AD Workshop 199: The Future of the Internet and its Impact on the World: A Scenarios Summit

 

Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum
27 -30 September 2011
United Nations Office in Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya

September 29, 2011 - 14:30 PM

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The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Sixth Meeting of the IGF, in Nairobi, Kenya. 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 session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

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>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Good afternoon.  We are about to start our session.  I think we have sorted out all our technical problems.  We would like the first part of the afternoon will be presentations, but we would like to engage in discussion, and we feel it will be nicer if you moved a little bit to the front seats to be closer, so that we can see each other.

I know people quite often prefer sitting in the back, and have their work to do, and listen to it.  But please, we would very much welcome if you could move forward.

Great.  Very much appreciated.

Let's get started.  My name is Markus Kummer.  I'm Vice President for public policy for the Internet society.  We have a few changes from the programme as it is written or on the Web site, and I have to blame the organisers of this session that they did not update this description of the workshop.

We have a number of excellent speakers here gathered on the podium.  To my left is Laszlo Pinter from the Centre of European University in Budapest, and he is also advisor to the United Nations environment programme.

On the left to him is Heather Creech from the International Institute of Sustainable Development.

And left to her is Walda Roseman, the chief operating officer of the Internet Society.  And Ben Akoh is to her left from also the IISD.  And right at the end is Marilyn Cade.  I think your official title in this context will be the chief catalyst of the U.S. IGF, correct?  Yes.  We have also people to our right.  We have here David Satola from the World Bank, and to his right is Taylor Reynolds from the OECD.  Are you presenter?  And Steve Delbianco is also a presenter.

Let me just give the history of this session which is a first for the IGF in the IGF context.  We call it now a scenario summit.

I was first introduced to the fascinating world of scenarios shortly after the Rio IGF when I went to attend a meeting of the global knowledge partnership, and I was in one of the sessions dealing with Internet Governance.  And there was Heather confronting us with scenarios for the future of the Internet.

As she is from the Institute of Sustainable Development, you will not be surprised that we all agreed that the future needs to be sustainable.  She presented it very nicely, and I thought this is actually a fascinating way of looking at the future of what would be if this happened or that happened.

I found this creates a very engaging introduction into a subject.  And couple of years later, I attended the IGF USA, where they did also scenarios, and I found it slightly different angle and I found it equally fascinating.  What I found was that it really engaged the participants in the discussion.

I seem to remember then that most participants agreed they wanted the user-centric Internet in the future, but interestingly enough, most of them believe this would not be the case I think; that was there the sort of general feeling.

But, we will have a session wherein each of these scenarios will be presented.  And I should add of course that ISOC has also developed scenarios, but I was not at all involved in these.  And unfortunately, our colleague Bill Graham who was working on these cannot be with us for private reasons.  So Walda kindly agreed to step in and present the ISOC scenarios.

But before we go into these presentations, we get more theoretical introduction into scenarios, what they are, what they have been used for in global issues planning and decision-making, and so that we know a little bit, have a little bit theoretical framework.

Please, Laszlo, present us your scenario thinking. 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  Okay.  Thank you, Markus, for the introductory words.  And I would like to welcome as the first speaker all participants.  It's really a honour to be here.  I'm finding myself in a strange situation.  I do a lot of work with UNEP.  When I'm usually in the room, I know at least 50 percent of the participants.  But the IGF is not one I played before.  So I'm happy to meet new colleagues and to talk about an issue that is I think very close, not just to our heart, those who work on sustainable development or environment, but also to the heart of others.

Again, as Markus mentioned, I was asked to give an overview to bring, establish some common language, and provide some examples on how scenarios can be and are developed, and how they can be used.  So I'll do that quickly.  I'm not sure; I don't see my slides anywhere.

So we might have a bit of a technical issue here.  That was the one, yes.

Obviously, there are things to say to start off on the future.  First of all, is that the future is uncertain, and the second is that the future is important.

We might not be here in 50 years, and we certainly won't be here in 100 years.  But we will have children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, and I think we all care about where they end up.  Now, how do we navigate this fog of uncertainty and risk and opportunity, is what scenarios are about.

Couple of key points.  Why do we want to think about the future?  One is to identify and understand problems, to explore uncertainties, and also to share understanding and concerns.  We also want to test, not just uncover but also test our assumptions about our actions, and see how they might influence the course of development.

We also want to have, identify choices and actually make at some point decisions based on this.

People have always been fascinated by the future, and we always use different technologies to try and understand what the future might bring.  This is the image of Delphi in Greece.  So that was one sort of set of technologies.  And then as we progressed on, we used different sets of technologies.  And now we use yet another set of technologies to understand, and we just point out that I don't necessarily present these in more and more advanced levels of understanding the future.

So what makes it difficult to think about the future?  One is ignorance.  Our understanding of what might happen is limited.  In fact, our understanding of what is happening is limited by knowledge, by lack of data, by limitations to intelligence in many ways.  Second is surprise, the unexpected and the novel.  There are things out there that will happen that will catch us unprepared.

The terms is what I refer to here is volition.  And volition is the influence of humans, with their understanding and power to act in independent ways, we are going to, we are influencing the future.  This is both a source of risk and opportunity.

What do we call a scenario?  It's one of the things that we always have to come back to is a scenario is not a prediction what the future will be, because in fact, most often we talk about scenarios in plural, not just a scenario but scenarios.

Predictions, especially linear predictions, are very often leading us astray.  And they kind of give us false sense of security, knowing that we know where we are heading.

So it's more about how the future might unfold.  Scenarios explore the possible, not just the probable.  And also it challenges us to go beyond the conventional wisdom, getting out of our box and imagining alternatives.

In one sort of definitional way, you could call scenarios as histories of the future.  They tell coherent multi-dimensional stories about how events might unfold.  So in that unfolding obviously there is a process, and there is a point about coherence.  There are many dimensions of the future, and our scenarios have to take those multiple dimensions and interactions into account.

So, what are scenarios like?  On the one hand, they can be qualitative descriptions, and that take into account cultural influences, values, behaviors, shock, discontinuities and so on.  This is basically about a scenario narrative.  We have to be able to tell coherent stories.

But at the same time, they also have to be grounded in some sense of reality.  This reality is more stable as we look into the past and as we look at conditions today.  But they become uncertain, fraught with uncertainty as we look into the future.

Yet, including this quantitative domain is, can be helpful, because it helps underpin the qualitative story and messages, and it helps test the validity of our assumptions.  How we bring this quantitative and qualitative side together is really the, both the art and the science of scenarios.

For that, we need a process, that is structured in a certain way.  Why do we need to think about scenarios in this structured way?

What does it mean?  It means that we have to be clear about our purpose.  Why are we doing this?  Why are we thinking about the future?  And why do we build these scenarios?  What are the questions that we want to get an answer to by developing these scenarios?

We have to be clear about that we call the objective study or the system here, and that is informed by whether we are looking at scenarios from the environmental development, from the technology perspective, from any sort of social well-being perspective.  We have to establish some parameters around the system.  It has some spatial aspects.  We need to have a time scale.  Most scenario processes have certain time dimension, and they have 100 years, 50 years or even shorter time horizon.

It has to have certain components, that is, look at particular sectors, some key variables, and the relationships between them.  Those relationships can be qualitatively or quantitatively established, and if you use models, they are, they have to be quantitative.

Then there has to be coherence and consistency, both within and between the qualitative and the quantitative domain.  Couple of decisions that one needs to make as developing the scenarios usually.  One is the purpose.  What is the purpose of the scenario?  Are we simply just exploring the future, without the clear intention to actually influence decision-making?

That might in fact be valuable and might influence decision-making at the end of the day, but there are scenario exercises that are very explicitly focused on informing, planning and strategy development processes.

The second question is the how, and I already touched on this.  This is whether we simply just want to talk about the qualitative story or whether we want to use more quantitative scenarios grounded in data and evidence.

And the third question here is, what do we want, do we want -- I think again we have a problem with the projection.  I'm not sure.  Okay.

So do we want the simple or complex scenario, scenario process?  Another choice is between the use of forecasting or backcasting.  Forecasting is looking into alternative futures without having the clear end point in mind, and the other is obviously backcasting where we have a clear end point.  Let's say 2050, this is how far we want to get, describe that end point in either/or qualitative sense or have quantitative targets.  And then try to look back and work our way back from that to the present, and explore alternative trajectories to that future.

I'll provide an example related to that.  This is one diagram for a potential scenario process.  We have been doing quite a bit of capacity building with UNEP on something we called integrated environmental reporting, which includes scenario analysis.  And in that process we developed this diagram as a sort of generic scenario process.

So there are, and I won't dwell on this much, I just want to point out the, some of the key components.  You see that there are three big boxes with smaller boxes.  The first is clarifying the purpose and structures of the scenario exercise, then laying the foundation for the scenarios, and then developing and testing, and at the end there is communication and outreach.

With regard to clarifying the purpose and structure, first there is a need to establish the nature and scope of the scenarios.  Then as we, in the context of that approach, we think about participatory scenario building, we identify stakeholders and participants, experts and nonexperts who play a role in that process.

Then identify themes, targets, indicators and potential policies that will be used, they will be the ingredients for cooking the scenario.

Then for the second large component, we identify driving forces, such as demographic change, technology development, and so on, selecting critical uncertainties.  Critical uncertainties would be related to the main questions that we want to answer by using the scenarios.  And we could develop the scenarios based on our assumptions about those critical uncertainties.

Then, using those uncertainties we create a scenario framework.

In the third large box there is an elaboration of the scenario narrative.  There is an undertaking of quantitative analysis.  This is usually a cyclical process.  The modeling and the qualitative narrative development usually feeds off itself.  And that is the, probably one of the most challenging parts of the process, because the model informs the narrative and vice versa.  They both of them get adjusted.

The third component there is exploring policy.  Once we have the story line, once we have a model, we interrogate both from the perspective of policy options, what happens if we undertake this or that policy.

And finally, there is communication and outreach, which relates to what do we actually use the scenarios for?

So scenarios can provide the information, and I have about five minutes maybe?  Okay.  So, scenarios provide information to eliminate problems and explore alternative responses, and simplify potentially complex information and so on.

They are also, as I mentioned, we have been thinking about scenarios, usually as a participatory learning process.  So they also provide a platform for interaction among very different stakeholders that might include decision-makers and policymakers, and where uncertainties can be brought up and different value systems might collide and different assumptions, but how the future might unfold, based on decisions.

This could, this is more art in a way than science, but the process is informed by science.

I would like to mention two examples at the end, to illustrate how scenarios could be used.  One is a national level scenario process that was used in a particular historic political context in South Africa at the time of the political changes in the early '90s.

And in this case, 22 prominent South Africans came together and participated in what is now referred to as the Mont Fleur  scenarios, to try to imagine where South Africa might go if apartheid changes.  And this turned out to be an influential process actually, to help envision a South Africa that transitions successfully into future.

This is the depiction of what these scenarios turned out to.  One was, and you see that there are different sort of, there is a trajectory where scenarios are, different scenarios are defined on the basis of how this future might evolve.  There was a possibility that there is no negotiated settlement, so South Africa would kind of plod along on a business-as-usual trajectory.  That was the ostrich scenario.  There was a lame duck scenario which means that there is a transition, but there is an incompetent Government that cannot really tackle the issues that, under the new system.

There was the Icarus -- I'm not sure of the pronunciation of that -- scenario, that says there is a rapid transition, but the new Government introduces policies that turn out to be unsustainable, and in many ways simplistic and populist.  And finally the last scenario at the top right corner is flight of the flamingos, which is inclusive democracy and growth, which is the one that they did try to and in certain ways successfully, certain ways implement.

The second example I wanted to mention is something I'm more familiar with, global environment outlook 4 scenarios.  This is UNEP's flagship product.  And in Geo-4, which was published about two years ago, there were four scenarios that were developed:  Markets first, policy first, security first, and sustainability first.

I won't dwell on this.  There was a model and conceptual framework in the background that related all the components of the system.

Markets first was basically a scenario that put the emphasis on the role of the private sector, and I won't get into details, because there is no time.

Policy first assumes that there is a major role to be played by Governments and international organisations, to some extent based on the first Rio agenda; security first, where countries would influence and power managed to secure their borders and withdraw within those borders, but there is growing inequity and risk around the growth.  There was sustainability first, which is not without risk, but it does try to balance on a still risky path towards sufficiency and the transition.

There was a whole range of trajectories, modeled and described on the basis of these scenarios, with the accompanying narrative, with regard to population.

Gross domestic product, global gene index, total primary energy.  You realise I'm not getting into these details.  But under the different scenarios, there are obviously different trajectories.  If I just take one, this one as an example, total primary energy use, you see under market first, there is a major increase in primary energy use, policy first, somewhat moderated, similar to security first, and sustainability first seems to project a transition to a lower growth path, energy use path actually.

That has different implications for carbon, or atmospheric CO2 concentrations.  Some of these scenarios can be also shown in the geospatial context.  And as a closing, because I think I'm probably running out of time, a few thoughts on our work on geo-5, that is not yet published.  I'm a CLA of the scenario chapter.  Something we are doing differently for this process, is that we are using a backcasting approach.

In geo-4 there was a projection of four alternative futures.  In geo-5 we are backcasting from goals and targets for 2050.

As a result, we are also looking only at two potential scenarios.  One is business as usual projection, and try to see where we would end up with related to goals and targets.  And the other is a sustainable, sustainability or sustainable world scenario where we meet those goals and targets.  We are trying to understand what are the options available to meet those goals and targets.

I will skip that.  We take into account planetary boundaries, critical boundaries with regard to climate change, and biodiversity and water, and factor those in as expected or desirable outcomes.

We also take into account transformation at three different levels:  Mind sets, goals, and aspirations; rules of the game, basically at the policy level, and parameters, numbers, feedback, basically technology goal level transformation.

