The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> CHAFIC DAVA: Good afternoon, everyone. I believe you can hear me. I have a distortion. Good afternoon, everyone. On behalf of the Lebanon IGF and of the Canadian Registration Internet Authority, I would like to welcome you all to this workshop entitled multi‑stakeholder internet governance from best of practices in two countries, Lebanon and IGF.
The main critical question for today will be how to drive multi‑stakeholder and get diverse voices around one table in two different environments, Canada and Lebanon? I believe the Canada and Lebanon is the best example to show that Lebanon as a developing country with its diversity and political complexity is still challenging, and its multi‑stakeholder progress towards inclusivity and collaboration. While Canada, with its robust and well‑established multi‑stakeholder approach is another example, and we'll hear from the experts that are with us today.
Before I start, thank you for CRIA and online participants and Sabrina, and for the Lebanon IGF secretary for their efforts and support to make this session happen. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Just to give you the importance of the session, we have the Ex‑Minister of Information for Lebanon here today. Let's see what's the difference between the Lebanese and Canadian path in the multi‑stakeholder environment.
Let me start ‑‑ I will not address you. Please, can you introduce yourselves so we can have some more time? I will start. We have online ‑‑ wait. I will not forget our two speakers online. We have Mirna Barbar and Maha Zouwayhed. David and Charles will be here onsite.
I will leave the floor to our Moderator, Dana Cramer. You can introduce the speakers and give an overview of how this session will go during this 90 minutes. Dane, I will give you the floor.
>> DANA CRAMER: Thank you for such a warm welcome. It's really great to see such a diversity of stakeholders in the room, and also, too, I think it's really inspiring that we're seeing your Lebanese colleagues who have also come as well. It's a wonderful show of support. I know we have some really great Canadians and those based in Canada in the room additionally.
I'm the online Moderator for this session. If you are online and have any questions, please feel free to post them into the chat. If you would like, I can read them out, or you can raise your hand, and we will work with technical support to unmute you where, if technical ‑‑ if there are any technical difficulties within the session for unmuting, we will read out your question from the chat to ensure that your perspective is brought into the room.
In terms of introducing the speakers, I think that everyone would probably be best at introducing themselves because they'll be able to identify too their stakeholder position and where they come to this topic as well. So I'll pass the microphone to Charles.
>> CHARLES NOIR: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Charles Noir, and I'm the Vice President of Community Investment, Policy, and Advocacy at CRIA, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority. Thrilled to be here in Saudi Arabia with you. Thank you to our hosts for this wonderful IGF.
I'll be speaking today as a Canadian, but from a technical operator perspective. CRIA runs the dot‑CA. We're CCTLD and been quite active in the multi‑stakeholder community and internet governance for some time. I'll hand it over to my colleague, David.
>> DAVID BEDARD: Thanks, Charles. I just want to echo what a great IGF this has been, and thank you to the government of Saudi Arabia. It's been wonderful, and thank you for everybody in the room and online.
My name is David Bedard, and I'm the internet governance manager at our industry department, which is ‑‑ it's a long name, but it's our Department of Innovation, science, and economic development Canada, and the acronym for that, which I might reference, is ISED. In my spot we are obviously a government stakeholder. We engage broadly with the community. We manage both our participation at ICANN, so I'm the government of Canada's representative at ICANN as well, and we lead on the IGF as well as feed inputs to our global affairs on the WSIS and broader government discussions. That's kind of where I'm coming at this discussion from.
>> CHAFIC CAYA: Thank you, David. Please, Mirna, go ahead.
>> MIRNA EL HAIJ BARBAR: My name is Mirna El Haij Barbar. I'm a program officer at ESCWA, working within the data corporation, data development program. I also reading the inclusion platform, and I witnessed actually the North of the Arab IGF as well as the Lebanon IGF.
>> CHAFIC CAYA: Thank you.
>> MAHA ZOUWAYHED: Hello, everyone. I am Maha Zouwayed. I represent the American University of Beirut. I work at the Office of Innovation and Transportation at the university. I currently handle the Innovation Center. I used to work in IT business development and was involved in many collaboration initiatives by the American University of Beirut. We represent the academic sector and, of course, I'll try to share some experience related to the national level collaborations in Lebanon.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you so much. We have the private stakeholders, technical, government, intergovernmental, academic and civil society. Thank you so much for being with us today.
