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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>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Welcome, everybody, to the main session on the Dynamic Coalition for Innovative Approaches to Connecting the Unconnected. In this audience there's no need to explain the importance of increasing the reach of the Internet, increasing the number are of people online. My name is Christopher Yoo. And Helani Galpaya I understand she is not feeling well, she will attempt to join us. It is a very important week for many of us but very taxing in many ways. We are joined by three wonderful friends who are leaders in their own right in connecting people to the Internet. Anriette Esterhueysen, Karen McCabe and Alex Wong. And I thank all of them for being here and I would like to thank all of you are for being here as well. I'm delighted to have the chance to share this with you today. If you would start the slides, please.
So the wonderful thing or the reason we are really driven to do this is the build on the work the Internet governance forum has done. It's been extended by the national and regional IGFs that are doing great work. In many ways they are the people responsible for getting this vision started and getting people working towards the idea of broadening the reach of the Internet. At the same time the Internet society is making grants to make all this possible and local chapters instrumental in sharing information and making and building a sense of community. There are wonderful new initiatives. Alex's organization and Karen's organization have been helpful. In addition there's the community networking community which really is one of the most vibrant parts of building up the Internet and in fact one of the things we are going to do is I'm going to show you some of the case studies we learned and most of them are going to be from the community networking community. Many of the people who have done those projects are actually going to be either here in the room with us or doing participating remotely with us through remote connections.
And governments, businesses, many, many actors, it's really consistent with the multistakeholder separate of the IGF. The problem is so large that we understand that we cannot simply rely on universal funding to bridge this gap. We need the community networking community to be part of this. We need where it's sustainable business models are possible we need private investment to play its role in making this possible. Interesting observation there's many, many innovative experiments going on. There is no place where you can get a catalog of all of what those initiatives are. And more importantly, no one is collecting data to empirically validate what is working and not working. Our goal is to try to generate and when they do collect data they do so in a different idiosyncratic way each project is unique, there's no basis for comparing consistent metrics across all the different projects. Our goal we have to be very realistic in the sense that data collection is hard and expensive but to make some attempt to get some traction on ideas of what is working and not working and also to share the learnings we have in different communities and initiatives to make it's possible for all of us to moved forward and share information with each other. And we are depending on these other communities to give us the information, give us the insights, because we are only going to go as far as the people who participate with us and help us with the vision is going to take us. We are trying to take advantage of all the wonderful things people are doing in the communities and to make them work. Once we have that information we are going to make it available on the website. We are going ‑‑ every initiative we can find will make a good faith effort to complete the process. There are times for confidentiality reasons individual projects have been reluctant to participate we respect that but we are trying to be as comprehensive as possible and develop every case study we can find. We have identified more than 200 potential case studies and completed the narrative portion of 20 of them. Right now they're available in PDF forms. We are trying to search them into a searchable database. We have an invitation to share your story. We would like to get the opportunity for anyone with an innovative story they would like to bring, please share it with us. We are creating a blog telling the stories before the case study is released. And the final stage will be to synthesize the information and disseminate it. That's the warm up. Here is the fun part. I'm going to share with you a half dozen stories of the things we found and they're really in my opinion inspiring to me about what people have been able to do. There's a company organization, this is a community owned and funded initiative to provide broad band in one island. It was started by a health care professional who had the experience that many community networking institutions do. They approached the operators and asked them if they were interested. They were unable to do so. They approached governments. Finally they decided to build it themselves even though they were not engineers they developed the expertise based on the commitment. They piggybacked on a satellite connection for the emperor of Japan to provide 15 mega bit service. It's the first service for this entire area. And the real issue there is telemedicine because of the gee graph of Vanuatu it takes them two days to get to a hospital. It provides connectivity for 2600 people. The cost is $6,000 done by $2 contributions. And they attended to deploy the 2.4 gigahertz. And it provided Internet links outside the island for the first time. This is an amazing story which I think is something that can be learned that we need ‑‑ that other projects can benefit from hearing. Nepal wireless networking project. I should apologize. The people who obviously did this project no far more about it than I do. So if I make this our attempt to represent part of it. We need your help to improve the case studies. If I make mistakes I will apologize in advance. They will provide the first connectivity to 200 remote Hamlets using TV space then and community Wi-Fi. And interestingly as we talked about smart cities there was an earthquake that was both a tragedy but created an opportunity. They are creating smart villages. This has been a tremendous success, online payments and e commerce and allowing smart villages to thrive. Third example that I didn't think about when I began this project, refugees and undocumented migrants, even if they're in places where there is Internet service available they don't have the permanent addresses and credentials and payment systems to take advantage of them. Through a series of donations to support the base stations they're supporting 50 kilo bit per second in two locations in refugee camps in the Netherlands supported by devices to make them functional. What is happening now is providing connectivity. We cannot report the number of connections because they regard that as essential not to reveal that to protect the privacy interests of the refugees. There are current discussions to expand it to other countries which are also being affected in Europe by the refugee crisis.
