The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF virtual intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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(Video plays:)
>> We all live in a digital world.
We all need it to be open and safe.
We all want to trust.
>> And to be trusted.
>> We all despise control.
>> And desire freedom.
>> BOTH SPEAKERS: We are all united.
(End video.)
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Hello, everyone. We will be starting in a minute. We have people still joining online. The chair of the session which is connected directly online should take the floor in a minute.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: I propose we start now. Welcome, everyone, to this networking session on researching internet governance. I hope you can hear me well. My name is Clement Perarnaud. I am a political scientist based in Brussels, working for the Center for European Policies Studies, CEPS, and Associate Lecturer at the new VUB Brussels School of Governance.
Before starting I want to thank Lucien Castex for the invitation to this session which is indeed very topical and timely. The session aims at gathering researchers and experts working on internet governance to identify synergies and build collaborations, especially following the successful symposium of the Global Internet Governance Academic Network yesterday. For those who are not familiar with this organization, it's an international association of academic researchers. And so we would like, following up this symposium, to continue discussion, these academic discussions, around internet governance, but also bring other stakeholders around the table.
So basically, this event is aimed to provide, first, a flash presentation of different research projects, including our own, but also yours, and also promoting research around internet governance as part of a wider community, the one of the IGF.
So I propose to start very rapidly with, if it's possible, a brief introduction of the different participants within the video room, if you want to provide a brief explanation of who you are, so that the networking connection can actually start. Then I propose to give the floor to Lucien Castex, Francesca Musiani, as well as Julien Rossi, who are part of the Internet Governance and Regulation Research Group in Paris, within the Center Internet et Societe, and who are leading a number of very relative projects related to internet governance and to digital policies. After this brief tour de table, I will give them the floor.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Maybe Francesca, you can take the floor and start.
>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Sounds good. I was waiting to see if we could take the floor afterwards. I was going to introduce myself a last, but that's good. Hello, everyone, I'm Francesca Musiani, and so as Clement mentioned, I am part of the Centre Internet et Societe in Paris. I cofounded it and I am the Deputy Director of it. And yes. My research focus is internet infrastructure as a tool of governance, and currently my research project is about internet governance in Russia and the digital residence to internet governance in Russia. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you.
Julian, next?
>> JULIEN ROSSI: Thank you, Lucien, and Clement, for your introduction. Good afternoon, everyone. So I am Julien Rossi from the Research Unit of the University of Technology of Compiegne. I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about the Working Group on Internet Governance and Regulation, of the Research Group on Internet of Artificial Intelligence and Society, which Clement said a few words about.
This group has been set up in 2019. And our aim is to foster research, interdisciplinary research on internet governance in the Francophone area. We're particularly interested in anyone interested in collaborating with this network, either to present research done outside of the Francophone sphere to a Francophone public, or if you're interested in helping foster and develop research on internet governance in the Francophone area then we'll be very happy to talk with you and engage on your different projects. Unfortunately, I have an urgent call at 1:00 p.m. I hope I will be able to make it as far as possible and join you at the end of this session if you're interested in discuss your projects and/or if you are from the Francophone academia then I will be very happy to talk about your research and see how we can maybe even provide support. Thank you very much.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. Thank you, Julian. I'll say a very few words and then go around the table. This is an opportunity to speak about all the research projects. I am the representative for public policy and also a researcher at Sorbonne University, in innovation. We have a number, Julian and Clement as well as Francesca said, within internet governance, including on internet resilience, and new policies being enabled of the French and European level.
And the session is an opportunity to discuss it with a broader community at the IGF, and obviously improve cooperation.
I propose we go around the table, either on site. Verteli, maybe you want to take the floor and say a few words? Sure.
