The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in João Pessoa, Brazil, from 10 to 13 November 2015. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> YANNIS LI: Hi. Good afternoon. Everyone. I guess we will be starting soon, since the room is already pretty full. We will review the attendance sheet to get everyone's email address so we can get connected and see who are here. So I will wait for David to come back to start.
(Pause.)
>> YANNIS LI: Okay. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. So they are fixing some technical problems. I'll introduce myself. I'm Yannis Li from Hong Kong. I'm with the NetMission Asia-Pacific Internet Governance Forum. Sitting besides me is David Ng, also from Hong Kong and NetMission and organizing the youth program that we support. And also Ephraim is another youth working with us in YCIG, but unfortunately he has another meeting going on in another meeting room. We couldn't have him here. Also Bianca, she unfortunately couldn't join us here in Brazil as well. Hopefully we will have her on remote. So thanks again everyone for joining us in this Youth Coalition on Internet Governance, YCIG for short. So before we start maybe you can try to see what are the youth, where are the youth coming from in this room.
So where are the Asia-Pacific youth? Raise your hands. One, two, three -- eight!
What about Europe? Okay! What about Africa?
Cool! And LAC IGF? Did I miss any region? Did I include it all? Okay, cool. Since we have many youth from different parts of the world, that's great. So I guess we are projecting. Are we projecting?
>> DAVID NG: Indeed we are ready for the remote participant headphones. Could the teleco people help us to show this on the screen? For the slides?
Cool. So starting with an introduction, I am David Ng from Hong Kong. I welcome you all to join this session. This is for Youth Coalition on Internet Governance. To start with, we have introduced Youth Coalition on Internet Governance what it is, started in 2009 this coalition was a part of the IGF which is organised in Egypt, in the Egypt one. After that we started promoting youth to engage in Internet Governance. This is for people under 30 who are enjoying time to be here for discussion, engage more people and youth's voices to be heard and to know more about Internet Governance.
We also like to understand different kinds of programs. I would like to show the other slide for you because last year we got plans for how we can engage more young people, in a sense. For this session today I will briefly talk about the agenda first. For the first part as I mentioned I will share the working report of what we did last year and also we had some activities that had been done in this IGF as well.
In another sense, how can we make things to run smoothly? We need to have another Steering Committee to be established in a sense to help things going on. We would like to talk about charters and discussing among us to see how the Steering Committee of YCIG should be because this hasn't been very clearly stated in our charters. For IGF or the Internet Governance we would like to have an open mind set, open for everyone to contribute and see how this is a very transparent organization. We would like to set the second part of our program today for doing consultation and hear what you think the youth coalition should be. Last but not least because next year we still have IGF probably, I think hopefully it should be another IGF. We need to plan for our next IGF activities to engage more youth. We will need you guys to contribute your ideas on how we can make things better for this year and already done new stuff like the IGF ABCs For Newbies and also mention that there is a liaison?
So for some updates for what we have done last year, in last year we proposed doing some field steps on IGFs for this year. The first one is YCIG plays PTO, we would like to have some modification on this. The second one in the last meeting we think it is important to get one day, one youth get-together event as an informal event to network and meet up.
The third one is about sending youth speakers to different panels, not only on those things like on Internet things but all different kinds of topics related to youth.
The next is getting youth involved in IGF.
The fifth one is the sharing youth engagement. The next is forming an advisory group. As I mentioned for the membership of Lao is like to have youth under 30 to join under YCIG, but we would really like to have people in the center age on giving advice. That is proposed, the ideas for last year.
It is linked and you can check on the Internet for our report from last year. I mean the report, the session report of last year.
So now I would like to talk about and share about some achievements we have done this year. For many of you, I think you have seen this postcard. This postcard is like the ideas of doing some survival kit for the newbies in IGF. You can check on the Web site. The Web site has ideas on how Internet Governance and what the meetings are about and that kind of introduction to both Internet Governance and IGF.
We would like to have this shared on your tables and if anyone has it, you can just go to the Web site to see it. And the other sense for promoting YCIG, I would like every one of you to keep a check on our Facebook, which is Youth Coalition on Internet Governance. You can join our group. We are doing some kind of discussion over there but at the same time we are doing email. For that Leaning, I will share with you guys at the end.
This is the very new initiative we are working on that we would like to keep this to be open to all. When you go to the Web site you can see the other Leaning which is a Google document. We would like everyone to contribute to make this be a live, keep this running. I think not only one of the toolkits should be done in a sense. It is important to keep everyone in check to see which angle you think is important, anything for the survival kit. Go to the Web site and everything is on there.
For the other event we have this year is about youth mentor youth Leaning up. This is for doing some coordination work. Bianca is in touch with members to join our session. In our session is around 40 youth attending the youth meet up. For the ideas of the youth meet up is similar to doing the day one informal meetings as we have planned last year and as we have proposed last year.
The membership is quite good. We are thinking about how to do it next year. Perhaps some modification is needed. We need your feedback, and we can check on this later on for the way forward session. Here are some pictures. For the moment it is good to have a meet up, for the members in IGF. But it is also important to provide a channel for youth to meet each other. I think for last night, the Latin America youth did a very good group on organizing a beach party on the beach. It was very enjoyable. The other kind of meet and greets, most of us like it. Very enjoyable. I would want to encourage everyone to host a meeting like this. We will have a very good time there.
(Applause.)
>> DAVID NG: So if you guys have an informal event, share it on Facebook. Most of us communicate with Facebook and also in the mailing list. So print all those awesome things on Facebook and probably we can join every party. Yes.
(Laughter.)
>> DAVID NG: For the other stuff I would like to share about the Facebook group. It was newly created last time. Previously, as many communicated through the mailing list based on the discussion outcome of last year, we think it is important to have an informal channel to share this stuff. It is great that we've already got 259 members to join the Facebook group. If you like, you can join the Facebook group and we can do more discussion on Facebook.