This is a simplified diagram of what we are looking at.  This is a conventional world outcome.  And you see that that's the targets we are trying to hit.  So we are trying to assess what is the trajectories that takes us to those goals and targets.

And then we come up with graphs like this, that looks at emissions of CO2 based on existing business as usual projections, and sustainable world type projections based on the major IPPC and other type of scenario work.  This is synthesis of existing scenarios.

Then we look at leverage points.

I think this is my last slide, Mr. Chairman.  So just some parting thoughts.  I was trying to relate some of this work more to the subject of this Forum here.  A couple of things.  ICT is from the perspective of our work, which is integrated environment and development scenarios, ICTs are an important enabling element, both in the positive and negative sense of the, of what we project as a coming transformation, that has many aspects in terms of material use and sustainability.

The second is that ICTs can have a potential role in the, it is a question what is the role in the dematerialization of social aspirations, sense of well-being, and also dematerialization in the industrial sort of production sense.

I also think that ICTs are, will be obviously a major element of knowledge generation.  One of the key issues that we are tackling with is looking at the upcoming transition from the perspective of the earth system.  There is increasing complexity, increasing risk where these risks have to emerge at different levels, and understanding this risk, the development of responses, we will have, will have to come from multiple levels.  ICTs as a connector and as an element of discovery of problems and solutions will be I think increasingly important.

Finally, the last point is that ICTs are and will be really essential for providing data, geospatial and statistical and other type of data, and because that is still a constraint.  So this role is going to increase.

There is more to be said.  I'm sure others will say that.  I hope I didn't go too much beyond my allocated time .

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you very much for the framing of the session.  We thought as a theoretical introduction maybe to ask whether anybody has any questions to ask from Laszlo before we move into the more Internet related part.  Are there any questions?

>> MARTIN BOYLE:  My name is Martin Boyle, with Nominet and UK IGF.  And we have been doing some scenario work.  I think an awful lot of what you are presenting was really quite long term and therefore probably also quite expensive work.  Could you give us an idea roughly how much some of those activities cost and how long they took? 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  I don't have information on the South African case because I wasn't involved.  The geo-4 and geo-3, as you saw, we took very different approaches.  The Geo-4 work was expensive and long.  That, I think the cost was probably in the million dollars plus range.  I think it took over two years, in both the multiple modeling groups, and there was actually new modeling done.  For geo5 we didn't have that luxury, or curse, depending how you look at it.  The budget was smaller, still in the several hundred thousand dollar range.

The number of parties involved would be in the, I would say 20-ish.  We didn't, we are doing some restricted new modeling, but there is no comprehensive new model.  That could get expensive, and the time line is really constrained to less than a year.

And then, we have done other lower scale modeling, or scenario exercises, where I think this could be done faster, obviously.  So the scale matters.  Travel cost and other things. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Another question?

>> PABLO MOLINA:  Thank you, Markus.  Very interesting.  This is Pablo Molina.  I teach at Georgetown University and work on scenarios with IGF USA.  We share activities in common.  I've been thinking about tapping the intellectual power of my students, slaves, intellectuals to work on the scenarios.  Have you succeeded at doing this?  Are you aware of any significant collaboration between academic students, in feeding the information for the scenarios? 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  Not in the context of the specific scenarios that I mentioned, the geo-scenarios.  Mind you, once the drafts are out, they are open for comment.  People can provide input.  But I think more broadly speaking, I think participatory scenario development, which what you refer to is a type of participatory scenario development, is a very important and growing and interesting field.  I think involving the next generation in that with students is really important.

I've been an academic only for one year.  I had a career before, but I am very actively going to, and I am trying to involve students.  I think that's essentially, that is the next, that is the future.  We need to engage them. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Other questions?

>>  Thank you.  My name is Lennial Mondy.  I work for Computer Genesis in Nairobi.  I appreciate what we talked about the scenarios so well, and the time you have taken, so nicely explained.

My question is in all the scenarios, what is the probability in percentage, in case it is to be successful?  Thank you. 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  I don't think we really, you know, looked at that very carefully.  If I understand your question right, you know, to what degree are the scenarios turning out to be accurate.  In a sense, that is probably not even the purpose, not the primary purpose of the scenario exercises, at least the way we said that scenarios are not projections, or certainly not predictions, we are not trying to predict in a way the future.  I think most people who are involved in scenario analysis would be very adamant to point that out.

But these are used more as learning exercises, and the emphasis would be on not so much in trying to predict what will happen, but how can we outline what, how can we use description of what might happen to inform discussions today, so that we can more actively shape the cause of action.  So we put the emphasis on that.

I wouldn't necessarily look back and say were we right?  Did we get it right?  Even if we got it right, it doesn't mean that we will get it right again.  I think it's more important to look at these as learning exercises. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Are there other questions?  Doesn't seem to be the case.  Then we can move to the presentations.  And here maybe I will have to explain a little bit.

In my previous function, I thought, good idea to have scenarios in the IGF, and I approached Heather and Marilyn and said, don't you want to do scenarios?  Then they got together, there were lengthy discussions, and I have to admit I wasn't involved at all.  But maybe Heather, would you like to explain how you came about with this format, what we call now a scenario summit, instead of having individual scenarios?  That might be interesting for participants here.

>> HEATHER CREECH:  Sure.  One of the options that we talked about at some length was whether we could do within the IGF a participatory scenario process.

But we decided at the end it would be too challenging, simply because it takes a great deal of advance planning to identify the range of issues that need to be discussed.  The amount of research that has to go into just laying the groundwork for a scenarios process was something that we felt we had neither the time nor the capacity to do at this stage.

We probably thought there was still a base level of understanding about what scenarios are, how they can be used to guide planning for the future, so we thought maybe it was a good idea to lay some groundwork now, build that level of understanding, explore the value of this type of methodology, what are some of the critical inputs required for a good scenarios process, with a view to maybe in another year, holding something a bit more of a realtime participatory scenarios process within this community.

I think one of the things to keep in mind about scenarios is that they can be quite contentious and divisive.  This is not necessarily a methodology that brings people to common agreement on what the future should look like.  And it could in fact open up real fault lines.

So we were also sensitive to the fact that, we need to build some basic understanding, some basic models, and then decide whether we could then move down further down the road for a group endeavor within the IGF itself, or, as a preconference to the IGF.  So that is a little more about why we are here.  We thought it would be useful for Laszlo to present more of that scenarios 101 thinking, and how it's been used to address other global issues to great effect.

At IISD we decided about three years ago to see whether or not we could use a scenarios approach to connect the Internet issues with global scenarios, with sustainable development, what is happening in terms of the global world in terms of climate change, energy consumption, financial crises, security and so on, that might impact the development and deployment of the Internet; and conversely, what are some of the critical uncertainties of the Internet that might actually exacerbate some of these problems down the road.

We have all heard about the growth in GHG emissions coming from various Internet technologies and services, in particular the data centres.  Requirements for cooling and for power consumption contribute in the sector overall, contribute to both 2 to 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions now.  And it's the fastest growing source of emission.  It is getting beyond that of the airline industry at the moment.  That data is getting a little out of date.  We are probably a little bit past that.

We thought it would be really interesting at IISD to see if we could use scenarios to take us a little bit further down this road to better understand some of these intersections.  Our first goal was basically to come up with a framework for understanding how the development of the Internet affects global sustainable development.

And then what might the critical uncertainties be in the Internet domain that we should be particularly aware of in the sustainable development business, and then how we could use this process to broaden interest in Internet policy issues, beyond the immediate Internet technical community.  Our observation was this is still a very closed community in many respects and very self-referential.

Could scenario building be a way to engage more people outside of the immediate technical community, who do actually have a stake in what happens to how the Internet develops?

And we conducted three rounds.  We did some advance work, trying to build on some existing global scenarios data, comparable to what Laszlo presented for geo-4.  We did an initial process in Canada, and then we ran a scenarios workshop, small, sort of very tightly driven workshop in Hyderabad, and then later on in Hyderabad, we did the first one in Hyderabad with delegates, and then the second round we did with all of the youth delegates that DiploFoundation had brought in, to bring in that next generation perspective on what might happen down the road.

I'll walk you through really quickly what we came up with in our four scenarios.  It was not entirely by accident that they actually correspond to in many respects to the four global issues scenarios.  The first one we called the mall scenario.  Basically it was a regulated market, where there is a lot of Government policy intervention, but still lots of scope for business actors to pursue their driver's interest.

The driver behind the regulated market scenario was the climate change issue and the need to bring more control over greenhouse gas emissions, that led to requirements around energy consumption, energy efficiency, that had a significant impact on data centres and other of the technical infrastructure for the Internet.

So in this case, it was very much a global issue driving how the Internet was going to proceed over time, and the role of various stakeholders in that.

The second scenario, interestingly, this was the unregulated market scenario, this is no Government intervention whatsoever, no influence from civil society or personal interests.  Basically, the Internet becomes dominated, both the infrastructure, the services and so on, become dominated through economies of scale by half a dozen private sector interests.  But this is like a sign wave and it gets disrupted every so often by new technologies that emerge, that fracture the private sector business model.  And then eventually that fracturing gets consolidated back into three or four business interests that manages things.

Interestingly enough, this scenario, the unregulated market scenario, had no intersection with global issues at all.  This was completely divorced from anything that was happening outside in the world in terms of security or financial insurance.  It was just a straight what happens if the private sector runs the Internet.

The third scenario is closest to the security scenario that Laszlo mentioned briefly, where everyone, where basically the wealthy countries and wealthy individuals retreat into a highly protected environment.  This scenario was driven largely by views around security, cyber-security, where attacks on smart grids, attacks on Government servers, attacks on private sector online business, all of this drives a retreat into highly secure systems, to the point where the average citizen simply can't get online because they don't have the credentials to get online.

So the VIPnet scenario is where the Internet becomes the purview only of the elite.

Finally, we have the Internet common scenario.  This is the flight of the flamingos, where basically what drives this is everyone's agreement that we need to repair the planet.  We need to bring all of the tools and resources available for restoring the ecosystem, for addressing climate change, for dealing with economic inequities, and we use the Internet as a global platform for dialogue and collaboration and debate.

So this then leads to issues around openness, opening up IPR regimes and various other things.  These were the four scenarios that we came up with.  Just briefly, what we did and didn't achieve through this process:  First of all, we never actually got to this conceptual framework around the Internet and sustainable development.

But we did identify a number of important intersection points between the Internet domain and sustainability.  For us, one of the critical issues now becomes universal affordable access.  It became clear that that is essential in order to get to our preferred scenario, which is the Internet commons.

Second was Internet Protocol version 6.  In order to be able to wire up the natural environment, ubiquitous sensor networks, in order to be able to provide the individual with the ability to monitor their own energy budget, you need an addressing system.  You need the Internet of things.  And that requires IP version 6.

Finally we need to be able to deal with trust and identity online.

We, through this whole process, it allowed us to focus in on what we saw to be three of the major issues in Internet policy development.

Finally, it reinforced for us the importance of this broader-based multistakeholder engagement, to get the environmental NGOs interested in Internet issues and advocating for resolution of some of the challenges and the rights NGOs and development NGOs and so on. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you for that.  We will continue with the presentations, and then have a short break, and then engage in discussions when you can also ask questions.  So the next presentation then will be Walda, about ISOC's scenarios for the future of the Internet. 

>> WALDA ROSEMAN:  While he is making sure that I'm linked up, I'd like to thank you very much for having me on this session.  Like Markus, I was not there when ISOC did its scenarios.  But I have been involved and I've been very interested in what has been said so far.  I've been involved in, with scenario planning for, and I shouldn't say this publicly, but for 35 years.  The first, my encounter with scenario planning was with a U.S. White House office of telecommunications policy, and we were trying to decide what would be the consequences if we allowed competition to AT&T.

And we contracted in those days with AD Little, who created four scenarios for us.  And not surprisingly in retrospect, the scenario of introducing competition to AT&T was phased with phased-in levels of regulation, suggested that competition would stimulate the marketplace, and even though AT&T would lose market share, and that ultimately the consumer would benefit.

So we see in one instance how in fact four scenarios, I should say, informed the policy making of a Government office, that actually had consequences beyond just that particular country.

I would just say very quickly, and this is not ISOC, but the second one that comes to mind was it costs much less money.  I know, because my husband did it for the Department of Commerce.  And I wished he had charged more.

But he was asked to do some scenarios on what might be the glide paths for introducing high definition television in the United States.  And interestingly, he came up with three scenarios.  What he called the rosy scenario was that it could be done in five years, if all of these other risk factors were dealt with, basically Government policies and taking into account the consumer.  But there were far less rosy ones.  And we found, he chose as his personal favorite the least rosy, which turned out to be the right one, but the industry chose the rosy, and, but and used to quote the rosy scenario.  So scenarios, whether they cost more money or less money, if they are thoughtful, can actually have a tremendous impact on the direction that industries take on company directions and on Government policies.

I'm going to be very brief, I hope, and you hope, about the scenario planning that the Internet society initiated in 2009.  And again, this one was a bit different from what we have heard about, in that it was not, as Heather I believe is trying to accomplish, and makes a lot of sense, a scenario, scenarios that are based on a broad participation, but rather these scenarios were constructed by the executive team, the senior staff of the Internet society, based on their knowledge of facts and trends, and their participation.

It was designed to get them thinking about their own strategic planning process and three-year programme development, to get the Board of Trustees doing the same, but moreover, to light the spark of participation from its membership.  And it actually has done that, which has been quite interesting.

We also used these scenarios as a springboard to identify key factors that would help us visualize how the Internet might develop in the future, and to help us introduce flexibility into our planning processes.