>> INGRID VOLKMER: Hi. My name is Ingrid Volkmer. I'm from Australia, I was hoping we would talk about more international approaches; however, I'm, of course, interested in the Francophone world. I'm interested in your work but I feel my own work has to do with global interdependencies and that's the policy angle we want to develop. I just created a new center at Melbourne University called International Digital Policy Initiative, which brings in policymakers as well as academia, hopefully from international organizations. We've just done a big study from the WHO on social media and young generations in 24 countries, which has interesting insights also for policy making in a global crisis. That's the work we're doing.
I would like to hear more about yours, but unfortunately I don't have any Francophone work to offer to you.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. We're quite open to other countries. First we're focusing on that topic, but we're open to any research, obviously. You want to take the floor?
>> AUDIENCE: Good afternoon. I'm Iranka (?) I'm actually from Romania, so I could be somewhat in the Francophone zone, but my work is not necessarily related to the region. I work with the Council of Europe, and for the past two years we've been exploring a little bit youth participation in youth governments, but in particular AI governance processes. I think this a little bit of focus of my work most recently, but there are different areas that we work with as well. That's it from my side.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. Do you want to take the floor?
>> GREGORY ENGELS: Yeah. Hello, my name is Gregory Engels. I am with Pirate Parties International. It is an NGO that is related to Pirate Parties. We organize certain conferences, the Think Twice Conference next year in Prague, and looking to all different areas of research around internet governance and, yeah, that's why I'm here.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Excellent. On my right, maybe you want to say a quick presentation word?
>> AUDIENCE: Hello. My name is Sean. I work to cybersecurity company and we are very interested right now in about the discussions in cooperation and regulations of the cybersecurity market.
>> MODERATOR:
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. Thank you. On my right, just take the floor.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm Salvo, from Brazil. I'm not exactly from a French speaker, but my research is about IT basic security. More specifically about vulnerability management for IoT systems in home networks and smart cities. And my research focus is probably for my future Ph.D. in the sense of supporting the deployment of security standards and best practice for not only the deployment but understand how to make more standards more suitable to being deployed, both part of the process.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. Last but not least, Judith, did you want to say a word?
>> JUDITH HELLERSTEIN: Hi, Judith Hellerstein, just listening here. I don't have any research on Francophone countries, but I thought it sounded like an interesting panel.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you, Judith.
I propose we follow up with our colleagues online. Can you take the lead?
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Yes, sure. Thank you so much for all the contributions. I can see that we have a very diverse group of people in the room. I suppose it is the same in the virtual room. At some point I saw a hand raised from the IGF Remote Hub of Dhaka, I suppose. If you want to take the floor, do not hesitate.
If not, if not, you are obviously if you want to participate, share a bit about your own projects or own profile, please don't hesitate to raise your hand or take the floor. Oh, yes, I think we can hear you now.
>> AUDIENCE: Hello from Bangladesh Remote Hub. We're all connected from Dhaka, Bangladesh, as you can see in the video. Thank you so much for giving us a platform to join with you.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Many thanks. Thank you very much. Welcome as well to this session.
Anyone else? Please do not hesitate to raise your hand.
Obviously, the communication is more difficult when we are online. So I propose if no one wants to share a bit more information about their own research, in the virtual room, to follow up with ongoing projects that you would like to discuss and to share with the wider community of the IGF, not only researchers and academics, but also the technical policy making communities. So yes, I see, Shilongo, you can take the floor.
>> KRISTOPHINA SHILONGO: Good afternoon. I'm Kristophona Shilongo. I work for a non‑profit think tank based in Cape Town, South Africa. We work to fill the gaps in developing a sustainable information ecosystem for digital economy, which includes, you know, advising governments and original as well as continental bodies on regulatory as well as, yes, policy strategies.
We're recently in the process of completing a study in both Francophone Africa and Africa focusing on information disorder on the continent and how people are or how actors, both state and non‑state, are responding to the information disorder. And this includes would like to look at ways that we can advise the gaps in which states or non‑state actors can come in and kind of like collaborate and come together and tackle the information disorder. That's our work in Francophone Africa. We have partners all over. Hoping to share more on this project and any other proceeding projects.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Many thanks for your contribution. Maybe, Francesca, if you want to present very briefly one of the projects of the working group we talked about from the Centre Internet et Societe in Paris.
