The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Geneva, Switzerland, from 17 to 21 December 2017. 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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>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Are you ready? Can we start? Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the small island developing states preparatory session at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum day 0. I'm pleased to be here. I'm Tracy Hackshaw, and I'm from Trinidad Tobago. I also work for the government, and I'm also here as a coach and moderator for the Youth at IGF Fellows with the Internet Society. I'm from the Caribbean, so I'm glad to represent the Caribbean here.
I see colleagues from other small island territories in the room. To my left I have Chengetai Masango, who is head of the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Secretariat based in Geneva. To my right I have Mr. Armin Plum, who is the Senior Program Management Officer for the United Nations division for Sustainable Development, Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA). He's from New York. Welcome.
I'll introduce Sala, who will introduce the other guests. Sala has a very long last name, so we just call her Sala from Fiji, our Pacific colleagues on the other side of the ocean. She'll introduce our other guests. Sala.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Good morning, fellow colleagues of the IGF. It's our privilege to introduce Her Excellency from the Fiji Permanent Representative mission to the United Nations and International Organizations in Geneva. Her Excellency is Ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan, who has kindly volunteered to grace us with her presence. She used to be a High Court judge in the Republic of Fiji prior to taking up the position as Ambassador. Most of you might know that Fiji was recently the President of COP 23 and she happened to be the Chief Negotiator for the COP23, so lessons to be learned from her in terms of broadening global stakeholder engagement within the complex processes such as U.N. processes.
So thank you, Ambassador Khan, for gracing us with your presence. Welcome.
>> TRACY HACKSHAW: All right. Very good. According to the Agenda, we have Setting the Stage ‑‑ Setting the Context for Internet Governance Forum. So for this I will hand over to Chengetai Masango of the IGF Secretariat who will give us some context and some information. Thank you very much.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much, and also thank you for inviting me to speak at this meeting, The Internet Governance Forum, as most of you know, but I'll go over the background briefly, is called the dialogue on public policy issues related to the key elements of the Internet. Its main purpose is to maximize the opportunity for open and inclusive dialogue and the exchange of ideas and also to create opportunities to share perspectives and experiences, identify emerging issues and bring them to the attention of the relevant bodies and to contribute to the capacity building for the Internet.
The IGF comes out of the World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS). The Summit recognized the need for broad‑based discussions of public policy issues related to the Internet. We had our mandate ‑‑ we received our mandate in 2005 from the Agenda, paragraph 72, and it has been renewed three times, the last time being in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly.
Paragraph 72, apart from giving us the general mandate to discuss public policy issues, also specifically states that the IGF has to facilitate the exchange of information and perspectives and, in this regard, make full use of the expertise of the academic, scientific and technical communities, strengthen and enhance the stakeholders in Internet governance mechanisms and particularly those from developing countries.
We should also contribute to the capacity building for Internet governance in developing countries on the local sources of knowledge and expertise. Now, as I said, the three main tenets of the IGF is stakeholder nature. All stakeholders should participate on equal footing. The government, the private sector, the technical community and the IGOs, the intergovernmental bodies as well.
We also have a lot of national and regional initiatives (NRIs), which I'll get into just now. For the small island development states, they have specific issues related to Internet governance. There’s are many challenges to bring meaningful access of challenges in bringing in the infrastructure, because it's more expensive to bring in the small island states and not concentrated.
You don't have the economies of scale that you have on the major continents. They're widely spread apart, and the IGF has, in the past, had workshops and open forums focusing on access issues, but the issues specifically for small island states have been put on as an aftermath or an afterthought, so they have been very little focused, attention on the small island states. So we are trying to encourage more and more specifically focused workshops, open forums and Dynamic Coalitions on these.
This year we do have an open forum on SIDS, and it is entitled “Islands Surrounded by Land and Sea: The Road for Full Connectivity for Least Developed Countries and also Small Island States.” That's one that is specifically focused on SIDS, but we actually need more. It's up to the small island states to organize.
We have the idea that Secretariat will help and (?) will help. We do have capacity building programs that can help. In our budget we do have budget lines to help maybe bringing in an expert to participate in capacity building if they are summer schools. We have summer schools for the Latin‑American and the Caribbean.
We don't have summer schools for the specific islands just yet, but we're willing to help. Of course, this is all based on the funding that we receive ourselves through the trust fund, but if we have a little bit of money to spare, we'll focus it on the small island states because I think that is very important and very critical to help develop the infrastructure there and also the Internet governance capacity to participate in the debate.
For the National and Regional Initiative (NRI), we have the Caribbean IGF and the Pacific IGF and the Asia‑Pacific Regional IGF as well. It does include many small island states.
Next year I think the Asia‑Pacific Regional IGF is going to be in Vanuatu, so I think that is very important, and we can work together and see whether or not we can have a summer school there as well to try and encourage. We'll see whether or not ‑‑ how we can help out.
As I say, it all depends on how much money we have in the Trust Fund to see whether we can do small grants to help bring people in or to help bring in some experts in to help with the capacity building there.