I think this here ends the report of what I have done last year and what we have done in this IGF. For the second part, as I mentioned, we would like to have everyone's contribution on giving your collective wisdom on how the YCIG should run, mainly on two things. The first thing is about the role of our Steering Committee. We need a Steering Committee to keep things running.
The other stuff is about the procedures and the action process for the Steering Committee. Because on the charters, there is a list for what the clear roles are. The charter is already established from 2009 and the time has past and it's time to create a more efficient way to run.
Here comes some reference material we would like to discuss. You can go to the link for the charter and because we are now having some kind of consultation period which is running. You can go to the portion for the comments. I will pass this to Yannis to moderate a discussion.
>> YANNIS LI: Actually, yes.
>> AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> YANNIS LI: If you are on black books, we can do the chat. If you click www.YCIG.org, we can show it online. Can we show it here on the screen as well?
But before we go into a discussion, I want to say this setting is not really right for us. I think we need a U-shaped table like a round table. Even though we are sitting here, we are just helping to start a discussion. So we need every one of you to really contribute and raise your opinion. It was meant to be open and interactive, we are hoping this section will be. We are trying to get more youth's voices together and not just from some of us. We are trying to get everybody to really work together. Also just want to add to what David mentioned about the Facebook group. It is a good outreach to your friends as well. Please invite them to join. We still hope you can join the mailing list as well so we can keep all the discussions in email archive so we will have a better record as well.
It is not showing up here.
Can you make it a little bit larger perhaps?
Actually, if you have your computer -- oh, yes, please?
>> AUDIENCE: (Speaker away from microphone.)
>> YANNIS LI: Oh, yeah, yeah, please.
>> AUDIENCE: Thanks, Pim from Dutch IGF. In the meantime, to do a suggestion to the organization in general, whoever that is, that for the social meet-ups it would be really beneficial if this meeting is totally at the beginning. Then everyone sees each other. I suggested that last year as well already. The meeting was on Friday, so it is really good for everyone to be able to see each other on the first day.
>> YANNIS LI: So we moved one day earlier this year.
(Laughter.)
>> YANNIS LI: Bianca was trying to help us do that with the agenda. We can keep advocating that, yeah.
That's a good suggestion.
On the screen actually is right now we are showing the charter that was created when this group was actually initiated way back in 2009. There was an, in Article 1 it outlines that we need a Steering Committee to be formed of three elected members for Chairs and Vice-Chairs. Only individual numbers under 30 years old and representatives of organisations can be elected.
We mentioned last year that since we are lacking a Steering Committee, official Steering Committee right now, we are pretty loose in a sense that we kind of fall under the basis to get things going. So we would like to really formalize the Steering Committee this year. Then trying to make the transition with the previous founders of this YCIG group better. So that is why we are doing this election discussion here right now.
So this is the background. I guess that is why we have created, actually we have regular calls before opening the Facebook chat to discuss this with youth before. We have opened a draft in the power pack that David just mentioned.
I think today we need to discuss the first thing the role of the Steering Committee. Right now in the charter it didn't really outline what the responsibilities of this Steering Committee would be. Since we have so many different voices here and different youth from different parts of the world, we would like to as a group see what do you think from your perspective that the Steering Committee should have. I mean, what role of the steering committee members should have in this group and how many of them do you think are needed? Is it just Chairs and Vice-Chairs? Or do we need more people on the Steering Committee to make sure this group really has projects and working? So someone has a hand up.
>> AUDIENCE: I think there are, important that from each continent or zone in the world there should be representation. If you are a coalition of youth, you have to be youth from all over the world. I suggest to keep it five or six maximum. That's in general the most workable number for people to meet as well.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, everybody. I stand up. I'm Florian representing the youth of Europe. I'll sit down again. I don't think it's necessary to define that we need youth from every continent or region. That is something we cannot guarantee. So it may be a case that at some point there is nobody from one region, for example from Europe, who wants to be on the Steering Committee. So it is risky to say that this is a necessity. But I definitely agree that five members, five to six members is a good amount to have a representative group of people.
>> AUDIENCE: This is Ranjha from Pakistan. I have a suggestion. Instead of having five regional Committee members, we can have a central Steering Committee and then the regional Committees under that global Steering Committee. That could be a suggestion.
>> YANNIS LI: Anybody else?
>> AUDIENCE: Maybe for -- Florian again. David, maybe you can first clarify a little bit about the Steering Committee? We are now discussing a group of people and how many there should be and who they should be, but what is the purpose or the function? What should they do? So maybe we can first talk about this.
>> DAVID NG: Thank you for your question. We are also referring to charters. First of all, I'm not that familiarized with the charters, I'm not engaging, I just engaged three years ago on this stuff. Just referring to the charters, the Steering Committee should have responsibility to organise different activities and representative groups. Instead of just reading the documents out. In order to promote transparency from all documents from the Steering Committee meetings. We would publish these at the IGF Web site. It is unclear to say what the Steering Committee should be. In another sense we would like to form a youth coalition in IGF with at least three people from different stakeholders group. For the one in YCIG, we want this to be done at the very beginning. We have to think about how the Steering Committee should be and is it just for that administrative role? Does it have accountability for organizing events? In this sense we need to discuss what is the role of the Steering Committee?
This is just being the secretaries of the whole coalition but not making those kinds of decisions? It will be very open in how we can form this as a more, with more representative ways. So the discussion of day for this part is focusing on how many people should be in the Steering Committee and also on what things are to be done for this Steering Committee.
For example, I think let me make it very simple example. For every YCIG meeting in IGF we need someone to host the meeting. Is it the responsibility for the Steering Committee to host the meeting? They should set the agenda and before establishing that they should do consultation with members? This kind of stuff should be discussed at this time.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from NetMission in Hong Kong, I'm Felix. Regarding the role of the Steering Committee, in the charter, it's way too broad and unclear on what it should do. I think the primary thing that the Steering Committee has to do is lay out specific goals for the year. Instead of organizing activities they should specify what kind of activities they want to hold and where and just to have a specific year planned for the, regarding that year.
