FINISHED TRANSCRIPT
EIGHTH INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM
BALI
BUILDING BRIDGES-ENHANCING MULTI-STAKEHOLDER COOPERATION
FOR GROWTH AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
OCTOBER 23, 2013
2:30 P.M.
FLASH SESSIONS
TaC AND SEED ALLIANCE
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This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Welcome to this Open Forum together supported by IFLA, International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.
And we have Stuart Hamilton with us, who kindly accepted to be present here and to organize the Open Forum.
What did this Open Forum involve and what we would like to do to present, to discuss mainly today with you, it's an outcome of the previous IGF meetings and the workshops that we organized or co-organized on the subject of vulnerable people and ICTs. Marginalized groups in the Information Society or how ICTs could help assist vulnerable marginalized group to be better integrated in the economic and social life. So the result, one of the results of the workshop last year, somehow it was the Working Group which was created completely naturally and the Working Group engaged to work on the issue and maybe to develop a kind of recommendations for countries on how to better integrate the mentioned groups
What we tried actually to do during this first year is to identify the areas we think to be important for the margin lies and vulnerable groups. What we would like to discuss with you and mainly to have your input, we have with us and we were very proud and happy to have with us and to have the support from ICANN. We have with us Nigel Hickson present here. Thank you so much for joining and I think Nigel will present the message from the CEO and president of ICANN. We would like to thank again ICANN for their support
Because we think that the issue is not addressed for the moment, not correctly but it is discussed, but as we can see, I would say it is not the most sexy issue for Internet Governance community. We would like to address this as well. I think that is why the support of ICANN of other institutions is so important in order to better address the issue.
We also have with us Ana from the government of Portugal. Thank you, Ana for joining and thank you for the support of the government.
Sure, would you like to ...
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thank you, Yulia. We have all been told we have to essentially almost put the microphones into our mouths in order for the remote participation to be able to hear us
I'm here representing IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. And actually, I recognize many of you in the room from the session that took place just before lunch. So I'm going to try not to repeat myself but at the same time I think there are a few things I would like to restate.
IFLA has been coming to the IGF for about five or six years now and during that time we focused on a number of issues in the workshops that we participated in and in the Plenaries. One of those has been about access to information through more balanced copyright frameworks. But more recent we have been placing a great emphasis on public access to ICTs in the community. And last year in Azerbaijan I will I can't approached us to participate in a workshop on access to ICTs for vulnerable and disadvantaged groups. And we were very happy to take part in that workshop because public libraries and many other types of libraries serve all sorts of groups in the community. In fact, are kind of mission statement if one could be said to exist would be to make sure that everybody in the community gets equal access to information.
So we took part in that workshop which we felt was a very good thing for us to do. It had some very, very good partners. Ana was there. Other people from various NGOs working in the areas of cyber crime and protection of vulnerable people and we followed it up with Yulia with a workshop in the European Internet Governance Forum in June this year in Portugal. That workshop went very well and in fact I distributed a document which I'm sure that Yulia will talk about in just a moment that does contain a set of recommendations that came out of the workshop in Portugal
From IFLA's perspective I wouldn't say this is a simple issue but our approach to it is relatively simple. Libraries all over the world are already working with marginlised and disadvantaged groups to provide them with public access to ICTs, but there is still much more that we could do if we are able to work with the correct partners in the development community. If we are able to work with the correct partners in government policy areas. And with partners in the business community and partners such as ICANN, of course.
We really feel that there are a lot of opportunities to increase access to information for vulnerable and marginlised groups if we take advantage of what our sector has to offer and that is a space, a trusted place in the community where people can come, con feel safe and can get access and training to ICTs that offer them access to information, offer them access to skills, to jobs, and to really the processes of civic engagement
So I'm very pleased to be here and pleased to be able to be able to be on hand to moderate the discussion and to take part. I'm pleased to see that there are a few of my colleagues in the audience from library groups. We have had a few librarians join us for the first time this week in the IGF and I'm keen to see a louder voice for the library and information community in Internet Governance debates. I'll leave it there and pass it back to Yulia.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you so much, Stuart. I think we need to, when we speak about vulnerable people in marginalised communities to underline because the question is always raised: What is the definition of vulnerable? When we speak about vulnerable people and marginlised we refer to the definition begin be the tune is agenda for the Information Society. And I also would like to speak a little bit more about the Working Group and the members who took this engagement to work with us. We have the representative of the African Union of ITU, World Economic Forum of OACD. We have the support of the Council of Europe, the civil society as well as the number of representatives of the private sector. So I would like to thank them. They were unable to travel to Bali, but they helped us and we worked all together during this year.
I would like to turn now maybe to ask Nigel where do you think ICANN can or think it is important to support this kind of initiatives, and specifically why ICANN thinks it is important to have the voice for vulnerable communities concerning Internet Governance issues and Information Society issues? Nigel?
>> NIGEL HICKSON: So you have to talk very close to the microphone, is that the idea? Well, good afternoon and thank you very much, Yulia for inviting me to speak this afternoon.