So to end off, I'll just repeat what I've just said. We do have to work together, and the initiatives have to come from you, and we will help as much as we can. Thank you.
>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Thank you very much. To add to the list of activities at this IGF, I just wanted to mention that there's a roundtable tomorrow on December 18th at 10:40 a.m., the small island development states roundtable, which is the fourth year that we have this roundtable. It's 10:40, as I said, so please feel free to join us as we discuss whether I'll be running out of resources in small developing states and if we have people to actually participate in the economy.
It's an interesting discussion to have tomorrow. My colleagues in the room will be there as well, and we have a presentation from the society on the report ‑‑ SIDS report they did last year, which is very comprehensive and spanned across the entire region.
I'm going to hand over now to Mr. Plum, who will provide additional context on the IGF and from the U.N. perspective from New York.
>> AMMAN ARMIN PLUM: Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here to represent the U.N. I'm going to talk more broadly on the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.
So as most of you know, the 2030 Agenda was adopted in 2015 in November by member states, and it's covering social, economic, environmental issues and gives the agenda the roadmap, if you wish, how the world as a whole will improve and will achieve equality.
At the heart of the 2030 agenda is the ‑‑ are the 17 development sustainment development goals.
There are 169 targets overall, and member states are encouraged to implement those goals by obtaining and achieving those targets. We in the U.N. have by organizing one a year the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. That is taking place every year in New York in July.
It covers ‑‑ it's supposed to monitor and review the status of the implementation. So this is where once a year everybody comes together, and the idea is to present what has been achieved and what are the lessons learned and what is the way forward.
How is the (?) forum doing this? There are two main tracks. One is a track that is a review of some of the 17 goals every year for assembly 2018 we're going to review five specific goals.
Last year in 2017 one of the goals that was reviewed was SDG 14, which is particularly interesting for this audience here, which is the live underwater SDG, which covers the whole ocean issue. And as a preparatory event, we organized the World Ocean Conference -- and it was co‑hosted by Fiji actually and Sweden we organized the conference in June in New York that reviewed that. That's an example of preparatory events that we organized leading up to the political forum.
I think it's important to note that all these STGs SDGs are not ‑‑ they're an integrated set of goals. You can't pick and choose. It's not ‑‑ there's not one more important goal than the others. They're all interlinked, and that is very important to keep in mind. Specific events we are organizing later in the year, a specific event on interlinkages of all these SDGs because it's important to take care of that aspect.
The other aspects that is important is that this agenda is not targeted at developing countries. It's really targeting all member states. There are goals and targets in there that are to be implemented really by all countries, and that is one of the big differences to the MDGs.
The other mechanism -- and that's where it goes more into the IGF, the other mechanism for implementing the 2030 Agenda at the High Level Political Forum are the volunteer national reviews. It's where member states are invited to come forward and present for peer review by the other member states their plans and their progress.
So they're supposed to demonstrate how they intend to achieve all the goals and then how to obtain the ‑‑ how to implement the 2030 agenda. These volunteer national reviews are, obviously, organized by the government. They are supposed to be inclusive, so they are ‑‑ the intention is that all stakeholders at the national and regional levels are excited and jointly present the plan.
This is where, as I was saying, I see the IGF, the National and Regional IGFs come in, because a multi stakeholder process ‑‑ the IGF is already a very good example and a very old in UN terms of a multi stakeholder approach. There is a lot to learn, I think, from the IGF on the regional and national level to help governments and stakeholders to present these reviews.
For 2018 -- Just to give you a few figures, for 2018 we have 48 countries that are coming forward, and we as a division for systemic development, are accompanying those countries, helping them prepare their reports. We are, obviously, working with other partners in the U.N. system at the regional and national level. Yeah, I think I'll leave it there. I think that kind of summarizes what I wanted to say.
>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Thank you, Mr. Plum. An excellent summary, especially from the New York perspective. So I think that we as Small Island Developing States need to really work more closely with the United Nations and their programs to ensure that what we are doing and what the United Nations is doing both in Geneva and in New York would be very closely aligned, and we can also achieve more visibility, I think, within the programs because the SIDS are not just developing countries, but we have unique challenges that I think we keep trying to say it's ‑‑ I mentioned it's still a developing state, it is because the SIDS issues are not necessarily economic. They're also environmental and other, let's use the word other, because as you come to the roundtable, we will tell you about it.
I'm going to have our feature speaker for the morning. I'm glad to introduce her excellency, Ambassador Nazhat Shameem Khan, lenipotentiary and Permanent Representative of Fiji to the United Nations and International Organisations in Geneva who will give us opening remarks.
>> AMBASSADOR KHAN: May I say, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here. I haven't been addressed by my full title since I first presented my credentials to the Swiss government and to the head of the U.N. in Geneva. Thank you, but please desist on the full title. It's very intimidating for me.
So it's a pleasure to be here, and a pleasure also to talk about a topic which really does, I think, showcase the coherence in policies, which are now developing throughout the international development world, in relation to a number of these issues. You mentioned COP‑23, but we also saw at COP‑23 this real wish for coherence in U.N. policies and international organizational policies and national policies in relation to climate action, and I would say the same applies to the international policies on the information economy.