We chose this tool because we understood that there was a need to be able to respond to a range of potential opportunities and risks that could arise in a highly fluid environment, such as ICT and the Internet, and all of the other factors that are vectors for change.

And so we planned, we took into account technology changes, business models, public policy, public reactions, and more.

In addition, we planned to share the scenarios as I've mentioned with the global Internet community, to inspire them to think about Internet's future, and to get engaged themselves, to ensure an open Internet.

This we have subsequently done in terms of sharing.  So, the scenarios were developed as I've mentioned by senior staff, and they, the most critical element that went into designing these scenarios was getting the questions right.  That took a great deal of time and effort.

And as you can see here, the focal questions for our scenario planning exercise turned out to be, will the world embrace or resist the open Internet model?  And which model will be more successful?  Will it be command and control?  Or distributed and decentralized?

Actually, what we did is we put, we did four scenarios in quadrants, and the horizontal line on the left side was command and control, and on the right side was distributed and decentralized.

The vertical line was at the top generative, or there was a lot of opportunity involved in this model.  The other was reductive, which of course means causes diminution or curtailment of opportunity.

As we, and you can find this, I will give our Web site link to this later, should you want to follow up on these scenarios.

We continued to track a broad range of information sources, from news and reports, to the outcomes of policy discussions and conferences, and to observe whether the world seems to be moving toward one, in one direction or another.  So awareness of the scenario exercises continues to help shape our thinking and planning in the future.

So the four scenarios are, A, the common pool scenario, which is both the most generative and the most decentralized and distributed.  The common pool is about opportunity and growth.  There are no barriers to entry for those wishing to take part.  Disputes and challenges are resolved through debate and cooperation and competition.  There is constant evolution.

A healthy ecosystem is essential, with interlinked network operators, developers, infrastructure providers and resource management organisation.  The second, what we called the porous garden, is actually on the generative side, but it is a command and control scenario.

It is characterized by networks that would remain global, but would access to content and services.  That access to content and services would be tied to the use of specific networks, specific devices and associated information applications.  This scenario anticipates the rise of an app store approach, which feels uncomfortably, or not so, familiar.  But nevertheless, we see this happening, an app store approach to platforms and services started on smart phones, but increasingly spreading.

Then we have moats and drawbridges.  Moats and drawbridges are both on the command and control side and the most reductive, or the least generative, the least opportunity for innovation.

This one shows the world of the Internet as heavily centralized and dominated by a small number of players who create their own big boys clubs, whether they are industry or Government.  Connections between the networks would be the result of extensive negotiations and deal-making, and there would be strong regulation as Governments seek to impose some public interest obligations on the industry.  The fourth are boutique networks, and the boutique networks are on the decentralized and distributed side, but are reductive.

They are evidenced by efforts to lock down networks to currently known applications, such as Web and streaming video, rather than allowing the Internet to serve as a platform for open innovation.

This scenario envisions a future where political, regional and large enterprise interests fail to optimize on the social and economic potential of a shared global set of richly connected networks.  Each one of these scenarios has proven to be thought provoking, and we do see elements of the scenarios emerging in the Internet that exists today.

So let me now turn to the ways the Internet society put our scenario development exercise together.

We launched the scenarios in September, 2010, with short animated videos that were promoted widely on our Web site, which you see at the bottom.  I was going to show one, but we are in a technical business, and therefore, technology didn't cooperate.  So you can see them online.

And also, we have shown them at a series of global events, including our own iNet meetings held in all regions of the world.

The scenarios interestingly are consistently in the top ten most visited sections of our Web site.  The videos average, still average 4500 unique views per month on our Web site, and are also popular on YouTube.  In fact, the common pool scenario received more than 18,000 views so far.

We also circulated the scenarios among our members, our 50,000 members, and have received a broad range of interesting responses that show that our membership is thinking and debating these issues.  These were also taken to our Board of Trustees.

An informal poll suggested visitors to our various sites see excessive Government control as the main risk to the future development of the industry -- I mean of the Internet.

So, what are the results that we have found from our scenarios?  Well, they provided a common lexicon for talking about an open Internet.  In fact, every once in a while something happens in the news, and in our mailbox somebody says, porous gardens.  And then you say, oh, yeah, I understand what is happening here.

It has given us a strategic framework that helps us and others think about events that may happen, and impact events that might have, that there might be, as well as make observations, as we see events transpired.

So again, what might otherwise appear to be a random event, random policy, random commercial development, suddenly takes on more form, as we look to see whether there are subsequent random events that actually are leading in a certain direction or trending.

The scenarios have provided a benchmark for our own strategic planning efforts, to enable us to position ourselves for possible changes as the future unfolds.

We think it makes us more nimble in uncertain environment.  So what are the questions that we are asking ourselves about next steps?  Well, among them are, should we be reviewing these scenarios in a few years to determine their value?  And I think it would be clear that the answer is yes.

But, and are there immediate actions to address events that have occurred since we've created these scenarios?  And again, yes.  This includes monitoring a wide range of sources as I mentioned earlier.  We are also adapting our plans and programmes to address the new realities we see emerging.

And thirdly, how do we make scenario planning a more useful tool for us in the future?  I think what we would do would be to probably take a longer time, adopt some more of the tools and processes that we have heard about here today, use more third-party information, and poll and utilize our own membership around the world at the front end as well.

So thank you for that. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you, Walda.  Can we move straight ahead to Ben?  You will present us scenarios from West African IGF, if I understand correctly.

>> BEN AKOH:  Thank you, Markus.

I will rather present a scenario from a small country, scenarios exercise that we conducted in a small country of Togo in West Africa, and just speak to four things, the process that we embarked on, the content of that scenario exercise, some of the outcomes that emerged, and a few of the challenges that we were faced with.

In terms of our process, it emerged after we had conducted a survey in West Africa, and have identified a number of key issues that relates to Internet public policy, in a multistakeholder fashion, across West Africa.

And it became evident that all of a sudden, there is this vibrant Togo list community that wanted to share in this regional landscape, and to make their case or their situation known a lot more broadly to people in the region.

So we had a lot of inputs to the survey from this country.  Over 100 multistakeholder partners, people that were IT, with an Internet community, civil society organisations and rights education, private sector, even Government were involved in providing data that fed the surveys.

So we thought it was important for us to go to a much deeper level in the country to identify some of the critical uncertainties within the country.  Togo being a country of about 6 million people, had been under a very repressive regime for a long time.  And after the last administration had passed on, and with the advent of a new administration, there was a much more vibrant community.

So we could tell exactly why all of us knew a desire for openness was coming up.  We capitalized on that situation.  So we identified a local person that was able to catalyze the civil society groups, and then we conducted a deeper level survey within the country, just so we could elicit more of the issues within the country.

The first survey was very broad, and talked about a lot of things that concerns the region of West Africa.  But the most specific survey that focused on the country itself was more directed at the things that emerged from the broader survey.  We narrowed it down to more of the security concerns, the access issues, and it was not surprise that most of the consents came up in the future scenarios that they talked about.

I must say also that this survey was the data that fed into defining this narrowness; we had to base it on a lot of data.  And so we had some evidence that fed into this narrowness process.

When we met the group, this planning group, preceding the scenarios workshop, we had a number of challenges.  I'll talk about challenges a little later.

But we found out that it was such a difficult thing for the group to conceptualize thinking about the future, because up until now, or up until that time, it had always been now, how can we deal with today's situation?  How can we put food on the table?  How can we have access to the Internet to push that news out, or that information out, or to send that E-mail?  So thinking about the future was such a difficult exercise for the group of people.

I'll explain, I'll talk a little more about challenges that were faced a lot later.  But it was important that I highlight that the planning group that was responsible for setting the agenda for the scenarios exercise that involved a much larger group found it difficult to think about the future.

And then it became also evident that it would be difficult for the larger group to think about the future.  We had to find a way of pitching the scenarios to the much larger group in a way that they would understand, participate and be able to generate the kind of output we thought.

One of the things that fed into defining the different scenarios also was what IISD has done previously.  So the four scenarios that Heather talked about earlier were useful in conceptualizing the different cases that we could describe to the future.  We looked at a regulated scenario, fully regulated, VIP scenario, which we define as the orca scenario.  Most of you familiar with West Africa would understand the word orga, which is the big man scenario, so we had to localize the word and make it sensible to the local community.  So it made sense to them that, well, as a big boss, I would like to capitalize the network and hold it to myself.

So they got a picture of that, and it made a sense in terms of defining what the future was supposed to be.

Of course, we talked about a Government and the public, the more acceptable scenario.  The content was, that emerged after we talked about this within the much larger group, as we went into that, was that first of all, Togo has no legislation that regulates the use of the Internet at all.

During the time that processes were being, rather strategies, ICT strategies were being rolled out across the entire African continent by institutions such as the United Nations economic commission for Africa, Togo was not ready to engage in the process, and the reason being that the Democratic regime, sorry, the repressive regime at the time was not looking along those lines.

Up until 2009, there was no push towards a national policy for technology.  In 2009, there was an indication, and only in May this year was there an ICT plan, not so much as a national strategy, and it's important to note that the scenarios exercise that we conducted and the survey that we had put out fed into certain components of the four pillars that emerged in that plan.  Three of the pillars that they identified that talked about the future of the Internet in Togo, the future of the Togo list society and Internet economy and one other scenario featured and resulted from the work that we did.

The cost of the Internet on point for structure does not encourage a promotion of access to most people in the Togo list situation; that became evident during the workshop we conducted.  The Internet remains a luxury for a significant number of Togolese.  There is no framework for dialogue among stakeholders in the development of the Internet.  This way issues were beginning to emerge as we talked about the scenarios.  As we went on, a number of outcomes emerged.

First of all, I said earlier that it was difficult for them to conceptualize the future.  We had to narrow it down, we had to bring it back to about ten years for us to be able to think about, because ten years seemed feasible enough.  Ten years it was.  We went on, and some of the things that came out was in that future, a good future, we wanted to see, we would see secure services and widely deployed infrastructure.  And given that Togo is such a, in such a state that the infrastructure was, is so horrible, very little access.  As a matter of fact, while we were planning the meeting, someone from one of the regions was sitting down eavesdropping on our conversation and he said, what are you guys talking about?  If you are sitting in Togo and I'm sitting at the same hotel, sorry, in Loma, the capital of the city, and sit at the same hotel as you are and you are having access to the Internet, you should come to my city where I travel 200 kilometers to send a single E-mail.

I think it drew the point home to us that there was a lot of infrastructure issues, there were a lot of access issues in the country.  That emerged as one of the critical things that they thought would be addressed in what would be a much more positive scenario of the future of the Internet in Togo.

They looked at IPv6 deployment.  Children are introduced to the Internet at an early age, 10 years from now.  There is a strong support to consumer associations that would be able to use the Internet for their business, and there would be a Cybercrime-free society in the future.

Three things emerged more concretely as a worst scenario, heavily censored Internet, a monopoly situation, managed purely by the Government.  And finally -- my computer just froze on me.  Finally, a heavily taxed infrastructure market where access devices becomes luxury goods.

They had seen that the worst scenario would totally restrict access, and it was more heavily based on access.  I talked about challenges.  And these are my last points.  First of all, there was that absence of existing policy framework literature or documentation of any sort that provides a background to the ICT policy situation of that country.  There was none.  We couldn't find any because there was none that was previously done.  And in the literature you couldn't find much to say about Togo.  The project was beginning to input into that process.

Secondly, the challenge of shifting the paradigm of the planning committee from the traditional forms of inquiry, that is focused on thematic issues, such as we know, access, connectivity, and so on and so forth, was difficult to, whereas we were trying to shift them to the point where they can begin to think along the lines of economic development, the future, how it applies to their person, the identity, that shift was very difficult for them to see.

It was easy for us to talk about access, we would like to see this access in ten years, but they couldn't see the shift to how access can actually benefit them as an individual, as a nation, in that period of time.

So I think subsequent, sort of, and that is a lesson I took from this, that subsequent exercise would have to clearly define pictures, scenarios, futures, how people can actually create an image of what, where they would like to be, of course using some data to get there.

I think the last point that emerged, challenge that emerged from this is that in the context of the Web futuristic thinking is not a common occurrence.  There are positive challenges, of course, with defining uncertainties within a political context.  So they are aware of the factors that repressed thinking along these lines, political situation, for instance, especially living in such a repressive regime for such a period of time, it was so hard to get people to think outside the regime that they have lived in.

And so how that can change future thinking around planning scenarios is quite key.

I think with that, I'll stop.  Thanks. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you very much for this.  And last but not least, Marilyn, U.S. IGF.

>> MARILYN CADE:  I serve as the chief catalyst for U.S. IGF, and I'm fortunate to have members of the steering group with me.  And some of them will help me explain how we use scenarios.  But I have to thank Walda Roseman.  Although we have been friends and colleagues for many years, I only learned today that the only reason I ended up in the computer industry and the Internet industry is that Walda broke AT&T up -- (chuckles.) -- thus introducing a competitive environment and forcing them to hire people to.  And so thank you, Walda.  I didn't know that. 

>> WALDA ROSEMAN:  Any time.

>> MARILYN CADE:  It's a more connected world than we ever knew, huh?

IGF USA is very different as a national initiative than most of the national and regional initiatives.

Although I had done scenario work when I was at AT&T, with WEF and within other settings, and my background is in organizational development, I kind of had gone stagnant on really thinking about the use of scenarios, or I couldn't find a place to use them.  I'm not sure which it was.

So I was familiar with the concept, but, and had even been engaged in them, but something happened in May of 2000, and actually I think it was February or March, I learned about a workshop that Daniel Erasmus was going to do called scenarios for the Internet, 2020.  I attended that workshop and participated.  And we were facing what I considered a real problem in the United States, and that was as we were trying to prepare for the IGF USA, and our main objective is to deepen and broaden awareness about Internet Governance and build support for the IGF and for Internet Governance in the multistakeholder model, we encountered I suppose now I would describe it as the ostrich syndrome, that is, a lot of people didn't want to think about it.

