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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>> FARZANEH BADIEI: Okay. Hello, everyone. We're going to start the workshop on the power of noncommercial users and Internet governance. I am Farzaneh. I'm going to tell you a little bit why we have this workshop and then go through the agenda.
So, the rationale behind this is we want to measure the effectiveness and non‑commercial users in making policy changes and Internet Governance. And also we want to contradict the assertion that any society by showing that who we and are what we do.
Also, we want to show our collective effort has worked. It was supposed to be a debate. It was supposed to be that one side of the table would say we've done these great things within society and we made these policy changes and we make the life of some businesses held and you have achieved what we want, but the other side of the table to tell us that no. Actually what you've done was really bad because you had inefficiency and you started folding innovation and all this sort of things. But unfortunately, no one was really willing from the other side of the table, which is the non‑civil society to come and tell us how bad we were. They just like to criticize us in the back. So we are going to ‑‑ we are going to cover the negative part ourselves by just saying there might be some ‑‑ a level of one sided story. But we are working on that and I actually invited someone from the government to come and criticize and he said, well, one hour and a half is not really enough, is it?
So, um, in the beginning, we are going to talk about the positive effects and what we have done and what we've achieved. And second segment, we are going to talk about the negative and the failures of civil society. We have here ‑‑ so would you like to just introduce yourself?
>> Good morning. I am a researcher and work very closely with human rights and ARTICLE 19. Tatiana will cover ‑‑
>> TATIANA TROPINA: Tatiana Tropina from Germany, a member of the non‑commercial constituency at ICANN.
>> RACHEL POLLACK: Rachel Pollack. Some of you may know I work at UNESCO, but I would like to clarify I am here as a nun‑commercial members constituencies ‑‑ non‑commercial members constituencies.
>> Thanks a lot. Giovanni is the only non‑civil society member we have found.
>> You promise to be nice.
>> No, we won't be, but you shouldn't be nice either.
[Laughter]
>> I'm fine. I'm fine.
>> You're going to talk how we like to go into this session.
>> Okay. Wonderful. So we start with coding and then we can ‑‑ so coding will tell us a little bit like the broader perspective and how research space can be implemented and how we can uphold values and then we go to Tatiana and Tatiana will talk about her efforts as a civil society member in ICANN. And then we will go to Giovanni and Giovanni will tell us about the civil society at first and ccTLD.
At the first segment, we only cover the positive parts and then we criticize heavily in the second segment. And their ratio has crowd sourced a lot of civil society stories, failures and successes and then she will cover that. Okay.
>> All right. So first they asked me to focus a little bit on setting the broader scenes and how that places in civil society successes. I want to talk a lit bit about the research I did as a master student at the Oxford institute where we focused on the Internet and engineering task force as it relates to human rights. So, the internet engineering task force just for those who don't know is the organization that makes the standards and protocols that enable us all to have the Internet that we have. It's a crucial part of making this Eco system work. And so there had been some discussion there specifically obviously on security and privacy considerations where there was a group of civil society who thought it was very important to look at the potential human rights impact on protocols and standards. So they started by attending the ITF floating this idea of talking to people about it. Initially, there was some resistance on the part. Obviously not because this is a community that doesn't support the notion of human rights, but because it is a community that solves technical problems and they didn't necessarily see how this work would directly relate to what they were doing. So, in order to sort of address the issues, a research group was started on the Internet research tank force which is a subsidiary of the ITF, which very much focused on trying to figure out what is the relationship with human rights and protocols. If it exists, how can we insure that any potential impact on human rights gets documented with the results. What we will focus on doing are if the last two years is develop a document for the human rights protocols considerations document which pretty much gives a set of guidelines to engineers, a set of questions and that way they can see what potential impact exists or doesn't exist and the next would be figure out a way to (low sound) we see a group of people coalesce around this topic. We see a number of people actually joining the group sessions from Itech meetings going and going. So it is really a conversation there on human rights in a more structural way and this is a huge success for us and a huge step forth. The document drafted by research is the last call and that means it will become an official Internet research.
