, you do maintain your autonomy and independence.
The second point, with this understanding, we would like to help you as much as you help us by coming here and contributing to the discussions here. Your discussions make the IGF so much richer, and I personally have heard so many positive comments about the session yesterday which extended beyond normal hours and it doesn't happen all of the time.
So we are grateful for your contributions, and the task for us is how we can help you in a way that respect your autonomy, your independence for those who help you grow. We have some ideas we are discussing with potential donors how to support you with small grounds in a way that respect your independence and autonomy but also help you grow. So that is one thing we plan to do, but the specific modalities are how to make this happen.
We would very much like to hear from you in a way that, and in a way that our support is beneficial to you without under mining your capacity to be independent and autonomous and in this way I think it will make the world a much better place with you with you being closer to the ground representing the voices of the citizens and with us providing a global platform, a platform for making your voices heard and in doing so, enriching us. I think it is a wonderful symbiotic relationship and it is typical win/win solution and we are here to learn more about your work and also to hear your advice on how we can support you better. So these are the few words that I would like to say. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. And let's offer a round of applause.
(Applause).
Then I'm going to give you a response on your behalf. Later today, this is a working session and later today we are discussing our successes, our, what we have learned and what we need to be successful in 2017 and beyond. We are beginning to plan our work plan, and one of the top topics that has continued to come out, we did a survey last year, we had four key priorities. The top one was awareness and participation. The second was funding and the third was helping to grow, the fourth was helping to grow the number of NRIs. We will talk further today, we do most of our work virtually, and Anja and I were just looking at each other with great enthusiasm that we will convene working sessions of the NRI coordinators so that we can come back to you based on the work they have already done. They have done terrific work already and perhaps we can continue this dialogue for the support of the MAG Chair and Chengetai as we get more thinking together. We are also working on comments specific to the IGF retreat document. I will just take the opportunity to say this before I learn to Lynn. Although there were a few NRI coordinators who were able to attend the retreat, 60%, which you will see from Anja's presentation of the NRIs hold their sessions after June which means the idea that I call them up 14 times a week and tell them to submit a written comment was getting burdensome. So that will help us as well. Thank you so much for the offer of this partnership and may I say on all of your behalf this is most welcome to have this opportunity for us to be providing guidance and input on any thinking that is going on.
May I now turn to Lynn as our MAG Chair, and welcome comments from you, Lynn. Having just said that we are very fortunate that Lynn was extremely well trained in what the IGF is, how it functions and all of its issues because she is from the community. And I think that was a very welcome, very much welcomed by all of us, but also welcomed by the full community and Thank You, Madame Chair.
>> LYNN ST. AMOUR: Thank you. A follow on for that just a moment to say I did in fact participate when it was the Internet Society present CEO on WSIS 1, WSIS 2 and all of the multiweek prep coms and I have never missed an IGF so the trend line there goes back quite deep. I will be very brief because I think it's better to hear from Anja and from all of you. I wanted to say that I thank you for the honour of co‑moderating the session with Anja which is an honour to coordinate and work with Anja in any case. She has been a great representative and voice of the NRIs within the Secretariat, and it really was just a fantastic session. It was. I know the work in the NRIs but so much of the work you are doing is reflected back in the work of the global IGF and all of the other stakeholder communities as well and vice versa. So I think we are on a path here and we need to continue to evolve our processes and insure that we are getting the NRI voices in earlier to the processes and the topics and the direction of the IGF.
And we will continue to do that. So as with everything, all suggestions are welcome. I actually think I'm going to stop there. There is some excellent presentations from Anja, and maybe simply to thank the Secretariat for providing us with Anja. She has really done a tremendous job as the focal point for the NRIs within the Secretariat. So thank you and thank you Marilyn for organising this and specifically for all of the organisation that went into the fantastic session a couple of days ago. It really was a very good session. Thank you.
(Applause).
>> MODERATOR: Before we turn to Anja, I'm going to turn to Chengetai Mesango has been the most critical part of making the IGF an ongoing success, but also what I recall, and I see Mark in the room. Long before we had the term NRI and long before we had anything formal. Chengetai helped to allow informal gathering of those who were coordinating at lunch time during the MAG session so that we could begin to build an identity, and then Chengetai made sure we had meeting room space at annual IGF after annual IGF and I don't think we would have been where we are today had the early days of sherpaing and coaching and coordinating not be championed by Chengetai so let me recognize his great work now in the Secretariat and thank him for those early insights and vision. Chengetai.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much, Marilyn, for those kind words. It wasn't just me. It's the whole team, the MAG and the DESA team and you as well. And I would also like to thank Anja for all of her good work as well. I would also like to thank the national and regional initiatives. Yes, you are independent but we do collaborate. You have helped so greatly in the intersessional processes as well you have put in your work so and we could not have gone that far without your help and policy implementation begins at the national level so you are very important to that whole process. We are working together with the whole team, DESA, myself, I am just a spear head connecting to you as the focal point to try and see how we can best help to nurture and support the national and regional initiatives.
I won't say anything much more but as you know you are always free to contact me directly and we do work well together and we will continue to do so.
(Applause).
>> MODERATOR: I'm pleased to turn to Anja who will do a very brief Power Point. Some of you have seen it, but not all have, and it illustrates the fantastic growth. Anja?
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you so much, Marilyn and thank you to the colleagues. It makes me happy that the IGF team is here. The thick that makes me sad is that the whole team of the NRI is not there, but Abdul will tell us later. I know with colleagues on line with us.
What I wanted to go over briefly is what we did over the past months and how the records significantly changed. This is especially for the colleagues not regularly on our calls and that didn't attend the main sessions. As you know these slides already. As we said at the beginning and as it was emphasized by the previous speakers, there are core principles and characteristics of the NRIs that we are in full respect to as you being independent following the IGF principles as the IGF itself.
So let me not stay long with this slide, but briefly mention the five key principles of the IGF that the NRIs are following within their internal organisations which is that we are all organized as multistakeholder entities, completely independent, open and close, transparent, non‑commercial within our organisations and serving the needs of our respective communities.