They didn't, it is like the UN is out there, Governments are out there, but it didn't bring home to them that the futures for the Internet and for Internet Governance were at stake.

So I brought the concept into the steering group, and it was received there with great interest, and a number of the steering group members joined the process.  I developed a sort of outline and core themes and papers, a white paper that we could work from.  But really after that, the teams -- and we had three teams of three people each, striving to have gender diversity.  And I will just note for the record so that everyone knows, is that Walda was on one of our first teams, as well as the three gentlemen you are going to hear from.

In using scenarios, what we were trying to do, because I suppose this is really obvious, but I should say this, it's not always easy in the United States for business, the technical community and civil society to talk civilly to each other, because we have a lot of national policy issues that are where we work out our differences through media documents or through workshops or think tank events, and people argue out their different points of view.  They do so professionally, but they often do so not with the common goal, but to try to sort of divide the ground, rather than to draw to consensus.

The use of scenarios we felt could allow us to put what we considered a fairly complex issue, which a small group of people might be understanding as a risk, but it was not accepted or acknowledged by the vast majority of our participants, to put it into an environment where we would all be able to talk, to learn, to share.  And we have done scenarios twice now.  I was very thrilled by Markus proposing that we talk more about them.  I had a lot of cautions about how we would apply scenarios to the IGF.  And in the next section, I'll probably talk more about that.

We have done scenarios twice.  We have taken the initial approach of, and we have introduced the scenarios, we post them on our Web site.  We put people into small workshops.  The next three speakers will describe three scenarios to you.  There are common drivers that we use in all three scenarios, but each scenario has a different emphasis on certain drivers.

We are looking at the future for Internet Governance, and the implications for the Internet.

So, after we do the workshops, we do them during the IGF meeting, we do those in the morning.  The team leaders of the workshops meet and work together, and they bring a unified presentation into the plenary.  And the entire registered participants at IGF USA are briefed on the scenarios, and debate the findings that have come out of those three workshops.

It's been very very helpful to us in gaining consensus around certain positions.  And I would like now to ask the team leaders who have guided the three scenarios to talk about their scenario, tell you the title of their scenario.  They are going to be brief, but they will continue to respond with questions.  And Garland, I'm going to start with you, and go to Pablo, please, and then to Steve, and then I'll wrap up.

>> GARLAND McCOY:  Garland McCoy, with Technology Education Institute.  And I came into the scenario ideas, I was intrigued by it actually.  I kind of like the idea of weighting in.  And I picked up on the Internet islands, is what we called the first go at this, and it mutated into regionalization.  And I sort of picked up I think on a lot of the themes that folks have already touched on, which is unfortunately a rather bleak scenario, and one in which both the first workshop engagement with the participants and a year later, same process, where we engaged the audience in continuing review of the Internet islands, now regionalization scenario, that people were first and foremost commenting that, well, it's already taking place.  It's already happening.

We looked at again some of the key drivers that is pretty unfortunately pretty obvious out there, which is the Governments' control over the Internet and creating castles with moats, and however you want to visualize this; but basically, because of concern about the content, or as an effort to control their citizens, they are erecting these intranets.

We also looked at going forward the cyber threats, and that as a driver to erecting further strengthened barriers around countries.  Financial considerations, that unfortunately as the world goes through a very unfortunate retrenchment here globally in terms of monetary policy, etcetera, you look at things like Internet taxes and tariffs; again, as the Internet becomes as it is, and it's of course growing exponentially as a highway of commerce, so you are looking at taxes and tariffs and protectionism that is starting to rise in certain countries, as buy America first or buy whatever first, so you have that protectionist trend going.

Finally, one that sort of actually just hit me, and I'm going to build it in, Marilyn, in the one next here, which is the issue that was touched on earlier about the electricity, energy, that I actually stumbled on in the clouds, and I'll really briefly touch on this, because I know I'm supposed to be brief.

But it was obvious in this cloud workshop just yesterday that many of the participants weren't quite getting where the cloud was residing.  They were talking about, we have ways through solar panels or whatever to power our cell phones, and we have these wi-fi towers that don't require a lot of electricity, and this sort of thing.  And these network operation centres are knots, if you will, or data centres, as one of the panellists correctly pointed out, that you could completely black out downtown Nairobi with what one of these babies takes to both run it, and of course, as was pointed out, cool the damn thing.  They are just, and it's getting worse, not better.

The latest package from CISCO, the rack that comes in is just horrific, you know, in terms of twice as much electricity.  Four times more cooling needs to take place for the rack.  It goes on and on.  Anyway, yeah, I'm going to wind it up.  But that is another area, because you are going to have to look at that real sustainable power for like Kenya, for example, to roll this out, and that becomes a big, a significant issue as well.

>> MARILYN CADE:  Did you want to say something about how your, you said that your panelist responded that this future is already here.  Did you want to say anything about how the plenary responded to that?

>> GARLAND McCOY:  Again, I think that both at the workshop and then when the findings were brought forward, that unfortunately, there was a lot of agreement on this.

I think that, on the positive side to some extent, the hope that the IGF would continue, that this new framework of multistakeholder discussions would be a nice framework to work on some of the key issues, and this would promulgate, that we would continue this; and that governments would practice what they preach where they wouldn't have, even in the U.S., where there is legislation to take down the DNSs because they are perceived to be bad actors in terms of content and not violation of copyrights, intellectual protection, these sorts of things.  So blocking the Bart cell wi-fi cell towers because of being concerned about disorderly protests, this sort of thing, so in San Francisco, so we've got unfortunately lots of homegrown examples that aren't serving us well.

>> MARILYN CADE:  I'd like to go to Pablo, who had a very interesting scenario that he sort of self, I think Pablo was really the person who suggested we take the particular focus that you took in your scenario.

>> PABLO MOLINA:  Thank you, Marilyn.  I'd like to make it clear that while I suggested the scenario, it was not my intention to work on this.  So careful what you wish for.  The title for the scenario was, that youth rising and raining.  It is an alternative future, where as a consequence of the Arab Spring, and the protests of the disenfranchised, in European countries like Greece and Spain, and other social unrest movements, powered by Internet technologies, there is a change in the world.

Young people increasingly became the power producers and consumers of Internet content.

With this title, and this content, it was clear to me that the room was going to be full of people whose average age was at least ten years younger than people in other scenarios, because young people participated, they saw these as something which they could engage very well.

The drivers here were partially the global economy, suffering through recession, job loss, massive Government debt.  There were the problem of pandemic and civil strife and natural disasters affecting some parts of the world, and certainly the fact that Internet always continue to be increasingly simpler and more affordable, worldwide, but certainly in the United States as well.

Some of the things that happened there is that, for example, citizen journalism became mainstream medium for production and consumption of news and entertainment.  It wasn't the New York Times that gives news to the people, but instead these young journalists starting to tell the side of the story, and people read what they had to say and people watched their multi-media productions.

The problem with this is that governments were concerned about the quality of the information, is lack of control.  So in some cases they decided to strengthen the security, as it happened also in other scenarios.  They started looking at biometric identification for online users to make sure that people were who they claim to be.  They even considered some Government, the idea that you have to have an online license, akin to a driver's license, before you could actually use the Internet, and that it could be revoked, you could be banned from using the Internet for misbehaving.

The people in the room thought that this is a possible scenario, that youth can have a more saying in the use and development of the Internet.  To have a driver's license seemed a little bit farfetched, but people thought maybe a learner's permit would be a good idea, something you build in the digital literacy of the people, to prevent falling victim to abuses of Cybercrime and be able to use the technologies more effectively.

Certainly, the technologies are there already, like the social networks, continue to improve and are being offered by both small start-ups as well as very developed, very wealthy companies.

But in the end, youth was not the defining factor to this scenario.  What they identified as the defining factor that many young people have but others can develop is the literacy and mastery.  Those are the key skills in these particular scenario, as identified by participants.

Regardless of the technologies and the regulation of the best extensions of all the actors, it is clear that some bad actors will circumvent the rules of the game, and that the remedies for that are going to be cumbersome barriers and rules that can indeed affect the legitimate uses.

So in this scenario people identified that education and awareness are critical, that it is fundamental to promote the social participation and political engagement of citizens, particularly young citizens' reduced participation in the political discourse by using online tools and content produced by politicians, Government and society, and certainly to civilize what was defined as the wild west of the Internet, so that fear rhetoric does not translate into additional regulation and threats to privacy.

>> MARILYN CADE:  Thank you.  And Steve is going to wrap up with our third scenario.  Then I know we need to move along because we are running a little bit long.  But Steve has the scenario that we thought would scare everyone.

>> STEVE DELBIANCO:  Thanks.  Steve Delbianco with Net Choice.  Last year was my first exposure to scenario as a method.  I'm excited about it as a technique.  It works; scares you sometimes, but makes you think.

My scenario is Government prevails.  You start by describing current and natural disasters.  We could have used real news footage to begin our scenario because natural disasters are prevalent.  Governments, however, seem to be the only ones who were capable of responding to a rising tide of natural disasters; many impacted the ICTs we are here to talk about.

Over the next decade of the scenario, most stakeholders turn to Governments for disaster response, but also for precautions, many of which, many of the precautions eroded the private sector's role and civil society's role in Internet Governance.  And ten years in the future, 2020, most national Governments, and we said including the USA, wanted to build on the success of multinational cooperation to fight terrorism and to respond to disasters, and multi-governmental organisations, they also took every opportunity to consolidate their power under various mandates for global solutions, and many of these involved control over Internet technologies and communications.

By 2025, which is the end of the scenario, we laid out a vision where the public and industry had come to rely very heavily on Governments' unique abilities to respond to man-made natural disasters, and by that year governments and law enforcement were deeply embedded in all aspects of Internet communications, technology and commerce.

Then we did the audience reaction.  I'll share a couple highlights, the audience reaction.  Initially they reacted negatively, talked about I woke up this morning with nothing to be afraid of; now I'm afraid.

There was a concern that more Government intervention like this would mean a lot less innovation.  The discussion turned more positive then.  Some participants started to suggest factors that would work against the scenario ever occurring.  For instance, governmental, Government alone cannot afford to build and maintain Internet infrastructure.  Governments have to engage public-private partnerships, trying to point out how it wouldn't happen.  Another was the youth and educated of the world will counterbalance the Government powers that we show in the scenario.

But I'll tell you at the end, that positive tone yielded to a realistic assessment of the natural forces at work.  For instance, freedom often gives way to privacy, security, and the rule of law, because online civil liberties, they don't poll very well against law and order.  The open Internet of today we wanted to denote came from conscious choices that were made in engineering and policy, but if we change those choices, the Internet will become less open.

Finally we said, we would love to, as Markus described, conduct a scenario here at the IGF in Kenya, because I would have enjoyed watching the reaction and discussion of a worldwide IGF audience.  But thank you, Marilyn.

>> MARILYN CADE:  Thank you.  Markus, back to you. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you.  Thank you all for this presentation.  I think it's fascinating to see how the scenario development depends very much on local circumstances between an African scenario or a U.S. scenario.  You have to take these into account.

Before we move to our colleagues from World Bank and OECD, I wonder, I originally said we have all the presentations running in the flow and have the discussion only after, but it was such a rich menu, I wonder whether there are any comments or questions to the four -- not four, more presenters -- seven, I think, if I count right, I would not say developed big thoughts, but if you have specific questions on how this or that worked out.

Doesn't seem to be the case.  Okay.  Then we move on to, is David first?  World Bank, yes, please.

>> DAVID SATOLA:  I have a presentation .

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Okay.  This is basically now we have two big intergovernmental organisations who will talk on the need for accurate data, as far as I understand it, as an input into any serious scenario planning.  Are you ready?  David, please.

>> DAVID SATOLA:  Thank you very much.  I'm David Satola from the World Bank.  I'd like to thank the organisers of this session, and the organisers of the IGF generally, and our sponsors in Kenya for having us all here.  Thank you very much.

I have two basic themes that I want to talk to you about today, very briefly.

One is to highlight what in my view are some mega trends that would affect scenario planning, and the other is to talk to you about open data as a basis and a foundation for assisting in more rigorous scenario planning.

So, very quickly, I see three or four sort of mega trends out there.

One is that we have seen within the context of the IGF a shift of focus.  When we started out, it was all about institutions and who should be in control, and what their role was.

And now that has shifted I think a little bit, where we now see that issues of Internet Governance have been elevated, and they are now part of the, they are no longer purely technical discussion.  They are part of the global foreign policy initiative.  They are front and centre.  They are part of the G8 agenda, they are part of the G20 agenda.

U.S. Secretary of State Clinton has spoken about Internet rights and freedoms recently.  Other presidents of other countries and other foreign ministers have included these issues in their dialogue.  So it's got a different flavor to it than it did before.  I'd also like to suggest that some of the themes we started out talking about were really silos, and we were comfortable for a time talking about issues within those silos.

I think that over the course of the five or so years of the IGF and WSIS before that, and thanks in great part to Markus for his leadership, we all have a better collective understanding of what the issues are.  In some of these areas the temperature has come way down.  So now we can think of things in more cross cutting terms.  For lack of a better phrase and to use a small pun, I call these domains.  Sorry about that.

   (Chuckles.)

Just not very imaginative, that's all.  Some of the domains that I think that are out there, that are important are -- not yet, I'll get to my presentation in a minute.  It's really complicated.  You'll see.

We've got, and I'll run through them quickly, domain of intergovernmental organisations, human rights, very important one, intellectual property as a domain, privacy and data protection, information security, and a few others.  I think what you will recognize already is that even in an attempt to recast and redefine the themes, the domains, there is a great deal of interrelation between them.  It's difficult to talk about human rights, without talking about data protection.  It's difficult to talk about human rights and data protection without talking about information security, because somehow they are all different facets of the same thing.

