IGF 2023 Open Forum #157 Donor Principles for the Digital Age: Turning Principles int

This proposed event will officially launch the Donor Principles for the Digital Age and begin a multistakeholder engagement process to bring them to fruition. International development actors have an outsized impact on technological innovation, use and governance around the world through digital programming and related engagements. Despite increased cooperation on technology and democracy engagements overall, donors have yet to collectively articulate and adopt comprehensive safeguards that can help to ensure that donor-supported programs do not inadvertently facilitate the weaponization of, or adverse impacts caused by, data driven technologies and information. This is a gap in the development sector that international and local civil society stakeholders have called on donors to fill. These voluntary, non-binding donor principles will provide an opportunity for donor nations to negotiate and agree upon a set of normative parameters for rights-respecting, democracy-affirming investments and engagements in digital contexts. They will be negotiated and agreed upon by FOC member governments from June - October 2023, with inputs from the FOC's multistakeholder Advisory Network. This Open Forum / Town Hall will launch the principles, and kick off the process of implementing them. The Donor Principles for the Digital Age will reflect the high-level principles articulated in the Declaration for the Future of the Internet, but will be specific to international development. This session has four main goals: officially launch the Donor Principles for the Digital Age (see more below); gather diverse multistakeholder input - particularly from global majority countries - on the types of commitments different stakeholders could make to put these principles into action; discuss how existing multistakeholder fora, including national IGFs, could be leveraged to generate support for and implementation of the Donor Principles; socialize and gain support for the Principles from an expanded set of government, civil society, private sector and academic stakeholders Inputs for this session will be collected at two RightsCon events on June 6, 2023, where the Donor Principles will be an agenda item. Specific speakers for the session will be chosen at that time.

1) During breakout sessions, the online moderator will provide the initial instructions for the breakout sessions to everyone to create more engagement between the online group and the onsite group. Rapporteurs from each group will take notes in a shared Google doc. Participants will reconvene and share key points from their discussions, and moderators will facilitate discussion based on those points. The session will feature equal speaker engagement from onsite and online participants. 2) Online participants will structure and lead the session to the same degree as onsite participants, so there will be communication and engagement throughout, rather than having online participants be passive onlookers. 3) Google docs will be used to facilitate interactions across onsite and online participants. Other possible tools and platforms will be discussed at the FOC FCG at RightsCon in June.