My first question directly to Charles. To set the scene, give us an overview on the multi‑stakeholder approach in Canada and how CIRA is implementing this multi‑stakeholderism around or inside Canada to get all the stakeholders around one table?
>> CHARLES NOIR: Thanks for the question. As a technical operator in Canada, I've certainly noticed and benefited from a really active ecosystem within the internet governance community. In terms of some of what we're doing to engage, I think a lot of us around the room are doing, we're very active in the ICANN space, for example, as a technical operator where we're a member of the CCNSO, the Country Code Name Supporting Organization.
We sole sponsor of the Canadian IGF, so we're very active in the national, regional initiative space, which has been a real pleasure, particularly as we move into the WSIS process.
I would say that the global engagement that we do is very much reflected also in our domestic approach as well. We're very active not only in talking and working with registrars and registrees in the technical community across the country as the CA operator. We certainly are involved in policy processes along the way. That can include both legislation at the federal level and at the domestic level. Sorry. Federal and provincial levels.
Largely, I would say that we have a fairly healthy multi‑stakeholder environment in Canada. I feel that government in particular has been wide open to hearing from stakeholders. I feel that we've also been very lucky to have had an opportunity to convene and collaborate with other technical operators and organizations throughout the ecosystem. So overall I feel that the participation as a technical operator is going well. I know there are some challenges, and we might get into that in a bit, but largely, that's how we see ourselves playing in this ecosystem.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you so much, Charles. Can you give us ‑‑ provide us an overview of the Lebanon IGF and how you manage to support this national activity?
>> MIRNA EL HAIJ BARBAR: I would like to congratulate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting this year's IGF in such an outstanding manner. Unfortunately, I couldn't be with you due to personal commitments.
I'm also very grateful to the invitation to participate to this workshop. Thank you to you, Chafic, Sabrina, Dana. It's really important to be part of this important discussion.
Regarding actually the Lebanon Internet Governance Forum. It involves all the relevant stakeholders and provide an opportunity for open and inclusive dialogue. It also creates opportunities for knowledge‑sharing and exchange ideas on issues related to internet governance. The Lebanon IGF model full of actually the same structure and mechanisms that the United Nations approach actually suggests within its fundamental principles from transparency, inclusivity, and the multi‑stakeholder participation and specifically bottom‑up approach.
Now, regarding the role of in supporting the Lebanon IGF, I would like to mention, first of all, that ESCWA has been a key player in advancing internet governance not only at regional and national level, but also at the global arena. Actually, we were involved in the internet governance process since its inception in 2005 and 2006, and we are continuing to work on all these global processes.
So with its contribution at the global level and its leadership in launching the Arab IGF with 2012 with the League of Arab States and all the other stakeholders from all sectors in the Arab region, ESCWA actually extended its expertise to support the Lebanon IGF. Whereas actually while we recognize the need for a local platform for such an open dialogue on internet governance issues, ESCWA encouraged and supported and worked very closely with the main stakeholders in Lebanon, namely the Ministry of IT and many other representatives from the private sector, the technical community, academia, and NGOs in order to establish such a forum and actually that was launched in 2018, but the work took us between one year and two years before.
So in addition to providing technical assistance and facilitating consultations towards launching this forum, ESCWA also played an important role in drafting the Lebanon IGF charter and the related terms of reference, days on the fundamental principles of the U.N. This is to ensure actually a structured multi‑stakeholder and inclusive framework for the forum.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you for this overview. If gives us a picture how important is the collaboration not only between the stakeholders, but between the stakeholders and the international original organization.
From this I will ask David, the government perspective, how do you see the involvement of Canadian government in this multi‑stakeholder approach in Canada, and how will you deal with all these different opinions and visions from the different stakeholder groups?
>> DAVID BEDARD: Thanks, that's a great question. I'll first start off by saying that within sort of the multi‑stakeholder internet governance we add ISED employ a variety of different strategies in terms of bringing voices together. We see ourselves as a convenor, especially from the government, to get stakeholders around the table to hear their concerns hear their priorities and figure out ways that we can integrate some of those concerns and priorities into our work as we participate in various international forum like ICANN or the IGF or the ITU.
So domestically, when engaging in the multi‑stakeholder process, we aim to collaborate with other stakeholders directly. We work together to determine how to prepare our strategies collectively. So I think it's really important for us as a government to hear what our stakeholders have to say, especially when we're heading into multilateral spaces that may not be as open to other stakeholder inputs. So we really rely on them for meaningful input and engagement.