I think we have seen an evolution in the way that we address those issues.  Finally, in this meta discussion, I'd like to raise an issue I owe to my good friend Markus for raising the first time, and I heard it raised within other context in IGF, the multistakeholder approach that we have here, while it's an accurate reflection of what the Internet is and how it's governed, is also, I think, a threat to the traditional conception of the best failing and nation state and its role in all of this.  It cannot be the case that states only have a role to play in the Internet Governance equation, so some of the scenarios you were talking about before were focusing on the role of state, the role of Government.

I don't think when you have nonstate actors like the IETF, nonstate actors like ICANN, nonstate actors like individuals who attend here who have good ideas, that in developing and discussing policy at the international level, it's a unique thing, and I think that is a really important trend.

What would be really interesting, I think, is to see that same kind of approach be applied to climate change, maternal health, you name it; whatever the international issue is under discussion.  If the multistakeholder approach were brought to it, what would that mean?

At the same time, I think some of the old fissures, the divisions that we saw previously still exist.  And I think the main one is this tension between the role of Governments and the role of nonstate actors in shaping the future of the Internet.

Now I'm going to start with my presentation.  Please push the button.  I told you it was complicated.

Now I'm going to talk about data, and the use of data and the importance of getting good data to the scenario planning environment.  I'm no scenario planning expert.  But we have at the World Bank recently launched what we call the open data initiative.  That is the first Web site that you've got up there.

For those who are participating remotely, I'll read it out quickly.  It's http://data.worldbank.org.

The open data initiative was a response I suppose to requests by NGOs and others to access the raw data that the World Bank collects.  In many respects, the World Bank is a data gathering machine.  And our economists are crunching data all the time.

There were concerns I suppose that the reports that were produced based on this data were skewed somehow, or were biased somehow.

So in an attempt to address concerns about transparency, all of the World Bank gathered data is now open to the public.  It is available at that site.

That means, when I say open, I mean open.  Anyone who wants to access data can access it.  They can use it, they can publish it, they can exploit it in intellectual property terms, they can profit from it.  We will use the data as well.  If contrary results emerge, then so be it.

The data is then contestable.  And that is the point.

That sounds great in and of itself.  Open data is great.  You can imagine how organisations involved in the Internet space could also make their data open.  What data does ICANN have that it's not sharing that it could open up?  How could that data be used?  Very interesting question.

But I don't think that the data availability itself is enough.  I think that, what I'm going to propose here is end-to-end data used in consumption; I think it's great that the institutions make the data affordable or available.  But I think also, the users need to be trained at how to gather that data, how to use the data, how to manipulate it.  There is quite a bit of capacity building that needs to go along with it as well as awareness raising.  There needs to be an enabling environment to access and use that data.  If the enabling environment isn't there, then getting access to it really isn't worth a lot.

Finally, I think in any context, there should be consultation between the organisation making the data available, and users, because without that consultation, having a mass of naughts and 1s and bits and things is interesting, but perhaps not very approachable.

I think though that there is an underlying problem to this underlying problem.  The underlying problem is how data are gathered.  We worked in one country recently who was revising, wanted to revise their ICT statistics.  So we worked with the National Statistics Bureau.  And the ministry didn't think that the data being generated about ICT use in that country was accurate.

They thought that the wrong picture was being painted.  We spent quite a bit of time working with the national statistics agency in that country, and found that the form which they were using to do household data gathering was developed in the 1970s.  And while the information that was being requested was being genuinely responded to, it wasn't really the right data.

So we took a long time going through with them how to change the form, how to change the questions being asked in order to gather the right data.

So I think whatever proposition is going to be undertaken to make data available, one needs to critically examine both the methodology for gathering the underlying data, and what data is being produced.  If you could -- thank you.

This slide shows you part of our open data initiative.  We have a project here in Kenya working with both the Kenya ICT board and the ministry on moving Kenya in the direction of open data.  It's basically built on our platform, but is just one example of the kinds of things that you will find at our Web site.

And my final slide and final comment on data is, recently we did an online game called Evoke.

It was done with a cartoon.  And it was sort of a scenario planning kind of crowd sourcing online, if you will, where six or seven development problems were posed, and then as you work, as players work through the game, as they work through the cartoon, or the comic, different results could evolve.  And so it was set up in a way that different things could happen, and it could go off on different vectors.

That was the other Web site that I had posted up there.  It's a very interesting tool that was used.  It was obviously aimed at a certain demographic.  I think the response was overwhelmingly positive.  We thought we would get a couple thousand users, and I think we got in the order of 35 or 40,000 users globally.  Anyone in the room participate in Evoke?  Must have been the rest of the people here.

>> MARILYN CADE:  I was going to say not yet.  But I'd like to.

>> DAVID SATOLA:  Unfortunately, Marilyn, this game is closed.  We are looking for funding actually to do another game.  But some of the issues that were looked at in this game were, ironically, or maybe not so, a natural disaster in Japan, and what would be done about that.

There was a women's rights in Saudi Arabia module, which was as you can imagine, quite controversial, and things like that.  There was a food crisis in Africa one, and there are five or six of these different situations.

In terms of the purpose of it, like the purposes of the different scenarios that you were running, was to help people in the World Bank who work on these areas, food, health, women's rights, to understand what some of the soft spots were, but to hear it from other parties, either to validate their own thinking, or to reevaluate some of that thinking.

So I hope this has been helpful in terms of some of the things that we are doing, and hopefully can be used as examples in scenario planning, and look forward to your questions.  Thank you.  Thank you to my able assistant. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you, and Taylor from the OECD, please.

>> TAYLOR REYNOLDS:  That is the end of my presentation.  There we go.  Thank you very much.  My name is Taylor Reynolds, an economist at the OECD in Paris.

I too am going to provide a little vision on how OECD work might be able to feed into some of the scenario planning in the future.

I want to start first though with a slide, and this is one of my favorite slides to show.  This is a magazine article from 1950 in the United States.  It is from a magazine I used to love as a kid called Popular Mechanics.

This was a magazine where they teach you how to take things apart in this technical magazine.  But in 1950, they put out an article that said, miracles you will see in the year 2000; someone who scanned all of these pages, it's 6 or 7 pages, and talked about life in the future.  If you read here, it says miracles you will see.  For example, you will drop in by rocket plane on Tutanville, the sootless garden city where you will live in scientific comfort in AD 2000.  You will cook by solar heat, shop by television in the world just around the corner.

The reason I use this picture is because you see the woman shopping online.  They weren't that far off.

You read through and they get some of these right.  We also laugh about the one on the top; you can't read it but it says, you'll eat food made from sawdust.

It's quite difficult.    (Chuckles).

Predicting the future is a bit difficult.  So because we don't know exactly what is going to happen in terms of policy at the OECD, we always try to leave our options open.  We want to be as open as we can, in terms of infrastructure, for example, to support developments in the future.

One area that we look at in terms of the Internet and with broadband in particular, is that broadband to us is very similar to electricity.

So we ask the question, is broadband the new electricity?  You can see here, this is, my statistics are from the U.S., because the U.S. publishes these data, but this is average U.S. residential electricity consumption broken down by category, in 1950, 1960, 1970 and 1980.

You can see that the household consumption of electricity has grown significantly over three decades here.

What is interesting is the data that we had stops in 1980.  This you have television, dishwasher, dryer, freezer, air conditioner, lighting, water, heat.  But then since 1980, look at just a sample of some of the devices that we have added to the electrical grid, from 1980 on, so beyond that picture.

We have got computers, modems, disk drives, printers, we have satellite radio, video cameras, set top boxes.  You can go through the list.  I have electric cars, video game consoles, computers, iPods, cellular telephones.  You can see how our demand for this electricity source is growing over time.  But in reality, I think about it, in 1950, I am sure, or even earlier when they were putting in the electrical grid, no one had an idea that we would be using the network this way.

So I'm very grateful that they put in an electricity network that was able to support the devices we have today.  The question I ask is, are we building networks today that will be able to support a future innovation like the electric car?  I think this is what we need to keep in mind when we are thinking about the future is, how are we planning for the future in terms of policy, to support things that we can't imagine.

How can the OECD support this scenario work?  One of the key ways that we can help support the work that you are doing is in terms of data.  Similar to the World Bank, we have a lot of data that is available.

The World Bank and the OECD complement each other.  We are not competing data sources.  We are complementary, because the World Bank covers a vast number of countries, around 200 countries, but the OECD only covers 34.

Our value added though in the 34 that we cover is that we can actually add many more variables and many more data sets than would be possible if you had to do it for 200 countries.

We are able to get newer variables, newer data sets, but we are limited by the number of countries that we cover.

To give you an idea of some of the data and some of the things you can use in terms of looking at the past, to help predict the future, we follow for example the growth of new technologies.

This is, this chart here shows the growth of fixed line telephony from 1960 until 2008.  It is the red line that stays, goes up slightly and then comes back down.

But you can see that mobile telephony which starts growing in about 1995 rockets right up past everything else.

Something that is interesting in our data sets we found, recently we have been tracking progress of IPv4.  How many routed IPv4 addresses are there?  It turns out that IPv4 follows a very similar trend to the growth in mobile.

So there is a precedent for the growth of the Internet and it's something that we can use.

We also see the growth of some industries but the decline of others.  Here you can see how dial-up broadband, dial-up Internet connections have drastically fallen since the year 2002 when they peaked, while broadband has grown.

We are able to with our data show differences across countries.  I think this is something that is important because it allows us to identify countries that have something that is working, but it also allows us to identify countries that are lagging behind.  You can say, why is Korea doing so well in terms of access to the Internet at the top of the OECD list, and what is the situation in Mexico that is holding them back from growing like the rest of the OECD?

We also, we get into fairly good detail about market trends and changes.  We look at how broadband prices change over time, and how broadband advertised speeds evolve over time.

We also look at evolving services.  For example, we have data on banking services.  We want to see how many individuals are using the Internet for banking services in 2010, and this can give you a breakdown of data.  There is a rich data set that is available from the OECD and from the World Bank to do this type of analysis.

I think one of the other areas where the OECD can help with this is in observing and sharing trends.

People ask me sometimes, what exactly do you do at the OECD?  I tell them I'm an economist, but what I spend a lot of my time doing is tracking what is going on in the 34 countries of the OECD in my sector, which is information economy.

I follow trends, and I look for interesting things, and we share them with member countries.  For example, one of the things that we have been reporting on for a long time is mobile commerce.  As you know, this is something that is picking up steam in many developed countries right now.

But I think some people would be surprised to know this has been going on for seven years in Asia.  You have been able to pay for grocery at a 711 store in Korea for the past five or six years.  That is something that is coming to other countries.  We highlight that.  We highlight things like MPesa, which is a mobile payment system in Kenya.  It is a way for people to buy things or send money.  This is very innovative and spreading across Africa.  We think this is a service that could spread up into OECD countries as well.

We look at trends for example in how people use mobile phones.  Something that would have shocked many people around the world about two or three years ago is the fact that Americans typically bought a big basket of minutes or an unlimited number of voice calls on a mobile plan.

That is a trend that first appeared in the United States, but now we are starting to see this spread across the world.  This is again an area where because we deal with United States and the member countries, we can say this is interesting in the U.S., we see this potentially moving to other countries.

I want to tell you about an interesting trend, and this is one of my favorites I love to share in many conferences, because people are really surprised.  France I would have to say is one of the leaders in terms of broadband, and they have some of the most innovative services I've ever found.

They have a thing called pico cells and wi-fi sharing that is available from all of the broadband providers in France.  What this actually does is, I have a modem at my house, set top box, and my modem has a wi-fi component for me, and a wi-fi component that is shared with all other subscribers to the ISP.

What happens is, I have a picture here of the dentist's office.  Every time I go to the dentist's office, I open up my laptop.  I log in to someone's wi-fi access who lives in the apartment above my dentist's office.

I'm logged in automatically, but it knows who I am.  I use a slice of their broadband connection for free.  Almost anywhere I go in France, I can log into wi-fi at someone's house for free, as part of my monthly data subscription.

This is a trend that we have heard about for a long time, but it's really started coming in France, and we see that it's probably going to move to the rest of the world.

These types of things are quite interesting.  This is my final slide.  I want to say that the OECD stands by ready to help the best we can in scenario planning.  This is extremely important for us, because the decisions in terms of the Internet that are being made today are going to have ramifications for the next 50 to 100 years.  I chose a picture of telephone poles, and you can see how old the cars are.

We are still using infrastructure from 50 or 60 years ago to power the Internet.  So what we do now needs to be done very thoughtfully.  So thank you very much for the chance to talk. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you very much, Taylor, for this.

Basically, we have gone through without a break, but I'm told that Martin Boyle from Nominet would like to talk briefly about UK experience in scenario planning.  Please, Martin.

>> MARTIN BOYLE:  What a build-up; I'm between you and a coffee.

I've been asked to say a few words about the work that we did stimulated by the work that the U.S. IGF had done last year.  Well, if it's a good idea, why not plagiarize.

We approached it in a slightly different way.  We did a very quick and simple process and engaged people through a series of workshops.  And the series of workshops in that case, in our case was finding small groups professionally facilitated, and fitting them against an existing structure of future vision that have been done by Sussex University for the future foresight 2020 programme for the DTI for UK Government.

And that set out four different ways in which society might develop up to 2020, including us leaving the European Union and doing our own thing, and perhaps even breaking up into small communities and everybody doing their own thing.

One of the starting points we went for is avoid going to what I call the usual suspects, the people who know about the technology, and are thinking forward already about the technology.  And instead we adopted a let's look at the users, and the things that they are seeing, and the things that are giving them cause for concern or for glee in the future.