So may I say also that we know, of course, that the information economy has really transformed the world and the economies of the world, and in particular has really transformed the way that health sectors, education sectors, trade, tourism, energy, and so on, how all of them operate and are able to do business.
But, of course, connected to the fact that the economy has transformed itself as a result of the Internet, we have accompanying challenges, and we experience these challenges not just in the world of the Internet economy but also in the world of human rights and in the world of national policies and political policies. For instance, in Fiji, one of the discussions that is raging now and particularly before next year where we have our elections is the extent to which the Internet can be governed where there is hate speech.
So then we come into this whole discussion of what is hate speech? What is the balance between freedom of expression and the need to for the Internet to be regulated to prevent the discrimination of persons or communities, which are particularly vulnerable?
That, of course, includes women and children and other marginal groups. This is an important discussion, and I think it's an important discussion that needs to take place not just in Geneva and U.N. Vienna, where it does take place. It needs to take place at national level, which is why, in fact, the workshops that this forum is going to be exploring becomes so important. It's important because these are the discussions, which actually affect national policies.
So to the extent to which we can regulate the Internet, because of pornography or the trafficking of drugs or hate speeches, how we balance freedom with a regulation of individual action becomes an important matter of Internet governance, which affects policies at national level. I think that the international organizations should give very good guidance to national governments to help them to decide how they are going to adopt laws which help them make very difficult and very challenging decisions.
So within this forum, 2017, then, SIDS and developing countries will have this opportunity to share lessons and to exchange experiences from across and to learn from each other while engaging in global developmental dialogue on a diverse range of issues, and has said already there is, in fact, this very strong overlap between the SDGs and the discussions you'll have at this forum.
So the central objective of the preparatory session is to increase meaningful participation within the Internet Governance Forum and the best practice forums and Dynamic Coalitions. It's the hope of the conveners of this session there will more workshop proposals to effectively contribute to the Internet Governance Forum. Let me talk a little bit about the SOMOA S.A.M.O.A Pathway so important to SIDS.
In 2014, heads of states and government and high‑level representatives at the 3rd international conference on SIDS and developing states with a full participation very importantly of Civil Society and stakeholders re‑affirmed the commitment to the sustainable development of small island developing states and emphasized the development goals can only be achieved through a broad alliance of people, governments, Civil Society, and the private sector all working together to achieve the future we want for our present and future generations.
I'll pause there, and I'm sorry to talk about COP‑23, but I just came out there and it's completely populating my mind.
This is what we discovered by climate action. We asked ourselves, what made Paris, the Paris agreement possible? It's not that governments suddenly transformed themselves or changed their minds. It's because people and the Civil Society and private sector realized that climate change was a reality, but that it's good business to work towards better climate action.
This particular partnership that the S.A.M.O.A Pathway saw and the partnership that continued to do well for sustainable development for developing countries is the actual solution, which is the magic solution. If we are to make progress, we must work together with Civil Society and the private sector to ensure that we work towards sustainable development. We cannot do it without them.
That's the bottom line. We cannot do it without them. So the leaders at the S.A.M.O.A Pathway under scored they're still be implemented in relation to governance, and there's a need for a more integrated approach of small island and developing state with the support of the international community and all stakeholders.
So it was re‑affirmed at the S.A.M.O.A Pathway that small island developing states remain a special case for development because of the unique vulnerabilities and remain constrained in meeting goals in all three dimensions of sustainable development.
I'll pause there again, because some of the discussions here are about data. How do we achieve our SDGs in terms of producing information about the path we've taken and the extent to which we achieved, and we don't have the data? If we have the data, it's not desegregated. We need to work with technology to ensure we keep the data.
This is an important partnership between being aware and competent of where we need the data and Internet governance to ensure that the technology helps us to get it. So, for instance, if we're in a community and we simply don't see the women in this community, very common malady, we don't see the women. The women are not participating in this discussion, and they will not feature in the data. If they don't feature in the data, how do we report on gender competence for the purpose of the SDGs?
So important we remember there is a special case for sustainable development in relation to the unique vulnerabilities of Small Island Developing States, and actually, achieving the SDGs has a potentially transformative agenda also. In records on the SDGs, we're forced to go to communities and ask, where are the women? Where are the personalities with disabilities? Questions that might not have been asked in the cultural context of all of our communities. Some, yes, but not all.
So then reporting and the use of technology in producing the data that is required for the SDG's implementation becomes transformative in relation to our societies, and to ignore that in our communities in the Pacific and I speak about the Pacific because the community I know. In the Pacific to ignore this dimension of this marriage between cultural barriers and reporting on data and technology would be a failure of the SDGs.
We really do need to understand this important synergy, and it is unique in every country. That's why it's very important that these unique and particular vulnerabilities are acknowledged when considering the meeting of the goals of the SDGs.