And this is supporting 12 different nodes using solar powered stations. It's providing connectivity for 3500 people and most importantly the charges are 50% lower than the incumbent is charging. One of the insights we have had is it's important to train to make it sustainable you have to train the community members to maintain these sorts of nodes because many of them will go up but when they encounter problems if you have not done the capacity building it's often unsuccessful. The solar charging stations are an essential part of the revenue model because service is done at a low cost. Everyone needs to charge their devices and that's how they're making the financing work. Democratic remember of Congo. This is an island in the middle of a lake in DR Congo run by a king who has authorized the use of a major kiosk that provides connectivity for devices but really provides critical information for this community, one for travel safety they need to know the travel conditions whether it's safe to cross the lake and they need to know the security status of various parts of the Congo and they are able to do this providing the first Internet access to these 10,000 people in DR Congo and provide vital information they need. And these small devices are providing uncensored access.
This is a very inspirational story on providing connectivity to 16 rural communities. In the first instance they have a very interesting approach, they really are looking for the communities that are willing to commit and contribute part of the money to connect to the Internet, they're asking for an initial investment of $1,500. They provide support for an open source software solution to make it run. It's supporting access to banking, health care. Rise‑A‑Matic success allowed them to go to the regulator. It's been a tremendous opportunity. Wireless for communities in India, again connecting over 120,000 people in a country number one in the area, two in the area of cell phone connectivity. It's reaching travel communities, and they have a project targeted of women entrepreneurs. They understand the need of capacity building at the local level. All the traditional things associated with this and it been a tremendous success. These are just the tip of the iceberg. There are other case studies. In fact wireless for communities has an agenda component. I'm supporting UN women in part by wearing the orange shoes to curb violence against women. Disabled communities, seniors, youth access, illiterate communities which are some of the most challenging to serve. There are learnings that I think that many people in this community already know about but many people outside the broader community don't know about. And even the people who do know about this can use the case studies we provide as a way to educate people as the tools they need to carry the message about the innovative ways we can find to connect more people to the Internet. What comes next, we are looking to help from the community particularly because many people are pro-actively involved in these projects can help us improve the work we are doing. We are interested in partnering anyone who wants to partner with us. We want to improve the existing case studies but identify new case studies and we are willing to take up the hard work. We like to leverage other people's interest and willingness to work on this project. It is our goal to develop metrics not just in the traditional ones about cost and the number of people connected but in terms of the outcomes that matter, education, gender divide, digital divide. And our hope is to consolidate this information in a uniform format and make it available to everyone, pull that information together and disseminate it to the public. What can we ask for you or what can you do to help? This is to join the dynamic community coalition mailing list. Every time we get a case study we will push it out to let people know the results we are finding. We need though let people know that we are doing this. Bypassing the word along to other members of the community that would be vitally important to us to help us do that work. If you see work that we have done that we can improve we would welcome all that feedback as well. We are just excited about the project. We think it's important. Every partner we talked to finds it fills a niche that expands and we are delighted to talk about it with this community. Thank you, very much. What I would say is we will now ‑‑ two co‑conveners. The next I will turn it over to is Michael Kende.
>> MICHAEL KENDE: Thank you. First congratulations. I remember talking to you about this I think a year ago and you built it up from scratch so congratulations. I'll say a few words about why I think this is going to be very valuable. So I think stepping ban and looked in history growth rates of Internet year on year growth rates of Internet access are slowing down quite a bit. In Africa in 2008 it was 51% year on year growth according to ITU and now for the last year's numbers it was 15%. For other regions it's 10% or less. So that's okay in Europe where you're nearing saturation at 80% for are the growth rates to slow down and hit single digits but Africa has 22% Internet penetration so slowing growth rates at that level of penetration is quite worrying.
So I think what it requires is a shift in approach. Many people are talking about this. I'll give a little background in my view on it. But in the last ten years infrastructure was the real focus for development. Africa at one point I think 2009 east Africa had no submarine cables, it's was all satellite. And barely any DSL or any kind of fixed.
So people were focused on international connectivity, IXP's, all this infrastructure. I would say this approach that was needed was in a sense you could say very linear or I wouldn't say easy but it was well‑understood. The government there was a set of sector reforms that the government could undertake. Liberalizing the sector, privatizing or corporatizing the incumbent. These were well‑known and for the large part they worked. Once those reforms were made the private sector stepped in starting investing, putting in the infrastructure sometimes with international organizations or governments putting in the submarine cables and the last came through the mobile networks.