So we pulled out eight workshops, two of which we did with media companies, and that was really about how they saw their use of the Internet changing the whole way in which they did businesses, did their business.

We took some graduate students, postgraduate students at the option Internet institute, one of whom is British and the other 7 were foreign students, we got a group of older people who were living in an assisted living environment, and they range from age 60 to 90, and we also had a pain clinic which was staff and patients, and also people who were being very carefully supported, for them to be able to cope with the intense pain that they were under.

We took two regions, Cambria, which is a very rural area, and Wales, which is one of the devolved administrations in the UK, and we took a primary school which was 11-year-old students and two teachers.  And they were mixed ability, they were mixed ethnicity, there was a balance of gender, and they were all too young to use Facebook.

What came out was actually for me a little bit surprising, in that a lot of the same issues came up in completely different work, completely different workshops.

And so I thought I'd just focus on the half-dozen of these issues that came out.  The first one was privacy, no surprise there really; apart from the fact that the children, in spite of all the awareness exercises that the school had gone through, didn't mention it.

And the suspicion we have is that the children probably didn't mention it because it was so well drilled into them, they didn't see, you know, they are just now in the process of assuming that that was not going to be a problem in the future.

But what did come out is a point on the need to control our own data.  I've got a fly buzzing around me.

>>  You want me to swat it?

>>  MARTIN BOYLE: Go on, as long as it's not on me.    (Chuckles.)

And access to tailored content, where you might actually want somebody to have information about your preferences, so that they deliver you things that you are interested in, the Amazon people, who like that book also bought this.  And so you are getting a build in to help you make choices.  But it might also be in the way that people present tailored TV, or present, as your supermarket probably already does, by a loyalty card, chooses things that are interesting for you.

Against that there were the loss of your identity, loss of details, identity theft.  We all know overall about those arguments, but what then was coming about very clearly was one of the key areas that we as the UK IGF need to start thinking about and bringing to the fore, is on identity management and how people might be able to control their identity.

A related subject was on trusted sources.  It was the verification of the media that you are reading.  Can you actually trust what you are reading?  Do you know who presented it?  Can you actually tell the difference between an editorial or an opinion piece and something that is news?

And then can you actually be sure that the information you are looking at hasn't been altered, and amended?  And then one of the things that was coming out very clearly, from some of the older people in particular, was themes of lack of trust as a barrier and fear of dependency on that information also being something that puts them off the technology.

So two things came out there, key issue, where one of them is the identity management and control issue again.  The other one is that we actually have a key issue here, probably on content validation.  Can you actually think about that content?

The third area was digital inclusion.  And of course, everybody expected our digital inclusion to get better.  But, and there is always a "but," there are issues against that, come across people who are in disadvantaged groups, and no matter where you are, you will always have people that are running behind.  Also people in rural communities where delivery of the services is more difficult, and then you, of course have a cost based, a cost issue.

And then also, the way that people design services that allow the more dependent people, disabled people to be able to get access to the services, and in particular when it comes to things like Government services.  So another key issue there was the need for being able to support users and recognize that you are always going to need to support users; and then the awareness of appropriate technology.

If I just do my last one, and leave the other two, because I see that Markus is getting a bit irritated with me, and that was on piracy; and again, inevitable one to come up, but the conclusions that were coming up were actually I thought slightly interesting.

Firstly, it started off on the basis that you can't really rely on regulatory protection, and that there really is on the other side of that an issue of funding content, and if you don't find ways of funding content, then people stop providing content through a more open environment.

And then of course, you get payrolls as barriers to access to the content.  Key issue there is thought on the funding, access to the content and business models associated with it.

So, four of the six big messages, horizontal messages that came over, and I'll stop there. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you very much; not irritated at all, just concerned.  We have a very long menu, and fascinating presentations.  But I think we want to move to also the discussion.  And I think we do need a break to digest the rich menu.  Can we be back 5:00 sharp?  That gives us a ten-minute break.  Thank you.

   (Break.)

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  This time, I hope we can engage a little bit in a discussion.  First of all, I would like to remind you that you can actually see videos of scenarios on the ISOC Web site.  There are videos.  And also on the IGF USA Web site, you can watch these videos which we were not able to show this afternoon.

Before turning to the panellists, I would also like to turn a little bit to the audience, and ask a few questions, or see whether they would like to comment.  For instance, is anyone in the audience -- I mean, I know there are a lot of people involved in national regional IGF initiatives.  Is anyone, for instance, interested or considering carrying out a scenario in their national environment?

Would you have other questions to the panellists, their experience with scenarios?

If not, then I would turn to the panellists.  Have you any lessons learned to share with the participants?  Would you do it again -- (off microphone).

>> MARILYN CADE:  I would like to talk a little bit kind of candidly with all of you and with the audience about why we use scenarios, and get your feedback for us.

At this point, I think Pablo had to step out.  So I'll speak for him, because he's -- the teams who have been using scenarios, I think, have found them really useful as a tool to engage an audience that comes in and invited you to the IGF USA, and very often they have very little in common with each other.  As I said earlier, they know very little about Internet Governance and they don't know much.  So I have experts like Steve and Pablo, myself and others who are deeply knowledgeable about the risk issues that we were talking about the threats to Internet Governance.  I have people who come to the IGF USA because they are interested in security openness and privacy, are interested in digital citizenship, or some are hearing Larry Strickland speak.  And we put those people, whether they were expert or nonexpert, into a room to talk about the future.

So having the written scenarios was a fantastic tool for us.

And we found it a very very engaging tool.  I think at this point, Markus, we are intending to reuse, to do it again.  But we felt that the scenario summit by sharing with others who were going from the more deeply theoretical approaches back to what we were doing, as examples, that we would learn a whole lot.  I think we have.

One of the things that Pablo intends to do is to, he is teaching an Internet Governance course, and so he will be helping us with our research and with writing the original papers.  And then we will probably do focus groups this time beforehand, before we then fine tune the papers.  And we are probably going to do that through some regional half-day meetings.

So we are going to be moving more toward the more structured approach; at least that is our goal, if that is what the steering group steps up to.

I have some concerns about scenarios.  And I know Heather kind of, maybe my question to you, I feel scenarios can be manipulated easily.  Laszlo is still here.  I think that there are, they can be divisive.  I think that we were fortunate that our scenarios resonated to people, the threats we talked about did resonate to people.

But I could have easily seen it going in another direction, and people having a big argument in Steve's workshop about your trends are wrong, your analysis is wrong, your projection is wrong, you are wrong.  That didn't happen to us, but I could see it happening.

>>  Thank you for that.  When I was at the IGF USA, what I found was there that it helped engage the audience; people are really participating extremely actively.  From that point of view I had thought it could be useful to have that kind of engagement also at the IGF.  But I do take the point Heather made that they, depending on how you frame them, that they can have the potential of being divisive.  What about UK?  You are planning to continue with scenario?

>>  I'd say that we haven't come to the end of the first round.  We have done the building up.  We have identified issues.  And I think certainly for me, the next step would be to try and get some wider validation.  And therefore, we will probably, we will certainly be presenting some of these ideas to high level policy audience at the parliament and Internet conference in the middle of October.

Certainly the exercise has been useful.  We probably do need to look at doing something now a bit more rigorous and perhaps drilling down and then sharing it much more widely.  And I did like the ideas of the of the crowd sourcing of input, into scenarios, as being a way of where validating it, so I might well be borrowing that idea as well.

>> MARILYN CADE:  We did the probably lowest cost approach to scenarios stories that you could do.  The people in the room who worked on them, yeah, free labour.  I think I used, I have access to a fair amount of reports, I used the, I had done some work with WEF before, and I had access to their scenario materials, and the trends reports, plus some other reports that I had access to.

So we had free labour.  I mean, everybody, our entire team was free labour.

And that worries me a little bit.  I think when we are at, we want to add more rigor into it, we are still not talking about adding much money into it.  We may have to add travel for Pablo and for some of our students and things.  But we are not going toward the several hundred thousand dollar approach.  That is one of the things, Laszlo, that worries me a little bit.  It is like I need a checklist of a central things I have to include, and some of it may be some money to make sure that there is rigor to make it legitimate, and neutral.

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  One lesson I have learned over the years in an IGF context, there is no one size fits all solution.

And I think each of the examples we heard had a different nature, a different genesis and different objectives.  I think the very first scenarios -- please, I was just coming to you -- scenarios you presented, they had a much more ambitious objective than some of the scenarios here.  And I think they were all equally valid.  They fulfilled a purpose.  I was going to turn to you.  Fill us in a little bit.  You have most experience with us here.

>> LASZLO PINTER:  I have some experience, but I would say I think you are right, that scenarios can be divisive.  But in order to get around it, I think they also have to have some credibility.  We know that the scenarios by definition are uncertain.  There are elements of uncertainty.  But there are ways to make them credible.

And one part is related to data, what is the data, what are the modeling engines, and what is the quality of the peer review, for instance.

Again, these are not, not sort of the same scientific documents and others, they always have quality attached to it.  But they can still be run through peer reviews and reach through quality improved there.  I think that costs people money, time to bring people together, that does cost real money.

The other part of it is that I think there is a difference between scenarios that are done just for the purpose of, I mean, they are not games, but they are, they are play food to some extent.

We are exploring different futures; somehow they might influence the way we make decisions and so on.

But there are, there is a class of scenarios I think, and maybe those go beyond just four or five different futures.  I think we are starting to get there in some of our new network and some of the work we are doing now also with the China council, to use the more backcasting type approach, where there are some goals and objectives that have been agreed upon in multilateral processes or in planning processes.  And this is a question about, how do we get there.

Then the scenario is about alternative pathways and risks and so on, with potentially much more serious impact.  And then you are engaging partners and kind of fitting into policy making and decision processes, that require a degree of credibility and so on.

That is not free, unfortunately.  Thanks. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  May I ask a follow-up question?  Somebody asked in the previous session, Laszlo, how accurate your scenarios were, and that you answered very eloquently that that was not the point.  But could I ask how much impact did you see your scenarios had in the environment context? 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  I think that's, there are many exercises, there are different exercises might have different impact.  I mean, I think what is important, maybe increasingly so, is that we go beyond the artisanal style of scenario work where the use of the scenario is thought about very carefully, and the impact is thought about very carefully right at the beginning, so we have some understanding of where this will actually be useful.  And then, I think, and we had projects, we try to think about projects like this, related to, for instance, climate change adaptation scenarios, where we thought about certain of funding mechanisms that we hypothesize could use this kind of scenario information, and it could use it.

I think if it's unclear at the beginning where the results of the scenario would be useful, what is the type of policy process that it can influence, then there might not be as much influence.  Some of the scenario works before, maybe the work of the global scenario group, that was an exploratory type work.  It was interesting.  It informed science.  It informed dialogue in kind of fuzzy ways.  It didn't specifically influence one agenda.  I think it still had impact.  Now you can run much more targeted specific scenario exercises, where the recipient end is more clear. 

>> HEATHER CREECH:  Maybe if I could add to that, Laszlo, certainly the global environmental outlook and the scenarios within that, landed on the desk of every Ministry of Environment around the world, and so the impact there was that every ministry now works from these four possible projections, and at least it provides that opportunity to frame some of their decision-making .

>> LASZLO PINTER:  Can I just, because I don't think I actually answered your question.  I would add to Heather, if I think specifically about global environment outlook, the previous approach was projecting very different futures, and I think one of the impacts was that people said, this is fine.  But what we are concerned about is commitment and getting to goals and targets.  So next time you guys do this work, don't just kind of paint a really broad brush picture of many different futures.

Come back to us and tell us what do you think, in that scenario context, about our options and risks and opportunities of getting to the goals and targets that we are actually concerned about, that we are held to account for. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Turning to the more sort of Internet Governance scenarios, the motivation for the scenario sessions at the UK, U.S., for instance, was it more to stimulate the discussion?  Or was the idea to have an impact?

>> MARILYN CADE:  Well, I can speak for us, I think, and Steve and Pablo and Garland and Walda who was there at the time as well.  We wanted to have an impact.  Some of us who were working day-to-day in the global environment, and dealing with what we considered real risk to the support for the multistakeholder model and for Internet Governance overall, we were seeing trends, big Government, centralized global Government.

We were looking at the misunderstandings that were emerging in some countries, that the answer to dealing with cyber threats or Cybercrime should be passing laws as opposed to training people, and giving them skills.  And I think because what the IGF USA focus is on, as I think I said, is not the national issues, but taking a national perspective, but with a global view.

So there I think are 20 members of the IGF USA steering group that are here.  And we were trying to take input.  We were trying to understand whether other people that are more diverse than us, and all stakeholders, would, how would they feel about these different scenarios that we were seeing as possibilities?  We actually started with five.  But we whittled it down to three.  I don't think we could have lived through five.

But I think we were trying to have an impact for ourselves as well as for all these people who don't live and breathe Internet Governance like we do.

>>  GARLAND McCOY:  I can add to what Marilyn says, being one of the peoples who volunteered his time to put Forth what first was an intriguing exercise, but in addition to that one of the nice things about both the IGF USA as well as IGF here, is that it is a magnet, that it draws in a very diverse but very, I think intelligent group of people, all committed and knowledgeable and thoughtful people in this space; and so to throw something out and get some validation or to not get validation, so the exciting part.  You think, yeah, I might be on to something here, but let's throw it out to people that are far smarter than I am that are out there in the field working the stuff, and see if I am basically in the sweet spot here, if I'm way off base or whatever.  And then get some feedback and then use that to sort of, for the next year, to fine tune it a little bit.

I think that for me was the kind of interesting exercise.  That is what scenarios are all about.  You throw it out there, and then you look to a broad group of very smart people that are in the space to help you march it down the line .

