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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>> VENECIOS: Good morning. Yeah, I think we can start. Good morning to everyone. Thank you, everybody, to come here. We know that it's very early. This is the open Forum of Internet observatories. The title is fostering dialogue between Internet observatories and maps. And we have good expectations for the session. Because it is a continuation of a dialogue initiated last year, the IGF last year, 2015 IGF.
My name is Venecios. I will be doing some sort of introduction and overview of the session. Just let me throw it out.
The one that was meant to be here was Mr. Abajo, unfortunately he couldn't come, had some personal problems and had to stay in Brazil, but I'll be here trying to ‑‑ not be substituting because it's not that easy to do, but I'll be here trying to help the presenters with the discussion they will conduct. Okay. Well, I will start making some sort of overview and introduction and then we will pass to the most substantial content, okay? Let's start from the beginning, sorry.
At the 2015 round table attended by more than 50 people ended up bringing together people involved with the Internet observatories from different parts of the world to reflect upon the following fundamental question: How can different projects create synergies, avoid duplication of efforts in their activities and foster cooperation among different projects to leverage capacity building and education as well as policymaking, vis‑a‑vis Internet Governance? This is the question. So this is a big question with several elements inside of it. Probably we could say that cooperation was something to be the centre of it, to be this idea of connections among the several different initiatives.
Well, trying to recover a little bit about the session that we held last year, participants and the audience agreed upon the need for similar events in the future. And including another session for furthering the dialogue at the IGF 2016.
Among the issues that were raised in the last year's session, technology was probably the main one, the main one that was kind of preoccupation by ‑‑ for all the people that were presenting the session. And the presentation of individual projects revealed several different technical solutions for data and information compilation, processing and diffusion. Actually some more elements that we had: Semantics, collaboration among initiatives, common taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and others were some of the issues people were raising in that session.
What more? Okay. In the session last year, the workshop was centred on a general presentation of the individual projects, building on the collective work of a group of projects that kept discussions and collaboration going on throughout the year. The idea for this open Forum today, this open Forum in the 2016 edition of IGF is to provide the audience of these events with a snapshot of the information‑seeking environment that is currently available. Also, it aims at furthering the dialogue between those projects and the IGF community.
We believe also that all this has of to contribute, for example, to energize the national and regional initiatives and newcomers and all other interests.
This open Forum is a joint project of the Brazilian Internet observatory by ‑‑ and I am in his place today. Tereza, the cybersecurity capacity portal, Carolin, and GIPO, and now passing to the structure of this session. This session is supposed to last 60 minutes. The best use of our time, we split the session in four parts as you can see in this slide. We will have this short overview that is this part now. And then we'll pass to Kasia. She will discuss the current information‑seeking landscape. From GIPO.
And then we'll pass to Tereza, from Digital Watch. She will discuss the seeking joining. And well also put some questions for ‑‑ here. And then we will have an open dialogue to have a conversation with you all. And we expect you to gain many contributions for all this process and what is going on and what happens next.
Well, we brought you today some policy questions that will not be kind of a thing that we are obligated to stick to, but just to guide the session. But you are always welcome to propose new questions and propose contributions on it. But I will read some of these questions just for you to keep in mind.
We have what is the public assessment of the information‑seeking environment currently available?
What can be done by projects that exist today in order to serve information‑seeking needs of different users, including the growing number of national regionals and UGIFS?
What gaps are identifiable in the current landscape? How can those gaps be filled?
And then the last question and probably one of the most important: Where do we go from here?
So we expect from you to have some suggestions on it.
Okay. We'll return to these questions later. But it is a good highlight, these questions here just for guidance. So don't worry about being stuck to it.
I think that's it. I'll now pass the floor to Kasia so she can present the current landscape. If you have any doubts, we will work on it during the session.
>> KASIA JAKINOWICZ: I'm responsible for ‑‑ GIPOsor Internet policy observatory.
So today I want to present just brief information about the landscape of observatory, policy observatories and mapping initiatives. This is a joint meeting where we invite everybody to collaborate. And as a start and a continuation also for it what was done before, we prepared a short summary of existing initiatives that we found so far. But please remember that what I'm showing is not the exhaustive list. This is a dynamic situation. And if you are not there, just let us know and we're going to put you in the loop, in the scope of the whole thing.
