The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MAX SENGES: Good afternoon. We're not going to start right now because the room has a location that I think a lot of people will take a moment to figure out where it is, so give us another two, three minutes, and then we will start.
All right. Good afternoon. Let's start. I'm sure every minute we wait now we will regret later when the conversation is up and we want to get more points and more perspectives in.
Good afternoon. My name is Max Senges. I'm chairing our session today on Deliberation on Encryption Governance. This is going to be, on the one hand, an introduction to deliberative polling and to the possibilities, the benefits, and challenges that that offers for multistakeholder governance, and in particular Internet governance, as well as a feedback session and a collaborative really workshop session on prototyping a deliberative toolkit, which is a smaller version -- as we will share during our session, a smaller -- I shouldn't even say version, it's inspired by deliberative polling, and it brings together a number of elements, but it's quite different, as we will discuss during the day.
We have -- the group that's organizing this session works at the Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford and at the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford, and Professor Jim Fishkin is here to -- really as our expert on deliberative polling and discussing with us how the benefits can be reaped and how some of the challenges can be overcome.
We hope to make this is a really interactive session, so please, by all means, come forward, sit close to the microphones so we can hear you. Just signal -- give me a hand signal if you want to come in. We're going to have a number of slides, more to guide the conversation than to have us give you a frontal lecture or knowledge sharing. It's supposed to be as interactive as possible. Short hand signal -- when you do speak, please introduce yourself, if you want, with or without affiliation. One of the questions that we will discuss, in fact, is how to organize such a deliberative democracy experience in a multistakeholder world where your stakeholders' perspective is important, whether there is a representation of the stakeholder group or if -- you know, in an exercise like this, it's more adequate to participate as citizens of the Internet. One last comment before I give you an overview of how we are structuring this workshop, we have done a pilot last year off deliberative polling on access for the next billion, and it went really well. We had about 69, I believe, participants online and during the session, and got some really interesting insights that we've published in a report that is available on the Stanford website.
By all means, if you're interested in access and the policy options and debates around that, do come up and we're happy to share more and think about further applications, as this is not the last workshop to understand where you folks -- where the community, the Internet governance participants, see a need and good application for this form of democratic practice and values.
So here's an overview of how we're going to structure the day. We're going to start with short overview and introduction by Professor Fishkin and myself about what deliberative polling is and how it differs from the deliberative toolkit for a multistakeholder governance.
Then we wanted to give you a kind of taste for what this is actually like, so the bulk of the second or -- for about an hour we're going to have a walk-through off the briefing materials that you have in front of you on encryption governance and the pros and cons to that. Jackie will introduce you to that -- those.
Then you'll break up into small groups and get an experience of how the deliberation is happening, moderated by Jim Fishkin and Kathleen Giles for about half an hour. Then we come back together and discuss what you heard and bring more insights from a plenum discussion and questions that you have come up with in those smaller groups.
Then we just have a look at how a survey will look like that allows you to understand how opinions shifts before and after such a deliberation, and then we would like to gather some feedback from you, both about the process overall as well as on the briefing materials in particular. Then we'll take a short break, and then we have another hour of deliberation and collaboration about how these elements of deliberative democracy can be useful and can be brought to the multistakeholder world. We'll give you a better rundown, a more detailed rundown of what that means at 3:45.
With that, I pass it over -- oh, no. The goals for the day are clearly we want you to have a good understanding of the concept of deliberative democracy and the tools that come with it and how they can be applied to multistakeholder governance and how deliberative polling can be applied here.
We want you to actually have a better understanding of what encryption governance means and what the different options in the field are, how that relates to multistakeholder governance, and then, of course, we want you to have a really good and high-quality open deliberation and see how different trade-offs and different perspectives come together when you're considering the tradeoffs and options in the field.
And last but not -- last but not least, of course, we want to think about how your thinking evolves and you can perceive how your thinking and knowledge evolves in such an exercise of critical thinking and civic engagement.
With that, except if there are any questions or suggestions to alter the agenda, which are always welcome, we're set in an open workshop format -- I want to pass it to Jim Fishkin to give a quick overview of the deliberative polling process as such.
>> JIM FISHKIN: This doesn't move, so I will move. Great.
Well, great to be back here. So some of you are familiar with what we're talking about; some not, so let me just say the notion of deliberative polling is to take a random sample of a population and engage it -- give it a survey, engage it in serious discussion, balanced, the best conditions we can create with vetted materials, access to competing experts, small -- moderated small group discussions for several hours or even several days. Sometimes it's done online with video, small group video, Google Hangouts or some such. Often it's done face-to-face, and then we -- at the end of the process, people take another questionnaire and we see the changes of opinion. This has been mostly conducted with the mass public. It's now been conducted -- we have done with various collaborators 26 countries and maybe 80 projects and -- around the world, in developing countries, in the most -- in developed countries, all kinds of countries on all six inhabited continents.
Last year we got interested in doing this with a -- in the context of multistakeholder governance for the Internet and people said, well, you're dealing with an expert community, so you won't get any change of opinion, people won't feel free to tell what they really think because they'll feel that they're sort of ambassadors from their institutions, and there won't be any knowledge gain because they know too much, so we did this project here at the IGF last year in Joao Pessoa, and even though the turnout replicates relatively limited, nevertheless, compared to the people who took the survey and didn't come, the sample was in its attitudes and demographics highly representative, and there was considerable knowledge gain and considerable opinion change.
Now -- and so we viewed it by our criteria as a success, and there are a lot more things to say about -- looking at the results quantitatively -- why it was a success.
Now, what does this have to do with multistakeholder governance? Well, the whole idea of multistakeholder governance, as the U.N. and other related documents have said, is that it should be in some way a democratic process, it should in some way be deliberative, and it should in some way be inclusive, and how do you -- and it should in some way generate some conclusions, whether those are recommendations or reference points or whatever, there should be some conclusions, and we think -- and there's been calls for methods for more than just bland statements but some organized process.
We think that deliberative poll, as a model, has something to recommend it in this context, but it requires -- because in some way democratic it's conceptually difficult because you've got such different entities. You've got countries, you've got companies, you've got people from Civil Society, people from academia, different sectors, people from all around the world. How are we going to have democracy among such different groups? So the approach that we've been taking with deliberative polling is to say let's see if we can treat the participants at forums such as this one and other Internet Governance venues -- let's see if we can treat them asnetizen, take a stratified random sample of them as individuals. If we get a good sample, it's representative of the population, and we treat them under context of equality, where everybody's voice counts, we have moderated small-group discussion in a civil way where people count equally, and they share information, they clarify the key questions that they want answered, they raise those questions, usually in a deliberative poll it's to panels of competing experts. In this workshop, we've got so many experts, we're going to raise the questions for the group to answer, but they get more information, and we see, then, they register their opinions in confidential questionnaires so that they're not -- so we want their sincere judgments. They're not acting as ambassadors, they're acting as netizens. People said they would never act as netizens, but we did this last year. At least on the topic of increasing access, there was considerable opinion on change, and it was motivated for coherent reasons.
The whole process, even though it wasn't as large as we would like, generated a number of statistically significant changes, and it really was credible by our analysis, and there's a report on the Center for Deliberative Democracy website and we're preparing a version of that. A version for that will be submitted for publication.
Now, so that was -- but that was access. We think encryption is even -- is -- today we're prototyping such a project for which there would be a full-scale deliberative polling, and we're looking for the kinds of partners, contexts, and venues where this topic of encryption could really have an impact, both within the Internet governance community and potentially with the mass public, perhaps in various countries. We think it's a very timely, important topic, but to do that, we want your feedback on the materials, on the way we frame the topic. This is a draft in progress. We think it could be improved. So that's one of the purposes.
Another purpose is to distinguish the deliberative polling, which is meant to be representative of a broader population. That's why we do stratified random sampling, to distinguish that from a somewhat less ambitious but nevertheless still extremely useful use of this kind of process in that in various contexts we've had what we call a deliberative toolkit, usually in schools or for various kinds of civic groups, where they can, for the group in question, consider the issues in the same way as if they were the population in a deliberative poll. They can discuss the issues, excellent balance, vetted briefing materials, small group discussions, questions to competing experts, register their opinions before and after, and what does that do? It helps a group clarify it's considered judgments about an issue because by registering -- it's all very simple and commonsensical if you think about it, but it's a route to getting something more than bland consensus statements on a contested issue. Instead, when the people really think about the tradeoffs, you get the actual distribution of opinion, and people offer their answers without the social pressure of just going along with the group and arriving at a rough consensus. Instead we see what the real distribution of opinion is and we can see why and do various analyses about why the opinions shift the way they do.
So we think there will be contexts in which the sort of toolkit version of this is useful, and so we're going to sort of pilot the materials with both of those things in mind today.
>> MAX SENGES: Perfect. And, in fact, the hour from 4:00 to 5:00 is really to think about what adaptations to that toolkit that has been used in other contexts should be made for a multistakeholder environment like this, so we don't think we have all the answers together, and we really want to hear how you think, especially the balanced briefing materials, just the production of that seems valuable and the deliberation experience that is a bit more organized but very egalitarian deliberation rather than the panel discussions that we are used to at IGF, how can we balance that more, make it a bit more democratic.
But with that, we want to start the actual deliberative experience with an overview of the briefing materials. After Jackie Kerr is done, we'll move to smaller group deliberations, probably divided the left and right side of the table.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Let me say this. Normally, if there were a deliberative process, we would have sent you the materials beforehand, but Jackie, who has helped us develop the materials, among others, has very kindly agreed to give you a quick walk through the materials because you have not had a chance to read them in advance. You should say who Jackie is.
>> MAX SENGES: Absolutely. Jackie is a post-doc scholar in Stanford and various other institutions, but I think you better say a couple of words about yourself. We have vetted the materials with a group of about 15 to 20 experts and shared them broadly through various stakeholder groups, and with that, over to you, Jackie.
(Laughter)
>> JACKIE KERR: Okay. Hi, there. So it's an honor to be here, and I will try to do justice to these very brief details that you've been given. I'll walk you through them and invite you to look at more at the text and the charts. They're in the red folders. So if you look at what is -- there's a document that's titled "DP Encryption Briefing Material," and that's the one I'll be walking you through, so as -- I guess by way of a few words about myself, yeah, I'm a post-doctoral research fellow at theCenter for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and I'm a research affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, and I've been lucky to be involved in a couple of stages of this process in development, and it's just a very interesting project. So as -- how to get this a little closer.
As everyone here is aware the issue of encryption and debates over encryption policy have become extremely significant in the public sphere in discussion in the last several years. Encryption is widely used as a secure -- as a way to secure protected data and communications, secure these data against criminals, spies, governments, but there's significant concern also, especially on the part of governments and law enforcement, over the effect that encryption, especially strong encryption on devices or end-to-end encryption of communications plays in obstructing the efforts of law enforcement, hindering law enforcement's ability to access and read encrypted data, and so there's been a significant debate over what the correct policy position is on this subject.
