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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>> STUART HAMILTON: Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming after lunch. Hopefully you're fell fed but not to fall asleep. I'm Stuart Hamilton. One of the world's longest named NGOs, I am here with Janet Sawaya from Electronic Information for Libraries. Between our two organizations we're the conveners of the Dynamic Coalition on public access in libraries. I would say that within the IGF context we're one of the most specific IGFs. We're dealing with a specific issue and we're looking at a specific institution and yet some of the things that we can do through these institutions go across all of the themes that are present here in all these other workshops. In these Dynamic Coalition meetings every year we have to conduct some business and some of that business is really to report on what the Dynamic Coalition has been doing in the previous 12 months.
But I would like to move through that relatively quickly because we're lucky enough to have some excellent people with us to share their thoughts on how libraries can take forward some of the IGF issues. Vint, we're glad to have you here. We have brought you up to top level this year. And I'll introduce our other speakers as we go. We've got remote participation so I'll be looking over occasionally to see if there is anyone coming in. But some of you will have seen the flyer that we put out for this event and the top of that we put up public access to the Internet is having a moment and I know we don't really do slides in these meetings, but I did just want to pull out over the last 12 to 18 months we've seen a number of reports and processes kind of double back round to where we were in 2001-2005 when the digital divide was a big issue.
We're seeing a number of processes and reports recognizing without public access to the Internet we aren't going to be able to bring the next 1.5 billion people online. We're not going to be able to reach target 9C of SCGs, to get 100% of the people in LDCs by 2020. A rather ambitious target but one we're working on. Some of the things I pulled out there. The Global Commission on Internet Governance. The World Bank Digital Dividends Report. Policy options within the IGF itself for connecting the next billion. The Stanford polling exercise that put public access to the Internet through libraries. The Alliance for Affordable Internet Report. The 2015-and 2016 report and the Global Connect Initiative. We really felt that this time out at the IGF there is a lot of good things in the air. A lot of opportunities.
The second part of this meeting we're going to have a moderated discussion by Janet where we want to bring in all of you to sort of think about what do some of these opportunities translate to in a work program sense? What can we do in the next 12 months to sort of push forward public access in the Internet governance context? So before I do that, though, there is business. And I'm pleased to say in the last 12 months we've had a number of engagements from the members of the Dynamic Coalition on public access. We tend to focus on the regional IGFs and the national IGFs. We do this because we're lucky enough to have librarians at each of those levels and bring in our partner organization.
Some of the things that we've done, we were at the EuroDIG, which, of course is the European IGF doing workshops on refugees and access to the Internet. Clearly a hugely important issue. We had a fantastic librarian from Helsinki city library, he was a refugee himself before becoming a librarian and he led a workshop on that topic.
We were in the Asia Pacific where we had librarians organize the workshop and right to be forgotten. We're stretching out. We had people present at the Latin American IGF and we were lucky enough to have a person from Senegal who arranged the -- I ask somebody else to give a different percent respective. I've asked you to give us information on what happened at the Senegal IGFs. It's where we can see some of these ideas. Talk about what happened there.
>> Thank you, the African idea for organizing IGF organized by the African Union Commission and the Government of South Africa, and it was an inclusive dialogue between different sectors. Librarians were part of the debate. The Library Association in Africa. The African Association of Librarians and -- and before that we coordinate the meeting that we -- under the coordination of the director -- we had a nice panel, six speakers take the floor just talking about libraries and how they can participate. The theme we're delivering and development and how libraries help bring people online and enrich the African Union agenda 2033. And then before where the president -- after our workshop we had -- we just organized sharing and tried to see how we can put in the recommendation the part of the library in this issue and it was mentioned in the final report of the IGF that government need to use libraries to deliver and national development plans and African Union agenda. Another thing is also that Internet to promote affordability of the Internet to the people in Africa. Bringing broadband to academia and libraries. That really what the librarian delegates took the floor.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Can I ask so we can get a bigger picture here? In the African IGF did you speak to other non-library groups? Who were the people interested in what you had to say?
>> Yeah. As I say, we organize the librarians and other stakeholders but just after that we prepare how to deliver the message. All the panels were librarians. The delegation was in several workshops and sessions just to put the voice of library and how libraries can bring people online and helping achieve this.
>> STUART HAMILTON: You found a positive reaction to that message?
>> Yeah.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Is there an outcome document?
>> Yes, a big report. Over 200 participants down from government and private sector, academia and technical community coming over 30 countries attend this IGF.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Any questions for him? Any thoughts on the African IGF? Something we tried to engage with more in recent years and there are increasing number of country IGFs alerting the librarians to. This effort at a national level. We have to educate the librarians about the IGFs well. A substantial bit of work to be done there.
>> VINT CERF: It's Vint Cerf. It has to do with the frequency of the annual meetings. If it's only once a year or do you have meetings during the rest of the year as well? For the continental African IGF or the national IGFs. Is there more than one meeting during the year?
>> What we tend to do, we try to have a slot in any workshop in Africa just to try to take that on and talk about that.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I can pick that up because to move on from there one of the things we did next is there is an annual conference every August IFLA. It moves around the various regions and has a transparent bidding process. But this year we were in Columbus in Ohio. And we had a special session there on the Dynamic Coalition. So we brought together the Association for Progressive Communications, IFLA were there and we began to expose the Dynamic Coalition to the broader library audience. Think -- we had a workshop about 70 people and we were able to sort of go through some of these reports. Let people know this sort of thing was happening and had a pretty good discussion where some of the issues that we are dealing with here, particularly in our cooperative work the librarians in the room recognized that and Janet, I don't know if you have any comments. We had colleagues from Jamaica talk to us about the situation facing them there but flipping it back we had a librarian from West Virginia talking about not having the best access in her library. We're trying to sensitize the community a little bit to the IGF. We say the last count we had something like 650,000 information professionals in the world library and reaching them, sensitizing them to the sorts of issues being described here is a heavy lift but something that I think the role of this DC is taking on and can do a lot more work. I think we'll probably turn that meeting and our conference into an annual meeting. And we also had a smaller business meeting, I think, on the side just to work out what we were going to do in relation to this. Anything to add? Go for it. I with like to run this meeting because we're quite a small group in as open a manner as possible. I think presentation by presentation is no good. If you do have a question at any point go for it. Could you introduce yourself to everybody?