>> AUDIENCE: Pim again from N-IGF. I agree with you in the sense that it would be good to have a specific year plan but it needs to be voted in and approved by all members, I would say, of the Facebook group or of the coalition. And because you mentioned the charter being vague, which I would say that the first thing that the Steering Committee should really do is make that more clear and come up with a proposal to clarify the whole charter.
>> AUDIENCE: Florian again. I don't think the Steering Committee should do anything -- maybe you are familiar with the structure of ICANN. They may call it a board but it is somewhat similar. I heard today Steve saying that they are just doing what the community is telling them. Sometimes they have to take leadership because it is a rather big organization than like YCIG, but the charter should be designed by the mailing list and the but not by the steering group.
>> This is Hailey from Hong Kong as well. I agree with Florian. The steering group should not do proposing or decision making because I think we should like all of us can be the -- like the ones to suggest and propose should be us instead of the Steering Committee. I agree five to six people would be enough. But the Steering Committee should consist of at least one representative from each continent.
>>
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, it's Felix again. If we let the communities speak for themselves, some bigger groups will have a bigger voice and it is possibility that some smaller groups and minorities will be left out and maybe because of language barriers as well.
I think the Steering Committee has a role to equally address the interests of different groups across different areas and different interest groups as well.
>> AUDIENCE: For now I will stop saying my name to save time. No, I cannot agree. It's for the record, okay, Florian again.
(Laughter.)
>> AUDIENCE: No, I cannot agree because that is the way a democratic process works. If there are more people agreeing with something, more people are agreeing with something. If it is simplified to a Steering Committee of five, six, ten people, we let out all the other hundreds of thousands of young people who maybe want to have their voice heard. I think you should really try to copy and paste a little bit from the existing communities within the Internet Governance society to say that the community basically makes the decisions. If the community is not streamlined and cannot agree on something, it just doesn't happen. And that is a very direct way. It takes long, but it is working. We see it is working, so why should we do something else?
>> YANNIS LI: I think I'm hearing several very good suggestions. We kind of have a rough agreement that we think five to six people is a good number for the steering group. But then I'm hearing different views on whether the Steering Committee should be the one to propose the specific year plan or should we make it and just the Steering Committee as the administrative consultant should be open to suggestions for the year plan and develop a bottom up model from the multistakeholders from different regions of youth to get together and discuss about the plan and the Steering Committee is helping to coordinate this effort. I guess because we are saying we need to listen to different voices, is there anybody from the Africa? From the LAC IGF youth group that would like to comment? Do you have any suggestions?
>> DAVID NG: Before that.
>>
>> AUDIENCE: I would like to add, I am not against the democratic process, but some areas like South America or Africa, they may not have Internet connection problems and they are not as involved as. The Steering Committee should take into effect the constraints that they may have as well as the different barriers they may have so they won't be left out of the entire process.
My point is that we have to, like everybody has to really participate in this process. So it is not ...
>> YANNIS LI: Could I try to get somebody from Africa to speak as well? I thought I saw somebody from that region raising their hand. So? Or if you want to comment?
>> AUDIENCE: Florian again.
(Laughter.)
>> AUDIENCE: Okay, now I'm kind of distracted in my brain. Where I'm coming from, when we make a decisions via the mailing list and if people from regions, for example from Africa, if the problem is to connect the mailing list we are facing a completely different problem. We have to start building Internet structure. It is not something we can do. We can support it but that has to be done from somebody else.
So if we use the mailing list as our main decision making process then I think it is fair to say that everybody who is connected to the Internet right now has the possibility to stay connected because mailing is such a simple technology, it can be used like always. And then I want to add, I think the Facebook group is fine to inform members and fine to inform others, but on Facebook there should not be any discussion or decision making ongoing because it is Facebook.
And we don't know how long Facebook is going to run, you know?
Yeah, we don't want to be relying on Facebook on making our decisions. We also should make that clear.
>> YANNIS LI: Are is there somebody in the back who wanted to comment as well?
>> AUDIENCE: Pim. Short question then because if you say we can use we can't use Facebook, but we can not use Google groups or any other technology in a sense, that can be very fast like dying and there is no archive anymore. I would state that Facebook can be used but there should be an archive in a more central place somewhere. Because otherwise, yeah, it becomes impossible to do any remote participation in a sense.
>> AUDIENCE: Anna Orlova, Network of European Digital Youth. To comment on Facebook, some people for political reasons don't use this tool for communication, but everybody uses emails. We want to discuss where we archive these email communications but I support that some people might not be on Facebook.
>> AUDIENCE: I support what you just said. My name is Gustav from the UFRN and I support what you said. I also understand that some people do not go to Facebook for political reasons, which must be respected, I think they must. I would rather work through a mailing list than Facebook. I remind you all that IGF has a best practice Forums and dynamic coalitions that work through mailing lists. It seems to work out for them. So I think that is to be considered.
>> YANNIS LI: I saw there is a hand in the back, but before I give the floor to you I want to say that I think this is did a good discussion. I personally agree as well that Facebook probably will be a good outreach, too, but we are going to dip right now and talk about where we are making the decision, but we should go back to discuss whether the role of the Steering Committee should be coordination of all these discussions or they should be like the one proposing some goals or specific plans. I think that is the question.
But maybe we will let the youth in the back?