I mean, clearly this is an issue of importance. I used to work in the U.K. government and it was always an issue of how you, if you like, reached out to all parts of the community in terms of Internet access, in terms of bringing people on board. And governments of whatever complexion, whatever place in the world have tackled this problem in various ways. I'm not sitting or standing before you this afternoon and suggesting that ICANN has any more insight into this than any other organisation. What I think is clear, however, and I think it was striking what we just heard about libraries because I mean, you know, sometimes you think of libraries and firstly, I thought what is the connection between libraries and marginlised and disadvantaged groups? Of course, there is a connection. I'm not saying there is an absolute connection. But what I clear here is that we have to provide access to communications. We have to provide access to communications in a way, access to the Internet in a way that is understandable, affordable, and attributable to the people that want it. And ICANN has no magic wand in doing. In all aspects, we don't provide broadband. We don't provide infrastructure. But I think something that we do provide is domain names in different types of languages. And the new introduction and only yesterday we were able to announce that the first new generic top level domains, as some of you know ICANN just introduced or in the process of introducing, there are only 22 generic top level domains at the moment. And we are in the process of perhaps introducing another thousand into the root of the Internet over the next year that people have applied for and in a fairly extensive process.
The first four or five to go into the root of the Internet perhaps as soon as next week or perhaps even later this week will be international domain names in the Russian language, in the Chinese language, and in the Indian language.
And Indian script. Therefore, this is very significant. I am not suggesting that this touches all marginlised groups but it certainly allows people in communities to be able to take part in the Internet that possibly didn't before.
There is one other thing I want to say in this debate which I think is relevant. And that is the relevancy of an open and a single Internet. Because we are not, and we found this out in the U.K. when we were trying to extend the reach offed about into the communities. I'm sure it is the same in other countries as well. We are not going to attract marginlised groups on to the Internet unless it is a single, open and secure Internet. That is something at the heart of the ICANN mission. We are just not going to do it. When we asked in the U.K. only two or three years ago, you know, U.K. ministers used to say: Why are these people not on the Internet? Is it money? Is it -- what is it?
And it is a whole variety of reasons. I mean, some of it is physical access, of course. But a lot of it is the perception of what the Internet is to them. And that is something that I think we are all responsible for. We have to have an attractive environment in which to use the Internet to get people to use it. Thank you.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you, Nigel, for this opening statement and once again for the support of ICANN to this initiative. Actually, it was one of the questions I wanted to raise. How do you think the initiative of this program could assist this vulnerable groups or, you know, to help them to better integrate via the use of new opportunities in the social life and economic life of their societies?
>> NIGEL HICKSON: Well, you know, I don't think we want to over emphasize the point. One of the great advantages of having new international domain names is that you can have domain names in Chinese and Cyrillic script. I'm not suggesting that just doing that is an answer to disadvantaged and marginalized people. But I assume there are people that hither to not have been able to or felt reluctant to take part in the Internet because of the dominance of Latin scripts on the Internet because of this perception that the Internet is a sort of Anglo-Saxon sort of entity or whatever.
You know, there's just a few French people.
But I think the ability to have Internet in different scripts must help. Of course, the next billion Internet users isn't going to come from Europe or North America. It comes from Africa. It comes from China and India. So I mean, I think this must help, you know, not a complete answer to the question at all.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I do think it really does have a strong possibility of helping in that for the first time on that top level, as you say over the next year or so, there is the possibility to direct people in a much easier way to resources that could help them through domain names in their own script. It's a very simple step and obviously it goes on to depend on the quality of the resource that lives behind that URL, but nevertheless it is the sort of thing that, to keep hitting the same drum that libraries can introduce to their patrons and actually point them in the right direction. So it's only something that my community can work with.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: We would like actually now to have a discussion with you. We have identified during this year of our engagement of the engagement of the group a number of areas that you can see on the screen. That came out from previous discussions during the IGF or in a different force where it is very important for the target group we work with. So we would like just to have -- you have the kind of very first draft that is, that you can take from the first table and we can give it to you later on.
Which explains actually why this area, how we have arrived to this area. You are welcome to comment and send us your suggestions. We will be very happy to work on this together and specifically to know more about needs and solutions because we think that the recommendations we try to put together, the most important is to answer the needs and to have the solutions, and to integrate solutions which we already developed and already exist.
So we would like to launch a discussion. Do you have comments, ideas, do you think there are other areas where you would like to see among the addressed questions? We with like to have your experiences if ... please, you have the mic. Please introduce yourself.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Tariq Zaman. I am here with ISF and APNIC. We are working in the different indigenous communities of Malaysia. One of the things that I would like to highlight here is other than -- I mean, in Korean ICT, the radio and television role in giving rights to vulnerable people. If you would like to explain something, especially in terms of library relationship with this type of tools.
The second one is yeah, the perception, the issue of perception is very much important. I just want to highlight one of the experience. When we were working on the indigenous botanical knowledge of the community and the indigenous communities are very good for this type of information to transform it or store it from oral structure to a documented digitized structure. Because there is a whole ecosystem, whole structure which is governing this type of information, which is, which was previously implicit and now we are making it in explicit form. The libraries in Australia are really working on if a data is a server, data storage place is specifically for traditional knowledge, but we felt that the communities are not that much easily acceptable to this type of concept unless they have the physical control of the data. It is not only the logical control, but the physical control. And in terms of that, then the data server, local data server concept was very supportive for us to make the community understand where the data will be stored and how it will be accessed. Thank you.
