IGF 2016: Enabling Inclusive and Sustainable Growth

Last year’s WSIS+10 Review culminated in an Outcome Document which recognizes the extraordinary extent to which the Internet and ICTs have been instrumental in realizing the WSIS vision of building a people-centered, inclusive, and development-oriented Information Society. But the Outcome Document also acknowledges a troubling reality. Despite the past 10 years of technological and connectivity advancements, a significant gender digital divides persists. This has hampered the ability of women to become active and productive members of the digital economy and realize a more rewarding, empowered, and improved quality of life for themselves, their families, and their communities. The Outcome Document calls for immediate measures to achieve gender equality in Internet users by 2020 through educational and other initiatives across all female age groups. 

Stakeholders have long been aware of this digital gender gap and during the past decade have launched digital/computer literacy and other capacity-building efforts to bridge this divide. Some of these initiatives have yielded impressive results, while others have encountered obstacles. Workshop speakers from all stakeholder groups will explore these challenges and how they have tackled them, putting us on track to realize the WSIS 2020 goal. In particular, we will provide a research-based context for barriers women of all ages face in becoming digitally connected. Speakers will then explore specific stakeholder efforts aimed at improving technical literacy, shaping entrepreneurial talent through internships and mentoring programs, creating a safe online environment for women, leadership training, and other initiatives building capacity. 

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Bogdan-Martin, Doreen
Hafkin, Nancy
Lemineur, Marie-Laure
Muthoni, Dorcas
Nguyen, Carolyn

Countries around the world have recognized the transformational impact of connecting more people to the Internet. It increases economic productivity, improves the lives of users, and positively impacts economic development of countries. Surveys in both the developing and the developed world have revealed that Internet adoption is not simply a matter of availability and cost. Demand-side barriers also play a significant role, including the lack of perceived need for an Internet subscription, digital literacy, and the availability of local content. Sustained, inclusive Internet user growth thus requires a better understanding of the demand-side barriers to Internet adoption, particular in rural areas and in low- and medium-income countries. This workshop brings together numerous experts with real-world experience in overcoming demand-side barriers to Internet adoption in unconnected communities that are coming online. The aim of the workshop is to improve our understanding of the obstacles that these communities face in gaining access to the Internet and to develop principles and ideas that may be used by relevant stakeholders in their endeavors to bring these communities online in the future.

Speakers include:

Bharadwaj, Manu - US Department of State
Blackler, Ellen - The Walt Disney Corporation
Jorge, Sonia - The Alliance for Affordable Internet
Pisanty, Alejandro - National University of Mexico
Mitchell, Paul - Microsoft

Around the world, private sector actors, civil society organizations, and governments are engaged in numerous initiatives that are bringing the benefits of Internet access to rural communities. However, an analysis of these initiatives and their success or lack thereof is quite limited, which stymies information flow, cross learning, and collaborations. This workshop looks at ways in which that data gap can be bridged by bringing together a roundtable of various stakeholders from civil society, business, technical community, and governments. Some key questions that will orient the discussion are: What are the key knowledge gaps in this area and how should they be addressed? Are the information needs of governments, the technical community and civil society being appropriately addressed by current research efforts? What are some good (and possibly bad) examples that address these needs? How can further collaboration be fostered between data producers and users? Are current research methods and standards appropriate? How can data collected at various national, sub-national, and community levels be brought to the forefront of cross-sector and cross-country collaborations? Is crowdsourcing a viable option for the collection of such data? What other outreach initiatives can best bring together data on such endeavors? Are there barriers to divulging data on private sector initiatives, and if so, what are the ways in which these can be addressed?