This is a very interesting slide to me as it shows the continued growth of the NRIs across the three IGF mandates and as you see at the end of the first, beginning of the second mandate, we were on the total number of 37 IGF initiatives, and now we are stepping into a third mandate with a number of 79. I like to say 79 although we have 72 officially recognized NRIs and we have 7 NRIs that are internally organized but they are facing challenges in organising their own annual events and hopefully that will happen soon.
This illustrates how busy the 2016 was for us especially the fact that the majority of the annual meetings of the NRIs were scheduled for the second half of the year. And finally, this will illustrate where we are in the world, which is kind of impressive that we work together being spread all over the world.
So this is very briefly what I wanted to show to our colleagues and now I would like to turn to Marilyn maybe to go through the agenda and finally to give the floor to the ‑‑
>> MODERATOR: Very quickly we are going to ‑‑ remember this is a working session. So we have two main areas that we need to cover. The agenda is on line. Anja sent it to you, but I am going to take us to segment two which Anja will be moderating, and we are going to have be having a moderated discussion about ‑‑ we had four sections as you all ‑‑ we had four sections which you all will remember, but we reserved a particular discussion and I think it's particularly appropriate to continue this. We are going to talk about the key challenges and the solutions that were identified through the NRI main session.
The main points have been captured by the rapporteurs. We will have more polished material and summaries in our report, but we wanted to take the opportunity to just quickly identify some of the points that were raised and then to open the microphone to hear further from you.
So Anja is going to reference a few of the key challenges raised and then we will hear from you about your comments on that. We will spend 20 minutes on that. So Anja, perhaps you could start.
>> ANJA KOVACS: Let me just briefly just reference the key points that were raised. One was the funding and fundraising internally within our respective communities. The other was the stakeholder engagement. The third was the mutual support that exists between the NRIs but also on the side of the global IGF. One that was also raised was the structure of the NRIs the internal structure and the need for support in that sense and the issue of collaboration on many level starting within the national IGF, regional, subregional IGFs. The combination within the youth IGFs and, of course, bringing your voice on a firm level to the global IGF, but also bringing the input from the global IGF to the levels of the national, regional and youth IGFs. So those are briefly the key challenges that were identified, and now if we can maybe move and give floor to all of you. Since we are limited with time I will ask you to limit preparations to up to one minute if possible to identify main challenges and give us a couple of recommendations and as we are all here, how can we help.
>> MODERATOR: I will write down names and Anja will moderate. If you want to speak in this segment, you get one minute and you know what a tough time keeper I am. So Sandra, Mary, I see Mary's hand. Let's start with, yes, Trinidad and Tobago. Let's start with those three and I will do another round. I'm sorry, Euro dig.
>> SANDRA HOFERICHTER: Thank you very much and thank you very much for giving us the pleasure to join the session. I think it is important for the NRIs to get this visibility. We know that we are not mandated by the UN per se, but we very much appreciate the support we have gained over the last year especially by the Chair and also by providing a Secretariat report to facilitate the work of the NRI. We wish that this could be continued and if it could be supported by UNDESA and the IGF Secretariat in this respect because this really helped, us diverse group to manage us in one way or another.
And also we appreciate, we would like to, from the EuroDIG perspective, we would like to continue working to improve the process to get messages from the bottom to the top and vice versa. I know there is an interaction on the things the IGF is doing that are their own processes which are not necessarily aligned with the processes in the regions, but on the other hand, we are trying hard to get at least some of the messages which are discussed offer a national level that are very specific in some respect which have an impact also on the regional level to get them ‑‑ regional level to get them to the global level so we could improve on the type of processes how we interact with each other. This is actually from the EuroDIG perspective we would like to move forward to improve over the next year as I think we have reached a great level already, but more hard work needs to be done. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, and I'm just going to compliment, mention something that each of the NRIs in order to be listed on the IGF website prepares a report, and I just want to compliment all of you for the great reports that you do. So we may be shipping you a big stack of materials in case you are interested in seeing some examples.
We are going to go to Mary. Let me say this differently. Nigeria and West Africa IGF.
>> MARY UDUMA: Thank you very much, and I want to join Sandra to say that we are grateful for the platform given to us to discuss and share knowledge and experiences and also be able to learn from one another. One of the challenges we have, let me start with West Africa, for instance, the 2016 IGF we couldn't do remote participation because of infrastructure so connectivity is a big challenge for us in that region and we were not able to connect. We were not able to, we had given information on participation could not participate remotely and we didn't have all of the funds to bring everybody where we were organising the program. So the various voices we needed to hear were limited because it was limited. So funding and infrastructure is mostly one of the things we would like to see. In terms of Nigeria, we don't have the private sector participating fully. We still lack people from the private sector. We have Government, we have Civil Society, we have technical stakeholders, but the business people that are in Nigeria they are not part of it, so there is need to make conscious effort to bring them in while creating awareness even if it means to go to their offices and present IGF to them, whatever we can do to bring them.
So that's another thing. Then the other thing I want to say, Sandra has put it correctly, that we need stability for the Secretariat, so if the Secretariat was supported Ike Anja, giving resources to that would accept us get more coordinated and let us hear our voices and transmit to our global Secretariat.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Mary.
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you for the useful comment. Next in the cue.
>> AUDIENCE: Thanks for the platform. My question is actually the mirror image of Mary's own, private sector participation or support of an IGF. I would like to see some method where we could avoid capture the resources in the Caribbean region are limited so it's likely the funding will only come from private sector. And given the challenges we have in our region we will find attempts made to capture the work. So there is a way without naming any names or going into details, if there is a way we could get guidance from the Secretariat, some sort of rule that's could assist. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Before Anja goes on we have a show of hands, we have Italy and I want to go to another part of the world before I go back to Europe. I'm looking to see we have a few new folks that have come in, we will come from Italy to Central Asia.