>> Thank you very much. That question, the first if I was hearing you correctly, the first point that you were bringing in was the use of other sorts of ICTs, television, radio, I guess, local radio for access to information for these groups.
From a library perspective, I know that in certain parts of Africa there has been a connection between community libraries and the use of radio for sharing health information, for example. I have to confess I don't know too much about what we've really done with television. I do have some colleagues in the audience who may be able to mention things like that. But certainly if you think about our community, we are very much used to improvising, shall we say. We are quite well-known for having Camel, horse libraries, donkey libraries. There are parts of the world in remote communities where our general concept of what a library looks like has to go out of the window. That, of course, means that the sort of people that staff those libraries are able to improvise.
So in terms of new technologies, librarians actually have been adapting quite well to new technologies for the last 50, if not more years. We don't tend to have a great reputation in some respects, but we get on with our jobs quietly an get on with things and very often we are using new technologies before other professions. Enough for blowing the trumpet for librarians there.
When it comes to access to traditional and indigenous knowledge, this is something we have been working on quite a lot, particularly within my organisation.
We work, IFLA works to protect and make available indigenous expressions and we work at the World Intellectual Property Organisation to make sure that the legal frameworks for which some of this information is transferred and stored are robust and in fact benefit everybody, not just people coming and taking the information out and reusing it.
At a community level we have policies. We have a multicultural library manifesto which essentially is a guidance document for librarians who wish to work with diverse populations. It includes obviously sensitivity issues and a number of things that librarians need to be aware of. Because you touched upon some of them in your intervention, the feeling that once this information is taken from intangible form and put into digital form, what happens next? There are levels of information that are available to you as you go older or if you come from certain parts within your community. Of course, the Internet is about making it available for everybody. How do you actually ensure that those traditions can be held?
So I am pleased to say it's something that our community has been working on. If you go to IFLA.org and search for the multicultural library manifesto you'll find a good deal of resources on that. I hope that answers your question in a couple of ways.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: I wanted to address also your statement. It will be very useful probably to add one of the areas through all of mass media so we can ensure that this is addressed as well if it will go for the recommendations or a kind of paper we would like to circulate and to present maybe next year or at least work on it in the coming months.
As well as to pay attention to traditional content as may be part of the local content. We do have already with multilingualism.
Thank you for this. Do we have -- would you like to share, please.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Udogis. I work as selector at the University of Indonesia. My mom is a librarian. Now she is retired and I hope directly related to IFLA. I want to share what is happening to access to ICT, et cetera. Indonesia is a large country. We have about 17,000 islands and we have about 500 local languages. So you can imagine. And our government is actually wants to comply with the WSIS where we have a target that by 2015 15 percent of our population will have access to information.
Lots of initiatives have been done by Civil Society and also government for this. One example is that our governments set up a mobile Internet cafe. It is like a small truck which is converted to a mobile Internet. They have distributed to all municipalities in Indonesia. And the small truck will go to rural areas, villages, et cetera, to give access to the rural people. So here in Indonesia, the vulnerable, we can mention it is not the people with disability, et cetera, although that is also included. But more to the rural people who doesn't have access, who don't have access to the information. So then the only problem is that as you can see, after we give access to information, then we realize that the local content, our local content is actually not so much for them. So that is one thing that we should work on. Yes, we can give Facebook or give access to Google, et cetera, but if let's say most of the content is actually in English, and when you speak to farmer or let's say fishermen, et cetera, then within a couple of months then they will get bored and move away from the Internet. So that is something that we really, for us to really work on.
I am also one of the Chair of the dot ID, CC ID. We have spoken about the option of developing the internationalized domain names for non-Latin scripts. As you can see, we have so many scripts as well. One of the most famous may be the Japanese language, Hana Japonica.
But still two days ago we have discussion with ICANN as well and they also remind us that the road to have an ISBN is still so long. We need to follow the acceptance of the people here, whether we have a local newspaper with non-Latin scripts, et cetera, and whether we have the software to write the content in the local languages, et cetera.
Now, other than that our government also have launched a new regulation, new government regulation on public information communication information public -- what is it? Public information access, something like that. So it gives responsibility to the government to give access of information to the people. Now, the initiative of having the mobile, this is actually a public-private cooperation. So I guess I have mentioned most of the topics over there with the Indonesian example. Who knows if other countries can learn something of what we have done here. Thank you.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you so much. We do have a couple of minutes for -- I think it is what we wanted to engage this discussion actually and to know what is going on in other countries.
Do we have someone else who would like to share the experience of your country? Please, sir.
>> AUDIENCE: I actually have -- my name is Omar Ansari. I'm sorry, I'm from Afghanistan, working for the national ICT Alliance of Afghanistan.
I run a business called technician where we provide community technology services incubator management and support to different institutions to use technologies as a tool for development.
My question is we are talking about open data and the eGovernment solutions and the Internet and connectivity. There is one thing very important in that called software. What is more important, especially for the Developing Countries, is open source software. Open source, it is either free or very cheap where the source code is open for improvements and modification and collaboration as well between various developer communities.