So until now over 35 initiatives have been identified in the process. They represent three groups have we can divide them into three groups. So we have policy observatories, mapping initiatives and initiatives that Myanmar repositories of knowledge. Now how do we divide them?
Actually we divide them basically for what they state in their mission and what the initiatives this think about themselves. So if we have any doubt, we just ask them and they decide in which group they are.
I see that the picture is a little bit turned around. I don't know what happened but this is a current landscape of the 35 observatories. This is just the visualization. So moving on. Of the 35 observatories, we have policy initiatives, we have policy observatories and here is the list of the initiatives that we managed to map right now. We have mapping initiatives. As you can see it is a little bit smaller.
And then we have initiatives that focus on managing the repository of knowledge.
Now, as a global Internet policy observatory, one of our tasks is to facilitate the cooperation of the friend stakeholders in order to create a federation roadmap for global Internet policy observatories. So this is why also the discussion started.
And within that, we have ran a survey to get to know a little bit about the landscape. I don't want to go too much into details so that you don't get bored with numbers, but I prepared a very short summary of the findings and maybe some are going to be interesting for you.
So what we have learned while looking at all these initiatives, it's a broad range of observations with different objectives and functions. So we have observations that are managed by NGOs, academia, but also national and supra national organizations organizations such as GIPO, or totally independent initiatives.
Most of the initiatives go beyond providing ‑‑ just providing access to information. So they provide evidence policy support and they focus on fostering the dialogue and multistakeholders' process, as well. That's almost half of it.
Initiatives come from variety of countries, but the majority focus on the global coverage of IG policy topics. And even if not, if they are ‑‑ if they focus on the national level, then they provide the information in the local language, kind of obvious.
Then we look at what kind of coverage of topics they have. Of course we are interested in Internet Governance policy issues, but over 30 percent of all the initiatives declared that they have a thematic coverage that is broader than on IG policy topics.
The vast majority of the platforms initiatives started more than one type of audience. So of course some target a very specific audience. We have Digital Watch, which is more focused on diplomats. But there are ‑‑ or we have like friends of IGF that is focused on the audience of the IGF community. But most of them focus very broad range of audience and therefore they are interested in providing a varied content. I think what is very interesting about the finding is that we are looking at the landscape stay fresh and young. So most of the initiatives declared that they were founded after 2012. So we are not talking about long lasting entities. And most of them is very small, actually. There's only a few of them that have more than five people working on a regular basis. Most of them have 1, 2 people working on, assigned to the initiative on a regular basis.
A lot of them work on a voluntary basis, so it's very important to remember that these are not initiatives that have a huge ‑‑ that have a very, I don't know, big financing, with the exceptions of some. So some are big, but some are very small.
So most of the initiatives feel the mix of internal effort and the crowd sourcing of knowledge of external experts, which is obvious when you are small.
Now I'm going the try to move now we looked a little bit what are the ‑‑ collaborations mentioned by the initiatives. And Diego mentioned it a little bit before, but I will summarize the findings that what we see that most of the initiatives mentioned is the availability of resources for further development., finding the relevant information is a problem still. And if you have to manually look for the content, global Internet policy observatories it's kind of different in scope. It is one of the very few automated tools when it goes for Internet governance observatories. But the rest you'll actually find the content and create it manually.
So finding relevant information can be hard. And it can take a lot of resources.
There is an overarching, thing to work for future and it's a big task to be done, still. The taxonomy and semantics of Internet Governance so how to make the policy interoperable with each other when it goes for tagging the topics and finding the topics.
And multilingualism is still an issue.
So that was a very short introduction on my part to give you just an overview of what's there.
>> DIEGO RAFAEL CANABARRO: Now Tereza?
>> TEREZA HOREJSOVA: Thank you very much, Kasia. As you have seen and I think it's very useful that the global Internet policy observatory has actually taken the efforts to map all the observatories that are available. Really, there are plenty of them, the ranking into the categories has helped us also to understand what is out there. The dialogue we are all having together is mainly inspired by the fact that I think running an observatory is quite a demanding task. It's time consuming task. And the last thing that we would like to do would be to duplicate any efforts. So in order to do the job that we do on kind of our institutional level, we should be aware of what is available elsewhere, what the other entities are doing, and also make sure that each of these observatories is having ‑‑ is actually used and provides the users of the observatories the opportunity to get to the information that they are seeking.