>> ITALY: Thank you. So I want to take a minute with the fact that Mr. Zhou mentioned about the independence because this is a key word important, but in any case in some case every national or regional should have a document since we have ten years in front of us, sort of a charter or best effort in order to reach more homogenously the spirit of all of the figures. So ‑‑ IGFs so this is necessary. If we want to address more and more the participation, broad participation in the local IGFs we are encountering even more effort including money, of course. So this observation is about private sector are very welcomed, about the United Nations and other important organisations including the Internet Society I represent in Italy. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Anja is dealing with a quick direction so I will go to Central Asia and she will resume moderating.
>> CENTRAL ASIA: We held the first Central Asia IGF, it helped in building nexus against different stakeholders although there is a lot of work still. What I would like to have on our other regional IGFs is more presence of UN officials at the event because, you know, some Government officials are not quite aware about problems in Internet Governance and just to increase the value of the event, visible value of the event, it would be very great to have somebody from Secretariat, somebody from UN institutions at the event just to raise this value. Thank you.
>> ANJA GENGO: Turning back to U.K., Mark?
>> UNITED KINGDOM: Yes, thank you very much for everything in preparation for this session, and also the main session to you Marilyn and Anja it's been fantastic work. I want to underline from the United Kingdom experience two points, firstly the importance of maximizing diversity of participation in the program setting and then in the actual event itself. We have put a lot of effort into that, but we feel we still have more work to do in the United Kingdom case. We think we were the first national IGF going all the way back following the global IGF coming into practice. We really saw the importance of creating an opportunity for U.K. stakeholders to prepare for the global IGF and then to respond to the outcomes, the discussions at the global IGF. So that was the original purpose of that, of the U.K. in setting up our national IGF in 2007.
So two points I wanted to underline was, as I say, diversity of participation. Extending to all constituencies if that's the right word who have an interest in the evolution of the Internet. That includes young people. Young people are not the future. The young people are now. They are the Internet now. So we at our regional IGF in London we had a youth panel. We also had a minister there who has responsibility for youth issues speaking up at that. And that connects with my second point of engaging across Government in the national IGF. We had two ministers speaking at our London event.
We are still trying to get more traction from other departments, health, education and so on and development, Department for International Development. They are sort of sign posted on the relationship between the IGF and SDGs. We want them there talking about initiatives on digital access worldwide that our agency is involved in.
So it's important to get everybody posted within Government and that helps with the messaging, messaging from the national and global IGF, mainstreaming those messages into other fora where ICTs are relevant, and, again, it's always of those important areas, health, education, trade, so on.
So I hope that's a helpful comment at this stage. Thank you.
>> ANJA GENGO: I'm asking Marilyn.
>> MODERATOR: You need to go to Arab, Colombia and back to the others.
>> ARAB IGF: Thank you very much, and think you for the previous session. We have been organising the Arab IGF now for 40 years. We had many successes, many faults but this year we have taken this year actually for forming mechanism to evaluate the previous phase of the Arab IGF and maybe sort of reform for the Arab IGF. I think we have besides the bodies of the IGF and the processes, we are also addressing most of the challenges that have been on us in this room.
We are looking at the funding mechanism, and how to insure that the funding insures the sustainability and effectiveness of the process. We are also looking at engagement and our major concern was the engagement of the private sector, and the active engagement of Government also. Besides the third point maybe is the outreach, and we are looking on more outreach for the Arab IGF, and by outreach, we mean we are looking at simple messages for the normal public that can actually reach most of the community in the Arab region. Thank you very much.
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you very much. Colombian IGF.
>> COLOMBIA: Thank you. In Colombia this year was our third IGF. And I want to share with you the challenges that we identified this year and from the Colombian IGF. The first one is to become a reference space in the local discussion on issues related to Internet Governance. The development of training spaces for young people and initiates, we are very happy this year we have five young representatives Colombian participating in the global IGF. We want to extend that. Bringing the national Forum and the Colombian IGF group to different regions where there is no presence, and bring representatives from the regions to the national Forum. A permanent invitation in the search of more participants, especially, again, young people and small and medium sized enterprises from the private sector that we believe it's very little participation at this stage.
Identifying in other key ways that bring benefits of participating in IGF. Maintain independence and plurality of interest and expand and maintain remote participation in the event. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Let me fill in while we are dealing with our remote speaker. We are going to go to Asia‑Pacific next and I want to go through the speakers that I have and do a time check. I have Asia‑Pacific, and I'm going to do a bit more of a tour of the world. I will go to see dig, Brazil, and if Brazil's mic is not working they will type in their statement. And then I will come, please, to Portugal and Germany. And I have the U.S., IGF‑USA. Got you. And then we are going to need to wrap, I think, and move to our next session. There anybody else besides those I have named that have a burning opportunity if you are a coordinator and you will look to see if there is anybody besides Brazil. German youth. Okay.
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: This is the secretary from the Asia‑Pacific IGF. I want to echo and amplify the messages we had from our central Asian colleague Artem and Mark with UKIGF the importance of youth participation in national, regional and global IGF. We are lucky that we had our seventh meeting in Taipei. And at every single meeting we also had a youth IGF. And this is very much driven and coordinated by the youth themselves on issues that matter the most and that is really important. So just basic three points on why it's so important. Not only is the youth now that Mark mentioned we need to look at challenges, Internet Governance, why that should matter to them.
It should be we need to build capacity to empower them to speak on issues that really affect them. The second point is motivation. They need to see that what they are saying and what they are concerned about makes an impact on the policies that will absolutely affect them in the future. The third point is continuous participation.
We can't just have a youth just come to an annual meeting, say what they need to say and then go away and for the rest of the year they don't know what's going to go on. So there needs to be tons of these and continuous engagement of the youth delegates, of the youth participation so that is my three main points on that.
>> ANJA GENGO: Moving to SEEDIG, Sarina.
>> SEEDIG: Thank you Anja. I will be brief. At SEEDIG we have two main objectives the first is engaging local community and the second is bringing voices from the region the global level. We have challenges with achieving both objectives and in meeting those challenges we count a lot on the support of the MAG, the IGF Secretariat and on UNDESA. We thank you for the support that has been provided and we kindly ask you to continue this support.