Technologists and civil liberties advocates say weakening encryption or allowing a back door would lower data security. On the other hand, law enforcement and governments often take the position of being concerned that there would be a way -- or thinking there is a way to create some sort of legal mechanism or back door or a key that the government also has access to that would allow an acceptable level of risk, while allowing very limited access to encrypted data for law enforcement purposes.
This debate came to the fore in the U.S. in if the last year with the debate following the San Bernardino massacre and the Apple's pushback against the be FBI's efforts in getting assistance in decrypting one of the iPhones involved in the attack, so if you look through this packet of information, we walk through several of the major concerns and issues and then lay out several policy options that we invite you to think about and also think about other policy options that we might not have included in the list.
So if you turn to Page 2, the second paragraph from the bottom, we discuss -- one second. -- we discuss the focus of this deliberative exercise, which is on cases where government actors have sought legal authorization to access encrypted data but cannot access it due to encryption, and what this exercise aims to do is to assess the optimal solution to these sorts of cases from a legal and technical perspective.
If you -- if you turn to Page 3, there's a discussion here of the issues concerning lawful access regimes, whereby government and law enforcement would have access in one form or another to the sort of encrypted data, and the discussion is how to balance legal processes that allow protection of individual's civil liberties but at the same time allow for access to decrypted versions, plain text versions of such data.
There are concerns that there's already a significant degree of assistance from corporations to governments on more of an ad hoc basis, answering to requests for data, and whether there's some way to make this into a more formal legal regime that doesn't allow for the kinds of slowed-down legal debates and processes like happened following San Bernardino or whether that actually is not desirable.
One of the major issues that comes up in this is the concern over terrorism. If you look at Page 4, we have a more developed discussion on this issue. There's concern about true crypt and telegram and other technologies by terrorist networks such as ISIS, but -- and there's also been the discussion of -- and as encryption -- as strong encryption technologies become more ubiquitous, this is a fundamental change in the access to data available to law enforcement.
Now, this brings us to on Page 5 the going dark versus the golden age of surveillance debate. The one side of this issue that is usually a possibility by law enforcement is that there's this concern that the access to the types of data that have traditionally been used by law enforcement is becoming less and less possible. This data is becoming more and more available, it's so-called going dark because of encryption technologies.
The counter-argument posed by many civil libertarians, for example, is that, in fact, this is far from going dark, this is the golden age of surveillance, that there are new forms of data available that never were available before. Encrypted data is just a tip of the iceberg and there's metadata, there's data of personal communications, there's forms of data, sometimes data that is encrypted is also stored in an unencrypted version in the Cloud, for example, and there are ways of accessing that data.
Overall, people's lives and contacts and communications are much more traceable than they've ever been, and so this is a golden age of surveillance, far from going dark. This debate continues, and there are arguments on both sides.
So that brings us to the international dimension of this puzzle, which is it's very easy and I think it's been something that's happened a bit too much in the U.S. context to think about this in a bubble, just thinking about what's going on, what's the ideal policy solution in the United States, but this does not happen in a vacuum for multiple reasons.
First, encryption technologies are not just produced in the United States. There are 546 encryption solutions available globally. That number might have changed since we researched this. There's hundreds of technologies and hundreds that are produced outside the U.S., furthermore, that are quality encryption solutions, and so if you have one country that takes a particular legal approach to this issue and -- that differs from others, this could affect global economics of import, export, of encryption technologies. It could also affect what technologies individuals actually choose to utilize, even if those technologies are not legal within their country.
And it's necessary to consider how that affects rights activists in other contexts, including repressive political regimes, how that affects criminal networks, terrorist networks, and so on.
Other dimensions of the international debate include a normative dimension over how these policy choices in one country might reflect on and influence policy decisions in other countries. There's ongoing debate right now in the U.S., China, India, the UK, France, and this is on Page 8, by the way, Russia and Germany, over these very policy questions. New laws requiring companies to assist in decrypting or hand over encryption keys to governments have been passed in the last year and a half in Russia and China, for example.
Meanwhile, the U.N. has issued several reports, including a report by the Human Rights Council declaring encryption as necessary for the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. This is on Page 9 of the discussion, which brings us to the discussion we're going have today.
There are a number of policy possible options. Now, for your reference, on Pages 10 and 11 there's a discussion of key terms, so if you want to look for definitions of things like lawful access, end-to-end encryption, metadatas, these are all there and described.
If you turn to Page 12 now, this is where we talk about and lay out a handful of different policy options, and also, for your reference, on Pages 14 through the end of the document there's a chart, which will help you look at these options in more detail, giving pros and cons of each policy option. What we've tried to do here is incorporate options which deal with both the domestic policy debates in any given country and the international dimensions and normative dimensions.
So to begin with, I will not start with Option 1. We'll come back to that at the very end, but starting with Option 2, which is under bullet point B, it's called Approaches: Accessing Encrypted Data, Break, Circumvent, and Compel, so we've laid out several options that deal with policies concerning access to encrypted data.
The first one, Option 2, says, to mandate exceptional access, create technical means for law enforcement to decrypt and access data when legally authorized. This is definitely one of the strong positions that has been held and supported by law enforcement. For example -- and there are several possible ways for how to further that objective. For example, you can -- 2.1 here, you can impose costs for noncompliance, can you make companies pay fines or be liable if they block this exceptional access.
Policy Option 3, reject mandatory exceptional access we made as a distinct option. It's clearly the opposite in the way of 2, but it could be made as a legal framework in its own right, and we've laid out in the chart a number of pros and cons that have been argued on both sides of this position.
Option 4 deals directly with the issue of whether or not to compel companies to assist in decrypting data, to either provide keys or back doors or direct assistance to the government in decrypting data, and this could be done in such a way that it affected design decisions so that companies were legally liable to decrypt data, and so if they didn't retain that ability themselves, then they would face problems legally and they wouldn't have the ability to push back legally that this was a violation of the -- of the divine of their product.
Option 5 is to authorize government hacking, which is clearly another different solution to this issue, and it deals with, among other things, what we discussed in bullet 5.1, the ability of markets and governments restoring vulnerabilities to allow them to hack into encryption protocols or encrypted devices.
And moving on to Section C, regulating the availability of encryption technology, deny, restrict, or promote, we've laid out several -- we've laid out a couple of options, again. One would be to restrict ubiquitous, strong encryption for public use; another would be to support ubiquitous, strong encryption for public use. Again, I refer you to the chart, which goes into a great more detail than I have time to right now as you debate and discuss these policies for more on the pro and contra arguments for each of these.
Obviously, there's a relationship between the legal frameworks discussed in the first set of points and the -- this technological decision, and the two will influence each other as policies.
Moving to Part D, Approaches: Consult and deliberate to find solutions to the encryption problem, this deals with the question of what process should be used to come to an answer. I think one frustration for many in different communities has been the siloedness and disjunctures in the setting where this debate has been happening. You have people in law schools deliberating security issues and there's an extent to which the two don't necessarily happen in the same place. There's a lot of secret discussions and so on, and so one option would be to have a national public expert commission that was appointed to deliberate on and identify possible solutions.
Clearly, interesting topic in this particular setting where we're talking about deliberative democracy as well.
Moving to Point E, dealing with the international dimension, we could establish a set of voluntary global norms to protect encryption against restrictions and weakening due to national security and economic interests, so this would be a set of best practices that then states could attempt to conform to.
Now, I'd like to come back to that meta question which I skipped at the beginning of the policy discussion, and so we've been debating this a bit amongst ourselves today even what is the right framework for this. It's written on the sheet that you have, the meta Debate is private and ubiquitous, strong encryption vs. access. Which is more important to security, private and ubiquitous strong encryption or exceptional access following due process. I would suggest in debating this that you maybe think about what you think of that framing of the question and possibly consider it without the for security and instead think of which is more important, period, for whichever values you think are most important.
This is a question we could debate at length. Security can mean many things. It can mean personal security and protection of civil liberties being part of that, but there's some concern that it primes the debate to be focused more on national security, so the meta debate is over which of these options is better, period.
And on this note, I want to turn it over to you all for the discussion. The main thing here is not to try to pick every single one of these policy options and debate and come to a solution on each of them but more to think about which you think are most important and discuss those in depth and perhaps also there might be other policy options that we haven't thought of or put here that you would like to consider, so on that note, open it up to the small group discussion.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you, Jackie. You did the impossible. We gave her 15 minutes, and I think you actually stuck to time. Thanks a lot. Just a couple of very small comments before we take off for the conversation and deliberations. Importantly, there is a very strong technology component in this topic innately, and we do not anybody to be a technology expert. In fact, if technology questions come up, please signal and we will try to get you a good answer, but this is really more on the policy dimension, and if, you know, somebody thinks that yeah, as a technology solution or wants to champion that, something that is not in here and we haven't considered, let's kind of park that for the moment and try to find an answer following our conversations are.
Also, of course, we want your feedback to the material, so any annotation and comments that you have -- as Jackie noted, we just had some refinements earlier today that we think made sense -- we'll get better and improve over time. Of course, if you're interested to use these materials in any context, then we do think their application goes far beyond a deliberative poll at this location. This is really an attempt to map a debate that is very fast and difficult to understand, and, you know, if we actually get together and we kind of have a Wikipedia and neutral point of view overview of what the debate looks like, that might be very handy to inform decision-makers around the world to have good debates.
So with that, let's split off into small groups.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Yeah. Let's -- why don't we -- why don't we go around the room and count off and then we'll use the number that you get to divide you, so would you like to go first and just say you're number 1, you're number 2? Just remember your number. Just speak loudly. Go around. Hello.
>> MAX SENGES: No, 1, 2, 1, 2.
>> JIM FISHKIN: They know which are odd and which are even. We could just go around, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 -- the participants, people who are willing to participate. So just go around the room and count off from 1 to whatever, maybe 40. Go ahead. 5, 6, 7, 8. All right. You want to do 1, 2, 1, 2? You can do that. Whatever's quick. We don't want to use --
>> (Off microphone).
>> JIM FISHKIN: That's fine. Okay. 1, 2, 1, 2, okay. Go around.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 1.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 2.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER 2.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Whatever. Just --
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 1.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 2.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 1.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 2.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 2.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 1.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: 1.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Are we all finished? You're what? And there's some people here. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. Just please -- keep going. Who else is --
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone)
>> JIM FISHKIN: We've done it. Okay. I just didn't want everybody to sit with their friends, so if we do 1, 2. So all the 1s come over here, all the 2s go over there, and we're going to -- we're going to circle the chairs, and then we'll come back to these --
>> MAX SENGES: 1s over here. Jim is going to moderate that conversation. Kathleen in the back, who's raising her arm right now, is going to moderate the Number 2 deliberations.