>> Sorry to go for it. You asked for a question. I'm Catalina Hosin. I have joined Facebook a month ago and I work with librarians all my life through open access and other issues. My question for our colleague from the African region is I'm sorry if the question was made before. What is the involvement of also the social entrepreneurs and small business and software developers and app developers in those discussions in your region?
>> Really, a big field of sharing between stakeholders really focused on putting on the voice of libraries and we tried to talk to all the stakeholders, yeah.
>> I forgot to clarify what is the connection? I see a lot of libraries and public access points where those folks congregate. That was the connection.
>> Yeah. We just know that -- say that the safe space to use, to connect the unconnected person, and for that we try to pattern to all the other stakeholders on the issue of connected person.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Maybe I can jump in a little bit to tackle. You said one of the recent contacts we've had in the African context is with the initiative I am the code. We've been talking and we put Miriam in contact with him so she is originally from Senegal. How can we use that library system to host those workshops on getting young women and girls coding which is what I think the connections we want to be looking for. That's the beginning of the connection. I would love to see it go to different countries particularly in Africa and elsewhere as well.
>> Senegal for the National Association of Librarians we were planning to meet Miriam. We have a project -- to projects. The one is called cities and corners. Just want to put what we call a corner in each municipality where citizens can be trained for information -- they need to describe corners to be connected to have the possibility to use the information, to use ICT. They have not this facility in their home but we know that municipalities are run by the how you say it -- the money of the -- and we are trying to see how they can work with their local authorities to have -- what we'll call cities and corners where we will find information about local governments information, about also how they can exploit all the possibilities that ICT give them.
>> STUART HAMILTON: So one of the ways that we've been trying to use the regional IGFs and library meetings to sensitize people to what we're doing in the IGF is through something we launched at the last IGF but the year after that launch has been the work period. I'll pass down copies of the principles on public access in libraries which was developed as a work -- a piece of work by this Dynamic Coalition over the last few years. And this I think is part of the principles gets at some of the things you're talking about, because of the way that we've framed the work that we're doing and he mentioned skills. I hear skills a lot at this IGF. I'm hearing how do we have the literacy skills to deal with the post-truth world and it keeps coming up again and again.
I wanted to share this with you so you have a paper copy, a bit old school, I guess. This is where we've been basing our work on and when we get to the discussion and talk to our partners, these are the principles that we talk about public access. It is something that we talked about within the conference in August and we think there is enough life in this document to keep us going with the work program for the next couple of years.
Now, because I'm still doing business as what we've got up to in the last 12 months I have more hand-outs for you. These are color. You'll be much more excited. We see all of this work that we're doing is very much connected to the 2030 agenda. Our position in the 2030 agenda negotiations from the very beginning was that access to information can support the achievement of every single sustainable development goal. And therefore libraries have a role to play in helping governments reach those goals and targets. So as part of our advocacy this year we've been using this document you have in front of you to sort of get our librarians at national levels to be in with their policymakers talking to them about how we can help you with goal 4 and goal 8 and it is an effective way of mobilizing our librarians at national levels. One of the things I would say about my own library community over the last 15, 20 years, sometimes we aren't very good at seeing ourselves as part of the bigger picture.
If you ask a librarian what he or she does they will tell you an activity or something which is contributing to development but they won't be able to talk about that activity in the way that perhaps a policymaker or a partner organization wants to hear. So we actually have something new, something called the international advocacy program which started this year in August, and we have a huge amount of resources thanks to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to take it on national levels and a cascade training model. We've done four regional workshops by the end of the year where we've brought together 60 countries and those countries have to commit to going back to their country and developing an action plan to reach out to their policymakers.
This is where we really see the principles in public access can come in. First come, first served. We produced a better booklet that breaks down every goal specific examples of what libraries are doing in relation to that. And so far so good on this. This has been quite effective. We actually had libraries in the national development plan of Jamaica. We have concrete evidence that this advocacy has been working. In Australia the libraries are close to getting into the national development plan there and generally I think we'll be able to come back next August and report with a hope a few more positive examples of that.
They are in Poland. I didn't know that. Someone take the minutes. We've gone up from one to two, which is great. We know that some countries already have their national development plans and others are very much at the beginning of putting them together. That's why it's essential we have to be in those conversations from the start. So any questions just on this that I've passed out?
>> VINT CERF: It's Vint Cerf again. This is having to do with other public institutions besides the public libraries that could also offer access. Unusual cases I've learned about. I was in Cuba in March and I met with an artist there called Cacho. He has a compound with multiple studios and galleries and given access by the administration to now a 70 megabit system to get out to the Internet and he makes it available for anyone who comes within the compound. It is a WiFi service and there is a major thoroughfare going around Havana. I won't bother Googling it. There are other points where people can get access to the Internet. I hope the scope of the discussion here isn't limited to libraries because there are other possibilities to provide public access.
>> STUART HAMILTON: That's a very good point and as I mentioned at the outset with our name we look like the most specific Dynamic Coalition you can get your hands on. Libraries have been working with tele centers for many years. Pleased to have Nicholas from the Dynamic Coalition that we can build out to take the public access further. And I think while we're keen to keep the spotlight on libraries, I wouldn't take anything away from the other methods that we can do to share the public access. I do think that extending the reach of WiFi networks through any way, shape or form using libraries as base stations but you may be picking up WiFi -- hopefully you have an idea in information security and digital literacy sense comes from a library. I hope that's something I would also like us to consider for the work program over the next 12 months as well is how can we broaden partners. Do you want to say something?