How do IFLA and ICANN see open source? And how, what are your support initiatives for countries, let's say, like Afghanistan and other countries who are very new to the content and the software industries? Thank you.
>> Okay. Yeah. Open source is something that we most definitely support. IFLA is a membership organisation with every 1500 members. One of those members is called Electronic Information For Libraries or EIFL. Website is EIFL.org. They have a free and open source software program which is aimed at libraries to get them to implement free and open source software solutions. In a slight cop-out, as we would say and conscious of time I will direct you straight away there and give you my card afterwards so I can link you up with those people. In general it ethos sorts of solutions that we support.
There is a couple of things, the gentleman from Indonesia also reminded me that some of the issues that we are talking about here with regard to local content and open source, this really crosses developed and Developing Countries. I'm thinking about the way that you've still got elderly and margin naturalized users in European countries who come into libraries not knowing anything about the Internet and one of the ways that we bring them into a safe space where they can learn about it is through local content. We use family history resources or things about the environment in which people live. That makes them much more comfortable. I thought that was quite interesting. Then in open source terms one of countries which is doing the most with open source in its libraries is Finland which is actually one of the leaders for library services in the world. They have a wonderful thing in Helsinki which is the laptop doctor. You can bring your laptop in to him and he'll fix it for you. If you decide to get rid of Windows on your laptop and put in Linux, he'll do it for free. It's a free switch to Linux. The Fins are pushing that. I will be happy to talk more about the free software program to you. I will introduce you to the colleagues in the back. We have three members from the library association here in Bali and if they are here, I'm happy to introduce you to them.
>> NIGEL HICKSON: I'll be brief. That's quite incredible, it happens in Finland. Open source software, yeah. I mean, I don't think ICANN has a formal position, but clearly I mean, as we were talking about earlier it is all to do with access and barriers, isn't it? And the fewer barriers you can put in place in terms of allowing someone to access the better.
I mean, I think the other point about local content is -- again I'm not trying to say that new generic top level domains are going to sort of create a whole new paradigm here, but I think there is something about local content and certainly again I fully support what you were saying in that if you can bring -- you know, if someone comes into a library I'm sure and says you are trying to get them on the Internet, being able to show them the local bus timetables or the local, you know, when you're in a restaurant, it's probably more relevant than showing them the BBC news or CNN which they say they have come at home and they've come to the library to get away from it.
Domain names play a role here and personally, the new generic top level domain program for me is all about community names. I mean, that's where I see a real, something that is really important. And localities having their own generic top level domain in whatever language I think is going to help people write content for local communities. And that must be positive.
In terms of international domain names, I take your point that in an environment where you've got so many different cultures, so many different islands and no one is going to -- in the last generic top level domain around no one is going to spend $165,000 in applying for domain name for a small island or something. Well, I mean some people might, but very few.
What I hope ICANN can be able to do going forward in the next round on domain napes, generic level top level domain names is have a completely new approach where perhaps we are able to address the issues of cost and the issues of the real need to reach out to a more diversified community are in terms of providing such domains. Hopefully something will happen on that.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you once again, Nigel. It gives us also ideas on which way we have to work.
We can take five more comments. Wondering what question, we would like to have the point of view of Portugal. Be sure we have only five minutes. Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Okay. My name is Michael Ortid, representing the ISP industry from Europe as well as from Germany. What we are currently, in Europe what is working with is on a guide, on human rights for Internet users. You will hear more about it by the end of this week. It is currently in a draft status, but I think this covers quite a lot of what is on the page there. Already from the Council of Europe developed and used in many countries even outside of Europe are guidelines on human rights for Internet service providers. Or even for game developers, but this is a little bit outside.
But what I can imagine is, if you have a certain set of fundamental things which are important for the group of vulnerables and you put it additionally on guidelines and whoever signs up for it gets a stamp on his Web page, IGF approved for vulnerables or something like that, this would help people to know their rights even. And to know what they can expect in other countries and puts pressure on those countries which do not develop.
In terms of access, access to Internet or to information is normally a very national thing. It is up to the country to provide this access, which means in turn you have to put pressure on countries on governments of countries in order to provide appropriate access for vulnerables.
And this is I think the hard part of everything. Everything else can be done. And I know there are a lot of initiatives for supporting blind people or for those groups already on the way. Someone should collect everything and then try to put it together. That would be my remarks to what is on the screen. Thank you.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you, Michael. I think it is a wonderful idea. We will be happy to work actually together to have this as an addition to the guide because it was a lot of work done and was also involved in this work. Partly so it would be a fantastic idea to compile it our efforts and to move together on this.
I think we have one question from the remote participant?