And the next step for the group would be to then move it to the ITF and see if we can redo the process there and that also might be a top of that I can address what we're talking about the challenges. So if you're interested in this work and want to know more, you can look at HR PCIO and you can see all the documents that are going on. But this is an example of where we started from pretty much got to a place where we have a documented place where you have a really interesting and exciting group conversation on this. That is a huge success when you're talking about how to engage with the technical community on the topical things.
>> Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about your research side so you first started researching and then kind of implemented that effort?
>> I started out as a research student at the internet institute and then I started working for ARTICLE 19, the human rights. In the research that I did, I sort of identified several entries or several barriers to enter into the ITF that are now being addressed and the focus on diversity, for instance, insuring that the space is successful to people who don't necessarily have the means and the resources to come. It's like the IFG. It's conferences that travel. So you need to have visas, money, you need to be able to come to these places and you have to have a pretty comprehensive knowledge of the English language. So there's all these other things that are very important and that's something that I'm working on, but not through the human rights support.
>> Okay. Great. Tatiana?
>> TATIANA TROPINA: I will cover the commercial stakeholders in ICANN facilitating the adoption of the human rights by law. So a bit of history on these. As far as I'm aware, I jumped on to this topic one and a half, two years ago during the process of transition of ICANN from the U.S. government. And I know that the calls for inclusion of human rights considerations into ICANN by law. By laws processes have been made since ages. So we are not in any ‑‑ they came during the transition. Sorry for using acronym. It is transition of the ICANN from the U.S. government. Just to clarify.
So, the calls for human rights by law didn't come from the very beginning of the process of IANA transition or the ICANN accountability. The process has been announced and there was a meeting in Los Angeles where ICANN do respect human rights and they think that human rights are ready available to anything. But they don't see any events for ICANN. But for me, it was incredible how in the short period of time non‑commercial stakeholders collaborating with other constituents and other stakeholders were able to put human rights into the agenda and to achieve the adoption of this bylaw. Again, a bit of the timeline.
The first text for human rights by law was proposed on the second draft of the ICANN accountable proposal. So they were not taken into account from the beginning. They were not mentioned in the first draft accountability proposal. When they appear, there was still big resistance from different parts of the community especially from the board and very few people of the non‑commercial stakeholder group were able to bring together different interests including business of registered and registrars and get a formal support for first of all drafting the text of the bylaw. We called it commitment to human rights, to respect human rights to explain people that it will not mean that ICANN is going to turn into human rights or to enforce human rights law or human rights in relation to the third parties so that ICANN will take human rights into consideration in the policy development processes and its operation. It was very important in one of the main arguments was that U.S. government before the transition or the final stop if something goes wrong as human rights they could always say no or they could intervene. When ICANN goes to the free fly, they have a concern that in addition to being completely unaccountable, ICANN might value human rights or not take them into consideration. What was really in all these experiments? Well, two things.
Achievements of these by law provision and adoption in a very short period of time just to give you an idea. The proposal was adopted in March, approved in March this year. In January, we were still arguing with the board with the cross community working group whether we should have bylaw on human rights. The board told that maybe the commitment of ICANN just a simple commitment, a statement would be enough. And the second thing that we wouldn't have achieved this if we wouldn't have gone out of our silos and incorporated with different stakeholders. We got immense support from registers and registrars. We got support from governments and members of this cross community working group. So, it was a very good experience in terms of creating this basis to work together and this was the lesson that we learned during the whole process that while big non‑commercial stakeholders, we are supposed to protect human rights and speak loud about this. We are supposed to pursue our interests, but all of them, all of these interests could be ‑‑ could find the common ground, could intercept with the interest of other stakeholders and once you're able to articulate this clear, once you are able to channel the communications, it is much easier to pursue your interests as non‑commercials because they might align this others.
>> Thank you, Tatiana. Giovanni, are you ready to tell us what trouble we made?
>> GIOVANNI: Thank you. I always like challenges. So I'm here to speak about country code top level domains and civil society. The way country code top level domains engage with a lack of communities.
First of all, I like to underline how country codes have been always strongly advocating the fact that they're independent from ICANN policies and procedures because they serve communities. There are those who decide about the policies and the procedures. And there's a lot of best practice sharing among the value of this community. But the main point is they do decide by themselves about the lack of policies and procedures.