So within the best practice forums of the Internet governance, it's noted what works in Europe may not work in a developing country. So, therefore, you must factor in development and the unique context of geographical regions and their peculiarities. That doesn't mean we can't learn from Europe. It's important we continue to do so.
This conversation today is really a way this which we have partnerships with what happens in the developed world to learn what will work with us, but at the same time adapt national programs to make sure they work in the context of small island developing states. So the United Nations general assembly in its resolution A/70/125 in 2015 extended the mandate for the continuation of the Internet Governance Forum for another ten years.
What would we expect from SIDS? We would expect SIDS to speak out and to speak boldly about their specific views and perspectives within the Global Internet Governance, to participate, to initiate, and to innovate and work together with the developed world to enable development in the diverse contexts of the world. I don't think we should be restricted by size.
Here we are in a room with not so many people in it, but you already have three Fijians, so that's really progress. Three Fijians in a room. I think this is very important, and I remember what the founder of the Body Shop said once. She said, if you think that you're too small to make an impact, consider going to bed with a mosquito.
So when it comes to small island developing states, we shouldn't be intimidated by the fact we're a small island state and need to make an impact and have our voices heard. I know this better than anyone in Geneva because we're one of the few island communities here in Geneva.
When I speak on the human rights council for WHO, I'm very aware I'm the only Pacific voice in the room. Very important whatever I say reflects specific perspectives.
So this morning you will hear from leaders from diverse stratas of the Internet eco‑system who will give brief highlights to prepare you to engage strategically. So important to be strategic and allow for informed participation in whatever workshops you choose to attend during the IGF. I gather that you will be creating an alliance for SIDS and LLDCs and developing countries to encourage wider participation and share best practices, and I think this would be an excellent step forward and I strongly encourage and hope this is, indeed, what will happen. Of course, I wish you meaningful engagement at this forum and beyond and a merry Christmas and happy new year. Thank you very much indeed.
(Applause)
>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Thank you. That's a very motivational and forthright introduction into our section today. Some of the things you covered I do share your concerns and your vision, especially about data. One of the things that I think we are struggling with in the Caribbean and Pacific is the concept of having our government agencies open up data for use by third parties.
So getting that data in our Ministries and Agencies and breaking through the legacy of regulations and laws that seem to burden us in these countries where it's perceived that in those countries if your data is exposed, there's something wrong with that. Therefore, issues such as gender, as you pointed out, people with disabilities don't really surface, and government policy‑making is therefore hampered and struggles to reach those it needs to reach.
When you talk about those underserved groups that I call them, we also have to remember even a small island, there's still areas that are rural. In a very small island, you can find extreme disparity between what is perceived as a city, you know, so the capital wherever it is, and everything else. Those rural areas even on a small island like Niue or smaller where there are 5,000 people or even where half the island is decimated by a volcano, there is still (?) and the ruling people are not fully served by Internet access or government services or data.
I think those are issues that need to be surfaced within the SIDS. They're unique issues we need to get through. Besides the ones that I think are documented well, they're also interesting to get to.
So I'm watching my timekeeper, and she's indicating we need to move on to the next item on the agenda. For that, Sala, I think you will be able to guide me as to who we're tossing to.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you, Tracy. We have an unusual time constraint, and we only have until 11:00. I'd like to thank the panelists that have spoken and perhaps call upon our (?) to please come up and perhaps ask the current panelists to please step down, and then we'll switch over again.
Also, the lovely Miss Marilyn Cade. We'll be taking a photo after this with everybody, so please don't leave.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce the current panelists that are before you. As you can imagine, we switch order program slightly. So now we have the business constituency gathering in where they will share their thoughts on how we can broaden SIDS engagement, particularly in the business communities within the different regions. Perhaps, Tracy, feel free to intervene when it comes to the Caribbean since Bevil Wooding halfway between flights.
First, let me first introduce our panelists. The Director General of APNIC, Paul Wilson, is known to all of us. APNIC is one of the five Regional Internet Registries, and it's the largest Regional Internet Registry canvassing the Asian Australasian and Pacific region where they allocate IP addresses to various organizations. So we're very happy you're here, Mr. Wilson. He will speak on behalf of (?) the national member Number Resource Organization.
Next to him is Miss Marilyn Cade. She's known to a lot of us. She's the former counsel of AT&T and sat on several executive boards in various capacities. One of the current ‑‑ one of the two hats which she holds which is relevant to this particular session is she's one of the key coordinators for the national regional initiatives where she works closely with the IGF Secretariat in promoting engagement from countries and territories around the world and regions to host Internet Governance Forums. On top of that, she's the president now of the IGFSA.
>> MARILYN CADE: No, I'm not. I'm just a board member. Not yet.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Yes. The elections are coming up. She's a board member of the Internet governance ‑‑
>> MARILYN CADE: The IGF support association.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: IGFSA. Third is Mr. Aslam Khan. He's very well‑known in the Pacific region. He used to be chief executive officer of Vodafone Fiji Limited which has several subsidiaries. He has extensive background in information communication technology and telecommunications in Fiji and the Pacific. He's been a former member of the ‑‑ probably a current member, too, of the Pacific Islands Telecommunications Association, and so he will be speaking from a Pacific perspective on business.