>> HEATHER CREECH:  Thanks, Markus.  Let me speak briefly on behalf of Ben and the work Ben and IISD did and the Togo scenarios.  There it was a mechanism to open up discussion in a difficult context with nearly insurmountable problems, but to bring people together to begin to focus what was priority setting exercise, what really are the most significant issues that are of paramount interest to all of the stakeholders involved affected by Internet access and so on. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  You seem to have a certain audio problem, but you handled that remarkably well.  If that happens, turn it off and then on again.  There are quite a few people who want to talk.  Pablo, Walda, yourself.  Walda first. 

>> WALDA ROSEMAN:  Thank you.  Actually, Heather has said some of what I wanted to say, as has Laszlo, and that is that the different scenario plannings I've been involved in have often very intended impact.  And it's important to be clear at the front what impact you are trying to achieve, so that you can at some point measure it looking backward; did this accomplish what we wanted to accomplish?

As I had mentioned, the ISOC scenarios were designed to expand the global conversation about an open Internet and what the elements were often to people who would not be thinking in those terms, who don't see all the players that we see, and don't see all of the options.

And I think that it's been successful.  It probably could be more successful with a broader plan for distribution.

But on the policy level, I think we go everywhere from, and in the scenarios, everywhere from having a good time as you said, Laszlo, through plausibility, which is what we have done with the IGF work, to probability, which is a lot tougher.  And it sounds to me you have been doing a lot of the probability work, to downright guidance, and that works too.

But one of the things in all of this that, one of the impacts that you can seek in that process, and any one of those, is going to policymakers, and since I've been one, I don't feel like I'm insulting anyone other than myself maybe, but policymakers can often see within the box that they are working, as can industry and as can others.

And one of the impacts that I think we seek with scenarios is just helping people get outside that box in a safe way; which doesn't necessarily lead directly to the solution, but it opens the door to the solution. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Pablo, I think.

>> PABLO MOLINA:  Yes, I'd like to follow up on the comments that were made about the IGF USA.

In my mind, one of the greatest impacts of the scenario work that we did, precisely training and education and awareness, which is absolutely critical as well as being exposed to new ideas, because these are very participatory methodology that allows many people in the room, participating online, to offer their views about what is going to happen in the future.

Not only that, but this being Washington, everybody has an agenda.  I did have my agenda, beyond the academic, and my agenda was very clear.  I sit on the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre.  So I wanted to see explorations of privacy into the different scenarios and their potential impact.  I also sit on the board of the Hispanic Technology Council in the United States, so I wanted to discuss the issue of diversity and inclusiveness.

And by the same token, many of the people there work for one of organisations or corporations or Government agencies, or even we are just students in an academic programme, and they brought different perspectives to the discussion that I would have never thought of.  This made the process very very rich. 

>> HEATHER CREECH:  If I could add to that, the scenarios that IISD ran on trying to frame up Internet issues and sustainable development, that issue of the diversity of the participants was absolutely key.  So we had the international development agencies there, we had the environmental groups there.  We had the industry people there.  And it really was an effort to get more than the technical community there.  And that added an enormous amount of richness, and as you said, it sort of opened up two people out of the box in a safe way, and really had a real awareness raising benefit as well. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Laszlo, please, and Steve. 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  Thank you.  Maybe one more thought from a slightly different angle.

I think we also, what is also important is that the organisations we are trying to influence through scenarios or that we think we want to inform, whether it's explicit or not, they also need to have some capacity to, or and ability to know what to do with the information.

And I'll give you one interesting example for Government that I think I won't name, that commissioned us to do a particular scenario exercise that was going to look at a broader issue; and then as we kind of got into the initiative, and identified risks and uncertainties, it kind of narrowed it down.  It was a participatory exercise with that particular partner.

And narrower and narrower, and finally, we got in, and this was input for particular product.  And at the end of the day, the decision was made that even an extremely streamlined and narrow result from that scenario exercise would not be put into this particular report.  And the explanation was that we cannot include any information like that in a Government report, unless we already have a solution for that.  And we were simply, we were using the scenario exercise to point out certain risks that we thought that Government and that set of partners was not prepared for, and this was the answer.  So there might be cases where the parties or institutions are not prepared fully to make use of this type of information.

>>  Thank you.  And question for Martin:  One observation was the challenge in Washington, D.C. Was to have things that were provocative and yet plausible, because Washington, D.C. Is full of people that are very sensitive, they have their antenna up to fear rhetoric.  Few folks in the scenarios, you were there the first year, Markus, said come on, that would never happen.  And that can stop and shut down the debate of a scenario because that isn't the point initially.

Initially you want to get people to assume that it happened and now we will discuss, do you like it?  What measures would you take to prevent or enhance it?  And so I discovered in the second time around that when people said, ah, that will never happen, the moderators probes back and says, really?  Why not?  And engage in a debate with the audience about why they don't think it will happen, and that ends up exposing the forces that would either promote or suppress that.  But it's a challenge.

The question for you, Martin, I was so intrigued by what you did in stratifying the demographics, you had preFacebook as well as assisted living individuals.  Were they in the same room together, done separately?  Did you travel to the assisted living facility and some kindergarten school to find people that weren't in Facebook yet?

>>  MARTIN BOYLE:  The approach really was to deal with them and untrend -- if you mix people, I don't think it's going to work, because very quickly, the children find themselves out of their depth or so many things we ask can be a stupid thing to say.

What we did, what our contractors did was to narrow down on to quite a small group, and then give them enough background, play their imagination on the way things might go, and then to get them to, and not much point in asking a 90-year-old to imagine what life is going to be like in 20 years time for them, in the same way it wasn't worthwhile asking the 11-year-old what life was, what a day in their life ten years ago was.

But what you can do is try and stimulate that expectation, which is then tinged by, and this was really the thing we were looking for, was to tease out and identify what those common issues were, and how people might then respond to them, and we were looking in that process for trying to build up that prioritization.

As we sort of went through that, one of the things that really occurred to me, because it's been an underlying problem, concern, issue for me, is that if we improve understanding in this way, it should also help us communicate the issues much more easily to not just the usual suspects, but to the people who should be the usual suspects.

And that's a very difficult group to reach.  So I'm hoping that a lot of the ideas there will do that.

>> STEVE DELBIANCO:  Did you distribute written descriptions of the scenario before you went in to that older individual's home?

>> MARTIN BOYLE:  I don't know whether they saw it before.  I think it was presented on the spot.  They were then encouraged in the first step to think about that four segment and what that might mean in society.  I'm pretty sure that nobody saw it in advance, because by and large, people, if they are given material in advance, don't read it, whether they are 11 or 90. 

>> HEATHER CREECH:  We distributed ours at the time.  We didn't do it in advance.  But we did do some prep work, and laid out some options.  And mostly it was just in the interests of time that we didn't have the time to develop the various story lines, the narratives from scratch in the workshop itself. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  I would also encourage participants in the back seats to ask questions and to make comments.  There has been very much a discussion among those who had the presentation to make.

So please, Marilyn.

>> MARILYN CADE:  I might also suggest to those of you who are interested, and you can get this online on the Web, and there is no charge for it, it is copyrighted but it's freely available, the Netherlands Government, Dutch Government sponsored scenario stories 2020.  And that was a projects managed by Daniel Erasmus, that was presented at the world congress on IT in May of 2010.

It's a, of use to me, it is kind of a useful model, but it did follow a rigorous approach.  Daniel's work is quite good.  He has done work for Dot World, Dot Shell and SAP.  It followed a rigorous approach, but it was done in a way that is accessible; that is, you can understand it easily as a layperson.  They did focus group interviews.  They did a, I think about three-month effort of going around and interviewing different thought leaders, and the thought leaders range from being experts to being users.

The workshop approach they took was breaking into small groups with a facilitator of four to five people, take five minutes to read the scenario, then engage with the moderator on the practicality.  The table conversation was recorded and Rapporteurs were pulling out, and sort of synthesizing.

But that was a half day event, and the preliminary work they did was very extensive, and there were no, the people participating in the workshop were not the people they had interviewed.

But it is another, and it is a resource for those of you who are interested to kind of go and look at. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you for that.  We certainly learned that there are many different ways of doing scenarios.

One question that will be foremost in my mind is how we relate this to the IGF.  Is there any point in pursuing this further?  There were warning voices about the potential, the divisiveness of having scenario sessions.  In the IGF, we want to be inclusive and not divisive, so it may not be the right approach.

Is there merit in continuing with this kind of discussion, in a more meta discussion of scenarios and encouraging local initiatives on scenarios to bring them into the IGF context?  It is certainly intellectually fascinating.  But I think we have also to be a little bit careful not to stimulate the divisive discussion.  Heather, please .

>> HEATHER CREECH:  It comes back to first principles, that Laszlo so nicely laid out for us, which is to what purpose? 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  The purpose can be to have a lively stimulating discussion.  But it may not be what we want.

>> MARILYN CADE:  I had been talking a little bit to Heather about maybe a pilot idea.  And a couple things that come to my mind are, there are many Governments that haven't yet decided whether or not they are going to do a national initiative, and they may face a challenge, increasing awareness about what Internet Governance is and what is going on.

As a learning tool and awareness tool, scenarios might have an attraction, as a sort of stimulating discussion, and then not using it to make decisions, but using it to tell a story about what is going on and that what some people think the implications could be.

I'm going to continue to have few reservations, and think that we should learn to toddle before we run, which to me would be maybe thinking about keeping in touch with folks that have done scenarios here.  Maybe think about whether we could do a repeat of the scenario summit in a half-day proposal for next year, see if some of us, see what we have learned by then, and then try to decide if it's a mechanism that there are resources to do.

It is going to be extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive to be able to provide any kind of consistency.  And I would turn to Laszlo on that point.

Also consistency in the moderation, where the moderators really need some training. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Laszlo asked for the floor.  There you have it. 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  That's a big question.  I think capacity is an interesting question, because despite all the activities that have been going on, on scenario analysis, using a wide range of methods, I think there are structurally, many of them, at least the mainstream organisations have lack, lack capacity to run such exercises.  We are in many ways still in a learning mode.  We did develop capacity building and training modules that are generic enough, focused on environment and development connections, and sort of developing integrated scenarios.

I think one could probably think of developing some core generic enough methodology, that you could then distribute, and train trainers or something like that, and do that in a distributed enough way, so that there is consistency across different regions.

I think that is doable.  One last point, Mr. Chairman, if I may, one of the things that we included so far as a draft finding in our geo-5 report, by the way, that the summary for policymakers of that will be negotiated document by Governments, probably in this room.  That is going to give us some hard time.  But one of the suggestions is, which is not an environment specific suggestion, is that there need to be focus on building capacity at the level of, various levels of governance to engage in more structured policy focus conversations about the future.

So that is true in the environment context, but it's true in other ways as well.

So I think that what you are suggesting, I think resonates with that. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you for that.  Steve, then Walda, please.

>> STEVE DELBIANCO:  Thank you.  I don't think that the use of scenarios necessarily has to generate an outcome, if it is successful at fostering a much more focused and lively and participatory dialogue.

A lot of the workshops and round tables of the past six years, and I've been to all six of them, reveal many times we fall into our old modality of extensive opening remarks, maybe presenting a paper and everyone goes double the allocated time, we have a little bit of Q and A, but that often touches on divisive subjects that Marilyn is concerned about.  There is plenty of divisive subjects that show up in the current modalities that we use.

I would propose, and maybe I should do this myself next year, is propose that one of the workshops that I do would use a scenario as a method, and give it a try, on a particular subject.  Make it privacy, security; pick one of the subjects we always do.  Even a rank amateur like myself, I believe we could generate broader participation of dialogue, as well as more focused findings and reporting out from a workshop.  But we ought to try that and not be constrained by saying that it needs to be consistent everywhere it's done, or that it has to be a big dollar funding.

Let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  This is one of my favorite sayings.  Martin.  Or Walda first.  Sorry. 

>> WALDA ROSEMAN:  Thank you.  At the risk of repeating what a lot of people have said, I really think that, obviously, we are not going to answer your question here.  But I think that we need to be very clear what return on value we are seeking, because it is extremely time intensive, even if it doesn't turn out to be financially intensive.

It is going to, there are risks involved, depending on which way we go, and whether we are really trying to generate a vigorous conversation among multistakeholders, or drill into something where there may not be great disagreement, but it would be useful to bring new ideas to the table on how to make things happen.

And if we had time, I think we could come up with some of those topics too.  I rather like Steve's idea of having a workshop to test something up.  But I think we need to be very careful about thinking that through in advance.

I guess what I'm saying is that as highly as I think of this technique, it's not clear why we would do that, and what the question is we would ask, and whether we would want to determine the outcome; and then as Laszlo said, I've forgotten the actual term, go backwards and move back up to the outcome, or whether we are looking for multiple outcomes.  I mean, there's a lot involved in it, that may or may not be right for us, actually. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you.  Martin.

>> MARTIN BOYLE:  I certainly recognize Walda's concerns about a discussion that might go incredibly wrong.

But as we came at this in the UK, very much as a way of generating discussion, I actually do very much like Steve's idea, because it is a way of getting people engaged on thinking.  And you can cope with extreme views in the thinking in that process.

Yes, we would have to work at exactly how we went about it to make sure that we didn't go completely off the rails.

But going back to the original question, I think trying to stimulate people to think, well, doing scenarios nationally would be a good idea, is something that happens only if people see a value in doing the process.

I think when people see some of the things that come out, they might be stimulated to say, well, actually, yeah, we can do this locally.

We did ask because we wanted to try and identify some of our priorities.  But we also did it because we wanted to have stuff that we could communicate more easily, and so that you have a more easy to understand dialogue, that engages more people in that dialogue.