>> Hi, my name is Nicholas from Argentina. Thank you for inviting us. Thank you for giving me the hand to talk about this. Well, as you were saying, public libraries having a very important role on distributing -- giving access to the communities. And as for now, it is awesome for you to be doing that. But I think we need to commit to give -- to push that forward. We have already get here and it is awesome because a lot of people that haven't had the means available to get to Internet can do so. But now that the devices and the people -- the devices allow us to have more participation on Internet and technology, the people requires us to be online or to share content or to put our businesses on top of the Internet we have a chance from the library sector to push forward this limit and allow a lot more people to access this technology.
I don't know if you already know about what community networks are. Can you raise your hand if you know? Do you know? You know? Everyone knows what a community network is?
>> STUART HAMILTON: We think we do. You might want to say what your definition is.
>> I will. Okay. So the idea of community networking is to tackle the issue of unconnected people or the people that want to be connected that is not already connected. With a solution from the bottom up, right? From the people that already wants to connect, from that wheel build up on that. So what we propose, we have already developed a very wide range of technologies that help people to have the means to get themselves connected. This not only tackles the issue of being connected to the Internet but also helps us to fix Internet. Internet nowadays is not what it used to be when our friend here did what he did at the beginning. But it is very much vertical structure, right? And people is used to consume more than produce and to be not -- it's kind of a division to bundle. We need all together to fix that.
So community networks not only help people to have the access to Internet but also to have the means to get in touch with technology and empower themselves knowing how it works and building it for themselves and maintaining it for themselves.
And also it's kind of a commitment. When you build your network, you are involved in that. When you are involved in that, you start to participate and if you have some time that you can go to one of the meetings from community meeting the people that is there participating on IGF is not only technicians like me. I'm an engineer. But also mothers and fellows from the community. I don't know if there is any indigenous people, but there are also. So they build themselves the network that they need and the means are around. For you the librarians I think that we have a big chance to grow and expand your purpose. Like open access. Like giving tools for public services.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Hold that thought. We want to come back to you with some of those details when Janet gets into the moderating bit. We need to think about these working with the new things in the Dynamic Coalition on library sense how can we build some new things in. What I would like to do now. I'm mindful of time. That's my job. Is to invite Vint to pick up on some of the things we've been getting underway with. I think we put you on the menu as having assorted library musings or things like this. Feel free to give us sort of -- take your time but talk to us about the Stanford poll as well.
>> I'm happy to do that. I'm not the expert on the polling that has taken place at Stanford, although there were several people at the conference who can speak to this. Professor Francis and max from Google in particular. The impression I got from the polling is there is a distinct and rising desire for access to the Internet and the services that it offers and there is a great deal of recognition that public institutions have a role to play. And the libraries have been more visible than one might have anticipated partly because of their long history of bringing information to people and helping them find it. So the experiments that you've done, Don, with white spaces access is just one important example of drawing attention to Internet access.
There have been some setbacks, though. I wanted to mention them, because they are unexpected and surprising. I have been very interested in bringing Internet service to the Native American reservations in the United States. They've been left out because of their rural nature and the long history of neglect, frankly, in American policy. What I learned, however, is that for example some libraries or schools were outfitted with WiFi, made it publicly available. People would come to the parking lot to get access to Internet. And it actually became a problem because people were coming who were not locals necessarily, coming from all over the place and consumed so much of the resource that the library had to do something to control access to make it available to the patrons. That's an example of scarcity. The problem we have to solve is to remove the scarcity and provide abundance which is one reason why broader band access is important. Technologically speaking that's getting better. We're seeing much higher frequencies being -- I won't say deployed yet but at least investigated in the 60, 75, 80 gigahertz range. Even at 1 bit per hertz it's a lot of bandwidth. Bringing higher frequencies could make a big difference in terms of public access.
We have some experience as Google specifically. In India where we've been putting up public WiFi. Ultimately we intend 400 railroad stations. I don't remember how many we've put up so far. I just don't even want to guess. It might be 50 but I just don't remember. But the responses have been very positive because people are saying I have access to information when I go to the train station. And that just reinforces my belief that public access is a really important element in the Internet spread.
When it's still pretty expensive to have private access to the Internet, finding these alternative ways is really helpful. In the earlier days of Internet deployment it wasn't uncommon for universities to come up on the net and then people who graduate from the universities and it would get out into their cities and towns, and the first reaction they had is how do I get Internet access? So they would start Internet cafes as a way of sharing the cost of getting onto the system. I think that is still true today, although increasingly people are getting access with mobiles and Smartphones and things like that which is a very good thing.
We have that dynamic going on. Mr. Chairman, I wonder, though, if I could mention another topic, although we don't need to discuss it now. And it has to do with another related role that the libraries have. Historically some of the libraries are institutions that archive content and they do it to preserve that information for future generations. We are generating as a society an enormous amount of digital content and it isn't 100% clear to me that we are catering to its preservation. The librarians tell me they're very well aware of this problem. That many sources of content are showing up in digital form, whether it's CD-roms or disk drives or other kinds of things as well as online resources and they are struggling to find ways of preserving the utility of that digital content. So perhaps somewhere in the course of our conversation we could look at the problem of preserving digital content over long periods of time. As I think about all the people who take photographs with their mobiles and I have experienced a lot of them in the last few days, I keep wondering what will happen 10 or 20 years from now? Will all of that important content, important to the individuals, still be available? Will the formats still be able to be interpreted can they be rendered correctly and to make matters more complicated, what if it's a spread sheet or document with special formatting. Will the software that created the object still be available 100 years from now? So that might be worthy of your attention in the course of our conversation.
But to come back to the public access question, I think that we should be conscious of and in fact do everything we can to stimulate willingness to provide public access to the Internet where that's possible in order to overcome the limitations that we have now for affordability and accessibility. I'll stop there, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for allowing me to participate.
>> STUART HAMILTON: You'll now get some questions, Vint. We love to take advantage of haven't Vint here.