So with that, I'm going to ask a very broad question to the panelists, and feel free not to stick to that. Essentially, we're finding that the involvement of business constituencies within the Internet Governance Forum at least for the duration in which I've been involved in Internet Governance Forums, there's been very minuscule participation from the African, Caribbean, and Pacific and broader SIDS states.
Reasons for this are not known to me, but I would like to leave it open to you, the panelists, and with Mr. Wilson, one of the things I'd like to ask you as well, in your capacity as a leader within the Internet eco‑system, what are some of the things that you are witnessing in terms of trends? Do you find that there's broad participation from SIDS states in the development of policies and standards in terms of ‑‑ and that sort of thing?
With that, please let me give it over to the panel. Whoever wants to speak first, feel free.
>> ASLAM KHAN: So I'll share with you the perspective from Fiji. Also, one of the things I'm sure we'll have more information on this, Fiji is quite lucky in a sense that the penetration of mobile technology, for example, is more than 100%. We have 1 million mobile phones, and we only have 9,000 people in Fiji.
So we have a very good mode with telephony. 98% of the operation is covered with mobile phones and especially with Fiji coverage.
Fiji is lucky this that we have acquired higher penetration with our customers. Unlike in other south Pacific countries, as a matter of fact, like Samoa, we don't have that level of coverage.
That may be one of the impediments for getting operation. I feel that's one of the obstacles people face in our part of the world.
Fiji, quite frankly, is quite lucky in the sense that we enjoy a very quick VoIP (?) and we have 4G+ now, in terms of speeds Fiji enjoys that. In the business participation, I find and it's true that our customers, they're more the end users of applications.
For example, a mobile tracking system, cloud computing and all the others. For them it's a business decision to get involved in these things. They find that usually our customers and the business community are more the end users rather than being involved in policies.
The issue of policy is more of the related involvement, and unfortunately, in Fiji it's not that active. Fiji, the good thing is we enjoy light handed regulation and (?) and we don't get involved in everything unless operators raise an issue. But we're quite lucky in the sense that they like it.
I think later we don't get involved too much in the actual part of it or even probing the operators or its customers to engage in such policies. So I think that will be a fair thing from the perspective.
>> MARILYN CADE: It's Marilyn Cade. Maybe I'll just speak about business users, because you mentioned that. That's the world I come from. I worked at AT&T for many years, but I didn't work in the communications side.
I helped found AT&T Computer Systems and AT&T World Net, our ISP. The reason I mention that is that we, too, the communications part of the company, was highly regulated, and it was easy to get their attention by announcing that a commissioner was going to come and speak at a meeting. Everybody showed up including the head of the office.
When you tried to convince the users, the financial service companies or the manufacturing companies, et cetera, that they needed to come or the health care suppliers, it was like, why? Why do I need to come? I think one of our issues is decoding what is going on in the area of public policy in your country and at a regional and global level that is impacting your ability to use online services and your ability to use the Internet. Also, to talk about it in terms of what the uses are, because ‑‑ so I was in Afghanistan in March.
I did a kids’ academy on what is the Internet. Of course, the answer is Facebook, Google, and my response to that is, no, and here's why that's not Facebook or Google. Why they're important, but they're not the Internet, and how you need to be involved.
I think this decoding thing that the NRIs can be helpful with, the national and regional IGFs can be helpful with us to be thought of assertively at the global IGF and also at the national level.
There's a tendency to want to train people on what the Internet is from a technology perspective. That isn't actually explaining to businesses why the Internet is important and why they're not going to be able to do business unless they understand what is happening and get engaged in the policy level.
The digital transformation, which I think you are calling, Ambassador, the information economy, but the digitization about everything in our lives is facing us. 40% of the countries in the central Asia and MINA MENA states are younger than the age of 40.
40% of the population is younger than the age of 40, and in some countries more than 50%. And the jobs that are needed are going to come from the digitized world. So we have to think about how do we reach out to the ‑‑ and, you know, I think the RARs RIRs and the CCTLDs and the mobile operators, but we have to think about how we reach to the businesses who are using the Internet and the world wide web to deliver health care services and agriculture services. There I would say I saw one significant recommendation I have for reaching businesses in these countries and there's so much similarity between the Caribbean Islands, between the Pacific Islands, but also some of the least developed countries to get the attention of business.
We need to be talking to the other Ministers because the mobile operator isn't necessarily going to want to spend a lot of time unless they're thinking about getting into the delivery of health services via mobile application. If the Minister of Health care shows up, that may be of much more interest to them.
One thing I would say you should think about is how do we reach the others? The other problem that you're faced with is many of the large companies do not actually have a physical presence in your islands or in the developing countries.
The vice president for marketing for most of the large companies for Africa lives in the U.K. and doesn't even travel to the U.K. ‑‑ to the AfrICANN countries, and that's true also for many of the companies. Many of the companies you might be able to not ‑‑ you're not thinking about them now, but you should.