So one example of this engagement we have at ISED is Canadian preparatory committee calls before every ITU meeting and IGF so we can share some Canadian priorities and hear from our stakeholders to help inform our own Canadian positions on the ground. We have these before each and every meeting.
It's an opportunity to share best practices, to meet, talk about concerns, and just have an open and honest dialogue about their priorities and about where the government of Canada looks to push some of our priorities on the ground and how our stakeholders can help contribute to that process.
We're also working with our stakeholders to make this a bit more of an iterative process, so we do a lot of Conversing and engaging with our stakeholders before each and every meeting, but we're really trying to work on reporting out after the meeting is done to let our stakeholders know, if they're not able to participate in the meeting. If they're smaller, for instance. We want them to know how we've used their input on the ground as well. We want a feedback loop, a constant feedback loop, with our stakeholders.
We're extremely fortunate to have a wide range of experts in our internet governance space in Canada, and we need to engage and continue to engage with them, especially with the upcoming WSIS. We actually just had our kickoff meeting with our stakeholders last week. Some of the people in the room here were there to articulate some priorities that we see in the WSIS, to discuss how in Canada what we want to see out of that process. We really look forward to continuing engaging with them.
Those are some of the ways in which we collate some of the inputs in Canada. There's lots of work that we need to do in terms of making sure that it remains inclusive, and we get lots of smaller voices in the room from smaller organizations as well.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: I believe this is the first take‑away for the Lebanon IGF. I believe my colleague to have this coordination meeting with the ministry of ICT in Lebanon before these big meetings. Not to go in silence. Thank you, David. Interesting feedback from you.
I'll go to the academic stakeholder group. Maha, we know you'll be hosting one of the IGF sessions in the past. During the last two days here, we heard a lot that there is a lack in academic presence in the IGF discussions. So how will you be the American University of Beirut, one of the prestigious universities in the region, deal with this? How will you support the Lebanon IGF, and how we can encourage more academics to join this IGF discussions?
>> MAHA ZOUWAYHED: Thank you, Chafic. First, thank you for having me in this session. I'll start by speaking about AUB specifically. We have established mechanisms internally to keep engaging the academic community. As the Office of Innovation and Transformation, we have periodic meetings and designated communication channels. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is ruled out without the involvement of academics, and the best example was when we hosted the event.
Every year, in fact, when they are ‑‑ when we are planning Lebanese Internet Governance Forum, we always make sure to incorporate the academic part. Basically whenever we want to roll out any initiative or take strategic decision or initiative, we activate these channels. We make sure that the academic input is equally there as well as the business industry and technical input.
Did I answer your question?
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you. Yes, sure. I will go back to the online participants. We have about 20 online participants. Dana, if they have any comments, any feedbacks from the online, please, let's hear their voices. I will come back to the room to see if there is any feedback for this first round.
>> DANA CRAMER: We don't have feedback at the moment. However, for those online, if you would like to begin typing in any questions or unmuting yourselves or raising hand to be unmuted ‑‑ my apologies ‑‑ then we would love to hear from you. We'll just give five seconds to collect thoughts and then move on.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: I know the culture here is they're shy to take the microphone. Please put your feedback and comments in the chatroom for the Zoom. Thank you.
Same here for the audience. If you have any feedback or comment, please raise your hand, and we'll have your feedback. Especially coming from IC colleagues from U.S. I see colleagues. Canada. Please, go ahead.
>> Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Chafic, for organizing this session. I am very fortunate because my background covers two continents. Originally from Egypt, but I'm a Canadian, so I have the pleasure and honor to participate in this community and also in the Canadian IGF as part of the learning program committee.
I have the pleasure to participate with ISED and the process for ITUT meetings, which is very important because technology and innovation needs to be aware of the developments and have a position to protect the investment, protect the internet as an open and secure and trustworthy platform.
On the WSIS side, it's very, very important, and congratulations to Canadian government to set up this process, to engage multi‑stakeholders from different backgrounds, from academia, technical community, business community, and individual experts to convey their priorities and impressions about the WSIS process. I think this is a model to be followed by other governments, as we have discussed in the previous session on the Arab region preparation and priorities for the WSIS.