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, good afternoon. My name is Alejandro Acosta from Venezuela. I'm an ISOC ambassador and also your remote moderator. You mentioned a few minutes ago if anybody from the audience have an experience in this topic, they can share it with you. In Venezuela we had I believe a successful implementation of connecting libraries to Internet and it was quite good. It was mainly oriented in the rural areas. In fact, it is working. Maybe it has more than six or seven years. I helped, participated a lot in designing the network. And regarding the open source software and maybe not open source software. At the beginning the implementation was done using Microsoft, but maybe two years later we moved everything to open source. And that's the way it is working right now. The only thing that they would like to point out is that it is some rural areas are working with satellite links which are usually slow, but well sometimes you can do -- you cannot do anything else. So I would like to promote the use of fiber even as much as possible. Thank you.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you for this. I think we have definitely to close in two minutes.
Two to three minutes. I would like to invite Anna to make the statement why to support this initiative from the government of Portugal an also to share with us already the work which was done in reference to the publication. Anna, please.
>> Anna: Thank you very much. Well, I have only two minutes, so I will be really, really short. But I have to say that today during the meeting that we had about the national and regional initiatives of the IGF, it was asked which themes we discuss normally at the national and regional initiatives that are not discussed here at the global IGF.
And I know year I can't put together -- Nigeria put together with Portugal the lack of sessions about inclusion, about empowerment, about capacity building. So all these part of ICT and society is missing here. So it is interesting.
Well, in Portugal since 1997, so for more than 15 years, that we are working with what is now called vulnerable people. And we work with people with the functional limitations and we did a lot of things with the citizens with special needs, which includes the increased use of sign language, closed captions and audio description on television.
Another thing that we did is to put the ATMs, you know, the money machines with the interface accessible to visually impaired and this exists since 1998.
Then we have an Internet safety in the formal curriculum. Digital inclusion centers and digital literacy and access to ICTs, which includes ICT and the elderly, open and free ICT training sessions all over the country, municipal libraries, inclusion nationality coverage, ICT in remote rural areas and the recognition of the digital skills acquired in informal and nonformal learning contexts.
The most important thing now that we are trying to setting up on top of this is an ICT and society network. And this ICT and society network will be launched on the 29th of October. With whom? With the professors from the universities and the from Portugal and all over the regions because we conclude that we can not be dependent on the change of governments and on the funding from the governments.
So we have to have this civil society mobilised and not to depend from outsiders and political changes.
So it is interesting because we are going to have 21 professors, dealing with ICT and the society issues and they will be the coordinators of 21st, 21 regions in Portugal.
Doing what? They will boost the digital literacy and the digital inclusion in that particular region. So we have evidence how is now the digital literacy and the digital inclusion and in about six months we are going to measure what they did with whom. We are incurring, encouraging them to work with all the stakeholders of the region including, of course, the private sector. And try to do partnerships with them. And in six months we are going to measure if the evidence we had now, it is the same or not. And in one year again we are going to monitor.
And we will see what were the best practices that really work out and that allow to increase the literacy in a particular region and help to increase the or decrease the -- no, increase the inclusion, the digital inclusion. Sorry.
Increase, decrease, okay.
Thank you.
>> YULIA ELANSKAYA: Thank you, Ana. I think we made pressure because of the three minutes. Thank you for sharing these initiatives in really a very short amount of time. I would like also to mention that the ministry of ICTs and Anna's department, they made a publication that they prepared for the European dialogue on Internet governance in June. It is a publication on vulnerable people and ICTs, the situation in Portugal. Well, Ana has the book. This booklet, I believe, will be disseminated later on this week at the IGF and is at least available at their website and at our website which is www.vulnerables.edu.
Please follow our work. I would like to summation, before going for the one minute final statement, I would like to sum up how we would proceed now. We will definitely include all comments and suggestions. Work out on the areas identified here by the area that is we just mentioned before. And maybe draft a kind of short recommendations for this particular target group vulnerable people, for national, for countries at national and regional level how to better integrate them in the Information Society and I think it will be definitely interesting to work and to follow what Michael mentioned as a suggestion.
And to have a kind of very short notice on how it could be implemented. Afterwards, we had already an interest and the cooperation on the possible implementation of these recommendations in Portugal. This is why I would like once again to thank for the support. In India, I would like to call to other countries who are interested to work together to maybe see how we could implement these or work together or whatever. Please contact us. Visit our website, www.vulnerable.EU. I would like also to thank, we are unable unfortunately due to technical problems in the room to have this support from the European economic and social Committee from the president, Mr. Milos, who personally engaged to support the initiative. We would like to thank the European economic an social Committee and Mr. Milos as well as Faris Hada for his work and Nigel for taking his time and contributing to this. Thank you, Stuart, and all members of the group and the audience.
I would like to give the floor to the next.
>> STUART HAMILTON: In summary I would like to say something very, very short. IFLA loves coming to the IGF. We learn a lot of stuff from a lot of people and we share information about what it is that libraries do.
However, there are ways in which we can make a very concrete difference by making, by engaging with some of the processes which are currently ongoing around the world to actually make some of the things that we are talking about, shall we say, a policy reality. I'm talking about things like the WSIS+10 review and I'm talking about things like the process that is leading to the post 2015 development framework which is currently being discussed by the United Nations.
If anyone in the room is interested in what IFLA is trying to do in those processes and what we are trying to do is to ensure access to information is recognised as an fundamental pillar for development, then I welcome you to come along to room 10 at 4:30 today where the dynamic coalition on public access in libraries is meeting and talking about concrete outcomes rather than learning from each other. We are talking about how we can get things done. Thank you for coming to this meeting, though. It has been very interesting.