Sorry we don't have Diego with us who really CGI put a lot of efforts into facilitating this dialogue among ourselves. So thank you very much for that.
When we were preparing for this session and continuing this dialogue, we have tried to simplify this by trying to visualize the as we called it at the beginning of the session, this information‑seeking user journeys. And we have a DiploFoundation, which is the operating entity of the ‑‑ platform initiative supported by the Swiss authorities running the GIP Digital Watch, we always tried to simplify things by putting it in a simple illustration.
So we have tried to produce this illustration: And you see a lot of terms just put up there. And a lot of various users that are trying to find their way. You would have a techie that would probably have a very technical perspective but still might need to understand some of the policy context.
You would have parents of a small child that maybe have a lot of concerning questions about the use of Internet and their children. You have people coming from various communities where they might appreciate some localised content or available in their local language. So on so forth. You have a diplomat running around like crazy trying to take a grasp of what is happening in the very complex discussion of digital policy. And all these people are looking for some source of information that would make their jobs easier, that would help them navigate better through the complex waters of Internet Governance and digital policy.
So that was kind of how it all came about. We are talking to each other. The way we talk to each other is in various formats. There is a lot of informal conversations that we are having where we meet. But there are also some very practical examples of this.
One that I can mention for instance that we are very proud about together with the global Internet policy observatory that we are using the same taxonomy because it wouldn't make sense if somebody is looking for information of Cybercrime that would be, let's say, put under cybersecurity while somebody else would place it under a different heading. We really try to simplify. GIPO is working extensively on this technical level interoperability among the platforms.
Again, all these kind of concrete examples prove this.
Another example of the fact that it is possible to have this dialogue together is I myself are have two heads in the session. While I am quite connected with the Digital Watch, my observation has to be part of the ‑‑ financed by the European Commission which is running an observatory although with a totally different focus but still another observatory. So this kind of cooperation and interacting with each other is possible and is desired. Now, we are coming to the part of the session and Carolin will help me with that where we will try to throw it back to you. We are all doing some work. We have mentioned some of the observatories. We don't have representatives of all the ‑‑ how many? 35 plus? But we are a few. We also pull from the Internet jurisdiction project who will tell us few things. But can we go over you and maybe ask you: What are your needs? In what format and what kind of information would you need? What would help you to understand the complexity of digital and Internet Governance a bit better? Carolin I will let now over to you.
>> CAROLIN WEISSER: I'm Carolin Weisser from the cybersecurity capacity portal, which is one of the major outputs of the global cybersecurity capacity centre, the University of Oxford. And what we do, we are very nearby niche project because we focus on research outputs in the area of cybersecurity capacity building. And we also partner with the GFCE, on mapping, global and cybersecurity, capacity building abilities by all those in the field. It's a very niche topic. So that's why I think it's very good this conversation, this kind of group of observatories are talking to each other and working together because we can so much benefit from knowing about each other, promoting each other, flagging to each other. Because due to the limited resources, time and also resources, is a key that we have to get support from others in terms of even flagging, linking or even supporting each other's work and I think it's extreme beneficial. I think between all the observatories, an the least all that are on the table here. All the interlinkages, promoting content or linking to events of the others or flagging at events that someone is doing this mapping. It's very, very beneficial. And overall, it avoids a lot of ‑‑ yeah. Reinventing the wheel. And also on that I think that's a key. I know it's why we decide to focus this year on this information seeking journeys is actually enhancing or enabling people who are working in the field actually be directed to the right source. So if someone is there, is looking for a specific information on a specific issue, you might find on one of the observatories, but if maybe this observatories doesn't fulfill the need or doesn't provide the information you need, there's very good chance through this cooperation that you can find information, you're guided to another observatory or mapping or website because it's flagged on this platform.
The other thing I would like to mention is I think that it is sometimes for users difficult to ‑‑ because these often ‑‑ the websites or like the source is not really clear to find, I think one of the this mapping also Kasia's work is enhancing describing all the initiatives and programmes at one point. One stop shop to actually look what observatories are out there so I don't have to go to every single one but I kind of know what I'm looking for.
I would maybe give the floor to Paul because you can describe your project and then I would suggest to open the floor for questions and also ask if you can maybe give more specific information the different observatories.