This was a pretty well understood approach and successful in many countries now 90% of people have a mobile broadband signal. 3G signal. And that's basically because we all know mobile phones cellular took off and then the upgrade from voice to mobile broadband costs about 10% of the original cost so this was well‑understood technology. It was pretty‑well understood.
Now you have this issue where 90% of people in some countries can get access, have a signal and maybe 15 or 20% are taking it so it opens up a whole new set of issues and there are basically two sets of non‑users that need to be addressed. The first are the ones that are covered by mobile broadband but they're not taking it for whatever reason. And here you have to look at the demand side and surveys of these people who aren't taking it are saying they're not interested and they don't have the skills or understanding of how to go online. So that's the one set of people on the demand side. And then there's other 10% who have no infrastructure, who have no possibility to get online and then you need new supply side approaches.
Clearly the market has the ability to go into those regions but because it's high cost low demand they haven't chosen to so the traditional networks aren't extending to those areas. Then you get into hard issues that aren't as simple as the infrastructure story. You have to think on the demand side about creating local content, training, language issues, trying to create innovators to create this local language and getting them motivated with monetization that requires payments. One region of a country may not work in another. There are all these other access technologies that Christopher just described that are taking the place of the incumbent or mobile operators going into the regions.
So that brings me to the value of the case studies. Since there's not one approach that is going to work, if you can have a depository of things that have been tried in similar regions you can start to draw that and learn from that, not make the same mistakes and move into and start to address these demand and supply side issues. I think those the real learning, both as a depository and once you have 2 or 300 case studies start to draw from that and learn those conclusions. I think that's the power of where this is going to go. And as part of the initiative that Alex is about to describe we are thinking of doing a similar thing on this policy side so what are the policy tweaks that can take place to help these networks emerge as well as lowering import taxes on smartphones.
So we are talking about doing a similar case study learning approach on policy issues. Overall I think that's why this is going to be a very valuable effort and play a big role I think in meeting all of our goals of getting everyone online.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you. I'd like to introduce Rajan Mathews.
>> RAJAN MATHEWS: Thank you, Chris. We are very excited about the Dynamic Coalition for a number of reasons. First when you look at the number of sessions here at IGF on connecting the next 1 billion, it's quite astounding. In fact so astounding that I overheard a group of folks talking over lunch saying if I hear one more session about connecting the next 1 billion I'm going to not attend the next IGF. So I think we are getting to a point where we have to get this whole discussion in the multiple fora coalesced around critical issues around what it takes to deliver on the ground level and talking at it from the particular context of India, one of the things that we have noticed is when we talk about connecting the next 1 billion it is clearly an issue for India because we have about 1.3 billion folks.
And the last statistics we had about 250 million people who were connected to the Internet and most were in the urban areas and 63 to 65% of our population resides in the rural areas so that imperative is still there. It's to connect the 650 million to 700 million folks by 2020, that's astounding figure and much of that lies on the shoulders of the operators because they're the ones rolling out the infrastructure to provide connectivity.
And the issues that come up are issues where our policy folks the government and the regulators find that there's very little academic rigorous analysis with good data to back up a lot of the positions that they are making. For example a case in point we all had the celebrated case of Facebook trying to do 0‑rating in India and the issues that kept going back and forth based on what was going on in the U.S. and Brazil and in some instances from the EU. We didn't think that was the appropriate context. There was an implied understanding of what net neutrality ought to be taken from the FCC guidelines which add as its construct common carrier requirements and title to all of which were totally foreign to the Indian context.
So again the need and the focus that needed to move to looking contextually at what it means to connect the next 1 billion. So I think this is why we are so excited about the Dynamic Coalition so that we from the operator's side are working to make sure that data is available. Obviously there's a tremendous amount of information available. And again in the context of India when you look at the rest of the countries of the world there are at least five networks in play. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on what side of the coin you look at it we have one network so most countries have a very, very penetrated land line network, high penetration of fiber, you have a wireless also connected in and highly penetrated, you have satellite, cable, private networks, government networks.
In India we have one predominant network which is the mobile network. And so all of the demand for connectivity is going to ride on this one network. It imposes tremendous stresses on the network and opportunities on the network, why? Because things like education, things like Governance and a plethora of other matters will have to ride on this particular single‑threaded network. We have challenges in terms of spectrum.