>> JIM FISHKIN: After that, we'll reconvene the chairs and come back to where you were.
>> MAX SENGES: We come back at 3:20.
>> JIM FISHKIN: So you can hear me. No. Max is saying no microphone. Okay.
(Small group deliberations taking place until 1520)
>> MAX SENGES: Just a quick housekeeping announcement. We have five more minutes. Maybe you have some questions you'd like to ask in the plenumround.
(Small group deliberations continue)
All right. I know now the conversations just really got deep, but I have to ask you to come back to the Plenum and we can continue the conversation there, maybe finish the last -- yeah.
((Small group deliberations continue)
Hello, hello. Okay. Okay. So let's get started with a panel conversation or the plenum conversation in deliberative poll as Professor Fishkin developed it. There will be experts that we've briefed and chosen for various perspectives and their expertise in the field.
Now, in an IGF context, there was expertise spread across the whole community and different viewpoints come from that, so we will have one of the group participants that you've selected ask the question, and then we will see who from the group finds to offer a perspective and answer to the particular question and have a short debate on each of the questions. Rebecca, may I ask you to ask the first question?
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: Okay. Sure. Am I okay? All right. So the -- one of the questions we came up with is the question of what do government commitments to a free and open and human rights compatible Internet, among those governments who have made such commitments, demand in relation to encryption and what -- what institutions for us should deliberations about this take place?
>> MAX SENGES: So just give me a shorthand signal if you feel you can offer a perspective, a partial answer, one answer. I'm sure there's more than one to this very difficult question.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: Or if it's not clear what I meant, feel free to ask me more about what I meant.
>> MAX SENGES: Yes, please.
>> PENG HWA ANG: Yeah, I think in this area, okay, human rights, as you know, is not absolute, it is a contextual in the sense of culture and all that, but also from observation, depending on time. So in the UK the act was passed at the time of panic and that, unfortunately, got rolled over in the Commonwealth. All Commonwealth have an act. So I feel at this point in time we're having sort of a panic with respect to terrorism, and so I think in this area, if you ask that question, you would depend on time. I guess if you recall, after the September 11, attack on -- there was a rollback on privacy, and now that things have kind of softened a bit, there's some pushback now against that rollback, so when you ask that question, I guess it depends on the context of it. If you feel you are in a threat, you will definitely have, in a sense, more rolling back of privacy concerns, and if you feel safer, you allow more human rights concern. I guess here the human rights concern we know is the respect of privacy, so my big point is on contextual culture as well as time.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you, and if you may invite you to say your name and, you know, what stakeholder group you want to speak for or what regional perspective you want to bring in, are that might be interesting for the conversation as well. Do we have anybody else who want to tackle this difficult and must-be-difficult question? Oh, yes. Thank you. Please choose to introduce yourself or not.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think everything -- every perspective should be set for making Internet human rights compatible. For the reason I have the universal answer is to adopt international instruments which can preserve human rights with that, so I think this is a -- the issue of encryption is very crucial for everyone. It's -- Russian experience shows that so that we have to ensure human rights should work on the Internet. Thank you very much.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. I'll take another look, okay, if anybody wants to comment or build on what has been said. Otherwise, let's move to the next question, maybe from Group Number 2. Let me see. Do you want to ask the first one?
>> NALINI ELKINS: Sure. Yes. Nalini Elkins from the United States. One of the questions that we had was no matter what we do and what we decide on, how can it be enforced? I mean, who's going to regulate what we do? I mean, is there really a protocol police?
So I guess that was kind of a question we had about whatever -- you know, whatever happens.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. Who governs the Internet? I think that's probably one of the questions that motivated the forum in the first place, but observations, how can the space be policed and any -- you know, any of the measures be enforced?
>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Thanks. Farzaneh Badiei. I have to say my group? Yes. Civil Society. I think that question is kind of in line with our first question, which is about what institutions should talk about, but also do we want to go towards like standard setting institution, like similar to what IETF does or then we are going to have some kind of a norm there for the technologists or do we want -- by enforcement you mean more like hard law? So for -- I think a standard-setting institution would be a good idea, but I have no idea about the hard law because then the sovereign states would -- like different countries have different laws, and it would be difficult to enforce that.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. I see a direct reaction, and I'm going to move over to you in a moment.
>> NALINI ELKINS: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, I actually work at the IETF, and I do standards, and that's why I say -- that's why I say, like, that's -- we -- that comes up all the time, and we have standards. They're adopted, adopted in certain OSs, and then everybody says, you need to make sure this and that standard is implemented, and we're like, we're not the protocol police.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. Very multifaceted.
>> EDMON CHUNG: Edmon Chung here from DotAsia here, but I guess I'm bringing this up as an individual, so Civil Society. I think the two questions may be related. I apologize again, I'm coming in late, and I'm probably going to ask a stupid question here, but the question I have is, you know, if the governments are trying to say that, you know, we need a back door, the problem is those who won't -- those who are going to use technology that doesn't have a back door are probably going to be the criminals, so what is the gain anyway in trying to do this kind of thing because you can't enforce the criminals not to use the technology that has no back door, so I -- I'm just scratching my head, you know, what -- what gain does it give law enforcement in, you know, trying to enforce that there would be back doors in certain devices or technology?
>> MAX SENGES: That's bringing up a completely new question, how can you limit, even if you wanted to mandate or for bid the use of solutions without a back door? Interesting one. Direct reaction, please.
>> WALID AL-SAQAF: I'm Walid. I come from Yemen in the Middle East. Often I ask the question can technology use -- can we limit the terrorist's use of technology because, you know, the Middle East is often labeled with that notion, and I tell them that what you're trying to do is driving the problem underground. You're causing criminals to become more adaptive, more creative, more revolutionary in the ways of working, and you're making it much more difficult. In fact, you're trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the roots of the problems, and so if governments keep on thinking in this way, that applies, actually, beyond simply the Internet.
And then they're actually causing more of the devastations happening, and so when we think of encryption -- I mean, trying to create back doors to track criminal activity, you're actually making it worse, and, in fact, you're somewhat contributing to the backlash.
>> MAX SENGES: Okay. Thank you. In the interest of time, we've got to move on to keep the train rolling. James, may I ask you to ask the second question from Group Number 1.
>> JAMES EDWARDS: It's the classic policy questions and we've just heard good questions from Ed and Walid, so it's going to be what's the disease or what's the cur. How important is lawful circumvention of local security to one public safety and, two, to the administration of justice? What difference does it make?
>> MAX SENGES: How could you come up with these very hard questions? Thank you. Does anybody feel he or she can contribute to the beginning of an answer to this big question?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have one comment. I think if we wanted to allow governments to be able to get in through the back door, they're going to do it anyway. I think no matter what, if we say no, it's going to still happen, but by making it lawful, then I believe any evident gains would be able to be admissible in court, otherwise it's gain from unlawful means, so I think it's better to do it in a lawful way; however, I don't believe we should allow back-door access.
>> MAX SENGES: Any more observations maybe from different parts of the planet or from different stakeholder groups, different perspectives? Do we have somebody who would support the other side of the argument?
>> NALINI ELKINS: I hate to say I support back-door access, but I -- there's a point that hasn't been brought up, really, which we discussed in our group, is I work with a lot of financial institutions and large corporations, and really, they decrypt for lawful reasons, for fraud detection, for -- you know, I mean, for any number of things, and literally, you're going to bring corporations to their knees, which I'm sure you don't want, by getting rid of all this kind of access. This is -- it's a huge problem that we've had, and so, you know, it's a very complex question, I'll just say that.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. Do we have any other perspectives. Peng Hwa.
>> PENG HWA ANG: I'm Peng Hwa from Singapore. I have a concrete example of what it means if you don't have the kind of lawful submission that you talked about. I have this wonderful Chinese tracker. It's got -- it's got a fitness tracker, of course, heartbeat measurement. Tells me after an hour I'm sitting for too long, and of course, with delivery right now, the sale $25 U.S. dollars. It pairs to my Chinese phone, and I unlock my phone, I pick up my phone, my tracker unlocks my phone. What a brilliant idea, but I have a friend who will not use the Chinese phone because it has a record in the past of sending data back to his home head office, and my friends in China tell me you should be using an Apple phone because they don't allow people to access the data.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you very much for that perspective. Let's move on to the second question of Group Number 2.
>> ANA: Good afternoon. I'm Ana from Brazil. I came here with Youth@IGF, so the question that I brought to the small group is whether -- is there really a tendency of communications going dark, since, because, a lot of companies still rely on data as their business model, as really a commodity. Is there really an interest of completely blacking out communications?
>> MAX SENGES: So the question, whether the going dark argument is even in the interest of the private sector and, hence, would ever come to bear. Anybody wants to comment and elaborate a little bit on their perspective on the going dark perspective?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone)
>> MAX SENGES: So the going dark argument is that if the -- we'd use encryption widespread, strong encryption, then the police and the enforcement agencies couldn't do their job because they couldn't access any data, and that is, of course, you know, fueled by companies like WhatsApp and similar who start to encrypt all communications end-to-end, which makes it much more difficult to access.
I mean, I can say if I take my Stanford hat off and my Google hat on that, you know, we are obviously interested to provide value to the user, and if the user wants the communication to be encrypted, then we will do our best to make that happen, and there are technological means, like homomorphic encryption, where you can actually do certain queries on data and provide services on encrypted data that allow to, you know, not identify the person that is being served. You can, of course, go up in granularity when you address certain value propositions or, you know, your products in that space, so, again, unfortunately, I don't think it's a black-or-white environment, but it's certainly true that data is information and knowledge and that there's a lot of good that can be taken out of it, so I don't think switching it off and going dark would be the right thing to do, nor is it practically possible, really.
Do I provoke any reactions with that statement?
>> WALID AL-SAQAF: It's Walid again. I think encryption, having it peer-to-peer will be different than peer-to-central service, such as Google, et cetera, and so the idea that companies would embrace encryption end-to-end in all traffic communications means that they will have to change their business model altogether because they will not be able to understand what data there is on the servers and what people are communicating with, so ads will change in terms of how they streamline. Of course, if it's by default, but companies -- and I think this is the more likely situation, that companies will actually afford to have an encryption button that you dig in and try to find on your own and then turn on, and by default, it will not be encrypted, so that's just my understanding of how it might be.
>> MAX SENGES: Okay. Thank you. I think we have one last contribution, then we'll move on.
>> JAMES EDWARDS: So James. In the going dark argument, in practice, sophisticated privacy technology seems to be not that widely adopted. There's lots of users who make themselves very public and accessible, and even those who do deliberately use private technologies interface in the physical world in some way that is probably discoverable by lawful authorities, so it just doesn't seem like the concern that might be argued to be from point of view of administering justice or protecting public safety.