With youth within the IGF Secretariat helping us coordinate among each other not in a he negative way but as it has been done so far, with the MAG liaison position we have found that to be useful if in coordinating and helping the IGF with getting input from the local and national and regional IGFs and from UNDESA has it had been said it would bring us more credibility at the regional level if we have presence in our events. It's a bit difficult at times to explain what you are trying to do if you don't have support from someone higher than yourself. Thank you.
>> ANJA GENGO: Anna, Portugal IGF.
>> PORTUGAL: Youth is something we are not working very much on that, but we will do something from next year onward definitely. So it's something that now we are attaching lots of importance, but our main challenge with the six years that we have of experience with our national IGF is that in Portugal it was a bit difficult for people to understand the difference between the several stakeholders.
So for people in Portugal it was like Governments and Civil Society. And it was very difficult to make them understand that Civil Society was one of the several stakeholders here. So nowadays we don't have so much involvement from the private sector and from the Civil Society. So we have a strong engagement from the Government, from the technical community, but the private sector it's only telecoms sometimes and Civil Society no.
So it's something I'm thinking about since last year that perhaps bearing in mind that we have this network, that perhaps we could use this network to serve the interests of our several initiatives. So I acknowledge that the Civil Society and the private sector they are very strong in some countries and in some regional initiatives and I would like to ask them to use their own networks to make a linkage with our Civil Society and private sector, the content companies, et cetera, to make them aware of the importance of Internet Governance because it's very difficult because they are only thinking on the private sector on profit, et cetera, so they don't understand why they should be so much involved in the Internet Governance and Civil Society is more for the poverty, et cetera.
So, again, it's very difficult. So if the Civil Society in the private sector, they will make this connection with ours maybe we will have two good things. It's the connection between our national initiative and other National Initiatives and they will bring us some experience and knowledge. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: As the time keeper I'm going to start turning the alarm on.
>> ANJA GENGO: Anna, thank you. I would like to try Manuel from Brazil IGF. He is with us online.
>> DIEGO CANABARRO: I am Diego Canabarro, I work as adviser for Internet steering committee in Brazil.
>> ANJA GENGO: Can you try speaking. I am going to read later Diego's message. Let me move to the youth IGF of Germany. Can we have a microphone here?
>> SARAH FRATIF: Thank you. Sarah Fratif from the youth IGF. I'm excited that I'm hearing you all of the NRIs talking about youth engagement and youth participation for the future. I'm really thankful that you are aware of this topic and this participation. So I'm part of the youth observatory which is a platform created for and by youth in order to promote the youth participation, but active participation in the Internet Governance system. So if you want to know how to engage and promote the youth participation in your future IGFs, I am really available to speak WITH YOU. SO THANK YOU.
>> ANJA GENGO: The youth observatory.
>> MODERATOR: Do the order again, please.
>> ANJA GENGO: USA.
>> SHANE TEWS: Shane Tews, Chair of the US IGF. One of the things we had multiple Government agencies since we don't have a Ministry of Communications in the United States, that engage both in our steering committee and working groups in both the coordination phase and as participants, so it was a very good year for us with, we had the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Commerce, the Department of State. Our Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission and the CTO of the Department of Defense that actually attended our planning meetings along with Civil Society and our youth that were sometimes remote and our business interests. So it was a very healthy year for us and the work out, the breakout groups were exceptionally attended so we were excited about the format working in a lot of the new attendance we had this year.
>> MODERATOR: I will ask Shane a quick question because she has been the Co‑Chair before, I was the catalyst for several years, but, Shane, can you make a comment about the experience you have had at IGF‑USA in the drawing power of having those multiple agencies who not only speak, but then they actually participate even though they are high level, they participate in workshops. Could you say a quick thing about that, because I think we are hearing a lot about that challenge?
>> SHANE TEWS: IANA was a big issue, but Internet of Things was very large for us, how we manage information flow in the United States on the Internet as far as having the Federal Trade Commission engaged because we had more people looking at how consumers were not only consuming information, but abiding by the guidance of information flow and any challenges they were having. We had people that were front and centre in our Government agencies that were engaged in this.
The Department of Defense was sort of interesting for us, but they stayed very committed to the progress as well as the Federal Communications Commission and then having Homeland Security. And having them hear directly from the participants, you know, Civil Society, and the business constituency and our youth organisations.
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you, Shane. Germany IGF.
>> GERMANY: Thank you very much. I would like to congratulate the Secretariat in the position of Anja and also Marilyn for achieving a coordination that is creating, that is making possible both diversity while also accountability. I'm hear with my Co‑Chair, with my Co‑Chair from the German steering committee and we were here last year, and we already took a lot of inspiration based on that diversity saying what are the different models that are existing out there for our German IGF that led us to new improvements this year, and we are taking again this year a lot of new inspiration from this different models that we are seeing from other NRIs.
For us, this diversity is key to keep innovating and getting inspiration from other countries and other cultures and see what we can take into our own initiative. I would also like to support the point also made by SEEDIG with regards to the liaison that we have at the MAG. One of the things that we have as secretaries or many of us are secretaries of the National Initiatives, original initiatives and we cannot stick to any stakeholder group because we sort of are neutral positions that have to moderate between all stakeholder groups to make sure that the process is not flawed. It's inclusive and it's transparent. So we can either identify as a Civil Society, as private sector or anything else.
So what I wonder if we could create, perhaps, an additional stakeholder group at the MAG. And send the MAG member that is representing precisely this sort of new stakeholder group, and perhaps it would be a good idea if the NRIs could select this new stakeholder group, this representative of the new stakeholder group and send it into the MAG. I think it could be a very nice way to sort of create a better link to the MAG and create this ideal support with the MAG, the IGF Secretariat position and the interaction between all NRIs. Thank you very much.
>> ANJA GENGO: We will move Togo IGF. Keep the presentations to one minute.