Let me give you data context. We pay because of the necessity to buy spectrum in open auction 30% more vis‑à‑vis global pricing than what is paid in the U.S. or Europe or anywhere else. We pay global pricing for our network elements all of our network elements. So 30% more per spectrum, global prices per network. And our average revenue per user is $3 compared to $75 internationally. So you can understand what the dynamics and the pressures are in terms of what we need to do. So we have to be careful in how we parse regulatory and policy issues that's why it's important to have credible, factual, rigorous data that is looked at academically so that the policy makers use it to do their business effectively. The big impact as I said we believe that some of the regulations just recently in the last six months, 33 papers on various subs of regulation, some of which impact the ability of people to access the Internet and consumer interest as well as commercial interest. Again, we need that rigorous analysis and we also need this compatibility in terms of saying what is working, what is not working. Because the one thing that we find in India is that if it's not scalable and if it's not affordable, it's very little chance this is going to take off. And it's clearly one of the dynamics we are looking at. So thank you Chris and we hope that the Dynamic Coalition has as many participants. Thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you, Raj. We represent three of the multi stakeholder groups, Michael from the technical community and Raj from the business community. There are many issues we discuss at the IGF, there are many points of view on all of them but hopefully the goal is to collect the data where we can put this on ‑‑ talk about the disputes and the issues and understand them as well as we can in a concrete context that will hopefully improve the quality. And whatever our opinions are on individual issues we will hopefully share the commit tent to the idea that all the debates will be better formed by getting proper data and extend that farther. I'm proud of the other three people I'm going to turn to. If it's okay with you Alex I'll start you with as our next person.
>> ALEX WONG: Thank you, for this. The purpose of the panel I'll say we represent the business community but we are actually an international institution representing all groups. The work we have been doing, I'll tell you I'm not an Internet engineer or implementation expert. What we are good at doing is raising an issue, creating a common language and convening people who are the experts in these areas to work together. This project we started off a year and a half ago was because we felt like many issue in the world these are all solvable.
All the solutions are out there, more or less. So what we have been doing is together with many of the people on the panel and others in the room we actually have gone through a long process to create first of all a framework which for all of you will be very common sense. You need to address this issue through four dimensions. Our dimensions are infrastructure, affordable, skills and awareness and content. Other organizations that many of you I'm sure have slightly different variations but it's to have a common language and a message to give other leaders that it's a multidimensional problem.
Secondly we have now working with many of the partners both business and Civil Society and academia we want to work with governments to try to bring everyone together to address the issue inside the country. So move beyond the talk of the next billion to action. And in that regard there are two things that I would want to share and why I think it's great to be part of the coalition and to be here at IGF. There are so many people working on these solutions and there's a need to bring these all together. The best way to bring them together, it's nice to have the conversation here in the conference but it's going down to a country or state. And let's try to resolve this.
So one of the major activities we have been trying to do is work together with many organizations out there globally to come together as one as much as we can, I call it the Coalition of the willing, to work together when we decide to do something in a country. That's a work in progress and we will continue to always be a work in progress. The second thing is let's now go into some countries to actually work and try to get these solutions exposed and understand what are some of the policy regulatory challenges that need to be addressed. And we have kicked off our first programme in Africa, we did just kick off something in Argentina as well with our first meeting a few weeks ago only and we are looking to do something in India.
All this plays to why I think it's important to have this conversation at IGF and why it's important to be part of the Dynamic Coalition because not one single actor is going to be able to address the issue. We have to create the framework that everyone with work together. I've been excited to learn more of the grassroots or the community network activities happening. We have to create the frame works that empower the people on the ground to take charge. It doesn't have to be a top down solution but we to have create the right framework and environment that allows human beings to do what they're best at which is to innovate and be entrepreneurial.
We were brainstorming the work that Christopher is doing. We need dynamic partnerships to figure out the right solution for every situation. We are looking to see hue we can put forces together to do a data case in one of the programs that we are doing at the world economic forum. So stay tuned on that and hopefully we can contribute to the project Christopher is mentioning. Thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you, Alex. I understand the ambiguity in characterizations. The point is there are labels. There's a lots of people, Anriette is as technical as anybody in this experience and it's hard to put anybody in a single bucket. Next, Karen McCabe of IEEE.
>> KAREN McCABE: Thank you very much. We started the Internet initiative at IEEE a few years ago, 2014 to be exact. The initial charge was about connecting technologists to policy makers so there was more informed information to the policy makers when their making their decisions, understanding technology and the impact of those decisions. Through course or journey of the effort we have come across and been connected to so many great people and partners and ideas that have been fed into the initiative but also outside the initiative. IEEE is a large professional association.
The strength that we bring to this challenge and into the dynamic coalition is that technical expertise that we have under the umbrella of the IEEE so through the course of this past year we have been holding two types of events, one is technology events. And the other is what we call our advancing solutions events. We had two in DC because we were trying to align them with the World Bank meetings. It's important that we address the financing issues around these as well. We also had a local one in Delhi in September. Alex outlined the 4 or 5 sorts of parameters or the structure of the Internet for all initiative.
Many of our initiatives have different framework or similar frame works so we sort of look at it holistically but from 4 or 5 dimensions, one is of course technology, one is infrastructure, one is policy and regulation. And of course the capacity building part of it as well. So we have been working with ISOC, the World Bank and people centered Internet. There's also a critical element of this is having a human centric approach to this as well.