>> I'm Larry Magot, the CEO of Connect Safely.com and I may do a radio segment on this today. Two comments on Vint's presentation. One in New York City there is something called link NYC in the process of replacing pay phones with terminals. This is a great public/private partnership. The other thing I was thinking about when you mentioned the issue of libraries archiving content. We have the archive.org the Internet. They can't do it all. How information can be changed. Many years ago I was writing a consumer fraud column for the computer magazine and only because of some kind of archival system was it able to find out this company, which claimed that they didn't commit the crime that they had committed, in fact did. They made a claim that they couldn't deliver on and then when they were caught they deleted that claim. Suddenly they became unaccountable. I think it was Google cash that enabled me to determine that. There is so much that can be deliberately changed, not to mention accidentally lost, and I don't know -- I think the Internet archive is doing a great effort but it can't possibly keep track of all that.
>> Thank you for bringing that up. The obvious answer is to use digital signatures and hashes to make information hard to alter. But you still have to be able to find it. And so the Internet archive as an example is trying very hard to accumulate as much as possible of what's out there in web space, in addition to software and other materials including books. And things like that. The part that resonated with me in your comment are the instances where something appears on the net and then it's changed later. Or it's erased. And our ability to prevent the revision of history is going to depend a great deal on capturing the content and putting it in a form which is not alterable, at least not without visible tampering.
>> STUART HAMILTON: You had a question?
>> Just a comment on that and it's actually not what I don't -- things I saw over the years with librarians. We have to keep remembering the efforts. That both repositories and documents have adopted over the years open standards to be -- there is an international repository alliance that have set open standards for that. I think it's important to remember that for rendering the future.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I would also comment on something we're working on with UNESCO, the persist project. Preservation of digital memory. There is an interesting thing that has come up. It was a conference organized in the IGF multi-stakeholder approach and we had a lot of librarians, archivists, governments and as many private sector companies as we could find who would come, which was not a huge amount. In the two, three years since that we've become to work on principles with what needs to be preserved. There is a huge amount of preservation activity going on. It can't capture everything. There is a recognition of the problems you've outlined. Personal opinion here, I don't think we have any idea how big a problem it will be when people's family photo collections start disappearing. You see what happens when someone loses iTunes collection. There are some things that will start to hit home personally. The point I make is we are having difficulty getting the private sector interested in those discussions. So we have UNESCO and member states who already have something called the memory of the world, a good program. We have the librarians and archivists who want to do everything they can. And we run up against a little bit all three sides are perhaps unable to explain themselves to each other in this context. It is something we're trying to overcome but I thought I would put it in as an example we're trying to deal with that we need to solve before we can even get onto the main problem.
>> Just to observe, the first problem is business models will count here because whatever this is has to be sustainable over long periods of time. As I was thinking about preserving digital information for 500 years, 1,000 years, I got to think what institutions exist that long? And I thought well, the Catholic Church has been around for 2,000 years and they used to use monks in order to copy information. So maybe there is something there. Also I discovered that breweries and wineries sometimes have been around for 500 or 600 years but I haven't figured out how to couple their business model with preserving digital information. But I'm working on it over the occasional glass of wine.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Religion and alcohol.
>> Tablets last a long time. Not the electronic ones, the original tablets. Stone tablets, yeah.
>> You didn't mention -- there are many institutions, by the way and groups that are concerned about preservation. One of them is the international Internet preservation consortium which met in April in Iceland and has some UNESCO support, as I remember. It is important for us to discovering those parties and do, as you say, find a way to help them recognize each other and reinforce their work as opposed to effectively competing with each other for resources to get the work done.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I do think the Persist Project has given us a framework to make it happen. We need the resourcing for it. Before we close up -- before we move on to a discussion, any other sort of questions on Vint's musings or any reflections? We're going to drill into a bit of public access. I thought the railway station thing was a very interesting approach. With my librarian hat on I find it interesting, a great public access points. How can we add skills and value in that with some sort of information literacy?
>> MEI LIN FUNG: I want to make an observation about the history and that Douglas Ingle bought was the inventor of the mouse and the second note with Vint on the Internet and he always reminded us that gathering in community would be very critically important for moving ahead. I had the honor of breaking Douglas Ingle bot to Singapore in 2002. He addressed a crowd of over 1,000 librarians and said you are the navigators for the future. I just want to bring back that thought which Douglas Ingle bot really saw libraries as the trading posts and that organizations like the IEEE might be the trail guides, the technical people exploring into the technical frontiers and to come together in the trading post to learn from each other. Today we're in a place where global institutions are trying to decide the fate of the Internet. We have to give a voice to the local communities. Libraries are the trading post for the local communities. We must take advantage of that and that was the Clarion call that Douglas left for us with his insight that network improved communities the way we needed to go. I wanted to bring that thought back into this discussion.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I think that's really important. We have a comment over there. Jesus, you need to get to a microphone, sir. Maybe this one will do.
>> I'm a librarian work for a Mexican university in the southeastern part. I love to hear your comments about the library role and I wanted to make two comments. Libraries are access point to Internet in this country how about 8,000 public libraries. Half of them are in remote rural areas. In those places the public libraries may be the only place where people can have access to Internet. Sometimes it's not reliable but it's the only way to -- for people to communicate. Many of those people want to communicate with their husbands, fathers working in the U.S. or somewhere. Second, about the preservation of information. Human beings are having the greatest information output at the moment but also are facing the greater risk of losing our memory. And I think we as a team, we have to teach not only the bigger population but individuals, institutions and businesses to keep the memories. Latin America has a consortium founded by the InterAmerican Bank and it covers most countries but the focus is academic.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Thanks for that. What I'm going to do, a quick comment, go for it.
>> I want to make a comment about public WiFi and the security issue and whether or not as libraries are putting these out or people thinking about fake WiFi networks that appear to be legitimate or other forms of security issues and how that can be countered. Just want to put that in the conversation.
>> STUART HAMILTON: That's good. What I with like to do now. We'll bring in in, Nicholas. Hand over to Janet to ask a few questions. I want to keep that security one on the table. That's a skills element and it's quite important. Janet, take us through the next 40 minutes and we'll tease out a bit more on public access. I would like you to help -- if something really resonates with you as something this Dynamic Coalition can do over the next 12 months and maybe you should work with that Dynamic Coalition or work with those partners, let's bring that into the conversation as well. Janet.