Many ccTLD policies are indeed, driven by the local communities including known commercial stakeholders. And let's say that the biggest example is the so‑called liberation policy that has been introduced in many country code in the past decade. Many country code until 10 years ago were restricted in the sense they were a limitation for registering a domain name because not everybody could register the domain name. There were limitations because you must have been in a county or must have had a company or because you were an individual, you could have not registered more than one domain name and things have changed. They've changed quite rapidly in the past decade for many country code top level domain. This one is called liberalization of the policy and has help those ccTLDs to grow. In some cases, exponentially. At the same time, all of the country code top level domains is perceived as quite a strong role. Also support new things. There are registries even in Europe.
There's been in the past in 2014 an interest in worship that was coordinated by center, center is the Council of European top level domain registry. This organization is mainly for European and cord manager. If you go back to that which has a good somebody, which is supposed to have been on the IGF side, you would have seen the work done by CCLDs and it has been great and instrumental to facilitate the participation of many more people in the Internet governance processes. And I would like to stop here for the moment.
>> Thank you very much, Giovanni. Rachel, can you please tell us about this.
>> RACHEL POLLACK: Yes. As Farzaneh said, we have a project to seek inputs and examples of successful civil society efforts and also failures. I have to say in response to that, we only received one example of the success and one example of a failure. So since I've been here in Mexico, I've been speaking with civil society organizations to add other examples as well. So we have a broader variety.
First has been discussed in ICANN the non‑commercial users constituency achieved a better balance between trademark law and intellectual property interest and use free expression and due process. So I heard from Kathy who is one of our members about how throughout the last 10 years and even earlier, NCNC has achieved this plan in the universal dispute resolution and then more recently in the uniform rapid suspension and trademark community house. Just to quote her. She said we have fought for the more traditional balance of trademark law and due process. We have taken is this balance to the technologist and communities creating infrastructure rules and one of the many issues we fought for. Domain registrants, past, past and future are protected. Some on the theme of protecting free expression and fair use against intellectual property interests, we can look to the case of the SOPAPIPA registration in 2011 and 2012. So that of the SOPA is stop online privacy act. And they would have had an impact on free expression on the Internet namely the possibility of creating a black list of sensor websites. It can have a domain name impact. So there was a campaign led by EFF, the electronic frontier election together with other civil society groups as well as private sector companies such as Google and Flicker.
So what happened was together they were organizing the campaign and had a sort of blackout of content on Wikipedia for one day redirecting users to information about this legislation. They also had announcements on the pages of Mozilla, Google, Flicker. So as a result of this campaign, 3 million people e‑mailed congress on 4.5 million signatures were collected by a Google petition and the two bills ultimately failed. This is a clear example of a successful civil society movement together working together with private sector partners.
And then the third example I wanted to discuss was the coalition led by Access Now the Keep On Coalition. It was launched in spring 2016 following an Internet shutdown in Uganda around the time of the ‑‑ Uganda around the time of the elections. They're had discussions with freedom online coalition of governments that sent freedom of expression online. They're also successfully worked with the African commission which just in the last few weeks was also issued a statement against internet shutdowns. And just last week around the presidential elections Access Now learned that shutdown was possible. So they mobilized to their coalition and sent an open letter to the government. They also coordinated with governments that supported this and in the end, a shutdown still happened, but it was shortened and it was two days still. But on the day of the election, the Internet was back on. So we can see three examples within ICANN, SOPAPIPA and the easy is keep it on coalition and how civil society can have a impact and especially when it is able to mobilize partnerships.
>> Thank you very much, Rachel. I would like to go to participants and see if there are any positive stories about effective civil society and noncommercial users. Maybe I can call on you, Chris. I know it might not be positive on your side.
[Laughter]
>> CHRIS: It's not negative. My name is Chris. And so we also facilitate through our work with the community policy development process, which is open inclusive and bottom‑up. People in our service region have developed policies about the distribution and management of internet number sources and IP addresses, autonomous systems and the like. I think it is fair to say in the past, there hasn't been a great deal of formal society development. I think it's coming still from operators from business and more recently from government and law enforcement. But I think there is some exceptions to that. We have in the right community and at the right meetings and working groups and one of those cooperation working group and that's actually been a release for venue in recent years. And I think Colin at the understand of the table can speak more about it. We also have a program called racy, which is to get academics a bit more involved and bring that voice and then beyond what the right one is doing, they have been working on that same Eco system. So that's funded ‑‑ well, a huge number of projects in Africa, south America, the Asia Pacific in recent years have related to civil society and projects.