>> JACKIE KERR: I'd also here, bringing back the argument of the age of golden surveillance, the counter argument that's often brought up in reaction to this, there's a period of time, the last ten years, say, where a lot of digital information and communication has been available for law enforcement purposes, but that's the easiest it's ever been to access people's private communications, so maybe that's sort of being pushed back a little bit, but think about before that, before the Internet, the ways in which law enforcement had to go through significant legwork to get that same level of access to people's communications, get embedded in networks, get wire taps on specific phones in specific places, et cetera. It was much more difficult to get access to that kind of communication data so to say that it's going dark is looking at a very limited, short-term, historical horizon, and in fact, there's more data out there and available than there ever was before. That's the counter argument that is often brought up as the golden age of surveillance.
>> MAX SENGES: Okay. So let's go to the next item on our agenda, and that is Jim giving you a bit of a background of how this survey that we've not administered to you because of the shortness of the format that we're doing today, it's just a taste of the deliberation experience, but a survey will be handed out before our communications and before you've read the balanced briefing material, and then after, so in a small group like that, the purpose is just to notice yourself how your perspectives have changed and how the perspectives of the group have changed.
In a full deliberative poll, you'd have a random stratified sampling, and you could see how the population would shift its perspective and more importantly, for the second part, for the second survey, really have a reference point of what a community would say if they had thought through and deliberated about the tradeoffs of different options, so Jim, over to you.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Just in the interest of -- well, to explain, if you -- you have in the back part of a survey. We're not asking you to take the survey. But let me say a couple things about it.
When we do these projects, we find that there's substantial significant, in the statistical sense, opinion change. About 70% of the items we ask change significantly.
If you ask an individual person, did you change your mind, we find they never say they changed their mind, but if you actually look at what they said before and what they said after, there's significant changes, so if you look at this and say, well, I wouldn't change my mind, that's fine, but, in fact, many of you would on many of the items.
Now, what use does that have? Well, sometimes the changes are quite big, and we also -- we have a number of different kinds of questions. We have the policy proposals, we have information questions to see if people became more informed, and as I said, last year on the -- in the pilot we did, with this kind of community, they did become quite significantly more informed, so you guys know a lot, but you don't know everything.
And how do we measure informed? Well, we have questions that -- that relate to the issue, and not true/false question because it's 50/50, you can guess those, but multiple choice questions is usually the way it's done, and there are just snippets of information that -- information's usually correlated with other information, so if you answer some of those more correctly at the end, it's just a way of measuring, you probably gained a lot of other knowledge too.
And then questions -- questions that we think we feel might be used to explain the changes, so they're tradeoffs, they're values, they're other things that -- so we understand, and we can do regressions with those, so that's what we would do with a full-scale deliberative poll where you would be asked the first question on initial contact before -- not here at the meeting but when we first contact you.
Now, in this toolkit, if we -- this were done just with a toolkit and a smaller group, we still think it's interesting to speculate whether it's useful. The reason is that if we just got a group together to discuss -- first of all, it was just a group together to discuss in a big meeting, you wouldn't have any product from the result.
Then, if you had a show of hands or tried to get some consensus statement, usually it's quite bland, a bland consensus statement, but if you fill out confidentialquestionnaires like this, we can really -- without the social pressure of seeing how everybody else is going, so there aren't the bandwagon effects, you can see what you really think, and one thing we do know is that after a discussion like this -- and this was a very brief discussion, but let's say you had several hours of this or more. You really do have opinions. You have -- and your opinions have become more considered and you've considered arguments on either side. We think that that would be quite useful for any group trying to get its collective, informed judgment, so I only point out the questionnaire as an exhibit to consider, and we'll refine it -- we're going to be refining everything in light of what we learn in this discussion. Did you want to comment?
>> (Off microphone)
>> JIM FISHKIN: You need a microphone.
>> (Off microphone)
>> JIM FISHKIN: Okay. Let it boom.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: One of the things I --
>> JIM FISHKIN: Give him the microphone.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm sorry. I was involved in this last year. By the way, I really like this, that's why I sort of came back at it, but one of the -- if I had any sort of overarching, it's what we want and what this platform can deliver --
>> JIM FISHKIN: Right.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: -- are really two different things in many, many, many instances. You know, you really do need people that live in this soup all the time to understand that you don't have the right to be forgotten because you can't be forgotten. The architecture doesn't --
>> JIM FISHKIN: Right.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: -- permit for that, okay, and that -- you know, and God knows if you just follow the news, governments can't be trusted.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Well --
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: You've got problems with the private sector too, but quite frankly, all they want to do is sell you something, so it's not like they're going to come knocking at your door or something, but -- so just more framing it in the environment of what the platform will actually permit, right, and then -- and then, you know, finally, I had this discussion earlier very briefly, but I think it bears down the road here. This is really an arms warfare. This is going to be very much like the nuclear weapons age, and the only -- only a handful of companies and countries will have the power -- I mean power, electrical power, hundreds and hundreds of megawatts, to drive the technology that will allow them to have the keys to the kingdom anyway, so everybody else is going to be road kill. At the final end game is what I'm trying to say.
So you're -- we're only going to have a few king makers the way this is all going to shape out anyway, so --
>> JIM FISHKIN: So are you saying this is worth deliberating about or not? If we're all going to be road kill inevitably --
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, no, I do think -- quite frankly, I do think we should continue it because I do think we're, at some point -- I'll say this, just because of what just happened in America and what happened to the Catholic church and what's happened throughout our history, the poor little guy with a pitch fork is going to say, no, I'm tired of the church service in Latin or I'm tired of the Papal dispensation, or I'm tired of being treated like some -- and then you will have a -- but long before that, you really will have just a handful of players that will have all the keys. That's the technology.
>> MAX SENGES: So let me pick up on your point about -- and I want to let you come in in a second -- on your point about, you know, what we want this instrument to deliver and what it can deliver. I think that's exactly what we're going to spend the next part of the session about.
First a quick round of feedback from you, what you liked, what you didn't like about the materials, but before we come to that, I think Rebecca wants a word.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: Yeah, no, I just had a follow-on based on what you just said that, you know, it's going to be a handful of powerful government and corporate players that are really going to drive this at the end of the day or have the power to shape it, and that kind of relates to the initial question I pose, which is whom should we be engaging with as sort of the priority? You know, which powers, private and government, need to sort of be the target of engagement? Is do you have to engage with everybody in the United Nations or do you need to just make sure that those companies that you engage with -- that you engage with those companies and those governments that have the bandwidth and the power, in all senses of power, that are going to drive this thing, and try and get some common agreements and standards around the kind of world we want to have and how approaches to encryption fit into that?
>> JIM FISHKIN: She wants to say something too.
>> MAX SENGES: Yes. I guess that depends on your world view too, right, whether you have a perspective where you only address those that actually are in the position to cause change or whether you go more with a democratic approach where you say, let's get a baseline understanding with enough people, you know, small people drum on the drum --
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: The small people are the stakeholders. The big powers ultimately will only be powerful if their stakeholders kind of trust them to a certain amount, and for at least the corporate side, those people are not limited to just one nation's state, so in a sense, it gets to the little people -- the little people end up having some power, you know, or being able to -- there are ways to exercise the power.
>> MAX SENGES: So I agree.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone) support for exactly that reason, because if we can inform the -- the IGF is important for exactly that reason because if you have a multistakeholder and you continue to chip away at education and communication, involvement, collaboration, then those handful of people, you can -- you can hold them accountable, you can show that -- your displeasure in a lot of different ways. If it's a company, by boycotting their products or whatever; if it's a government, by ridicule, by -- you know, there are ways, and we've had that throughout history, I mean, short of a guillotine.
>> MAX SENGES: Just because it's an energetic conversation, I want you to come in too and take off my Stanford hat for a second and say Google is probably one of those players you're thinking about, right? I mean, we do sit here. There's always a big delegation, and I would say there's three things that get companies -- get everybody to move, carrots, sticks, and reason, and, you know, I don't think the IGF is particularly good with carrots and sticks, but we are good in doing things like what we're doing right here; that is, getting to the bottom and really hearing out what a good solution is because as you have actually just mentioned, you know, Google's intention is not to take over the world and, you know, to rule. It's a business, you know. It's pretty straightforward, so we want people to be happy, so we're absolutely here to listen, some of us more to engage and participate, but obviously, it's a collective action problem, and these are very complex, big organizations that are almost -- I mean, we're about 100,000 people, I think, at this point, you know. If there's seven or ten of us in a conversation like that, that also needs to carry and get informed.
So great conversation. Let's have two more folks come in and then get more on the -- how do we shape this tool to make it as powerful and as reasonable and useful as it can be for this multistakeholder conversation.
>> NALINI ELKINS: Yeah. I'm going to push back a little bit on some of what I've heard here. One of the things about the Internet and one of the things -- one of the reasons I really believe in the Internet is that it levels the playing field in a way that we have not seen for many, many -- maybe ever in our lives or maybe in the history of the world. I mean, not to use too much hyperbole in there, but really, it's a -- you know, you can have a small company that goes -- if -- right up against IBM or Google. If you've got a better algorithm -- I'm not saying always but oftentimes you can make it work, and we see this all the time, all the time there's stuff coming out, and so I think the monopoly of the big powers, you know, I don't know so much about that. Of course, of course there's things and there's some things for which you need capital. You're not going to go up against Chevron because that just takes too much capital, but some of the other people, sure, you can go up against a lot of that, and -- and the beginning -- and the open source community is a huge thing which just shows you that, and so I think the -- this is probably a whole discussion in itself, so I'm going to stop now. Thanks.
>> MAX SENGES: Snapchat that's probably the thing that's most appropriate. Martin, quick comment, please.
>> MARTIN: Yes. Thanks, Max. My issue was the deliberative polling and what comes out of that, and the danger of getting away and how we end up talking now is we talk a little bit in circles where the question is, well, is it useful or not?
>> MAX SENGES: That's why you're the last one.
(Laughter)
>> MARTIN: And I think basically what I see is it's a useful instrument where it can help to better understand where we stand, but not as a final conclusion, particularly with the number of people we're working with here. Then big data analysis is much better, but it can help group in a specific setting like IGF, which means global level, multiple cultures, multiple jurisdictions into discussing subjects, and then takes stock once in a while, this is what we think now, this is where progress is, these are the issues remaining, so in that way I see useful role in global debates for that, but please stay away from any pointing that this may lead to conclusions with these kind of meetings. That's not my feeling and that has not been growing stronger after this --
>> MAX SENGES: Well, I mean, I think conclusions are very -- you know, that goes person by person, that may be organization by organization, so I think, you know, depending on the subject matter -- in fact, one of the arguments that we make about the methodology is that you can see by the delta between the before deliberation and after deliberation, if there is a big delta, if a lot of people change their minds, then probably there isn't all that much clear -- the topic isn't that ripe yet, right? There is no consensus, not even close, but, yes, I mean, we don't expect there to be consensus at the end.