>> JANET SAWAYA: This is meant to be a conversation and I'm here to tee it up. I've talked to a couple of people and I'll ask them some questions as a means to get you all engaged. The background is that we as libraries for a long time have known that we need to work with lots of different actors and I think that's becoming increasingly so in that we're increasingly finding ways to do that. The purpose of this conversation is really to continue that. We found some very specific ways in some certain events and venues in the last couple years and we want to highlight some of those which Stuart has already done. We want to expand and broaden in. First I want to give background about myself. I work for electronic information for libraries. I worked for eight years on the gate's foundation local libraries program. We installed thousands and thousands and thousands of computers in 20, 30 countries. In some cases we put computers in every single library, public library in the country. And in that partnership issues obviously was crucial. We can't install computers and train librarians if there is no broadband. People aren't going to come in and use it if there is no relevant content. So the partnership issue has always been there. It just takes time to build some of the basic infrastructure which is what the Gates Foundation spent years doing and how do we expand the use of that structure.
It's there now. The skills are there, the computers are there, the new buildings are there. How do we make it bigger? And then I want to say one of the things that I think going to Vint's point but other public access points. I think it's crucial. We all need to work together.
I would add that when the Gates Foundation started their program, the reason they did it was because they looked at all the different public institutions and Bill and Linda decided public libraries were the best place. That doesn't mean others aren't important but this is one of the massive institutions that we can really take advantage as others have pointed out have information sharing as their core mission. And also they've been, as we did lots of studies while I was at the Gates Foundation, there are in a place where people can get online, that people who might otherwise not go to a public access point. For example, in many countries, women. We saw that particularly in Asia particularly in Muslim countries. You won't get them into an Internet cafe where you have lots of boys gaming. But they feel comfortable going into a public libraries. Disabled. They've helped disabled communities for a long time. The elderly who might be embarrassed to ask a young person to get online. They often serve a lot of communities that others do not
There is a lot saying infrastructure is there in a lot of places but people still aren't getting online.
What's the missing piece? Local relevant content. Libraries have been digitizing their local content. That's one of their roles and they've been doing it at an increasingly quick rate. And they are also really good at helping people find the content that is relevant to them. You sit down at a public access point with nobody there to help you and type in words in Google and you may or may not find what you need or you may find something that is not true at all in this day and age in the post truth post fact world. That's my pitch for libraries. I want to go back to the main point. We know it's important for everybody to work together. Here this this room you agree public access is a critical issue to get people online. Sometimes we say it's the gateway to private access but there is a value in public access in and of itself. Often it's the gateway but we know people find value in coming together in a place to work together on accessing information and discussing it. So with that in mind, I wanted to just -- because I said there has been a lot happening in the last couple of years on organizations working together, recognizing the value of both public access and particularly libraries, just to ask a few questions to sort of kick off a greater discussion about how we can expand and I'll start with Marija from Global Connect Initiative. One of the critical players in getting Global Connect off the ground and just to say can you tell us a little bit more about Global Connect for those people who haven't heard of it and what value you see in what we're doing with libraries?
>> Thank you so much. It is great to be here again with this community. Before we even launched the Global Connect Initiative we viewed the IGF as the critical forum for consultation on how to move forward and thanks to Stuart and IFLA we identified early the importance of public access. The importance of identifying the need for more locally relevant content and digital literacy to the point of when we actually launched the initiative we included all the values as the connectivity principles accepted by over 40 countries around the world. It shows the type of impact the IGF can have and the type of impact that IFLA can have and is having in its leadership.
It is clear to me Global Connect is an initiative that's trying to bring 1.5 billion people online by 2020. That's an international metric agreed upon by all countries at the I.T. meeting in Korea and one of our takeaways was how do we actually make this goal a reality? What will we do with the stakeholder community to leverage expertise and be successful come 2020? Another key benchmark is we've launched the initiative purposefully when the 2030 sustainable development agenda was launched. We're trying to make the point the Internet is a key means of achieving those. We need to be thinking about the Internet as a vital component of success in achieving the development agenda. To bring that many people online by 2020 we need a public access strategy. It is not going to happen without one. I think that just shows the critical importance of moving forward deliberatively with this community and I actually have two specific requests that I'll make at the end of the presentation for us to be thinking about next steps.
From our vantage point we're extremely proud of what this initiative has been able to achieve in just 14 months. We of course as I mentioned have 40 countries that are now highlighting the importance of public access, digital literacy and other values that I know this group holds very dear. We also were able to identify 65 global actions valued at over $20 billion. Like a clearinghouse of connectivity initiatives. It was designed to try to also provide them more visibility with -- also maybe get more funding and support and encourage and catalyze more activity in the Global Connectivity space. We announced these actions at an important meeting with John Kerry and with all the presidents of the banks and finance ministers and many folks from this community. What was interesting to me is we take for granted the idea that Internet infrastructure is just as important to economic development as traditional structure. That's new information to them.
We have more work to do to highlight the importance of the Internet but then also showcasing this is a common misperception that I have to listen to. I'm sorry to say it like that. That connectivity can be achieved through industry-driven efforts. That's all, that the industry will figure this out and bring everyone online. We know the importance of public/private partnerships. The importance of libraries and public access. There are so many different ways. A lot of times the market won't provide connectivity to certain areas because of no commercial benefit. We have to be real and honest.
As we think about the way forward for Global Connect and how that might intersect with this community and this discussion, we have announced a number of focused country efforts. We are taking a listening first approach with this initiative and countries that they would like to seek help from the stakeholder communities or Global Connect partners. We're encouraging them to reach out for us, raise their hand. A number of countries have done so. It is extremely exciting and possible. Tunisia is one. There are a number of important initiatives there. Liberia, India, a full list of countries that I will give after this. Really thinking about how can we build a public access strategy as a key component of what it means to be a Global Connect focused country. What we have countries expressing interest, we have a way to work together and deliver advice or some sort of substantive guidance on how they can better take advantage of this very important resource.