(Applause.)
(Standing by.)
>> MODERATOR: You are more than welcome to attend the Seed Alliance Open Forum for those who were here previously. We are going to start right now soon, if possible. But once again you are more than welcome to attend.
So Raul, could you please open our session?
>> RAUL ECHEBERRIA: Thank you very much. How long is it? Few minutes? Short? Okay.
Good afternoon, everybody. This open forum is about very exciting experience of collaboration across the different regions. That is the Seed Alliance project. The Seed Alliance project is a project that is run by three organisations.
APNIC in Asia-Pacific, AFRNIC and LACNIC from Latin America and the Caribbean. The objectives of this project is to identify good initiatives that contribute with the development of the Information Society in the respective regions and support those projects as with small grants, but also to create opportunity, new opportunities for the people that is behind these projects and for the projects themselves, increasing the coordination and working among the projects' proposals and also to help them to scale the projects when, with some additional grants to get a new faces of the projects.
The Seed Alliance is a project that is supported by SIDA, the cooperation agency of Sweden. And the IDRC, the developed cooperation agency from Canada.
And it is composed by three projects. They are run in their respective regions. ISSIF, the project run by APNIC in the Asia-Pacific. FIFA is the project run by AFRNIC in Africa. And FRIDA is the project run by LACNIC in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Every year thousands of people is involved in preparing projects and presenting projects to different, for competing for the grants, small grants, but also for the awards that are presented by each project in the regions. And also for the opportunities of scaling the project. And so it is the achievement of the project of the Seed Alliance project. It is not only to the results of the project that are directly supported by the program but also the creation of the community, the community that is created around the program composed by all the people that every year is preparing the projects to be to be presented to the program.
And we try to help them to work with them, trying to work within five initiatives, try to improve their projects. And also we had a conversation a few minutes ago when we found some opportunities of putting some people that is running projects in contact with other people with other projects, but also with people from governments and from other initiatives saying okay, what you are doing is I'm sure very interesting for a given country or given organisation
This is the introduction that I was supposed to make. I hope this is okay so I can stop speaking. Okay.
Now it is done.
I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Raul Echeberria from LACNIC, one of the organisations that participate in the Seed Alliance. Seed Alliance is supported by SIDA and IDRC from Canada and also the projects FRIDA and others have the support of the Internet society.
So okay? Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Raul. Now we give the floor to the awardees to tell you the award that they have been rewarded with represent for them and what are the challenges they are going to face and achieve. So let's start first with you.
Quickly. Just one minute, tell us what the award is for you.
>> Okay. Yeah. Actually the award is really a great achievement for me and my team and our organisation. Should I give some introduction of the project? Okay.
Yeah. Our project is basically designing mobile tools for documenting key righting and collecting the indigenous botanical knowledge with indigenous community of Malaysia which was previously, now they are settled. They have Internet access with solar powered tele-center and they don't have any other source of income. With this type of activity, then the Internet they are moving towards opening their community for ecotourism and other economic opportunities. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you. I forgot to ask you before speaking, can you present yourself and the project, your project quickly?
>> Thank you, Patricia. I'm Fava Fuli from Benin, West Africa. Information net which is a system take allows anybody to find to find the nearest pharmacy in the immediate area and buy, pay online and deliver to home. This has been delivering orders and I am happy to tell that it is a modern recognition of all the effort my team and I have achieved in order to implement the project and forward we will try to improve our project to tell the group that they are right in trusting us. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. Let's go to FRIDA's awardees.
>> This is Dr. Masi, my project is Shiko.com. This is education platform that we provide in the native language, Bengali. So the remote area people are students, particularly kids and girls. Those who cannot afford to go to the territorial schools are or supporting schools because usually the rich peoples kids going those schools. So we are trying to give access to the education material to the poor people as well and people of, they tell about the digital divide. It is not the digital divide. It is the poor and rich divide. We have to realize that. We are interested in education and we are trying to provide the education material to the remote. Right now our next challenge is how we can bring this online material to the offline. So I look forward for the partnership or the any kind of project that would like to, how we can work together to bring this online material that is in local language to the offline, to print or something else. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: You're welcome. So you are ISF awardee. Now we are going to the FRIDA awardee.
>> Hi, I'm Laura from Argentina. I work to improve the public debate, the quality of public debate in my country. I am the leader of an organisation that is called Chequado. It is the first fact checking in the Latin America and Caribbean. We obtain the FRIDA prize in innovation category. We are looking forward to expanding the experience in other countries in region and in other continents in the south. There is no initiative nation that we know about it, but there is only one in Africa that is doing the same that we are doing. Thank you.
>> Good afternoon. My name is Marta Tella. I represent a organisation in Peru called Onguwa. The main objective of the project is using ICTs for improving the democratic process in the rural areas of Peru. Since 2007 we have improved the service offered by 44 public institutions, including health center, including educational establishment, including municipalities and we have made possible 180 civil associations. Can participate in the democratic process in the communities. Thanks to FRIDA program now we are start working on health information system with health center that we work before and we are in the future we expect that we can expand our activities in another areas in always in the rural part of Peru. Thank you.