In fact, what Jim pointed out is that it's good in clarifying positions and making clear why somebody, you know, holds one and the other and as we -- actually Jeremy and I will give a quick overview of how this potentially can contribute and what makes multistakeholderism, especially in this context, so let's not get hung up on that conversation now, let's have that at the end of the session.
Now we have -- had planned ten minutes. I would cut that down to five minutes and see what you have in terms of feedback on the material and on the subject matter that was discussed. I can -- I can start off by saying I think the groups were a little big. I think if we did it again -- I don't know what your ideal group size is, but it's probably closer to seven or maximum of ten people, and especially a loud setting like here is not particularly conducive to having everybody engaged and really have that deliberative conversation, so that's a first observation from me. Please, any points about the materials that you saw. Alex, if I understand correct -- did you want to comment?
>> ALEX: I think the design of the materials itself shapes a lot what is happening now in this methodology. That itself is a strong limitation to the value of the methodology. I think from Group 2 it became apparent that the case scenario is very U.S. centric scenario, which doesn't work in Russia, for example, as one of the colleagues said, so keep that in mind that maybe you have already designed materials through this type of methodology, and now we're going in circles.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Well, look, when you convene a group for a discussion, you really have to use everybody's time very productively to try to clarify the pros and cons of some different options, and, yes, these materials need to be more developed, but on the encryption issue, we were struggling with the fact that it is a ubiquitous international issue, and some of the context we were thinking about is the U.S., so maybe there's some further elements of the materials that could be developed to apply to other international contexts or to specify standards that would help clarify some of the questions because you're right, when some of these proposals are applied in the U.S., it's quite different from if they're applied in some other kinds of regimes, but, of course, the -- the context of multistakeholder Internet governance is an international context and it involves different sectors and it involves different perspectives, and so we should work further to refine it. But we always need materials of some sort because if you don't have materials that -- to begin the discussion and give some common basis for some facts that have been vetted and some competing arguments that need to be considered, you'll waste a lot of people's time as they try to construct it, and so we want to use your time very -- I think these materials produced an engaging discussion, but you're right, they can be added to.
By the way, I think if the groups are too small, then they don't have enough diversity in them, so if you have a good sample or a good collection of people and it's randomly assigned, then you've got a lot of different perspectives, and in this context, that means different -- the global north, global south, different ages, different genders, different perspectives, and so we usually find that 12 to 15 works well. If it gets too small, you lack the diversity. If it gets too big, people don't have enough of an opportunity to speak, so we'll work on that.
>> MAX SENGES: Because we're in the round where we're really talking about this particular material, the conversation, obviously, came up, Alexander, whether, you know, they're too U.S. centric or not, and we asked them to internationalize, et cetera.
On the other hand, the argument that our experts came back with is that a lot of the, you know, debate and what's driving the debate are cases like the Bernardino case and Apple, and of course, we could also bring examples from other countries, but that at least gives some coherence and a joint understanding of some of the practicalities, and that's one argument why, you know, there is a lot of U.S. companies and you could argue too many U.S. cases and contexts mentioned.
>> ALEX: I'm not questioning the setup because you could have that in any country, right, but the rule of law background is a very different one than, say, in the U.S. is to other countries, so that's influences and shapes the options you can consider, but just about the methodology, about the methodology, maybe you may want to include a loop where participants can question the assumptions and the case itself.
>> MAX SENGES: Oh, absolutely.
>> ALEX: Before proceeding --
>> MAX SENGES: That is both in the production of the materials and -- we don't claim these materials are deduced, right? In fact, that's probably the best and most engaged conversations if, you know, someone disagrees and others would probably in the group very much agree with the materials, et cetera, so, yes, methodologywise, that's --
>> JIM FISHKIN: And one of the motivations for this meeting is to further question the materials to refine them further, so we really appreciate your help.
>> MAX SENGES: We will have Kathleen's email up later, anybody who's interested in bringing -- repeating this conversation or bringing a deliberation about these topics and using these materials, we're very interested in talking about that. Peng Hwa.
>> PENG HWA ANG: Just a point, and maybe we need further discussion, James. It seems to me for this discussion, we need to cut off the extremes, what is not allowable and what is allowable, and so the aim is to develop a range of possibilities, but I do not want to extend deliberative polling to what's there. I'm not an expert in this area, but you are expert. In other words, instead of coming with one of the options, have a range of options with the lower end cutoff and an upper end cutoff, sort of a strong no and strong yes cutoff and what we have is an exceptional range.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: James, why would the extremes be wrong?
>> MAX SENGES: Why cut off the question?
>> PENG HWA ANG: The example I gave of my China phone, very good China phone. Has all the functions of iPhone, but people don't trust it, right? So the end is cut off. On the other hands, the concerns about terrorism, and it seems to me there are genuine concerns about terrorism, so what you have left is somewhere in the middle, but if, you know, a strong yes and strong no will be out, but the middle will be sort of acceptable, and how do you arrive at that. That's my two-cents contribution.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: You're saying strong encryption with no back door should be taken off the table as an option?
>> PENG HWA ANG: I think so, yeah.
>> MAX SENGES: James.
>> JAMES EDWARDS: My response to that is there's an important decision on how to specifically pitch the examples. As we have them, they're pitched at the level of policies you'd adopt. I think there's a case for going much more specific. Terrence has some dodgy material on his iPhone, you know, law school exam style, or for going much higher level, what concerns are at play in this arena, discuss, develop that, write your own policy, and that, I think, would be another way of addressing the concern you have about ending up with specific policies that sound extreme.
>> MAX SENGES: So that actually brings us back to Martin's earlier point, right, whether this can produce useful results, and I think the conversation is probably more engaging and a bit more realistic and not as policy abstract.
On the other hand, it would not allow the results to, you know, be pointed to as, look, this is somehow generalizable. And to Alex's earlier point like not using cases like Russia or other countries where rule of law might be a problem -- you see, I think the problem if you take the very problematic cases, so to say, is that then, of course, you know, you start -- you need a rule in the first place for any good process, for any of that to work, and then you diverge the discussion even further.
That would be at least the methodology or the methodological thing I had earlier. You had your hand up.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: We are speaking for Russia for the whole deliberative poll, so I would like to raise a proposal. Maybe it's possible to organize such a deliberative poll in Russia to compare the results.
(Laughter)
>> MAX SENGES: Yes, we would certainly be interested to compare results from different parts and experiences from different parts of the world.
Any more comments on --
>> JIM FISHKIN: She's got a comment.
>> MAX SENGES: -- on briefing materials, otherwise I think we should move on.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Wait.
>> MAX SENGES: I know. Jackie is going to comment.
>> JACKIE KERR: I just would think that considering those international perspectives could play a very useful role, and I guess one thing I would think about is how maybe to bring that in as even ideal type sort of cases to examine and to examine how the policies being considered affect different extreme situations of different sort of national settings, and, you know, you could look at Russia, you could look at China, you could look at India, you could look at the U.S., and that way it's not just so U.S. and Europe centric, it actually considers the different panoply of issues that come up in those others, if you take, if you will, sort of ideal type of other extremes of types of issues that might arise, and there might be a way to structure that into the discussion, so you have sort of explicit questions about the effects of policies in those different political settings.
>> JIM FISHKIN: I just wanted to say with response to Peng Hwa, I just wanted to say in some other cases, we have found that having the extreme cases on either end of a continuum is actually useful for clarifying the reasons that are at stake, and then people, if they get the full range of reasons on either side, they start grappling with them, balancing them, weighing them, and some of them end up someplace in between, as you were suggesting might be reasonable, but you need to calibrate all the arguments, and sometimes if you leave out the extreme reasons, the extreme cases, you're going to miss some of the arguments, so I think actually, in terms of the range of the questionnaire on a 0-10 scale, we get a lot of nuance, but if we get nuance also in the explanatory variables so we can get exactly why somebody doesn't go all the way but resists on the tradeoffs, it can be made to work, and I think some of these strong cases are clarifying on this issue because we're not asking -- ultimately we're not asking technical questions, we're asking sort of collective political will, what is it -- for what goals and what values and for what reasons do we want to do and what might be the costs of doing that, and we sort of want to clarify all of that, so I take the point, but thank you.
>> MAX SENGES: So should we stop here? Yeah, I think this is where we should stop the specific deliberation and experience about encryption governance and get to the second part of the meeting where we want to think about is that a tool that in its original setup where Jim Fishkin and his center have applied it many times to all kinds of questions very successfully, but this is a new challenge for a number of ways -- in a number of ways. The community is very diverse, you know, it's more difficult than country nationality to identify the constituency, you know, whoever shows up at an IGF shows up at an IGF and finds the community.
We're going to go through a number of the benefits and of the questions that we see here. First, myself and Jeremy are going to have a couple of slides talking about multistakeholder governance and democracy challenge.
Then we're going to look at the three value propositions that we see this method potentially contribute to multistakeholder governance, the balance briefing materials as an easy way to get an overview of the state of the debates, of the arguments made, of the options that are being discussed, the structured deliberation as a means to have a more moderated exchange, maybe a more egalitarian exchange in bigger groups that is maybe more appropriate and more knowledge sharing, leads to better understanding, facilitates potential consensus or a clarification of positions. Then the polling itself, both in the full poll as a means to have a point of reference for decision-makers to say this is what a well-informed, well-deliberated group of netizens or participants of a group would think or just to say, okay, this is how our opinions changed and how the opinions of the group changed and then at the end we have even more challenges and obviously once overcome opportunities to improve the materials.
So I just threw out two slides. In the interest of time, Jeremy, I'd ask you to also have a very quick five-minute overview of what you wanted to share. So just for those who might have come in a little bit late, welcome -- Izumi, for example. We're thinking about how can a big global resource like the online space be governed in the first place and how can we bring in democratic stake -- practices that allow everybody to -- every stakeholder to participate in their respective roles and how can these practices be informed by democratic values and -- yeah, as we -- have I think all recognized, the questions -- and encryption governance is just one of them. All of them are layered in so many different ways that the complexity of the challenge is just enormous. I think this picture has been around for ten years at this point. It's from the DiploFoundation, and I think it's the most realistic attempt to show what Internet governance is. It's a very, you know, heterogeneous and -- yeah, very much under construction building with all kinds of things happening. I think that's much more realistic than this, for example, which on the other hand, allows for better stratification of the discussion, where you do separate, okay, here's the technical layer, there's some things that we want to discuss there, there's a content layer where different stakeholders, different questions arise, and then there is a social layer.