>> PAUL: Yes. Thank you very much. First I want to reiterate what you already said. This is a great initiative that Diego from the Brazilian CGI observatory was taking last year and then also the mapping of the different observatories that are actually out there is very, very important to create the awareness that the outreach sources because they're important because we're talking about supporting policy decisions, informing the general public about ongoing trends. And as you're also saying, there are different kinds of observatories.
I am the deputy Director of Internet and jurisdiction, which is a global multistakeholder policy network. And the INJ observatory that supports this policy network is, I would say, quite specific because it is borne out of the need for specific policy community of stakeholders in the debate regarding the future of how jurisdiction applies on the cross‑border Internet to enable them to keep track of global trends.
And we also ‑‑ and I think this sort of demonstrates the value of having a dialogue between the different observatories to share this experience, this year we have converted ‑‑ we have been tracking over 1,000 cases of jurisdictional tensions over the past four years since 2012. It's funny to say but we are actually one of the older observatories and we're just four years old. And we have been tracking trends since 2012. And this year we have turned those cases into a searchable and index database. And that was a very, very interesting experience. There were technical challenges. There were taxonomy challenges that had to be addressed.
So I believe that one of the benefits of this dialogue between observatories can also be a sort of sharing of best practices, of insights, of knowledge. And I will be curious if this is something that we can explore as a sort of expertise sharing among observatories.
And all the different observatories are set up also in a very different way. For instance GIPO and ‑‑ relies on technology to scan what is out there and compiling it based on algorithms.
For us, it's different. The INJ observatory is 31 academic experts of 27 leading universities in 17 countries around the world that help us keep track of trends and do analysis of emerging issues.
But I think the sort of notion of best practices among ‑‑ and expertise sharing is something that needs to be explored. And I think there are also some emerging sort of common criteria between the observatories. And it will be interesting to leverage a bit more of them. Because one of the features that we all share in our observatories is I think that we provide open access information for the community. And I think there are several criteria that could define best practices for Internet‑related observatories. And I will be very curious if there can be a sort of dialogue and a sort of best practice standard setting and also a quality control dialogue that handles, be it in terms of taxonomy, awareness of the content of the distribution, cross indication of condition tent. I think there are many things that can be discussed to really make those resources available to the wider community, especially for those observatories that cater specific policy need or the case with INJ that supports multistakeholder policy process that the reach is wider and the people also from different regions are aware.
And last but not least I think also one thing that is really, really important and where there's room for improvement and probably for all of us if I'm not mistaken is that most observatories do not have multilingual features nowadays. Because as you said, it is already a challenge to build up those observatories. They are all pretty new. They contain a lot of information. But I think the notion of accessibility across languages is a very, very important point that we need to address and see if there might be technical modalities and best practices in that regard that we can elaborate.
>> KASIO: I will try with this. I was happy what I just heard. That was also one of the reasons why GIPO is preparing this web. And there are challenges that show best practices that you mentioned that we really want to facilitate and share.
I think this is one of the most important issues that we can really try to avoid the duplication of different efforts and also learn from each other.
Concerning multilinguals, it's still an issue. We're trying to also a little bit facilitate it. Actually it's more about awareness building because there are tools that you can use on European level where you can have automated translation. Provided and now it should be feasible. We are doing it with GIPO because for those that don't know, global Internet policy observatory tool is also for other observatories to be used.
So as you mentioned, your network is based on network of experts that search for content. We are there for them to make it easier to find information so that they can focus on creation of that. At the same time our technical team was looking at that issue of multilingualism, and we right now are providing not translating directly but providing the guidance on how to provide content in five or six different languages for all official human languages. And it's not so hard to be done.
And as concerning best practices, I think it's a fantastic thing to be done for the future. And we should take a note of that.
I'm going to give the voice to others.
>> I just would like to add something as Paul mentioned. I see the key benefit or the unique selling proposition of these observatories is some kind, it's curated. There is a certain kind of quality of control. But all the questions is there quality control? Who ensures that the information's reliable?
I think that's very crucial because it's probably because of all those time constraints and only one person working on it that maybe is one of the issues that has to be maybe looked close in the future.
So in terms of the cybersecurity capacity, we have 8 experts from different areas who constantly advise and feed back on the content and provide content. And also content is provided from around the world is always checked and doublechecked.
However, it is good to be controlled as well as to control but evaluated. I think that's maybe something for the working plan for the next phase.
>> Let us please again go back to you now because that's what we want to have the focus on the session of.