>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Yes. Thank you very much, Clement. So I am to speak briefly about two projects. One that is about to end. It will be in June of 2022, which is not directly related to our working group, but is nonetheless fully within its limits. It's just the project started before the working group. This project I'm talking about is called the ResisTIC. That's its acronym. It's about how surveillance and censorship and broader internet governance dynamics unfold in Russia, especially in the last decade or last few years where a number of laws have been proposed and most of them approved with the idea of reinforcing the digital sovereignty in the country. What we're particularly interested in in this project, is to critique these sorts of strategies and we have several publications by now that have come out of this project. When I stop speaking I will be sharing a couple of them in the chat, if that's of interest. The second project I wanted to briefly touch upon is a project of a report we have ongoing now for the panel for the future of science and technology of the European parliament. This is, well, a proposal that I received sometime in 2021, actually, it was this year already, from this panel, to work on a report concerning internet fragmentation and more broadly how protocols and services on the internet are currently ongoing, several dynamics divergence and in some cases convergence and the ability of different zones of the internet to actually keep on talking to one another. And so what we are doing now with Clement, who has been doing most of the very, very good work on this for the first part of the project, and with Lucien and Julian who we already met, is that we have completed our review of what is being said around this much talked about term of internet fragmentation and related terms, for example, splinternet, and we are currently speaking to a number of experts. I see at least one in the room, by the way. Hello, Mark. Good to see you again. Who enlighten us on several facets of what the definition of a fragmentation is about for different stakeholders of the internet. And we plan to eventually submit a final report that includes policy recommendations to the European Union Commission concerning this topic of fragmentation. So if you think that this is something that could interest you, we're very happy to talk further. Thank you so much.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Thank you very much, Francesca. That was very clear. Any question about these two particular projects, feel free to reach out to us. I see a hand raised physically by Allan Magezi. If you can unmute yourself, you should be able to communicate with us. We cannot hear you. That's perfect now.
>> ALLAN MAGEZI: Thank you. I'm Allan Magezi, and I'm joining in from a Remote Hub here in Uganda. It's quite an interesting discussion we're having here in regards to our networking, the internet governance space. The ITU has come up with a new coalition, particularly that is Partner2Connect and we're looking at four focus points. One is building the digital ecosystem, the other is connecting people everywhere, so basically in my research is in line with focus point one, which is connecting people everywhere. We come from the point of view that for us to have an equal and level ecosystem there should be some sort of streamlined platform and policy for everyone to connect and attain content online. So basically, the research more looks at how do you connect equally, irrespective of where you are. This doesn't limit to geographical locations. So we're thinking that if one region of the globe, someone else on the other side should have connectivity, for us to have some kind of full potential from the system. If there's not full connectivity, then we shall have some sort of divide in terms of how people and economies benefit from the digital ecosystem. So the ITU has come up with a new coalition and to streamlining, I think, by June next year, 2022, a very clear set of framework will be laid out for us to make sure that we have that report. I'm thinking by close of June next year, that is 2022, we'll be reporting back fully a documentary framework with respect to that research. So coming to this IGF session of networking, it is important for us to make sure that we're aware of this and I'm actually very excited about whoever is putting out that different region, we're thinking the digital ecosystem is going to change. From now on, from this IGF from Poland, we think we will have a different narrative in the digital ecosystem. So it is quite of bit of engagement. We're enjoying it. We're here in Uganda. That's basically what I wanted to add from my point of research. Thank you.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Thank you very much for your contribution. I think very, very useful to understand your work on these issues. If you can start more partnerships with your own project, that would be fantastic, if you want to share your contact details with the rest of the group. Or if you have a website, do not hesitate to do so, so people can connect with your project.