And at those events we have been learning more and more about different types of projects and that's I think how we got connected to the great work that you're doing, Christopher, and the coalition is doing. As we have those discussions on how to advance those solutions to go beyond discussion which is also critical. I know there's sometimes criticism about the talk tanks about a lot of these issues, you have to have those discussions and that dialog to raise awareness and get connected. And now take what you've learned in that information and the connections that you've made and start moving that into action. I'm pleased to see here at this IGF, I know you mentioned that there are so many sessions on connectivity.
But I think it shows the criticality of the issue but also when you attend some of those sessions you see the movement towards action and I think it's really a very positive sign and a good sign as we try to address the challenges that we have at hand. So with that I know we went to get into a dialogue and of course with the audience participation to get that engaged here. But we really are supportive of this and we find our self very much aligned so sum of having enough information and analytics to make an informed decision is so critical. And how we can learn from each other to expedite the solutions moving forward is what we are focused on so thank you.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you. It's a personal thank to you Alex and Internet for all and Karen for IEEE who allowed knee participate in some of the work they're doing. They're both leaders in this area. It's been a tremendous contribution. It was Karen to first attuned me to the idea of thinking about the international development banks and other potential audiences for this type of work who vitally need this information who are prepared to make investments but need data to base those decisions. And that was a dimension of the work I had and it's part of participating with partners that made that much more a bigger project for me and I think a higher impact one. And without last but not least final speaker will be Anriette Esterhueysen of ABC.
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUEYSEN: Thank you. We are an international network of member organizations. We were established in 1990 and emerged in the late 80's from community networks, organizations that were providing services. And using appropriate technology. Operating at a local level. Using technology for example that worked really effectively. And also that both those networks on the basis of an integrated approach to connectivity as being parts of political participation, social change, content creation and harnessing technology to give communities more agency.
I'm rather skeptical when I see innovation being used in this context. And APC members when there was commercial Internet available we went through a massive transition, APC members who were service providers either went out of business or reinvented themselves on capacity building training content creation. It's amazing to see how they are now emerging as leaders. And what we have been doing in terms of access and connectivity what is we feel can make a difference so broadband policy, more transparency and fiber, we have worked on white space, and trying to influence regulators in approaching spectrum from a more dynamic spectrum. And community network and infrastructure sharing is another area we have been advocating for.
And more diversification of Internet service provision markets. And just a look at the IGF and the whole debate of the connecting the next billion of the IGF is one we are critical of. It was a drive to build a nice international corporation to achieve people development to access to technology. It's disturbing we went from that to the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid to connecting the next billion. We went from this paradigm to one which really has been in my view about recreating more consumers. And one which has been critique of this and you would have people talk about the important concept and capacity; it really has been primarily about the next billion consumers, mostly for the mobile industry.
And of course this has made a massive difference from the point of view of increasing connectivity, financing the supporting back law but now is the time where we step back and look at what it is we really want to achieve. And that's why I think this coalition is so important. Working in access since the 1990s I'm relatively skeptical at this moment in time of global efforts. I think what I see is top down international initiatives, actors, governments, saying you've got to deal with connecting more people. I think there's a realization it's important.
There's fear on the part of governments on what the Internet can do in terms of political stability, cultural change. But I really think that we can only reverse that through local action. Action from within countries. Pressure from communities themselves, from businesses, and from all diverse multistakeholder spaces in the country. In my experience I find that governments and regulators actually are quite irritated when these global efforts come and tell them they need the Internet and they connect their people to the Internet. I think they know that and I think where there are barriers we need to find more effective ways I think of addressing those barriers. I'm not saying we shouldn't collaborate at a local level but I have a degree of skepticism about that.
We talked about community networks but public access I think is the other important way of providing sustainable access which has always fallen prey to this next billion approach. That might be something for this Dynamic Coalition to look at. Just a few remarks and data. Yes it's absolutely important. I think it is necessary, I think regulators actually are struggling to get data and many country's operators are not providing regulators particularly on issues of quality of service which has become a massive problem in terms of mobile and mobile data. Regulate yours often struggle to get the data from operators.
I think it's helpful to have data at the global level, we also need data at a local level and the data needs to go into a system where it can be used in for example forcing regulators to intervene in interconnection for example and that has happened very effectively. It's a pity Helani is not here. There's incredibly valuable research and that is influencing regulators. So I think that's the challenge. Having the data is not enough. It needs to plug into a system where it can be used for influence. It's also very political. The data needs to be independent.