>> Hello. Sorry, my English is not good so I am going to read. My name is Anna. I'm from Argentina. I am a member NGO analyst. Our group is a website in Argentina in sign language. That has to online books collection to facilitate free access to the deaf girls and byes. Thanks to the FRIDA programs, we have now new developing a new collection special for young people. In the future we speak to create a fully stocked library of books to be read in Argentina sign language. That equal lies opportunity to deaf girls and boys and put them aside from the situation of exclusion in which they are. And for that win of the support, our dream is that more children will discover and show the place of literature. Thank you very much.
>> Hi. My name is Juan Kamilla. I'm from Colombia. We were winners of the FRIDA award in the developing category. SETA is a project of the municipality of the rural region metropolitan and as computers. Our main objective is to tell the community about climate or environmental events such as landslides or flash floods that protect human lives and life quality by monitoring and communicating the data about those variables in the rural region in Colombia. It is a unique project in our region. Based on the Escala technologies generating scientific information for the people. I want to thank FRIDA for the opportunity to be here, for the opportunity of having so many people watching what our project is about. Thank you.
>> Hello. My name is Shawn Binestein. I'm from Argentina. I belong to the Director Mar Team and I represent them. This is a portable and expect electrocarrier device that intend to bring medical care for poor people and for people who live far away from the large centers. They, a lot of people in my country and a lot of Developing Countries don't have the possibility of monitoring their heart. We believe that there exists enough technology to solve this problem and also that this is very necessary to Democrat ties the access to heart health. Thanks to the FRIDA prize, we are almost finished with our product and we need more support for our product to reach as many people as possible. Thanks, FRIDA, for the opportunity to be here.
>> Hi. I'm Harry Surad. Our product is to give access to indigenous people using not the smart phone but a dumb phone because it is difficult to get the signal in remote area in west Kali mountain. We train them until now. We spend more than two years. We train around 300 indigenous peoples and they are sending news through SMS, using from SMS we blast the information, the SMS news to now there are 600 subscribers including around 200 members of local indigenous -- local government staffs, including police, parliament members, local parliament members and there are some social changes. The program managed to help the indigenous people resolve their conflict between them and, for example, the oil palm plantations. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Harry. Let's give the floor to Ms. Renatu from FIRE.
>> Hello, everyone. My name is Renatu. I'm the founder of Make Your Own Account. It is a pleasure to be here. I would like to thank FIRE and everyone to organised this for us. My project works on working with poor women in Africa through the use of information and social media. Basically we try to train women how to use the Internet but also how to access information which is really critical for them to employ themselves. It is a pleasure to receive the award from FIRE from AFRINIC. The challenge ahead is to keep going with the project we already started which is harder than anything else, but we are hoping that we already received this prize and there is a lot of challenges ahead but we will overcome those as well. Thank you. Bye.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Renatu. So Bernard, our last FIRE awardee.
>> Good afternoon. My name is Barnard. I run a company called Niko Hapa, which means "Hello, I'm here," in Swahili. I come from Kenya, but the fire awardee, I'm thankful for the recognition because we worked very, very hard at it. It is at times you work hard, you don't get recognised. Now you worked hard and you got recognised so you are really, really grateful. How our project started, our founder went to a cafe. He loved this cafe. So but then he went there the next time he found it had been turned into a Chinese restaurant. So imagine you are going to drink coffee an you find noodles or noodle soup. So the owner of the business just changed the business overnight because he wasn't making a lot of money. It was a bakery before. He wasn't making a lot money because of that.
He thought that people didn't want to drink coffee. But the problem was the employees were not really, they are not really active. They are not really giving their best at it.
So we thought of, he thought of how do you get feedback from the customer directly to the owner? Because the owner of the shop is not there every day. So while we were talking about it, that is how he started. We said okay, why don't we be able to send an SMS to the owner of the shop. Basically that's how it started. We started putting incentives for customers to provide that feedback. What if you give that feedback ten times, you get a free coffee? So basically it is a system where someone can go in, the owner of a business and go and be able to put in a reward after a number of times and keep track how many times the customer is there and be able to give feedback. This is a very long speech. You didn't limit my time.
Oh, one minute?
(Laughter.)
>> Sorry, I didn't get that. Anyhow, it is a custom engagement business, how the business, we help the customer to engage with the business. With the recognition, we are really grateful. But we realize that there are some areas, domains and businesses that it works very well, especially in the transport industry and different industries. That is where we are focusing our efforts. I believe you are going to make a really, really strong impact in those sectors.
Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Bernard. So now I'm giving the floor to the ISF awarders. Don't forget to present yourself.
>> Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. I am Moma Rabsak, representing a project system from Bangladesh. I'm from the university in Bangladesh. The application of the correct amount of fertilizer is very important for higher crop production and it is helpful for creating empowerment. We are addressing the problem by designing sensor systems and communication systems that can collect the soil macronutrient measurements from the crop field and can send to the server system. So that after processing from the server system we can send the recommendations and the actions that need to be taken by the farmer so take the crop production can be increased.