I'm also very open to other ideas how to strengthen the effort. We have view all of you as key partners and grateful for the advice and mentorship and excited to see what the future will bring and what we've achieved.
>> I'm David, part of the leaders program and from Columbia. I am going to talk about my country. In Columbia what happens is that we have a lot of hardware. The problem is not the infrastructure. We got hardware, not connection in all the country, but the problem maybe the skills for the people. The people, some examples, they think it is made for robbers. It is false. People don't understand how Internet is working. So if you want to bring Internet to the people thinking public libraries. It is the only institution in my country that is in 1400 little towns and everywhere. The public libraries are the place. The people in Columbia lost his faith on things free. They think it is bad quality if you get free. And something especially in Columbia is that the people don't go to the library because they think they are going to have a fee, a payment in their bill for example. So bring the confidence in use, the free it has quality, too.
>> Hi, again Nicholas. I wanted to a little bit about what my colleagues here have put on the table. You librarians will know better than me. I don't remember if it was Einstein or one of those big guys in our history they said that if we want to achieve different things, that what we have already achieved, we need to change the strategy. If we keep doing the same, we will keep getting the same results, okay? Einstein, okay, thank you. So -- it was great to really hear her because what I feel is happening to Internet, the reason why there is a lot of -- it hasn't happened yet getting people connected because we aren't involving the people. The initiatives always come from top to bottom. We think they need Internet and we take Internet to them but we have never asked them what they really need. So that's what I want to say. We need to involve communities in this process and libraries are an excellent actor in the territory because they know the community. They can engage with them. Let's do that bridge.
>> JANET SAWAYA: Helen.
>> Hello, I'm Helen. I'm also librarian from Mexico. Thinking of a strategy to increase access to information, I think that as a librarian, as we see humanity, people, seven for eight billion people many of them are sick because they lack information. They don't have the right information to improve their lives. So I was thinking if one of the strategies is to work more closely with politicians, with policymakers in our countries to make them understand it's like -- if somebody has diabetes that is a common sickness in Mexico, it is better to prevent diabetes than to curing diabetes. It is more expensive the cure than to prevent. So if politicians understanding that increasing access to information, going to these remote areas in the country Mexico we are 123 million people, about 50% don't have access to information. Those are the people that are getting sick. They don't have information how to end poverty. They don't have information how to stay healthy. So it is more costly to ignore access to information than for the country to set this -- to increase the budget to increase, you know, infrastructure, training, skills, and I agree it is not only a work for librarians, it is for everybody in the country until they realize we are losing money because we are paying for ignorance, for poverty, sickness and those things. To work more closely with politicians on a strategy.
>> I want to build on Helen and Jonathan and I wanted to add the Helen's. I don't come at it from a librarian perspective. I'm a lawyer by training. I became a librarian evangelist in part because I think they are the only place that can provide access to information. Information is a critical part of our democracy and I think we can all agree after these last couple of years this is increasingly a problem. Real information, getting people access to real information is critical and libraries have a new challenge on their hands because it used to be I could say library, provide access to information. Now that information that's out there is often misinformation or disinformation and so we really -- it's a new strategy and a new challenge. I'll give this over Jonathan.
>> I'm Jonathan from Mexico. So certainly libraries have many important issues to address but one of them is we need to be an important actor for digital literacy. We are now living in a world dominated by algorithms and we must not forget to rights of privacy threats and censorship. In Mexico we're facing now some important privacy threat for many states from the government and libraries have to be an important actor to teach to the user how to use the information, how to be secure in a not so secure place.
>> Mei Lin,can you talk about working in Tunisia and with people-centered Internet and Iy and others?
>> MEI LIN FUNG: I will respond to Helen. I am a citizen of Singapore. It is an economic miracle. I was activated in a library at 14 years old. It was the knowledge in a library that got me going. We have the opportunity to invest in people. Because of the background that I have, I know that Singapore invested a billion dollars in their library and I would actually say that you can use Singapore as an example of how investment in libraries has truly paid off in ways that are incredible to behold. People don't talk about this, but the libraries were used as innovation labs for technology, for learning, for teaching, feedback loops, going back to health, prevention, not cure. Singapore now has -- only spends 4% of their GDP on health and has some of the best outcomes in the world because when you have an educated populous, people know that they want to stay well and they know how to stay well. It is a whole different way of doing things so going back to what I was saying earlier about the trading post and trail guides, please consider Singapore as a trail guide. Not everything will work but in a trading post like IGF, let's take some of the good stuff and you can use it to influence your policymakers.
Going back to Tunisia, it is inspired by the idea of Singapore as a people-powered economy. A country with no resources whatsoever but just simply human ingenuity. Singapore had no other resources and did it. No matter where in the world we are we'll find the people to do it. So in Tunisia in the first school we found a 14-year-old and knowing more than college students and he was self-taught. There is genius and miracles everywhere. There is gold but we just need to begin to look at it and why we're working together with IFLA and IEEE to do the trading post, IFLA trading post and IEEE trail guides and to provide a voice for local communities with local people to then insert these voices into the global dialogue through Global Connect and the World Economic Forum.
>> VINT CERF: Thank you, I have three things. Vint Cerf again. Getting equipment into the library. Operations maintenance and replenishment are problems. How did that work out in the case of the gates initiative and if I could share I have two other things I would like to add but I would like to hear an answer to that.
>> Part of the Gates Foundation programs from the outset was massive training of librarians to do advocacy. I come from an advocacy background and I worked with parliaments in civil societies in gates and part of the reason I went there. Never was I engaged in such a large advocacy training initiative. I'm not saying it's successful across the board but part of the issue is it's local governments who will be there for the operations and maintenance. The national government has some role to play but usually it's local government and the librarians needed to learn how to talk to their local governments to get what they need. We have seen places where it's failed even in the U.S. where the Gates Foundation installed libraries in every community, Jackson county, Oregon, they shut it all down. You'll have that. I think it's been more successful than not.