There is a paper from a group at MIT about tussle that raises how we should always try to separate these different conversations in different groups and not, you know, jump from the technical layer all the way to the social layer. It's very difficult, and I think it takes years of experience in this space for -- you know, there were some colleagues from the Youth IGF that have come here for the first time. I remember when I started to engage in this environment, it takes years before you can really do that, and to some degree, I'm not sure how a deliberative poll and how briefing materials can overcome that difficulty and make the communication more accessible.
Oh. This is one of the slides I wanted to skip. And this is from ISOC, and I think that represents, again, the status quo relatively well. You have a lot of different stakeholders. There's open debate in various fora, but in the end the standards and policies are decided by individual groups that have jurisdiction or that have the mandate to decide on the policies, and then there is yet another group of operators, the ISPs, the Internet service providers like Google, et cetera, that then bring the services to the people.
This is another angle, but this is from a paper that myself and two other colleagues wrote, I think, two IGFs back, and it describes the roles of the IGF of identifying issues. I think deliberative polling can be very good in identifying and even better at framing the challenges and bringing them to -- yeah -- a concreteness that then groups outside of the IGF can start experiments and can start to work on solutions, and then we come back in this environment and we document and track how things are going, so one of the options that the group -- that the team is discussing that -- you know, full disclosure -- I always bring up is the IGF not one big deliberation, and should we see how has one IGF changed people's opinion before IGF and after IGF? Are there mailing lists that are going on, the Internet Governance caucus not deliberation spaces as well, and I think there is a lot of meat there. We'd love your opinions on those.
Another element that I think is important to bring up, we have very high standards and very high ambitions for this multistakeholder Internet governance environment and policymaking, and these are all the principles that the NETmundial conference and process had identified, you know, transparency, accountability, distribution, multistakeholder, but there are enabling, meaningful participation. All of them really resonate well with the deliberative polling.
So how do we design multistakeholder Internet governance with democratic values? Well, the question starts with representative democracy vs. representation of stakeholders that we could discuss in this context. What are the role of these stakeholders? Is it the fact in a there is no voting, but bringing the different perspectives to the deliberations, Civil Society certainly a watchdog role to bring reason and services requests from the other groups; the private-sector provision of innovation and actually provision of services, and government in its, you know, theoretic role, is more of a broker and setting the rules according to what Civil Society and the private sector have come up with, and then, of course, policing.
And this is my last point, the relationship between national, regional, and global spheres of conversation is another complexity that we should consider, and with that, I pass it over to you. There's a clicker that you can use. I hope you can stick to five minutes about.
>> JEREMY MALCOLM: I have my five-minute timer running. So this takes off from the last slide, which referred to how representative democracy is not really workable in the global environment because we don't have a global parliament, we don't have a global -- we don't have elections at the global level. The United Nations is not really a substitute for that, so instead we have multistakeholder representation, and I see multistakeholderism as trying to accomplish a global alternative to a representative democracy, but I also see them as being fairly far apart, and as you can see in the diagram, fairly rough on the right-hand side, so what we want to do is move them closer together and smooth off the rough edges so that we have an overlap there.
And I think that deliberative processes are a way of trying to smooth off those rough edges, the rough edges being that some stakeholders are more powerful than others, that issues are not really considered in-depth and people may jump to conclusions, and so through deliberation, we can smooth that out and come to a better approximation of democracy on a global scale.
This diagram is impossible to see because of the resolution of the screen, but basically, what it shows is how we have the three stakeholder groups, governance, private sector, and Civil Society all trying to make rules and influence rulemaking without a real center of connection where they can coordinate and collaborate on policies to guide them, and the IGF is there in the center.
What we could do is to use the IGF more effectively for the exchange of policy ideas and it wouldn't change the power structures. Governments would still be the ones making laws, companies would still be the ones making their own policies, but the IGF would help to coordinate.
This is also impossible to read, but this is one template for a way in which the IGF could become more effective as a set of deliberative -- a deliberation on Internet policy issues. I won't go into the nuts and bolts of that, but I've tried to create a simpler version at the EFF, which is where I work, through this little info graphic. I have hard copies of it if you'd like to come and see me later, you can grab one, and it tries to break down what we're trying to accomplish at the IGF and in other multistakeholder fora into a set of criteria, which are inclusion, balance, and accountability, and I think deliberation really is mainly about balance, it's about how we stop certain stakeholder groups from -- all certain stakeholders from imposing their external power that they may have, whether it be financial or political, and really boiling down to actual issues and actual what is in the shared public interest.
So there are various ways in which we can achieve that sort of balance.
A traditional multistakeholder structure is that of ICANN which tries to reach balance by splitting up the organization into various constituencies and stakeholder groups and trying to reflect that in the board structure, but, I mean, it's a little inflexible, it's a little vulnerable to capture, so I feel that deliberative approaches are better than the -- what I'm calling the constituency approach of ICANN. It's not so vulnerable to capture and strategic game playing as the constituency model can be. It is more adaptable. You can have different roles taken by different stakeholders, depending on the issue, and this is something that we learned from the NETmundial forum where they clarified that the respective roles of stakeholders aren't fixed but may change from one issue to another.
Through deliberative democracy, we also have a focus on achieving win-win outcomes, rather than just brokering compromises, and I won't go through the other points because I've just about used up my time, but -- so I think that the experiment that this represents has some potentially really valuable lessons for how the IGF as a whole could evolve and better fit its mandate to be an institution that helps to -- helps everyone to develop shared global public policies for the Internet.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. That was very helpful and incredibly on time. I couldn't believe that he managed that when I saw the slides. Well done. Thank you.
So we're now going to walk through the different, let's say, proposition, value propositions that deliberative polling can bring, and the first one we believe is to allow stakeholders to obtain an overview through neutral point of view briefing -- briefings on policy options to address Internet governance issues. The briefing materials in front of you. And the current practice is, of course, that, you know, we find academic experts, anybody can find an academic expert to issue one point of the materials basically asking questions, how, you know -- what is the current state of the debate and writing that down and we or another organizer of such a deliberative polling exercise would go and ship that to the different stakeholders and experts that then look at the proposition, and the outcome is really not that far away from a very good Wikipedia Article, right, where you would have something like some party and ideally in this more concrete and applied context, you would say, you know, Google's position is X; the ICC's position is Y, and you could list the different positions and proposals, either with or without the actual stakeholder that is proposing it.
The challenges that we see is -- as has been pointed out, the political complexity on the one hand between different regional, national, cultural spheres, that you have that very thick technology underlay that, you know, quite frankly, sometimes a genius engineer comes up with a new solution, and that, of course, changes completely the rules. It's already very, very -- yeah, very complex layered arrangements when you start with a traditional Internet and they're constantly pushing the boundaries, adding medical devices, adding, you know, large area, low power networks, et cetera, and then, of course, as we all know, these Internet governance issues evolve very fast compared to other policy spheres that, you know, are discussed, like, sustainable development or other areas where, yes, they're also moving, but I think the constellation in the Internet, not last based on the constant innovation and evolution is enormous.
You've seen the materials that we've produced for this. Some of you, I believe, have seen the materials from last year's deliberative poll on access for the next billion. Do you think this is a valuable or can be a valuable contribution if -- or a valuable tool for -- in a governance and multistakeholder exchanges? If so, you know, do you have ideas on how this should be made accessible?
One of the challenges that I can bring up just very practically is that, of course, you don't want the people who have already reviewed the materials to then take the poll, right, so you can't just make them publicly available and say, well, just throw them on a Wiki and then you have the community look at them. Well, then, you've already preempted the possibility to pull these people into the actual deliberative poll later, so many practicalities. We're interested in ideas or additional challenges that we might not have considered. Martin, please.
>> MARTIN: Thanks. With the background, I must say informed policymaking makes a lot of sense, even when it's policymaking by multistakeholders, so an informed document is very good.
I think what's crucial is to test it, particularly when it's the global level, that it's truly relevant in multiple regions in its setup and in its presentation, and that is a challenge that's not trivial, and that's where at ICANN a lot of work has been done already, and I don't say the perfect answers are there, but that is the challenge, to make it truly global in its presentation as well.
And then I think it's the way forward to make sure that every time, again, that we evolved in the process there's a clear grasping of the next level of common understanding, so, yes, very much appreciate the believing material, and I call for making sure it's fit for the platform that we're talking it and, yeah, please continue to add from those perspectives that are most of your interest.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. Any other observations or -- Peng Hwa.
>> PENG HWA ANG: I guess if you're talking about trying to get policy passed or policy implemented in some form, it's a whole different ball game. I think one is the group -- and I guess it's maybe one of you should write op-eds because the politicians don't read papers. That's a fact. The sun rises in the east, it's a fact, politicians don't read papers, it's a fact. But with op-eds it's also a fact.
I think the second one would be industry groups that have concerns and policy implications. I don't know in this part of the world, but in Asia we have the Asian Internet coalition, a bunch of councils and firms, and when they think a law is good, they'll do something there. It works both ways, because if you can get the people into this, perhaps the government officials can also have access to it, so we think we have kind of a balanced and informed output, a range of options, and this can be to people who can bring the government in another way as well.
It requires active sort of pushing and not just picking up and putting them on Wiki.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. It's hard to read, but on the overview that Jim talked you through, the right bottom corner, it says media coverage, and actually, Jim has been very successful in getting certainly national coverage for his polls and sometimes, you know, good international coverage, and, yes, I mean, the movement of citizen engagement and, you know, the -- these polling approaches is really growing worldwide, right?
>> JIM FISHKIN: Well, yeah. I mean we've now done this on a country basis -- we've done it in 26 countries, about 80 projects, as well as two Europeanwide projects. All 27 countries at once with the samples convened in Brussels, but, look, the key to getting attention and impact is having the right collaborators and having the right contexts, so I don't do that. We provide technical support and help groups, institutions, sometimes governments, sometimes NGOs, whatever, do them in the right context, and I think -- I wanted to say the secret of success is to have the right partners who can somehow follow through or make sure that the results are going to be listened to and considered seriously because we're all subject, on a lot of issues, even in an expert community, to what was termed by Anthony Downs years ago as rational ignorance. We don't spend a lot of time on issues that we can't have an impact on, and if we're only one out of many, many people, we've got more -- other things that we'd rather spend our scarce time and effort on, but if you're part of a sample in a deliberative poll or even part of a discussion where you're one out of a dozen and then one out of a few hundred in a process, you feel that your voice matters, and if we can -- the more we can tell people that their voice matters, the more they'll do the hard work of participating and thinking through the issues and listening to participants, citizens, or netizens or whoever they are, whom they otherwise wouldn't actually speak to, and that -- in a civil way, and that actually is in itself very satisfying, but people don't realize this beforehand.
Like this discussion, I thought, was extremely rich, but it's different in format and almost commonsensical about how it's structured, but I think that we would like to solicit your interest and advice on contexts where on encryption or other issues this kind of process in the Internet governance space could be worth conducting because not only the issues are important but there would be some institutions that are interested in listening to the results, precisely because it's a hard question.