>> TOGO: First of all, I want to thank you all for the support, especially for the Togo figure. This year was ‑‑ IGF. This year was our fifth IGF but it was very difficult to get the Government participation into our IGF. I think this year was the first time that we have them in the discussion. It's true that we use more unofficial channels to get the Government involved in the discussion, and I would like to ask the Secretariat, the U.S. Secretariat if they can actually help us, help us in terms of the Government involvement maybe by sending a letter, I don't know. Use a channel kind of pressure, you know, on those institutions to bring them on the table. Because when you go to them and explain it to them, they themself they don't know and it's quite difficult building our own capacity and trying to build some other people's capacities quite difficult. So I would like to ask that.
The second point, the youth participation. I would like if the Secretariat can help us I don't know if it could be an online course of one week during the IGF so we can provide training to the youth like the Diplo course on line so they can know more about the IGF because as I mentioned it is difficult to build our own capacity and at the same time building others capacity. So that's my point. Thank you.
>> ANJA GENGO: We are taking inputs. We will be discussing inputs. Let me move to Georgia IGF.
>> GEORGIA: I want to continue IGF my friend, and in regard enrollment or representatives of IGF Secretariat for this first point and another point for assessment. Here assessment may be, we will kindly ask you for assessment of ourselves how it's going. Everything is okay or not. That's it. Thank you.
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you so much. And now we have Diego from Brazil that is present on line, but Abdul Dulel will read his message. Diego Canabarro, from Brazil IGF. He said I am Diego. First of all, I explained before due to personal problem I had to stay in Brazil. My friends from Brad I'll who are in Guadalajara are involved with the administration that runs in parallel. Second, Brazil shares the same ‑‑ of other projects presented today how to get expressive representative from the private sector and in 2016 we align the permanent work of CGA that particular stakeholder consultant chamber. It is to provide information, knowledge, and guidance that the Committee on specialized uses in the Forum. With broader participation, I will be happy to share such experience with friends and the room in 2017. We also reach out to the world social Forum in order to sensitize more traditional stakeholder in the importance of connecting the Internet agenda with other policy and developmental tracks.
We as a global focal point for more task oriented workshop not only among ourselves but among ourselves and networks that we all have. One of our main challenges is multistakeholder. As Portugal we are Portuguese speaking country and we need to think of ways of creating links between our committee and other. Thank you.
>> ANJA GENGO: I think this is what we had in the cue and if you agree, I would wrap up here because we are in the second segment.
>> MODERATOR: I want to thank all of you for really spontaneously agreeing to adjust our schedule. I really appreciate it, and I really want to also extend the appreciation to you and to Lynn for staying with us for this time. You have just heard a quick iteration that builds on the discussion on challenges and opportunities that we have been having for some time. Of course, we have the transcript. We will be talking more about this.
I can't say how much all of us appreciate your spending this much time with us. Would either you or Lynn like to make further comments before we go into the next segment? You are welcome to stay, but that's much more of a day‑to‑day agenda setting. So let me turn to you now.
>> JUWANG ZHU: Thank you, Marilyn, for giving us the floor again. I think I heard a lot of very useful comments and suggestions from colleagues. A few take-aways also follow up actions on my part and probably some on the part of the MAG Chair. You all mentioned talking about the MAG Chair that you would like to the extent possible a MAG member to be present at your meeting. I am in favor of that. I'm supportive of that, but I know that it's the Chair's decision to help make that happen, and we will be working very closely with the MAG Chair to achieve that objective.
The UN presence, yes, I'm aware of that, and we will certainly follow up working with both the IGF Secretariat colleagues and the other UN colleagues to see how we can support you. Physical participation is one way, and we will certainly go on discussing how to support you financially. As Anja said early on that we can't make promises, but the promise I can make is that we will study this very carefully. We hear you, and we will follow up on that.
And, again, in that spirit, we will be discussing the possibility of writing to your Government or other relevant authorities, officials to recommend their participation and we will, of course do some due diligence. Georgia very well aptly put the word assessment, but for those who are registered with us who are working with us, with we don't have problems in writing to recommend the Government participation. This is in my view the minimum we should do, but we will be doing more and this is just a start for us. And I'm very optimistic about working with you together.
It's a win/win situation for all of us. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: I think Anja wanted to make a quick comment.
>> ANJA GENGO: I want to say thank you on my behalf, but I'm sure I'm speaking on behalf of the NRI colleagues for a concrete and clear message that we are all together one team that we want to achieve the biggest possible benefits from the IGF. One concrete note that I wanted to mention as it was raised here a couple of times, I think the Secretariat was supporting as much as we could the NRIs within the current capacity. We have been asked to speak on many of the national and regional IGFs and I have to give credit to Chengetai to the mag Chair, to Marilyn that were speaking on a lot of national and regional IGFs on line trying to encourage the community to engage and increase the participation on their national and regional IGFs.
>> On the last point, we were happy to engage. When they were on 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, in the morning I preferred audio calls to video calls, but there were a couple of video calls. There is actually very little to say after the excellent remarks from Mr. Zhou and Anja. From the MAG perspective as MAG Chair we are listening very carefully. The NRIs are critically important to the shared objectives we all have and we share so many core principles and values that I think it simply a matter of finding the right working modalities if I can use a UN term. So I'm anxious to see the rest of the discussion from today. We certainly have the open mic and taking stock session later on today. Half will be focused on the retreat and half in open mic but because they are both in the open mic format it is the community who will determine what the topics are and how that is fed.
We will be looking at all of the transcripts from all of the relevant sessions over the coming weeks and working with Anja and all of you and the Secretariat to move these forward to thank you. This is an excellent program. And thank you for the flexibility and Marilyn's very able leadership to turn this session around on such short notice. Thank you. (Lynn).
(Applause).
>> MODERATOR: As I said, you are welcome to stay, but I'm afraid we are going into the part where you are really going to see me driving toward the end. Oh, look, they are leaving now.
For the rest of the session, I want us to treat this as getting our selves all on the same page and understanding the importance of the material that was developed in the IGF retreat. I realize that we had a few people who were able to be there. It was not allowed to follow it online and I know that many of us would have if we could have, and I think it would have been actually my feeling is that there perhaps was not enough insight in the room about the real work and evolution of the NRIs.