>> We've all had the experience of installing a piece of equipment at home and having it failed and not be able to figure out how to get it to work again. This problem of maintaining and sustaining and replacing if necessary is still a very important challenge.
>> You become part of the city, county, local government network no matter where they are. It is not an individual entity trying to buy its way.
>> The point about sustainability affects each of us individually too. The second has to do with information to help people stay healthy. One thing we've seen just in the last year or so of the American political campaign is the spread of disinformation, misinformation around the network and people struggling to recognize that it is not good quality. I think we're still far away from understanding how to detect that and how to help other people recognize good quality. Librarians have historically been a major source of information to guide people to good quality information. And in some sense we lack that in the open Internet and we need to do something about that and again libraries and librarians might help. One last point has to do specifically with the health problem that you mentioned. People who are obese and have diabetes tendencies. This problem is rampant in the United States but also through here in Mexico. The Gallup Company historically has tried to help people identify their own strengths and weaknesses, there is an online test you can take called strength finder, has also engaged in trying to discover entrepreneurs and those are unusual people. The head of Gallup, Jim Clifton says, there might be 1 in 15,000 people who is really an entrepreneur they started testing in the rural parts of Mexico tens of thousands of people and found a small number where the tests said these are really entrepreneurs. One is a 15-year-old girl who lives in the most remote, rural part of the country who wanted to start a candy company to make healthy candy for people who might otherwise have diabetes or get diabetes. She has been funded by the Gallup company in order to test whether or not their algorithm actually worked. This is put your money where your mouth is. I just bring this up because it's an example of a very creative attempt to discover people who are capable of making a difference.
>> It is just -- it is a shout from heard all the people -- invite them to partner with libraries and librarians. Libraries have always been evangelists for new information, access to information to all. And you know that access to information is the basic things for personal development, for global development. And that condition you have a piece in this world, more understanding.
>> I just wanted to bring back the comment from her about the idea of the trading post, the library as a trading post. I guess that we need to be -- the roles that get to the trading post also. Just to continue bringing up this thing about community networkings -- networks. What we promote from our experience. We are not just an -- we are the community. It is kind of the closest part from librarians to the community that we will actually be benefited from the connectivity, the public access connectivity to open a conversation. And what I wanted to share with you is that what happens on our networks that we built from our experience is that the networks are not money intensive. They are people intensive.
When we build -- the network that I belong, it's in Argentina. It is a small town near the mountains. And we are doing -- we are trying to connect a nearby village. But there is a mountain between us and the other village. So both of the communities, our community and the community that needs to be connected got to this mountain with all the materials that need to be used to build the tower that we need to connect and them, the poorest and the richest guys helped to get all the materials up, helped to make the holes in the earth to build the tower and helped to get the tower up. What we have to offer here is not just technology to get them connected but also the ways for them to engage in your spaces to do them for themselves. So the skills that you promote, this is a way to -- for them to get them there but also get engaged with the library and repurpose the library in a way that's useful for them. And also to bring knowledge that sometimes you don't have the means to get Internet some places, right? You have the library 50 kilometers an Internet connection and no economic feasible way you say to get Internet to those places. They want to be connected to information to call themselves inside their community. So there is also the knowledge to build this kind of technology for themselves, okay? Thank you.
>> I'll grab Jim, who is here from IEEE on my planted list. Anything else you want to say but to talk about the IEEE engineers and libraries partnership that is kind of building.
>> I'm Jim Wendorff with IEEE, for those who aren't aware the IEEE is one of the largest technical professional associations with over 430,000 members worldwide. So one of our strengths actually is the fact that we have the strong engineering communities in the local communities spread throughout the world. We really rely on the strength of our local chapters to actually represent the strength of technologists, the relevant technologists in the local communities. I personally am the program director for the IEEE Internet initiative. One of the main aspects of that is to bring that technical expertise together with the policymakers so that all of the discussions revolving around the policy issues associated with the Internet are well informed by protect -- technical college. It is well informed what might be possible and workable when you try to take that into community. That's introducing where I'm coming from.
One of the other aspects of the Internet initiative is dealing with Internet inclusion. We've made it from the IEEE a major thrust to try and use our technology for the benefit of humanity and one of the best ways we can see of doing that is if we can actually apply all this to extending Internet access, knowledge and global knowledge to everyone as possible in the world.
How can we build on that? Well, if we have the technical expertise in our communities and in our local chapters and so on, and that's where we have the local libraries, and so on as the access point, wouldn't it make a lot of sense we work together and actually provide that knowledge, treat the libraries not just as an information point but actually as a teaching point. That's where you get the education. You bring the knowledge of our technical community. We have a meeting point that you can use as a teaching thing. Because as you pointed out, others -- you can take it into the schools but that's mostly for the students and the young kids and doesn't reach all of the people in the community. But there is less resistance to having other people come into the libraries.
We kind of look at maybe it's partly just my own personal view as well that there is this good matching between our local chapters of technical experts and the libraries which I regard as in many ways maybe borrowing as a segue eventually into Don's stuff as the way of -- the best way maybe of bringing the world Internet to the local communities and then leveraging actually the community networks not so much to get the libraries connected. We'll probably need better technology to get them connected but use the local community networks to take it from the library central point out to the communities and that way we bring the whole world out and that may be a better kind of overall architecture way of thinking of it. That's my own personal view.
I'm looking at libraries as the educational points. Let's work together to actually bring the people who are already in the community, are enthusiastic about helping their own local communities. Often it's the student chapters of the IEEE that can do the best there. They're very enthusiastic. New engineers. They've learned the information. They want to apply it and make a difference in the world. How can they do that? They know what the problems are in their own community. We aren't parachuting in experts from the United States or Europe or something. We're using the people who know their own problems right there in the community working with the community. So I think that's where I come from and the value I see in this kind of working relationship of having IEEE work with Global Connect Initiative, work with all the funding agencies we've been trying to bring together, work with the libraries to try to actually make this happen.