You know, there are a lot of cases around the world where we ended up doing a project precisely because it seemed like a nearly insoluble problem, and so the decision-makers wanted to be able to invoke the deliberations and considered judgments of some population that had really thought about it and the reasoning for it as part of what might suggest a solution, so we did all this work on encryption because we were really interested in it, and it seemed like a ripe topic.
Anyway, I don't know what the right context is, but, you know, we would like to solicit your advice.
>> MAX SENGES: Last question on that matter. We already touched on it, the technical complexity. Is there any ideas on how to reduce that? Is there, you know, an almanac or some resource that you can recommend where, you know, these issues get explained from a technical perspective? Is that a general statement?
>> JIM FISHKIN: I think he's got a different question, a different comment he wants to make.
>> MAX SENGES: Any ideas for the technical side, because I think that is really, really, you know -- we could have added a whole book on the technology of encryption, right, and then nobody would have been -- then probably afterwards there was so many different understanding on the subject matter of how to encrypt stuff and what's possible and not possible.
>> JIM FISHKIN: We don't want to make the participants in any of these deliberations -- we don't want to presume to train them in technical issues, what we want to do is boil down the issues so people can see the tradeoffs of what might be at stake in one policy direction or another, and -- but we want to vet that with the technical community. We want to vet that to make sure we're reasonably accurate about it, but it's the tradeoffs and the values or the value-laden goals of different kinds of results that we want people to weigh, so that's the way I would always deal with the technical issues.
>> MAX SENGES: Can we have the next slide, please. And you wanted to comment.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just a common word. I think when we are going to think complexity, we can make -- we can turn challenges into opportunities, so the multistakeholder approach is the most bright example of that when we can discuss all the issues from different point of view. Thank you very much.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you. Okay. Let's move to the second value proposition, that the structured deliberation actually enables knowledge sharing in a deep way and to clarify the collective and formed preferences of a given group on issues posing tradeoffs, facilitate mutual understanding of the basis for agreement and consensus and disagreement.
So that's the goal that we believe this deliberation can pursue. Right now we're doing it through moderated small group discussions based on these briefing materials and then on the large group and Plenary question-and-answer sessions, either with experts that are dedicated and prevetted or are in the group.
Number of challenges, again, you know, the selection by -- for a pro democracy group or groups that do want to have this exchange, probably a good part of people would -- you know, who oppose some of the positions that are brought forward and discussed would not want to defend them here.
Challenges to define the constituency and the population we've mentioned before, and I think it can be agreed that the deliberation should be on value questions rather than technical options and their merit.
Any comments on how the deliberation can be structured more appropriately for the multistakeholder context that we have here? Rebecca, please.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: So if I understand from what you guys have been saying and a bit of what Jeremy was talking about earlier, that there's sort of a thought that the this deliberation, if you were to do more deliberation and kind of institutionalize it within the IGF, that might help with decision-making, might help with actual policy.
>> MAX SENGES: Not at the IGF, right?
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: Not IGF, but they would take it to places where decisions get made, even at the national level or in companies or at standard-setting bodies or whatever, and I guess the one challenge -- it's -- it relates to this kind of selection bias challenge in terms of who the decision-makers feel their constituencies are.
>> MAX SENGES: Yeah.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: And from whom they gain legitimacy and whose approval they care about, and so I wonder if limiting the deliberative polling only to those people who have funding to attend the IGF might kind of diminish the value of what you're trying to do, and if there's a way of thinking about how you get -- how you kind of identify the communities and constituencies that actually the decision-makers feel that they answer to or feel that really matter to them, and how you do deliberative polling amongst those groups, you know, so if it's related to trade agreements, you know, GPP, do we want it or not, you know, do you talk -- who are the constituencies that you need to go out to do a deliberative poll with that would -- that the politicians and the executives and whoever else at various places, you know, in terms of final sign-off, you know, that those -- those -- you know, that there's some kind of connection between --
>> MAX SENGES: Well, we're exactly in the same mind space.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: -- and where you go. Do you kind of do deliberative polls amongst Google users in different communities or amongst, you know, people in different countries or regions or what?
>> MAX SENGES: So that's exactly where, at least, I'm trying to get us to be able to do smaller experiments that then have more relevance with the respective group, but the challenge then is, you know, the smaller the community, the more difficult to do a full DP with a random stratified sample, right, so then you don't have the -- the potential impact of referring to this is the group that, you know, in a balanced sample of that and a balanced sample of that group, but Jim, I'm sure you have comments on Rebecca's question as well, or --
>> JIM FISHKIN: Yes. It's a question of who do you want -- this approach will give you the informed and representative views of a community, so then the question is what is the community? And you need to be able to recruit the community. We could do -- if we had a way of defining the Internet governance population, we could do global online deliberative polling with -- we do them with Google Hangouts --
>> MAX SENGES: We talk to ISOC tomorrow to consider that, but is that then the right group?
>> JIM FISHKIN: We could do that, or we could do with some government or we could do with some institution, but it's got to be somebody who would actually be interested in consulting a population. We did one project inside a big corporation with its employees, but it was about human resources issues, and so they wanted to see how the people -- the employees would really realize and think about those human resource issues.
So there -- you just need to be able to define the population to make it a deliberative poll. If you want some kind of deliberative process with some other group, it can be done, but then it doesn't have the additional claim that it's representative of a broader population.
So that's why we want some brainstorming about this.
>> MAX SENGES: And let me throw open another constraint and just quality assurance is very interesting. Jim has a trademark on the deliberative polling because he wants to make sure that it's done properly, right? If we let these deliberative toolkits loose and everybody starts to implement them, you get all kinds of implementations, and some of them are good, some of them are --
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone)
>> JIM FISHKIN: What's that? Oh, or they use fake news as the basis for discussion? I mean, the whole thing could go off the -- go off the tracks very quickly.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Off microphone)
>> MAX SENGES: Jeremy wants to comment. Anybody on this side? I don't see everybody -- and please, just raise your hand if you want to comment.
>> JEREMY MALCOLM: This is just a very short response to say that exactly the same thing happened at multistakeholderism because that was debased by being used in so many contexts by companies doing multistakeholders but not complying with any realistic set of what you'd expect to find in a multistakeholder process, so on this document we don't have the word "multistakeholder" anywhere because we think it's actually become a bad word for a lot of people.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Concerning decision-making and possible decision-making, I would like just to name one date and one organization. The date is 1919, early 20th Century, and the organization is ILO, International Labor Organization. It's not only governmental participants, so that this is also a kind of multistakeholderism of the early 20th Century, but there is a decision-making body. Maybe that's the future of the IGF and the multistakeholder approach.
>> MAX SENGES: Okay. I'll let that stand, or Jackie, do you want to comment?
>> JACKIE KERR: I want to comment on the briefing -- would a comment on the briefing process be relevant?
>> MAX SENGES: Can you take a mic?
>> JACKIE KERR: Yep. So there's a question -- hold on. Can't quite reach that. There's a question that occurs to me, looking at sort of the way you'd diagramed the way the briefing documents are developed, and thinking about that from my participation in the process, I -- I am very impressed by the degree of serious, you know, work that's gone into figuring these out both times I've been involved. I also find myself wondering because of the discussion today about, like, different national perspectives and things like this, whether there isn't a place for getting different stakeholders and different regional constituencies involved in the process earlier in preparing the briefing documents because they play such an important role in agenda setting and they can do their best to be objective and to cover all the different perspectives, but if it's a small group of people involved in the first phase of that that might not be representative, it does probably influence the direction the whole thing goes, and I'm not sure how one would go about implementing that, but it seems like it might be an interesting thing to think about.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Oh, yeah. And the last time -- that's very useful advice. The last time we had the documents for the previous round vetted with a couple of different international groups that were brought in, and so all of that is useful in this particular context.
>> MAX SENGES: And we did send it out this time as well, just -- yeah. It can always be improved. Let us move -- well, I have the -- a strong will to get all of us out of here by 5:00, so let's move to the last aspect, the one where we're proposing the value of tracking and understanding opinion shift for this deliberative toolkit that would be the aim, so it's not, you know, the full on -- the DP experience, but I still think that just understanding the opinion shift and getting a better understanding for the other perspectives is going to be -- or is a really valuable piece.
The challenge or -- we kept issues there. It should be challenges -- is, you know, do you think that in an IGF context people are -- should they even participate as netizens or should they participate for their stakeholder group because that is what, you know, they're here for, right? They're participating in a multistakeholder perspective, and that is a real dilemma. Jim points out that we did see the opinion shift in all groups, but we did tell them to act as netizens, so maybe that's an indication that that worked.
Maybe it's an indication that people didn't think that the consequences of the poll are, you know, so strong that, you know, their boss would come after them if they had changed their opinion.
I'm not convinced that, you know, we've solved this question, even though that, you know, we have one indication that opinion shift is possible.
We'd love your opinions on that matter.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that's a really difficult situation because when we come here, we come representing our stakeholder group, but I hear numerous times when people are speaking this is not necessarily the opinion of the organization that I represent, but this is my viewpoint. And I think for people to separate in their mind, they can do that, separate themselves from their organization and their stakeholder group, but I think it needs to be locked down before you do deliberative polling, are they representing their stakeholder group or are they representing themselves? And then also, I think you should know that there is a blurred line between those two because they come through it with their own self-agency and what they think. That's it.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: I need to add to that because this is an experiment and because it's not officially why people are coming to the IGF, to do a deliberative poll. You know, it -- people can just be themselves, but I think if deliberative polling were built into the kind of structure of the IGF and people are sent to the IGF by their group or by their government or by their company, and if deliberative polling is an official kind of activity, then their organizations are going to take it much more seriously, and I think people's kind of feeling that they're free to just do whatever they want will diminish. The higher the stakes and the higher the real-lifepolicy stakes and consequences and results, the less likely you're going to have people just being able to act as netizens.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: And I think we'll have a less rich discourse because people will be watching what they're saying.
>> JIM FISHKIN: There's two things, there's what they say and then there's what they do when they finally fill out the confidential questionnaire, and I want to mention a complexity. I appreciate this problem that you're raising, but the whole idea of deliberative polling or any exercise in deliberative democracy is that the people should be decided on the basis of what they've come to regard as the better reasons, you know, the -- the forceless force of the better argument, right? Now, if you are awaiting instructions from your government that has sent you or your corporation that has sent you, they are not in the room, just as Edmund Burke said in his famous letters to the electors of Bristol, you, the voters, are not in parliament, I'm in parliament listening to the reasons, you're 300 miles away, so we want people in the group to be thinking about the merits of the argument and offering their sincere views. If that's not going to be possible, then we should -- we shouldn't do the project.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: I mean, talk to people in the IETF who attend the IETF as individuals and ask them whether all of them are really acting as individuals, but I -- you know, I think there's a bit of a design flaw if you're actually going to use deliberative polling as a way to contribute to policy --
>> MAX SENGES: Multistakeholder governance.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: -- in having the polling all at the IGF, which, again, is -- you know, it's not a random sample, it's people who got funded to come here.