They use distributors and value-added resellers. So maybe another strategy would be to look at who the suppliers are.
Then think about building something for them on a day zero that is much more specific to how digitization is transforming business and how it's going to affect them.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: On that, Marilyn, I just thought I would add most people don't realize that the largest revenue for Tuvalu doesn't come from fisheries. It comes from the lease of .TV, which is managed by a U.S. Telco Verisign and they were among the top ten country level domains in the world several years ago.
In fact, we have Maureen Hilyard on the At-Large Advisory Committee who speaks to public interests and speaks to the ICANN policy from a public interest perspective. So they canvass these sorts of issues, so you have those challenges and challenges of territories such as Tokelau.
You can't get there by plane. You have to catch a ship and sort of stop halfway. To this day the good people of Tokelau, if they need to ask for funds, they need to put in extensive proposals to the New Zealand government, of course. Now we have the national resource that is being managed externally. I can't remember the name of it. It will come to me.
But the point is we have this extensive resources in the region, which, you know, can be fully utilized. Good points, Marilyn. Keep going.
>> MARILYN CADE: My only following comment is I can't stay with you all the way through, Sala, but I want to compliment you for organizing this and reinforce the importance of continuing this. I want to make one comment about ‑‑ you're very aware of this, and so is (?) and I want us to really think about the network of the NRIs that we have been able to create that Tracy is very aware of as well. We've been able to create them over the past two years with the very strong support of the focal point from the IGF.
That network can ‑‑ that model may be of particular interest to think about, okay, how did you get Microsoft to send a speaker? How did you get IBM to send a speaker? My final comment is going to be, I was in Afghanistan to help launch the afghan IGF. Now, you may not think that's a SIDS, but, of course, it is. It's a country that is dealing with post‑conflict.
No one else would travel. ISOC wouldn't travel, and ISOC only had to travel from Pakistan. We organized our speakers remotely and it was a fantastic event. The major thing you need to think about when you do that is you really add a lot of additional planning into your structure, but you can bring in a lot of expert speakers, perhaps in the future, if the plan well ahead and you strike up relationships with entities that are interested in advancing the issues.
Simon Technical and IBM and others that might not travel, but they be particularly interested in contributing to the knowledge and the skills. So I just add that as a thought, Sala, that I'm working with and will keep in touch to put this cadre of experts we may be able to draw in.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you, Marilyn. We'll give this time to Paul.
>> PAUL WILSON: Thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here. I'm the head of the IP registry for Asia‑Pacific. So it's hard to characterize APNIC in terms of the normal IGF stakeholder groups, because we're considered to be part of the technical community where the agency that allocates IP addresses around our region.
So it's one of those core, critical infrastructure task, and we've always had a lot to see and bring to the IGF in terms of the technical understanding and interfacing between what we do and other parts of the Internet governance system. We're also often regarded as a Civil Society sort of organization, because we're actually quite involved and have been involved since the beginning of APNIC in development of the Internet and region.
The reason for establishing APNIC as the IP address registry was precisely to support Internet development in the region. We've been involved heavily and increasingly in Internet development within our own capacity under our own funding and more recently in partnership with other sources of resources.
I'm also here with other folks from the business community because, in fact, the primary membership community of APNIC, the businesses that builds the Internet around the region. Yes, we are kind of crossing over all three of those stakeholder groups, and we do that in bringing ourselves, and our issues to the IGF.
The APNIC region includes all of the South Pacific island nations, so I can speak quite a bit about what's happening in that part of the world. We have four other regional Internet registries as partners and, of course, between the North America and Latin America, the Caribbean is covered. I can't say too much about that, but I'm sure Tracy could fill in any details that might be relevant there.
I think the trend at the moment that we're seeing and particularly since this started, we've seen an enormous amount of connectivity come to the Pacific. There have been almost all nations now are connected or about to be connected, and there are several that are left out and may be left out for some time.
The thing is the markets in these Pacific island nations were considered only a decade ago or so to be too small to possibly support the capital investment of cable infrastructure, and that has been shown to be false to the extent the cables are being connected and, in fact, the ambitions I think are increasing.
So once the cable is connected to one country and one country becomes dependent on that cable, the next very important question is, how to provide redundancy and what happens if that cable goes out? There may be technology like a satellite, but there's a certain demand to bring more cable in. As prices go down and demand goes up, then presumably that actually is going to happen.
In terms of participation, I'm a believer in the idea if you build it, people will come. Participation in the Internet will follow naturally across stakeholder groupings and across different sectors of society once the benefits of the Internet are actually apparent.
People might really question the balance, the diversity of that participation, and that, of course, is a good question. But until you've got the connectivity, you cannot have any form of meaningful participation in the first place, at least not while there's a huge digital divide between unconnected or poorly connected folks and the rest of the world.