Speakers:

Estavillo Flores, María Elena
Galpaya , Helani
Galperin, Hernan
Mathews, Rajan
Gillwald, Alison
Barbosa, Alexandre 
Yedaly, Moctar

According with the World Health Organization, nowadays there are more than 1000 million people with disability globally, that is about 15% of the world’s population. Taking into consideration in the aforementioned, disability is a development priority, as it could be seen in the sustainable development goals that make different emphasis in this topic.
In order to accomplish these objectives, it is essential to ensure that persons with disabilities have access to information and communication technologies, including Internet so the persons with disabilities fully enjoy this fundamental right and have access to all kind of social services. 
In this regard, this panel is relevant to Internet Governance because it will allow knowing the national and international experiences that have been developed in order to promote the inclusiveness of people with disabilities in the information and communication technologies as well as the Internet. Sharing the successful stories to promote the accessibility will benefit all people with disability from birth to old.

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

- Mónica Duhem, Hearcolors

-Mignon L. Clyburn, Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

-James Thurston, G3ict

-Adriana Labardini, Federal Telecommunications Institute

-Chandra Roy-Henriksen, Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues at the United Nations

-Donal J. Rice, NDA

-Shadi Abou-Zahra,  W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

 

This session is presented on behalf of the Internet Governance Caucus (IGC), which is one of the groups advocating for the interests of civil society actors within the Internet Governance arena.

Access, finance and knowledge are critical factors of sustainability and development. Stakeholders in the internet governance and economic development need to play more assertive roles and devise new strategy of enabling inclusion through access provision, knowledge replica and distribution; and financing ICT for Development. The role of civil society in this context is complex. This workshop will consider a mapping of the spaces where CS does engage and should engage in the three areas of focus for the workshop: access provision, financing ICT4D and knowledge distribution.

Therefore, civil society needs to have a critical discussion on how they could better involve in the financing of ICT4D and access provision. Also, in what way and capacity can civil society help bridging digital divide through knowledge distribution and capacity building?

Harnessing and reviewing the roles of civil society in Internet Governance and economic development would better help advance and connect civil society participation in the discussions of ICT for development especially Internet governance and its sustainability.

In brief, the workshop is going to identify the challenges and look to existing best practices and approaches as well as processes and institutions that have addressed part or all of the focus area of the workshop. 

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Bollow, Norbert
Cadena, Sylvia
Gurstein, Michael
Hvale Pellizzer, Valentina
Kane, Cissé
Malcolm, Jeremy
Mueller, Milton
SCHOMBE, BAUDOUIN 

The Internet today falls short of true inclusiveness and availability. However, many fundamental Internet applications still adopt English language and much of the existing Internet content and infrastructure depends on the ASCII character set which is based on the Latin characters commonly used by English speakers. It is regarded as a kind of digital gap and a main barrier for the users who do not use Latin characters to generally access and well use the Internet. For example, they have to learn a new character set to send emails, or finding the ASCII-based email addresses and domain names inconvenient. To some extent, single use of ASCII character set dose not conduce to the inclusive and sustainable development of the Internet.

With the emergence of internationalized domain names (IDN), email with Internationalized Email address (EAI), as two of the important fundamental applications, made an effective breakthrough to step over the gap. If the techs of IDN and EAI could be quickly deployed, we can enable more Internet users with unique Internet culture IDs. 

Nevertheless, the deployment of EAI still remains in the initial stage and more efforts shall be made. Firstly, we should increase the awareness of its significance. Secondly, it needs to upgrade the present email system to meet EAI’s technical requirements. Thirdly, the necessary policy and special talent team shall be established.

The workshop aims to assemble relevant stakeholders to share information and best practice from the global perspective, and try to figure out next actions for the future. 

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Arunwatanamongkol, Pensri
Saleh, Alireza
Sullivan , Andrew
Svancarek, Mark
TODOROV, Leonid
Woo, Marvin
Yao, Jiankang

For the internet to enable inclusive and sustainable growth, it is essential that individual internet users can create and access content and have software tools in their own languages. In 2016, more than 90% of the global internet population is outside of North America, yet English remains the language of more than 50% of web content. The session will address the following questions:

- How are the major web platforms encouraging diversity in cultural and linguistic expression?
- What are the trends in cultural and linguistic diversity from major studies such as UNESCO's Globalisation of Cultural Trade (2016), UNESCO Atlas of Languages in Danger or the Internet Society's Global Internet Report
- What are the links between internationalised domain names and multilingual content, and what work is taking place to overcome barriers to large-scale IDN adoption?
- What are the implications for inclusive and sustainable growth of failure to take positive steps to enhance cultural and linguistic diversity?
- How can the policy process be made more inclusive in order to prioritise issues such as enhancing cultural and linguistic diversity?