>> JIM FISHKIN: No, no, we understand it. We would want to make it -- whatever we do -- which is why we had a portion of last time was online and global.
>> REBECCA MacKINNON: But they were still selected through kind of the network of people who's --
(Two people talking at the same time)
>> JIM FISHKIN: Which is maybe why IGF is not the best venue to be starting this.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Correct.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Then we have to find the appropriate venue, but the idea is if we can get people to consider the merits of the argument, yes, they are informed by their background, they are informed by their experience in their institutions, but we would like to get a substantive view on the merits from all the participants, which is why I said that we're, in a way, drawing a sample of netizens, but you are correct, Rebecca, that it has to be a good sample, and then we have to think of what is the population of netizens, how do we identify that, and so that's a challenge.
>> MAX SENGES: Jackie and Jeremy. I'm still looking along this long line of folks. Please --
>> JACKIE KERR: It's almost like you have two steps in the process that are necessary. The people at IGF are the people you want to be voicing their opinions about this at least as one step in this in terms of thinking about what the policy options are. These are the people who are experts, who are professionals in the space one way or another, who are advocates, who are technicians, et cetera, and so these are people you want involved in the process of thinking through these briefing documents of -- et cetera, and yet the other issue is that they are, by definition of having funding, like Rebecca was saying, to come here, they are not indifferent to the positions they express in terms of the personal benefits and interests vested in what position they hold, and also, this isn't an anonymous setting, they know the other people in the room and there's the interpersonal politics of positioning that happens here, and you can't separate that professional hat from the personal hat in so clear a way when you're in a room with all the people who are your professional colleagues who you agree with or fight against in your professional life.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Or we raise -- about the funding, we raise some money and provide resources for people to come to the deliberations, which we, of course, do in other contexts.
>> JEREMY MALCOLM: Exactly. The IGF has a responsibility to become more inclusive but if the IGF is not the right venue, what is the right venue? Any time someone suggests creating a new venue or discusses moving it elsewhere, there are lots of objections. Look at the NETmundial which collapsed, it was looked at seeing the top down. The IGF, we have to make the best of it. I don't think we have to give up an making it more inclusive, but that's the starting point. Deliberative polling may not be the only way to do that in the IGF. There's another experiment with Dynamic Coalitions and we're using a technique of sorts called idea rating sheets. So I think we should do this in several streams. Maybe the deliberative polling or deliberative toolkit is the one that works, maybe the Dynamic Coalitions or maybe something else that we haven't even started on yet.
>> MAX SENGES: Martin, you want to comment?
>> MARTIN: Yeah. Maybe another way of thinking of it is rather than assuming we can get a better and better sample in the room is to have a very good description of the sample we have, so add some questions that really try to stratify your sample against a general global view of people you would want to be sampled with so you can have the delta between the representation of the sample and others, because if -- if -- also with the Dynamic Coalition process, which I'm involved in, I think the methodology that has been developed is quite good, yet what we see is that a number of responses is such that it's rather more -- it's not more than anecdotal that we can do with it.
Again, it can be input -- used for input for further discussions, but let's not make it more than it is, and in that it has its value.
>> MAX SENGES: James, then I would like to invite everybody who wants to come in. We're doing a last round.
>> JAMES EDWARDS: So the task here is a hybrid between information and representation. Jim put it that way a little while ago, and the information task, the characteristics are you want all the right ideas in the room to be evaluated in the right way. The representation task, you want the right people to encounter those ideas.
The hybrid is you expect that people, by having this discussion, will come out with different ideas, and to some extent, you're trading off the perfect vision of doing this information-processing task, that's what you do on a philosophy tutorial, and the perfect of what you do on the representation task, that's what you do in the democratic poll or something like that, so there's probably no perfect answer, but if you have in mind those different components of a hybrid task, you might think about some other ways of doing things.
Does everyone have to present their own actual position? Jeremy usefully took a devil's advocate position.
>> MAX SENGES: That is true. I have Massimo and then Peng Hwa.
>> PENG HWA ANG: I could be wrong in this. I think I would characterize the tension here as the tension between the (Inaudible) and diversity. You want a broad spectrum of views coming in, but you want legitimacy for what is produced, and at one level you have diversity to gather legitimacy, but at the end of the day, if you want to get agreement, assuming you want agreement, then diversity can work against legitimacy, and because if it's too diverse, people don't agree at all so you don't have any outcome at all, so I think the tension between the legitimacy and diversity.
>> MAX SENGES: I think we would both object on the --
>> JIM FISHKIN: You may not get agreement, but you will get something from the fact that there is no agreement on this, and here are the reasons why, and that may set the stage for some further policy innovations that might achieve agreement in the future, but otherwise I completely endorse what you say --
>> PENG HWA ANG: If you don't get agreement, I think the problem goes away because we're not worried who represents the views because --
>> MAX SENGES: Well, to understand the different positions and tradeoffs will move you further towards coming to a consensus, which, you know, consensus an agreement, the consensus has the tradeoffs. You might have a very painful consensus.
>> JIM FISHKIN: If there is agreement, we'll find it in the confidential questionnaires, but if we ask people just for a show of hands, we might -- that could be a forced consensus where people felt pressure as in a jury to go along with the verdict of everybody else, so we'll find whatever agreement there is, we'll find what disagreement there is, we'll find the reasons for the disagreement, and that may help further move the issue forward.
>> MAX SENGES: I want to come to Massimo, and then I think Jackie wanted to comment if we don't have a participant who wants to make another comment. Massimo, please.
>> JAKIMO: Jakimo, by the way, but no problem. I think this idea, if you are not obliged from the first shot already in arriving to a concentric position, then you have to consider that you can use different methodology between the first phase in which you want to identify, which are the positions of the various groups, and the second phase in which you want to incentive the position that are possible dialogue and bridges with the others, so in the first phase, you need to have those that are the most representative possibly of the various position of their constituencies, and then you invite them because of their constituency, but in the second phase, eventually you have to invite them as the most dialoguing persons to become the -- to come as netizen and to give their personal opinion on that.
Then I want -- I want to comment on what was said before about the ILO, that is a multistakeholder organization. Yes, it's true, but it's a model that doesn't fit with the Internet world because, as you know, at the ILO, you have -- at the end is the National Delegation that votes, and usually they're led by the government, so the only thing you have is to convince within your national group that this position needs to be supported by the whole group, so in reality, at the end it's the government that prevails, and it's very difficult to have a different position. And on the top of that, the Internet, we see that there are a lot of -- a lot of groups that are not necessarily any more coinciding with the country, they are larger than the country, larger than the continent, larger than the region, so it's very difficult to adopt that model.
>> MAX SENGES: Thank you, Jakimo. Please, Jackie.
>> JACKIE KERR: The more I listen to this discussion, I a second ago was sort of intervening saying, well, maybe this isn't the right setting. The other side of it which I think is important, balancing this netizen vs. stakeholder, we end up with a sort of -- you can take it from one extreme to the other or sorry, you can find a space in between, but at the extremes, it's always going to be this challenge that stakeholders in the multistakeholder system, if you come to a venue like the IGF, are, by definition, representatives of particular points of view and ideas and agendas, and it's like associational democracy, this sort of thing, and so as a result, that's going to always lead to these set of problems we've been discussing.
On the other hand, what a great discussion can be had, and in terms of impact, you've got all the people in the room who are involved in the stuff and passionate about it at the international level who can go back to their particular constituencies, governments, local venues, and argue and debate these things and maybe take away some insights from this discussion.
And so if you want to have impact, maybe this is the place to do it, but then the tradeoff is if you wanted on the other hand to have more of a scientific sample, more findings about how people's opinions change, you don't go to the people who already have thought about their opinions for their lifetime and are professionals on advocating a particular position, you go to the less informed netizens, Internet users, et cetera, and so then you need to have a room of nonexperts, and so it's maybe that you want to be doing two different things, one which is the scientific findings about nonexperts and how their opinions change and the other, which is a deliberative exercise, but not necessarily for the same kind of opinion change finding, oh, where you have the stakeholders who are informed and engaging with each other in the room. Maybe there's a different kind of finding.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Well, last year we found that the experts did change their views because a lot of the participation is siloed here. People talked to their -- to the like-minded, and in this discussion, if we get a good sample, even of the IGF, and we have small group discussions randomly assigned, people are talking to other people they wouldn't normally talk to at the IGF, and so if we think of these people not just as speakers but as listeners, they -- we can show that they moderated the views.
Now, I don't know, maybe that was a one-shot -- maybe we're lucky on that topic, but that's why it would be interesting to do it on this topic, so I think we do get scientific findings in the sense that we get a sample, it changes its views, we can do regressions and analyses as to why it changed its views, we can tape the discussions, we can find out a lot about what this population would think.
The problem is -- Rebecca's problem that the IGF is itself not as representative of the Internet governance community as one would want, which is why originally when I got into this, I said, we need to raise some money to bring -- to help subsidize the participation of people who might not otherwise come to make the sample more broadly representative of the Internet governance community. In we did that, I think it might be quite successful.
>> MAX SENGES: There is -- you know, the thing as an Internet governance community is the first place, but I want to pick up on Jackie's --
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: What's the definition of the Internet governance community.
>> MAX SENGES: I want to pick up on Jackie's enthusiasm and reiterate that there is a dare there, there is value, there is something that can be done, and I hope you agree that there was some value in what we did today already. You're very welcome to use these briefing materials. This is Kathleen's email address if you want --
>> JIM FISHKIN: That's Kathleen back there.
>> MAX SENGES: -- if you want to get in touch. We're going to be here at the session today, and I think the solution is indeed, let's -- these briefing materials are a great resource and instrument that I'd like to see for other topics, for use and refined for this topic for access that we have already done. I think doing these smaller group deliberative experiences and toolkits, just to get to the bottom and to do that -- I think, let's find the reason rather than the tricks rather than the carrots and the sticks to get people to do things, and let's do it in different contexts.
Yes, if we have -- if we manage to pull this off, like Jim did, 25 E.U. Member States, you know, several days in Brussels, that was a huge experiment, and I think it was very valuable.
>> JIM FISHKIN: 27.
>> MAX SENGES: 27.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Not 28, but it's going to be 27 again, I'm afraid.
>> MAX SENGES: Anyway. Thank you so much for coming here. We are around for the week. We're interested to work with you and to improve and evolve this and make it contribute to Internet governance. The one thing I learned today is I'm going to strike the multistakeholder term for most of what I talk to because it is contagious. Thank you so much for coming here. Looking forward to the conversation.
>> JIM FISHKIN: Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
(Session concluded at 1707)