I don't see anymore hands raised in the virtual room. I don't know if it is the case or not in the regular room in Katowice, so Lucien, do not hesitate to interrupt me if it is the case.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: I'm not seeing in the room but anyone who wants to take the floor, just raise your hand and I'll give you the floor, obviously.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Maybe another project that we could mention in the project, actually, Lucien, since we are here, you might be interested in providing more information about this developing ongoing project around internet governance. So please do not hesitate if you want to take the floor.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: I have one floor request in Katowice. Just take the floor. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Well, I will introduce myself again. My name is Sean Focault. One of the research I made over the past few years is about cybersecurity in election. We were trying to figure out what is needed for electronic voting system to be safe and give a transparent result. So if someone wants to discuss that, I am completely open and one of my research works are in this field. So I research about what can be done with cryptography and the hardware to ensure a safe electronic voting system.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. Is anyone else in the room want to take the floor?
Back to you Clement and Francesca.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: So I don't see anyone else. Maybe a project that would be once again for Francesca you want to mention a bit about this project around internet governance that we are developing in Paris at the Centre Internet et Societe.
>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: I really think that Lucien should because he's the coordinator of it. So please, Lucien, do. Because you are the best person to speak about it.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: If not, I think Lucien might be interrupted because he has a meeting at the same time. So it's possible that he has to ‑‑
>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Does he? Oh, my god. Never mind. Okay. Well, I mean I can speak about it. Okay. Never mind. Okay. So I'll speak about this. The idea of this particular project is to, so it is funded by a program of the region in France, which is the region which Paris is based in, which overall hosts a good number of Universities, big universities in France, as well as companies, including, what do we call those? The French tech. So the idea of this project was to bring in into internet governance research, we're not the first that tried to do so, but the focus is this also taking into account the type of program that funds it, is to give more importance to methods of textual analysis and so also including quantitative treatments of text in internet governance, recognizing that there are several communities, first and foremost, the Internet Engineering Task Force, but not only IGF, who also has a good bulk of information, that is conversational information that is in a mailing list, for example. So there are communities of internet governance that have really become structured around the ability to exchange messages in asynchronous manners and have built up important quantities of text. So the idea is to being able to leverage these quite big empirical material in a quantitative manner to understand better how this fora help structure a particular ethos and communities, I guess, around internet governance.
We haven't really started this particular work, but we are most of this project should happen in over the course of 2022. So it will always be like our small group that is involved in it with the support of the Working Group on Internet Governance in Paris.
And being here, given that this session is called Researching internet governance I take the opportunity to mention in a little volume that has exact the same title which is focused on methods and theories of internet governance. Clement has just shared the link. Thank you so much, Clement. It is a narrative book that came out last year with MIT Press which I coedited with a trio of colleagues, who you may be familiar, most of you will be familiar with their names: Laura DeNardis, Nanette Levinson and Derrick Cogburn. Our idea here was to really take internet governance research as research itself. That's the punchline we developed for this book, with the idea to really focus on the different sorts of methodologies that can be leveraged to study internet governance and also what are the main theoretical paradigms that well from the first perspectives in international law and international relations and theory and so on, have moved on to include a larger number of disciplines and the projects that are internet governance.
I think that's it.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Francesca. Yes, the link to the book can be found in the chat. It's open access. So you should be able to read it wherever you are. And I found it very rich and super interesting for people interested in internet governance research. So do not hesitate to have a look.
Any other intervention when it comes to your research project? But it could also be about the challenges that you face when trying to study internet governance processes or actors. Since we have a very diverse room, in terms of the stakeholders involved, I'm sure that if you're looking to engage with IGF, obviously with The Internet Governance Forum, all the actors, I think that would be a good venue for you to express your research interests and the different avenues that you would like to follow in terms of research.