So back to the sessions that I asked a few minutes ago. When you need to find policy related issues, where do you go? Or what kind of resource would you like to see? If you could help us make sure that we address this need, it would be very helpful. Do we have any either here questions or from the remote participants?
Please, then, if you could induce yourself, we would appreciate it. Thank you.
>> ADAM PEAKE: Good morning. Adam Peake. I work for ICANN for civil society and sort of academic engagement. One of the programmes that we have and things that we get involved with, you probably know we do an ICANN learn programme. And we bring a lot of Fellows into ICANN meetings and then to other events. We're have e involved with schools on Internet governance and we support youth and IGFs and so on and so forth. So not really an observatory, but it's about the same sorts and types of information is: We want to try and prepare these people before they come. You don't want people to come in without a general knowledge of the issues that they may be discussing and hearing about at either an IGF, regional IGF or an ICANN meeting.
So I think some way of making information from the various observatories, categorizing them so that people can see this is an information session about something and then organizations like ICANN. I'm imagining something here. It's not something I can commit to. Might be able to take that and build it into courses. Or we might collaborate to build it into courses so that either people have pre‑reading materials so that they come up to speed and it could be from beginner to intermediary to however we want to categorize it. So that kind of use for an observatory would be helpful to me, I think. I don't know how it fits with your ideas about how the observatories are structured. But this is just a thought. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: I think it's a good point. Obviously what I like about it most is we have this capacity development aim in the way that we run our observatory, the DW, the Digital Watch. Connecting it to the capacity building work that you're doing is definitely what I think should be appreciated.
As we said, please join our dialogue. Please get on board. We are planning some protocols and we are planning some furthermore public meeting which can take place, we are hoping to have at the margins of the EuroDIG to get it a little bit better and have them take part after the session. Thank you.
Kasia?
>> KASIA: I think it's a very valid point. So how to make the work of observatories an initiative more useful for other stakeholders. This is an interesting project. We are in the IGF. And you have different stakeholders. We are here, a group of people talking about ‑‑ taking an effort to cover the information and analyze it and present it to others. So we are a specific group of people.
And for us, for example, you are a kind of another, a user, right? You're not exactly the policy observatory or mapping initiatives. From the GIPO perspective, you are the user that can use the information. That's a very important input of how the high quality user that can use the information to facilitate further education spreading the knowledge. So I think it should be taken back and as something to consider over in the future.
>> MODERATOR: Anyone more? No more questions?
>> Are you familiar with some of the observatories that we have been mentioning here? Or are they all totally new for you? You are, thank you. Jorge, I hope you are, too. Jorge is from the Swiss government, one of our key partners in running Digital Watch. So we try really to work closely with Switzerland also to make sure that the observatory is kind of addressing the needs of the communities. So please help us in getting this right as well as the others.
>> I think many of us work on similar types of issues. ICANN has the NETmundial that we're closing down our funding for that but we want to continue on being a useful resource, but we're also all similar organizations supporting Internet Governance schools, as I said. We're working in similar areas. Perhaps coordination, particularly in use, I think, is something ‑‑ I have been to doing Internet related governance stuff a couple decades. And I'm not I haven't always found the repositories of information that useful, yet.
>> Can you specify why it wasn't useful? What was the format that wasn't addressing your needs?
>> Sometimes it's just difficult to find things.
I think something is you have many different formats cross the different observatories. And I know that there was some talk yesterday when you were talking about GIPO, trying to have a unified API is a good idea.
But I suppose what you're doing now in trying to coordinate your various work is the right way forward. So I'm not intending to be critical of it. I'm saying it's just how we're evolving at the moment. Carry on, I think.
>> MODERATOR: Well, let me make a short comment just building on the comments that Paul has made. And one thing that he was talking about was the thing of the multilingual content of the observatories.
And just to share the experience, because in our observatory in Brazil, actually, we face some of these problems, to have more multilingual content because we have a kind of system to extract content from various sources, but most of them are in English. And the content that we produce, we and the network of collaborators produce is mainly in Portuguese. And we are trying to have more content in other languages. But it really is a very difficult point to reinforce. So it is a difficult thing to work for in this thing we are trying to set.
>> Just to that, because GIPO is having a little bit of educational role.
So I mentioned automated translation. I have seen from the faces that, okay, it's not working, really. So it's not working. Maybe it's not.