The Birds of a Feather session will bring together actors from government, private sector, civil society and the technical community who are engaged in promoting online cultural and linguistic diversity.  Participants will be drawn from Latin America, Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and North America. Gender balance will be observed. Partners who have already committed support include UNESCO, ICANN, the ccTLD organisations CENTR and LACTLD, global platform providers Google and Microsoft, and Chatham House.

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Aguerre, Carolina

This round table will discuss existing examples of community networks in order to identify the main challenges that such connectivity model may face with regard to (i) policy and regulation; (ii) self governance and sustainability models; (iii) deployment, software and hardware technology iv) how to strengthen community networks collectively.

The goal of the workshop is to expand knowledge and share lessons learned about the topic and elaborate concrete suggestions for topics and lines of action that may be used to nurture the work of the Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity

The workshop will utilise an interactive-roundtable format aimed at allowing participants to understand the issues at stake thanks to concise presentations by experts. Emphasis of the dialogue will be on the current state of Community Network challenges and reality.

The meeting will be divided in three moments: 1) presentation of concrete problems and challenges, 2) approaches to solutions based on community network experiences, 3) general discussion with the public aimed at jointly crafting key recommendations.

Speakers Include

• Jane Coffin, ISOC          
• Mike Jensen, APC
• Lee Hibbard, Council of Europe  
• Osama Manzar, Digital Empowerment Foundation
• Leandro Navarro, guifi.net / Technical University of Catalonia
• Carlos Rey-Moreno, University of the Western Cape
• Nicolás Echániz, Altermundi
• Luca Belli, Center for Technology & Society at FGV

Mobile phone data can be used to help solve some of the most pressing public policy needs of our times – from managing traffic in congested and polluted urban environments, to understanding and preventing the spread of diseases. Analysis of mobile data can offer important insights to governments and institutions when making policy decisions, whether it’s about maximising citizen welfare or allocating critical resources in the aftermath of natural disasters. Such insights can not only save people’s lives but also enable inclusive and sustainable growth through the creation of jobs (e.g in data analytics) and lead to economic growth. Public and private organisations, researchers and citizen groups are currently experimenting, innovating and adapting to our increasingly connected world where more and more data are created, faster and more detailed than ever before.

Our proposed ‘Birds of a Feather’ session is aimed at bringing together individuals with a shared interest in the field of Big Data analytics with a view to:
(a) sharing their experiences and real life examples of how aggregated data (including mobile data) are used to benefit citizens and consumers in ‘social good’ contexts (tracking diseases, disaster response, targeting humanitarian aid etc.); 
(b) expressing views on how the various stakeholders in a Big Data value chain can best address privacy challenges where personal data are involved, while maintaining the sustainability of Big Data innovation
This session will be held based on a ‘Birds of a Feather’ format, so, while a few invited speakers will make some remarks we would expect attendees to participate by sharing their thoughts/comments on this topic. Proposed themes/pillars are: Transparency, Algorithms, Anonymity, Impact on Individuals.

Speakers confirmed:

Miguel Calderon Lelo de Larrea (Telefonica)
Reveyrand-de Menthon, Michel (Orange)
Alexandrine de Corbion (Privacy International)
Fernando Sosa (INAI - Mexican Data Protection Authority) 
Romanoff, Mila (UN Global Pulse)
Wojtan, Boris (GSMA) 

This session addresses the issue of "How do we ensure accountability in developing Internet related policies and to have them adopted and maintained in an effective manner?"