For final or the complete production of this system, we need to work hard and I am again thanking the ISF award 2013 Committee for bringing this opportunity and thank you all meeting here for this recognition that has been made by the IGF 2013, thank you.
>> Hello. I'm Sabica and my project is in English called My Country, My Village. This is the first kind of project in our country. In fact, we can claim to the world there is amazon.com, there's eBay.com, but my platform is different. It is actually connecting the rural producers of the village, like women especially, all the farmers and fishermans to sell their products directly and we don't have anywhere else. Wherever a consumer orders the products are taken from the farmers and they are the one who is managing the whole thing. So we are creating particularly eCenters in the rural villages and those are run by the local youth of the community. We give them training and Internet access and a computer logistics and the center is being given to them. They are the ones, the local youth are the one driving the centers and serving these local producers to sell online on their own price. Because the consumer can buy directly giving them a fair price. On the other hand and unemployment rate for our youth is being served as we are more than 150 million people in our country. Eighty percent are in the rural areas. So Internet access is not available for them. ECommerce is a fancy thing for them. So we wanted to do eCommerce for rural development, rural trading and still now we have done seven centers with our own funds and we have our own 5,500 entrepreneurs, 800 plus youth have been trained in eCommerce, not only eCommerce in terms of technology, how to use computers, computer trainings, everything. They are giving training to the local community.
So if we can cover 64 countries, 64 districts in our country, 64 centers, we can actually serve a lot of people who are in the 80 percent. So we are trying to not create a technology divide but we want to break this divide and take technology to the mass level of people. In the future we can trade to the world with our own products. We want to make Bangladesh to be a successful developed world with their own products. Thank you so much.
>> MODERATOR: Then we have the last FRIDA winner with us.
>> Thank you. My name is Anna Menendez from Argentina. My project is Botalo.com, winner in category more water and more creative. I believe that democracy is the best form of government organisation and that it still has a lot to improve. We believe it has to have even more participatory, transparent and democratic forums. This is our Botalo Botalo, access to public information and democratic values. I have feared that this project and other projects and the initiatives and we need individuals. We need the multi-stakeholders to make the project sustainable over time and also to make it a tool for transformation and improvement of the world.
I am finished. Thank you for listening to me.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you very much. I think we're done with the presentation of your projects. I think we can give the floor to questions. Any of you would like to ask a question in relation to the projects that you have been presented with? Okay. Bruce.
>> Hello. Good afternoon. I'm Bruce Baikie from Invideo. I would like to hear from the awardees on what they see their challenges are now on the next steps in improving their projects. Maybe the gentleman from Benin can start.
>> If I understand your question you're asking about the next steps in our project. Okay. Actually, we have a bigger project, but we are trying to make it small pieces and work iteratively. The thing is the first one as you described but the next is in hospital. In hospital will allow anybody to make an appointment with a doctor before leaving the house and check in in the area, the closest hospital which specialist is available and can I go there, can I pay, can I request a specialist in cardiology now? Imagine that we are sitting here and somebody had a heart attack, but we know that in our system we have 100 doctors that are working and they are connected like in -- or whatever. So you can know the closest one and send him an invitation and say okay, we have somebody with a heart attack here. Can you just please come? This translation will be recorded. You can use mobile money on your phone to pay all the care that will be given to you and the system keeps going and keeps going that's the point. We have an solution but we need investors so we are working step-by-step. We are working as a research team. We have a partner from Germany, the institute of Bonn in pharmacy. That is helping us to work. Thank you very much.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Farel. Laura, can you please answer to his question?
>> If I stay seated is okay? Better sitting. The next step for us to first to make Takiado more popular and more used by society, by next generation of young people to make citizens more interest about data and open data, and about the quality of data. At least in Argentina we are all the same people caring about this subject, but most of the people in the society are not care about it.
And what we are trying to do in Takiado, that's why our video is with a song and I'm looking to -- (speaking Spanish words) to approach not only decision makers or people in academics, but every citizen in society. We are trying to do, the first thing is to pay them attention about data and be more alert. And the second one is to try to make knowledge more collaborative and more immediate in the moment that the leaders make statement in the public debate.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Laura. Let me ask to our last person, Tariq, would you give us your point on your next steps?
>> Yes. Actually, our next one is really on the Intellectual Property. The community has this all type of traditional knowledge, medicine knowledge. They have already, they have got the copyright of this because they have documented it. But how to go beyond that when they can get the Intellectual Property and there will be strict laws involved in Intellectual Property laws, international will be involved. Other than that, how this traditional botanical knowledge database can be linked with the international organisation line WIPO or the Indian traditional digital library, with this type of organisation. We are talking with the Indian counterpart on that but still waiting for, just before as with IFLA, they have some sort of initiative on that. We are also talking with them on that. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Tariq. Does anybody else have more questions? Another question?
(There was no response.)
>> MODERATOR: No? So thank you very much for having participated and just wanted to let you know that we have brochures at the front to give you more information about the Seed Alliance and the three programs which are part of the alliance. Thank you very much.
(Applause.)
>> MODERATOR: And enjoy your afternoon. Okay. If you want to go for a break, there is the coffee break now.
(The session concluded at 4:06 p.m.)
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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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