So the organization that facilitates the right communities have been proactive in setting up things like the corporation working group and the Racy thing. We want to get more involvement there. And that really comes down to not just we want to see nor civil society people at our meeting and hang out with them, but that community based development for its accountable. But for it to be seen and it needs to live up to that idea of being inclusive and relevant stakeholders being able to contribute and be part of that. We're going to continue to try to get a bit more civil society and a bit involvement. What sort of issue is being discussed in internet sourced. I am happy to tell you about it and perhaps the academic initiative.
>> We does not participate in the process. I invite you civil society members to participate. Would you like to add something or not? You are like the right ‑‑
>> I am also a member of NCUC. It's an example that we have been discussing in the IGF for quite a few years. It is always good to remember.
Some years ago, Brazil was living a difficult moment in terms of many bills being sent to congress that tried to criminalize very common behaviors online such as downloaded music or unblocking our cell phone with time in prison, with time in jail. It was quite a harsh view and simp society groups in Brazil joined together under the label movement called Mega No. To say a big no to this bill, they were quite successful with campaigns they put online. They convinced a government, which was at that time the government of the President who put this Bill aside and before discussing anything with criminalized online users in Brazil, to discuss what should be the right response they should have. Users and companies to the state itself and throughout the very low process, but very interesting one that I was not going into details, the Bill approved and with open participation and people wanted to see it written in the Bill. It is a successful story of how something very complex can be written in an open and par participatory. Complete the information because the skies are not so blue in Brazil right now. This Bill is in threat, but many positive examples that Brazil has with Internet Governance and Brazilian internet committee to take the committee for the policies in Brazil. The new governance which many of us consider is now questioning many of the things that we conquered in the last few years. And many of the provisions of Markus Sevill. If you are in a less civil society, many things have cirque united asking for civil support. This is much more picky because they had a very good dialogue with the government. The dialogue has been broken with the current government. It is difficult for them is to go from Brazil as they acted before. So that's why we are asking for international support. So if you are one ever these lists that received it, please make sure it circulates and sign the manifesto if you can.
>> Any comments?
Okay. Now we go to the fun part, which is the negative impact of the stories and failures of civil society. How we failed and didn't change or if is they have a negative effect that was positive to uphold human rights principle. And it had negative effects. So I can start from you, Tatiana.
>> TATIANA TROPINA: I have to say with my example, I was full of negativity at the end. This process ‑‑ but what we discovered in the process of the different groups in civil society fighting each other and couldn't align. It was much easier to talk to order stakeholders and it was much easier to align yourself with commercials. It was much easier to explain them what our interests and our rationale compared to some of other civil society stakeholders who just didn't want to listen. Who, for example, had on their agenda the prevention of IN transition or some agenda to design it in a way that give it some transition periods, some trial period or wherever you name it. And these two still track me about civil society because we cannot truly define our interests. Sometimes it looks like human rights or privacy or whatever we said as our aim they're just words. We do not and we cannot always agree what we put into these words, how broad is the definition, how we are actually going to achieve our goals and also I see in civil society the lack of common strategy. So I do believe that it is because of this diversity, which is not necessarily bad, but it becomes a big issue when it comes to the lack of strategizing. Thanks.
>> CORINNE CATH: Thank you. I think the channel did a great job on focusing on some of the issues I've run into. I think another thing that is also mentioned before is just a question of how do you do this? So for a lot of the civil society initiative that exists at the content layer of the internet, it's quite clear what we can do. You can look at regulation. You can lobby your governments. You can look at market forces and see what kind of positive incentives you can create that businesses are going to be open to your line of reasoning. But especially the work that ARTICLE 19 does, it's more at the technical level or logical level of the layer of the Internet. And some of these things can be used, but not all of them.
And additionally, you really have to go and figure out how to do this. There are many organizations, other organizations that we can look towards and say this is something that worked or this is something that didn't work. So it is very much trial and error. And that means that sometimes we fail.