But the thing is that it should work. And it should get better. But in order to be able to use automated translation, and to provide the content in different languages, it's make sure the content you provide is machine‑readable format. What GIPO has an you with and tries to solve it right now is that a lot of sources we just cannot use. It would be of simpler if all the initiatives were educated about how to provide the information. It's an easy thing. How to provide the information that it can be easily extracted from through the Web by others. It cannot be in the formats that are unreadable. Like flash or whatever. So this is a very important thing just to start from the basic if you want to have open access to the information and provide it to others. Let's make sure that safeguard the small little basic things of how the information is provided. And then based on that we can share it with others but we can also try to use machine tools for automated translation and some other solutions, otherwise it's not possible and we're going to have to use experts to translate everything.
>> Which as you mentioned, which would be the case, for instance, for the INJ observatory and the INJ retrospect database because what we are doing is providing high quality legal information. It is a summary that is understanding to policymakers and civil society and so on. But it would require experts to do it. It would not be possible to do machine‑based translation.
What I would be curious and this would be sort of capacity building element that this federation of observatories or this sort of collaboration or dialogue between the observatories could do is maybe talk a bit more about different approaches to how to collect the information, how you function. I don't know if everybody in the room is aware of the different modalities of how actually those observatories work.
For instance, in our case, as I said before, the INJ observatory is composed of world leading academic experts that support us to keep track of global trends. And how it works is that over the course of one month, with the help of observatory members and wider users involved in policy network, we are sort of noting and collecting all the different cases that are ongoing. But this will be too much information to digest. So the attention span of stakeholders is very limited.
So what we have put in place since 2012 is a crowd ranking process. So the members of the INJ observatory every month rank the cases according to the relevancy for the INJ policy network that they attach to single cases and this allows us to identify the top 20 cases every month that then go out to the stakeholders are and are now accessible in our new INJ database.
So our sort of quality insurance lies in a lot of analytical human‑based work.
I would be very curious if you could share the methodology of how you collect information, how much ‑‑ I mean there's a sort of range between creation between writing content, between doing deep analysis. So I think it would be very interesting for people who think maybe about setting up observatories and ponder about the different options to hear a bit more about how the other observatories that are here if the room are doing it.
>> KASIO: First of all on this multilingual future plans. In the case of Digital Watch, yes, this is the direction, this is the vision we also have for the future but also as for the case of the Internet ‑‑ project. With the Digital Watch being totally based on curated kind of handpicked content for us also this would be a massive exercise, which requires resources ‑‑ Tereza Horejsova speaking ‑‑ and would also be the sustain ability of the project because obviously you are not starting an adventure of this scope if you're not aware of what is going to be the situation in a few years from now.
Because if you allow me, we have a few minutes left and I know Diego would like to intervene remotely so maybe in three sentences, four sentences if we can quickly answer the question how do we function?
In part. Digital Watch is an observatory that was set up with the aim of enable users in particular in our case diplomats who need to follow the very complex discussions happening in the digital policy space. Provide them with a one stop shop where they would find served on a silver plate on one page information that would comprise the description of the topic, let's say privacy. Let's say Cybercrime. Whichever topic that we cover. And we really try to continuously adjust our taxonomy to take into account the newest developments. So they will find a description of the topic. They would find what are the latest developments on the global level so that you don't miss out something happening. They would find what are the related events, tech and related to that particular issue? Who are the actors that are involved in that? Who are the observations that are involved in the discussion on that particular issue? And last but not least an overview and extraction of all policy documents and other types of documents and instruments that are related.
So it is not an easy task and we rely heavily on a quite big and absolutely amazing and dedicated network of cure a towards who are the issue experts ‑‑ curators. Because nobody of us as a human can possibly follow everything and can be an expert on everything. So we rely on each curator who is really dep into the particular issue to provide a zoomed‑out perspective to the end user.
Carolin?
>> CAROLIN WEISSER: So in our case, we try to collect all the knowledge of the world to the world and present to the world. And there are different approaches. One approach is that we have a large stakeholder network. And some of them actually kind of flag they have something new, they have a new toolkit, they have a new case, a new report. And they proactively ask that it be presented on the portal. That's the best case if it happens proactively, people know about it and share it.
The second thing is we have kind of a network of correspondence around the world who also contributed. And they provide special input and expertise from their region.
We also go into the capacity centres of global cybersecurity capacity centre with Oceana cybersecurity centre and their task would be to contribute to the portal from there.