It's important to have a common regional priority and agenda, but also individual stakeholders are encouraged to approach their national delegations, national governments for the priority on national level. Ultimately the multilateral process will set the negotiations and set the priorities for the global process. So this kind of engagement with ‑‑ direct engagement with the government is very much needed. Thank you for that.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Well said. This is what I would like to take from this workshop as experience from Canada, the government of Canada, how they work with all these stakeholders. Dana.
>> DANA CRAMER: Speaking of another stakeholder group, Dana had noted in the chat AUB has hosted two times on their campus for students. It's important to bring in the youth element as well. Thank you for posting your comments. If you there are any others, please post them, and we will address them accordingly.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you so much. I will talk about the support of governments to this multi‑stakeholder approach. Back to you, David. Please, tell us more how the Canadian government work with the different stakeholder groups from academia to private to technical to civil society. What is your magic, let's say, tool to get these people together?
>> DAVID BEDARD: Thanks, Chafic. I think it's a good question. We do have ‑‑ I'll start from we have formal processes, like Hossein was saying where we have the Canadian preparatory processes. They're very formal.
Sometimes we don't always reach everybody that we should, especially smaller players in this space. Particularly, you know, we like to see youth at the table, and now they're very well‑engaged, or they're very well‑organized now. It makes it a little bit easier. We can reach out to Dana to get youth involved and others involved, but we also rely on our larger stakeholders. CIRA has the ‑‑ that's a great initiative that we know where to go to so they can collate other smaller organizations, and we can hear some of their voices who ‑‑ we're not on the ground, so we don't have the same reach as some people do that play in this space every single day and live and breathe some of these issues.
It's really incumbent on us to casually and informally reach out it as many stakeholders as we can outside of more formal processes in order to get as many voices around the table as possible. That's one element.
The only other thing that I'll add is that the relationship element is really important for government of Canada. We really work very closely with our Global Affairs Department, and we really try to institute a no wrong doors approach. It's important for government officials to be out at things like the IGF, and at IT meetings, and expanding our networks and putting faces to names so people know who they can ‑‑ who in the government. It's not just a scary bureaucracy, but they can develop relationships with them, and that's an important element as well.
As much as I know everybody's resources are an issue, but as long as you can try to make the case to get out there and meet people, it's really important as well.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, David. I believe that makes me a little bit more comfortable with myself because when in this region we ‑‑ when we talk about internet governance, we say, yeah, it's the government lead. Canada, the government leads, which is good. That means we are not doing things in the wrong way.
Going back to Maha, just to make it for you because you hosted twice the IGF, not one. Tell us about the experience. How you were supported and continue to support the IGF as an academia.
>> MAHA ZOUWAYHED: Well, in fact, we enjoy a very good relationship with multi‑stakeholder groups in Lebanon, including governmental sector and civil society. In fact, working in the Lebanese Internet Governance Forum group really added a lot to our resources for identifying priorities. Also to bring value from what we are doing because we have a lot of other multi‑stakeholder initiatives going on in Lebanon.
For example, we support the dot‑LB domain. We have a consortium. That is a consortium of eight universities. We have international collaborations that have national impact, such as HBC for Lebanon. We try to blend all this and deploy it to integrate with the initiatives that the Internet Governance Forum is trying to support.
All the way it's always with academic part. For example, when we did the National Cybersecurity Day, it was ‑‑ the content was planned between our academic faculty members in collaboration with CIRN and multiple colleagues from Lebanese Chapter in IGF. Also, we make sure that it is sustainable. We always bring back this feedback and engagement to academia, and we try to foster and simulate innovation to this end, so we constantly incorporate this into our innovation programs and priorities, academic research and projects.
One other thing we did is, for example, when we wanted to implement the digital accessibility on the national level, we also resorted to our colleagues at the Internet Governance Forum, and it was incorporated in several sessions and capacity building sessions that was presented by the Lebanese chapter. Also, it's now being rolled out in multiple universities as part of the consortium we are working with the syndicates, professional syndicates, industry leaders.
I don't know if I demonstrated enough how it works. It's basically fixed communication channels, collaboration platforms, and events. Yeah, basically that's it.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you. I think this is one strong point for IGF. We have now one for Canada, one for Lebanon.
You talk about the innovation, about the capacity building. That makes me go to Charles as a technical community. In the region here we open the doors with the capacity building, with sharing expertise. In Canada what the role of the technical community? How do you engage with other multi‑stakeholder groups?