Their statements in the present document that I frankly feel are not factual in that they misconvey the depth of engagement that already exists between the NRIs and the IGF. And I say that by pointing out that Mark, you know, we have MAG members who are both heavily involved in NRIs, and involved in the, so we have MAG, and then we heavily involved in a national or regional. We have very active participants in the NRIs who in their capacity engage in workshop submissions, who develop special sessions such as the SEEDIG session. We have, of course, the booths that have been a consistent part and very visible part such as the EuroDIG and the Dutch IGFs. We have the youth activity.
So what we are struggling with here is we need better marketing and visibility of what we are already doing even as we work to strengthen it. What comes across to me in the IGF retreat document is although it was open for public comment, I'm so happy Chengetai is back, although it was open for public comment, very few of you had time to pay attention to that because you were working on delivering your annual event.
To there were about eight different commenters and not enough diversity. A key suggestion I have is Anja has done a highlighted version of that report which highlights the Paragraphs in the report which reference the NRIs. The comments received are shorter document. You have both of those sent to you last night by me, and then Anja sent the highlighted document this morning.
You are not going to get a lot of time at the microphone, but I would like to hear feedback on the following suggestion. The NRIs discussed this morning the IGF retreat document and acknowledge that many of them have not had a chance to take consultation with their communities on the references to the NRIs that are contained in the document due to other conflicts, not due to lack of interest.
Therefore, the NRIs suggest, the NRIs propose is that the IGF retreat document be left open for further examination by the NRIs within their national or subregional or regional communities and further comments be accepted at least from the NRI communities who feel that they have not had sufficient opportunity to analyze, consider and comment.
I am not ‑‑ I just want to take a general discussion on that. That does not mean that any of you should not go individually to the microphone, but there will be roughly a thousand people in that room, and I think if you agree with this and want the opportunity to provide comments, in particular in light of the discussion we just had I would like to see a show of hands if you think it would be a good idea for us to present a general request for that kind of extension of the opportunity to comment? Show of hands on people who want more time.
You are not making a commitment to submit a commitment, you are making a commitment to ask for an extension to others can submit a comment.
>> HISHAM ABOULYAZED: It's more of a question if we may. Hisham Aboulyazed, based in Egypt, IGF Secretariat. I admit I'm coming a bit late to the discussion on this point. I want to understand if there has been to the implications to such a request. Will this give a reason to other communities to make similar requests to keep the document open for comments by others as well? This is just a question. Marilyn, I will comment about this on the record so everybody will be able to read it. This retreat was organized really not by the MAG. Or the Secretariat, but organized more by DESA. And there was a call for suggestions of nominations of names, and it was, you know, it wasn't possible to have perhaps the kind of broader bottom up consultation that we would have all called for.
There was a timing issue in order to put a two‑day event back‑to‑back with a MAG issue. There is in the MAG discussion about the retreat proposal, and in the open consultation discussion which is much broader, there were many, many suggestions that that this small group is not setting the agenda and they are not defining the future, that in fact all they were was basically a brain storming initial, you know, getting ideas out. I will tell you I know in great detail because I was strongly on the record as a MAG member about this, and raised the issue on behalf of the NRIs as well.
So I don't think we are alone in thinking that this document needs further diagnosis, but what I'm concerned about is the idea of a 45 minute open mic when I know from moderating open mics here that you will only get 10 to 12 speakers that's not a balanced consultation. So I will turn to Chengetai to respond if he wishes to that. I think that the NRIs retreat document needs to be left open for further comment. I'm not asking permission. I'm asking if he wants to respond.
>> We just listen to the community, I mean, if you feel that way, you can say it and then we will take it under consideration and come back to you.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. So I'll put something into the transcript. Anja and I will clean up what I put in the transcript, send it back out, and what I would propose is that Anja and I just read it. May I ask does anyone else plan to go to the microphone on this particular topic that wants to, the IGF retreat that wants to share a point of view?
We also have a session ‑‑ we do have support from Brazil. Fantastic. We also have a 45‑minute taking stock session. How many you have been in ‑‑ let me say it differently. How many of you have not participated in a taking stock session? Okay. Chengetai, do you want me to explain taking stock or would you like to ‑‑ taking stock was developed by the MAG as an idea that we would think about lessons learned and then try to capture the, you know, what we have learned that the MAG needs to be taking consideration. There will be a written online opportunity to submit comments on taking stock. I know that every IGF has lots of challenges, but every IGF so far has been the best IGF ever. And we have, I want you guys to think about if you have comments to make that you absolutely individually feel that you must make to think about the positive as well as the challenging thoughts you want to share.
I have been in more than one taking stock session when I was personally embarrassed by my business colleagues who focused primarily first on the things that didn't work well. We have been so graciously hosted in my own view on behalf of the NRIs is that, wow, did Mexico IGF do well by us! We got a booth! We got great timing thanks to the Secretariat for our session! We got a special room. We have had so much help from the local hosts.
We had voluntarily the host country Chair changed his schedule to be the host country Chair for our NRI session because Mexico has an NRI. And I just, for me, I just want to highlight the opportunity for taking stock to be a chance for us to say thank you as well as then look ahead to use the online consultation if we feel we need to provide some other feedback and I think we do need to provide other feedback like we are going to need a room twice this size next year, Chengetai.
So think about that and think about when you want to go to the microphone during the taking stock session. It is about the entire program. It could be the idea that you in your individual capacity in participating were having too many conflicts between needing to be all of the subject topics you were interested in were competing with each other. It could be that you were unable to really to understand what a work happen versus what a Dynamic Coalition was, it could be anything relevant to you. One thing I would ask you to think about if you came to the newcomers session that Anja and Bianco planned, if you came to that and you have feedback on that as an NRI or as a newcomer attendee, I think that would be really helpful to hear in the session as well.
Anja.