>> I'm a non-profit professional and I worked with the Gates Foundation. One of the advisors in the project. My observation and question is much of the conversation we've had is from the supply side is really looking at policies creating access to libraries and such. A couple observations, increasingly millenials and younger people aren't going to libraries, especially as they get connected because they net the information and misinformation on their devices. I want to comment on -- I would ask data on what percentage of people are coming into libraries compared to back before we had connectivity. What trends are you seeing? And much of our investment in time, resources and conversation I'm on the steering committee of USIGF. Many of the initiatives is heavy on supply side. If you look at the research data, the study that I saw that Brazil did, 90% availability of mobile connectivity and 30 or 40% adoption. We're increasing supply side against and not so much how do we engage with this new generation of people who are interacting with technology very differently? Far fewer of them are going to libraries. Even if you did the partnerships, how are you seeing that adoption piece?
>> One quick -- I know we're running out of time and I'll make a quick plug for an amazing database of information called GL Atlas. It provides a breakdown of users of libraries by gender, age. 53 datasets across 200 countries and there is a lot of information in there. What we've seen is used increasingly in developing countries, increasingly going into libraries because they don't have connectivity at home. For many people it's the only point of access. Anybody can log on.
>> STUART HAMILTON: I might jump in. Don wants to say something as well. The study which I point you towards is the impact study done by the social change group at the University of Washington known as TASHA they looked at all types of public access in a number of developing countries. Public libraries were the most trusting associations and teased out what the youth use public access spaces. You can't do your homework on your phone. You can't do your job application. The public access space was used. You have the big screen. You have your desktop and actually you are -- happy to provide them. We're running out of time.
>> DON MEANS: A lot of things you would have said have already been said. Thank you for everybody making all the points that I would love to respond to a lot of them and I think that makes a case for continuity of this excellent consultation and thank you for leading us, Stuart. Well, I with like to circle back to public access if I might. I come at this from an infrastructure standpoint and became a library lover about 10 years ago when we created something called digital village in the mid-90s, about the time the web arrived just around the ideas that communities need a strategy for using this new infrastructure and it was more or less a case of plan or be planned. And it is not the old world of the provider coming in for you. So I wanted to thank Manu making the key point within the context of doing real work which was an objective of this forum. What are we coming out with? And the GCI is an extremely powerful consortium but I think its greatest power is by providing the metrics to measure progress. To connect the 1.5 billion people by 2020, okay? It is not just we need everybody connected, which is a good thing, but, you know, it doesn't really hold anybody to something. That creates a sense of urgency if you think about four years from now. So I think the Dynamic Coalition could be joining directly with the GCI in that goal and I would encourage everyone to embrace that goal and find a role, local, global and everything in between. The infrastructure point, I think the library case has been made here for sure. And it's difficult because the library is so plastic and flexible and touches so many things it is hard to nail down. I have think that's why a lot of people tend to overlook it.
But from the connectivity side, as president Kim of the World Bank said, it is critical but insufficient. I think we can agree on that. Reversing that phrase it is insufficient but it is critical. So if we don't deliver connectivity. If connectivity is not created, then what are you connected to and much less why? The whole point about bandwidth, I appreciated Vint's example in India in talking about new extremely high-speed wireless, this is amazing stuff. It just has to be on the wire and you have to be near the wire to take advantage of it. We've worked in an area in this TV white spaces which are longer range frequencies and have the ability to travel through things and over hills quite a bit. This has put me back in touch with the point about connectivity and versus the concept of capacity. So in the U.S. we're all kind of giga maniacs. If you don't have a gig you're second class. Working with TB white space has been an amazing experience. This is public spectrum, all spectrum it starts out as public property. The public airwaves. It is being rolled out in different countries at different rates for difference reasons. A lot of the pushback mainly from the carriers, why should we give away for free something we could sell for billions? Who is we? Because we in the first place as the public own the airwaves. Our response is why sell it all off only to have to buy some back to deliver public services?
In other words, an example might be a community selling off all of its public land to have to lease some back to create parks forever. Retain some of the precious stuff and look to sustain public services and the library being the anchor institution.
TV white space also represents in my experience the first time that rural has ever caught a break on the economics of an infrastructure. It is always more expensive. People have less money, they're farther apart. It is not profitable generally or really expensive. In the case of TV band spectrum there is an abundance. Vast amount of spectrum unused. The farther away you are from city core the more spectrum is available. The rural catches a break for the first time and I think it's an excellent additional and maybe the missing link, if I may, component in building community mesh networks, which is where I think another joint where the DC3 and community, a much better name than DC pal can join, the notion that why build these community networks? You go around and say well, do you want Internet access? They go what's that? I would suggest that there is the application, we've touched on a lot of these but if I can borrow a term, community learning and information networks. So that brings in schools and libraries as a primary learning institutions. Information for anybody and it's an application. It is a network but also an application that can be built and maintained locally. Data and connectivity, they're delivering data by semi-tractor trailer truck now. Amazon is shipping things by road because gig fiber or 100 gig fiber is too slow. Connectivity is the first thing to provide. Capacity should come from that, and as we say the value of the first mega bit is more the next 999. Low text and mail and webpages and let's get everybody connected and then let's build up the infrastructure from there.
>> We've run out of time and I'll quickly recap what I've heard on things to do together. Manu mentioned partnership in countries where there is already movement, India, we've talked about Tunisia. Libraries as key education points and members and a hub for community networks and working with others who do that. I'm sure I missed points that people made. You can please join the DC pal list serve or email me or Stuart directly. We're here to hand out our cards.
>> STUART HAMILTON: Definitely here for the cards. I do think that preservation issue is crucial and it is maybe not for this DC but how are we going to do it? We put a workshop application in for it this year at the IGF but we never get any traction. That's something we might want the take to a different place. Thank you very much to those of you who agreed to be the test questionnaires for that sort of thing and thank you for everyone that chipped in. Very excited about the DC with community connectivity.
Thanks, everybody over the Net. We're done. Thank you.
(Applause)
(Session ended at 4:32 PM CT)