>> CHARLES NOIR: We do two things really. First, we think about ways that we can engage as an organization ourselves in the processes that we need to engage in. Then, secondly, we think about ways that we can use our organization and our resources as a convening power to bring other stakeholders to the table that maybe in the same community to start to understand where we have shared interests or concerns.
I'll back up now and say from the first perspective CIRA is an organization that certainly monitors the policy space very closely. We have a team ‑‑ I lead a team that looks at both domestic and at the international space. We're first and foremost looking to see where policy and trends are moving within the internet governance space or with internet legislation. That may affect us as an operator, but also may affect the global internet in ways that we think may undermine the multi‑stakeholder nature, bottom‑up way that the internet is governed.
So we have a framework. There are three principles that we use. We'll take any issue and look at it from a monitor, engage, and lead perspective. Very few things we lead. In this space there's a lot that we can be looking at as an organization, as a technical operator, whether that's different visions of protocol, what's coming in from the IETF, what's coming in from a domestic legislation point of view. We need to decide where best our resources are spent.
For example, we've invested a great deal of time and effort in participating in the cybersecurity legislation that's before the parliament in Canada at the moment. We've done that because we believe that certain aspects of the legislation could be improved, and we do that because we also ‑‑ our vision our mandate, we believe, is to have a trusted internet for Canadians, and cybersecurity is a big part of that. So we really link into the domestic space where we feel that that's most appropriate.
In terms of convening stakeholders, for example, during the GDC process, we were very fortunate to have a strong working relationship. We have a regular working relationship with ISED. We also with our partners at Global Affairs and our Foreign Ministry. During that experience, we reached out. We took on the role of reaching out as a technical operator to technical operators across the country seeking their views on what was being proposed within the GDC process. We took those back and then we worked those up into a summary and provided that to our government so that our government could bring that to the table and be able to identify the top three issues or so that as a technical community collectively we agreed on as being very important.
So, again, just to sum up, CIRA is in a unique position. I think as a technical operator to be able to offer technical advice on legal policy issues that may not be necessarily front of mind for policymakers who are dealing with really difficult things like content regulation, really difficult social, political issues.
As a technical operator we can bring a certain degree of expertise to that that others can't. At the same time we have an opportunity to bring that community together within the country and connect that into a global system as well.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Charles. Really this is a very interesting coming from the technical community who are involved in making policy or supporting making the policy. Not making the policy. Because in this region this is a gap, and I look at Mirna from ESCWA because I know you play an important role in supporting or doing research and the papers to support making policies for the Arab region and in Lebanon. What are the challenges that ESCWA face in dealing with these topics at the national level in Lebanon?
>> MIRNA EL HAIJ BARBAR: Yes. Actually, it's not an ESCWA challenge. It's a general challenge promoting a multi‑stakeholder approach. At national level or at region level, we take into consideration, first of all, the cultural environment of ‑‑ and the local culture of the community.
Lebanon also there is some specificities for the environment. Some challenges were presented because or in light of the ongoing political security and the economic crisis. This is since 2017 actually, which has significantly shifted the national priorities away from initiatives like internet governance, forums, discussions, dialogue, and something like that.
The crisis in Lebanon created an environment where all stakeholders from all sectors, so from government, private sector, technical community, academia, students, everybody, were driven to focus more on their immediate political and economic concerns. This challenge presented a big challenge on how ‑‑ the question was on how we can align or adjust the discussions within the Internet Governance Forum in Lebanon with the urgent needs of the country.
Also, we worked a lot to provide the guidance or advices on how the digital inclusion and digital governance can remediate or can contribute to address some of the current problems at the national level or at the community level.
Also, there was another challenge regarding how to engage all groups. Mainly I would like to focus on one category, which is very important, because it forms actually our future in the dialogue or in the policymaking, which is the group of students or youth.
Actually, in Lebanon we ‑‑ students were unfamiliar with internet governance concerns, and they lack the proper engagement within the processes of internet governance at regional, global, and of course, at national level. This is due to that the curriculum at the universities does not include any related topics or something like that, and here I would like to recommend that we need to introduce some topics of internet governance and policy dialogue, policy making within the curriculum at the university in order to get more students engaged.