>> Thank you. Rachel?
>> RACHEL POLLACK: Yeah. Just to quickly share two examples of what one might call a failure of civil society or areas where the ultimate goal was not issued. So the first I received from Stephanie Paraprine who wrote her PHD dissertation on why it hasn't adopted better society adoptions. This is one area where civil society has continued to try to push for greater privacy. There are two aspects. One is who is database, which is where domain name registrants have their names, phone numbers, physical addresses listed publicly of people and organizations. This can include a political ethnic religion and sexual minorities. There's also a requirement of registers accreditation agreement. And from a data protection perspective, it's problematic because it requires registrars to collect more data than is needed to publish registrant information and who has database to retain this data and also to escrow the data in the U.S. So this is one area perhaps too harsh to say it is a failure of civil society but a failure of ICANN and not being able to strength and privacy protections.
The second example is really to surveillance legislation and the last few years following the revolutions of mass surveillance, there was a great deal of civil society activity namely the necessary and proportionate principles. A lot of awareness raising campaigns, but a lot of rather seeing positive developments in legislation. More and more we see the existing processees, exist and practices being put into law and one example of this is just in the last couple of weeks and the U.K. with the investigatory powers and the open race group, Internet society UK to try to bring attention to the problematic aspects of this, but ultimately it passed through parliament. Those are two cases. And again, in speaking with individuals from open Race group and group and chapter of ISOC, they say similar to the case of ICANN that it's not a failure of civil society, but regard of the overall context of not putting enough importance into the multi‑stakeholder model and having open discussions. I guess that's something we can discuss and why in these two cases the efforts failed.
>> Thank you, Rachel. Giovanni, would you like to enlighten us?
>> GIOVANNI: I'll try. First of all, I would like to catch up on what my colleague panelists have just said. First of all, I was quite surprised to hear what is going on with CGI Brazil. CGI has Ben for many registries world wide one of the best practices to look at. And so I'm really sorry to hear what is going on. And I met several representatives of CGI over the years. They went even on a tour European live to tell the different governments and registries. They were managing Internet policies at a national level.
So my advice and recommendation would be for them also to look for support from all the world wide registries and I think it's very ‑‑ in many cases, there's a special situation where it impacted registries and they look for the haven't at international levels and the support was very precious to prove to local for the authorities how much it was best practice. You just said who he is and registrar agreement. As I'm representing a country code top level domain, I would like to underline once more that what you said refers to generic top level domains. That's quite important. It's also important in terms of the policies. It is true that registries and registrars request wave of the policy and modification of the policy to comply with legislation, which is also important to mention. And the same is for the standard registry, registrar agreement and registry ICANN and registrar ICANN agreements. They're all sent to possible modifications because of laws and things they may require. They will operate differently. To the best of my knowledge, ICANN ‑‑ a you go is to the guest of ‑‑ probably one of the most around the world because we are heavily regulated by the European Commission. So behind us, there are two regulations. One of the European parliament and the council and one of the European Commission. It specializes moo to say it is nice for this because ‑‑ it is it is not really a failure, but for us it was also best practices to open public ‑‑ it insults not only the members of our board, but also all our stakeholders and I would like to invite you because it is possible now as there have been changes in here to come up to us because I think it would be really valuable not only forever us, but probably for many order registers to have your input. In many internationalized domain names, what you think about internationalized domain names? I think it is very important and sometimes you are not well heard as you should. So please speak up stronger than what you have done and go to some registry operators. And we'll be happy to listen to you. I always like to listen and we are listed and serving 31 countries with 28 member states plus and three countries from the European economic area. So it is really important for us to listen and learn from what you have to say.
>> Thank you, Giovanni. Is there a new remote comment?
So are there any comments from the participants? No. Okay.