That, again, when I say build it and they'll come, I'm talking about building an effective Internet infrastructure, and a cable connection to a country doesn't necessarily give that at all. If you expect the benefits of the Internet that occur in developed markets to also appear in new markets, particularly the ones we're talking about, if you really want people to come online and participate, then you have to actually create comparable conditions for Internet access.
So that means at least the reliability of that service, the speed, the bandwidth of the service and the cost of that service. Cost is a very big issue, because the cost of these cables are still very substantial and recovery of the cost is substantial.
If anyone thinks that you can somehow have it both ways and recover the cost of the cable in the short term while also encouraging people to come online and participate, then that simply isn't going to happen. I mean, there's the alliance for affordable Internet, which is described something called the two for one target which is that a gigabyte of volume on the Internet should cost no more than 2% of average monthly income, and they've identified that as a rough level of affordability.
If you're very far above that, then you simply can't expect people to come online freely. You can't expect parents to let their kids come online without very strong constraints, and you just can't expect people to really explore and make use of the Internet in a way that is free and permissive, and that people enjoy in developed economies.
So I think that cost factor just absolutely needs to be borne in mind. The other thing is about the ‑‑ as I mentioned, the reliability, the security, the speed, the technical capacity and quality of services, which are being provided. That is something that contrary to a lot of expectations doesn't come automatically or necessarily easily just because a cable is installed. So, again, successful Internet economies rely on pretty vigorous competition.
They rely on competitors providing services within a market so the prices can fall and quality can increase. That can't happen unless the competing providers have got access to technical expertise as well. I'm called on to point out that the difference between an Internet infrastructure which is secure and fast and reliable and cost‑effective and an Internet service or infrastructure that is none of those things, the difference there can be nothing but a question of the technical capacity, the human capacity of the people who are designing and building and running those networks.
They're by people on the ground who are there to fix things when they break to keep building the infrastructure and making sure it runs. That human capacity thing is something that's been really at the basis of APNIC’s interesting Internet development since we started training and technical assistance or workshops and capacity building fellowships to conferences targeting throughout our history the developing parts of the region.
So in particular the Pacific islands have been targets for our work. In recent years we've been involved with supporting the development of Internet exchange points. We had a couple of new IXPs established in the Pacific just in the last year, in fact, in Papua New Guinea and Fiji. There is another issue we deal with actively in the moment in the Pacific is security. APNIC is a membership organization.
We serve our members. We have 6,000 members around the entire region, and we're called on to serve them not only with the IP address services but also with whatever else we can reasonably be expected to do. That included ‑‑ that's primary in the area of technical support, and what has changed in recent years is that the priority that network operators are placing on infrastructure security has skyrocketed and it will no doubt continue to increase very dramatically.
As we all know, security is the number one concern of Internet stakeholders these days. What we've been involved with in the Pacific is promoting the model of the industry community‑driven certificate, the computer edge response team or the security response team how you like to interpret the acronym.
So we've employed several security specialists in recent years. There have been involved quite closely with the establishment of the THOMAS cert which happened a year ago.
It's community-oriented workshops that happened in Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu towards the same end. The critical thing. Using CERTS as one example, it goes to other aspects. The critical thing in CERTS in the question of CERTS is governmental leadership.
The critical thing that happened in Tonga just over a year ago was a governmental decision to provide leadership and to provide endorsement for a community‑based, multi‑stakeholder cert initiative. It was very successful.
It happened much quicker than my board expected, particularly after five or ten years of a lot of talk about CERTS. So I'm mentioning CERTS only because, as I said, the security of that infrastructure being built is critical to the utility and its ability to deliver benefits to communities.
The CERT model is something that's very well‑established throughout different parts of the Internet, both in the established markets and in new and emerging markets. So it really is taking off in the Pacific at the moment. That's going to be, as I mentioned, pretty important for Pacific development.
So that's probably all I've got to cover at the moment. I guess we have more time for discussion at some point.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Mr. Khan, was there something else you wanted to add? Not really?
>> ASLAM KHAN: The only thing is I'm looking from a user's perspective. Like I say, a lot of things you say in terms of the involvement I feel in Fiji it could play a more engaging role in getting things done with engagement with IGF and others. I don't think it happens enough, because they really sit on top of the operators and users in the end, and they decide at the policy level how this is. You'll find this a lot as well because you need to give you engagement in terms of policy matters to grab it.
The good thing in terms of the prioritizing that drives a lot of things here, now the conversion of copper to fiber is happening. So slowly they are rolling out a fiber network to homes and there's a time line in which all copper will be replaced with fiber, and that's the initial problem in Australia, which we, obviously, will increase to people and, of course, give access.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you, Mr. Khan. I just thought I'd add for a long time in the Pacific and in the developing world, if I could use an analogy because there are just aside from the business community and technical users, you have ordinary people. We're all ordinary, anyway, but the ordinary end user who doesn't know the technical specifications, so I'll use an analogy. This is an analogy that Bevil Wooding likes to use when explaining IXPs, but currently he's stuck between London and Geneva, unfortunately.