To this problem, actually, we thank a lot the technical community and academia where we partnership a lot in order to provide capacity‑building and necessary skills to engage meaningfully youth into the IGF in Lebanon in particular and at the global and regional level.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you so much for this input, and that makes the score 2‑2 technical community. In both countries they are doing their job excellent. Thank you, Mirna. I believe I have question from online.
>> DANA CRAMER: We do have a question online from Zeina in Lebanon. Canada is a huge country compared to Lebanon. How can the Canadian Organizing Committee include all voices from the different provinces? I'm assuming this would also be different between the Canadian IGF and the Youth IGF in Canada. I'll send it over to Charles, I guess, or David.
>> DAVID BEDARD: That's a really good question, and I'll just from the government of Canada perspective I won't lie. It's a challenge. We have a vast country that is, you know, lots of rural and remote communities that are not as well‑connected as larger, urban centers in southern provinces. It's something that we are continually trying to improve.
Technology always helps as communities start getting online and they're more connected now than ever, so we definitely rely on ‑‑ we definitely rely on technology to help us out. All of our meetings and all of our strategies, our virtual participation is an option. That's a lesson learned from COVID. I think everybody learned that lesson that we can operate more efficiently and collectively when we have hybrid environments to reach stakeholders. We integrate that into our ongoing engagement.
Also, just connecting with larger stakeholders. We encourage them to also reach out to their networks and sort of create ‑‑ cast a wider net for us so we can't be everywhere at once, but I think if we have good connections and good relationships with the folks that we do have, they can then take messages to their community as well and sort of bring their concerns to the table too.
>> CHARLES NOIR: Just to echo a bit of David. In terms of the CIGF, yes, Canada is very large. We have a volunteer committee that organizes. I think you've heard that talked about. We rely very much on the community to come together from various parts of Canada to develop and to push forward ideas that we're going to take forward into an IGF for that year.
We, as CIRA, are often looking as a national operator across coast‑to‑coast where we can reach out to folks that we may know that are interested in or where we make calls to different parts of the country for participation and interest.
On that same note, we have at the CIGF at different locations across the country, but as you alluded to, it does take resources, time, and effort in a country the size of Canada, which can take six hours to get from one side to the other. Again, CIRA has been fortunate enough to be able to support. We do rely very much on regional expertise and regional views. There is really no sense of having a CIGF without having representation from different parts and communities across the country and also from different backgrounds and different stakeholder groups.
So we're very conscious about trying to level that out. We're not always able to do so. It is sometimes more centered around parts of the country than others, but we really work hard to reach out.
Just really quickly, CIRA is very involved with also investing in communities across the country. That's also under my remit. So we do ‑‑ we do take a percentage of the revenue that we take in, and we do put that back into community projects. Over the last ten years we put about $12 million back into the community, and that's included also supporting Youth IGF initiatives as well as communities that are both in the north or in very rural conditions.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Charles, for this. I believe this is another point we take for the Lebanon IGF to create such an authority or organization like CIRA so they can handle all of these coordinations between the Youth IGF and the academic and to have some fellowship or funds to fund some people to join IGF.
By the way, the main reason behind my colleagues that didn't attend this event because there was no fund. We know that we are volunteers. We are not paid for such volunteering activities. So I believe, yes, it's important to have an organization to handle all these even small details, but important details to make the national IGFs inclusive.
I will go to Maha and Mirna. Talking about the technology tools ‑‑ technology as a tool to make this multi‑stakeholder approach inclusive for everyone, in Lebanon at the IGF how you use the technology to foster this inclusivity? I'll start with Mirna or Maha. I give the floor to you. You heard the Canadian point of view, so please let us know how Lebanon IGF dealing with this technology to get more engagement in the multi‑stakeholder process.
>> MAHA ZOUWAYHED: Mirna, should I ‑‑ okay, so we always capitalize on the technical capabilities in Lebanon and intellectual wealth, and we are so lucky for that. So technology played a transformative role in fostering either internal collaborations or international collaborations. In fact, it's all what we have.
It proved very high value and very high return on investment. So, first of all, technology enabled inclusivity and accessibility. This way we were able to reach everyone everywhere at any time, removing barriers. Whether physical barriers or circumstantial barriers or cultural barriers. Today with all the advanced conferencing and collaboration tools and AI, we also remove the language barriers, so people of any ability and background are able to be involved and to enrich the collaboration.