>> ANJA GENGO: Thank you. What I wanted to say is just kind of making retrospective of what we did starting from January this year, I think we did a lot, and everything started after Brazil, and the stock taking session especially the sending the written inputs I think was very important. As you would remember, we ran several public consultations and meetings in order to put together all of our requests and demands to the global IGF community and accommodations as well, and we did, and that was kind of our work plan for 2016. Now, summing up almost at the end of the year what we achieved, I think we achieved a lot, and I think we can thank to that stock taking document submitted by the NRIs as that was something that came from the community. So if you would remember we called for the main session, we called for the tool kit, we will have the tool kit by the end of the year, we called for the info manual. We have info manual January of next year. I think the Secretariat really showed concretely that we want the support, but as I said at the beginning, we operate with certain capacity which are probably not enough to accommodate now 79 NRIs, but this is why we are sitting here and we need to be a bit creative and to say what concretely we want. So the open mic session that will be today, I hope I will see many of you cueing up and saying we are the NRI, this is what we do and this is what we want.
>> MODERATOR: So I'm just going to spill the beans on a piece of information you should be thinking about. At present Anja's project ends in February of 2017. And I think there will be a revolt Chengetai is not with us for next year. Can I see a show of hands on that?
>> ANJA GENGO: This is a bit ‑‑ I will say that there is the understanding within the Secretariat that it all seems to me within DESA, we know what is on the mind of the MAG Chair that the NRIs will be supported so whether there will be me or somebody else in any case you will have your own voice which I think is the most important here.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Even though the UN, the deputy UNDESA did not reemphasize the point that Lauren reached about creating the next stakeholder group, he did not mention it, but I don't know whether it's something we can see at the stock taking to raise, you know, coordinators. We can't identify ourselves as one of the stakeholder groups, so if that would be taken into consideration, one. After the African IGF we raised the question to Chengetai to ask the linkages between the national and in my own case sub national to national to regional or subregional and to the global IGF. That linkage is still very hazy, even at the national levels our stakeholders don't understand the linkages. So I don't know whether that type of thing needs to be raised at the stock taking?
>> MODERATOR: Mary, as the substantive coordinator appointed by the MAG Chair I hope Chengetai is okay with me taking these two. I heard Lamena's comment, and I would suggest that you think about when you raise a comment as an individual NRI, you have to realize that there needs to be more socialization of the ideas across all of the NRIs before there could be a concrete consideration. So that would be one point I would make.
I also think that you need to keep in mind something that those of us who have been around forever like Mark and myself and a few others remember that the stakeholder groups were created in a different purpose. I also think what I heard, leave aside the word stakeholder, what I heard was a call for strengthening the engagement and thinking about the idea of a more identified liaisonning between the NRI group. You already have a number of MAG members. You have a substantive coordinator working with Anja.
I think you should be thinking about that creating a new stakeholder group, stakeholder groups are intended to be a balance against another group and I don't actually think that that is exactly what you want. I think you, and I think we need to discuss it more broadly to see across, remember we are not, we don't represent a single region and not all regions are as well developed as others.
So I think it's a topic that should go into more discussion both on the list and on our calls. The second comment that I want to suggest is if you are new as an NRI, I'm going to ask Anja right after the, she takes three days off to sleep straight through to find the transcript from our substantive session last year from IANA Kerkland's discussion on this issue. There are legal issues about signing a MOU between organisations that do not have a legal structure.
And laws differ from country to country and they differ region. Signing a legal document with the UN is a very complicated process as I know because I signed a legal document to be, in order to be a member of the trust fund as did Finland, as did a few others. So I think that I would just ask you to think about right now there are informal ways to establish relationships.
If you are establishing a relationship that is Government to Government, it is sometimes tricky outside of certain legal jurisdictions. And I think you also ought to be thinking about whether you really want a binding agreement. I will tell you right now I'm dealing with three NRIs where the Government leadership changed, and the support and view of the Government is totally different on the role than it was last year. Last year Government acted on an equal footing. This year they would be in charge.
So, on the other hand, I think, Mary, if I might ask you to speak very briefly about the concept that you are working on which I call almost an exchange of communicae about what functions a group might perform. We sign in, I'm sorry, Jemison, but at IFICTA we sign MOUs that lay out the expectations from one group for another. They are an industry group, but there may be other kinds of vehicles, but could you speak about the charter idea you have? As we need to wrap up. It has been absolutely fantastic I think for all of us last year at the substantive session. You all talked about the fact that you didn't know each other. You sometimes walked past each other in the hall if you came from different regions, we didn't have a network, we didn't communicate on an ongoing basis.
You called for certain improvements, and think we have really make major work on that. Now, I wanted you to wear a pin this year, you noticed I failed on that. And I'm not sure that's the right thing, but I just want to say a quick word about the booth and the experience that I saw in the booth. We are not going to dwell on it because we are going to go on. There was discussion last year, not everybody was in support of the NRIs having a shared booth and I think that my observation about the booth is it was a pilot, but a major benefit from it, and I will turn to you and Mary, is there was a gathering point.
And it wasn't just that we could put material out. We didn't have somebody in it all of the time. I will tell you some of you are better at marketing than others. I will be running training programs later, but the idea here of having a place, an identity, and I think next year a major improvement that Anja and I have talked about and maybe we will spend some of DESA's money, will be to have professional signage.
The idea of a gathering point, having your name out there, but also a place that you could go and work because several of you needed a work space so real quick, one minute I will turn to you about the booth because I think you and Mary were the major captains of it.
>> AUDIENCE: Musab from Chad. We have more visitor and people like the booth because they see in their eyes national, regional and we are also the youth IGF, and we met with people from Algeria, I take their business card that I can send to Anja and they listen in. And we met people from Tunisia and from USA, from (Indiscernible) from USA he want to be involved in USA IGF. And people from Mali Alonzo. It benefit because we have material from the Portugal for Armenia and youth IGF we put and people come and discuss with us and we give them materials. It's a very good experience for me to be in charge of people and to share information together. Thank you. That's all.
>> MODERATOR: Mary, do you want to say something?
>> MARION JANSEN: Yes, it was a very good experience and one thing I want to encourage you that since not all of us can have a booth, if you have your publications next year. If you have publications and you can drop it there, anybody can come and pick up your publications this is from Georgia, from Togo, and some came, asked questions and we were able to, especially those that don't run, they were impressed that they will go and start their own national IGF. It was a rally point and more especially this is a first from Africa.