So it's kind of like organisation level the people have responsibility to collect knowledge. And then of course it's a lot of, yeah, time consuming but finding the knowledge and talking to people, asking experts if there's anything they would like to share. That's our approach.
But we are very young. And I'm very happy to learn more about the "older" actors in the field. And any suggestions? Because I think it's an ongoing challenge to get this information.
>> KASIO: Maybe I can add something using your example. GIPO observatory tool would use your source, your information and the observatories that are here to ‑‑ would use it, and other observatories would be a source of information for GIPO provided is in the right format.
So what we actually are doing, we have through the advisory group members and through our Internet Governance expert team, we are covering the list of sources. And then of course we are adding also crowd sourcing of sources. We are covering the list of sources. We are reviewing them and we are adding them to the database of GIPO sources. So this is where our curation ends. We are checking the quality of the sources for the proper information.
So first of all, we have two, whether it's reliable source of information. Second information provided needs to be in specific machine‑readable format. It doesn't have to be the Word document. It can be different sorts of documents. So we cover information also from social media. Also from videos, et cetera.
So in a way we are curating the content for the quality. So prechecking the sources.
And any observatories will be our source where we can find all the information in one place.
And the observatories can be our client and user and can use this information and then curate the content further. And then it's going to come back to us one more time. So this is why we're saying that also it's a great tool to new observatories to use.
I can imagine, then, when all of the observatories were set up, GIPO was not existing. It's still in the development phase. But from the next year on, it's already fully interoperable. So we are spending time to educate other observatories and say, okay, you need experts to curate the content because you want to provide the high quality content. That's the key. And I think the analysis is the most important thing. But you don't have so much resources. So just focus on the most important thing and you can use other tools to source the information.
This is how we do it.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. We have remote participation from Diego Rafael Canabarro. We will read ‑‑ comments.
>> DIEGO RAFAEL CANABARRO: I would like to thank you for joining us in 2015. We wanted to put the topic on the agenda of the IGF. It is very, very important. In 2016, only a few projects joined the effort of keeping it on the agenda. The challenge for 2017 is to increase outreach and think of ways of enhancing the level of dialogue about the issue of observatories, maps and repositories within the scope of the IGF. Not only the global one, but more specifically the national, regional and youth initiatives. I would like to invite you all to join the effort of these brave women and men who helped with preparing this open Forum.
>> MODERATOR: This was the comment. Thank you for following the streaming and for the comment.
Okay. You had a comment? Please identify yourself and make this.
>> Can you hear me? Okay. So in the description of the event there is something like the journey of using and sharing the information. I'm a youth. My name is Gustavo. I would like to know about your experience, your local experience with the use of the information.
I know the main objective of the observatories is to provide information. But I would like to know if that information is being used by public policies or the application of law. How is that information being used? Because I think it must be used for something, right? Or is information changing the way the society understands the Internet? Or are we just in a vicious cycle with the same people discussing the same thing? Okay, that's my question.
>> PAUL: I think that's a very good question and a very important question. So speaking for in the case of the Internet and jurisdiction policy network, the INJ observatory was created to support the ongoing policy process in the Internet and jurisdiction policy network.
If we go five years ago, the issue of jurisdiction was not on the global Internet Governance agenda as it is today.
So there was a big effort to make to actually understand what are the problems that need to be addressed? And the INJ observatory and the INJ retrospect database were borne out of this need to inform the people who actively participate in the policy process to keep track of global trends because policy discussions need to be firmly based in evidence. We need evidence‑based policy and innovation.
So out of this very specific reason, in our case the INJ observatory was created. So all the participants in the wider public, they can freely access this information. They are informed every month about the trends so that we not only ensure awareness about what is going on but also that we adopt policy solutions that might be incompatible in a few years because of emerging trends because we see already, to give you concrete example, if we talk about data and jurisdiction and the using data cross borders, the rise or spread of encryption across many, many platforms, this is a global trend. And it changes the discussion considerably have so being aware of ongoing trends around the world is very, very important.
So in our case, there's a direct policy relevance of the work of the INJ observatory to a policy process.
>> MODERATOR: Okay: Okay. We have no more time. Thanks for your questions, thanks for your compliments, Paul. Thanks for being here. And we must finish for the other session. If you don't is any other comments. Yes, we're finish, thank you all.
(end of session)