But listening around the table, other people have had rather different motivations for doing it.  And so again, it's not, the one size does not fit all.  And I think we are looking for people to see the various things that are available, and decide whether they want to do it or not, and if they do want to do it, what sort of techniques, what sort of approach, what sort of questions they are looking for. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  As Walda said, we are not here to take a decision whether or not we are going to continue.  This was an experiment, this session.  We can all come to the conclusion, we have done it, we explained it.  We know what it's all about.  And we don't need -- we may encourage national initiatives, and that's it.  But we may also pursue the other.  One thing, in terms of impact, it seems clear that the greatest impact you may have at the national level, where you actually engage with policy makers.  And I don't see the IGF meeting at the global level of having any impact on the global policy, if we do a scenario session.

However, what we could have, have impact in terms of participation, in creating participatory environment, and that was where I first was drawn to the scenario idea, because I like the engagement of the participants, so there may be well merit in looking at different approaches, in encouraging national initiatives, and then comparing them at the annual meeting.

But at the annual IGF, maybe focus more on using it as a method for smaller workshops to engage.

But I see my attempt to sum up has provoked some reactions.  Laszlo first and then Marilyn.

>>  Ladies first.

>>  Marilyn.

>> MARILYN CADE:  You know, I do confess to having professional training in organizational development.  So I'll try to remember something from that.  Laszlo, I would really welcome your comment on this.

I think that actually, the organisers of the group and the participants ought to sit down among ourselves and have a debrief discussion, and maybe Laszlo might join us, and think about what we are proposing and if we understand what we are proposing.

The reason I say that is, ideally I think scenarios are worked on in very small groups with people that had some training.  I don't mean the prework which can be done by a smaller team, but when you are going through the scenarios, and then we have to examine whether or not the facilities and the resources are available, and we can devote the training and coaching, Laszlo, I would turn to you on that, whether it's possible to build the skills, do them effectively.

I wasn't -- I want to clarify something.  I didn't mean that scenarios could be, I wasn't using the term divisive in talking about a topic.  Scenarios can be very helpful in talking about divisive topics.

My point was that participating in a scenario can without a skilled and responsible facilitator end up with people feeling angry at each other or the facilitator, and that can really blow the whole, you know, so it's just -- the main thing I'm thinking about right now is resources, rooms, the ability to do the prework for something like a global, etcetera. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  One thing is clear.  We will not get a million dollars for having a very big comprehensive scenario.  And we rely essentially on volunteers.  This will not happen unless we have volunteers who are willing to put in an awful lot of effort.

So we can decide, yes, you can say yes, it will be nice to have, but we need volunteers to step forward to do the work.  Laszlo, please. 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  Okay.  I think Walda made this point before, or emphasized this point that is important, that scenarios are a tool.  The end that this exercise would serve would have to be clear.

It cannot be self-serving in that sense.  But having said that, I think this learning by doing careful approach starting with a pilot, but having a big vision, I think is probably the right way to do it.

We were talking about big dollars before.  I don't think that is really that essential, depending on the type of approach one chooses.  If the end is clear, if the vision is big, it's okay to start small, because you are learning, you learn in the process.  One last point I would want to make, and that is a question about how much appetite would there be for such a thing out there in the world.

In our experience, and we have been doing this type of capacity building work mostly through UNEP, but not only through UNEP, for last little while, is that there was a vision, that the global environment, outlook, big global product, expensive and so on, will influence decision-makers through certain way, through book, through a report.

What we found was that what many countries are actually most interested in is trying to replicate that process and develop their own outlooks.  And now you can go to half of the Latin-American countries, and they have outlooks.  So there are I think at least in that domain, environment and development domain, I would say there was a clear appetite to embrace that, this kind of methodology, and I think particularly the scenario methods.  Again, there are big clouds on the horizon.  People are interested. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Well, learning by doing is very much an IGF approach.  We have been stumbling forward in the right direction for the past six years.

We are slowly approaching our closing time, and I would like to approach another subject.

You, Heather, mentioned about linkages between Internet Governance and sustainable development.  You may recall that in his opening speech, Assistant Secretary General Stelzer actually called on the IGF to be involved in the Rio process.  He did not specify how this could be done, and how this could happen.  Rio plus 20 is one of next year's big events.

I think the Internet can and will play a big role in solving global problems.  In this Internet Governance discussion context, I've never really been linked up, but there have been attempts in the IGF to try and build a bridge, but we have never really succeeded in drawing in the sustainable development community.

I think the IISD is kind of an exception which bridges the two.  I wonder whether you would like to comment on this issue. 

>> HEATHER CREECH:  Well, I'd have to give some credit to APC as well.  I think both of us have been committed to linking the discussions within this Forum to a larger global issues agenda.

I'll be having a chat with Andrea later today about what needs to be, what the opportunities are with Rio plus 20 coming up.  We tend to use a shorthand in this business, and some of you may not actually know what we mean by Rio plus 20, but it's the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit which took place in 1992.  It was at the Earth Summit that an agenda, shared agenda for action was developed.  This is an opportunity now to revisit, to see how far we have got.

There are two major issues on that agenda.  One is framed in the context of a green economy.  Is it possible to, in having learned from the global economic crisis, is it possible to use the global economic crisis to shift our economic structures, to be more supportive of green activities and to have more of a green agenda.

Then the second, and for us, certainly for IISD, APC and others, this is the prime opportunity to link all the work that's been done in the OECD and elsewhere on the Internet economy; how does, is the Internet, how does the Internet economy support a transition to a green economy?

These are major issues that the IGF stakeholders can certainly engage in and help us develop this further for some kind of platform at Rio plus 20.

The second agenda item at Rio plus 20 will be a review of international environmental governance in general.  But I won't go into that because that is a rather more arcane...

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  You haven't answered the question, the how we can actually be part of this process. 

>> HEATHER CREECH:  I was trying to avoid it.  (Chuckles.)  I think that requires some reflection.  Maybe this is something that can come up in the emerging issues debate tomorrow, and possibly create some space within the summing up platform tomorrow, that would allow the Mag and allow the Secretariat of the IGF to actually focus on this as an action item over the next six months.  Rio plus 20 is in June.  There is not much of a window left to prepare for it.

>> MARILYN CADE:  I want to call to everyone's attention something that is very much on my mind, but you might not have noticed unless it's a topic, the audience might not have noticed unless it was a topic they were interested in.  That is, this year for the first time three national IGFs had workshops that were driven from a concern about the use of ICTs in disaster.

They are not exactly in the area, Heather, of sustainability, but at least in ours, at least in ours the person who, there may be an emerging, and we will mention in the emerging, we will be saying in this, taking stock, that workshop report will say that they think there is a link to sustainability issues .

>> HEATHER CREECH:  Let me just add something to that.  One of the things to bear in mind is that Rio is a negotiating Forum, so it functions differently from the IGF.

So if we were to do something for Rio, it would need to be framed in that context, that this is any, any knowledge that we develop, any positions that we may wish to take, need to be presented a little bit differently from how this works.

The alternative is simply to have a side event.  But really, the action is in the negotiations themselves, which are Government-led. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  This reminds me of what, I think it was David Satola that made the remark that the IGF process is a multistakeholder process in itself, is a driver and may be a model and may be, in many ways this could be the main message also, that the multistakeholder process that came out basically of the Internet model which is open.  I saw some sign language which I didn't understand.

I was just going to say, I'll finish my thought.  Basically, our process we have developed over the years coming out of the Internet model as a bottom/up collaborative effort, which is open and inclusive, everybody participates as equal, even gives individuals a voice as such, may be a better model to reach consensus also on a global scale, also on other issues.

>>  Markus, a quick comment about the IGF process and sustainable development.

I see a wonderful opportunity now with the evolution that is happening with the IGF process, and I insist on saying a process, not an event, because it is a real process that is gaining more and more dynamic collaboration.

I saw this time that the topic of local content is popping up very strongly.  I think this is heavily related to sustainable development.  If we look at the UN and Millennium Development Goals, in health, education, in climate change and sustainable environment, content, local content pops up everywhere.

Today, the tools have evolved, technically very strong, became affordable and powerful to develop local content.  I see when we talk about regional IGF and national IGFs, we need to empower the dialogue about the development of local content strongly, user generated content, community generated content that is relevant to people in their own languages, and that keeps their heritage and keeps their identity as well.

This is how we are going to be gaining the next billion users in my opinion, linking to development issues and moving from access to basic access, basic Internet access to real access to knowledge.  This is where I see the link created to sustainable development.  And the bridge now is possible and easier due to the evolution of technology that happened and due to the affordability of the tools.  Thank you .

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you very much. 

>> LASZLO PINTER:  Just a few more thoughts on this.

Beyond the link to sustainable development, I think the link to transition is an important one.  What comes out of the, at least the environment development discourse very strongly is that beyond the rhetoric of the first Rio summit, we have to think about transition processes, and the role knowledge, generation knowledge, distribution knowledge, use and so on, the role that plays in this transition process, and we are not talking about one transition.  We are talking about multiple transitions, which goes back to the point made very well by the previous speaker.

So we are talking about coordinated transitions, but locally specific transition by necessity, by necessity of culture, by necessity of specific local problems and ecosystem conditions and so on.

So I think networks in general, ICTs as enabling conditions in that play a particular role.  And just the last parting thought, there will, the point on data was made before, data is also essential in that.

And many local initiatives are engaged in local monitoring, local observation, local adaptation.  There is a summit actually in Abu Dhabi in December, Eye on Earth, which is a large event like this, on global observation, with very heavy emphasis on technology.

So that interface is very strong. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you also for this.  I think we all agree that the Internet is absolutely crucial for the challenges ahead.  It is just what we have not been able to do is link up our discussion to the discussion taking place in this sustainable development community at the very basic level; what are the next steps, what we should do.  But I suppose this may well be -- Louis, yes, please.  You are a brilliant mind.  I'm sure you have a suggestion.

>>  Thank you.  It's just to mention the point where actually the OECD, and in particular the working party that is being accompanied by Reynold as experience, so when there was the big meeting in Copenhagen about one year and a half ago I guess, the OECD through its working party on information economy which is a subsidiary of the committee on information, computer and communications policy, tried and actually did a very strong effort to bring the issues of the role of ICT in the environmental sustainability, with quite a lot of background work, with workshops before the meeting, and even introducing a paragraph to appear in the final declaration.  But at the end, it didn't appear, which was a disappointment for all.

And well, I'm somehow asking for a contribution about that, because the impression I have is that of course for us, that work on this area in ICT, we see the possible applications as very clear.  However, from the point of view of applications of large scale open networks, as it is the case, usually, they are linked in terms of sustainability, marked as sustainability to new economic and business models.  And the fact that you present the idea without presenting the convincing economic or business case weakens very much the sort of linkage.

I would suggest if an effort is going to be done in this direction, that it should also be sustained from the economic and business point of view, if things are mature for that.  If Reynolds could come in.

>> TAYLOR REYNOLDS:  This is an area where of course, we are very interested in continuing work.  In fact, we will have a presentation, we will be participating in the ICTs for green growth discussions tomorrow here at the IGF.  So the OECD information economy group will be there as well.  This is an area we are very interested in, and will continue working in, because the linkage between ICTs and the environment is extremely strong.  It is one that we cannot afford to not focus on. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you.

>>  We have a question from D.C., it's in D.C., they are asking is there a way of refining the scenario so more people can participate in the developing and refining of these scenarios? 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  That is a big question.

>> MARILYN CADE:  It's Marilyn.  I probably ought to answer that, since that is the remote hub for the IGF USA, and maybe Pablo.  That is exactly what we hope to do next year.  We use the resources we had, and I think one of my colleagues mentioned earlier, free labour.  He didn't say this, but free labour and free intellectual contribution is sometimes limited in its availability.

So we do hope to do that, and I think Pablo, you wanted to follow up on that too.

>>  PABLO MOLINA:  If the question was totally asked by one of my students who is required to watch in Washington, D.C., we are aware this counts as class participation.  Thank you very much.

And also, be sure that the people who will take the course next semester will be doing this kind of work. 

>> MARKUS KUMMER:  Thank you for that.  You actually increase our remote participation statistics.    (Chuckles).

We have now, it's beyond 6:00.  I suppose we ought to come to closure.  I don't think we have a sort of consensus on everything we discussed.  That would have been impossible I think to achieve.  It's such a complex issue.

But I think there is enough enthusiasm here to continue the discussion, at least among those who are presenting and looking whether or not to pursue this further.

I think also, the link to Rio plus 20, that I think there is, if there was any consensus, I think everybody agrees that it is important and everybody agrees that the Internet can and does contribute to environmental issues and contributes to sustainable development.

I don't see yet a very clear path forward on how we should link us as IGF community to the Rio plus 20 process.  Maybe some way could be indeed, as Heather suggested, to have a kind of side event or something on Internet governance issues.  But the IGF as such is not an organisation that can actually do it.  We would rely on volunteers who would participate.

I know the business community I think is involved very strongly in the Rio plus 20 process.  And maybe there could be some kind of ad hoc Dynamic Coalition on building bridges with next year, it's in June next year, so it will be presumably ahead of next year's annual IGF meeting.

As I said, I don't think, and that is a good thing about the IGF, you don't have to decide anything.  We can have an interesting stimulating discussion, and we can take that home, think about it, and pursue this.

There will be more sessions tomorrow, emerging issues, taking stock, where we can think overnight and bring these ideas into these sessions tomorrow.

I would like to thank all the panellists for their extremely interesting and thoughtful presentations and for participating in what I thought was a stimulating discussion, and on the whole, a very stimulating session.  As an experiment, I think it was successful.  I would have wished for more participation.  But this we cannot steer, and quality matters more than quantity.  I thank you all for your attention and wish you an excellent evening.  Thank you.

>>  Thank you to our moderator.

   (Applause.)

   (Session ends at 18:08)

 

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