>> My name is Allen, I'm from youth LAC. I would like to suggest some kind of video conferences. We made the course for a month and we used some tools that we can indicate to contact ourselves after the IGF during the year to not have to wait until the next IGF to have, like to see ourselves in video conferences where you can interfere when the other one speaks and add comments not only just texting or emailing. That's it.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. My name is Yvenia from Netty. My comment about this Steering Committee, it could be a group of Google that we could create an email account and we can discuss and we can mail a lot of things there. My group works in the group of Google. So we can create one and put Pell email lists because everyone here has email and who doesn't -- I think that's a good idea to respect, for those who don't use Facebook for political reasons.
>> YANNIS LI: For clarification, we do have a mailing Lisa. If you go to YCIG.org, you can subscribe to the mailing list. There are discussions going on, but not enough, I think. So please.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Sonia from the youth IGF Europe and going back to the Steering Committee conversation, I also don't think the Steering Committee should be making decisions on behalf of the youth coalition, but just keeping up with the events and I think Alan said there could be video conferences or maybe Skype calls or whatever could be easier, but setting aside the means, I also agree that there should be at least two more maybe meetings between the yearly IGFs because once a year isn't enough.
>> AUDIENCE: Florian again. I want to also go back to the discussion about the Steering Committee. If we start from the bottom, we say we have a channel right now that is not sufficient to do anything because it is so general, generally speaking. We have to think who can create or adopt the charter. That can only be us, the community. Not a few people because we need means and defined rules how we elect the Steering Committee. This can only be defined in the charter. So right now we need to work on the charter and only the community as a whole can work on the charter.
In the charter we can define how the Steering Committee can look like. The way to go is always from the community to somewhere else and first to the charter. Once we have the charter there we can define how the Steering Committee works, but it cannot be that the Steering Committee defines the charter because the Steering Committee doesn't have any right to be without a charter saying how the Steering Committee should look like. Yeah, we need to go from the community, charter first.
>> YANNIS LI: Thanks, Florian.
>> AUDIENCE: Ranjha again from Pakistan. I agree with Florian that we should first focus on the Steering Committee. Let the Steering Committee come up with a draft and other people can comment on it and we can finalize the draft.
>> AUDIENCE: Florian here. That is not what I said. I said that the community has to come up with a draft and a proposal how the charter should look like. And in the charter, then it can be defined how the Steering Committee looks like. But the Steering Committee cannot be the start of the discussion. It has to be the community. There is no Steering Committee without a charter defining what the Steering Committee is. We really have to start with the community and not at the Steering Committee. Otherwise it does not make any sense.
>> YANNIS LI: I understand.
>> AUDIENCE: Well, sure. I think we should start with the Working Group that can carry out this process, make a draft. I think it could be the Steering Committee or it can be another Working Group. It's up to you guys. You form a Steering Committee?
>> YANNIS LI: Anyone else want to comment?
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, can you hear me? I think I have to get a mic.
>> YANNIS LI: I think your mic is working. Turn it on.
>> EPHRAIM PERCY KENYANITO: This is Ephraim. Sorry I'm late. I'm one of the YCIG members organizing the effort zero rating. I want to highlight that this is a discussion we had before about the charter and one of the is, I have been working with Yannis and David who have been trying to have the coalition revived for some time now. And it is nice that we have this great representation here. I will just go back to this discussion and give my two cents about the whole discussion, about the youth and what I think. So on the draft charter, we had come up with a Working Group. But then it didn't really kick off. People went home and some of them didn't have the momentum to keep this process going. We had opened it up for everyone to make suggestions for amendments to the charter that is in place right now. And I think we can go back to that Google document and share with all of you what we need, for everyone to contribute. We want very open, inclusive process whereby everyone, the Committee members, not a few people deciding how things are going to go. We want everybody to contribute. And it is public. When you make your comments this is how it should change, it should be open on the record. I don't know if that is clear with everyone. We want this process to be clear and open and transparent and inclusive for everybody.
So the youth involvement in IGF has been lack of funding. Young people cannot raise funds to go from meeting to meeting. For example, myself, I'm from Kenya. Coming here I wasn't sure, I was talking to Yannis and David last week. I wasn't sure I was going to come here. I had to do a lot of fundraisers here and there, well wishers, nonprofits. I got my ticket last Friday and left on Saturday. You can see the challenges, not just for me. So this is something which we have continually raised with various people and today I had a meeting with the Secretary General of the United Nations over lunch hour. He told me that they are working on this. This is, our concerns have been reflected about young people being involved in this space. And one thing I would like to credit the UN is for the first time they have three people, three young people all under 25 on the multistakeholder advisory group. Previously it was a group for Professors and it hasn't had young people on it.
So it is good that they have decided to involve young people. There are avenues and we need to keep this process going forward and let's keep the discussions online. During the Facebook group, I see that is the most active and join also the mailing list. And then we are going to put out the Leaning and then everyone can comment and that is my personal view. This is not the views of the interim Secretariat as it is right now, but it is my personal view this is how the process should go forward, we should have this online on a Google Doc. You can access that anywhere you are in the whole wide world and involve other young people in this discussion. Thank you very much.
>> YANNIS LI: Thanks, Ephraim, for this very good intervention. Actually you can see on the screen we are actually using power pad to be technically correct, Google may not be everywhere, not everywhere can access it to be correct. We are using power pad for this open consultation. There is a Leaning that David has shared and the mailing list, as well as on Facebook for this, which Bianca shared before and we can share it to the Facebook and the email list as well again. Actually, the consultation we target that we can start from -- we had our call on the 7th. We start with that and we hope to end this consultation on the 21st so we can turn around something that we can really make our process keep going and we don't spend too much time on this. Although this is a very important process.
>> DAVID NG: I would add to the discussion about how we can approach different people from the community. I think it is very important to have the bottom-up approach to have a community to be engaged. For this discussion, it is also about the role of the Steering Committee. They have a responsibility to consult all the members on ideas and doing consolidation on what is happening, by all means. Not just the mailing list, but they should do it based on Facebook or doing power pad or even Google document things. It is one of the responsibilities, I think, of everyone's consensus on the topic.