>> I think another thing that Tatiana also touched upon shortly, but that's something that really needs further emphasis is the need to ‑‑ especially as civil society actors to make sure that we understand what is going on technically. So ICANN and DITF in my case, these are not easy spaces to navigate if what you're used to is dealing with regulators and dealing with executives. I think that this is something where some of the ‑‑ I wouldn't say failures because I think it is too strong a word, but places where we don't initially get what we want or we're not able to properly communicate what the issue is also comes ‑‑ it comes from two sides obviously. It is lack of understanding on the part of whoever we're working, but also a lack of our understanding that it is really easy when you're a civil society actor to be so deeply engaged with the topics that you understand the urgency of it and you understand or you feel you understand why this needs to be done now and in the specific way that you're proposing. And I think what we need to focus on when we're turning in the more technical issues is making sure that we really properly do that translation. And obviously that means that we need to have a willing actor on the order side of the table. We're really to bear with us as we go through the process, but we can do a lot in terms of scaling up and learning how to speak tech and learning to understand and appreciate the order side of the table even if you don't care the point of view because we're not going to get very far with an adversarial stance. Civil society activism and adverse aerial stance works and I found that is not the case for the work I've been doing. I am being very specific to working on human rights issues at the logical layer of the Internet, but I think it is something to consider moving forward.
>> Yes.
>> I work in the IGF. And one of the things I wanted to reinforce about that is that a lot of ways in which organizations like the IGF were very much open there's no membership to the IGF participation in a particular topic means you're doing a mailing list and start contributing your ideas and your energy to it. And that often means because of that openness that we don't have the same idea of stakeholder communities that order types of organization might have. So a very interesting example of that is actually around privacy questions. Many of the people who initially came to the IGF to work on privacy issues either already were or became sufficiently fluid in their discussion of these issues that no one ever thinks of them as anything other than just IGFers anymore. A great example of that is Daniel Congilmore. He's the contributors and I think the number of times people think of DKG as coming from civil society in that content is about zero. Similar would be folks like Alyssa Cooper who originally started coming to the ITF from the center for democracy and technology is currently an area director for the art area. So there's a mechanism by which the dialogue changes through engagement, but one of the things that really happens in that from the experience on the ITF side is that after that engagement, people don't perceive you as from a stakeholder community. You are simply working on this topic. And that turns out to be very successful, but it may mean a longer engagement process than would be comfortable for very urgent topics. And that's why I think it's very important to have identified folks in a community who we all understand are sort of bilingual. Avri Doria, EKG, Corinne and others can help navigate this and find people who would understand and speak both languages while that engagement progresses.
And I sincerely hope that people take to heart that it is an open participation process in standards development and there are a lot of the issues around especially things like internationalization or particular transport protocols or messaging protocols like EAI where further engagement by affected communities would be very, very valuable. One of the realities is that if you're somebody who builds technology, the number of languages you speak may be higher than normal, but there are 7,000 different languages in use in the world. And the fact is we don't have 7,000 participants in the ITF. The chances we understand the impact and all of them is zero or very close to zero. So more participation. As members of the ITF, whether you come from civil society or not would be very welcome.
>> Thank you. I see Klaus. So we first go with Klaus.
>> KLAUS STOLL: Thank you very much. I think we ‑‑ especially now with the upcoming enhanced community, we have to look at the fundamental new ways of how civil society engages in policy making. I think we did very good efforts, but it time to change. I would like to suggest three major points which we should look at. One of them is classman's engagement. We need to find more contacted to the general civil society users. Basically who knows ICANN? Who knows that we exist? Who knows what is going on? We need ways to communicate. And the second one and I hope you don't misunderstand me here, but we need ‑‑ we are a unique precision ‑‑ you professionalize somehow this kind of engagement because we'll always end up with a few people who buy some academic or some personal lottery event to be able to participate.
>> Great. Thank you very much.
>> I have one more point if you don't mind.
>> Yeah. Sure.
>> And the third point is quite simply how we see our engagement, the form of engagement. It's no longer good enough when we just talk to each other and try to find the consensus. We have to talk and work together. What you just mentioned is we have to start. Just talk, talk, talk.
>> Thank you very much.
>> ALFREDO CALDERON: I am Alfredo Calderon from Puerto Rico. I'm from that civil society sector that got involved in ICANN and I actually participated as an observer in that working group and I also work in other groups as a volunteer. And I got involved because about three years ago, by the way, I'm a chemist. So that's my background. And I got involved in ICANN because as a civil society member, I wanted to know and learn the impact that the IANA transition would have within my profession and within what I do. Now, what does that mean? That I had to do what Tatiana mentioned and what he mentioned. I had to learn the language of ICANN, the language of ISOC, the language of ITF to get involved. And that's why I'm here so I can contribute, but I need to learn the language to get involved.