There is also technology that enables knowledge‑sharing. We are able to create knowledge hubs and deploy collaboration tools to bring every input possible from every user group. It also enhances stakeholder transparency. So we deployed data‑driven insights and interactive dashboards. We also utilized the national research and education networks on the national level and on a global level.
This also avails many resources for the different players in the ecosystem. We also try to foster innovation through deploying virtual innovation labs and the open-source platforms.
Lastly, we also use technology to scale our collaborations and initiatives nationally and globally. Mirna, did I forget something?
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Mirna?
>> MIRNA EL HAIJ BARBAR: Yes, yes. Excuse me. No, actually I think you covered the main pillars actually on how to capitalize on technology in order to foster multi‑stakeholder approach or very policy dialogue.
Also, how to boost research and development within the technology collabs in order to serve these policies. From a broader actually aspect and within the work of ESCWA, I would like to say that ESCWA has always harnessed the technology to enhance collaboration, engagement across all stakeholders in the region, in the Arab region at local level within a specific community, within a sector, or also with the global forums.
Actually, we use a lot everything related to virtual platforms, collaborative tools, surveys in order to actually gather all perspectives from different stakeholders. I would like to mention here, for example, the survey that ESCWA conducted during the first quarter of 2004, and this was actually to engage the stakeholders and to overcome the geographical barrier for those stakeholders all over the region in order to discuss very important topics related to digital cooperation related to the WFIS, the +20 review and its linkages to GDC. This was perfectly conducted throughout all the region, and we gather all the information, which resulted with a very nice outcome document that was channeled to the UN GA in New York in order to actually transport or convey the voice of the Arab community toward these global processes.
So the youth of digital platforms support a lot of the collaborative decision‑making process. This is for me and for us. We believe in that. It allows actually timely data‑driven policy development. We should be fine. We are all living in this digital space. We are one village, a digital village. I would like also to mention and the year I will call open Chafic and Dana. I don't know if we have colleagues from the Arab IGF, but you remember that all the preparations for the Arab IGF 7 that will take place in Jordan between the 23rd and the 26th of February 2015, all the preparations for the whole program went online.
This is a really fantastic tool. It is in our hands. We should use it to strengthen our regional and national collaboration to engage and empower all stakeholders and minorities, all groups who are left behind. This is all. Thank you.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Mirna. Thank you so much. I believe our 60 minutes as a discussion will come to the end, but before we open the floor to the audience and online participants, here just I want to give you one or two minutes for each speaker just to recap. What's the take‑away? How do you see the way forward? David, please.
>> DAVID BEDARD: Thanks. I think for governments I think it's really important to implement both informal and formal processes for people to get involved in your preparatory processes when are you making decisions about internet governance and when you are developing positions for various meetings, and I think that's ‑‑ I think governments can really benefit in thinking about a variety of stakeholders and creating forums that make it conducive for them to actually participate, making sure that the forums and diverse and making sure you're getting out there and meeting people. You're not a big, scary bureaucracy, but you are a person that people can talk to and bring concerns to.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Charles.
>> CHARLES NOIR: I would take away from this as a technical operator there is ‑‑ we're participating as a technical community within the technical community. Even within the technical community, for example, there is a significant degree of players with a number of different viewpoints. So no matter what group you're coming from in terms of that multi‑stakeholder position, there's opportunities to organize, convene, and come together on issues that are very important. From a technical perspective for us we're very centered on critical internet resources, the domain name system, the root server. All the aspects that make the plumbing of the internet work. It doesn't mean we're not particularly interested in other things that are happening, but as our stakeholder group we can bring the most to this discussion around those issues in terms of how the internet operates, and we can do that by convening both across Canada as technical operators, but we're also doing so, as David mentioned, very internationally as a technical community ‑‑ sorry ‑‑ a technical coalition ‑‑ technical community coalition for multi‑stakeholders. TCCM.global.
Anyway, my point is that we can come together as operators. We don't need to come together as all operators. The same thing for governments, academics, civil society.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Charles. Mirna, one‑minute wrap‑up.
>> MIRNA EL HAIJ BARBAR: Thank you for this interesting discussion. The contribution towards advancing internet governance at regional and local level highlights its commitment to fostering and implementing global principles at national and local levels. Looking ahead, actually, ESCWA will continue to champion these models and all its initiatives, such as IGF, other initiatives, and here we have many initiatives that we would like to invite you to contribute to and to be engaged and involved in these tracks, such as, for example, you are all invited to participate to the Arab IGF 7 next February 2025.