Do not hesitate to raise your hands. I cannot see in the room in Katowice, so I will rely on Lucien.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: I have someone asking for the floor. I have to leave the room for a minute and I'll come back. Please have the floor.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. As Clement mentioned, the IGF, I would ask us to share a bit more about in securing home IoT and management. I have now one active draft. I have submitted it. I think like 15 years ago. It's now under discretion in the IOTOPS Working Group, IoT Operations Working Group. So if anyone is interested on it, the project name is IENXU, I‑E‑N‑X‑U. So you can check it there. Make some criticism. I have also some papers published. So you can try to find by the same name and you'll find it.
Basically, it has a data model for sharing information about malicious activities, as a model for variant, and all the malicious activities that targets IoT systems. And then we can use this data model, for example, for sharing this information to other stakeholders. And then block these malicious activities in multiple networks at the same time. So just sharing a bit more about my project. That's all for now. Thank you.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Thank you very much.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thanks a lot. That was quite interesting. The aim of the session is really to share about your projects, to react to your colleagues' projects. Thank you, Francesca, for presenting the Tiger project. It's Tigre in French, but it means tiger. So we're quite fully convinced it will lead somewhere great. Don't hesitate to take the floor. This is a networking session. Back to you, Clement.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Yes. Many thanks, Lucien. I see Nadia raised her hand. Please feel free to take the floor.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thank you very much for the opportunity to share about my work and also listen to what you all have been working on. It will be great to see whether or not we can collaborate and see what kind of information and resources we have access to and available. I think with internet governance research, access, especially when we talk about privacy and access to data and things like that, understanding these and having access to these can be complicated. And reaching out to all different communities to collaborate together would be a wonderful opportunity. I would love to share a little bit about the paper I presented yesterday at Giganet, the academic symposium of the Internet Governance Forum. And I've been developing this project over the last couple of years where I'm looking at stakeholders in internet governance. So we always talk about multistakeholderism, the stakeholders in internet governance, and then we say there's Civil Society, private sector, government, intergovernmental organizations. And sometimes we include academic and technical community from the Tunis agenda. And sometimes we include end users. But who are they actually? And how do we move within these spheres of internet governance? I use the public data from the Internet Governance Forum and I looked at how people self‑identify themselves at the Internet Governance Forum, but also I designed a codebook of the types of stakeholders that are coming to the Internet Governance Forum. Such as there are policeman at the Internet Governance Forum. There are mayors that are coming to the Internet Governance Forum. There are engineers. So I have an entire list of the different types of people that are coming that's compiled together. And then I compared them to see how people self‑identify themselves. For example, is a mayor government? Because he is paid by public money? Or is he Civil Society because he represents the people? So we have questions like that. Where do people fit in when we're talking about bringing stakeholders to the room? We found there were some discrepancies. For example, some universities define themselves as private sector, but should they be academia or Civil Society? Is then police Civil Society or something else? We found there's intersecting stakeholders. For example, social entrepreneurs, people who are private sector, but they're not actually solely for profit. Their mission is to do something for the community. So we have to make sure people don't fall in between the gaps. So what the aim and purpose of our research is to provide the wider community, who is working on policy making, but also the MAG, to support them to work on informed decision‑making. When you're making decisions for stakeholders, that you have the information of the people that are coming to the Internet Governance Forum, but also when we start thinking about stakeholders, how do we think about them? One of the graphs we designed actually was how many newbies are there every year? We always say the Internet Governance Forum is always the same people, but we actually found out that 60% every year are new people that are coming to the Internet Governance Forum. And 40% are people who are returning internet governance people. But the amount of people is rising. The amount of people attending every year is rising. There's increasingly more newbies and then increasingly more people returning. My question to the MAG is, how can we make sure the people who are not returning, how can we keep them engaged and return them? This is not a policy I'm proposing to find an answer to, but it's something our information is trying to bring back. Another thing we looked at was double hats. I am a Ph.D. fellow at the United Nations University CRIS and at Vrije University of Brussels. But I work as an organizational board member. So you see United Nations University is an IGO. The VUB is academia, which is civil society. The boards I'm on, one is civil society, and the other is technically a technical community. I'm wearing these double hats. I'm not the only one. How many people in this room are a member of ICANN and ITF but have a job and are part of civil society?