>> I'm going to open, but three years ago, we have like many other organizations in the Internet, we have what we call the academy. That's for anyone interested in learning more about the environment that we work. Education and awareness and education to be able to contribute. So the academy starts for anybody and we have students from universities around Europe who may like to learn more. How are registries managed from a technical perspective, what is ‑‑ anybody who is interested. It's not slavery because you're going to get paid. First, you will be trained and then you're going to get a project to develop the project. It could be one week, three weeks, two months. We had students for different timeframes and you get also travel and expenses and it's a contract. It's a nice experience. So I would recommend again if any of you is interesting, please go to our site and apply for it and we'll be happy to welcome you.
>> Thank you. This is very interesting. So you actually initiated something to educate people and how to get engaged. Maybe ATF can do that too ‑‑ maybe ITF can do that too.
>> Sorry. ITF's organizational home is ISOC. And ISOC does do that through ISOC policy fellows and a number of other programs.
>> Yes. I am aware of that program which is normally addressed to regulators. It's very difficult to get into. But I might be wrong. Just got rejected, you know.
>> Perhaps we should talk offline about that particular thing, but if there are extensions or many other folks are here and I'm sure we would be very interested in talking about how that could expand.
>> That's very helpful. Thank you. Are there any other comments?
>> CORINNE CATH: I think the ISOC program is definitely a very good step into the ITF. We always give trainings to them and talk about the work that the human rights considerations group is doing. They're always an extremely smart bunch. The problem is that they're having is retaining the fellows after the one week because the problem is these are all people who have other jobs and it is extremely useful for them to know what is going on in ITF, but it doesn't necessarily lead to structural participation in the processes. That indeed, is an open question and something that is good to hear that ICANN is struggling with. Doing all the work that is either based because you volunteer your time or because you have another organization that is willing to pay for the time that you spend working on whatever technical stuff you do. And this is something that you see often and especially something that I've seen within ICANN is that you do run into these issues of the people who end up being able to volunteer their time. They have other homes that pay for their rent. And that leads the selection of who actually is able to participate here to be not as representative as you would ideally want to have. The question of resources is something that as civil society, we haven't figured out yet and that's because we can do more strategizing on how to pull resources and at least make sure our participation is structured and that there is funding for it. So it doesn't depend on people who decide that this is so important that they're volunteering their own time to it, but rather that we can have a good concrete approach to doing that. It is very much an open call to the people in the room of who has ideas of how to fix this or who has examples of other places where this has been done in an effective way. I think a lot of ground can be gained for civil society if we can figure this one out.
>> Thank you, Corinne. So there is the issue of funding and how to source funding. And that might be difficult, but also we have the issue of conflict of interest, which civil society itself within it criticizes other cell society members if they get funding from various sources which limits our access to various sources of funding. We have to consider. Are there any other comments? Okay.
>> Just a very quick to the comments. There are models, but we have to be brave. For example, we have to redefine what it means non‑commercial. We have to do a lot of things. We have to jump over a lot of things we built ourselves. But the models are liveable and some are implemented. We just have to have the guts to do it.
>> Yeah, actually, two remarks. One of them is on funding. I think another problem of funding that even if you have it, even if you have limited funding, did is a laidoff. New faces and new comers or veterans. Who are you betting on. Who will do my job? How will you get more people involved if you bring people who are already doing a job? And of course is diversity. You want to insure that all the regions are represented. Sometimes it becomes hard for people in some regions to be shoot and they're always in demanned. So volunteers do a lot ever work and you have some other things, but in Latin America and other regions they're really struggling. And back to quite a long time ago to what Corinne said about understanding deeper the technical issues. I also think that understanding deeply any issues about the process you're involved with not only technical and what I mean by understanding, it is understanding of the concerns whom you're talking to, understanding of the concerns whom you're actually fighting against.