I think in our sector we have a lot of market research which is produced by industry bodies which then start operating in the public policy space and can influence policy makers so they treat it as research when in fact it's not necessarily independent research. So who pays for the research also can be quite important. Who validates the research? That could be quite a challenge with your initiative. And I think you need to think about that, once you've connected the data and the case studies, how does the validation take place, is it the users of those networks on the ground that validates it or is it a demonstration type exercise that can show how many exciting examples there are.
And yeah I think the issue is we also need to balance how much we spend on collecting this kind of data on doing case studies with money that could be spent on actually supporting deployment. So getting that balance right but I think you're trying to do that in the way you're working and working cooperatively with the operators. Yes, finally I think innovation. I think as I said I'm happy that we are calling this innovation and innovative approaches because they're buzz words but it's recognition that has been the dominant model of approaching access is failing and what we need to do is revisit models that link demand and supply, that look at content and capacity.
And that look at diversity of type of operators. We have the Internet is one of our newest sectors, it's one in which there's the most concentration and we have so much monopoly, there's so little competition in social networking platforms, and access through the mobile industry we are trying to achieve competition at a national level but amongst model operators there's very little competition between ISP's for example and mobile service providers. And I think that's why the community networks are such a good model. It's not just about community networks; it's also about small and medium ISP's.
Let's look at this as innovative but it's also an approach that's emerging from recognition of some of the older more traditional ways of doing development and of achieving community empowerment and social change actually do work best. So...
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you very much, Anriette. I always learn from you whenever we speak. I find myself in violent agreement with everything you say this. Is really ‑‑ we are looking at local projects and the idea is to distill that information and turn it into a usable forum. You're letting us tap into deployments and gives us tremendous insight into pushing that forward.
About public access we are looking at publicly provided services and our goal, our determination is really to go into each project with no providers not to assume there's one model that we are going to prefer another. I saw you had this discussion in one of the meetings about community networking. Even within community networking there's many ways to do that and part of what we are learning through this process is finding out what those varieties are around start to share that even within different communities to make that come out. Cost is no question. The data is going to be hard.
I have no illusions but how difficult and expensive it is to collect. Particularly when we try to translate it into the challenge you're giving us and I think it's to turn it into real outcomes, that's reflects from the global community's commit tent to SDGs and the way those SDGs reframe the way we talk about this. You know as well as I do getting data on the that when the academic community hasn't even agreed on the way to measure that in a way that is relevant is challenging. Our attempt is maybe into better than to say here are some ideas that really seem to be bad, here's some ideas that seem to be good and here are some we don't know. I'm humble about what the first effort is going to be like.
What our goal is to start a dialogue where we start to develop those metrics and data gathering as a first step but hopefully not the final step. And you mentioned LIRNEAsia; I agree with you they do great work. We spent an hour talking about the data collection and we are going to try to tap into the expertise of ever scholar to try to learn more about this. I love your idea about demand side and supply side is linked. What we have discovered is the debate tends to frame particular policy initiatives as standalone initiatives.
In fact they often have to go together with other things in order to be effective. And that one of the lessons that Mike was talking about if just frame things this term of making Internet more available and cheaper without understanding the other aspects on the demand side you can built great networks and not get the kind of results we are all committed to doing. There are policies linked together that we had no clear understanding before now and we may not be able to quantify what the linkage is but it's going to start the process of a dialogue and we are going to let the research go where it goes. I wouldn't name anybody but I know from talking to organizations they're funding initiatives and some don't work. They sort of bury the ones that don't work because they don't talk about them.
I'm not going to shy away from talking about every story because I believe we need to learn as much about the stories that didn't turn out as well add we would like as the ones we read about all the time because that's part of the data we need to make this go forward. I always want to get dialogue from the people in the community and I'm acutely aware we are the last event on a day and so I will without further ado as promised I would give the first intervention to remote moderation. Sharda.
>> Hi. My name is Alexis I want to say thank you to everyone (Away from microphone) network. I didn't know anything about it when I first started so it was a painful process for us. I really appreciated what Alex Wong said (Away from microphone) I saw firsthand. And also Anriette about what the data (Away from microphone).
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Thank you very much.
>> I just wanted to introduce Alexis; she's the Peace Corps volunteer. She's currently joining us. And as someone who had the chance to speak to her I want the say it's a pleasure to have someone from these communities be able to join the Internet governance forum and represent the spirit of this forum which is to go as global as you possibly can.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: I see people in the audience who are the stories that are inspiring us and providing the lessons that the rest of us can learn. And I'm hoping that the generosity of our friends in Vanuatu in sharing the story will make it so the next person facing this problem will have a better experience. It's critically important to make that happen.