Before we go through the power pad for the question, I think I saw Bianca raised up her hand. Can we get Bianca from remote to speak on behalf?
>> YANNIS LI: Bianca, are you connected on audio? Technical team, do you think you can get her on the audio?
Bianca, if you are speaking, we are not hearing you. Or type it in chat if you cannot speak.
>> DAVID NG: Speaking Bianca. Maybe we should wait a bit?
I think Bianca also has talked about, for some of you, you have also mentioned we should have meetings between the IGF meetings for every time, because there is one year time for IGF.
We already are doing some kind of call, doing the coordination work. We already have the meetings in a period of time during this year to coordinate how it should be done in this IGF but I think you guys make a very good point that there is also a mission and responsibility of the Steering Committee to doing this kind of consultation and regularly have meetings with other members. To make sure that everything is going and running well.
>> YANNIS LI: Bianca, can you try to talk again? I think the host here will give you the right.
I think the audio issue is within the room. Can we project the voice from Webex?
Pim, you have a comment?
>> AUDIENCE: Maybe in the meantime, it is good. I would like to know, because we are now kind of six or ten of us talking, but there are a lot more people in the room. Maybe can we propose that you ask us the questions whether we would like a Steering Committee that is more doing proposals and formulating, doing work on our own or more a communication-based, just communicating what is happening, et cetera? So these two kind of Steering Committees.
>> YANNIS LI: Want to do a show of hands?
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, just to see.
>> YANNIS LI: Taking your suggestion, why don't we do this. I guess we have discussed about what is the role of the Steering Committee, just to be coordination and organizing the calls, et cetera? Or they should be the ones proposing a draft of those goals and year plan?
If you think it should be the coordination role, can we have a show of your hands? How do you want to do that?
>> DAVID NG: Or even -- oh, okay.
>> YANNIS LI: Okay.
>> AUDIENCE:
>> DAVID NG: Thanks, Yannis, for doing those kind of work on the discussion. I think it is very good to know everyone's point of view on how you think the Steering Committee should be. Because Yannis just mentioned about our discussion outcome for the past like half hour. We think that the Steering Committee should be more like they have the role on coordination instead of doing proposing the action plans because it needs to be bottom up and with community engagement in a sense doing some consultation from the members, but not giving them power to do all this stuff. This is the first thing on coordination, but not doing the proposing.
The second one is, they should have by all means turn to members for consultation forgetting feedback and hearing their voice.
The second thing, the Steering Committee should be.
The first thing I think you guys have also mentioned is about archiving things. Previously, I think for the charter that is written down for all the meetings, the business should be keeping records and posting it on the Web site. Archiving is an important role that the Steering Committee should do as a secretary role.
So these three areas is what we have mentioned in previous times. Taking Pim's suggestion on doing some rough consensus on the discussion outcomes, as I just mentioned about the three roles we have discussed in this half hour, I would just like to note everyone to show your hands if you think on these three points are not accurate or appropriate enough, you can raise your hand and we will do a modification.
Please just raise your hand if you think it is not appropriate or accurate.
>> DAVID NG: Okay. So I think from the point of view of rough consensus, if there is no objection on this discussion outcome, I will see these as the consensus of our group.
>> YANNIS LI: I actually think, why don't we -- this will be some of the discussion that comes out of this meeting. We still have to feed into this consultation process. I guess we can try to draft something from this Assembly and put it into the document as well. Why don't we show the power pad again. We will kind of go through and show everyone what are the questions raised in the process so that everyone can continue thinking and then they can comment offline after this meeting as well.
And then we can go into talking about how we want to go forward to really adopt this process.
Okay, Ranjha, please.
>> AUDIENCE: We should do some discussion on planning our meetings so that we can plan and discuss remotely through Webex or through adopt so we may discuss issues at that time. It can be quarterly or maybe every six months.
>> YANNIS LI: That's what I guess what we have to discuss next, after the consultation how do you want to turn around this document or agree on whether this is what we want, to be added to the charter and how this process and how many meetings we want to discuss about this. But before going into that, I think I would like to briefly go through the questions raised in the power pad right now so that everybody has a sense of where we are and what we have to discuss offline as well.
>> DAVID NG: I will take the mic to do so. The very first part of this is about the election. We would like to do something about leadership in YCIG. We want to talk about consultation. First, who can vote? Do all members have voting rights? Next, openness things. For the second question, it is about how should the election process be for the Steering Committee? And, sorry, I skipped one. The setting of the Steering Committee things.
And then the next one, what is the timeline for the election process? As we know, we have every year YCIG meeting. We need to have procedures on doing these election things.
So for the following question, it will be the timeline for the election process. Followed by do we need nominations? And the responsibility of the Steering Committee as we have discussed.
Then we also have some follow-up questions. This kind of question is somehow a question we have discussed before we came to the YCIG meetings in IGF. It is about what does the open process mean? Defining the characteristics. Then we can enhance it in the future. It is important to see how we can make the process to be open and as you guys have mentioned, we should have those kind of bottom-up approach and with the youth community on various things. The open process is very much on our mind on how we can make it done.
For the future we also think we should have some guiding principles for YCIG on stuff like the openness, transparency and how we can engage people to join. I think this kind of question is a follow-up question on top of the election process.
And you can see new to our discussion before we come to YCIG meetings we have set the consultation date from 7 to 21 which is two weeks time. It is still open for everyone to do consultation. We will share this again in the Facebook group and also in the mailing list. Feel free to give us your comments, and we will be doing that kind of documentation work otherwise.
>> YANNIS LI: Okay. I guess just to give a brief scope of what we have to discuss offline out of this meeting and then I guess from, since we only have half an hour left we should discuss the way forward and next steps. How do we want to move forward with this charter or this election process? There is a suggestion actually raising the remote track. It was raised by Martin from the network of European digital youth. He said the YCIG has a charter. What it does not have is a Steering Committee. The most feasible way would be to select a preliminary Steering Committee at IGF along the routes of the charter under 30 and give them the mandate to rework the charter, enable young people to host a discussion instead of setting them to discuss statutes and Forums that they are not familiar with.