Over the recent years, discussions on accountability have mainly focused on the IANA transition and ICANN. Accountability, however, is a much bigger issue that goes deep in the heart of good and effective Internet governance. 

Placing accountability at the very heart of the post-WSIS agenda in Internet governance will be critical to make sure the commitments are met and honored in practice. Accountability helps create an environment of trust and effectiveness in policies, ranging from those for Critical Internet resources to public policies by governments. It brings a diverse set of stakeholders together to develop policies with fact based expert inputs and considerations from multiple angles. If we were to enable inclusive and sustainable growth for the Internet, and to develop and adopt policies to achieve this, improving accountability in the context of Internet governance is a critical component.

One of the reasons why the Internet is such a great technology is the existence and exercise of accountability mechanisms by the technical community. For years now, different parts of the technical community have formed accountability mechanisms that have allowed the creation of sound policies that have ensured an open and inclusive Internet, which has accommodated growth and innovation.Experience from setting up and following these models could provide guidance when similar process are set to develop other Internet related policies.

Moderator:
Scholte, Jan

Speakers:
Carvell, Mark
Githaiga, Grace
Kinoshita, Tsuyoshi
Sanchez, Leon 
Yamout, Salam

This roundtable session addresses the promotion of Internet access policies by innovating on regulatory frameworks that address both the access problem and the human rights dimension. The combination of market strategies, public policies and the intervention of community-driven efforts in many least developed countries and regions is a way forward to the challenges that surfaced at the roundtable organized last year about the how could Internet rights and access goals become reconciled. The way forward proposed then in the roundtable were in line with the recommendations from the Final Compilation document for “Connecting the Next Billion”, which stresses the need for an enabling environment, where “future connectivity efforts need to ensure that those coming online have access to the entire global and open Internet. Access should be universal, equitable, secure, affordable, and high-quality on the basis of human rights…”. (2015:31). The roundtable seeks to address the specific strategies that combine a public interest approach and the expertise deriving from the market sector and community initiatives.
Key questions for the debate: Which best practices in developed or developing countries provide good examples for striking these balances? How is government intervention envisaged in the development of policies and infrastructure for the next billion users? How adequate have Universal Service Funds been and what role should be foreseen for them? What’s the evidence of the impact of zero-rated programs on access and on human rights such as access to information and free expression? Are there successful community experiences that could be replicated in other contexts? How can empirical research further help advance the discussion beyond the statement of principles?

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Bellagamba, Sebastián, ISOC 
Perry Siena, APNIC
Casasbuenas, Julian, COLNODO APC
Estrada, Miguel Ignacio, Min. Modernización, Argentina
Galpaya , Helani, LIRNE ASIA
López, Fernando, ASIET
Gillwald, Alison, Research ICT Africa

The exhaustion of the IPv4 address supply has been predicted since the end of the 1980s. However, the large scale adoption of mobile devices and their associated IPv4 addressing needs accelerated the exhaustion timetable, and placed increased pressure on network operators to conserve IPv4 addresses

This pressure has resulted in a marked increase in the use of technologies, such as Network Address Translation (NAT), that allow pools of addresses to be shared across multiple endpoints. These mechanisms enable the reuse of the limited pool of available IPv4 addresses, resulting in the number of connected endpoints vastly outnumbering the number of addresses in use in the public internet.

This has three important implications for Internet technology developers, and those who depend on certain behaviors of the technology. 

Application designers need to consider the fact that an IP address does not necessarily identify an endpoint.

Law enforcement and forensic functions need to consider that an IP address alone may not be sufficient to correlate Internet activity observations with an endpoint; and even an IP address associated timestamp generally may not suffice.

Data retention mechanisms and policies that record or reference an IP address need to refactor their actions and requirements to consider that in increasingly large parts of the Internet, an IP address is merely a temporary identifier. Potentially large volumes of ancillary data are required to match an IP address to an endpoint.