>> Hi. I'm an ISOC ambassador. One thing seeing how the IGF's focus on, something we are not talking about at all and it's really critical is how data in other parts of connecting the next billion or connecting those that are unconnected, how it's going to affect energy and climate change. There was a study that came out earlier this year that says if we don't change our current data habits eventually all energy that we produce is going to go towards storing data, towards these kinds of aspects. So something that I hope this dynamic coalition can work more with is how for instance and multistakeholder solutions. For instance it's not just about powering devices which is still an issue in many parts of the world but it's also how are we going to power the data, how is it going to be renewable and how is it going to be sustainable but also think about other things like resources. In order to get online somebody needs to have a device. That device takes energy to produce, it takes carbon to produce, it takes rare elements to produce.
Where are those devices coming from? Are they coming from recycled parts, from the global North that are then going to global South? Are there new devices? How are they getting access to those? We need to be much more considerate of how energy is going into all of this process because I'm really worried about the future state if we don't address this more effectively.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: I think that's an important consideration. Some of the stories and it's not quite parts of the chain you're identifying that I've found inspirational there's an organization eco net wireless operating in Zimbabwe. They are facing a challenge. They are going to off grid locations empowering 3 G cell towers with diesel. I know there are many duplicates efforts going on and when someone cracks that nut we have to make it work. This is the stage we are collecting the metrics on any of the SDGs. We are probably not going to be able to develop workable metrics for every SDG.
If we are looking at upstream impacts from device manufacturers, if we are going to take the approach of letting the data talk that's going to be a challenge but we are open to the possibility of exploring it and seeing if we can develop those kinds of things. Anyone else? Please.
>> AUDIENCE: James. On the same point, if you're looking at energy costs, you need to consider that holistically, you don't want to consider the energy costs just within the Internet infrastructure because chances are connectivity is going to substitute for some other energy use. If you can get information wirelessly and remotely maybe you done have to drive to your library and the energy cost doesn't care whether it's for the Internet or something else. If you can look at the data on that look at it holistically.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Absolutely. Part of the energy cost, one of the case studies we did in Papua New Guinea before the wireless happened the only connective they would have is climbing a mountain and get weak service from 25 kilometers away to ordering supplies. They would have to walk two days and walk back. This is one of the benefits in ways that we have to think about all together.
>> Can I also comment on this? Sorry. You know commenting on the energy the renewable energy sustainability issue is a massive challenge. We are beginning to see and I think you see in the mobile energy there's more renewable energy in infrastructure and building of towers and sustaining energy so the connectivity cost itself quite a lot can be done and is being done. You need to look at holistically and if you look at the device manufacturer, the fact that we have cheaper devices, they're not recyclable, the computers are designed to stop working after two years, open hardware by the way and I think that's one of the exciting things emerging from the community networks sector is the idea of open hardware. From a sector wide perspective we are doing really, really badly and I'm not sure what will change it.
Cheap phones make a big difference in people's lives and giving people access to connectivity but it also comes at a huge cost of environmental sustainability. We are only scratching the surface of that discussion.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: In the end I don't know that we will come up with answers. Hopefully we will come up with data that will improve those answers. Please.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from Nepal. Little things when we do with social activism, there's a benefit to the community people. In Nepal we have one person; he started a small community level wireless network system. So it went very well and they are using a wireless system for their social activities. And it is giving their livelihood very smoothly going up. So what I'm saying is when talking about the big industry is like in Nepal so one of the most revenue collector is from the Europe, the company, that company earns lots of money and are taking the way from Nepal. But when we talk about the small entrepreneurs we don't have that much money to fund them so what is the dilemma in between these kinds of processes? They are not willing to do a kind of support this kind of small initiatives.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: I can speak for some of the case studies one of the things that emerges from some of them, some and not all of them, is that the addition of connectivity is unleashing the kind of small scale entrepreneurship you're talking about. There's an initiative again not on connective side, capacity building which is oriented towards entrepreneurship of women. We learned a lot of interesting things. Some of the training they do is not just in centers; they do interactive training on apps. They're creating an online bulletin board and communication system so even after the training ends they can maintain a sense of community, they can share information, developers, and have access to a lot of a broader community because capacity building on the entrepreneurship side requires just as much lateral support as capacity building on the maintenance side.