Also, we developed this year the Arab Digital Agenda, which is actually a general framework covering all the sectors to strategies to building the sector, to digital transformation and so on, and we are open to have all stakeholders engage in a collaborative way in order to implement its goals and the targets, but also to extend to cover many other sectors within its evolution towards addition number two.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Mirna.
>> MIRNA EL HAIJ BARBAR: One comment ‑‑ one final remark, Chafic. Our track on regional collaboration regarding the WSIS+20 review as well as the GDC implementation processes, so we have our platforms. We have our series of consultations, and we need ‑‑ and we invite you all to collaborate and be engaged in these tracks. Thank you.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you. This is really important to get the national and digital voices to the global scene. I believe ESCWA and the United Nations, they are the right venue to engage and get all these feedbacks and then share it with a global IG processes, GDC, WSIS+20, and the global IGF. Maha, one minute for what you have in mind at the end as a conclusion.
>> MAHA ZOUWAYHED: My take‑away that technology, internet, and governance, these are all public interests naturally it cannot bring value unless every representative group of the public is engaged in it in order to have the inclusive solutions and inclusive development and collective growth. Looking forward, well, it has been always the best thing we do. If we keep undoing what we know, we will never evolve. So the best thing we can do to evolve is to keep working together and involving as much stakeholder groups as it takes to do a real effective solutions and move forward.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Maha. Dana, the floor is yours. Online participants feedback.
>> DANA CRAMER: We do have one from Rudy. Saying, being Canadian and Lebanese how can we open bridges between IGF for future collaborations?
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Excellent. Question? I believe Charles came this morning to me with the first initiative. I will let you talk about it, Charles.
>> CHARLES NOIR: Thanks for the question. I think in between these big meetings and events it's important to identify, first, who it is that you want to talk to. For example, CIRA is certainly open to engaging in dialogue around the WSIS+20 if that's of interest or around the domain name process in general, anything technical that refers to country code. We're very happy to do so.
Additionally, I would offer that we're certainly also able to point in the general direction of folks within our technical community in Canada that would be open for dialogue at any time. We certainly reach out to folks like Chafic and others to come and be involved in various programs that we're looking at setting over the next, I would say, eight months, particularly around WSIS+20. Some of those are more invitation‑based. Others are more open. A good starting point is to reach out to us individually so we can get people connected both at the working level and as well in the executive space.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: Thank you, Charles. I believe Sabrina is noting about all of this as the reporter for the session. Yes, this will be an excellent call for action coming from CIRA or the Canadian IGF. Dana.
>> DANA CRAMER: We have a question from Zeina from Lebanon. My question is to David: My GAC colleague, is it relevant using the national IGF platform to promote the new gTLDs program?
>> DAVID BEDARD: So the national IGF space for the new gTLDs? Yeah, I think to promote ‑‑ I mean, I think it's important that people know that it exists and that it's coming up. We think it's going to really ‑‑ it's going to be a change space in terms of what is going to happen at ICANN, and it's a priority. It's a priority for government. I know that lots of folks are tracking it. Certainly we use venues. We engage very much with the youth IGF now. I mean, it certainly is a space that we can bring our priorities to, and we can discuss our priorities with stakeholders and priorities at ICANN like the new round. That's certainly one of those priorities. Yeah, it's certainly something that we can speak to, yeah.
>> CHAFIC CHAYA: So we don't have any other participation or feedback online. I know that now it's lunchtime, and I know that people now they are hungry after a long day. We give this 30 minutes in case we have any online participation, but I'm happy to give you the liberty if it's done and you don't have any comment or feedback from online. Nothing? Perfect. Because we did a lot. I think what we did in 70 minutes will take us the whole next year if we want to execute it. Once again, I would like to thank CIRA, David, Charles. I would like to thank Sabrina online for her efforts and for the follow‑up. IGF Lebanon, MIRNA, Maha and the Secretariat Dana, I really appreciate your efforts. Hopefully next time you'll be with us here onsite. Thanks, Dana, for your support and online moderation. It's really ‑‑ it's not an easy job to follow up on all this. Once again, as you can see, even though Lebanon is a developing country, Canada is a developed country, but both countries are working in multi‑stakeholder environments with different approaches, but these approaches works taking in consideration the environment that we or the stakeholders live and the challenges that we are facing every day. Thank you, once again. Thank you so much.