It became a meeting point for us. So we are all meeting there. And the only other thing I want to say is that we should have a bigger poster, not just the small fewer.
>> MODERATOR: We will.
>> MARION JANSEN: And by the time Anja gathered all of the happenings, you know, if we can applaud and have the television there it would have showed at that point some of the national or regional IGFs, some have large crowd, others have small crowd, so we could show them that. All in all, I think it was worth having the booth.
>> MODERATOR: Anything else before Anja reads the list of the by Latvias that she and I have had.
>> AUDIENCE: It was just one day at the booth supporting and bringing information to people coming around. I agree that the poster with the mob of NRI initiatives will help a lot to bring people in and provide information, and highlighting that the young people also came from youth NRI initiatives to support and to bring information about their initiative.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. So I'm going to read quickly just the list of bylats. We had with Bolivia, Venezuela, Karatu, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Namibia, Estonia, Libya and Congo. Not bad. So we are going to be setting up an informal working session just with the brand new folks so that we will be doing some coaching on background, et cetera. They will also sign up for your regular calls, but they have asked to have their own initial working sessions to, so they can start getting started. So you will be seeing a bunch of new names coming into your calls.
I want to thank Anja for as often as possible scheduling your calls at a time that doesn't compete with my day.
>> ANJA GENGO: With you are early morning, 4:00 a.m.
>> MODERATOR: We are trying to do two calls back to back different days in different time zones. We are making that effort because you said you wanted it, but here is my feedback. I get up at 2:00 a.m. in the morning to do those calls and most of you are not on them. So please fill in the survey so I know if I need to get up at 2:00 a.m.
I am happy to do it and would love to do it if it makes it possible for those of you in challenging time zones but let's make sure we are meeting your needs. We are going to wrap here. I just want you all ‑‑
>> ANJA GENGO: I approximate missed some of the ‑‑ promised some of the colleagues, I asked you what were the feedback that you received after the main session so I will share my feedback. I have to say that the community was surprised. They were not aware, first of all, there are so many of us. They were even more surprised when I said that it's only almost 50% of what we are. They liked the structure of the session, though they said that it was too long, but then again, it was very indicative that people stayed for 3.5 hours in the room. So that kind of makes it interesting.
A lot of stakeholders that are dealing with certain specific issues on Internet Governance approached me. For example, there was one colleague I think Martin that is dealing with cybersecurity, so he told me, can you connect me with the colleagues because many of the colleagues raised the issue of cybersecurity, but what I was hearing was so different across countries and across regions, and I think that was one of our objectives to show that the Internet Governance is so different and that's why we need as many of the IGFs working from the community and bringing inputs to the global IGF. If you want to share quickly something that is maybe different than I received, then please go ahead. After that I will be going to the booth. I will be typing there so come to there to chat.
>> MODERATOR: Does anyone else want to share feedback from our main session?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I also think this main session was very good in respect of giving us visibility, showing the political and also the support on the executive level. Maybe a proposal for next year could be and I raised it in some other foras already that all of the regions, the six or five regions in the world meet on day zero, coordinate among themselves, to find common ground of topics and then we have only six speakers in such a main session. This would have two advantages. First of all, people can get informed on day zero what is happening in their region and other people can go to regional foras and see what is happening in another region. So participants of the IGF, ordinary participants go more informed into the IGF, and might understand a little bit better in workshops, plenaries or whatever why people from Africa, from South America, are arguing the way they are because they heard about the main issues in this regional Forum already.
And secondly, it would, I mean, it's a multistakeholder process in itself because the region itself has to somehow coordinate and agree on sort of common ground. We are from the EuroDIG we are trying to do this for Europe and we were asking about the three hot topics from each country. We did it last year, we did it this year. We have quite a good feedback in this respect and we will publish it on the website, but I think these metrics of hot topics among one region could really help us to identify common ground topics which could be then brought up to the global IGF and with this we would avoid having 30 speakers from 30 national or regional IGFs but just having six speakers and then could open up the discussion about those topics.
I think this would be more interactive in the future, and for the EuroDIG, we will apply for a European Forum next year on day zero, and I would invite the other regions to maybe do the same and try to coordinate among the region, and agree on one of three topic that's then could be brought up as a message to the global IGF.
>> MODERATOR: Please take that to the list. You did propose that and you also put it in your comments. I will just say to you that your input was taken into account on the survey and as you know, the consensus did not support that. But take it back to the list, and see what kind of support it gets from the other regionals, but also from the nationals, but do, I ask all of you, please recognize that every region is very different, and the sub regions are very different.
Let me take a comment here.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, Marilyn. We have a very interesting meeting with the Ambassador in the press room last night IANA. I would like to remark what I told him. I think that a very important role of the Secretariat is to continue talking to our Governments about what we are doing here. So the Governments that actually are working with the National Initiatives continue working with them, and those who are not working get some motivation to get involved. But we need this kind of information from the Secretariat and maybe from other bodies in the UN to several labels of Government because sometimes the information remains only in the national Ambassadors of every country, but we have a complex structure, we have coordinators, and these guys are the real, the people that are getting involved with us and they even doesn't know about this kind of initiative. So I suggest that the information get more wide reach. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: I will just say to you guys, we are wrapping up, I have spoken to eight national IGFs or subregional IGFs. Every one of the requests I have gotten has included this issue. And also called to me specifically to talk about multistakeholder on an equal footing and pushing the engagement of business and Government.
So why don't we do this. We have a lot to digest, we have other things to go to. I want you to just understand how appreciative I can say as a MAG member and other MAG members are here that, you know, there is no lack of interest on the MAG, and as a matter of fact, once Anja was appointed we have actually included, we meet informally with whoever is there, and we tried it during the MAG meeting so please do understand there is a lot of interest, it's just we need to, I really agree with everything that Lorena, that Sandra have said and others of you have said. We need to keep strengthening the visibility of the national, subregional and regional IGFs.
And let me ask you to give yourselves a round of applause.
And it's probably best if we leave before we get ejected. (Concluded at 1157).