You are connected to event: CFI-RPC12 >> MONICA DUHEM: Good morning, everyone. So we have three remote participation, so we'll just wait that we have everyone connected. Yes, come. Three remote. Yes. So does the remote can hear the -- the remote participants can hear as well? >> Yes. >> MONICA DUHEM: Okay. Yeah. So, good morning, everyone. We're just going to start because -- to give you time to be able to ask questions to this very high-profile -- these very high-profile panelists to discuss accessibility in ICTs and public policies. I'm just going to present. We have three panelists that are remote and three panelists are here with me. I'm going to -- just briefly going to introduce them, and then I will give the floor to them so if they can just explain us the objectives of this workshop. So to my right is xh commissioner Labardini. She's a Mexican commissioner at the Mexican institute of telecommunications, a lawyer with master degree from Columbia university. Her expertise lies on public policies and the rights of telecommunications for consumers and users. As a commissioner, she advocates for disabled citizens as well as for the rights of ICT users. Thank you for being here with us, Commissioner Labardini. To my left I have Commissioner Clyburn. She's serving second term as commissioner in the FCC in the Fidel Communications Commission. Prior to her service at the FCC, commissioner Clyburn spent 11 years on the southern public service commission of South Carolina, and prior she was publisher and general manager of the Coastal Times, a Charleston-based weekly nurs paper. Commissioner Clyburn is a longtime defender for humans. She is a strong advocate for communication for disabled citizens as well. Commissioner Clyburn, very nice to have you here. Thank you for coming to Mexico. Then to my left we have James Thurston. He's vice president of G3ict, the global initiative for inclusive communication and information technologies, a digital inclusion and human rights advocacy organization. Prior to his work at G3ict, James was director of International Accessibility Policy at Microsoft Corporation. His deep knowledge of the global technology industry is key for pushing broader and deeper global implementation of the United Nations convention of the rights of persons with disabilities. Good morning. Then remotely we have the pleasure of having Chandra Roy-Henriksen. She's chief of the secure yacht of united forum of indigenous issues. The PFII is a UN coordination body for matters relating to the concerns of the rights of the world's indigenous people. There are more than 370 million indigenous people in some 70 countries worldwide. The mandate of the PFII is to discuss indigenous issues related to social development, culture, environment, education, health, and human rights. We also have the pleasure of having with us Shadi Abou-Zahra. He works with the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative as activity lead of the WAI international program office, which includes groups that are responsible for education and outreach, coordination with research, general discussion on web accessibility. Prior to joining W3C, Shadi was a lead welcome developer and managed to design an implementation of web online, community platform, and online game. Mr. Abou-Zahra also worked as a web consultant for the international data center of the Knighted nation comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty organization. And finally, we also have the pleasure of having Donal rice. He's senior design advisor ICT for the excellence in universal design at the National Disability Authority of Ireland. Donal has managed to develop a range of resources for ICT developers and design including the universal design guidelines for digital TV at Whitman Services and universal design guidelines for online public services. He's involved in national, European, and international standards development. Thank you very much for joining us remotely to this panel. Before giving the floor to our important panelists, I would like to give the floor to Ifadel so he can explain the objectives of the workshop and some of the points we would like to discuss. Victor. >> VICTOR: Thank you very much, Monica. Good morning, everyone. Thank you very much for being present at this workshop. First I would like to express our gratitude to speakers and moderator for your acceptance to participate in this workshop. As many know, the institute was created by Mexican constitution as an autonomous regulatory body responsible for developing the sector and also the Institute is an authority for the sector. Considering that the final document of the high-level meeting of the general assembly on the overall review of the implementation of the wishes, there is still significant divide such as between and within countries and between women and men, which need to be done among other actions, reinforced, and even policy environments and international cooperation to improve affordability, access, education, capacity building, cultural preservation, investment, and appropriate financing. This workshop has some main objectives identifying the measures to increase the access to ICTs and reduce the digital divide existing towards women and girls, people with disabilities, and all groups as isolated communities and indigenous people, taking into account important elements of accessibility, inclusion, and affordability. Thanks, again. Thank you, Monica. That's it. Thank you. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much. We still have plenty of place. We don't bite, so you can join us at the table if you want. Thank you very much. So I would like to start and give our panelists around five to seven minutes to explain their views on what accessibility is from a policy point of view, so I will start with Commissioner Labardini, if you could give some words, please. >> ADRIANA LABARDINI: Thank you, Monica. Good morning, everyone. I'm really thrilled to be here sharing the panel with Mignon Clyburn and with our remote panelists from all of which we have lots to learn. This is a most important issue in the context of the information Information Society, which is meant to be inclusive and to have every single person have access to telecommunication, to Internet, to ICT, but not only that, to be in a society where there's really the conditions to live in the same -- have the same quality life for people with -- a person with disabilities that enables them to interact, to develop, to produce, to feel thoroughly communicated. And so we have a big challenge. The more services, platforms, features, content that we experience and the more of the economy is set up in a digital manner, the more we need to make sure that all this is also accessible for everyone in a very equitable manner, and in Mexico, upon the telecommunication reform, we, for the first time, have provisions on how exactly telecommunications services should be made available on an accessible way and also broadcasting services, and I feel -- we all feel at IFT that we've been very fortunate to have been accompanied by experts like Monica in this challenging process. We had a number of consultations on how should we implement all this accessibility to websites, to services, to have -- and how our regulations could better serve this purpose so that devices are available, and this I recognize should have been put in place in Mexico decades ago, but it's only now that there's mandatory provisions requiring telephone carriers and broadcasters and paid TV services doing adjustments to all the way they offer services and the kind of devices that they should make available, and so we opened up public inquiries on how to regulate this. We used the best standards. We started by ourselves. We launched a fully accessible website according -- we learned a lot from Monica, all the standards of the W3C. We have AA -- accessibility standards in our website and have been giving training and making sure we are inclusive. We have a program, we have a number of collaborators at IFT with some kind of disability but who are very important, their work is important to us. But -- and then the second step was to pass these regulations so that services, websites are available for different kinds of -- of disabilities, and so just a few days back, around ten days back, the Board of Commissioners at IFT passed these guidelines on how teleconservices should be made, and in another piece of regulation also broadcast services should include all these features, and, of course, we listened very carefully to -- not only to what experts had to say on the subject but people with either visual or hearing or mobility disabilities had to say about it. The guidelines include obligations, like to provide legal assistance from telecom service providers on contracts, on the accessibility features. We have deployed a page where we show what kind of mobile devices are available and with what features, all contracts, rates, billing information must be accessible as well. This updated catalog of accessible devices, at least 6% of all public telephone booths must be accessible. Carriers must have all their premises -- customer service hotlines and also their premises must be accessible as well. We are very aware -- and there's much more behind the guidelines, but I want to limit the time I have. There's much more to do in -- as we look at smart cities, Internet of Things. We have to make sure that those new ways of living bring people closer and not the opposite. I have -- I was just been told this very important history about Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of telephone, and yet he started -- and I thank Professor ely Nohem who told me this anecdote. Sometimes we have unintended consequences of inventions and innovation. Alexander Graham Bell started by teaching the deaf. That's how he started and started thinking about hearing devices. He even married one of his students that was a deaf woman, and yet, when he came up with telephone, he said, oh, my gosh, this device is not at all friendly for deaf people, and, of course, it's never what I intended to do. And so we have to be very careful on how all these new platforms and features and automated and digital services and apps are either helping or holding apart people with certain kinds of disability so that we are in constant vigilance to make sure that they are inclusive and enablers and not deepening the digital divide. Thank you very much. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, Commissioner Labardini. And congratulations on the approval of the guidelines because you, as government, has the power to push the industry towards a more accessible path, so the guidelines was the first step in Mexico to push that industry on that path, so congratulations, and, of course, as manufacturers and website developers and telecommunication service providers, if they think about accessibility, not from Graham Bell but since the beginning, it eases the path for all of us. Thank you very much. Now I'll give the word to Commissioner Clyburn. Commissioner. >> MIGNON CLYBURN: Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Monica. Commissioner, pabists, those remotely -- panelists, those remotely, good morning. Allow me to thank the institute. I'm still trying to figure out that IFT thing, but we'll talk about that later, for organizing this workshop and inviting me to participate on this morning's panel. As an FCC commissioner, I've been a strong proponent of policies that seek to bridge the communications and opportunities divide. As a regulator, I believe that it is imperative that we adopt what I call a leave-no-one-behind attitude, particularly for those who could benefit the most from being connected. For me, this means fulfilling our obligation and accepting our duty to ensure that broadband is accessible and affordable to everyone, including individuals living with disabilities, those in rural and remote communities, people with limited economic means, those in underserved communities, because we all know how connectivity can and will change their lives. Last April I launched something we call a hashtag, Connecting Communities tour, to hear from those seeking to close the communications and opportunities divide. Getting out of our comfortable offices and into communities large and small, rich and poor. I believes that critical to gaining new insights and ensuring that your agency and our agency -- that we hear from a wide range of perspectives, including voices that often go unheard. By the time the tour came to an end this fall, we officially visited more than a dozen larger cities plus those surrounding areas in rural communities. We dropped by some health care centers, met with start-ups, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and providers of all sizes. We spoke with inmates and officials at a correctional facility. We deepened relationships with organizations focused on promoting diversity, inclusion, and enhancing opportunities for women and minorities, tribal -- those on tribal lands, and, yes, we spent hours with organizations that addressed the needs of persons with disabilities. And as diverse as these communities are, it may not surprise you that they all delivered the same message. They all have a desire for robust, affordable connectivity. They want and they know that through technological enhancements and inclusion that they too can be the very best that they were destined to be. So with the time I have left, allow me to focus on what a regulator can do to help narrow the accessibility gap for persons with disabilities. At the per kins School for the Blind, near Boston, Massachusetts, I saw firsthand what technology can do for people living with disabilities. The school participates in a program that the FCC administers called I Can Connect, which is providing necessary communications equipment to income qualified individuals who have significant combined vision and hearing loss. Programs like I Can Connect, they're essential because market forces do not always guarantee access for people with disabilities. In the United States, the marketplace typically addresses consumer needs by producing products and services that consumers want, but this does not always occur when it comes to devices and applications that can enhance the lives for persons with disabilities. This type of market failure can occur for several reasons, including the fact that each disability market oftentimes that they're too small for the market forces to work in a way in which we like. More often than not, in the United States, people with disabilities earn lower incomes, which means less purchasing power, which makes it economically less attractive for those in business, and their need for adaptive equipment can often discourage purchases and investment by these entities. So when these markets fail to address the critical needs for in the United States more than 50 million people who have been identified -- and that number is growing as we live longer -- you know, people with disability -- the government should not be timid about stepping in when we see the need. So justifications for government actions include recognition of the limits of a competitive marketplace for people with disabilities. We should encourage a competition and differentiation, universal service obligations. I love that blueprint and hope we can talk about how that can be more ubiquitous in so many ways. The cost to society of lost access. It costs us more to leave 50 million plus people behind in the United States as opposed to including and enhancing their lives. The recognition of pervasiveness of communications in it commercial transactions and personal contacts, I cannot emphasize that enough. And access to telecommunications as a basic right, and I would love to argue about that if you do not agree. So the United States passed numerous accessibility laws in the 1970s through the 1990s, including those requiring telephones to be accessible for people with hearing aids or cochlear implants. I am sorry that I offended whoever invented cochlear implants. Requiring a nationwide telecommunications relay service that provides telephone access for those with hearing or speech disabilities and mandating closed captioning for televisions. Many gaps in these laws remain, and even these well-intentioned laws fail to keep up with new technologies, so in 2010, with the enactment of the 21 Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act or CVAA, because you know we like acronyms, a landmark disability law was passed by Congress, signed by the President, implemented by the FCC, and that unleashed a whole host of regulations. The new law fills in gaps not addressed by those prior laws and addresses the accessibility challenges of the day head on. The law sought to ensure access to advance Internet-based communications technologies, and for example, electronic messaging, SMS, email, instant messaging, and similar communications technology, they must be accessible when available. And if a product or service, by chance, is not accessible, it must be compatible with specialized equipment. Internet browsers built into mobile phones must be accessible and usable by persons who are blind or have a visual impairment when achievable. The law also authorizes rules to ensure disability access to next-generation IP telephone emergency services. That is critically important. And it also establishes a permanent national deaf-blind equipment distribution program with a $10-million annual budget available for equipment for low-income people who are deaf-blind. Now, at the FCC, we have taken several actions to implement the provisions on this new law. For example, in April of this year, we proposed to update our rules to require support for real-time text to ensure that people with disabilities who rely on text to communicate have effective telephone access when we transition -- and we are transitioning -- to IP technologies. And later this month, we are poised to establish final rules in this particular proceeding. In August, we made permanent that national deaf-blind equipment distribution program, and this covers phones, tablets, computers, Braille devices, light signalers, specialized keyboards, vibrating alerts, and other devices, in addition to national laws and regulations, government can also take other steps to enhance connectivity for people with disabilities. At the FCC, we have found community engagement to be critical to the understanding of the needs of persons with disabilities and sharing best practices on how best to address those needs, that has got to happen. So to that end, we established a Disability Advisory Committee to provide advice and recommendations on disabilities' issues at the FCC. They're active. They are permanent. It will never go away. One important best practice we have learned from all of this, we -- is that we have encouraged companies to implement a universal design, which means that evaluating accessibility needs at the design stage, at the beginning; developing solutions and building in access features from the start. And I want to pause here -- and I'm coming -- I know I'm going over my seven minutes, but, look, are when we talk about what we have done and said to, you know, companies about, you know, designing at this -- you know, about putting things in place at the design phase, that's important, but as regulators, when we -- each and every docket that can enable communities, we need to put that same type of that framework -- that needs to be at the beginning of the regulatory phase too, so we don't get a hall pass on that. So the graphic growth of these new technologies -- I'm coming -- can create gaps for the disabled if appropriate accessibility features are not incorporated from the start. I cannot emphasize that enough. This approach can be much easier and less expensive and more effective than trying to retrofit down the road. So, you know, I'll pause here today. I took a little bit more time. Please forgive me. I am passionate about what we can do and what we should do about bridging the accessibility gap for those who are often more vulnerable in our community. They, like the rest of us, deserve the very best that we have to offer, and it is up to us to answer their call. Thank you very much. (Applause) >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, Commissioner Clyburn, and really updating laws and regulation when we're talking about technology is a never-ending story, so thank you very much for updating. And also the responsibility of a country like the United States, where countries like Mexico are the software and hardware, making that accessible from the beginning, it's a plus for our countries importing those kind of software and hardware, so thank you very much, and really interesting presentation, and we'll discuss more later. I'm going to give the floor to James Thurston from G3ict to discuss what are his thoughts on policies and accessibility. >> JAMES THURSTON: Great. Thank you, Monica. And thank you, IFT, for inviting G3ict to be a part of this panel. I've really been looking forward to it. I'm also really pleased to be on a panel with both of these commissioners, who, as you've just heard, really are leaders in their respective countries, and I think it makes the -- the work of the rest of us of trying to get more digital inclusion much easier when you have such leadership, so I appreciate that, and am also happy to be on the panel with our remote panelists as well. Monica, maybe I can just start a little bit by just introducing G3ict. Some of you may not be as familiar with our organization and what we do. We were set up actually ten years ago this month, around the time that the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the URCPD replicates coming into force. It's historic when you look at human rights of persons with disabilities. It's historic in a lot of ways. One of the ways that we see it as being historic is that it really elevates access to technology to the level of a basic human right, and G3ict was set up ten years ago with support of the United Nations an as independent nonprofit to help governments around the world focus on the technology parts of that convention, recognizing that technology is -- even ten years ago was becoming increasingly a part of our day-to-day living. We're sort of connected somehow to technology from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep at night, and there was the recognition in this treaty that persons with disabilities also have to have access to that technology and all that that means, whether it's in the classroom or in the workplace, in banking, just everywhere we're using technology. So what we do, our organization, is we're doing work around the world with governments, advising governments, working with governments and civil society, with disabled persons organizations, on looking at the UN Convention and coming up with policies and programs to improve the digital inclusion of persons with disabilities, and we do that in a variety of ways. We are advising governments on actual policies. We just, last week actually, signed an MOU here in Mexico with one of the ministries to look at how we can be partnering to make improvements on web accessibility and in other areas of public policy, including the public procurement of accessible technology, and we're doing that kind of work with countries around the world. We've developed a set of tools that you can get at our website G3ict.org, including model policies where -- that we developed in partnership with the ITU and with UNESCO. There's a set of six or seven model policies where a government can almost sort of cut and paste into their own legal framework policies to help improve the accessible -- accessibility -- access to technology for persons with disabilities, so there's a model policy for inclusive education that we developed for UNESCO, one for accessibility, one for public procurements, one for an accessible kiosk at ITMs. They were developed with experts. We work with more than a thousand experts around the world on these kinds of programs and tools. A big part of what we do and I think one of the most important things, and I think this will come up in if the discussion today, is a lot of -- in the discussion today, a lot of work with the disabled people with disability organizations, our approach in doing this work around the world is when we're partnering in the country and focusing on the UN Convention, we like to work with government, industry, and civil society together as equal partners. We feel pretty strongly that that kind of approach to public policymaking is going to lead to the best results in a country, and we actually heard a little about that approach from the commissioners. So we do -- but we also realize that civil society nonprofits or disabled persons organizations may not have the same level of experience and knowledge about technology, about policymaking, and so we've developed training where we will work with organizations in countries on raising their level of comfort with those topics so that they really are more equal partners in these discussions with industry and government on good policymaking on accessible technology. We -- one of the most interesting things that we do, and again, you can find this on our website, is actually collecting some pretty unique data on just how accessible the world is today and how much progress countries are making on implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Every other year we do an exhaustive survey and analysis of countries around the world who have signed on to the UN Convention, and most countries are signed and ratified it at this point, and we published that data. We did that this year. You can find it on the website. It really looks at a few things, one is how accessible is that country today, does it have accessible websites, accessible telecommunications and what extent? We also look at policy steps our government is making or not making, and even beyond that. We'll look at has the government passed a policy to make sure its government websites are accessible, yes or no, but we look at if they did, are they actually implementing that policy, and one of the things that we'll, I'm sure, discuss today is making policies great -- making policy is great, implementing policy is challenging and ultimately more impactful, and there are some issues around that that we'll -- I'm sure we'll get into. So we collect that kind of data, and we're also every day tracking what's going on around the world in countries, specifically on creating new accessibility policies, so we sift through more than a million news stories every day to find what's going on on accessibility policymaking so that we can stay on top of what's happening. We host a conference every June called Am Enabling in Washington, D.C. It's the largest accessibility and mobile technology conference in the world, attended by more than 600 people last year, I think, including with some of our other panelists as part ants and guests, and just recently last summer, we were asked by the Board of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals or the IAAP, which is the global professional society for accessibility, we were asked to run that organization globally because of our reach internationally on these issues, which is an exciting new step for us, and important, I think, because one of the challenges in implementation that I think we'll get into is -- governments are doing, I think, a better job of creating policies on accessible technology, but we reach a bit of a roadblock or a bottleneck in implementation, in part because there aren't necessarily enough trained professionals on accessible technology, IT professionals, to help implement those policies, and that's something -- a challenge that we collectively need to be addressing if we're really going to make a lot more progress on policymaking. So with that, I think I'll leave it there. Thanks very much. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, James, and thank you for all the wonderful work and benchmarking that G3ict is doing. I think some kind of competition and benchmarking amongst countries are a very good incentives to just go forward in the implementation of the accessibility policies, because as James says, creating policy sometimes is easier than implementing them, and also the importance of working with civil society but also creating capabilities among civil societies on what accessible technologies are and how to exert their rights on accessibility. And I would like to give now one of our remote moderators, Mrs. Chandra Roy-Henriksen -- sorry if I didn't pronounce it correctly, because I do believe that now that we're talking about accessibility, it also includes indigenous people. Indigenous persons, because also, they're among all these minorities that are not reached. Thank you. With regulations we can now have assistive technologies that helps the blind, the deaf to have access to ICTs, to Internet, but what can we do about indigenous subject, which is very important, and as we just said, it's ish -- it issues more than 300 million persons around the world, so Mrs. Chandra Roy-Henriksen, if we can hear from you, please. >> CHANDRA ROY-HENRIKSEN: Hello. Good morning to everyone, and thank you very much for inviting me to this panel. My apologies that I cannot be there in person, and thank you for allowing me to be there virtually. This is a very interesting discussion, and I was listening with great attention to the earlier panelists who have been speaking, and I very much believe strongly in what they were talking about when they talk about the digital divide, but the last presenter also brought in what we have been challenged with here at the UN for many, many years, and of course, beyond the UN to all our partners, and this is the implementation gap. Now, for indigenous peoples, as you have mentioned, they are amongst the most marginalized in any country that they can be in, whether it's a developed country or a developing country, whether it's in Mexico or in Norway or in Philippines. It is the same issues that they will confront. And we'll look more specifically to the indigenous peoples and persons with disabilities. This is even further compounded because not only do you have greater problems of access in terms of the ICTs, but being a disabled person, you also have other obstacles, other challenges that you have to overcome, and if you add to that creation indigenous women -- and as we know around the world -- I was just looking at some of the statistics that you have put out -- that only 41% of women have access to Internet. Out of that 41%, how many of them are indigenous women and how many of them are indigenous women with disabilities? So these are all elements that I think we have to take very much into account when we look into this question of Internet governance and how are we going to come up with some ways of addressing these issues but also making it much more accessible. As some of the earlier presenters have said, ICT is actually a great enabler. It is also a great driver for development. For indigenous peoples, this is very important in terms that as per the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in 2007 after over nearly 20 years of very intense, very political negotiations, with the Declaration being adopted, the rights of indigenous peoples are captured in a document that provides the road map, the framework for all of us around the world and, of course, at the UN and as adopted by the member states in their countries of how we are going to go forward in terms of addressing the rights of indigenous peoples. One of the main elements that indigenous peoples have been very clear in anuns eighting is the rights of determination. This includes the right to determine their own priorities for development, and this includes, of course, all these new elements that are coming in. I know that when we first started out we didn't have all this Internet, we didn't have the mobile phones, but now we have all these gadgets, these tools which can be used to improve the situation, to give people all over the world whatever may be the personal situation or political situation -- have them get greater access to how they want to determine their own lives, their own destinies and their own livelihoods and skills. In this way, I was looking into some of the examples around the world where you have seen indigenous peoples, including indigenous persons with disabilities, using the mobile phone, using the Internet in terms of livelihoods, in terms of being able to market their products or paying greater attention to their issues, and in this element, I also wanted to look into what you were discussing about in terms of languages. From what I understand, it's only about ten languages that are prevalent for the Internet use. Indigenous peoples have many languages, and each country where they come from they have different languages that are not necessarily easy to translate into the Internet languages. I am not very versed in all these -- the tools that you have, but I know that there are some challenges. But we have had some examples of indigenous peoples using the Internet, using the web, and using the -- the apps, the applications in such a way as to strengthen and increase awareness and learning of their own languages, and they have even, in some ways, been able to put up the fonts that have been able to use so that you can read and write in their own -- in their own languages. I'm not too sure how much of this translates to those who have other challenges that they face, but I'm looking at it from a positive point of view that this may be something that with such meetings as you are hosting now in 2016 that this is something that can also be addressed so that we do make sure that there is no one that is left behind, whether they are from indigenous peoples, indigenous women, persons with disabilities, or other communities that have challenges in terms of access and inclusion into the national development frameworks, national development programs, but also on a global level. As we know, globally we have all been able to connect sometimes on a much easier way than it is to connect with the community just across the river because of certain aspects of, let's say, geographical location, remoteness, and in that way, the Internet and Internet governance has actually given us a great way forward in terms of how we can use this to better improve, better strengthen, raise awareness of the rights of persons with disabilities, indigenous peoples, but also in terms of strengthening and advancing and preserving the tremendous and very rich cultural and biodiversity heritage that the world has. I just wanted to mention that in 2018 the UN is going to -- has proclaimed the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and this could be something we could also look at in terms of how we could go forward using all these apps and Internet and governance. I will end here, but I just want to say that I would like to just put it on the table that one of the biggest challenges we face is the digital divide and how we're going to use the digital divide to not -- to bridge the implementation gap, and that's my big question that I leave you with. Thank you very much. (Applause) >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much for those important comments, and just -- it's an eye-opening how language challenge is for us and the preservation of indigenous tradition and priorities and how also in another hand, the ICT, to use it as an enabler of having communities together, so thank you very much for that enlightening point of view, and we certainly open the floor to some comments about that. I would like to give the floor to Shadi Abou-Zahra who is the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative lead, so he can talk a bit about standards and accessibility on an Internet platform. Mr. Abou-Zahra. >> SHADI ABOU-ZAHRA: Hello. Good morning. My name is Shadi Abou-Zahra. It's great to be with you virtually. Unfortunately, I cannot be there in person. I have been a regular attendant of the IGF meetings, but this year, unfortunately, I was not able to travel to the meeting. It's a very great session with great panelists, and it's great to be here today, so just introducing the worldwide web consortium, W3C, is an international standards development organization that develops the core web standards. It's been launched and continues to be directed by the inventor of the worldwide web, Tim Burners Lee, and part of W3C is part of the web initiative, WAI, that focuses on making the web accessible to people with disabilities. I see some comments saying that you don't see my video. Unfortunately, I do not have a camera installed, so just some technology issues, so I will be just speaking to you. So the Web Accessibility Initiative is part of W3C on focusing on making the web accessible to people with disabilities, but it's really embedded in a strong vision of the W3C of the web, making the web available to everyone. People might remember the famous Twitter message from Tim Berners Lee at the London Olympics saying, this is for everyone, so we do look at -- in W3C at aspects of language and cultural difference, geographical aspects, and as I mentioned, part of it W3C. And here we do the work in multiple ways. On the one side we focus on making sure the web technologies themselves that are used for web apps and mobile and coming also on the Internet of Things and all sorts of devices and technologies, they're web enabled, making those available to people with disabilities to support different languages but also support the needs of people can disabilities. And we also develop the guidelines, the web content Accessibility Guidelines, for example, that have been mentioned before that have been internationally adopted in many policies, and these explain to web developers how to make websites and applications accessible to people with disabilities. And I think this is really one of the contributions that I'd like to bring in is as policies focus on the adoption of accessibility requirements, on the one side what's very important to accessibility is international harmonization. The web does not have borders, and I think it was also mentioned earlier by the Commissioner about having applications that are developed in the U.S., for example, and used in Mexico or -- and this happens all over the place, where things are developed in one country and used in another. And if the accessibility requirements are different in each country, what happens is it reduces the market for accessibility and slows down the implementation, and we've seen this on many occasions. It is encouraging to see that we -- that the web content Accessibility Guidelines is becoming an international standard or internationally adopted across many parts of the world and countries are certainly moving to harmonization, so harmonizing on a single set of requirements is very important. Another aspect that is important is to -- as technology evolves and moves that policies are able to keep up with these changes, so on the one side, we want to have stable and clearly understandable requirements; on the other hand, the flexibility that is needed to move along as technologies change. And last point I want to mention is really the importance of open standards and standards that are freely available, particularly for accessibility to allow the innovation, to allow the development of low-cost and affordable assistive technologies, and, you know, to allow the production of intraoperable devices in many parts. This is actually one of the secrets of success of the Internet and the web is having those open standards, things that everybody can create a website or an application without needing to pay royalties, and this really has led to a lot of innovation, a lot of invention, and including for accessibility. I will stop here for now and give these -- as the technical perspective maybe on policies, on making sure that we have consistent requirements, updateable requirements that can move along as technology evolves and open and freely available standards. That's it from me. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, Mr. Abou-Zahra, and thank you for pointing out the importance of the international harmonization of standards. If all of our countries start inventing new standards for accessibility, I do believe that it will be -- make our work much more harder, so thank you very much. And finally, imgoing to give the floor to -- I'm going to give the floor to Mr. Rice so we can start the discussion, so Mr. Rice, please, you have the floor. >> DONAL RICE: Hello. Good morning, Madam Moderator, Commissioners, fellow panelists, captioners, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon from Dublin, Ireland. I hope you can all hear me and that the line is good between our two locations, and I can see by the captioners that you're picking up what I'm saying, so I will -- I will continue, and it's very good to be with you today. It's very good to hear the previous speakers, and I will not cover what has been already covered but to make a couple of interventions. Part of my work is to be an advisor with the International Telecommunications Union, and one piece of work I'm involved in at the moment is to help a country in the Arab region to develop their policies in if relation to accessible ICT -- in relation to accessible ICT, and coming from Europe, where accessible ICT has been a policy topic for over two decades within the European Commission and in Member States and listening also to the Madam Commissioner from the FCC, we must, I think, sometimes remember that the right mix of regulation policy and law take a very long time to get right, and certainly, in Europe we're still at a stage where at the European level, Europeanwide level, we are really only beginning to develop laws around accessible ICT. It has taken us a very long time to agree amongst Member States what the approach should be. So the reason I'm saying that is that for a country maybe in -- where Mexico is and certainly in some of the countries that I assist the ITU develop policies for -- and there are some things that very often are important to focus on at the beginning. One area that I find assists is focusing on the role of government, not just as policy and regulator but also as exemplar, and it was interesting to hear the Moderator at the beginning speak about the accessibility of a website and the learning it took to get that right. One of the first things any government can do is to get its own house in order and to ensure that its own websites are accessible, and I emphasize that, not as -- well, I emphasize that, not to be preaching to anyone in Mexico about the approach that should be taken, but certainly in Ireland and in what I've seen in other countries, government requiring their own websites and their own ICT services to be accessible has two impacts. Firstly, government, as consumer and -- influences the market when it decides to buy accessible ICT goods and services, but also government as exemplar can assist industry and others to understand what does accessibility mean, what does an accessible website look like, and it also develops a capacity within the country when government procures accessible ICT goods and services. So just that point, again, is to say that government while it's developing the policies and regulations that take time to get right and to embed, can improve their own practice by procuring accessible goods and services and by creating a demand within the market in their own country. The areas of goods and services I'm currently focusing on in my policy advisory work are the following five: Web accessibility; telecommunications, primarily mobile; digital television; and public access to computers, such as computers in libraries and in schools; and the fifth area are procurement. And for me, those tend to be the five technology areas that a country ought to focus on when beginning to look at its own policies and laws and regulations in relation to accessible ICTs. Each take a different approach, but underpinning each of them, as has been mentioned by Shadi and has been mentioned by James, are a clear specification of what accessibility means, and that, as always, comes back to standards. My own experience in working with the government in Ireland is that when we started off on our journey around accessibility, we were very eager to fund the development of guidelines and standards for our own country on accessibility. That had its pluses in that it helped build capacity around accessibility and a lot of us in government learned a lot through that process of commissioning guidelines and standards, what accessibility was about, but ultimately it proved to be a few tile exercise because a lot of the requirements we specified were not harmonized, were not available in other countries, and were not -- could not be meshed by manufacturers of IT equipment, such as computers and ATM machines, et cetera. So just to emphasize again the need for considering which standards to adopt and the importance of adopting harmonized standards, it certainly is one of the first things to be considered, what are the international standards that should be adopted when developing ICT policies and regulations. And finally to say -- emphasizing again the area of public procurement, I'm currently delivering a course online for the ITU Academy on public procurement, and we're seeing more and more public procurement being used as one of the first policy areas that countries who are looking to improve their own availability and their own practices in terms of accessibility -- public procurement is one of the first areas that governments are turning to to develop new policies in, and the policies that are available from G3ict and ITU are those -- those model policies are also very useful resources in considering how best to adopt and develop a policy in the area of public procurement. So, again, just to emphasize the three messages I have to provide you today are government as exemplar and consumer; the adoption of harmonized standards; and a focus on public procurement as one of the key policy areas that a government should look at when developing new policies in the area of accessible ICT. Thank you very much for your time and for listening to me, and I'm very interested to hear any comments or questions that may come from the floor. Thank you, Madam Moderator. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, Mr. Rice, and we have a little less than 30 minutes, so I would like to give now the floor to the audience, so -- if you have some questions -- we had something -- some interesting thought about policies, connectivity, civil society participation, creating a market, the government as an exemplar and also as a very important client, so I would like to give the floor to the audience. Yes. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi. My name is Luis Martinez. I'm going from the university and the Internet Society in Mexico, ISOC. I'm very curious about the -- how we compare indigenous languages with disabilities because most of the talk has been around disability, and suddenly we bring indigenous languages, which also is a problem of accessibility. What I feel, very worried about the idea of of thinking speaking another language is something comparable to disability, so I strongly believe that regulators should encourage licensees, operators, software producers to make their products and services accessible to these communities. Actually, the -- from their point of view and as our experience says in the working status in Mexico is they often feel the disabled, in terms of language, is the producer, not them. Yes, they see from the other side -- from another point of view. Yes. And also, I think that governments should support those projects working on translating common platforms on the Internet to languages, such as navigators. Mexico is lagging compared to other countries in the region, barely just Internet navigators have been translated, and one of the best examples is close to here. We had a language, which is indigenous people living around Guadalajara who have translated one of the navigators for the Internet. Also, in the Cental region in Chapas, the speakers were trying to keep their language alive. They have developed a way to text using the mobile phone, just simply by the way the language is written, so I think that that's one real challenge. And another challenge that I put to the -- on the floor is how we should think about being disabled and being indigenous. That leaves you nearly in the edge of noncommunication. Thank you very much. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much. I would like to give the floor to Commissioner Labardini and then Commissioner Clyburn. >> ADRIANA LABARDINI: Thank you. How many here speak Spanish? Could you raise your hand? Okay. Well, it seems like a minority in this room, but when it comes to languages, of course, it's not a disability, it's a diversity, it's a cultural richness, and we have to make sure we preserve that diversity. I'd love to speak in Spanish in this room right now. Maybe next IGF we'll -- we'll have different languages spoken in the workshops. I think it was not meant to say that indigenous people -- we're talking about inclusion. Some vulnerable groups are Peeps with disability -- peoples with disability. There's rural people. Indigenous peoples also have other challenges, not only for connectivity, for -- for education, for health, for many of the development goals. We have women as -- who are not a minority, by the way, across the world, and yet face special challenges of equality. So, yes, we have -- I mean, the goal at the end is to leave no one behind whether it's someone with a disability or in conditions of poverty or being another minority group or a majority but vulnerable groups like women. As you know, Luis Miguel, and yes, I only referred in my talk about physical accessibility. There's also affordability of services. In Mexico, in only two years, the prices have gone down, an average 25%, and when it comes to mobile services, they have gone down 32%. Penetration is increasing, although we're not happy when it comes to broadband. We still have only 56 subscribers of mobile broadband per 100 people, and that's clearly not enough, but it has been increasing dramatically as more competition is put in place and, thus, better pricing, so that's -- affordability is an issue, but we have other tools and instruments. We -- for us, after this constitutional mandate, we have indigenous people licenses. We don't see them -- and that's also very important -- not only as consumers, we have to look at all these groups as wonderful, productive people and people that also would increase the market. 50 million, Mignon said, in the U.S. In Mexico, while we have identified almost eight million, but I'm sure there more, our indicators and statistics have also to improve when it comes to counting people with disability. Indigenous people are license owners. They are providing community radio in their own languages, more than 60 in Mexico. They have, for the first time ever, received a license for an 800 megahertz band to have their own cellular mobile network in the mountains in Wahaka, and hopefully it will go further, but yes, we need to also make content in those languages much more easy to find. There's an issue being led by Canadian regulator about this coveribility. How will the audiences now find relevant content, whether it's in their own language or whether it refers to their local lives. There's so many more platforms and apps and content that we need to make sure that people with disabilities and rural people and women and everyone can find that content. In the app -- apps market, only 1% of apps downloaded in Mexico, whether in an iOS system or Android, only 1% are apps made in Mexico. We have 400 million people speaking Spanish across the world, and yet content in Spanish but even more in these wonderful languages we have in Mexico is scarce or not easy to find, but we are licensing not enough but much more than in the last four decades community radios, and hopefully we'll see digital TV owned by communities, whether rural or urban, but addressing relevant local content for community and citizen participation. There's also the elderly. We need -- we haven't done much for the elderly, and we need to make sure we have accessibility in all these platforms and services. , And finally see them as contributors. They could be wonderful for content, of applications, of functions and services that are useful and meaningful to their lives. Thank you. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, Commissioner Labardini. Commissioner Clyburn. >> MIGNON CLYBURN: Thank you. Forgive me for being informed. Chandra, I don't know your last name, so sorry about that. When I heard you, I thought the last thing you said almost answered your own question, meaning that we need to make sure that we take what we call back in the States a dig once mentality, and what I mean by that is when we have the potential to do something and it might have multiple applications or means, we should do that, so when we're talking about being more accessible and inclusive, meaning that person that might speak a language that you know -- if I can't say Chandra's last name, you know I can't speak the other language, correct? That, you know, maybe using the same platform with that being harmonized would be the way to reach that particular community, someone who is disabled in a community. It is about honestly going back -- you know what we said earlier, not leaving anybody behind and being as inclusive, you know, as possible if -- you know, when Chandra talked about ten languages that are more prevalent on the Internet, you and I both know there are ten languages within 100 miles of where we sit. It is not serving the people who are the most vulnerable well. Again, I thought you answered your own question, but I appreciate you putting it out there. We need to be challenged. Thanks. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much. And I'll give the floor to James, and if we can see if some of our remote participants want to say something. >> JAMES THURSTON: I also want to thank Chandra and Luis for raising this issue and the linkage between accessibility for persons with disabilities and indigenous populations. One of the great things about accessible technology -- and I think one of -- one of you mentioned this already -- is that there are sort of unintended benefits from it. If you design something to be usable by everyone, to be accessible for people with disabilities, it's going to be more usable by everyone, and we see that both in it the built environment but absolutely we see it in -- with technology. If you ever see -- when you see me using my mobile phone, I'm almost always using the accessibility features. I don't identify with having a disability, but it's just easier for me to use speech recognition, and with -- with -- and there's actually some good data on this as well. Microsoft, several years ago, commissioned Forester Research to do a market analysis of the -- of accessible technology, and they make that public. I think can you still get it on their website, but they basically found, Forester did, that 57% of all adults benefit from the accessibility features that are built into technology, and adults in this study was working-age adults, so up to 60 -- 55, I think, so it's not even really the older people in society who get a lot of benefit from accessibility. Likewise, Gartner has done some market research that's also very interesting that shows that 85% of us are what they call situationly disabled at some point during the day. You're in a loud bar or you're in a quiet church or somewhere where -- or you're driving, but somewhere where the accessibility features of your technology help you use your technology in that situation. So there are -- for -- with speech-to-text and screen readers and those kinds of -- speech recognition, those kinds of accessibility features are also very helpful to people who are illiterate, and we know that, and I'm sort of making the link here to indigenous populations. Unfortunately, what we also know is that many of these accessibility features are not developed -- and were you starting to get into this with your apps. They're not developed in minority languages in countries. I mentioned earlier that we do this analysis every other year of how accessible countries are around the world, and one of the things that we know is that for things like text-to-speech on smartphones, 70% of the countries around the world who are signed on to the CRPD, text-to-speech on smartphones is available in the national language, the main language of the country, 70%, which is not great but it's good, but if you look at the minority languages in that country, only 23% of countries around the world have text-to-speech in minority languages, and this is going to be a problem, obviously, for -- in countries who have a lot of indigenous populations with their own languages and don't have access to that accessibility. Likewise, for screen readers, 60% of countries around the world, screen readers are available in the national language of the country. Again, not great but good. But if you look at the minority languages, in only 21% of countries around the world who have a commitment under the UN Convention are screen readers available in minority languages, and again, this has a big impact on indigenous populations, are particularly those with disabilities. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much. I would like -- we have ten minutes. Time flies. I would like to hear another question, and -- >> (Off microphone) >> MONICA DUHEM: Yes, of course. We'll hear from Mrs. Roy-Henriksen and then (Off microphone) >> CHANDRA ROY-HENRIKSEN: Thank you very much. I just wanted to come in here. It's very good that we have the commissioners here because you are the ones who actually set the pace in terms of accessibility and you also have a lot of experts around who can address this issue. I just wanted to remind you one of the main things we have in terms of indigenous peoples is the issue of population, and I think if we have indigenous peoples involved when these policies and programs are being developed or being crafted, that could make a big difference because then they would be able to give input as to how -- to their own approaches and their own identity and culture, and also the traditional systems can be taken into account when we are developing these approaches. I wanted to just make sure that there is not dichotomy between the individuals and the collective rights of indigenous peoples and disabilities because, as I said earlier, this is where there is intersection as (Off microphone) and we want to make sure that we fully addressed accessing services (Off microphone) preserving the identities so they don't have to make a choice between these two. And the third thing that I wanted to point out (Lost audio) in terms of defining (Off microphone) that it should also include indigenous people into this in the statistics -- >> MONICA DUHEM: Excuse me to interrupt. I don't know if you could repeat the third thing because the audio wasn't very good here at the floor. >> CHANDRA ROY-HENRIKSEN: Okay. This is in terms of this application of (Audio cutting in and out) I know there's an echo. I'll start again. (Audio cutting in and out) statistics and to ask -- >> MONICA DUHEM: Unfortunately, we're not getting the audio in the floor. >> CHANDRA ROY-HENRIKSEN: Okay. We'll type it in. >> MONICA DUHEM: Okay. Perfect. (Laughter) >> CHANDRA ROY-HENRIKSEN: Thank you. >> MONICA DUHEM: So meanwhile, we have another question here from the floor. >> Well, it's not a question, it's a comment. I would like to give a viewpoint from the industry. My name is Ms. Sanchez. I am director of corporate affairs at Microsoft, Mexico, and I would just like to say that Microsoft is a company which is very committed to accessibility. This is not a new thing at Microsoft. The efforts are working in -- our work in accessibility started 24 years ago when Bill Gates himself thought that technologies were eliminate barriers of people with disabilities to enable them to realize their potential, and nowadays, just on the engineering side, we have 150 senior engineers working on the accessibility of Office 365. We have a chief accessibility office, a very brilliant British woman, Jenula Fury, who has a very serious hearing impairment, and at Microsoft Mexico, standard is the person who receives the call is a blind woman who works with a narrator, so our strategy at Microsoft has mainly three components, investing substantial resources in innovation and in creating accessible technologies and improving the accessibility of our technologies; increasing the percentage of hiring people with disabilities, and retaining them at our company; and also, strategic partnerships with government and with NGOs, especially to advance in the public policy matter. Just a last week, with Monica and with Luis to my left, we created the working group at the economy to work on the EO 1549, which refers to public procurement of accessible technologies. We also worked with -- work very closely with G3ict, and I wanted to mention for seven years we had a partnership with the trustworthy Americas of the OAS where we founded more than 120 dmunt Keck knowledge centers with accessible technologies with people with disabilities. In it Mexico, we have 50 of them. So I want to say Microsoft is very committed to accessibilities and you can count on our company and our hard work and efforts to advance accessibility. >> MONICA DUHEM: Thank you very much, Amira, and I think we have five more minutes. Someone else would like the floor to ask -- last chance to take advantage of our panelists and ask a question. Do we have a better connection with Mrs. Roy -- >> (Off microphone) >> MONICA DUHEM: Okay. So I would like to close this. Thank you very much for attending, thank you very much, our panelists, for being here. I think that we can leave this workshop taking into account ICTs as an enabler and as really a tool for communication, and also, we can -- I love the no-leave-behind attitude, which really is the key to address these kinds of issues. I think that a lot of work has been done from a policy point of view. I wanted to speak more about implementation, which is the very difficult stone under way, but thank you very much for being here and thank you all for attending this workshop. (Applause) (Session concluded at 10:28 a.m.) Internet Governance Forum 7 December 2016 Workshop 150 ICT4D: Connecting CS Roles on Access, Finance & Knowledge 10:45 a.m. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Hi, everyone. Good morning. Thanks for joining us today for this session. My name is Arsene Tungali, and I'm happy to be moderating this session today. I serve as the cocoordinate of the Internet Society governance caucus, which is a group of different actors across the world who are interested in civil society issues, and so we -- today we are inviting you to join us for the discussion and the debates on this session today, and thank you so much for coming. I will give you a brief of what we'll be talking about today, so I'll be starting by a few words, to introduce the panelists and to introduce what we'll be doing today. Later on we'll be having two presentations, so we'll be having one presentation by my colleague, who is just on my left, Mrs. Sylvia, and on my right we have Jeremy. I'll be introducing them shortly. And later on we'll be breaking into two different groups, and so we'll be using the two sides of the room to discuss in depth some of the issues that we'll be raising during this session, and later on we'll be reconvening. That means we'll come back to the seats here, and we'll be having a rapporteur from each one of the groups to come and share what was the outcome of the discussion in each one of those groups. Then after that we'll be finishing today. Thank you so much for your patience as we're dealing with technical ib use. So I'd like to present -- technical issues. So we'll be talked about-the theme of our session is ICT -- sorry -- ICT4 Developments, how do we connect the roles of civil society on access, finance, and knowledge, and we have two main panelists. We'll be having two group facilitators. We have Mrs. Valentina and Milton. They will be the ones facilitating the group discussions today. And so on my left we have Mrs. Sylvia, who is currently working with APNIC, which is the -- I think the -- >> SYLVIA CADENA: (Off microphone) >> ARSENE TUNGALI: They are the registry for that region, so she's currently the head of the program for APNIC, and she will be discussing around issues for access to finance for civil society organizations. And on my right, I have Jeremy Malcolm, who is a senior global policy analyst at Atlantic frontier foundation, and he'll be focusing his remarks on issues of access to knowledge, including the regulation of data flows and international Intellectual Property roles and informed enforcement practices, so they will be presenting shortly. They'll be giving their remarks shortly, and after that we'll be immediately breaking into groups. So before we go -- before we kick off, I would like you to start brainstorming or to start thinking which one of the two groups you'll be breaking into, so that's whenever -- whenever it's determined for breakout so we don't take a lot of time, we'll be breaking into the two rooms -- into two groups. Other groups will be discussing in this same room, sos it will be very ease -- so it will be very easy for that. Before starting again, I would like to know how many of you are familiar with the interInternet governance caucus or if there are any members in the room of the Internet governance caucus, just raise your hands. Thank you very much. It's good to have you here. All of those not familiar with the Governance Caucus, we have our website down there so you can join there and be part of the civil society discussions. So without further delay, I'd like to start by my first panelist, and that will be Mrs. Sylvia. Welcome. >> SYLVIA CADENA: Thank you. Well, my name is Sylvia Cadena. I work with the APNIC foundation. I'm the head of programs of this just recently launched foundation that starts out of APNIC, which is the Asia-Pacific network information center. We are located -- we locate IP addresses for people in the region to connect their users, so we have our main core responsibility is the maintenance of the -- of who is registry and to provide a lot of technical support for ISPs and universities and others that are connecting people to the Internet in our region. APNIC has started a lot of development work over the years on training capacity building, grants, awards, and a collection of programs that have kind of taken a life of its own, and now that was the reason why the foundation was established. It's really new. It was just established this September, so we are in the process of designing and implementing these programs. I have worked before the technical community, I worked with Civil Society for, what, 15 years, in one of the known commercial ISP ins in in Columbia, which is an organization for communicative member, setting up telecenters, training women how to send email, doing the reporting for the women, the Beijing Women's Forum, you know, back in the day, so a long, long time ago. Very familiar with civil society issues, so today I would like to raise six points, and I have seven minutes, so I hope I will be able to cover them all. First I think that for Civil Society organizations there are a little bit of conflicting questions in our minds when we are actually trying to look for funding and trying to implement our ideas and turn them into reality. First is that the fundings have changed considerably in the last five years, especially. It's confusing and it kind of requires different brains. It's not the same to write a grant proposal to pitch funding to an investor, it requires a whole different -- it's a different ball game, it's a different dance, and in most cases, it's exactly the same person who is dealing with the challenges of actually writing the grant proposal and pitching to the investor at the same time. There is also challenges in the funding ecosystem in terms of how much the eight agencies and governments have actually cut budget availability for civil society organizations. A lot of organizations -- a lot of governments also have -- due to political situations happening have placed a higher bar of how a civil society organization can actually access funding, and in some cases, those -- those thresholds are quite high, really high, and now it's almost impossible for an NGO to get funding or to apply to funding from external sources. That, in the Asia-Pacific region, is quite visible, especially in India, for example. So it's -- where an NGO has to subscribed to the FCRA and they have to have clearing to get funds in so they're not linked to terrorism and all those things, and it takes a long time to get all the paperwork going. So there is also new players in the market or the funding market where social enterprises are playing a big role and everything is about entrepreneurship and innovation, and they are all bringing the same -- ringing the same bells, let's say, singing the same song, not necessarily in tune, right? So my -- that's the first -- the first point. The second point I wanted to make was that it is a division between the focus on what you really want to do and the focus of what the funding source wants you to do and how you reconcile those, you know, tear-apart kind of dichotomy, you know, inside of you conversations. At the time where you negotiate a proposal or an investment or -- it might seem easy that the investor or the donor might be actually flexible, they might actually not, so it's very important that you know that -- you know, what dance, again, are you -- you know, what game are you playing there. If you're going to get in a very difficult situation where you thought you had the money to do what you wanted to do and you actually got money to do something you were not that interested in doing or that is actually the wrong thing to be doing. And then, you know, the -- they have this question of all in that context for -- in my experience is to, you know, do the sole searching and say can I really, really -- can we really deliver to that? You know, it's not that idea we're going to change the world and we're going to do it in 12 months and here's the plan, can you really deliver to that, do you really have the staff capacity, do you really have the theme to do it, do you really have the skills? And it's a difficult conversation because you want the donor or the funder or the investor to come along, and so sometimes you can say ah, and then ah, because you don't really know what's going to happen, so you can have your poker face, let's say, and, you know, deal with the investor or the donor in that way, but in the end, if you get the money, you need to get those questions answered; do you have a plan and can you deliver it, because anything you don't, even if you have all sorts of excuses -- and there are some that are really good and valuable -- might actually play against you in the future in terms of receiving other sources of funding because all the sources of funding talk to each other, so it is quite difficult to, you know, have a -- a good or a bad wrap, let's say. What goes around comes around, so everybody kind of talks to each other. Then the third point, there are a couple of very scary words for civil society organizations, when they're dealing with -- especially in both cases when you're looking at investors and angel investors and capital funding and donors and grants and foundations and all the different sources that are in the market. There are a couple of very scary words that are everywhere, in contracts, in proposals, in their terms and conditions, and those scary words are -- or concepts are the measuring impact part and the evaluation frameworks part. Those are words that are not to be taken lightly because they mean actually very different things for each and every one of the donors or the investors that you are going to approach. So it -- it has totally different meanings, so -- and it has totally different connotations. So on the measuring impact side of things, for example, and to give you a couple of very practical examples on the evaluation frameworks, from idea, in CIDA, for example, there are two main donors funding ICT4D. On their side, they have their own methods for evaluation that they have pushed out throughout the years, the outcome mapping and all sorts of different things. They are very flexible, they have loads in experience in ICT4D in different countries, so they are very flexible, very, very flexible, and they're willing to risk it and learn with you, right? But they also are accountable for the taxpayers' money that they give you, so they still need to get your reports and turn it into something they can report to, you know -- they still need some data and information from you. On the other side, for CIDA, for example, they have the same push from their taxpayers' money that they need to report on results, but they do have a very strict evaluation framework. If you're not familiar with the framework, the tool and how they use it and the language they use it, it will be very difficult to actually deliver to what you said you were going to do in a program funded by CIDA, so it is worth taking a look at exactly what they're asking you to do. Then there is another thing that you might be scared of -- >> ARSENE TUNGALI: (Off microphone) >> SYLVIA CADENA: Okay. Is the flexibility vs. the matching source I was gawkd in a couple of examples. I was talking earlier if you have a plan and a team and you can actually deliver, there are very big challenges in terms of the administrative capacity, the comms -- the communications capacity because now everybody wants the photos, tweets about everything you're doing, interviews and videos, plus the hundred pages' report with all the data analyzed on an open data set available online, so really, can you really deliver to all of that versus the project rhythm. Is that what the -- the way that particular community moves and evolves? And then there is also the challenge for civil society organizations and many organizations in all of the -- although the stakeholders about the roles that people play, are you an implementation kind of person or are you fundraising kind of person, or are you actually the techie that implements and reports, and you do the whole show and you tweet in between? So if that is the case, that your organization is overworked and understaffed and all that sort of stuff, you know, be careful when you design those proposals because that's -- the challenges are not to fund those proposals, the challenge is to do it right, to do it well, so more funding will come, and that will end my initial points. I hope they spark some questions for the breaking groups. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Thank you so much, Sylvia. I think if you -- that was really, really brilliant. So if you closely followed the presentation, you will understand that it's really, really not an easy task, right, to get funding for civil society organizations, and Sylvia had liked to mention some of the issues like myself being from the nonprofit sector, there is those issues like when you ply for funding, right, you have what -- apply for funding, right, you have what you want to do, what you wrote in the proposal about what you want to do, but on the other side, about the funder, is it the same thing the funder wants you to do, and sometimes some funders will tell you, well, this is what you wrote in your proposal, but we would like for you to do, for instance, this and this and this and this as well, and there you need to have a balance, to satisfy the funder but also you need to make sure that you did the right -- the job that was supposed to be done in that specific manner. And I think another important point, you mentioned, I think the CIDAS Alliance, right, which is a good -- Seeds Alliance, which I think people will learn about the Seeds Alliance who are funding civil society organizations who are having nice projects. I think those funds are for Africa, Latin America, and I think for Asia-Pacific region as well, so if you are here and you have, like, good idea, try to link up with Sylvia during the break-out sessions so you can learn more about how to get funding as well through the Seeds Alliance. >> DIERDRE SIDJANSKI: We have a booth at the IGF villages, and there are lots of informations about the grants and awards programs and how we do. Sorry. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Perfect. If you're going to join the breakout session with the financing, you should get ready for your questions and sure your experience how you deal with funders, how you're dealing with submitting proposals, how you're dealing with when those funders are putting higher the bar to give or to provide funds in those civil society organizations. So now I'll turn now to my second panelist, who is Jeremy Malcolm. As I said, he's a senior global policy analyst as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, so he'll get to explain himself and tell us in a short minute -- I mean in a few minutes what they usually do at EFF, and of course, he'll give his remarks as well. Jeremy. >> JEREMY MALCOLM: Thanks very much. So, yes, I've been asked to address this workshop on access to knowledge, and this is a phrase that's often associated with copyright activism, particularly copyright from a development perspective, but it's actually broader than that. There's -- because it literally just means what it says, access to knowledge, what are the barriers that prevent people from accessing knowledge, and in this context, we're talking about online. So there's -- there are legal barriers and there are technical barriers, and copyright is only one of them, so copyright would fall into the basket of the legal issues around access to knowledge because, of course, copyright rules can impede us from gaining access to information, particularly when the copyright term is being lengthened, for example, it may take works out of the public domain and make it more expensive to access those, but other legal issues that impair access to knowledge include privacy and data protection. Why is that? Well, when we access information online, sometimes that's in exchange for giving up some of our personal data, isn't it? And also, there are legal regimes such as the right to be forgotten, which may take information away from us and, therefore, that also impacts on access to knowledge. There are also other legal ra schemes that may sense information -- ra genomics that may sense information for various reasons, whether they be religious, moral, or any number of reasons why there may be censorship of information online, so these are some of the legal issues that can impact on access to knowledge. Those are copyright, privacy and data collection, and censorship, but there are also technological issues that can have a bearing on our ability to access knowledge online, so net neutrality is one of those, because if particular players in if the content providers have a special priority or special access to the end user through the network, then that unbalances the playing field and will skew the kind of knowledge that the user has access to. Also, other technological issues, Geofencing is one that may lock off particular sources of knowledge from people in particular regions, whether that's for copyright licensing reasons or for other reasons, but the technology there is the technical one that enables this sort of geofencing so that we can no longer access information online. Encryption is another technology that can affect access to knowledge. For example, if you want to access information that's blocked in your region, maybe you can use something like the Tour browser to bypass that block and access that information, so access to knowledge, far from being scus about copyright, it -- just about copyright, it impacts a lot of this that we discuss at the Internet Governance Forum, the ones I mentioned, encryption, net neutrality, copyright privacy. We're pretty much covering the board of Internet Governance Forum to access to knowledge. Now, where are these issues dealt with? There are some specific venues where different aspects of access to knowledge are discussed, so, for example, copyright, of course, discussed at WIPO, encryption may come up at the UN Human Rights Council, but there is also one venue in which all of these issues are discussed together, and I'm actually not talking about the Internet Governance Forum because at the IGF, while we may talk about these issues, we don't really develop policies on them that have an impact on the end user, at least not a very direct impact. In fact, I'm talking about trade negotiations. Surprisingly enough, trade negotiations, such as the TPP and the T -- the other agreements that have followed and which will follow in the future, will deal with all of these issues, so just to take the TPP as an example, the transPacific partnership, although it may have failed in the United States recently, it will be a template for future trade agreements, and we have a session dedicated to that tomorrow, which you should attend, but looking at TPP, there were rules on copyright, extending the minimum term to life plus 70 years, there were rules on privacy, not very good rules, of course, but it did say they had to be the least trade restrictive rules on privacy, but still, there was some treatment of that topic. Net neutrality also not dealt with very well. That was a weak and nonbinding provision on net neutrality. There was a provision on encryption which would limit the policy space that countries had to make rules on encryption. There were rules on the free flow of data, which had impacts on things like censorship and on geofencing or Geoblocking, so all of the issues that I mentioned that have an access to knowledge were a part of the TPP and are a part of ongoing trade agreements. Many of those are in the trade and services agreement and many will be part of bilaterals and future trade agreements, such as a possible renegotiated NAFTA, which might be in the wings, and future bilaterals. So the difficulty here is that when we're talking about connecting civil society in its role in access to knowledge, there is no role for civil society in these negotiations because we're locked out. It's very difficult for civil society to have any influence on what is happening behind closed doors in these trade negotiations, so that's one reason why my organization and I personally believe that it's very important for us to reform trade negotiation processes so that civil society is given a voice and can have a role in expanding access to knowledge or at least safeguarding access to knowledge when these rules may come under threat by the sort of restrictive provisions that the trade lobbyists would like to see. Either we need to have a voice in these trade negotiations or we need to draw a line and say, look, some of these topics, like net neutrality, don't belong in trade negotiations at all and there are better fora to discuss these issues, such as the IGF itself. So I'm probably out of time, and I'll leave it there, and we can discuss more in the breakout groups. Thank you. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Perfect. Thank you so much, Jeremy. I think you raised very, very important issues about how do we access content, and you specifically focused on the online content, right? And you mentioned some of the barriers that as civil society or anyone else who wants access to knowledge are facing as barrier. And one of those issues, the copyrights -- the copyrights issues, you also mentioned the privacy and data protection, because not everyone would be willing just to put away their information, and I think you also mentioned some of those technical issues, like net neutrality or geofencing or encryption, and you gave even a suggestion to anyone to probably or in some terms use browsers or any other -- any other apps that can help to bypass some of those blockages, but one of the things probably that will need to be discussed in the breakout group on this specific topic will be -- because you also mentioned that as civil society, we quite have nothing to do. I think you said that. It's really, really difficult for us to have access to knowledge, especially when it's online, but you also mentioned that your organization is giving people the voice. I hope you'll be able, yew, to discuss in-depth that issue and how we can help -- we can help people, how we can help civil society organizations to have access to information. And sometimes probably I'm wondering whether even accessing information about funding or funders, is it really easy for civil society, whenever you do a research online, to be easily directed to those organizations who are providing funding or to some of their criteria, and I think some of those will be some of the other questions that will need to be discussed during the breakout session. Soap I'd like to just point -- so I'd like to just point out this is also followed by some remote participants, so we have some remote participants that are following our session from I think across the world. I can see some names popping up on my screen, so thank you so much for following. They had an issue with the sound, but thanks technical -- the technics for solving that issue. Thank you so much. For those who are following us from the remote, if you have a question, don't hesitate. Just type your question, and I'll be really pleased to bring your question on the floor. So for now, I think we'll be moving to our second -- the second part of this session today, which will be the breakouts, the breakoutgroups. As I said, we'll be having two sessions, like two breakout groups, and one will be on this side, and I think the group on financing ICT for development initiatives will be on this side. Sylvia will be also joining to discuss and will be -- and we'll have our wonderful facilitators. That's -- I'm really pleased to introduce to you in a minute. We'll be having on one side -- so I think this side we'll be having Dr. Milton, a professor at the School of Public Policy at Georgia Institute of Technology. He also works, I think, for Internet governance projects, so he'll be leading the crew on this side, discussing the issues affecting on financing the ICT4D initiatives, so Dr. Mueller will be joining the group on this side. And we'll be having on the other side Mrs. Valentina, who is I think the head of One World Platform Foundation, so she'll be also entertaining or discussing with the second group on my right, so if you're interested in discussing, Jeremy will be also joining the second group on this side, and please, we'll be having less than 20 minutes, so when you go there, I expect you to raise some of the issues that the panelists raised regarding either what's your experience on financing your own initiatives if you're running a nonprofit or if you need more information on how to get access to funding, or those are some of the challenges you're meeting in your own area. I think those kinds of experiences would be really, really important for us so we can inform some future actions as civil society. On the other side will be -- I think you'll be also talking about what are those challenges that you're facing as civil society on accessing knowledge or knowledge distribution when accessing online contents, and Jeremy will be also joined by Valentina to discuss on those -- on those issues. Yes. >> I just would like to make a suggestion also. For both groups, if we could kind of think the other side as well. It would be very good, for example, I would like to know from Jeremy, for example, as what he sees as challenges from your organization to actually fund the topics you discussed and how difficult or not difficult it is to communicate what -- what was it? -- geofencing mean. I can't remember exactly. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Geofencing, yeah. >> SYLVIA CADENA: What exactly that means and how difficult it is to get money for it or funding for it, right? And on the other side, what are the issues that you're raising that are not represented in groups here, that are not about funding, that are particular to, I don't know, a big coin -- bit coin solution for refugees, how difficult it is to sell that idea to someone, so it's not only about the money and not only about access to knowledge, how you -- because the workshop is supposed to be titled "Connecting" right? >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Yes. >> SYLVIA CADENA: So I will get a lot of notes of all your comments because that's what I need to be doing, connecting the -- >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Thank you so much, Sylvia. I would like you -- if you've already made your minds about which group you'll be going on, but our substance facilitators will be the main one leading the discussions, and our panelists will be shifting probably, as suggested by Sylvia, shifting from one group to another one to try to bring some -- if there is a need. Every group, I suggest you have a rapporteur, someone who will be taking a few notes, because hopefully we'll still have time, so I would like three or four or five main points that you had from your discussions, so thank you so much, and we'll be reconvening, I think, in less than 20 minutes. Let's say 15 minutes. Thank you so much. (Breakout sessions started) >> ARSENE TUNGALI: So maybe to recap if you didn't get it right. On this side, we'll be talking about financing or ICT initiatives, so this is on my left, and on my right, you'll be discussing about the nonetheless and the barriers we're having in accessing knowledge services or the contents online. So please join any of the groups and contribute. Thank you so much. (Breakout sessions started) >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Hello. Hi, everyone. So we'll be reconvening, please. Please do join us. You'll be presenting? >> Yes. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Okay. Perfect. Mr. Mueller. Thank you so much, everybody, for your contributions during the group discussions. Yeah, we are short on time, and I really hope you had good conversations in the -- in your respective groups. So now we'll be listening to two people. We'll be listening to Valentina and Dr. Mueller, that will be giving us just in a few minutes two or three points, main points that they had as discussion in their group, and after that, we'll be wrapping up this session today. So I'll start with Valentina. >> VALENTINA HVALE PELLIZZER: Okay. Thank you very much. Our group was on knowledge, and what we realized, that there are several levels, so there is the first level of user, the users that are seeking for knowledge and that very often don't know how to find, and there are different issues. It can be because of the current culture, issues that are not there, not developed, or can be incriminateive of themselves, and this is one level, so how user can seek knowledge and where they can go to seek and find this knowledge. Very often those are civil society in their diversity. And then there is the layer of the civil society, the ones that produce knowledge and don't know or are not able sometimes to distribute this knowledge and to reach out because of different layer of misunderstanding or also capacity issues, and then there are also the other civil societies that are seeking for knowledge and would like to know what the others are doing. One thing that is emerging is the role of library, library as an entry point for knowledge that is there and knowledge that is very often prevented because it's costly. We discussed briefly the fact that there is -- there are costs, and if there the content should be available, they're not, so we were talking about the possibility on how to strategize better and consider a library as an entry point, a place that can help in the distribution of the knowledge, also guiding the research of the knowledge, even if, of course, the libraries are not at the same standard everywhere, but this can be one of the points. Thank you. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Thank you so much, valley Tina. That was brief, and thank you so much. Dr. Mueller. >> MILTON MUELLER: Thank you. Hello, everybody. I'm Milton Mueller at Georgia tech on Internet governance project, so we had quite a -- an informative discussion, but mostly it was about obstacles to financing rather than solutions. Basically, we learned about the different problems that the group members had in achieving funding, and one of the most significant ones, I think, politically is the increasing a number of restrictions that are placed on transnational funding flows by national governments because of money laundering or -- or terrorist restrictions or sometimes just political discrimination, civil society groups that have a better chance of getting funding maybe from outside the country, but they might have obstacles in actually getting the money in the end, so Sylvia's recommendation was to start looking inside your own country, even though the most promising sources might be outside. There was a brief mention of microfinance. One of our members was studying that, and that was something we didn't really have time to explore, but we would encourage various kinds of entrepreneurial initiatives in that regard, but we didn't really have time to go into it. And we also had a strange talk about how eligibility -- how countries might get classified as a whole, so maybe Peru, for example, was -- graduated from being low-income to middle-income, and suddenly many funders will no longer give money to Peruvian proposals because they're no longer considered low-income, even if there are obviously parts of the country where they would really still be in the same situation and still need it. So the other problem we encountered was the difference between a donor and an investor, so you go to a donor and you just want them to give you money, and if -- but many people consider themselves an investor and they want more control over what you do, and then there can be a mismatch between that might fatally affect and kill your project because they want you to do things that you don't want to do or vice versa. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Well, it looks like you really had a very nice discussion. I note that you mentioned, which is true -- I can agree that those restrictions on transnational funding. I had a chat this morning with a lady from Brazil who-they're running a project, and they received a grant from an international donor such as from the islands, but it took them, like, a very long time for them -- for their bank to even accept that transfer because their government is very, very restrictive and they're worried about all the issues of terrorism or the issues of money laundering, probably, and they said they had to explain, like, for quite a few number of weeks for their bank to be able to accept the transfer to entry into the country. I think that's also something really, really important, and you also mentioned that sometimes it's not easy to differentiate with the donor -- who is a donor and who is an investor because most of the time in the civil society world, like nonprofits world, we don't deal too much with investors, I think, unless we have, like, an entrepreneurship idea, and so sometimes that can also bring into confusion. From the other group, I note that you -- you spoke a lot about libraries and if there are ways to fund some of those libraries so they can make the content available. Also, you mentioned some of -- there are so many users who are looking for knowledge online but they don't have -- like, they're not aware of where to go to look for that knowledge, but also for some civil society organizations who have something to share but probably they don't have where -- they don't know where to put that information available to their readers. We are running out of time. I'm sorry. And so we -- we really need to wrap up this session. So I'd like to thank every one of you for showing up to our session today. We'll be hopefully continuing this discussion on our mailing list. We'll have a mailing list, and if you can -- there is the IGcaucus.org website, and you can request to have an account, and we can allow you to go -- to access the mailing list where we are having constantly discussions on civil society issues, so thank you so much on behalf -- thank you so much for our panelists. If we can give them a round of applause, please, for our panelists. (Applause) I was saying to give a round of applause for our panelists today and for our session facilitators. Thank you so much for being willing to share your knowledge with us, and I hope you can share your reports with our main rapporteur so we can -- whenever the reports -- the final reports of the session will be available, we'll be also sharing it on the list. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful day. >> Thank you, Arsene, for doing a lot of work for organizing this panel and has the unthankful task the chairing the IGC, so thank you. >> ARSENE TUNGALI: Thank you, Mueller. Please join our mailing list and I hope you'll be able to be part of our discussions at civil society. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. (Session concluded at 11:51 a.m.) Internet Governance Forum 7 December 2016 Workshop 144. Enabling Every User with a Unique Internet Culture ID 12:00 p.m. >> MODERATOR: Okay, everybody, we're getting ready to start. Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Workshop 144. Advance. We'll be discussing Enabling Every User with a Unique Internet Culture ID. We've received some feedback that the title is a little misleading, so this is, in part, about giving people internationalized email addresses that they can use as identifiers on the Internet. You went the wrong way. As you can see, we're having some resolution problems on the screen, so ... Thank you for your patience. So I'm mark Svancarek. I'm from Microsoft. I'm one of the coorganizers of this event. And our agenda today is for the coorganizers to welcome you. We will have keynote presentations on various topics from various people. Then there will be an open discussion for 45 minutes to discuss various issues related to this topic. So welcome to the event. I'd like to introduce Mr. Lee, the CEO of CNNIC, whose dream it is to give everyone an internationalized email address and support internationalized domain names for everyone in in China. >> MR. LEE: Thank you, Marc. This is Mr. Lee. I'm the CEO of CNNIC. It's my great honor to be here and to see so many different people here. At today's session, we've been having for many times in different topic. You know, since the first IGF meeting and also in the next couple of years, it has been discussed many, many times. I think it's even that we need to work together to do a lot for the future development for the ID and also email address in different languages. So just now, I also joined the ICANN program update in last session. I'll also mention that the community needs to work together to solve the current problem to deploy the -- the ID and also the internationalized email address. We need to be aware there's a lot of -- I a lot of tremendous effort has been made and a lot of implementation and research efforts have been deployed, so of course, this panel -- this is also including panelists from the industry, from the email proprietors, so I hope in the future we have a very successful in this area. If we want to recall memory from many years ago, since 1999, CNNIC and also myself have donated a lot of resources for the research of the Chinese domain name and also the Chinese email address. I think it's almost ten years ago I co-chaired the email address Internet working group to raise issues in the IGF to raise the international standard, also supported by many here, including John. I think it's a big effort from the community to do that, to solve the problem, but, you know, even nowadays a lot of issues with this. Even there's some service -- email service providers support that, but because the country, the email address used to be -- has been used as the ID for so many systems, not only for email service, maybe so many people never use the -- this ID as the email service, but they will use the email address to be the ID, so that means that the unique ID is a very, very critical resource for so many systems, even for IBM, Microsoft, also some big companies, just like Alibaba in China, so if we want to improve that system, we face a lot of challenge how to support that. So I think there's a lot of issues to be discussed, and also, as I mentioned just now, there's a lot of effort needs to be do in the future, so I hope that the committee members can work together, not only for the developers and entrepreneurs can work together to solve the problem. I have best wishes for this session, hopefully it will be a success. Thank you. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you. >> JIANKAN YAO: So, thank you Mr. Lee. We are a coordinator on Microsoft and Marc. Microsoft is working with Mark with 23 years of experience in Microsoft, also is a USGEW cochair, so welcome, Mark. >> Thank you, Yao. As he mentioned, I am on the universal steering group. I've had a lot of roles in Microsoft, and currently one of them is to help engineering teams to evaluate new standards and opportunities based on these standards that we know have impact on customers and partners. IPv6 is one of those, EIPIDN is another. >> JIANKANG YAO: Thank you, Mark. Next we will hear from ETDA. ETDA is one part of the organization, welcome (Off microphone) >> Good morning, everybody. Wana wit from ETDA, so I don't want to take that much time from you, and I think it's nice to be here, and thanks for the teams. We have the next billion that are not using a Roman corrector, so I do hope that this session we'll hear from feedback from you from the workshop. Thank you. >> Thank you, Wanawit. So here's our agenda, as mentioned. Andrew and John will present -- >> JIANKANG YAO: Yao (Off microphone) >> MARK SVANCAREK: Pardon? Please bear with us. So, for the agenda, John and Andrew will talk about their interests and concerns related to this topic, and then we'll have number of speakers, Microsoft.Asia, THNIC, and we'll cover other aspects of this. Will you drive off these slides or -- yeah. Okay. Good. >> Hi. For those of you who are lucky enough not to know me, I'm John celebson. This is Andrew Sullivan to my right. We were originally asked to do separate presentations, and we decided it would be much more interesting to do it almost unprepared dial yoing discussion between the two of us. These slides are an outline, which we may not follow. (Clenson.) The general idea is to try to share with you our perspectives, less on the specifics of implementations and protocols than on the issues associated with trying to deploy these addresses, and partly in the hope that people can keep their expectations enough in line with reality that it's actually possible to succeed rather than getting bogged down forever in things that are either not desirable or which won't work. Okay. Three buttons is forward, back, and stop? >> MARK SVANCAREK: I think this is forward. It looks like forward to me. I think you have to point at the computer. >> JOHN CLENSON: Oh, okay. So our first issue when we started looking at this replicates that from the session description, as Mark sort of mentioned, it was very hard to figure out what we were talking about at this session, so I felt the first thing we should do is try to clarify that. I didn't know what cultural meant in this context and I didn't know what unique meant in this context, and I'm not sure I knew what a user was in this context, and other than that, we were in great shape. Why don't you feel to interrupt me at any point. >> ANDREW SULLIVAN: I usually feel free to interrupt you at any time. >> JOHN CLENSON: Excuse me. When Andrew interrupts me, it is with my permission. The other piece of these sort of fundamental issues we wanted to talk about is what to use an email address as identifier actually means. It's widely practiced. We'll talk a little more about that later, but it could be an impediment to actually getting not ASCII -- nonASCII email addresses and even nonASCII domains deployed. There's a second issue with email which is that-Mark mentioned -- Yao mentioned that Mike had been in Microsoft for 23 years. Okay. I have been worried since about 1980 about the question of how to give normal human beings email addresses and let them communicate with each other, regardless of where they were. (Loud noise) And one of my concerns about this work is that we try to preserve that ability of anyone on the Internet who feels like doing so to communicate with anyone else on the Internet they feel like communicating with. And I'm very concerned that we not lose sight of that open communication goal in the process of giving ourselves email addresses and identifiers, whether they're the same thing or not, which are much more locally and culturally compatible. So we're going to be talking a little bit about that too. >> ANDREW SULLIVAN: So while you're going to the next slide, I think there are three themes I want to pick up here because they're individually important ones, and the first one is that there is a tendency with a number of these topics to fall into abstractions that don't always help, right, so you start with a fairly narrow problem and you think, oh, I've got this, like, identifier for domain names or for email addresses or something like that, and that's a fairly narrow problem, and then you realize that that thing has been reused for another purpose, like it's used for user identifiers in other systems, and then pretty quickly you're talking about, like, universal identifiers for people in the world. And the problem is that the last of those -- the last of those problems is a -- you know, is a boil-the-ocean -- no, it's a boil all the oceans, maybe the ones on Jupiter also, right? Like, that's just too big a problem to solve, so one issue that we have here is that it's super critical when we're talking about these things to be concrete so that we can actually, you know, get a problem that is tractable. The second one is that identifier reuse is great and it's a long tradition that we've got, but that's also the millstone that we've got to carry. The Internet is already deployed, so we don't have the opportunity to just start from nothing and say we're going to throw this all away and do something better, and some of the proposals that we sometimes hear from people sound very like, you know, we'll just build another Internet and deploy that and then everything will be great. Well, not going to happen. And I think the third thing -- I think the two things are enough to get us started, so rather than blathering on, I'll let John go back. >> JOHN CLENSON: So I've said this already. When we looked at enabling every user -- okay. Well, we just may give up on this. No. It's -- two buttons is at least one too many for me. Okay. That's where I was trying to get to. My subtitle for this discussion is what are really the goals and what is the issue here. I was very certain the way I first read and other people read the subject name probably wasn't the goal and if it was, we were in trouble, for partially the reasons Andrew mentions. -- mentions. So what we're hoping to do is we hope to get to the stage where we have an understanding of what the problem is and a closer proximation to and understanding of what the goals are, and -- and if we can't agree on that, we should at least be able to understand why we don't agree and where. So I think we're talking about cultural in terms of script and language and other issues and not a whole series of broader but fairly important things, especially given some parts of the world. And similarly, with uniqueness, there's a question about whether we are talking about one identifier per user, which is probably not a good idea, and we'll talk more about that later, or an identifier which identifies only one user, which is a slightly easier problem but not necessarily one that can be globally solved. Similarly, when we talk about email addresses as identifiers, rather than things which we use to send and receive email, there are many, many systems that accept those email addresses and think that they're identifiers. You're coming shopping on my site, please give me your email address, you come back later, we want to look it up by email address. And we've got a long history, even in the Latin character world, the databases which have the nasty property which when an email address that went in is looked up, you don't find it because the email address, the lookup process looks different than the email address in the original entry process. Internationalization doesn't create any of these problems, but it makes all of them worse or all -- or creates greater vulnerabilities to all of them, so, again, referring back to Andrew's comment about ocean boiling, having email addresses with local scripts matching people's names or whatever else they try to do is a far, far easier problem when those addresses are used for email than when they're used for general purpose identifiers of the Internet. It doesn't say you have to solve both problems because you may have to solve both problems, but if you define success only in terms of having a complete solution to both problems, if you're really lucky, it's 20 years off, and the other problem is one I sort of alluded to earlier, which is if we make our email addresses highly focused on the local language, local script, local culture, we then have a problem of thinking through what it continues to mean to communicate internationally. So I think we may have talked about this enough, unless there's somebody who is frightened by it still, but if we're talking about unique cultural identifiers, people have a tendency to hear something else, and that notion of a possibly government assigned unique identifier by which everybody in the world can be identified is, I hope not -- not what -- not what anyone thinks we are talking about here. >> ANDREW SULLIVAN: Okay. Let's move on. >> JOHN KLENSIN: So the question becomes can we have identifiers that are reasonable to the culture, and the answer to that is yes, up to a point, and how far one wants to push that point turns into how hard you want to make the problem to solve. I had a micro conversation a couple of weeks ago that in Chinese there are a lot of characters which Unicode has made hard to use because they haven't been in common use for anything for centuries, but they still appear in some Chinese communities in names, and if you want those characters used in if the names, because they use -- it's in your personal name, to be used in email addresses, then you have a more complicated problem than if you forbid that. Now, is that important or not? I don't know, that's a cultural question. The only thing I can tell you as an outsider is that the problem gets harder if you decide to have to allow that. There are similar problems with other languages, old scripts, languages which have changed, or thography and eliminated characters over the centuries. Again, if we can figure out a way to make this problem easier by constraining it, something about getting something done in the near future becomes a great deal easier. >> ANDREW SULLIVAN: So I think this is an important point, and there's another way to slice it, but it's the same basic point. There are three things in tension with one another here, and the first of them is we want people to have identifiers that are natural for them to use. If you want to enter something that you can remember easily and so on, you know, it should be like your name or it should be like, you know, something that is familiar to you. The second thing is that we have to deal with people communicating with one another in a shared cultural context, so people who speak the same language or people who come from the same neighborhood or, you know, speak the same language or write in the same writing system, which is not necessarily the same thing as speaking the same language, right? But then we've got this third problem, which is that we want systems to be internationalized, not localized; that is, this is the -- the distinction between having something that works for people in a particular community and something that works for everybody in every community, and depending on which one of those you want to make more important, you're going to have to make different choices about what to do because we can't have all of them all at once immediately, and I think that that is one of the big difficulties. It's fortunate that we have this situation where -- unfortunate that we have this situation where we've deployed a bunch of stuff that gets in the way of these future things, but, you know, this is a classic example of that old cliche, making the perfect the enemy of the good, right? The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we want something that is at least usable for most people to get started, and I think that that -- that we sometimes skip over the distinction between those two possibilities. Speaking personally, I will confess that, you know, because of my background, I always want to start with something and get something going before we get everything perfect because I would rather that, but there are people who then say in response to that, well, that's unfair to me because you've left me out, and I understand that problem, but I think that that is actually a difficult -- a difficult needs assessment problem that we have to face, and unfortunately, maybe we haven't done a good job of facing that needs assessment problem before we started fixing -- you know, working on the technologies, and so now we've got these nasty corner cases, and we've got three generations of them. Concern concern and because of my person -- >> And I tend to start worrying whether the road he's following leads over a cliff and I try to map cliffs, and that's another piece of our problem here is if we make early decisions and deployments which are too simplistic and ignore other kinds of options, we may find ourselves in a situation where some language or some script cannot be accommodated in any reasonable way without tearing everything else down first and we don't want to do that. (John) So again, this is a critical challenge there, so I believe in moving forward and I think we also need to look ahead. Okay. We've talked about the rest of this one. Oh, goody. Well, we're not going to get to the end of this. Okay. Skip this too. Okay. No, not the last one that you skipped. So I want to make one more point about this notion of unique personal names. If you compare the name John >> JOHN KLENSIN:Son to the name Andrew Sullivan, something very interesting emerges, or two things. The first one is that John c Klensin and JC Klensin are unique and match Klensin, but J Klensin is not unique, and the other -- while John Klensin in any of those forms is unique on the Internet, there are probably a whole lot of Andrew Sullivans. And if you decide that these unique identifiers have to uniquely identify users in a way which feels good to them, we end up with solutions, like, Joe Smith 37254 and Joe Smith doesn't think 37254 is part of his name, for some reason. And moving into multiple scripts doesn't change that problem for anybody who's -- the a national curl actuarial equivalent of John Smith, and it doesn't change anybody's national cultural equivalent of me, but I'm a unique case. Next slide. >> ANDREW SULLIVAN: Just to make that slide worse, remember what we're trying to do is not to uniquely identify people just for email, but you're also -- because email addresses persist over time, you actually have to do this temporally, which means if Joe Smith 37254 was an identifier, it has to remain an identifier at least for the plausible lifetime of Joe Smith, otherwise it goes to the wrong person, so it's not just now this has to be a problem but over the course of generational time, which is kind of awful on the Internet given that we've got, what, two generations with time on the Internet so far. >> JOHN KLENSIN: Okay. So we wanted to talk briefly about the difference between the IDN problem and the email address problem. The IDN issue is we've got a single global rigid matching system, it's deep hierarchy. When we started looking at internationalized domain names 15 or so years ago, we realized we had three basic choices about how to do that. The first one involved changing the DNS to change its matching rules and how it understood strengths, and we -- strings, and we decided we couldn't do that because we said it would take forever if it could happen. The second opportunity was to transfer all the labels what we call ASCII incompatible coding so these names could sneak by applications who didn't know about them, and that's, of course, what we decided to do. And the third possibility was to adopt a two-step resolution model involving looking at user-facing identifiers which were a little bit fuzzy and could ask questions like, do you mean this one or that one? And then go to the DNS, which was network-facing, as it was originally designed, to actually look up objects. The more we find people who are saying we need to change the DNS to do various things about bundling names, about fuzzy matching, about funny cross-tree things, the more it becomes possible that we made the wrong choice, that third choice might have been the right one, in spite of the fact it could have been deployed more quickly. So I won't belabor this more. Good news, before we continue. First piece of good news is that neither email addresses nor domain names, nonASCII indicators are needed to communicate content, and content is almost clearly the most important part, so people need to think about what's important. It doesn't make it less offensive for people to have to use names other than in their scripts, but it's worth remembering as we proceed. Next slide. Okay. The email side of this is different and much more complicated because it is easier than the IDN side. We cannot map email addresses into some ASCII compatible form because we've done that already for other reasons, and anybody who has an implementation which does it, I will tell you right now, as a preview of the future, your implementation will not work in some important cases. You can't encode without breaking existing systems. The email rule, which is very important and which was discovered over and over again that when we violate email (Off microphone) is that only the target system can interpret what those addresses mean as a consequence, you cannot in general encase in code. So IDNA situation, old applications continue to work with A labels. The affect is only ugly and culturally silly. It does work, and upgraded applications are just fine. For email, the old applications simply do not work and sometimes don't work in very bad ways, and only the upgraded application comes send or receive or retrieve messages that have nonASCII addresses or nonASCII headers in them in either the sender or the receiver, and that's the issue people have to be clear about in this distinction in combining the two. And we've talked about this. Try to use email addresses other than as addresses but as IDs. You may get yourself into problems. You certainly make the problem harder. And we need to think about user expectations. If a user thinks that three different spellings of their name are the same, we've, at a minimum, got a tutorial problem, an educational problem if we really make it so they're not the same and we tell the email addresses are personal identifiers, and we'll bring this back up later if we need it. And international interoperability may have different implications, depending on who you're talking with. The technical stuff, we've gone off and implemented this, is the really easy part. Getting to deal with the user expectations, getting it deployed, getting it to work comfortably, getting it to function across national boundaries is what's hard. Coming back to Andrew's earlier comment, having an implementation which works well for people in one country and one language and one culture is a really important first step, but it's really only a first step. And we're all impatient with this and we all want to -- about this and we all want to move forward with it, and that's good stuff, but if you want to understand how fast this happens, think about how long it took us to get universal availability of plain text Latin character-only email. No international characters, no international content, no multimedia. And the other question is to think about how long it's taken people to deal with reading and writing in languages they don't understand. So we look forward to other people telling us how they've solved all these problems so that we can go home and stop worrying about them or at least telling us carefully what problems they're solving. Thanks very much. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you very much, guys. So now we've level set on some expectations. We've heard some of the difficulties and challenges ahead, and now I'd like to move to the next set of speakers. >> JIANKANG YAO: You. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Am I next? >> JIANKANG YAO: Maybe use this. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Okay. So I'm Mark from Microsoft, as I mentioned earlier. My presentation, I just have a few slides, is to talk about how Microsoft came to be interested in this topic and what steps we've taken to address it. And the focus here will be mostly on Office 365 but not really limited to that. So our mission statement as a corporation is to empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more, and so right there that was an interesting way of thinking about EAI and IDN. You know, if you implement these standards, that's one more way that you can empower people to, you know, use their local writing method on the Internet. So it was automatically interesting to us when we saw that there was interest in the topic again because it has been around for a long time. I don't think you can read that, and really, you weren't meant to, but one of the first things we did was we evaluated what is the regional interest in these topics, who are the stakeholders in various areas, like New Zealand, China, India, Russia. Are there label generation rules panels that have been convened for the areas of interest, you know, to make it practical to create domain names and email addresses in those languages? Is it government? Is it UNESCO? Who's interested in those areas? And based on some of the information that's up here, we proceeded down the next step, you know, thinking, okay, there's some interest there, let's look at it again. You can't look at that either. Another way of evaluating the value of this is to think of it as a change event within not just the ecosystem but within our customer and partner base, and so you can look at things as having various levels of impact from low to critical across different criteria, such as who is the customer segment, who is the audience, or how does this affect our brand, or is this global versus regional, are there regulatory compliance and legal requirements, and hows to this -- how would the adoption of this impact our market share, whether by us or by our competitors? And you can see the areas, which are circled, which you can't see, show our evaluation of where the situation was when we started and then the dash lines show that some of the areas were likely to become more critical over time, mainly because of government regulations. So this further incented us to look at this, and so at this point we began to think, well, what would we offer relative to this because, you know, we are a software and services company, so at the end, it has to come down to very concrete sets of features, so consumer email is one of them, so thinking of Hotmail or Outlook.com, email for the masses, that's one possible scenario. It wasn't clear whether we could actually get a good return on investment on that in any short-term. Commercial email service, which is provided to corporations, governments, and education, that seemed more likely and more likely to be impacted by regulations and compliance issues. We are a Cloud services company, but we also have a long history doing on-premises infrastructure, you know. You have your own servers, your own directory services, things like that, and we have a hybrid offering, you know, where you have Office 365, but you also have servers on premise and they work together, so that seemed very likely as well because a lot of the customers who would be interested on the second bullet are tip toeing into Cloud services, so they'd be interested in how to do something hybrid as well. We see more and more people asking to bring their own demain name rather than saying I'm at Office 365.@myMicrosoft.blah blah blah. You just bring, you know, mydomain.com, and that's what your Office 365 tenant is named, and you would have email addresses at that same domain. And then finally, multiifactor authentication. I don't know if any of you are forced to deal with multiifactor authentication very much, but depending on your situation, you may need to use an email address, a domain name, a password, a phone, a SIM, a biometric, some combination of those in that situation, internationalized email addresses would also be impacting. So we decided -- and I think John is right about this. We decided to focus on concrete and short-term goals first, things that we knew that we could do readily, and we decided to focus on EAI, on email. We had already made lots of investments in in IDNs, and we weren't concerned about our software services supporting them very well, we were much more concerned about EAI because we knew we hadn't implemented that end to end. Engineering teams had been doing opportunistic feature work for years but never committed to doing an end-to-end. So the first thing we worked on was Outlook 2016, which is our desktop email client for Windows PCs, and that is now available. Based on that, we began to work on O -- oh, and inactive directory as well. So no one uses those features as far as I can tell, but Active Directory has supported Unicode names for several generations. So with those -- pardon? So with those available, we could focus on Exchange Online, which is the Office 365 email service, which is built on the Exchange server. This is being deployed right now. In fact, if you have an Office 365 subscription, your mailbox is probably already enabled. I know there's a few percent of the mailboxes out there that are going to be in if the long tail, so I can't guarantee definitively that you're enabled right now, but the chances are very good. And in progress, we have some of our other email clients, Outlook for Android, for iOS, and for Mac, and so we're hoping that this gets us most of the way through what I've been calling Phase 1. Phase 1 is being able to send and receive to and from EAI mailboxes. Phase 2 would be other scenarios, such as sharing files on Dropbox or One Drive addressed to people with those addresses or using them more comprehensively as identifiers for various programs like, Bing Search Rewards, et cetera. That's Phase 2. We're not doing that right. We're trying to close on Phase 1, and we're hoping that we can bring a little bit more critical mass so that people can say Gmail does it now, Microsoft can do it now, in addition to core mail and XGen Plus, so maybe we can start looking at this and feeling like it has some chance of succeeding. >> JIANKANG YAO: Next is Adam. 30 minutes. >> I will try. First of all, this is Edmon Chung from dot Asia, and thank you for inviting me to the panel. As I try to get my slide on, I guess -- I'm trying to, I guess, -- part of my presentation will try to move from a little bit more of the technical aspect that we talked about to a little bit more of the user expectation and perhaps the policy aspect of what we talk about here. Instead of using the clicker, I guess I'll say next slide. So next slide. So here's really just graphically, you know, letting people know -- I think the previous three speakers have already touched on that. Email addresses are not only used to send email these days, whether it's Facebook account registration or your, you know -- many of the different social medias or any account creation utilizes an email address, and that's where some of the issues are created, and that's where it's important. And as one of the anecdotal examples and why it's important on a policy level, there was an anecdotal example that when somebody was trying to register for their vote in the U.S. elections, they were unable to because the U.S. government system didn't allow certain email addresses that have a new top-level domain or are utilizing different languages. I don't know whether that affected the results of the U.S. elections, but that is besides the point. The point is it has policy implications on, you know, how government conduct their businesses online with these identifiers. Next slide, please. And it is also -- some of the other areas of -- one more click. Some of the other areas that you find problems with introducing these new characters into email addresses are, like, other types of email filters or spam filters, for example, is a good example. When spam filters see that, hey, this address looks a little bit weird, they cut you out, and that has implications on the developing world where a big topic here is getting the next billion online, and more often than not, their language -- the native language is not English, and if they utilize an email address with their own native language and it's blocked by spam filters, then that presents another type of challenge. You know, that's really -- you know, in terms of policy aspect, those are the issues that we talk about. Next slide, please. And that's where universal acceptance and the universal acceptance steering group is trying to work on, and Andrew mentioned about perfect being the enemy of good. This is also how we conduct our business, looking at what the, I guess, low-hanging fruits and also where we can hit the critical mass because to have all the systems everywhere on the Internet to be available to accept all the email addresses and all the top-level domains is probably impossible for the foreSiebel future, but we need to get to -- foreSiebel future, but we need to get to a critical mass so these can be used. A lot of Internet standards are not the perfect sense in universality, and that's how Internet evolves. We get to the critical mass, we get to a point, but that requires -- and that requires your attention in terms of the -- on the user end and also on the policy end. Next slide, please. (Foreseeable) And in terms of the UASG, the Universal Acceptance Steering Group, we've -- one of the things that in the last couple of years we've identified a kind of a standard to think about these issues and to define it, both on the IDNs and now on the email address internationalization, how we accept, validate, store, process, and display these identifiers, and these are aspects that you need to look at in terms of your system, whether it's a government system or corporate system, how to deal with these identifiers coming in. Next slide, please. And in terms of our progress, the current -- oh, one -- before that. That's the exciting slide. So -- keep going. So the current projects on EAI, in fact, we're excited to see that there's a growing participation, so -- and if you're still interested to participate, look for UASG, Universal Acceptance Steering Group on the ICANN website, and it's an open mailing list, just send an email in to join. I'm guessing it does not support EAI just yet, so please use an ASCII email address. Unfortunately -- there are a number of guides that we're working on, and please do participate. Next slide. But we go back to a question, do people actually use it, you know. A lot of people will say but nobody uses these names. I guess it's also a matter of a chicken-and-egg problem, but one of the things I'm excited about -- next slide -- is actually things are going to change. Today, maybe typing an email address in your own native language is a challenge, one more click, but think about the audio input with your mobile phone, that's going to change a lot. That's going to change a lot of things, and we know how mobile Internet is going to change. It's hard to imagine Chinese users or Arabic users speaking English to their phone and trying to sends an email to somebody else, and that's when email address internationallyizations or IDNs is going to really matter, and that's why bringing on the next billion is going to be important. Next slide, please. And this -- and the other thing that is coming along -- next click -- Internet of Things, again, speaking to your fridge, highly unlikely you'll use English rather than your native language, and this is a slide I've shown for many years, and Homing is saying I should have some progress. Next slide is the progress. It is possible to use tow main names for inter-- domain names for Internet of Things. Next slide, please, because I'm running out of time. The next important aspect is sustainable development goals. This has relationship to sustainable development goals. Next slide, please. And especially in infrastructure development. If you -- I won't go through in details, but eight, nine, 11, 12, they all include aspects of how -- how infrastructure is developed with the local -- localization and the local community in consideration, and EAI and IDNs are all part of that, because if you think about the Internet, we often think about it as an international tool, but it's as important in the local condition, you know, local company talking to your local audience, that's where EAI and IDN is going to play a role. Next slide, please. And that also has an aspect of the cultural aspect and heritage aspect of the SDGs, so fu, six, eight, 11, 12, 13, 15 all talks about the cultural aspects. I'll jump to the last slide. And that's why IG is involved, and in education, that's what we're trying to do, and IG, which is our tiger, is also focused on sustainable development, off course happening tigers but also universal acceptance. I won't talk about this, but you can come to our booth and I will explain why SDGs and universal acceptance are actually, you know, a very important part of it, because of the enabling of the local community in terms of infrastructure development and also in terms of heritage protection, protecting, you know -- and also thriving language and cultural aspects for the Internet, so thank you. >> JIANKANG YAO: Okay. Thank you. Next is Marvin. >> MARK SVANCAREK: You can drive it. >> MARVIN WOO: Good afternoon, everyone. This is Marvin would from Carmel, China, and carmel is the first EAI provider, and today, I will -- as a provider, will show some experience of EAI. I use my EAI for work every day, almost one year, so I feel something -- (Laughter) In 2012 Carmel is the first EAI provider, so we found some difficulties. For example, no client to support EAI, and they ask me if I want to have an EAI account, which -- so we do something -- next. So now carmel relate some client iOS and Windows, like mobile clientele and PC clientele. Usually these clientele work every day, almost -- use my EAI account, and I -- my English (Off microphone) Also use my EAI address to send email, you know. Next. And (Indiscernable) to some EAI account like this, and now we 100,000 users. Next. And this is some commercial example. In China we have enterprise custom, and then we an EAI system for custom, and so we -- this is the first real way to catch many through our custom. Okay. Now I have some challenges, and the first is EAI is limited in the local cycle. For example, my father, he doesn't like EAI account because he can't understand English, but for my foreign friends, like Mark, you can't understand my Chinese email. It's fairly terrible for you, so EAI account is using a no code cycle, I think. No, no, no. Another challenge is few applicants to accept EAI account as latest ID, so it's an endless loop. No application can accept EAI email address, so no people like to use. And software provider have no interest to improve their system, and still people use -- few people use EAI account. It's an endless loop, at least in my field. Like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and also the -- as email address, as register ID, so it's really an ID, but they can't accept EAI account. If I use Chinese -- another EAI email address through latest, it can accept, so the earlier ID I can't use to -- our Internet education. The last part is I think maybe in the future we can use email address in the local cycle or a user like to use EAI but in different country or different language they can't use it, so I think a code is necessary maybe for a long time because -- so maybe several millions of surveys for enterprise build itself, so they can't upgrade a system, so I think maybe Punicode is necessary for a long time in the future. And -- >> JIANKANG YAO: 30 seconds. >> EDMON CHUNG: Okay. Okay. This is common to something like Microsoft Exchange Online where it is the common SaaS and custom. Also, all of them can support EAI. Okay. That's all. >> JIANKANG YAO: Great. Thank you. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thanks, Marvin. Next up we have Pentri from TH Nick. I think you have a file compatibility problem. >> PDF you can't open. >> MARK SVANCAREK: We can't display her presentation right now, so she'll just have to speak to it. >> JOHN KLENSIN: So we can open proprietary but not PDF. >> (Inaudible) I'm from HTNIC. Our aim is to build millionless of Internet to those not familiar with English character, they cannot recognize, they cannot write, so I think the IDN and EAI is necessary for them. So we start our journey in 2011 where we provide Thai IDN. At that time, EAI was started with help, and from 2014 until now, we join many activities and did many tests. Finally in June this year we started to offer the Thai EAI service and dot Thai domain name for the.Thai domain name using costs for platform, and we plan to provide free EAI email account to people next year, so they can have the email. So today actually I would like to share my experience in implementing EAI, but we cannot see that one. We can show later. So we list problems that we face. Like, the first one is delivery label. That means to deliver email address that is using EAI to the server that do not support EAI. We need solutions, so they provide ASCII and nonASCII account -- address and point to the same email mailbox to solve this one, and they are, like -- the system is SMTP available. Next we found is that the interoperability, as different systems might use different encoding, so to -- we found out a message displays incorrectly, as that -- and that leads to incorrect address when the server tries to reply. To solve this issue, they placed the content type and encoding at the top of the header. Next intraon built issue is data from (Off microphone) so we can have like UTFA@UTFA or can you have other type, like -- you need to show that. Okay. So they will be able to display all of them and then convert them to unique code before sending back. -- Unicode before sending back. As we talk about interoperability, we need to work on each email system one by one, so -- or case-by-case basis. It would be helpful if we can have, like, the best practice so that all of us can follow and maybe go by scale of interoperability opportunities is also needed. Next issue is that there is no client application now that can do POP and iMap for unicode account. Microsoft said that Outlook 2016 can do that, right? >> MARK SVANCAREK: I thought so, yeah. Did your tests show otherwise? >> PANELIST: Maybe we need to work out interoperability. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Bugs are always welcome. >> PANELIST: Right. So clearly only webmail can do, and to inform us that they will develop a client application for our users. Yeah. And to provide EAI address for our users, we also want service provider that they can receive and reply back to all, so -- our user, so we build up a Wiki page to tell the small email service provider there's a guideline to set up that EAI by turning on the EAI if they are using -- so as many of you said, we need, like, big player, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple to support -- fully support EAI so that the ecosystem can happen, so the last -- last -- actually, I would touch the same, like, UA lady, asset plan lady. That user can use that EAI to register for, like, Facebook, Twitter, banks, or even government services. So we would need to list them, so we -- I think they are doing that one. Okay. So that is my presentation. >> MARK SVANCAREK: So, thanks, Pensri. Her presentation actually has a lot of great diagrams in it to show what they're doing and how they're implementing it, so let us know if you would like to see that afterwards. So that's the end of our prepared speakers, and now we'd like to have an open discussion and we'd like to maybe break into groups to talk about things like real-world deployment experiences, what we've learned, challenges and issues that remain, how we can enable every user with an Internet ID, a discussion of whether or not email addresses are good Internet IDs or not. I think that will be enough for now, so -- yeah, I don't know. Should we divide into -- >> PANELIST: You're the moderator. >> MARK SVANCAREK: So perhaps we could -- question. Are there some questions? >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, it's a question, and maybe a set of comments as well, because I'm still grappling to get onboard with your premises that an email address can be used as an identifier. Because there are -- I mean, it's counter-intuitive. We have a lot of places where we need to provide -- when we provide -- even email address providers ask for other factors for authentication, to factor -- two-factor authentication, especially for numbers, because phones are very individual, and they know when they send the codes, you'll be the one receiving it, and it's kind of more reliable in practice because people use phones for a lot of things every day, et cetera, but we have a lot of issues, spam and -- I mean, many people have my email address that I never met, and they send me junk email and all that, so anyone who has my email address can pretend to be me, if you use an email address as an identifier. That's a problem, and note that even government-issued identify is not just a name that's an identifier, it's a drank ulation of many -- several -- drank ulation of many different data, it's the name and date of birth and gender and those sorts of things, so it's a triangulation of those data points that makes it more likely that the credential represents uniquely an individual, so I still don't understand how you use an email address as an identifier, especially that you didn't mention any other factors. If you had in mind a password, the problem is passwords are things that are very annoying and very -- I mean, they're not manageable on the long run, and a lot of people in the technical world are thinking about how to get rid of passwords, so you have a lot of identity technologies being developed. The latest one I heard of is the Distributed technology, like Block Chain and stuff like that, so for me to hear that email addresses will be used as identifier is like going backwards, so can you explain that? >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you for your feedback. I think Andrew would like to answer first. >> ANDREW SULLIVAN: Thank you. So this is exactly in line with, I think, some of the remarks that John was making at the beginning; that is, what you have to do -- before you start saying here is a thing that we're going to use as an identifier is that you have to ask, so what is this an identifier for, what is the purpose to which you're going to put this piece of identity information and what consequences follow from that? And so if -- if I'm going to use my email address as an identifier, say, to Twitter, you know, so that I can also generate, then, a Twitter handle from that so that people can identify me within the Twitter system, that has certain implications, like, for instance, that people can, you know, tweet things to me, but it's rather less important, really, I think, that people be able to get their tweet information to me than, for instance, that my tax return be identified and associated with me because one of those things sends me to jail if I do it wrong and the other one doesn't, and so those kinds of things are among the questions that we have to ask. And I think what John was saying at the beginning of this was the initial scope seemed to be this enormous problem of, like, unique identifiers for individuals, and then it turned out actually that the scope of this is enabling people with an identifier that they can use when they go out into the world to identify themselves consistently across systems and building on top of the EAI system. That is a very different problem, and I think that you're right to ask whether these two things are the same thing because I don't believe they are. And more importantly, there is the follow-on question of whether we actually want people to have a singular unique identifier that carries across all of the systems. Personally, I would say that that is very close to the worst idea I've heard all week, so I think that that's a really bad idea, but, you know, I mean, people could have a discussion about that, but I think that what we tried to do at the beginning of the session was narrow the scope so we weren't also tackling that problem because I think it would be a very different discussion we'd be having. >> JOHN KLENSIN: Yeah, just a quick one. I hate the idea of using email addresses as identifiers for all of the reasons you mentioned and several more. Our difficulty is that it has become an extremely popular habit in a very large portion of the world, good reasons or bad reasons, whether we can get people to back away from that habit or not is an open question. We need to understand better as we move into this new phase of identifiers or of email addresses, just how far we want to go in that direction and what the implications are. I would even disagree with something Andrew said, which is that one could have a perfectly good email address without implying that it's an identifier at all, and maybe that's an option we should be pursuing, but, again, my main argument is we should be thinking about these things. One additional thing for everybody, I am going to make a personal plea, get the term "EAI" out of your vocabulary before it causes far more confusion with all of the other three-letter magical acronyms floating around. Talk about it as internationalized email if you want to, use the correct technical term which is STMP, but it's merely a working group which we picked after we were angry because all the other names had been taken and we were trying to keep it short. Let's try not to use that as a terminology generally in talking with each other and especially with talking with other people because we will just create confusion. >> MARK SVANCAREK: I think it explains why it's EAI and not IEA. >> JOHN KLENSIN: And if you know what an IEA is, you probably know why. Edmon. >> EDMON CHUNG: I guess that's probably part of the identifier problem, right? So in response, the way I see it actually, email address is one type of identifier. It doesn't have to be the only identifier. You have, like, in your physical world, you have your passport number, you have your license number, you have your physical postal address, you have your phone number. I guess one of the key aspects that at least I want to talk about and I think the group wants to talk about is think about your phone number. In my place in Hong Kong, in my lifetime, we've moved from six-letter -- six digits to seven digits to eight digits now. We're talking about databases that is only able to accept phone numbers in six digits and choke on seven or eight digits. Here is a case where systems use email addresses, whether they are as identifiers or not, but they -- you know, now that we've introduced other languages or other characters into email addresses, those databases now start having problems, so I think that is a bigger problem that we need to think about and address. Whether it becomes the only identifier, I don't necessarily think that's the pertinent kind of question we're asking, but -- and back to it is already being used as a kind of identifier, so let's make sure that, you know, the identifiers -- the systems can use the new types of email addresses, which includes native characters, and that's, I think, an important aspect. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just to clarify, I wasn't assuming that you wanted to be the unique identifier for anything. Even my name in some contents is an identifier. In my family I'm the only one called Miwaki, so it's an identifier, right, but the question is for what it's worth, what are we going to do with it? Why taking it from the status of being just email address to an identifier status, for what? That's the underlying question. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Okay. So we have Wanawit and the gentleman there and then chow Don. >> Yes. I would like to point out one other key aspect that's been overlooked. The email is part of the credential that requires to use in the signatures in the world. We have 137 trade agreements in the Pacific alone, 37. There are 27 measures talked in the trade agreement. 50% of them talked about the major delay to the eSignatures. What are we going to do? What are community going to give the answer? Government have to issue the paper? Email identifier is only means to be used, and I don't know whose fault this is, but that is the expectations from the world that we're living with. People do not know what is the problems there. I'm not talking about the identifier used across the system, but even within system, like people we don't use the Latin correctors. None of the government officers are carrying the -- offices are carrying the official Latin names, so how do you know if this is the qualifier or his credential could be able to sign this document and send across border, and I think what I'm talking here is not about the open identity or using, but it's there as part of the credential needed to provide to authenticate the trade documents. And the baseline is there, the trade facilitation agreement already reached 100 countries, eight countries to go. We expect next year we'll close. We have one year. 147 countries. If you look into the list, 80% of them are not using the Latin. This is the -- the problem is far more bigger than what we're talking here. It's not talking about this kind of messaging system. What IGF gives to us is a nonfragmented architectures of electronic mails or whatever you like to call SMTP. Without doing this, we'll get into the fragmented of the web applications that none of the governments will accept who's going to be the primary government. Email is the only means that can maintain the collaboration works, exchanging document. If we don't do anything, I don't know how the world's going to lead to? Maybe they will also need to have an English name within next three years, and I don't know -- I don't have the solutions, but I think you talk about chicken-and-egg problem, that's a paper published. The measure I've been talking about is these eSignatures, and I believe what you like to call EAI or email, it's a basic credential how we communicate. Thank you. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you, Wanawit. The closer gentlemen. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I put my hand up a few minutes ago because I thought Andrew was seriously overthinking the problem, and I think two other people who have spoken since I put my hand up initially have actually identified this a little bit better than I could have, so I'm going to draw on their words. The first is people don't actually want to use email identifiers, they want to use email as a return routeibility check, so it's an extremely basic form of proof of possession. You claimed X and I can actually send you a piece of message that you can use, some piece of text to say I've got it, therefore, we've established some return routeibility check, and it's a bootstrapping mechanism for far more complicated things, and as Edmon pointed out, lots of systems abandoned email as boot strapping system and have gone into boot strapping based on telephones. WhatsApp has built up a million users without using your email address because they have a different bootstrapping mechanism involved, so I think one of the questions that reads on the gentleman's point here about what are we going to do is one question we can ask ourselves isn't so much can we deal with the -- the tension of the fact that, you know, email has already been deployed for 30 years and changing it is very painful, with -- China has been deployed a good bit longer and changing it is equally painful or even more so, by saying are there fairly simple bootstrapping mechanisms which are out there which may serve a similar purpose to get us to an identifier that is, in fact, useful for some of these use cases like digital identity? But I don't think it's really practical for us to look at this and say we are going to abandon this problem because, as has been pointed out here, at the moment the email system does not provide an effective return routeibility check for a very large part of the world because they can't create email addresses that make sense in their environment, they can't get them delivered by many of the systems that haven't been upgraded, so it doesn't work for this. Maybe it's not the right answer for this. Maybe we just say, hey, if what you're looking for is a return routeibility check, you need something that is, in fact, a simpler mechanism than that, and maybe it is based on E164 numbers or something that doesn't have the same internationalization consequences of a text string, but leaving these people out of the world we're creating because of backwards compatibility with one particular mechanism is hopefully going to push them into other mechanisms people adopt or hopefully push us to create ones that work. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Whatever you lack, the email address -- I mean, the email address, the user has to choose the email address to be the identifier for so many applications on the Internet service, so I -- because the email is not only email, it's very good profile, which is a combination of a person's name or identifier, institution name, and also maybe includes the country name, so that is a natural way to identify one person in the real world. So they cannot change the requirements of the people, they want to use some kind of culture name to identify themselves. Maybe it's an email address, maybe it's another thing, something else. We need a combination to identify ourselves is my comment. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you. >> Thanks. Just very quickly because one of our questions at the beginning was around what other sort of possible means and mechanisms could we investigate to -- I come from the global mobile industry session. I just wanted to add that we have actually a couple of digital initiatives that are based on the premise that individuals can use their phone number as a means of authentication and accessing services. Now, clearly, we're not saying this is the only means available, but depending on the use case, the mobile number could be one option, so there are different levels of assurance, authentication, so accessing Twitter versus accessing a bank account would require different levels of assurance, but we believe that mobile on raivrts are in a good position to be able to leverage on existing assets to authenticate a user against a third-party service, and, you know, we invite at least in this session to speak to us and anyone about our initiatives, but we certainly believe that mobile numbers can act as identity sort of credential to accessing third-party services. Thank you. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Yeah, we do agree that there's multiple forms of identity that could be prepared. I think back to the keynote at ICANN 57 a few weeks ago where they were discussing people who, you know, can't afford to have their own mobile device and have to share their terminal devices, so there are other issues to involve in some use cases, but certainly, this is welcome feedback. Thank you. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just very quickly, I just thought of some things to -- Edmon, I just thought of some very important social role this EAI can play because I've just learned at the previous session that there are 7,000 languages spoken in the world, right, and 90% of the global population communicate in languages other than English. Now, if we imagine -- if we just tried to extrapolate the current situation, if we imagined that those people go online -- I mean, connecting -- unconnected and they may still be illiterate at that time, so probably that EAI -- I mean, which may be composed, for example, of their own name or something like that -- might be the only identifier which they could use when dealing, for example, with the Internet of Things stuff, simply because they can voice -- I mean, they speak out their name rather than the phone number, and that might be a very important factor, so I think that it's kind of a little bit arrogant for now to decline or just to dump in the idea that EAI may not be used as a -- as that key identifier for many in the world because simply, first of all, many of us can speak at least some English, and second, we have some means to live on, so we cannot imagine the gravity of the challenge for those -- I mean for that 54% of yet unconnected. Thank you. >> MARK SVANCAREK: Thank you. Very >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Very quickly, this is Barry Leba. Did you get anything out of this session? Did you get what you were hoping for? I didn't, so I'm wondering if I did. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Actually, I'm hoping you could tell me more about what you were expecting. Personally, I feel like I got a lot out of this just from conversing with John, frankly, but it's great to hear this feedback from the -- from the audience as well. (This is Mark Svancarek.) >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was hoping to see a conversation about what we're looking for and how we could get there, and what I got was a lecture on why it's difficult, which I already knew, which is why I didn't get anything out of it, and I've talked with John many times about this, so -- but the conversation didn't seem to happen. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, Barry. One of the things that we wanted to do, I've been working with the Indian community a lot with EAI, and we're going to have a session at 4:30 tomorrow on next steps, where do we go from here, and really pinning down the problems, the requirements, and I know you guys are going to get -- everybody's going to get all mad at me, but transition mechanisms, okay, interoperability and deployment kinds of things. I mean, you guys know that I'm pretty hard core and practical, so I -- you know, I'd like to have a practical discussion, so anybody who'd like to, please come, but -- and thank you, guys. I love hearing everybody. >> MARK SVANCAREK: That's Stleva. I actually had hoped that the presentation would give people some hope. The USAG always gets on stage and talks about how hard things are, but then we try to show some forward progress, and I think we generally do a good job lately of avoiding the it's so hard story and get to this is what we accomplished this quarter, and so I had hoped that Microsoft's recent success, even though we had this very broad portfolio of products and services -- we've actually made great progress becoming compatible, Pensri's presentation, which unfortunately you weren't able to see about an actual system that they've built, a hybrid solution for government use, but apparently, yeah, it didn't come through, and it didn't enable the conversation that you were hoping for, and I apologize. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Din din our nature is to help the employment and -- so make more email service providers and to support EAI and EAI and IDN more easily given by the application systems. Thank you. >> JOHN KLENSIN: Yeah, you don't put me in front of a microphone if you expect to hear tales of how easy things are going to be, at the same time, I'm actually encouraged by this. I'm encouraged by the number of implementations we've seen, I'm encouraged by other implementations. As I say, it's a first step, and I'm very concerned that we've put barriers in our way by either overpromising or making the problem bigger. I think the jury is still very much out on the identifier question rather than on the email question, and I think it's in our interest to look at that harder, and Ted's comments and several of the comments from the floor are very much in line with that, but I'm actually feeling fairly encouraged because I didn't expect to be where we are today for about another three, four years. >> MARK SVANCAREK: All right. We're out of time. They've actually let us run over, so thank you, everyone, for attending and for staying all the way to the end. (Session concluded at 1:37 p.m.) Internet Governance Forum 7 December 2016 Workshop 238 Community Connectivity Empowering the Unconnected 3:00 p.m. >> MODERATOR: Good morning, to everyone. >> Good afternoon. >> MODERATOR: Good afternoon. Sorry, to everyone. Welcome to this workshop on Community Connectivity: Empowering the Unconnected. The main issue that we are going to analyze that afternoon is community connectivity or better the various facets of community connectivity. We will analyze a lot of case studies and histories and stories of people that are building Community Networks, that are trying to empower local communities, and it is very important the empowerment element here for the workshop of today. We already spent a good hour and a half this morning at the meeting Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity trying to define what are the core elements of Community Networks so that we're all on the same page, we all have an understanding of we mean by Community Networks, and if you don't -- if you were not this morning at the event, I would suggest that you check our declaration on community connectivity, which is one of our annual outcomes, and also the report on community connectivity that we have released this morning. It's also -- unfortunately, all the copies have been taken this morning, so you can find it online. It's freely available at Internet-governance.fgv.br, and -- well, the important point of the meeting of that afternoon is to try to have -- to analyze a different paradigm, not to try to connect the unconnected but try to let the unconnected connect themself, let them build their own connectivity, do not be the victim or the recipient of other people's strategy but being the prag tan mist of their connectivity. I will let Raul moderate the session, and please, go ahead, Raul, with the moderation. >> RAUL: Yep. My name is Raul. I work for Finland, and I would just like our members of the group of the Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity to introduce themselves, and maybe we can start here on the left. >> Hi, I'm Nico Janus from Argentina. >> Hi. I am (Inaudible) [(Speaking non-English language). >> (Speaking non-English language). >> Hi. My name is Jay from South Africa. I'm working for the (Inaudible) >> My name is John from the foundation, Nigeria. (Microphone feedback) >> My name is (Inaudible) I'm working with the foundation in India. >> RAUL: Any more members of the Dynamic Coalition? >> Yes. Hi, my name is Mahaib, I am from Nepal, and I am with Nepal Wireless. >> My name is Maureen. I'm from Venezuela. >> Hi, I'm Osama man zer from Digital Empowerment Foundation, India. >> I'm from -- my name is Marcelo from institute Brazil and regional Brazil. >> I'm Lauria from article 19 Brazil. >> Hi. My name is Luis. Ola. I'm going from the university, and ISOC Mexico. >> (Inaudible) Catalonia. >> Okay. I'm Bob Bob frankston from the U.S. doing various projects. >> Jane Coffin from the Internet Society. >> Mike Jensen, association for progressive communications. >> CarlosRay Moreno. >> I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Luca belly. I work for the FGV. >> RAUL: Do we have anyone else working with Community Networks? Is it's a chance to let us know. Please have a mic and tell us what project are you dealing with? >> I'm Sichori from Georgia working for development fun from ISOC. >> Good afternoon, Peter Bloom from (Inaudible) >> I'm Paul from the institute fromRio di Janeiro, Brazil. >> RAUL: Okay. We'll now move on to speakers. It's very nice to see such a wide diversity here from all over the -- people from all over the world. That's really how Community Networks will build themselves. And now I'd like to move to the speakers, and we'll start with John Data. >> Thank you very much. I have a very short story just to illustrate my first encounter with the regulator in Nigeria. About 12 years ago, I had started a wireless network, and we were providing basic literacy training right up to competent network and skills, and we had a visit, we have a tower for communication, and on this day, the regulator and his team visited, which we are in the middle of nowhere, actually, but they had heard about what we were doing, and we had a tower, we had a Visat, and their concern was I was operating illegally because I didn't have a license. Frankly, I didn't know about a license, so I did ask them, by the way, how much is this license? And they gave me the same price as one of the big telelecoves in the capital city, about $5,000 U.S. dollars. I took a deep breath, and I said, well, can I just take you around the organization and show you what we're doing, so I did. I took them to one of the classes where the students were learning, I took them to some of the women who had access to our facility, and I said, can you tell me any of this that can afford because of that license? And they did agree that nobody there could afford it. Well, to cut a long story short, by the time they were leaving, they introduced me to the USP, the universal service provision fund, which I had never heard of, and I was given a five-year license to operate. So for me it was an interesting encounter, which also demonstrates what community networks do. Sometimes we operate in ignorance of the law, or sometimes we operate ahead of the regulation, the regulation hasn't caught up with us yet, but that can't stop us from the work we need to do. I have a slide that I'd like to show. Can I see my slide there, please? The slide is a picture I took in one of the sessions here today, and I'm juxtaposing it with a slide of my community to illustrate the kind of mental image I'm carrying in my head while I'm in this strange home. Any luck? Well, the thing about the -- for me the Community Network is its flexibility and relevance. Unless your Community Network is meeting an immediate need of your community, you might as well just close shop. I live in a community at the moment we are in the harvest season, and it's all manual harvest. No, it's not coming up? >> Yeah, we don't have the photo there. >> >> WELL, IT'S THERE. >> WHAT'S the name of the picture? >> Community Network. Sorry. >> RAUL: We have found the picture. >> Can we see them? Yeah. So for me, a Community Network needs to be relevant, it needs to be dynamic, it needs to be flexible, and it needs to meet immediate needs. The needs in my community at the moment is one about harvest and then the other is about refugees. These are not issues that are of immediate relevance to the regulator, but this is a matter of life or death in my community, so as a result of some sectarian crisis, there's been an influx of refugees in my community, and schools have been closed for some time. My concern has been the closure of schools, the fate of children and teachers. Teachers have lost out in terms of knowledge and skills, updates; children have lost hours of teaching. So I got in touch with some people, and they were willing to give me curriculum on continuing professional development for teachers. I needed a means of disseminating this information from a local server, and the Community Network came handy. There was the issue of girl children in these refugee positions that need immediate support and protection and needed a Community Network to attack -- to address that issue, so for me, the network has been dynamic. It looks -- it meets an immediate need; therefore, it is owned by the community. I'll tell you another short story. The Visat, there was some problems with it at one point, and I was getting frustrated with maintaining the Visat, and I said I was going to improve it, and the community came by and said, John, we would rather you approve yourself, but that Visa belongs to us, and I thought my job was done, so they had taken ownership, so I could rest as far as I was concerned. For me, the Community Network ownership is important. Now you can see those women -- that's a picture of my head at the moment. That's what's going on in my community. Now, how I show that the regulator -- since the need of this community -- because that is the local economy, that's the one that's keeping us going, the women farmers. How do I show that the Community Network meets their needs while I'm looking over my shoulder at whatever the regulator comes to say. When he comes, we'll have a chance again as usual. Thank you. (Applause) >> RAUL: Thank you, John. Next up is Ritu from India. >> RITU SRIVASTAVA: So I think that when we started Community Network in India, it's like back in 2010 or so, in 2010. The story was, like, we were working in a community and we started -- we -- we were not having any connectivity. There was a lack of connectivity and the people were unable to go to someplace -- access points were missing. There was no public infrastructure available as well to to the people, so the stories that -- back in 2010 when we started the Community Network in the multiple locations, where it's 70-person population is in the communities. They belong to -- they are Muslim, they are underprivileged one, and they were unable to access any sort of access to information. The problem -- when the -- we were -- we -- it was always the information lack -- lack of information or it was the online process as well. If we provide the information and accessible information and equitable access information, that they will be able to access certain kind of health services, they would be able to access whatever daily they required in their daily lives. So in one Community Network when we were -- when we started as well is we are using a very frugal model. We have it -- the model which we are using is also the innovative model that we started building, and sometimes we did illegal activities, we build up -- it was hard to put that as well, which is not legal in India, and we did not know that it's illegal. We were, like, okay, now if it's a build-up and its built up by some frugal matters which were lying on the ground or something, like I can -- I think Osama can tell much better about that, those stories as well when we were building those towers, but idea was that the community wanted to have that tower and to build that tower for their own purpose and to make themselves that -- be connected by the Internet as well. As well, the most important factor was when we were trying to build up those kind of Community Networks. The community was always -- it was -- they were proactive to adopt that technology, not we were proactive to get them as well. At the same time, we were proactive, but they were more proactive that, okay, we want the owners of that particular thing and we want -- we do not see that -- we really need Internet for the Internet purpose, we need some form of a communication to communicate, so in some of our locations, we -- right now we have 150 centers and we have 150 across the country as well, and some of the centers and some of the locations where we are providing the Community Networks is like one village -- group of village country members are approaching another group of community village members, and there's nothing else. They are just using as a source of information to share their knowledge and productivity, day-to-day life activity as well. It's more important for them to share their own daily life of activity as well. We are using -- technologywise we are using a 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz of a bandwidth spectrum, and simple point-to-point -- P2P technology as a line of sight. Most of the time what we're trying to build up a network tower, we tried not to build a tower as well. We tried to figure out which is the tallest building in that particular locality. There are some regulations which we end up having it, like, we -- as in the morning, Osama was mentioning there is a limited number of existing government -- most of the tallest buildings and government buildings are opened by government. Then you have restrictions of government regulations. You need to deal with the local bureaucratic system and so on and so forth, but the good point about it is that when the community itself starts taking the owners of that particular thing, it really starts establishing that this is not belong to us, this is belong to them and this is something that they really want to have it in their own capacity as well. Local content and the content which they're producing is more important for them than what they're accessing from the outside at times. What we have seen, it's more -- in cases like they're they are -- what they're producing has to go outside and what they want to consume is from outside of the world because then they want to explore the new world as well. So this is one of the major mediums that they would like to explore, Internet and the accessing through the video conferencing is one of the major things that they want to access a certain kind of things. Watching movies and films on a broadcasting way. This is the thing that they want to access in their daily life, which they don't get it, actually. So community -- what are Community Networks is -- most importantly is built up by community and for the community instead of like having owners of very small organizations. Regulators, the challenge -- good part is that regulators are not (Inaudible) the villages as well. They hesitate. There's no market in that. Where is the market lying? Is -- the market lies in the urban city. They are not willing to go as well, but when any small organization, when any organization like us, when we try to build up and we just give them some small investment, we do it, it's really good to see that they need to take the owners and ready to provide the facility with the human resource. Learning and capacity is the one that they really want to learn how this model works out, and -- but, yes, we need to be there as well for troubleshooting for a major operation purpose as well, but end of the day it goes to the community and they are taking the owners of it as well. >> RAUL: Thank you, Ritu. The next in line is Tony. >> TONY: Thank you. My name is Tony. I come from Uganda. I work for an organization called Bosco. Bosco is an organization for battery operated system for community outreach. Bosco Uganda started its operation way back when Uganda was in the war with the Army. We came up with an idea of reaching out to communities who are isolated in the desert that comes being protected by the armed forces and then rebels were attacking people. Many children were being abducted. Houses were being