So we then look at people who registered double hats and we need to acknowledge these people are also in the room and that there are many interests going around at the same time. What we also found interesting is looking at stakeholder mobility. So where stakeholders are moving from one job to another, but not only that, when stakeholders move from one stakeholder group to another stakeholder group. So I used to work for Civil Society, and then I started working ‑‑ that's not true. I started working for private sector, then I now work for Civil Society, and then these people are moving around and it's very interesting to see how that is forming at the IGF and how we are then being acknowledging all this mobility, this fluidity that exists, how we're exchanging information with each other, and that's something that my work is looking forward to, to further develop to see how can we support decision makers to make sure the right people sit at the table and we haven't forgotten people who have been falling in between these gaps because they don't fit in a particular stakeholder group or because their stakeholder group doesn't exist on a form. So if you had any interest in this, and wanted to share your thoughts and ideas, or if there was an idea in your head, like, oh, I saw this at the IGF; is that really true? Or is that really the case? I'm happy to look more into that and see if the data really reflects on that.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: That's amazing. Thank you so much, Nadia, for not only presenting very well your research article from yesterday's Giganet. Actually, I put the link in the chat for those of you attending this event online so you can have access to the paper and all the other papers that were presented yesterday. Obviously, once again, if you want to share your page, if people want to contact with you, they will be able to do so. But thank you so much for your great insights into deconstructing what we mean by stakeholder model and who are the actors that are actually in the room. I find it very fascinating.
I don't know whether there are other intervention that could be made? Maybe Lucien, once again?
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for your presentation. That was quite interesting. You are speaking to a member of the MAG. So we have discussions with that. Stakeholder groups and multihats, that's quite interesting. I have one ‑‑ take the floor. Thank you.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thank you very much, again. That's me again. I think I am having, like, have part of the time of this session, but okay. I just would like to say thank you, Nadia, for your contribution. One part of your comments caught my attention. That is related about the new‑comers and the people who stay and keep working in the IGF and the general internet governance forums and activities. And more specifically, this is not like a research interest for me now, but I think that I'm going to take a look at your work, more specifically my interest is more in the technical field, the technical community. They have the regional Technical Communities but not the broader internet governance community we are engaged. And this is actually a topic that I'm interested on, so I'm going to take a look at your work and try to figure something out to maybe support this in the Brazilian community. Maybe in the community in Brazil. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: If you don't mind me responding, thank you for your comment. I would be interested in seeing what feedback you have. At the moment we're not looking at geography because we're trying to define geography, especially people who have double hats, it's difficult to assess, if we decide, for example, their organization headquarters is in one country but they reside in another country, or you have double hats and you have two different organizations in two different countries. We have a little bit of a question, then, where do you belong to? If we think about, for example, ICANN, many people in ICANN all over the world, representing many different communities, but ICANN is based, you know, in the United States. So then everybody in ICANN is automatically then assigned the U.S.A. Is that a fair acknowledgment of their geography? Or do we then look at every single person and decide where did they live at the time they're living in. For example, I'm Dutch but I live in Belgium. So how do I identify, because I'm Dutch but my self‑identity? So these are definitely discussions I would like to have about how people feel about their participation and representation at the IGF?