The question right now is whether we want to have this preliminary Steering Committee here? Or a Working Group to carry out this process to organise calls further after this meeting to discuss about the plan? Any comments?
Ranjha?
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, I think the Interim Committee should be to look after all the process, comments. As for elections, the role of the interim Committee is important.
The interim Committee can be comprising a few members, four to five members. But further, for election we can have representation from the regions. We can -- and this is offline.
>> YANNIS LI: Okay. Florian?
>> AUDIENCE: For the record, Florian again and Pim just showed me the proposal part that everyone can see now in blue. Maybe we can get it a little bigger, yeah in general there is in the room we there is agreement that we need some kind of agreement to work on the charter. We can not map and do anything in this room. We have to really do it by the mailing list. I would say an open call of the mailing list for people who want to join the Working Group. This Working Group is then allowed to rework the charter or a draft of the charter. Then we go in an open comment round where everybody can again comment and bring their suggestions in. Through this process we should come to a final charter that can then be used to actually elect the steering group. Then we can start working.
>> This is Pim. That keeps the discussion to what is the process and do we need a preliminary steering commit, et cetera, away from this meeting. We say everyone can sign up for step one. Everybody can set up to get into a Working Group. Which I thought was a very good idea from the audience. The Working Group creates a call to the mailing list -- sorry, you guys, the organization of today create a call for a mailing list to create a Working Group. Everybody can participate in the Working Group. If there are a lot of people we make subgroups to work on a charter. Step two, there is a draft charter, and then the mailing list, the most general way to do it. Do we agree on the charter or not or change it? Via the charter, the Steering Committee is proposed and elected according as agreed by the whole community.
>> YANNIS LI: Thank you, Pim and Florian for the really good suggestions and proposals. Are there any other comments or objections to this proposal?
So the next step, if there is no other opinion, I guess we would have to set up a Working Group and see if in this room anyone would like to volunteer to join this Working Group to review the charter and also to -- I think the main Working Group outlet would be to organise calls for further consultation as well.
>> AUDIENCE: If someone wants to volunteer, what is the work that the person has to do? Or how that person is going to participate?
>> DAVID NG: Maybe I can answer this first. First, you join the call. Because you are from a youth program on behalf, you would like to do some consultation among your peers to review the charters. In another sense I'm just thinking for the Working Group because we are now doing some consultation on power pad, they would be taking the secretary role to consolidate all the things into clear documents. It is just with those kinds of comments in many ways is hard to read. So I think it is more taking the editor's role to doing the work on these two sense: The editing role and also on the consultation role. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I may have interest in volunteering for the Working Group but I would like to read the charter first. Would it be possible for me to volunteer later for the group?
>> YANNIS LI: No, actually, sorry, I should make myself clear.
So I guess what we have to do next is we will send an open like call for volunteers to the Working Group in the email list and Facebook group. So how long should this open period to be? A week?
So we will open -- two weeks? Okay, for people to travel back home, yeah, okay. And read the charter, okay. So we will open a two-week window for people to volunteer to join the Working Group, which the goal is to define the process and do the Ing of the charter on the power pack after consultations with members and Facebook and everything, I mean and the Working Group has to provide a clean version of the document and circulate the mailing list again for members to adopt and agree on.
Is that clear? Is the room okay with this suggestion?
I see nods of heads. Okay. So I guess that will be an action item for us.
>> DAVID NG: Because we are open for two more weeks for joining the Working Group. So I would suggest the consultation period should be extended for a bit. Hopefully two more weeks in a sense to doing more consultation buy the new Working Group members.
>> YANNIS LI: Actually, I am thinking because the two weeks is for forming the Working Group. Should we let the Working Group further define the consultation period? Agreed?
Okay. Cool.
>> DAVID NG: Okay. So we have completed that process. We move to the other agenda --
>> YANNIS LI: Is there any other comments on this particular Steering Committee discussion before we move on? No?
>> AUDIENCE: Maybe, just a small suggestion because the current charter, a lot of terms are poorly defined. I think just for the record maybe the Working Group can work on the definition of, for instance what is meant by open, as you've mentioned. I think it is -- yeah, they have to make it clear what they mean in the charter. It is just a small suggestion.
>> YANNIS LI: Thanks, Felix.
(Speaker away from microphone.)
>> DAVID NG: I think I can do this now. So let us just move to the other section. If there is no more comments. Okay. For the other section I would like to do now is setting up -- first I need to stop sharing. So reading from our agenda, it should be the way to move forward for the next IGF. Because for this year we have done the work like the knew bees, ABCs For Newbies and the new membership Leaning up. Many of you have joined the youth meet up and also had a look at the ABCs online. I would like to invite your views and collecting your views on what we can do next for the IGF, that we can engage more youth and getting them to be well prepared for their meetings.
For this session I would welcome feedback on the two mentioned activities we have done in this present IGF and for the other area is we welcome any comments and suggestions for the next IGF. Should we keep these two models to be organised in the next one? Is there any modification needed? We welcome all of you to raise questions.
>> AUDIENCE: Felix again. Maybe I'll start out with another small suggestion. For the remote participation, a lot of times we just throw out a single Leaning without much explanation. And without adjusting the time differences and stuff. So it would be kind of hard for our peers, especially youth not coming to the IGF to really participate in the remote conference. So I think that we can have a more comprehensive let's say Google file that outlines kind of the background of the workshops and kind of detailed instructions on how to participate in the remote participation because we represent NetMission and some Ambassadors may have some problems in the participation. They want to join but they are all sort of different technical difficulties that constrained access.
Thank you.