bombed. We came up with a feeling that how can we make these people access information? Access to information is limited to only armed forces because they were using handsets, the radio calls, but at certain point, radio calls became risk can I for government itself and then for the security. We decided to put pilot test by putting voice over Internet to about six internally placed participants where we found that information was being shared. We decided to put one computer internally displaced person comes. Out of that, many people were able to sit on computers, share information, learn what is happening on a daily basis. That came to pass. When our coms were congested, we realized that we needed to develop another strategy to reach out to communities who were isolated. Again, not internally intercomes but the back to the original homes, so when we went back with another strategy of mapping out the different communities who are there, so mapping out the communities became a challenge because you need to look for an organized group, send out information, try to assess the group, coming out with a group became also a problem, but we realize that following up the strategy that we did intercoms, we went down to local government authorities, we assessed different groups, community groups, who were established in the community, and we decided to send community ICT centers deep to rural communities, based on Bosco using battery and solar. We didn't realize much of the difficulties in sending out those kind of information, since our community are off grid, totally almost 80% of the rural community in the places where I come from, they're off grid, so the battery and solar project helped them a lot to actually see that the information in the villages are able to be accessed. The only limitation that Bosco Uganda had is that access to information sometimes is only limited to a few individuals who can be able to read and write. Looking at the literacy level of where my people are, I know many of them are now able to do so. What we did as Bosco, we came up with an idea of translating the local language, which are uploaded into the computer system, so we trained them using the local language, computer language translated into the local language. We used training manuals to send out information. Many people are getting -- got interested because they're able to read computers, use computer using their local language, and they're able to sit on computers, but before that, many people looked at computers as something that is coming to take away their culture, so as Bosco, we decided to brand our slogans that connecting people and preserving culture, and that slogan stood up, something that made Bosco up to now for ten years almost on their own. We have actually expanded sending out Internet to rural communities for 32 computer centers, 32 computer centers comprised of a minimum of five computers for each of the use group, and in those computer centers, we provide basic computer training, the basic web or applications, and then we provide the basic Internet access, bruising, and others that help the local people who don't have that level of education to get interested to learn computers. And, again, what we did was to integrate entrepreneurial training onto our computer centers, and then that actually encourages including young and adult people to join computer centers. The only challenge that we have as a limitation being a non-for-profit entity is the restriction on the line sensing aspect -- licensing aspect. You don't need to provide Internet that you gain at the end of the day. We're not commercial at the end of the day, but we are trying to build our community capacity to come up with a sustainable -- sustainability model, sustainability model in if the sense that each of the community centers is supposed to come up with their own strategy. If you are ever able to raise revenue from the local users, it's well and good, it will help. Once Bosco is not there, you are able to run your own centers, so that's how we're trying to build on the sustainability model for our ICT center, but the challenge still lies in the policies that govern the non-for-profit entities to operate within those contexts. Thank you. >> RAUL: Thank you, Tony. (Applause) And next up is Lee Hibbard. >> LEE HIBBARD: Okay. Thank you very much. Hello, everybody. My name is Lee Hibbard, from the Council of Europe, which is a human rights body based in France. I don't know whether you've heard of the European convention on human rights and the European court on human rights, but that's where it's all based. I'm coming from this from a different angle, a very simple angle, not a technical angle, which is different, but I think it's very important. I have one real message, which is we're here, you know, under the overarching theme of enabling inclusive and sustainable growth, inclusive and sustainable. That resonates with Community Network straight away. We hear about connecting the unconnected and empowering them, and I hear in this room and in previous workshops they're -- really at the base we're looking to get access to people to make informed choices, empowerment through real access to information, I mean information which is probably accurate and truthful and quality, so underlying many of the technical issues is the importance of literacy and the need to ensure that we have critical literacy to move forward. That's what I take away immediately, but connecting the next billions, connecting the developing countries in particular, and when we talk about net neutrality, when we talk about free basics, we're talking about access to information. And from where I come from and from my simple human rights standpoint, access to information, Community Networks, it's a nacant area, and it unlocks the potential for the exercise of the freedoms we all have under the universal declaration of human rights, so we talk about a constitutional right to access the Internet. I think as part of that discussion, we're not there yet. As part of that discussion, we're talking about a corollary linked to that is an access to maybe Community Networks. You know, can states really bridge the gaps, can they cover all the people in the population. If it becomes that fundamental, for so many things like freedom of expression, the right to be informed, to receive and impart information, there's a need for states to make best efforts to connect those people in the communities which matter. So how do they fill that gap? So maybe we're filling the gap here. Maybe this is part of filling the gap. Maybe we need to talk with states' representatives too to fill that gap, and so I see this as a nacant area also from my perspective, from a human rights perspective. And as we move forward and as the discussion gross, I think we -- grows, I think we need to keep in mind the need for safeguards, keep in mind on the other side of the technical discussion, we really are talking about fundamental human rights to so many things, which is in keeping with, you know, connecting the next billion, the sustainable development goals of the United Nations, et cetera. I know it's a more abstract discussion that I'm leading to, but it's the same thing as Network Neutrality, and Network Neutrality was a technical discussion in 2010. Luca and I organized an event in France on Network Neutrality before many other actors, and that led to a baseline standard which was adopted in 2010 and then another one, a policy agreed by many countries in 2000 -- which date, Luca? >> LUCA BELLI: '16. The >> LEE HIBBARD: In 2016. I'm going to stop talking, but one last thing is this year on the 27th of June, in the United Nations, there was a human rights Council meeting which they adopted a resolution on the protection and promotion of human rights on the Internet. It's very basic, but it sets the minimum bar for what we understand about, I think, Community Networks. Global open nature of the Internet, facilitating access to the Internet, expanding access to Internet, and, you know, making -- requesting states to make efforts to bridge the different divides, so that means bridging the gender divide, that means bridging divides between those with impairments, disabilities, that means condemning disruptions of access, and that means calling for states to take national action, public policy to ensure that we have universal access. Now, universal access is the key. I think you have the framework already in going forward with the Community Networks to say that actually this is an integral part of that, and it's an integral part of states' best efforts to connect the unconnected, and below that, there's a need for a strong push for information about Community Networks, about the human rights aspects, and about critical thinking and choice, and I will stop there. Thank you. >> RAUL: Thank you Lee. Next we'll open the floor for some questions and answers. Anybody can have the floor, and we'll start from there. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you very much. This is, for me, a fascinating topic. I'm with the world economic forum, and we have this project on Internet for all, so I understand fully the tension with regulators, and they don't understand and they need to be involved. What is the tension faced with the private sector operators and how has that worked? I'm just curious on how that plays out. >> RAUL: Okay. Does somebody want to answer that? >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think the tension lies on the difference that we were trying to highlight by the private sector is providing connectivity, period; the Community Networks are giving agency are in power in it communities and allowing them to develop -- to develop the infrastructure and the content that they want to provide to themselves, and that goes -- has developmental outcomes that go beyond the -- the private sector itself, and at the same time, it's also, as well, trying to regain some of the very first concepts of the Internet development of creating the network from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Thank you. (That was a panelist) >> PANELIST: If I could provide a comment. I think what is clear from the report we released this morning, and it is very clear to all the participants of the IGF is there are still four billion people that are unconnected, right? is the ones who have been connected are through private led strategies, public investment, but those strategies have a limit, and if four billion people are not connected yet, well, I think the limit is quite evident, so I -- no one here is a revolutionary trying to deny that private sector is an important key role, but besides that, what we are trying to do here is to build a different model that could be complementary. It does not have to be a substitute, a competitor, but could be a complement to what already exists, but it has to have limits, and there are four billion people that can witness that there are limits. Osama and -- sorry. >> OSAMA MANZAR: Alex, how are you? A couple of, you know, experience with the regulators as well as private sector in India, the prospective that we have understood is that when you go to do Community Networking, it's obviously, as Lucas had that -- you know, it's the need of the ground that, you know, private sector hasn't reached to them, but what is very interesting to note is that private sector is unable to understand the necessity and the need of the ground realities and they are only looking at it from the financial perspective. As the time that is required to look at the ROI is much longer and the social investment that is required to get into a ground is very high, and that doesn't really fit into their esteem of economic plan. Beside that, they also do not understand and perhaps it is a restrictive way, is that when the back haul is provided, and most of the time it's the back haul that's provided by the private sectors, the telecos, or the governmental telecos, the back line is supposed to be on the tariff card as available, but if you go and get them, it's not available. You know, there is a restrictive practice of how not to allow anybody else to go retail, but, you know, also do not invest in that area to go deep into the ground, so these are, you know, a couple of areas that we have experienced; however, if you see the city-based Community Network, which is actually not Community Network but is a privately owned going into the remote areas or the slum areas, their the back haul is very easily provided because there is a very high population concentration in the urban areas and in a very remote -- in a slum area also, you get a very high number of population, so the -- so the business practices of the private-sector telecos is not really healthy working with a community-based organization or those kind of organization, and policy is also not conducive. These are the two major outcomes that we have seen in India. >> RAUL: Thank you. It was Roger, >> ROGER: Yeah. Thank you. I would like to comment that also for us Community Network developers, we tend to look at the action of the government as contrary to our purpose, but in a point of view -- and I have the example of the Mexican government. Anyone and specifically on the comment of Mr. Data is that we are in our legislation we have differentiated the fees you have to pay for a license. Yes, we have a commercial license and we have what we use, a community use license, so that way for every fee you have to pay, you only pay half the price of the -- what are the duties to pay, and in the case of the license, it's free for community management or for Community Network, sorry, so also we need -- and we need to look into those efforts and to tell our governments that we should have differentiated tariff structure. Thank you. >> RAUL: Thank you. The next one is was Luis. >> LUIS: Private sector is very broad, from self-employed people to big transnationals, so it depends, and also geographically diverse, so usually we refer to the big telecos, but there's a lot of small companies. Small companies, it's -- on the other hand, Community Networks have been kept out of the general debate for so long. Now it's -- it's being integrated into the debate, and to merge these aspects, many small companies in just a matter of time to explain them what we are, what we do, for them, it's the only opportunity to survive in a world, in an industry that is concentrating more and more. We see this every day at home. These micro WISPS -- the micro wireless ISP, in our country fiber is being deployed, so in the next ten years fiber will be everywhere. In this scenario, micro ISP are not viable anymore, so what we're telling them is join us, we are also deploying fiber because we are integrating demand, so we have also to play the fiber game, and the only option you have, probably, is to join our -- our team. >> RAUL: Thank you, Roger. Next up was Ritu. >> RITU SRIVASTAVA: I think that Osama was right when we were facing a lot of challenges when we are facing the regulatory challenges already there, but the importance of a Community Network lies at the user base requirement, which we understand pretty well. Regulators often have a set tariff planks which is like set tariff plans which a user cannot afford at that time. Sometimes they cannot understand their tariff plans because if you take this plan, you need to take this plan, you need to take this plan, and that goes beyond it as well, so these networks also provide the user required what is -- how much structure do they need for data and how much requirement they really needed, so you need for one hour, they need for two hours, and how much do they need for a week, so it also depends on the community requirement, how -- what the structure is as well, so instead of going for a set tariff plans and data plans, instead of breaking them down into that level. >> RAUL: Thanks for that. It was -- baron. >> BARON: Baron, I just joined the mailing list, so I'm new to this, so I just wanted to share my perspective. I'm sorry. >> Go ahead. >> BARON: Okay. Forgive me. So we are a civil society group, and we work a lot on this very topic, and I'd like to suggest that I think there's a false dichotomy that drives a lot of these debates as between the private sector and the public sector. I'm all for doing as much as we can to enable private companies, but I think it's -- it doesn't follow to say that the status quo isn't good enough, and, therefore, we should have government built or Community Networks, depending on what that term means, so let me suggest that every community in the world, with some level of infrastructure, already has a Community Network, which is the public roads, the public rights-of-way, the land that is owned by the public, by the taxpayers. That is a network. That is essentially the dumbest possible part of a broadband network because if you're going to deploy, you need to use that network, so I would just like to suggest that as we think about this we start by thinking about how we can engage private capital and private enterprise in public-private partnerships because the reality is that any private broadband network is actually a partnership with the government. They're going to use streets, rights-of-way, poles, and the question is always here how can we get the biggest bang for the buck; that is to say, the most investment to do the most good for the most people? And from my perspective, I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge that there are places in the world. I'm from New Mexico, which is a very rural state, and it may be that on Indian reservations in the United States that you're not going to get private deployment, and I recognize that that may be true in many places around the world, but there are also lots of places, and I would suggest most places, where if you had smart policies that cut fees so that this gentleman didn't have to pay $5,000 in Nigeria or that the governments didn't charge exorbitant monopoly rates for using rights-of-way, if you could get governments out of the way, and if you could focus on smart infrastructure policies, like deploying conduits, making sure that the poles are fiber ready, making sure that when cities enstall street lamps that those are capable of interfacing with fiber, that they can carry 5G antennas, if you could do those sort of things, you could get more private deployment. nch I would suggest all of those things are in a sense Community Networks even if the fiber and the electronics are not owned by some sort of co-op. You could have private enterprise that is actually deploying these smart parts of the network where the government is deploying the least that it needs to, and that's going to depend on the circumstances. So this is a long way of saying I think we need to be flexible and not bind ourself to some sort of ideological preference for one role for the private sector or the public sector and the goal should be to get maximum results, so I hope that we're open to exploring those and not starting from the assumption that all elements of the network have to be owned by either the government or some sort of community cooperative. >> RAUL: Thank you. I don't think we've tied ourselves into anything yet. It's a fair comment. In the back. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Lauria from Brazil. I want to comment what Luca said about the limits of business model to connect people and the guy who talked about the Mexican legal framework because we are writing how to guide -- how to set up and legalize Community Network, and we are writing this guide for six months more or less. We are writing with partners that are here. And it was very difficult for us to find consensus, to achieve consensus what is the best legal path to legalize Community Networks, and I think the -- the beginning of the problem is that all the legal framework was designed for a business model, it wasn't designed for Community Networks, and it's not suitable for our proposals. And I think we have a lot of work with community wages, and we believe that anything -- in our country in Brazil, the community wages are very criminalized. Any kind of excuses are given to limit community wages, so we are very worried about this, to have a suitable legal framework because we believe that it will happen the same with the Community Networks, and we need to legalize them to -- not to have a problem of criminalization of these people of these communities. That's it. >> RAUL: Thank you. Next one up is the guy from Georgia. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just a few topics about our project. It is related with a special place. Okay? Is it okay? Yeah. This project is related with our local society, talking about a Georgianne project, some kind of -- the open networks. It's local society members. Next topic, this is funded with ISOC, and also there are involved some local ISOC chapter and some some kind of social responsibility of local society to have somehow this place. And the next topic about regulation of a country, we don't have any restrictions about licensing, et cetera, you just need authorization and about the radio wave, radio frequency. It's also free, and in these special areas, frequencies are enough for everything to put 4 and 5 megahertz, and it will be useful in this project. It will be done for July, and it will be financially -- the local community members are users of this network. That's why they're helping with resources. That's all. Thank you. >> RAUL: Thank you. Next one is Maureen. >> MAUREEN: Thank you. Yeah. I was thinking there are some initiatives -- most of these initiatives are about Community Networks. I mean, bringing the network from -- for the people, from the people, you know. They are the owners, but we do have to remember as well, we have a goal. We have a goal by 2020, and if I have the number right, we have to connect, like, three more billions, and it's not going to be easy just with Community Networks. It's not going to be easy only with private sector because we have -- the millions are connected right now, just following one line. I think we need to strengthen all different tactics that we have. And when we have most of the people connected, then we can use it the other way around and teach them to build Community Networks and to abandon maybe a private sector and continue on building the Internet, but we need to have them connected. We set a goal, and we need to work very hard to manage that goal to make it true by 2020, I believe. >> RAUL: Thank you. We're starting to run out of time, so we'll just have two more. There's one guy in the back. Yes, you. And then Nico, and then we move on to the next segment, and there will be more questions and answers at the end of that segment. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hello, everyone. My name is hoe hey Vargas, and I work for the wick media foundation. We have a mission of wanting to have a world that can access knowledge and information, freely licensed knowledge and information and that is in our project. (Jose) we're currently very interested in this topic of Community Networks because organically we've been noticing how there are different cases where locally the -- these networks or these communities want to incorporate or add Wikipedia content in a local way. Also, it's been interesting to see how they've taken the opportunity of having Wikipedia offline and sometimes online to be able to contribute back through knowledge, contribute information that they want to share, but at the same time, it's just very -- it's very small efforts that we are identifying, and in our strategy coming up, we really want to focus on pushing this. So I guess from me it's more of a question from the people here in the room that come from these different places of the world with these different Community Networks, is there any relevance for you all of having Wikipedia or Wikimedia projects as something that can be related, incorporated are, or in -- or in some sort of way articulated with what you're working on? >> RAUL: Thank you. One more comment from Nico. >> NICO: I will make it very short. I just wanted to emphasize that at least many of us in this Dynamic Coalition believe this dichotomy of private vs. Community Networks is not the one we should focus on. Here in the IGF, we are used to being divided vertically by stakeholders, so it's the same. The interest of maybe Verizon or AT&T, it should be like the same interest of a small wireless ISP, one that is not true, and what we believe is interesting and actually we need to do this. We need to connect the interest of small private sector, of medium and small providers with the interest of Community Networks, so we need to build this stakeholder reason instead of this stakeholder region. I want us to stress this. (Region) >> RAUL: Thank you. We'll have a -- three more speakers now, and I'm hoping you could keep it to about four minutes each, and we'll move on to Roger. >> ROGER: Roger wrong thank you. So let me introduce myself. I'm Roger. I'm coming from the Internet community, just some small data about this community. We started Wi-Fi about 13, 14 years ago. Currently we are doing fiber, and we estimate the total investment above 10 million Euros already. This is not to show you how big we are and how nice we are, just to give an idea of how this kind of scale and we're convinced this kind of scale much more. And just -- we have about 20 ISP operating inside the network. This means more than 100 job positions created, and, well, this is about empowering the unconnected, so the question, how can we do this? First of all u let me just make a short comment on what has been said about the public and private collaboration. In my opinion, Community Networks, how are they defined in my opinion? Nondiscriminatory and open participation. This is not incompatible with businesses, which on the condeclarery, we argue that community -- contrary, we argue that Community Networks deliver a perfect scenario for competition, but this means that the enterprises must also follow the rules of participation, as the rest of participants. So it has already been said that it's better -- better than connecting the unconnected is to let them develop the infrastructure necessary to connect themselves. That's okay, but how to do so, and this is about empowering, no? So how can we do this, no? We must make sure that they can set up the -- the ecosystem that is required that will allow them to develop this infrastructure, so the question is how we can help to create this ecosystem, and at least I see three points of action. First is knowledge transfer, to make sure that they develop the infrastructure to serve their needs, so they shape it as according to their needs, and they will, and to make sure that this doesn't end up in the hands of a private company or whatever else. In this specific point of action, I think the current community practitioners can help a lot. The second point of action is funds. They are required, and at least to bootstrap initiatives. And many of these initiatives, because we are talking about those who have been left unconnected, and they basically have been left unconnected because it's not profitable by the private sector to deliver connectivity there, it's probably that they will need co-funding in the long-term. But the good thing is that we have proof that we are very efficient in terms of resource usage, so small funding can help a lot. And the third point of action I see is at the institutional level. Yeah, at least we must be acknowledged. We are already being acknowledged when we are invited to participate in these sort of events, but we can do much more. We can receive explicit support. It has already been said that policymaking is needed to work further, making a spectrum available, making access to docs and other facilities to deploy fiber or whatever other technology, and that was my -- my thoughts. >> RAUL: Thank you. Next one up is Mahabir Pun. >> MAHABIR: Thank you. I am Mahabir Pun in Nepal. I started Nepal Wireless, a small project way back in 2000 when the wireless technology was just emerging, so at that time I didn't know that I would be involved in building networks like this for a long time, but I'm still working on it, so I think most of us were involved in these Community Networks are involved because we love the communities, and I suppose all of us who are involved doing this are not, you know, trying to make, you know, a lot of money or a business out of it, so what I see is when we talk about, you know, empowering the unconnected people, we just mostly think about, you know, the people living in the remote areas, people living far from the, you know, remote areas, but what I see is there are unconnected people in the urban areas as well, so we should not, you know -- we should not forget those people, unconnected people living in the rural rural areas -- and both in the urban areas and rural areas, the unconnected, most of them are poor people, you know, so they need help. So what -- the way -- the way we can empower them is, you know, first we need to connect them, you know, to connect them. They need help at the beginning, but after, you know, we connect them, to empower them we need to give the ownership to these people, ownership in these people who get connected, they won't be able to, you know, make it sustainable, and so it's very important issues. (Without people, ownership in these people) And so to empower them, they need -- at the beginning, they need a lot of training because most of these unconnected people, like I said, they're poor and they're less educated, so they need training, and -- training on the technical issues and training on maintaining, you know -- training on, you know, the mobilizing and the communities, so that kind of training. They need it. Without that, you know, they cannot be empowered. So -- and also, to empower them, you know, these people, unconnected people, you know, they need help not only in one sector, they need help in different sectors. You know, I have seen that there are several civil societies who are, you know, specifically involved in some specific areas, like some are doing -- you know, trying to help in the agriculture area, some are trying to help, you know, in the health area, education area, different areas, so my thing is, you know, to empower them, you know, we need to -- we need to try to involve in as many areas as possible to empower these rural communities, like for health, education, and anything. So that's what my solution is, and also, you know, sooner or later, most of -- we have seen that most of the governments around the world are trying to, you know, bring eGovernment services for the people, so what we have seen, without connecting these people, unconnected people, and without empowering them, no matter what that the government does to bring the, you know, eGovernment system, that is not going to work, so that's very important step the government needs to take. And one thing which I'm doing also, in Nepal trying to do, I would like to give all the friends who are involved in the Community Network is to find ways to, you know, build these unconnected, you know, communities -- connect them first and make those communities smart communities, so I'm working on, you know, finding ways to make the villages, the rural areas, you know, smart villages. That's what I'm saying now. So we are working with -- with some of my team members in Nepal to try to make ways to make villages smart. That means using the technology and bringing the benefit to the people as much as it is possible, and I am, you know, interested to collaborate with all the partners to find ways how to make the villages and communities smart communities. Thank you. >> RAUL: Thank you, Mahabir. Next up is Ruth, and she's translated by Peter. Go ahead. >> RUTH: ((Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: Good afternoon. My name is Ruth. I'm going to be presenting the organization telecommune canos, which is indigenous community telecommunications, which is a project that operates in Wahaca, Mexico, and is allied with RazamatIKA. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: So the organization is a not-for-profit civil society organization working on cellular connectivity in indigenous communities here in Mexico. One important thing we have in our favor is that we are a concession holder from the Mexican regulatory authority, so we're the fourth GSM operator in Mexico, and we're comprised of 20 communities, as of today. We have another community that came on. And that's about -- so it's 20 communities manage those networks and there's about 15 actual physical networks. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we do the work that we do. The first thing we try to take into consideration is an organizing principle that ensures that communities know what it means to be part of this network. In our case, the communities are actually the owners and the operators of their own networks, the organization is not the owner of the networks. We're not a company, again, and we're not seeking profits, but, nevertheless, when the community puts up their own network, they also become part of the organization, and that implies shared responsibility and also shared benefit. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: So the way we work is we make sure to always be in contact with the community assembly, the highest decision-making body in the communities that we're working in in order to be able to explain some of the issues that might come along with becoming a telecommunications operator. Basically, for this process to get started, a community needs to have a community meeting and then manifest or express their interest to us as an organization before we will engage with them further around the network. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: So once the community purchases the equipment necessary, so every community, again, is the owner of their equipment, once they do that, we help train the administrative committee in the operation of the network, which is generally fairly simple, it has to do with signing people up for service, adding top-up credit to their phones, things like that. They're also the link around technical support with the organization if it should get to that point. They also are meant to help deal with some of the technical issues directly. So that is basically the model of co-participation that we've developed. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: So in terms of the technology, the equipment that we're talking about here are GSM or cellular base stations that provides the coverage to the community as well as an administrative computer and a bunch of software that we and others have developed to actually allow the administration to happen, which we just talked about. The In terms of providing long distance, we use voice over IP and work with many small ISP and other community wireless networks. Just for your information, it's just a 2G network, so right now it's voice and SMS. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: So just quickly on the legal part, as mentioned, we have a concession from the Mexican government, two conceptionings, one as a telecommunications operator, which allows us to run any communication service that we wish and a 15 year spectrum dispensation in GSM, which makes us, again, the fourth operator, if you want to look at it that way. >> RUTH: (Speaking non-English language) >> PETER: Okay. So quickly, just about challenges. We just had our first annual assembly in which all of our assembly members, which are the communities that have these networks, have come together. They have a voice and a vote in the affairs of the organization. And some of the things that came up quickly are making the technology simpler to use, so for reasons like numbering and so on it's sometimes complicated to dial in, we don't have a number block, that's one issue. The issue of being able to consistently and constantly train up the administrators. Many of them rotate out, so there's political churn is one of the words we use in English to describe that, when different local authorities change, sometimes the administrator changes as well. Right now we're in a moment where the telecom's regulator isn't trying to get us to pay for the spectrum, but the tax authority is, so when the reform of communications happened, they forgot, eventually, to make an exemption for these types of networks, which are very clearly laid out as to what the rights are and so on, so we're in a bit of a struggle right now. At this moment, the taxes aren't that high, but we want to not have to pay them as a precedent because why should we be paying taxes on spectrum that we didn't have to pay for on the first place and on which we're providing a critical service, both the government and private sector that are unwilling and unable to provide. Our last challenge is to simply deepen the relationship with the communities and make it as clear as possible that we're not a service provider, they're the service provider and we're here to support them. Thank you very much. (Applause) >> RAUL: Thanks very much. The last part, we'll have some more comments, and can I already ask you at the end of the session to -- anybody that's interested and is not on the Dynamic Coalition list yet, please come and give me your email address and get to work with us to build the Community Networks. And I think Bob was first, had something to say from the last part. >> BOB: I just wanted to make a brief comment that public-private, I think, is the wrong dichotomy. It's really a question of whether individuals or communities are the customers in the funding units. We work -- it doesn't -- and so if you say the community as a whole, then you provide the infrastructure, the individual is more services. >> RAUL: Luis. >> LUIS: Thank you. Luis Martinez. From many of the comments and especially from Ruth and Peter's comment, I need to stress out the importance of not starting in the solution as technology. We -- we really face a challenge on the culture, yes, because we're bringing an external and foreign element into their community, which is used as some of the pictures we have seen on crops and simple community life, so we're bringing an element of communication but also an element of cultural complication, and one of the -- our -- the challenges I see here is how to empower, you need to adopt the technology. Yes, empowerment doesn't arise from magic, it needs work, and that work has to be done by someone, and usually engineers, we finish work connecting cables and putting things to work. There's a gap in the middle, and we need to fill that gap, and that's the real cultural challenge. Sorry. Thank you. >> >> RAUL: Tony. >> TONY: Yep. Thank you. My comment is on the challenge he has just mentioned. I think to make a Community Networks also better, looking at the experience that we had, it's just a matter of making the inception of a program right at the grass-root level. The inception starts from the capacity building of the grass-root people, especially for our example, we have what we call trainers of trainers. Those are the people who help us to bridge the gaps, the gaps that are there within the community, and at the end of the day, you find they're able to do troubleshooting, they're able to do connection, they're able to identify a bit of a challenge based on their knowledge and the level of that knowledge. So at the end of the day, that reduces the challenges that we have. Thank you. >> RAUL: Yep. Thank you. I was just told that we have four minutes left, so let's try to keep it very short. Next one was Osama. Last one. >> OSAMA MANZAR: I would like to say that, you know, most of the Community Network is because of the necessity to connect them because the telecos and the government hasn't been able to provide those infrastructure and those connectivity, so I would say that we -- all the Community Network practices should probably say that we should break as many rules as possible, because under the rule you have not been able to provide any connectivity to us. We are left alone and we are not being provided. Whether it -- you know, because if you can make a rule, then you should also make a rule to -- in a given period of time, all the communities should be connected. If it is not connected, that's the reason why most of these efforts are going on in terms of connectivity. Something like unauthorized colonies, you know. In most of the cities, you have unauthorized colonies. The more they proliferate, the more authorized it becomes. So they should pliv rate breaking all given rules, which is actually not connecting us, and therefore we should adopt what is making it possible in the community level. We should go ahead and do it because they haven't done it. (Applause) >> RAUL: Okay. I think that was the best way to close the session, so I think -- well, thanks to everyone, and if you -- you can come out, and we have to leave the room because there is another session. You can come out of the room, and if you want to join the coalition, you're free to join. If you want to interact with people that are building Community Networks, they are outside, so thanks a lot, and meet you outside. (Session concluded at 4:28 p.m.) >> MODERATOR: Hello. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We hope you're here for the workshop on post-IANA ICANN. If you're not, could you leave the room? Thank you. Bear with us, folks. We'll be starting in about two minutes. Thanks. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to -- I hope everybody is here for Workshop 64, post-IANA Transition ICANN. If you're not, you're still welcome to stay. So we're going to -- we're going to take a look at the post-transition ICANN and we're going to do it in a way that hopefully it's not an insider look. I've been told by the panelist above all we must avoid acronyms, I'm sure we'll fall into that trap, and we must address this in the way that the non-ICANN person can understand. The goal is really to give you -- to do a couple things. What we're going to do is give you an update as to where things stand, what happened in the run up to the transition itself and what is happening post-transition, and we'll do that -- we'll have a presentation on that, and then we'll do a tour detlab of the panelists that have participated in the transition and the post-transition, all who have watched it from afar, or have been involved to get a diversity of views, and we'll ask them for their personal experiences and their learnings of participating in these processes, and the reason why the learnings are important is because we want to look at this -- these working groups that did this -- the work of the transition and see what we can learn from the two years that we've been involved and see what we can learn from the transition and see how those learnings can be applied outside of the ICANN world. So the last part of the discussion in today's session will really be about what we're calling the port built of the model -- portabuilt of the model, in other words, what other places can we take this learning process, the ICANN transition process, earn and apply them in other places as best practice in multistakeholder approaches. So with that little introduction, my name is Matthew Shears with the center for technology and democracy, and I'm going to run through the very lengthy list of panelists who will be speaking today, and when they speak they can introduce themselves more fully. So we have Farzaneh Badiei, ole ka Cavalli, Carolyn Nguyen, Izumi Okutani, Jimson Olufuye, Leon Sanchez, and I ask when you introduce yourself you speak more fully. I think with that, we'll get straight to the update on where things are, a little bit of history on the transition and Leon is going to take us through that. Nigel, I think we -- okay, Leon, over to you. >> LEON SANCHEZ: (Speaking non-English language) >> (Off microphone) >> LEON SANCHEZ: (Speaking non-English language) >> (Speaking non-English language) >> LEON SANCHEZ: (Speaking non-English language) I'll try Mandarin. Okay. Nigel, do you have the clicker? >> NIGEL HICKSON: Yes. >> LEON SANCHEZ: May I use it? Thank you. Okay. So sorry for the hiccup. The IANA transition process is a process that took some 18 years to finalize, right? So you can see, barely in this slide, that ICANN was founded in if 1998, then on 2014 the NTIA announces the beginning of the process of the IANA transition, and then in the same 2014, ICANN is in charge of coordinating this process and it forms the ICG, and in 2015, the proposal for the transition is delivered to the NTIA, and finally in 2016, the contract between the NTIA and ICANN expires. So as I said, this was a short process that only took 18 years to finalize. And what are we talking about when we speak about the IANA stewardship transition and the functions? So these are to create registries, to maintain these registries, to assign the resources for numbers in the Internet, and to publish the registries for public use. So those are the IANA functions that were transitioned to the multistakeholder community. What does this mean to the Internet community? Well, this means that fundamentally, the decisions made to the fundamental part of the Internet go now into the hands of the multistakeholder community, to the global community, so this would eliminate the role that the U.S. government had played for the last 18 years in supervising these functions, these IANA functions. Now, for this, the NTIA, as I said previously, made an announcement, and it said that it was willing to transition this stewardship but under certain conditions, and some of these conditions were that the proposal that was set up for this transition would have wide support by the community, that this proposal would also foster and enhance the multistakeholder model, that it would maintain or guarantee the security, stability, and resiliency of the Domain Name System, that it would satisfy the expectations of the IANA services clients, and that it would maintain the nature of the Internet as a free and open resource. So as I said, ICANN was in charge of coordinating this process, and for this is formed the ICG, which was, in turn, constituted by ICANN, by ISOC, by the IETF, by the IAB, and the NRO, which all of these acronyms, I was told not to mention. (Laughter) So ICANN is the -- ISOC is the Internet Society, the IETF is the Internet engineering task force, the IAB is the Internet architectural board, and the NRO is the numbers registry operators, resource operators, sorry. You know, even us got confused by these acronyms. So all these communities took part -- had a role in this transition process, and each of these communities were, of course, essential to the process. We had doe names community, the -- domain names community, and the numbers community. If we look at how the different proposals were built by each of these communities, we can see that we had the CWG, which is the Cross Community Working Group on the IANA transition, for the demain name community, the CRISP, which was the group in charge of building the proposal for the registries, the numbers community, the IANA plan Working Group, which is the group in charge of designing this proposal as well from part of the technical community, and the CCWG, which is the Cross-community Working Group on enhancing ICANN's accountability. That acronym I know, and this group was in charge of designing a proposal that would enhance ICANN's accountability towards the multistakeholder community. So these four players, as I said, built independent proposals which then were submitted to the ICG, and the ICG had the very important task of nging these propose arls and -- consolidating these proposals and building a single proposal to be delivered to the NTIA. So what we have here is the chronological order in which the different proposals were delivered to the ICG, and the first two communities that delivered their proposals were the technical community and the numbers community. Then we had the domain names community proposal, which was delivered by June 2015, and finally, the proposal on enhancing ICANN's accountability, which was delivered in February 2016. So with these proposals all put together by the ICG, then on March the 10th, 2016, the ICG submitted -- and ICANN submitted the transition proposal to the NTIA for review and eventually for approval by the NTIA. So what we have next is just a flow of how things happened. The process began by building the working groups. Then each of these working groups designed the proposals that they were meant to design in regard to their respective communities. Then the ICG consolidated these proposals and delivered it to the NTIA, then the NTIA reviewed it and approved this proposal, and finally the transition took place, but regardless of the transition taking place, we still have some work to do. This is just a graphic of rough numbers of how many hours, how many emails, how many people participated in these efforts of designing the different proposals, and these numbers are only for the domain names community, and I don't think you can see them on the screen, but they're public. They are available on the ICANN website, so if you want to have a little bit more information on this, I would definitely encourage you to access ICANN's website and have the numbers handy. So what does this transition actually mean to end users, to all the communities that took a role in this transition plan? Well, as far as ICANN concerns, we have an ICANN that has new bylaws. We have a new organization that is in charge of managing the IANA functions. We have new contracts and new expected levels -- levels -- service level expectations, agreements. We have also a new community body, which is the Empowered Community, within ICANN. We have a new -- or a reviewed IRP, Independent Review Process, and we have also new responsibilities for the community, which is very important, like Spider Man once said, right, with great power comes great responsibility, so this is what we have in hand now. The community has a great responsibility to exercise these powers responsibly. And as I said, the transition happened. The Internet didn't fall apart. And we still have some work to do, so for these, while we were designing the proposal of accountability, we figured out or we realized that there were some topics that were not essential for the transition to take place, so what we did is in order to focus the cross-community working group on ICANN's accountability work, in those matters that were essential for the transition to happen, we selected these topics and reserved a plan for a second phase of work that encompasses these -- these topics, which are diversity, human rights, jurisdiction, ombudsman, the role of the ombudsman, SO and AC accountability, SO being support organizations, and AC being advisory committees, which are the structures that form ICANN as an organization; staff accountability, transparency, the repeal of the CPE which is the collaborative engagement process (CEP) and also the guides for good faith -- that are presumed to be good-faith conduct when xizing the power of removal of a -- when xizing the power of removal of a board member. So these topics are now the work that we need to flesh out (Exercising) and we need to further research and further develop in order to put reports so that the transition implementation can continue to take place. So what we are expecting on the next -- on the coming months is that some of the groups, of course, because of the nature of the topics that they're discussing, will end before and some others will end later, and we have -- we have an expectation that by our next meeting -- and when I say our next meeting, I mean the ICANN meeting that will take place in Copenhagen in March next year, we will have some of the groups already delivering their reports, and we also expect that some of the groups, as I said, will take a little bit longer to deliver, and those groups, so that is what we have in our near future, and, of course, if you want to get involved in the discussion, if you want to contribute to build these -- these second set of proposals, part of workstream 2, you can have more information and get engaged by accessing one of the different URLs, which, of course, are so blurryed, they are useless on this screen, but I will be sure to circulate this information so that you can be able to subscribe to the mailing lists, have access to the information that has been generated by the different subgroups, and, of course, participate if you feel that you have something to contribute to the work of the CCWG on accountability. Thank you very much. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank you, Leon, and fantastic job given the impossibility of talking about ICANN without having acronyms. Well done. Thank you for that. (Laughter) So what I want to do now is I want to turn the conversation over to the panelists, and what we're going to do now is talk about, as I said earlier on, our personal experiences in terms of what was achieved in the IANA transition, both workstream 1, as Leon explained, the work that happened before the transition itself, and also in the ongoing Work Stream 2 work, which many of us are involved here. Before I -- before I turn to the first panelist, though, I just want to note that there's a huge wealth of experience in the ICANN space in the audience as well, and I do urge that they share their experiences as well, so at this point in time, we're just going to get your experiences, the learnings, work stream 1, Work Stream 2. When you introduce yourself, can you give one line about the stakeholder that you represent or participate in this process for, because that will be important so that everybody gets a sense as to the diversity of players. Thanks. I'm going to turn to Fazy first. Thanks. >> FARZENEH BADIEI: Farzaneh Badiei. I'm from the noncommercial constituency at ICANN, noncommercial users constituency at ICANN. I better get that right. Okay. So I'm just -- since we have around ten panelists here, I'm just going to be very brief and going to just give you a broad overview of my experience. So the good thing, when I got engaged and what we have achieved, the good thing about it is that in if the end, we managed to reach consensus among very divergent and different views and interests, and -- which might not happen in a lot of other spaces in policymaking, and our recommendations were implemented, more or less, accurately in the bylaws, which is certainly an achievement in ICANN. The bad was that we were under a lot of time pressure, so we could not -- but in the end, we did manage to get the work done, but time pressure was certainly -- made us just do the work a little bit faster. And, of course, some of our concerns were not addressed, but we are now working on them. I'm not going to go through the details of the Work Stream 2. You can ask other people. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Farzy, you're absolutely right, and given the time limitations, we'll make quick interventions by the panelists and go to Q&A, because I suspect there will be quite a bit of that, and then we'll go to the second section after that Q&A. So next up is Olga, please. >> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much for inviting me to this panel and for allowing me to share my experience. I am the vice chair of the Governmental Advisory Committee of ICANN, and I represent Argentina in that group. My participation was in the cross-community working group on accountability. They appointed five representatives to the group, trying to achieve certain regional balance, so there was Argentina, there was the Asia-Pacific, African Union, United States, and den mark, and also we worked together with many colleagues from the GAC that participated very actively, although they were not formal members of the Cross-Community Working Group. As you know, the GAC works on the consensus basis, so it was not easy to achieve a single opinion about the whole process. We are a 170-plus countries, so we had divergent opinions, so it was not so easy to achieve the same -- the same page, so some countries are not totally in agreement with some final parts of the document, especially stress test 18. They were in the opinion it diminished the role of government, and it was not totally align with the multistakeholder model that we all support. And also, the relevance of the GAC advice was changing in the future structure of the ICANN -- of ICANN, so these different opinions, we didn't want to stop the process, so what we did was a minority report that you can find in the final document, and it was supported by -- it was prepared by three countries, France, Argentina, and Brazil, and supported by 20-plus countries, so you can see the content there about the process. A great learning experience. My English, as usual, after an ICANN process got to a higher level. This means that it was intensively English-speaking process, although documents were transaiptelaipted, which is very good -- translated, which is very good, a good effort from ICANN. The conversation, the discussions, and the dialogue was in English and quick, and so that is something to have in mind. Diversity is always a challenge. We were some participate fraternities some regions, and that was not so balanced, and we see it as a big challenge for the future structure of ICANN. At the time of the cause was challenging. I had to wake up very early in the morning sometimes, in the middle of the night (Calls) and some of us we are participating in the Work Stream 2. Some GAC members were in some subworking groups in trying to contribute there. Thank you very much. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Okay. Olga, I'm going to put you on the spot a bit. What about a positive learning? You listed a number of things that were a little bit challenges, but how about what contributed to the success? >> OLGA CAVALLI: Well, I think it was a very successful process. Also from the perspective of perhaps not as much as diverse as I personally would have expected, it was challenging, and I said it was a very great learning experience, so that's positive. I think we achieved something very important that we wanted to do, but also, we had the opportunity to make the statement that, for us, was important, so we didn't stop the process. We made our voices heard, and we all learned, and I think this puts ICANN in a new stage of higher interaction, and also, it shows that we need to work on the diversity thing. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Olga. The interesting thing I think -- I think one of the interesting takeaways that you'll probably hear around the table is this issue of working together and how in the beginning it was challenging, but as we went through the process, it became easier, and that level of trust, if you want to call it that, began to be established, and I think that's one of the key things as well. Okay. We're going to go next to Carolyn, please. >> CAROLYN NGUYEN: Thank you, Matthew, and thank you for enabling me to be -- participate as part of the panel. My name is Carolyn Nguyen. I'm with Microsoft. We are part of the business constituency within ICANN, so we participate to -- to submit input into the process, but I was not one of the people who were directly within the working groups, so -- can you hear me? >> Can you pull it in a little? >> CAROLYN NGUYEN: Great. Thank you. Perfect. So about the process itself. I'm going to speak about the process, but also what was going on elsewhere, like who was watching the process. So in 2015, six -- sorry. In 2015, the other international process that was going on at the same time was the WSIS Plus 10 review process, so from the perspective of the IANA transition, this was a very, very visible confirmation of the value of the multistakeholder process. It was also very apparent in terms of the passion and the commitment of the community to work through whatever issues that was being brought up, and you contrast that with what was going on in terms of the negotiation at the UN, which was determining the fate of the IGF at that point in time, so that contrast for us was really good for the whounz were involved in the WSIS+10 process. Another part, there was a process that was shared up front, and I think Larry Strickling played a crucial role in his strong and really steadfast endorsement of the process and to guide it along. I think that was really a crucial part. The development of the stress test was really helpful in terms of focusing on what were the real issues to the community and what were shall I just say red herrings, and again, there's a contrast there between the ICANN process and the UN process that was really useful. It was clearly an open bottom-up and transparent, so we found there were lots of opportunities in terms of during the process that was going on as well as we could participate either through the business constituency or through other constituencies, and we found that to be very helpful as well. So those were all the good things, right? Another part -- one thing I did want to bring up is that for those who were not involved in the process -- so, for example, the people in this room, the people who were really manipulating what was going on to put out comments about the U.S. relinquishing control or the U.S. maintaining control, there was not sufficient information to share with the broader public about what was going on, not at the level of, you know, the various working groups, but what is the IANA transition without involving the term "DNS" in it, what is the impact, right, and there was no information; whereas, the people who did not want the transition to go through were at least in the U.S. all over the editorials of newspapers, like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and there was no other information available, so what was happening is that in the broader policy stakeholder community, this was being looked at as a geeky, technical conversation that did not impact the brawrd business community in terms of -- broader business community in terms of what was going on, so when everything was happening at the end of September, no one was prepared to counteract that and there was no information ready, so that's one thing that I would want to put out there in terms of suggestions to think about. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Carolyn. I think that's absolutely right. We didn't have a good bumper sticker, and that was a great challenge to us in terms of our communications. Wonderful. Next I'm going go to Izumi. Please remember to introduce yourselves. Thanks. >> IZUMI OKUTANI: Izumi Okutani. I was involved in the IANA Stewardship Transition process as someone who was leading the proposal for the number of -- number resources component of the IANA Stewardship Transition proposal, and I was also involved in if the enhancing the ICANN part of the proposal as a representative from the number resources community, so it was really interesting to observe two processes. And as it has been said in many places, there's not been this skill of collaboration happening between communities, which has pretty been independent, and I'm not just talking about the number of resources -- number resources part where we have the protocols, the names and the numbers community, but also even for the -- developing the proposal within the -- within ICANN. I don't think the ASO, the number resources community, have been this committed in getting involved and making a proposal together with many of the stakeholders within ICANN or together with the GAC or I think there was IAB chair being actively involved, so this was really impressive to see. And I think while there were like, you know, challenges in between the process, one of the reasons I feel it may have -- we may have succeeded in reaching an agreement was that each of the people who represented the group, they did not have predefined position, they had enough trust from each of the communities that they will speak for the community, but they were not, like, aggregated, hey, you should say this on behalf of us, so they had the flexibility of observing the general discussions, and then in case they see anything that may, you know, have concerns from their respective community, then they had the opportunity to raise their concerns. So I think this actually accommodated a lot of the compromises that was needed in addition to the good spirit of each of the participants. Another thing is respecting the expertise of each of the communities, so this was happening in the IANA process where it was requested that each of the three operational communities develop the proposal rather than everybody trying to draft everything, and I think something that was similar was also happening in the ICANN accountability part of the proposal where, for example, the ASO drafted the part that affected the ASO, and I think it was pretty much tolerated by the other participants, so that was really added to efficiency and respect for the others with expertise really helped move things forward, so these are the positive observations I have about the process. It was still, like -- some of the challenges, it was still not easy for people who are not, like, English as their first language or not just the language, but they're not used to the culture of having this these discussions real-time. I think it was a bit difficult to join the discussions rather than just making last-minute comment at the public comment. I think having the tax tool helped a lot, more than just having this opportunity to speak vocally, so I think that's a positive thing, but I hope that there's some kind of like room for improvement in this area. And I also observed that there was someone who spoke publicly that this person was against the decision of the group after it was all decided and reached consensus, and I think different opinions should be respected, but once the consensus decision is made, I think the -- everybody who's participated in the process should respect the consensus decision, even though you may not necessarily agree with the outcome, so this might be something that's really worth sharing with the participants in the future process. And what can be applicable to other kind of, I don't know, Internet governance discussions, I think we certainly need a coordination body when different communities get together, so in our case, we had what the group called the ICG for the IANA, for the accountability part we have the chairs and we also had the rapporteurs, so this is definitely needed in making efficient conclusion. And I think a lot of us were under time pressure, so people not feeling so positively about it, but I think having a set of goal and timelines did actually help us in trying to, you know, come up with solutions and compromise on certain things to move forward, so these are my observations. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Izumi. Sometimes it's the smallest things that we take for granted, so when we met face-to-face, I found those meetings to be the most rewarding and the ones in which we made the most progress, which I think is always something we sometimes underestimate. Wonderful. Thank you. Okay. If I could just ask the participants just to hold their reflections on where these types of learnings might be taken in the future, we'll get to that in the next -- in the next piece. So if you can just hold those for the moment. Jimson. >> JIMSON OLUFUYE: Thank you very much, moderator. My name is Jimson Olufuye. I run an IT firm. We are users of the Internet, and we are about to be member of the Africa ICT Alliance that involve ICT companies and associations across Africa, 27 countries are involved right now, so A ICTA is a member of the business constituency, and they play a very, very active role in the entire process. I want to use this opportunity to thank Steve di by arrangeo, appointed me to be a representative even in the CCWG and all the other government processes. And it did something which is very important. There is consistent feedback. We're always were aware what was going on in the community, and I think that is very, very instructional. And with that as well, I was able to give some confidence to the process because back then, Africa, I met so many people that said, oh, don't mind the Americans, they're not going to relinquish IANA. You are wasting your time. Not one person, not two persons. In Geneva there are is a working group. Someone once told me America is -- not in this lifetime it will happen, but because I was involved and Steve was always engaging everybody, so I said, no, they're real, it's genuine. We had a big conference. I was the only voice that was saying it was going to work. I know that -- they say I don't believe the business people, that business people is only money. I said, it's not true. Business people are also concerned about the stability and the security of the Internet. Now that we have achieved the transition, so the maze, perhaps maybe there's still a catch, so that is why we need to keep up the engagement, but it so happens that with the Work Stream 2, I was so much interested in being actively engaged, but I found that because I'm only a volunteer, so the challenge is keeping up with the momentum, so that's why we need to do more outreach, get more people, build more capacity, you know, of many of the people that will engage the process. So there is providing more stability to our businesses, at least we have assurance that where we're going is predictable, and with that, more investment can come in. So maybe later I could talk about the challenges. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Jimson. I'm going to turn to Leon, please. >> LEON SANCHEZ: And -- well, as I said, if you want to get involved with Work Stream 2, you definitely can do so by approaching any of us and subscribing to different mailing lists and attending the meetings. You have a -- an excellent representative for the business constituency, and, well, feel free to approach any of us if you want to actually get deeper involved in Work Stream 2. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Any -- as one of the co-chairs, any quick thoughts on what were the success factors, some of the challenges? >> LEON SANCHEZ: I can think of many of them. Well, being the co-chair of the CCWG and the success factors, I think that in the beginning it was a bit difficult, as someone -- as some have said already, but I think that the -- you know, the progression of the work that we did allowed the different stakeholder groups to begin speaking the same language because when you listen to people speak about different topics and they have different interests in the same topic, you would think that one word will mean the same thing for each and every one of them, but that is not necessarily true, so I think at the beginning some of the discussions might have been a little bit heated on some topics, but then as the crowd -- as the different groups began to understand what the meaning of that specific topic was to their counterparts, then we began doing big progress. For example, I can tell you one example that has to do with human rights. Human rights has been a very interesting discussion. We discussed this in Work Stream 1. We are continuing to discuss this in Work Stream 2. We have, Tatiana, yourself is part of the human rights subgroup, and I -- honestly, I thought that the human rights group would take a lot of time to get to conclusions in Work Stream 2, but I didn't count that the participants of this subgroup have already learned the language of each other, right? So the discussions in the human rights subgroup have made a lot of progress, and they have actually delivered their first draft document that will be discussed in the Plenary in our next meeting, so I guess understanding the language of the other stakeholders was a success factor for this. Another success factor is that, as I've said many times, in ICANN's diversity lies its richness, right? So no matter how entrenched a discussion might seem that the diversity of views from each of the stakeholder groups would always push us forward into finding creative solutions for develop complex problems, very simple solutions to complex problems that would only be possible if you have these diversity in your background and in your DNA, right? And I think that DNA is an acceptable acronym, right, so -- (Laughter) -- so -- and another positive factor is that we have involvement from, of course, all stake hoshltiondz but also one other -- stakeholders, but also one other piece of the puzzle that was crucial for this effort, and that is the ICANN Board. At the beginning, the ICANN Board had some liaisons, which did an excellent job in liaising between the CCWG and the ICANN Board, but at some point, a deeper involvement of the board was required, and at that point the board was wise enough to recognize the situation, and they actually took the problem in their hands and said, okay, we're going to have a more active participation with each of the different groups that are trying to find solutions to the common problems that we all have. So I think that it was very positive to have the board which -- as you said, that there was kind of a mistrust in different pieces or different actors in this effort, and I think that one of those actors was the board itself, and what I did in stepping down from what was perceived as their stance and stepping down with the community and working hand on hand with the community to find the solutions was another success factor because when we arrived and we produced the final report from the CCWG, it was already vaccinated by the board, right? The board had taken part in the discussions. The board knew perfectly how the report was being designed, so when they received it, it was already approved, right? So I think those three -- because I could continue mentioning some more success factors, but I think that I will just mention those three to leave room for others to contribute to this positiveness. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: I'm already seeing a number of people who want to speak, so if you can just hold on, we're going to let the last few panelists have their say, and then we'll go to questions. I'd also encourage those who have been involved in the process to also let us know what they think the challenges were and what the successes were. So next is Tatiana, please. >> TATIANA TROPINA: Thanks a lot. I will try and be brief and not repeat what other speakers already mentioned, because I agree with all the liked and happy moments of this process. Just a few things to mention from my perspective, from my background. I'm going from the policymaking and legislative perspective where things get hey, let's get things agreed and done. I'm coming from the cyber security background. You can get AGIS to agree in something in this area. It was amazing to see how community could mobilize itself and adopt different situations, like, for example, when the first proposal was rejected by the board, when we had to work on the human rights when we were able to bring together the differences at the very last moment, and this is what I learned. Bridging these differences, bridging these gaps, working together and establishing the channels, and now a bit about challenges. Well, first of all, I'm have a civil society background, and what I learned is that civil society is very much divided, so sometimes you cannot really rely on the opinions of your aims, goals, of those who are in the same group with you, but the happy moment here and the happy lesson is that when you know how to work with other stakeholders that help can come from where you don't even expect, from business community, from registers and registrars, even from the board with whom sometimes they will antagonize, so this is my lesson. You go outside of your sivls and you find a lot of -- civils and you find a lot of help and coo. And a bit about Work Stream 2, my learnings. Sometimes it is hard, even exhausting because new people are joining. It's an open community, it's a multistakeholder process, and you have to explain what have been agreed upon. You have to explain which dues have been sealed, but you also have hard time to reconsider or not reconsider these deals which have been sealed. (Deals) you always ask yourself, do I have to reopen this issue for the sake of openness, for the sake of inclusiveness? Do I have to argue again on what have already been decided, and this is a hard question to answer. This is all for me. Thanks a lot. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Tatiana. Luis viz. >> Thank you very much. Louisiana vis. I'm a member of the ICANN board. I feel like a cheat because in October of last year I joined the board after almost everything had been done, so it's like jumping on a train about two minutes before it's about to pull into the station and say, look, we arrived. I said this to Matthew, but I want to give this from the perspective of someone from the outside because I know the session is supposed to be focusing on the nonICANN crowd, so for those who are nonICANN, I think my key message is if someone like me coming from the outside can join in this process, then anybody can. So when you first look at the ICANN community, and it was completely new to me, then the first thing that strikes you is it's incredible that this is the way the Internet actually is run. It's something that not many people know, and I have to keep on explaining again and again what is a multistakeholder process, how it's open, how it's inclusive, how everybody can participate, how everything is democratic, how anybody can chime in at any moment in Work Stream 1 and Work Stream 2, anything you want to raise as an issue, you can put on the table, and when I explain this to people who don't know this, you know, first they don't believe it, and when you explain it even more, they say, oh, so it's like a hippy kibutz that kind of gets along and that's how the Internet works, call it what you want but it works, and people who have been in it since the beginning underestimate how exceptional it is, the way it works, the way communities come together, the way people try to build bridges and understand each other, and I think the whole transition process is an amazing example of that happening, of the relationships being built, of the trust being established, of people, listening, really trying to understand each other. I saw it, Matthew, in face-to-face meetings. On mailing lists, people can can get out of hand and start losing site, even the way you would say some things online that you wouldn't actually say to someone's face, then you meet in meetings, and you meet someone for drinks and you meet someone at the bar and you say, hey, what did you really mean, that makes a huge difference, so I do believe in the power of these face-to-face gatherings. So on the Work Stream 2, I am the board liaison for diversity. On the last call we only had 20 people, so I'd say, please, everybody, join in because diversity means -- we're talking about age diversity, linguistic, regional, about getting a gender balance. It's really important that people join in, and so if the group on diversity is not diverse, then we have a problem, so please join in. And I'm also the substitute for Markus comber on the human rights working group, in the Work Stream 2 subgroup, and that's really been an interesting process as well. So basically my key take it is away is if someone like me as an outsider can feel at home and feel included -- thank you, everyone, especially helping out with all the acronyms. It's great. On one of the first emails there was an acronym I copyright figure out, and I went on ICANN Wiki, and it was SDB. It was Steve Dublienko, so it was on the Wiki. If I can part of this, I would encourage everybody -- as Leon says, with great power comes great responsibility, so the more people that join the responsibility in the new powered community, the more we can keep our Internet open and connected. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Lucavis. Sebastia >> SEBASTIAN: Thank you very much. My name is Sebastian Belgium a ba. I'm a big supporter of the transition of IANA, so as such I would like to give you our two takeaways. I mean, the main outputs that we see from this project. First, obviously, the transition in itself. We applaud that. I mean, we applaud you guys and all the other communities that have been involved for the work well done. And secondly, I think the most important thing is we scored a victory for the multistakeholder model, and I like to refer a little bit about that because I think I find it quite important. Multistakeholderism is another -- it's not an acronym, but it's as cryptic as the acronyms that we use, so let's refer to the collaborative model in -- to dealing with policy and technical issues on the Internet. I mean, so I think we -- since the -- yeah, since the WSIS, I mean, it was from the beginning of the discussion on the multistakeholder model in itself -- since then, we keep talking about the multistakeholder -- a multistakeholder model, but at this transition process, we validated the process in a way that we never did before, so I think the -- one main thing that we have at our disposal after this process is a set of tools, and we're always there at -- and they were always there at our disposal but now are evident to us. This process had a focus goal. It worked on a specific time frame. It worked with a shared vision. It worked with collective responsibility, collaboration. It took very important the stake of the value of consensus, and I left for the last one accountability. I think it was the first -- I mean, every single community -- Internet-related community, accountability was extremely important, but it was the first time that accountability was discussed at the global level, and I think those are very important things that came out of this process, and we have to realize what we've done because it's a big achievement for what we call the Internet model or the multistakeholder model, and we are not probably, most of us, realizing how important it was. Thank you very much. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Sebastian. Okay. So we're going to go to questions. I'm going to take questions for about five, seven minutes, not longer than that, so we can turn to the last section, which is about how do we take these learnings into other spaces and other processes. So so far I have Steve. Do you want to go ahead? >> STEVE: Thank you, Matt. It's Steve with the business constituency and also a group called Net Choice. I'll share three quick points about why I believe we succeeded. The first is that it was the community that gave rise to this entire accountability plan. It was not part of NTIA's imagination of how they would transition the contract, and it wasn't in the board and ICANN management's view: Instead, the community determined that this opportunity was our last best hope to give the community accountability powers over ICANN, the corporation, and its board because the community, thus far, had no accountability powers, the same way that, say, shareholders would have had over a corporation or members would have had over an association. And that came to a head at the London meeting of 2014. Keith Drasick led a group of us, multistakeholder stakeholder group to the microphone to tell the board of ICANN that you cannot do this transition until and unless we, the community, have designed accountability powers that we've never had before. I wouldn't necessarily say, like Leon did, that the board embraced that and management team. They didn't embrace that. They resisted for a while but then got on with the program, so the first critical success factor was that we invented this program. It wasn't a top-down initiative. The second that it was important. It was vitally important because what we would come up with would really matter for the management of the DNS. Third, we had a deadline. It was a political deadline, not a technical one, the political deadline of getting it done by the end of the Obama administration in 2016. Those three factors, I think, helped make it a success. And now that it's done, the transition, we still have nine things left, nine projects. You've heard about three or four of them tonight. We've called them Work Stream 2. Just to give the rest of the non-ICANN crowd an idea, in the actual transition, we knew we had a deadline, so we said are there any projects, however critical, that were not required to be done before the transition? And if so, let's put them into the second work stream, Work Stream 2, but it wasn't sufficient to just dump them to Work Stream 2. We had to add to the new bylaws implementation impertives and what do I mean by that? In the bylaws that we adopted in October, we have created a strong mechanism for the community to get consensus on these extra nine Work Stream 2 items, and then we have a significantly greater power to get ICANN to implement the community's recommendations, even if the -- even if the ICANN board and management wanted to resist them. These are to do with diversity, accountability, human rights. We have a handful of items on this Work Stream 2, and the community, if we have consensus, can pretty well guarantee they're going to be implemented, and that's a greater degree of implementation assurance than we've ever had before. So that's the open invitation to those of you who are perhaps brand-new to ICANN. You can find within these nine Work Stream 2 projects many opportunities to participate now, as we're just baking our proposals and recommendations and putting them forth for full consideration. There is plenty of time in the next 12 to 16, 18 months to make a real difference on areas that matter most to you in Work Stream 2. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Steve. If people are interested in asking a question, please raise their hands. I'm going to go to Ambassador Benedicto, please. >> Thank you. I'd like to raise the point by Olga, and I think that refers to the positive approach that governments in general took to this exercise. I think that this is something that maybe is not fully recognized the -- I would say very positive approach that the government holds to this exercise, because even in the end, in the very final stage of the process, some governments, including my own government, were very much concerned about some of the rules, some of the norms that were being proposed, particularly in regard to the need to have full consensus to trigger some consideration mechanism before the board otherwise, any advice coming from the GAC could be more easily dismissed. This, on top of not being the board, and this also on top of that rule not being applied to any other constituency, plus, in addition to that, to the fact that this is not the usual way governments operate. Consensus is a very important method for decision-making. We are fully in agreement with that, but usually governments in each and every stance have mechanisms to overcome, even if they are minority opinions, so we have come to a situation in which we have a kind of veto power that can be exercised some way, so this is a situation that many countries, including my own, were comfortable, but what is important to highlight is even in the face of some difficulties that are very serious from the part of government, there was a general willingness within the GAC to not object to the process, to let the proposal go forward, and we knew by doing this, we -- it would be approved in a way that would, lets say, be problematic for some of us, but we took that onboard when we made the decision in respect for the multistakeholder approach that was followed. I'd like to say that in the case of my delegation, this was very clear. We had very clear sense that some aspects were not to our liking very adequately addressed, but it in respect for the multistakeholder model, we'd like to see not only my -- internally, we were prepared to accept, so I think this is one thing that should be highlighted. Another thing is that in our perception, the IANA transition has unfolded and was completely implemented. We think this was a huge step forward. We see it very positively; however, we think, as others, including Steve D has recognized, it is unfinished business because there are very important aspects still being discussed. We think that the same energy, the same resources that were devoted to the first stage should also be allocated to the discussion of those remaining aspects that deal with -- that will allow in our view to elevate the perception of ICANN, the legitimacy, including from the perspective of government. We think it's very important that we pursue in those tracts with the same energy, so we, again -- I think the approach -- and speaking from the part of bra still -- was very positive in regard to the exercise. We think it was a huge step forward, but, however, we'd like to remain engaged in some aspects that are still very important for us. Thank you. And I think we have that shared interest in making the -- in achieving a situation all those remaining issues that will allow all of us to feel comfortable and to fully embrace ICANN and to be fully prepared to defend the organization and to -- in the face of others that maybe do not share the same sentiment towards this organization. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank you. I think as somebody who's lived through the working groups, both the IANA transition group and the accountability working group and participated in those quite extensively, like so many of us, the end game on the accountability side, it was a very interesting time. It must be said because there were -- I think some of the concerns that were lingering in the minds of the different stakeholder groups came to the fore, which is very understandable when you're getting close to coming to that end point, but what was, I think, an incredible achievement was that common goal and that desire to see this through prevailed, and that, at the end of the day, was the most important element, I think, of that particular very somewhat tense at times period in the end game. Yes, please. >> AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is Sharin, a member of the ICANN board. I wanted to give a perspective from inside the board on a couple of things, particularly what Leon mentioned and what Steve mentioned, Leon said embraced and Steve said resisted, so I'm going to tell you what I -- what really happened from inside. The transition began at a time when I believe -- and I think you would agree with that -- the trust between the board and the community was stretched, to say the least, and as a result, any action or any statement made by the board was -- had a different connotation, different interpretation, but let me assure you that personally I believe that the process that we went all through it has strengthed the relationship between the board and the community, and today I think the board is in a much stronger position because it is in partnership with the community, it is no longer us and them, so I think the multistakeholder model has prevailed in that instance and has helped tremendously reach -- or sorry, bring together the board with the community in partnership and actually improve the trust between them, and I think as years go forward, we're going to have some challenges in implementing all the new bylaws, but we have to work together in making sure it's not confrontational, but it's a partnership where we're going to sort out problems and move together, so I think to me, the lesson is that trust is so essential for the success of this model between the various constituents. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank you very much. One last question before we go to the next section of the -- of the workshop. Anybody? No. Okay. Wonderful. So now we get to the fun part, which is how do we take these lessons forward? Where do we take them? What spaces do we believe that the lessons we've learned as a part of this multistakeholder process could benefit from? And I know a couple of the panelists have -- want to share their thoughts on where these -- where this multistakeholder model could be taken, and actually, I'd welcome, given that we're in the last 15 minutes or so, if there are others other than the panelists who wish to jump in here and say this is a model we can take into this space or that space or should be considered, at least, then to please indicate they'd like to speak. So who would like to go first from among the panelists? Lucavis. >> So I come from working in the public sector, so working with governments. I'm used to governments sitting around the table making all the decisions and everybody is standing outside lobbying, and when you're in a company, it's easier to lobby and you get on a delegation or something like that. To me it's incredible to see everybody sits at the table and governments are one of the equal partners and not the ones who dominate, so I actually think we should do this everywhere. I mean, I think that if we can take it into -- you know, work on climate change, on fighting poverty, I mean, you name it, there is so much knowledge and so much expertise, and sometimes -- and I can say this as a former recovering politician, I like to say, you know, politicians are so out of touch with real people and what their problems are that if you can get more real people actually at the table saying these are the solutions and this is how we do it -- yes, it's going to be -- take a long time, it's going to be expensive, it's going to be very difficult, et cetera, but if the results are better and more sustainable and longer-term, I think it's worth it. So I think we shouldn't be too modest about what's happening here, and let's face it, the Internet is one of the few global things that works, so it's not like we have a bad track record. And so in that regard, I would say let's not be shy and take it to other fora. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Lucavis. Leon. Who else -- any hands on -- okay. Thanks. Leon. Go ahead. >> LEON SANCHEZ: I definitely agree with what Lucavis has said. My idea is to take the multistakeholder model particularly to the negotiations of, for example, free trade agreements. When you think of negotiating free trade agreements, this is something that is only made by the governments today, but the impact that free trade agreements has or have is immense, right? It impacts all sectors of society, economy, and different aspects of our lives, so I think that if countries are going to negotiate free trade agreements or whatever international agreements to be negotiated, then I think that the multistakeholder model could be ported to those -- to that firm, and we wouldn't -- forum, and we wouldn't have anyone wanting to do any huge changes to -- to agreements that have been in place for many years, right? (Laughter) >> No names. (Laughter) >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Leon. Jimson, and then Olga, and then Farzy. Yep. >> JIMSON OLUFUYE: There's no doubt there is great beauty to the multistakeholder approach, especially bottom-up, as we practice in ICANN. I see some of it happening in the United Nations, like in the working group on enhanced corporation and also working group on IGF improvement that concluded maybe some three years back. Well, the point is even some officials of the United Nations have recognized that you get a lot of ideas, valuable ideas on moving forward when you have a lot of diverse opinions on the table, so I think since we have seen the success in the cooperation in terms of discussion and broadening enlightenment, if it can be expanded to many other organizations, the so-called treaty organizations, like ITU, ITU is doing marvelous work, but I think if we also enhance it's governance, it makes a lot of sense. It will have more impact in -- socially and culturally. And then in Africa, we have recognized that 50 years of African Union, the government has not really impacted much, so we feel that when the AU also comes to the table to discuss, only government, they should bring in stakeholders, hear from the youth, hear from the market women, okay, and with that, we can move faster because everybody's involved in the process. And finally, in regard to getting into this, it also addresses the challenges, as I mentioned earlier, the need for outreach. We need to do more outreaches at many fora to talk about it. If you don't advertise, nobody will get to know what you're selling, so that is why we need to engage and engage, so we are the ambassadors of this success story, and we need to carry it to the global community. We should celebrate it. It's an endearing development, and we should push it. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Jimson, you raise an interesting point, at the end of the day what we should be selling is the result, not the process. The most important thing is the multistakeholder process, not the fact in a it's a multistakeholder process, because if you want that outcome, inevitably you have to bring those stakeholders to the table. I think sometimes we have a communication challenge around multistakeholder, and we have to be careful to the degree in which we use it, and what we should be fleecting on is what's the benefit, what's the outcome, what's the result, and I think in the case of the IANA transition, we've got a very clear result we can point to. Olga. >> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you. I'm not sure if I agree totally with you. I think the process was fine and was worth to have in mind and to repeat, and of course, the outcome. And I would agree with Lucavis. The challenge is to take this process and this idea of multistakeholder discussion and outcome at the national level or regional level, which is not easy. It is -- there is a long tradition from governments on discussing things about governments, which is good, and also business talking to business, so I think it's challenging, and it's also challenging not forgetting the role of each of the stakeholders. Businesses are good doing businesses, so they have to focus on that, and governments doing public policy and civil society and academia and others, so I see it as a real challenge for the future. So those of us who were lucky and really participant -- active ives in this process should -- participants in this process should go back and try to actively participate. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Good point. Farzy. >> FARZENEH BADIEI: I understand the enthusiasm, but I think we should be a bit shy when we want to transplant this amazing multistakeholder approach, and I would call this approach, not a model because we don't have one model, we have an -- we have -- we can have different approaches, the institutional design of ICANN might be different than other institutions and also the issue that we work on is the Internet and the issues might be different, so I think we need to be a little bit shy in transplanting it. And also, we have to think about woor we are going, where we want to take it -- about where we are going, where we want to take it, and it might not be appropriate for everywhere. Thank you. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Farzy. Izumi and then Chris. >> IZUMI OKUTANI: Thank you. Interesting that Leon said maybe this could be applied in trade agreement because recently around the negotiation of TPP, I had open discussions with our Japanese government and other stakeholder, and when I shared about the community process and the contrast with what happened with the TPP negotiation, this government officer who was involved in the negotiation, he just -- it was really a new idea, and he was really amazed and he took a note, okay, I will take it into consideration, so I don't know if it can be done in exactly the same way that we did for the -- for the accountability proposal, but at least the idea of, hey, you know, having a bit of open consultation with others, this is -- this is something that seems to be eye-opening, which was a surprise to me. And another thing that I really agree with the observation, we shouldn't be careful that we shouldn't apply exactly the same process in everything, and this kind of collaborative approach may apply to things that needs collaboration rather than negotiation, so for example, in the area of cyber security where like, you know, different shareholders will share the same goal of hey, let's know, you know, target and improve the cyber security, and each different players have their own -- those kind of like collaboration needed theme is maybe an area that a multistakeholder approach would work effectively compared to negotiation type of things. Thanks. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks. Chris. >> CHRIS: Thank you, Matthew. Cristopf Spec. ICANN is an example of a multistakeholder model, there is evidence that a multistakeholder model can work and can produce a result, and the process is an example of a process, and that is an example of a process that we've used. We may never use it again. We may find other processes. We may use it again, it depends, so I think it's very important not to GED. A, wedded to the process, and B, this is the only way to run a multistakeholder model, there are other things to do it, but that's it. I don't think any of that detracts from the result. Thanks. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thanks, Chris. Tatiana and then Carolyn. >> TATIANA TROPINA: Thanks a lot. I voiced my concerns about model vs. approaches, that we should not be that optimistic about it. While I do strongly believe in multistakeholder approaches, when we talk about model and when we talk about this particular process, we have to bear in mind three things. First of all, ICANN was born multistakeholder. Many processes we are talking about, like international agreements, like cyber security, they're long established power play, which is not easy to share. Secondly, this process had aim and strict time limitations, so I believe that it can be transported some way, it can be interoperable only in the processes, even in the processes when there are time limitations and the aim that you know what you're going to achieve and you know if you're not going to achieve your aim, you lose maybe not everything but a lot. So with all these grains of pessimism, I would say even if we cannot transport the model itself, the lessons learned from this process, from this model, from this approach can be taken anywhere, and they are good lessons, and that's what we have to do on the first place. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Carolyn. >> OLGA CAVALLI: Thanks, Matthew. I do want to reinforce some of the points that have been -- >> CAROLYN NGUYEN: Thanks, Matthew. I think this is more important to emphasize the multistakeholder. There are multistakeholder approaches used wherever, not just in IANA. When we go into a country and embark on a project, in order to make it sustainable, we have to work with governments, we have to work with local organizations, we have to work with civil society, so these approaches are being applied in multiple places everywhere, it's actually not new, although this is a very, very particular implementation of that process. So I want -- I want to go back to the other previous speakers and say, so what are the principles that would -- that should be incorporated, right? One is that there is a very specific problem definition here. Many people said it that there was a common goal, there was a compassionate community that wanted to really work through the issues, air the issues but work through the issues, and then once a solution had been arrived at to really honor that solution. And the stress test in terms of airing out what are the priorities in terms of -- in order to address the -- and get to this common goal and also the accountability, so I think that those were some of the principles that would be great to find, okay, so what are the solutions, what are the issues that this can be applied to. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank, Carolyn. Anyone else? Any other comments -- want to make some comments on this? No. Okay. So we're at the end of the session. I'm going to close it so we can go to the various parties and events that are this evening. Carolyn actually, you kind of did the summary in a way there, which I think what we have is a wonderful example of a significant achievement for the Internet, a significant achievement for the multistakeholder community. I think that the cautions about a particular model are absolute valid, but the characteristics and the principles of multistakeholderism at the end of the day are the things that were through here, and those are the learnings that we need to take into other spaces, as many have said. So with that, I'll wrap this up. Oh, wait a minute. Nigel's got a comment. >> NIGEL HICKSON: Yes, thank you. And -- Nigel Hickson, ICANN. Just before Matthew wraps this up, I thank the panel for taking part, but also to note we will be putting the links into the -- into the IGF page for this and also the links to the presentation, so if anyone missed some of the links to the working group. Also, there's a host of information, of course, on the ICANN website, and if you go into the ICANN website and look for the accountability and the Work Stream 2, all the links to the various subgroups that have been talked about are there, so please, please get involved. Thank you. Back to Matthew. >> MATTHEW SHEARS: And I will say there were some very interesting learnings from this session, and we will be capturing them in the report and welcome your further feedback when it comes out. With that, round of applause for the panelists and for yourselves, and have a good evening. Thank you. (Applause) (Session concluded at 6:00 p.m.) Copyright © 2016 Show/Hide Header