We are learning from the case studies a lot of germs of ideas of places we need to explore, we see there's many different ways people are doing things that are begging for a bit to examine them more closely and see if they can work as models and make people aware whether this is the practice they would like to build in their systems. Anyone else? I'm talking too much. Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Louise Bennett. I was relieved to hear you saying you're going to publish case studies that don't work. I come from the scientific community and one of the big problems is repeatedly I see people doing things that I know of been done before and haven't worked and it really one of the things that has been very good in the last few years in the UK our research councils have demanded if they give you money, even if you don't succeed in your research, and it's not in a peer review publication, you must publish your results. And they're doing that in the U.S. as well. I think it's important because people don't want to publish their failures but you learn as much from failure as from success. I think asking all the funders to say please say what has happened and if it didn't work why it didn't work. So someone doesn't make the same mistakes is really important.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: So one of the virtues I feel about being an academic institution that's part of my values. This project will make a good faith effort to publish every case study. If we can't get cooperation from the people doing the project, that's a different ‑‑ and there maybe selection bias in that. I know my publishing this I will lose friendships perhaps in parts of the world but it's too important to do. So any questions, we are going to look at everything and publish everything and let the data go where it goes because the bottom line is I don't care where you are in this community we can't afford to be wasting time and effort on bad ideas. There's too much work we need to do than to short change ourselves in that manner. Go ahead. If there's no one else I'll allow him to have a second question.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you for that. Michael, ISOC ambassador. Just to follow up, I do want to say there are solutions and they are actually multistakeholder in nature. Coming from multiple avenues some from the private sector some from the government. I wrote a lengthy article about climate change in the Internet that I published a few months ago. I'll be happy to share it on the list. The point is especially when I get excited about something that I think it's not being addressed, to end on a positive note there are these ‑‑ the solutions are out there and oftentimes going back to the whole reason why this DC needs to exist is we are not communicating about those solution as cross communities so the more we can raise that awareness, it will be implemented in a sustainable way.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: There are solutions and sharing with them is important. We are happy to work with anyone to develop any of them. That's the idea. We really do need a community. I'm acutely aware we are getting rapidly close to the end of the day. Is there any other remote participation? I want to make sure if they have taken the time to do that. What I would like to do to close this event is swing down the table and start can Anriette. Anriette?
>> ANRIETTE ESTERHUEYSEN: Not much more, as long as we apply I think important positive look at failure and it is indeed great that you're looking at that. I think also to apply critical thinking. I think in the multistakeholder space we it's quite inspirational to be in such a diverse space and work with this collaborative spirit with other stakeholders but we need to retain critical perspectives and critical thinking. And I think that applies as much to this theme as it does to any other theme in the IGF.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Michael?
>> MICHAEL KENDE: So one thing thinking about the energy issue that you raised is how the Internet and empowering entrepreneurs kind of creates its own solutions so I'm sure you know about the stories of the you can buy these solar panels and then use your phones to pay off the panel and if you send a little money you can use it for an hour, if you send a little more you can use it for a couple hours who charge your phone. There are a number of them around Africa. So it creates its own solution so it solves the charging problem, creates more power for the household so they don't use kerosene or anything else bad for the climate or dangerous for their house. Eventually in 3 or 4 years they own it. So those are entrepreneurs taking existing solutions and creating new things on the top of that.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Karen.
>> KAREN McCABE: I read your paper and it inspired me. As I mentioned IEEE is a large organization and we have a lot of work. Personally it did resonate with me. So from the energy piece I know we talked about the climate impact of that and the use of smart energy but also a lot of the focus when we look at connecting the unconnected is on ICTs and we need energy and we need power in order to make the ICTs work so I think this ecosystem not to put scope creek into the project goes beyond ICTs in a sense and sort of have to start looking at some of those other impacts also from an environmental perspective but also how do we get energy to realize the deployment of those ICTs so that people can have meaningful access and can grow socially and economically.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Raj.
>> RAJAN MATHEWS: I think one of the things we have been looking for is sound economic principles that need to be applied to this because there's new thinking on the economic models that need to be used. I constantly hear the old tried and true Orthodox methodology. By way of case studies the department of telecommunications mandated a reduced carbon footprint for renewable energy and it was solar panels. If we had done that five years ago we would have looked at a massive write offs on our box because of the crash of prices for solar panels. Good objective. So we need to look carefully at these things.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: Alex.
>> ALEX WONG: I think the case study, the reason why I think it's great, many much you probably think about we should collect case studies and then you get to the point I got this, who is going to make it's searchable, how are we going to make it accessible. We don't have the resources. Right now Christopher has the resources. Let's make his teamwork. Give him the raw materials so we can keep his team busy. It's like a free labor resource. It may not last that long. I'm not aware of that many other initiatives where they're trying to do this. Of course we have to keep doing what we need to do but if we can support that I'll do what I need to support that. It's a depository that we can build off of in different markets and in different situations.
>> CHRISTOPHER YOO: I appreciate that Alex, thank you very much. It's one of the advantages of being in a University. A lot of the leaders and people doing this are aspiring graduates, people trying to put this into the backbones of their dissertations. It's a time ‑‑ we are scaling back into the undergraduates for whom this kind of labor intensive detailed work is a tremendous learning experience for them so the hope is to leverage a unique role that universities can play into a reality that we can do something good for the people who are going the work as well as the community as a whole. We will conclude our event. Please join me in thanking the panel for participating in a very stimulating discussion.
(Applause)
(Session concluded at 17:52)