>> EPHRAIM PERCY KENYANITO:
Just on the activities, this is something that I don't know, I wanted to float out to you guys and I hope you support this idea the p current mandate of the IGF is being renewed. I suppose you all know that. Today with the discussions with the assistant Secretary General of the UN I talked about having it in writing about the UN commitments of youth in Internet Governance discussions and they suggested that we do a formal process of writing to them about this. I was thinking right now that the WSIS zero draft doesn't focus that much on youth. Part of the suggestion is if it is possible we come up with a public Google Doc and we can look at the WSIS zero draft. This is a very short deadline. I think it is a week and it will require some time, what we want the UN WSIS Ambassadors, those that are co-facilitating the discussions, to take into account youth issues. It is hard to have a discussion about youth because in talking to past YCIG members, this discussion moves from different places to different places. We need people who are committed to donating their time. I was looking at the previous discussions of YCIG within the current charter as it is. It is allowed to do that. In the past release statements, I was just thinking we need to contribute to this zero draft before the deadline. I don't know if that is something anyone one want to join me in because I am willing to set up some time and just come up -- it doesn't need to be something long. A short statement, a page or two, if that's okay.
Yeah, that is my suggestion on what is happening right now, taking into account the kind of support that the IGF has done for this year's, for the youth meet-up for us to have young people from Latin America join us at this IGF and this needs to be continued for next year's IGF in Mexico, if it is going to be renewed. We need to come up with a statement or something. I don't know, it's just something I wanted to raise out there. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm sorry, but I do have a small question on the youth statement because I am here not because I am a youth. I'm here because I'm a part of the Internet. So why do we have to specifically label ourselves as youth and say that we have to participate because we are youth? It is just a question because I am not so sure what you mean by the statement.
>> EPHRAIM PERCY KENYANITO: The reason I want to raise this is, for example, take into account the amount of young people that you've seen not just in this IGF but in other IGFs. The youth are the majority of the Internet users across the world, but when it comes to decisions on how the Internet is. Governed, all of the issues like privacy and security online. Young people are not involved in the discussions. I was just thinking that we need to push much further. The Youth Coalition on Internet Governance, go to Article 7 of the current charter, it says activities of the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance will include but not be limited to, advocacy and leadership in you have the floor, participating in workshops and panels, participating actively in panels and debates on youth issues and providing recommendations to stakeholders in the field of Internet Governance and the organizers of IGF regarding the involvement of young people. I was going back to our charter. This is within our mandate and we don't have to take Article 7 of our charter actively. We have to activate it because it was being used by previous Committees, I was just thinking.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you.
>> YANNIS LI: I think therein lies a question whether this statement will be representing YCIG as a consensus or what the statement will be, I mean, who is behind the statement. I think if we agree that it will be from the YCIG, we have to make like, how do we want to do this, do we want to be a volunteer to join you to work on that.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, Florian here. I fully can agree with you. I think it is important to produce some kind of statement even if it is on a certain time pressure and if we have work on the charter and stuff. It is necessary to make clear that young people care about it. I suggest that you use the mailing list again to decide on how we are going to do this because right now here we cannot decide. We can only discuss.
But I certainly think it is a good idea to create a document, to keep it really accessible for everybody. And to create a statement that everybody can agree with. And then maybe if time allows, send it back to the members who via the mailing list again to get confirmation of everybody. Then we can publish it. So I think it should be possible to do this in one week.
>> DAVID NG: I saw a hand in the back. We need a new voice to be received first.
>> AUDIENCE: I am going to talk about what he was talking about. Because I think you know, Daniel, but most part of the people doesn't know yet. We are from the youth LAC from Latin America Caribbean, we made a youth observatory. We have a Facebook account. For now it is only written in Spanish and Portuguese, but we have a declaration made in English too and also in English. And we can send up the Leaning. It is in Google Docs. So everybody can give suggestions because we are trying to make it an international document. For now it is from Latin America because we are from Latin America. But we want to spread ideas and we want to make agreements. I have talked to some people from other countries like French speakers countries to translate it into French or other languages because we want to spread our ideas. We want to listen to what people want to tell us. So I think it is very important to do agreements with the youth coalition from youth from Asia. It is important.
I had doubts about the mailing list. It is a, it still exists?
>> DAVID NG: Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: We have signed and we are going to participate in the mailing list, too. Do you want to talk?
Okay, he is going to complement the speech about the Internet observatory, the youth observatory.
>> DAVID NG: Please go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: Just going to complement what he said. As he said, we have our statement, our declaration of the youth for Latin America and Caribbean, the original idea with the observatory, it was to expand and make contact with other youth groups around the world. Maybe in the future, maybe the next panel, the next declaration is to make it a global view upon it. Listen to everyone from other groups as well as make a global youth observatory to make content for youth from youth because just like Ephraim said we are, most of the population on the Internet, but we are not involved in decisions. Sometimes the way people make decisions and publish couldn't tenth regarding Internet Governance is not made in a language or approach suitable for young people. We have to take up our arms and duties ourselves for other youth to spread the world. It will be a nice idea if everyone can take a look at our declaration and maybe use it as a reference point or debate upon it.
>> DAVID NG: Thank you for your question. We have remote participation question is ready.
Please go ahead.
(There is no audible response.)
>> AUDIENCE: While we are waiting we have another opinion.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, everybody. My name is Nick. I am from the U.K. government. And first of all, I was really pleased to see I'm still young enough to be able to join the youth IGF which is great. Also you guys organised the best parties in the IGF. I'm definitely up for that.
I just want to say a couple of things. I picked up on just a couple of those last points about sort of participation and feeling involved in these kind of processes. There is also the national IGFs which are open for everyone to participate. You know, the young people included.