In the example of the surveillance and in the example of us protecting human rights in digital investigations talking to law enforcement agencies trying to change the laws there and practices and policies, I think it is really important to understand for civil society the concerns of other parties. Governments do have to protect their citizens. Law enforcement does have to investigate crimes. Sometimes we run into the wolfs and we don't make ourselves heard. Why? We're not offering solutions. We're not offering to meet in the middle. We just reject what's been proposed. We've not proposing the ways to move forward. Proposing the ways to move forward would mean listen to other side. Negotiators was the other side. Without compromising the values, but listening to the other side and get what they actually want. I experienced this myself with some of the successes of change and legislation and law enforcement agencies told me why don't our lawyers tell us what you are saying. Why don't our lawyers ‑‑ why are not our lawyers able to compromise, for example, able to sit together for many hours and talk. I think this is what we have to learn how to do. Thanks.
>> I think he would like the mic.
>> This is tricky. If you have one mic, you movie single ‑‑
>> RAFIK DAMMAK: Rafik speaking. I just want to highlight civil society is quite diverse and I think we are quite distributed. And this can be strong point, but it is also weakness. It is hard to coordinate. I don't have the answer for that. I think we have to leave with that challenge and see how we can use it. I understand about the issues about funding and so on and the problem even if funding is create some competition between civil society actors among themselves because the source are not that diverse. People ‑‑ they create sometimes even a different interest in that matter. Another issue I see more is about attention. We are competing for the attention of the expert or the volunteers or civil society. So, each organization or activist will define his or her priority and what matters they want to work. So it is really hard to bring them from other spaces.
Let's join ICANN or let's join ITF because there is kind of learning curve to go through and to spend time where there are issues they want to work on even at the local level or global level. If you're an activist in developing countries, you will have a hard time to work outside. You want to focus what's happening in a local level. You will work around it. So, expand as much as possible, but help. I don't have the answer. It's again about resources. Yes again, we need to accept that it's okay to get resources from Google. We have, I know, it thrives a lot of questions from other organizations, but there is ‑‑ it's not diverse. The resources are not diverse. Few foundation, open foundation or Ford foundation, but there are also restrictive on the topic they want to work on. And this even happened at the other levels. Coming from Mina and Arabs spring. It's not that. It's just revolution. There is interest from many foundations to support activities in those countries. But those foundations don't have that and they're in term of priorities. At the end what I want to say, we need also to stop as a civil society to kind of serve regulation about our limitation. That's okay. We have to live up with that and see how we can improve and be a little bit more optimistic and positive.
>> Okay. Thank you very much. So it seems like our negative stories were not that long. So that's good.
[Laughter]
And if there are no questions or comments, I'm just going to wrap it up and we can just go early. Adam? So would you like to make comment?
>> ADAM PEEI: Why not, Adam Peek. I now work for ICANN in civil society engagement. But I've been very active in IGF and various other things. I think the observation really is ‑‑ the nice thing about this meeting today is that you're thinking about positives and one of the things I look at if I look at something like both the NCUC is probably the most diverse group in ICANN. You know, between you, you have almost 600 members probably almost 200 organizational members representation from at least 120 countries. So within the ICANN content, you are the most diverse group. You have more members probably than any other group and sometimes you really aught to say that because I'm quite sure that unless I say it to board members and so on, you're not doing. And you aught to because it is a group that is with limited resources as you said and you do an exceptional amount of work. Some of the most active members of the CCWG account ability all there civil society. You can look at the mailing list and see the measures of it. I think being a little bit more positive about your achievements will actually help you get more of the resources and more of the respect, more of the acknowledgment that you need to have your policies than better accepted within not only ICANN, but other of the Internet policy processes that we are dealing with. Just carry on what you're doing, but be a little bit more vocal of how well you're doing it.
>> That was very positive from ICANN. Okay. There are no other comments? Okay. I'm just going to wrap this up from the success stories that we're got and of course we're on the Internet Governance space and we work with more transnational. That's why the stories come from this space. I kind of think that maybe we have to look at in the future what sort of venues and institutions that are not multi‑stakeholder and are intergovernmental can be ‑‑ we can participate and make changes there because ‑‑ well, of course we can payment at ITF and ICANN because they're a multi‑stakeholder, but whether we can be more effective in intergovernmental organizations or processes. Even when the intergovernmental organizations say that they have multi‑stakeholder process, it is really sometimes close. So, I think that would be another step for us to look at before next year. And thank you very much for all the success and failure stories.