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Fernandez, Hernan
Galpaya, Helani 
Molano, Diego
Mulendema, Malenga

Despite having a population of approximately 350 million, The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has a relatively low level of Information Communication Technology (ICTs) penetration compared to most of the world. Given how ICTs can improve the standards of living by contributing to development in several areas such as governance, poverty alleviation, education, health, environement and community, fostering digital capacities can contribute to achieving sustainable social and economic development.

With that in mind, this workshop aims at exploring ways to raise the level of ICT penetration in the region by discussing challenges, weaknesses, strengths and opportunities in :

- Capacity building in the educational and vocational sector.

- Global and regional partnerships for development of the internet economy &

- Internet Governance and implementation isuues.

Given that education is at the core of any development policy, ICT capacity building in education is vital and can be achieved by connecting schools and promoting digital content, access, inclusion and gender equality, so that educators and students could benefits from the opportunities that internet provides. Fostering the digital skills of the youth through additional vocational trainings is also likely to have a long-term positive impact on all walks of life.

Exploring ways to establish and strengthen regional and global partnerships is needed to ensure synergy and coordination among different stakeholders, and it is a conerstone for future viable economic growth, Further, given the complexity of the cross-disciplinary Internet governance issues, its valuable to discuss thoses matters to identify effective approaches to deploy IG in the region based on improving the multistakeholderism and buttom-up models in the decision making process.

Moderator
Walid AL-SAQAF

Confirmed Speakers
Aboulyazed, Hisham 
Al-Araj, Nadira
Boujemi, Hanane
Cherkaoui, LEGHRIS
Idlebi, Nibal
Oumrane, Fatma
Saraswat, Mohit
Yahmadi, Hafedh

Online Moderator 

Said Bensbih 
A remote hub will be organized in cooperation with Hassan II university of Casablanca
The session will be held in room 2

Rapporteur 
Michael Oghia, ISOC IGF Ambassador 

Since the first IGF in 2006, several regional, national IGFs, dialogue spaces and capacity building initiatives have been created.

The purpose of this workshop is to exchange ideas about the experiences, outcomes and effectiveness of these debate spaces and capacity building initiatives and if they have an impact in promoting inclusive and sustainable growth. The workshop will review whether these initiatives to see if they accurately reflect the multistakeholder model and its implicit requirements, namely multiculturalism and multilingualism.

All the Internet Governance fundamental documents, since WSIS Tunis Agenda until the WSIS+10 Outcome Document released in 2015, recognize the importance of a multistakeholder dialogue and the value of capacity building initiatives.

But are they being effective? 
Are they mindful of development and inclusiveness?
Are they mindful of local reality and problems?

This debate will be based in these ideas:

How to balance the stakeholder participation in the dialogue spaces? 
Are all stakeholders presently participating in them?
Is remote participation an equal or good way to participate?
Is language a barrier? Does simultaneous interpretation make the difference? 
Within the context of economic barriers, should Internet Governance capacity building programs be paid or should all be available through fellowship programs? 
How can the gender composition of panels and discussions be addressed in these activities? 
How are these programs ensuring equity of voice during these events? 
With regard to language barriers, how to translate Internet governance material(s) into various languages without sacrificing timeliness and accuracy or causing volunteer burn-out?

We have a group of distinguished colleagues who will join us:

Martinez, Cintya
Reyes Krafft, Alfredo
Hibbard, Lee
Vega Gómez, Julio César
Contreras, Belisario
Tapia, Karka
Leonardi, Marcel
Komarov, Mikhail
BEN JEMAA, Tijani
Aguerre, Carolina
Ribeiro, Renata Aquino

Please join us onsite or remotely to share your ideas and views!!