We have a national IGF in the U.K. which was held at chat ham house in London back in June. It was noted there that there was a distinct lack of young people. It is only something I picked up on. I would like to see change and see more young people at next year's national IGF in the U.K. What I am going to do is share my details, my contact details with the guys here and I would very much like to sort of get the thoughts and ideas of the people in this room as to how we as a government can reach out and engage. It is not just about having the young people involved. There's a two-way dialogue coming from governments as well and how we can get you involved in our national processes which feed our thinking as governments, as part of our multistakeholder approach to how we can then sort of take your considerations and feed those in to the recommendations that we make as governments in some of these issues.
I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank you very much. I think you've got a great thing here and I would be very keen to sort of see how I can help get you guys involved as well. So thank you.
>> DAVID NG: Miguel, Tanya, I see two or three hands from Anna. We have two hands. The first is from the back and in the front. After these two questions we will close the session. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm Olga from the Dutch Delegation. First of all I want to respond to the English guy because he is telling that this is a great meeting. I disagree. I thought we had a clear agenda about how we would discuss some items but we have only talked about the definition of what the Steering Committee is looking like. But the definition is just in dictionaries. What have we actually created right now because I think this is a waste of time.
>> DAVID NG: Thank you for your question. It is very important that we got you to engage in the process and make it meaningful. The other question from in the front?
>> AUDIENCE: Yes. I would just like to remind you that we, besides the youth, the IGF, the Internet Governance Forum the international one, we have a lot of national ones that we could participate in a remote way. Like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Benin. We could try to learn, know more about them and join them and give our participation to make it more international because these are in preparation to the international ones. It is important to have engagement there, too.
>> DAVID NG: Last one.
>> EPHRAIM PERCY KENYANITO: I just want to say, his question I see is about this and the time is almost up, on why we will not have an interim Steering Committee right now is because we want to have the process, maybe have an election over the Internet if possible as coalitions. How they do the elections over the Internet for everyone who is not here. If we do it right now we are not going to have everybody involved, even those who maybe did not have the finances to be here. So that is just to answer, we need to take care of the remote, need to do this remotely. I would suggest seeking help from let's say those people, we need consistencies, and networking to do these things because they have infrastructure and experience. Some of them will be willing to donate their infrastructure and expertise on facilitating such kind of election, electronic justice. He wanted elections right now. He said it's a waste of time if we postpone it. I just wanted to say that we need to do this over the Internet so we can include others. Thank you.
>> DAVID NG: Just to round out the session, could the remote participation, the telecom guy just showed the slide. Hand raised in the back. Okay, the hand in the back, you have your last chance to have like 30 seconds to be up. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi. I'm Sarah from Guatemala. We met yesterday at the party with everyone.
(Laughter.)
>> AUDIENCE: I have like a social announcement. We are like hosting another after party in the same place.
(Cheers and applause.)
>> AUDIENCE: Bring money, beer and friends and everything so we can have this conversation in another field, more relaxed and everything and chill out.
>> DAVID NG: Okay, thank you. So just for the round up because the technical guy just showed the slide, the Leaning for everyone. For the wrap-up about the way to move forward. We have a suggestion on how we can do the remote participation more efficiently. Probably this can be done for next year. That would be one of the goals. The other is about the statement stuff. Ephraim raised questions about having a statement. I know that for the Latin America IGF, youth IGF group you also have the declaration and statement already done. I think you guys can firstly add on the mailing list and we can keep the discussion online to keep things running. Make sure the process will be open to all and because it is for the declaration, it I is also as a statement for youth, it should be a bottom-up approach and with the Committee engagement. You can see on the Leaning there are thing to share. First is Facebook. The Facebook group is an informal way for couples. This is Youth Coalition on Internet Governance, you can type it and join the group. We can have a discussion there. But at the same time we've got a mailing list. The mailing list is doing some other things. You can share your documents and opinions and we keep having a check on the mailing list. You can go to the mailing list for more information and keep everybody in touch on statement stuff and other things to get the discussion.
The other thing is on the Web site, you can go to the Web site to have a look. They have some information and also the chart is on the list and the other is the ABCs for newbies. This is very, very first initiative we are working on for engaging knew bees. They have some things on YCIG.org to look at stuff.
Another announcement for the collaboration of YCIG we have Workshop 191 tomorrow. That will be in room 7 at 11:00 o'clock. The main purpose is we wish to have the youth from different areas to join the meetings to somehow download your opinions on how IGF can be more youth-friendly. And the other is about how any Internet Governance concerns, we can do outcome documents as one of the very important outcomes for that workshop tomorrow.
I would like to send an invitation to you all. Please join us tomorrow morning at 11. I hope everyone can still attend after the party tonight.
(Laughter.)
>> DAVID NG: That will be in Workshop Room 7.
>> EPHRAIM PERCY KENYANITO: And just to add, we also have the process of creating a statement. We will take into account statements made before by national IGFs and other youth IGFs. We will each come up with, that's one of the outcomes. Because the practicum, are we going to have different stakeholders? I know many of you have participated in debates. You'll have civil society, we will divide ourselves into different multistakeholders and come up with different statements if that's okay. It will be awesome. See you tomorrow. Ninety minutes just like today. Please come up. Come up with friends. I'm glad we are full. Please leave your contacts with us. There was a paper going around. We want to include you in all the communications and add them to the discussions, some discussions, some contacts we had in last year's IGF in Turkey. We want to keep this discussion going. If you have not left your contact, leave your contact with us. See you tonight and see you tomorrow morning 11:00 p.m.
>> AUDIENCE: Excuse me, excuse me.
>> AUDIENCE: I remind you that our declaration is totally open to receive suggestions and opinions because we want to make it better and better. So if you can add suggestions to it, we are going to be receiving it in a very good way. Thank you for your participation.
>> DAVID NG: Thank you. And for tomorrow, the workshop we have is about your declaration also. Thanks again everyone for coming. For action items we are doing, the first thing is party. The other thing we would keep everyone on check on the mailing list. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.
(Applause.)