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you. I have somebody else requesting the floor. Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, again. I am Iranka and was mentioning I work with Council of Europe. I work on youth participation in different processes, and actually when we are doing the research and mapping either in the Council of Europe or either Europe and Central Asia, the question is, first of all, again we look at Civil Society. And actually, we are referring to different processes. First of all, I would say IGF are the spaces where we do the internet governance, but where we discuss about internet governance, but otherwise identifying what are the spaces for internet governance, it's a challenge so far. Then looking what is meaningful involvement in these kind of processes is the second level that we're looking at, and then looking at the different stakeholders is quite a challenge to separate who is part of Civil Society. Specifically because when we were researching youth involvement, we were referring to organized youth or at least loosely organized youth communities, so not general individuals or even youth experts in the field. The issue is whoever is working on this or whoever wants to work on this we can also look at these very specific issues because it's not, you know, general involvement in IGF or other processes. Because I don't think these processes are at all relevant for shaping the internet. I think we can take this discussion a little bit better. On AI governance in particular where we're looking, there are so many spaces and it's so much confusion of who is doing what, and putting youth lenses in this, it's just making it chaotic, but I think it's high time we also look fast into these processes so we make sure there is the space. So understanding the space but also making sure there is space to do that now when some decisions are being taken. That was more a reflection from my side, but again I'm already working on this and really interested in continuing the work on this with you guys. Thanks.
>> CLEMENT PERARNAUD: Thank you very much. We have an intervention from Francesca again. I see the time is passing, so we will soon conclude this session, I think.
>> FRANCESCA MUSIANI: Thank you. It was just to follow up for two minutes about this having multiple hats things. Currently, I'm preparing my habilitation to direct research, which is one thing we need to do in France, but it is also a way to reflect upon a number of years of research that we have done up to that point. I am reflecting quite a bit on how researchers are kind of co‑shaping the field itself of internet governance by oftentimes holding these multiple hats and I just wanted to bring forward another element that I think we should be attentive about, which is when institutions ask us to be part of an advisory board or reflection committees and so on, to what extent are we just providing our research input and to what extent we may be also not used but in some way we may be asked to be involved because of particular power balances and in particular an attempt to provide legitimacy to specific initiatives, for example. I think that given that there are more and more of these situations in which we are being asked to provide expertise in several scenarios, we should be mindful of this aspect because there are also these kinds of dynamics taking place and this should not prevent us from providing constructive input whenever we are being asked for it, but just to let us be reflexive in the first place on what our own role is in this kind of ‑‑ let us be our own direction on this.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you, Francesca. I have one request on the floor and maybe Julian who is back in the room might want to offer a few words. Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, Nadia, for your presentation. I am an example of your multiple hats because the first time I went to IGF I was representing Civil Society. The second, I was academia. And now I am private sector. So how to deal with that? And I think it's very important, too, to check this trajectory of these people. Like, how they're interacting. And to see the continuous work between these sectors and how they develop and talk to each other. So I think about this time line perspective, what are you focusing on? On the research. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA: Thanks for your question. The data we looked at was from 2006 and 2019 in‑person meetings. That was the most complete at the time, all years at the time had remote participation data available and we weren't entirely sure remote participation meant people signing up or actually attending. So those were questions that we would have needed to ask the IGF Secretariat but we kind of just thought this was plenty of data so we're going to start here and now with the last two years of everything going online there is different scopes available so there is definitely opportunities to start looking into kind of also online access, but so far we've been focusing primarily on on‑site. Also, questions we had at the time, when we start thinking about, is were people not coming back because of where it was in Europe? Or because it was in particular areas of the world? But we found that actually sessions that were outside of Europe were people where there was a large amount of people coming back. The last few years that were held in Europe, so that was Geneva, France, and Berlin, the amount of people that were kind of returning was not anymore, it was actually a little bit less, in comparison to other times. So returning rates in that regards were still around 40%. So that kind of gives us a little bit of an insight to what attracts people to come to a physical IGF. But we're looking forward to having more people asking questions like yours so we can look at the data, what kind of answers we can get.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thanks a lot. I propose to give the floor to Julian which is back in the room, maybe a reaction, if you would.
>> JULIEN ROSSI: Thank you, Lucien. However, I don't know if I can say much, but unfortunately I had to leave for much of this meeting. However, once again, thank you very much for everyone to have joined us. Now time is up. I think hopefully we can also continue discussing things more informally. I think Lucien has a village set up for that which can be useful for discussing research and different projects. Thank you very much.
>> LUCIEN CASTEX: Thank you.
(End session 6:46 a.m. CT.)