See you all in México

Olga and Dustin

Our workshop will primarily focus the the issue of Implementation of Multilingual Internet through IDN's (Internationalized Domain Names) so that we may connect 

remaining 57% population of the world to the internet in their local/Native language.
Many communities are actively and independently working to realize various components of multilingual internet viz. Support for Indic languages on various browsers and 

operating systems, partial support on email clients and servers, availability of software keypads and fonts for Indic languages, availability of some web content in 

local languages (though not significant), translation option from English to some of the local languages etc. 
However, there are still many challenges that need to be addressed. Broad challenges revolve around the universal acceptance of internationalized domain names, 

lack of awareness about the availability of many language tools like fonts and virtual keypads, the issue of email address internationalization, lack of 

standardization etc.
Hence, it is imperative to bring all these communities together to collectively address the challenges in creation of a multilingual ecosystem, by sharing of 

information and insights from their individual scope of work.
This workshop will ignite the thought amongst the participants to examine opportunities and challenges associated with achieving, goal of Multilingual Internet.

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

Chowdhary, Harish

Batra, Mohit

Elkins, Nalini
Hariharan, Reshmi
Svancarek, Mark
Yao, Jiankang

Today there is a fast increase in numbers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), open data and educational content (Open Educational Resources (OERs)) on the Internet and the process is getting even faster with emerging technologies: mobile, virtual and augmented reality etc. More and more educational programs depend on Internet resources. And online education services now are major approaches for empowerment people. Access to such a large and unregulated body of information, as exists on the Internet, suggests a need for content quality ranking and critical evaluation of related educational Internet resources as the information there might be both not relevant, not up to date and not scientific. Relevance of the educational content with labour markets is also important and it should be taken into consideration within ranking of the content. Thus, there should be basic principles of quality ranking of education services, and especially educational content discussed during the IGF with representatives of different stakeholders groups. This topic is an emerging issue and is connected to the emerging issues sub-theme of the IGF 2016 together with main topic of the IGF 2016. 
This workshop will be a continuation of 3 workshops from previous IGFs: “Empowering displaced people and migrants through online services” (IGF 2013), “Empowerment displaced people through online educational services” (IGF 2014) and “OERs and empowerment through quality online content” which was held in 2015 at the IGF and was of a high interest by different stakeholders.

Speakers provisionally confirmed:

CAVALLI, OLGA
Cárdenas, Cristina
Hfaiedh, Ines
Komarov, Mikhail
Liu, Chuang
Shcherbovich, Andrey

Internet Governance Content:
How to Make and Keep it Multistakeholder, Diverse, Multilingual and & a Means for Inclusive and Sustainable Growth

The purpose of this workshop is to exchange ideas and debate about the challenges related to the creation of Internet Governance Content, in the context of making it diverse, multilingual and truly multistakeholder.

WSIS+10 Outcome Document recognizes that there is a digital divide among developed and developing countries, and a primary dimension of this divide is content accessibility. It also recognizes that the approach to close the digital divide must be multidimensional and should understand quality of access, language and localized content.The creation of high quality, multilingual Internet Governance content is one way to move beyond “information societies” to “knowledge societies”. Internet Governance content can help developing countries and the Internet community at large to understand the complexity of Internet services, and how to address the challenges of regulations, cybersecurity and other technological developments that directly impact their everyday lives.

The debate will be opened under these general ideas:

How to create high quality Internet Governance content?
In which way can this content be created considering the multilingualism?
How can local content be reflected in the creation of Internet Governance content?
What does it mean for content to be truly multistakeholder? 
Who are the gatekeepers of information? How can we democratize information?
How can we create a globalized resources using a decentralized process?
For members from similarly inclined organizations, how do they democratize/translate/share this information?

These are the distinguished colleagues that will share with us their ideas:

Martinez, Cintya
Aquino Ribeiro, Renata
Solis, Cynthia
Carrera, Sergio
Barrett, Kerry-Anne
Maltseva , Svetlana
Chung, Edmond
Alaraj, Nadira
Lucena, Cláudio
Munyua, Alice
Garcia P. van Hoogstraten, Caterine

Join us on site or remotely to share your experience and ideas!!

See you all in México

Olga and Dustin