Take, for example, somebody within a country that sends an e‑mail to somebody ‑‑ say take Fiji for example. From Lautoka and Suva would send an e‑mail from this office to the next office. Before the ‑‑ before the presence of an Internet exchange point, what was actually happening was the traffic is was actually routed to Australia and back before arriving at the intended destination.
That poses all kinds of issues. In other words, it's kind of like for traveling Geneva and Bern, taking a flight out of Switzerland to come back to Switzerland to go to Bern.
One, it's expensive and clogs up traffic that was meant to be kept local. It is inefficient and slows traffic. Three, it opens security issues in terms of the capacity for that traffic to be vulnerable to anybody who is doing surveillance beyond your borders.
So when Mr. Wilson, Paul Wilson from APNIC was talking about the work they do to encourage Internet exchange points, I remember in 2012 and even before that APNIC has been very pivotal in sending experts to the Pacific in training through the Network Operator Groups.
So in the Pacific we have the PACNOG and in the Caribbean we have the CARIBNOG and so many are training telecommunications experts or specialists in terms of building things. In 2012 we reached out to APNIC, and for the first time we had an Executive Briefing just to stimulate the discussion on IXPs amongst Executives of Pacific Telcos.
The good news is many years later eventually, you know, once conversation gets going, people get to build it. We don't take the credit for it. The point is and that's the power of the Internet Governance Forum, is the capacity to hold and engage meaningful discussion and dialogue that can later lead to transformative change that is tangible.
Now, we've got ‑‑ it's unfortunate that the Caribbean Telecommunications Union Secretary‑ General who is not able to come onto the webcast, but she has sent her speaking notes. It's not long. It's just a few paragraphs, and I'd like to ask the government rep from Trinidad and Tobago. He's with the ministry of communications. Tracy, please read out Miss Lewis's speaking notes. After that we'll break and quickly take a picture. Thank you.
(A short break was taken)
>> TRACY HACKSHAW: Thank you, Sala. I'm not here representing the government. I want to make sure that's clear. That's okay.
Here's brief remarks from Bernadette Lewis, secretary‑general, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, CTU. It's with great pleasure I send warm greetings from the member countries of the telecommunications union.
I think she's calling now. Do you want me to try and answer the phone? Hello, this is Bernadette. It's 4:20 a.m. We'll see if we can get you to the mic. Can you speak so people can hear you?
>> BERNADETTE LEWIS: I'm hearing you, and I'm ready. I haven't been able to get to Fiji through at all.
>> BERNADETTE LEWIS: This is the best volume I have on my phone. If you speak, I think we can hear you. This is the best volume I have for my phone. Go ahead, Bernadette.
>> BERNADETTE LEWIS: Hi, good morning to everyone. I'm not sure where we are meeting.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: You have headsets, to ‑‑ so please use your headsets.
>> SPEAKER TRACY HACKSHAW: Okay, Bernadette. You can start again. We have you on speaker on my phone. So it's ‑‑ we're not seeing you, but we can hear you if you speak, and you can raise your volume on your side somehow. I don't know.
>> SPEAKER BERNADETTE LEWIS All right. Should I give my statement?
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Yes, go ahead.
>> SPEAKER: Okay. Well it is a great pleasure. I am very, very happy to be able to bring warm greetings from the member countries of the Caribbean Telecommunications Union Small Islands Developing state Preparatory session taking place in Geneva this morning. I'm representing the oldest Internet Governance Forum in the world, the Caribbean IGF. I'm very gratified to see that the participants in the Caribbean IGF are representing many small island developing states and Least Developed Countries.
The Caribbean IGF has achieved much in the 13 years of its existence. One of the early achievements was the development of the first Internet governance policy in the world.
Now in its 13th edition and its 3rd edition, this living document guides our work in Internet governance in the Caribbean and the implementation of this has resulted in the (?) in the Caribbean. The delivery of many programs for training and building the expertise of stakeholders and Internet governance in the region, and it's also resulted in greater participate of Caribbean stakeholders in the global Internet forum.
The Caribbean Internet Governance Forum has been actively encouraging and supporting many Caribbean countries in establishing their national IGFs, and there are at least five national IGFs in the region. I want to speak to some of the reasons why the Caribbean IGF has been so successful. I want to point to three things.
The first is the participation by key Caribbean IGF stakeholders in the global IGF and in the international meetings of Internet organizations. Participation in these forums provide great insight into Internet governance from a global perspective.
It also provides a platform for expressing the concerns of the region and bringing them to the attention of the global community. It affords participants the opportunity to be part of and to influence the evolution of the governance issues. I therefore encourage representatives of SIDS to participate and join in the global conversation.
The second thing that made the Caribbean IGF so successful is the fact that we do a lot of collaboration. The representatives collaborate through a number of collaborative processes. The Caribbean IGF continues to evolve bringing tangible benefits to the citizens of the region. I encourage the representatives of SIDS to collaborate and cooperate with other stakeholders for other ‑‑ for the developing states.
The third thing that has made the Caribbean IGF so successful is that we have recognized and behold the unshakeable belief that we have to chart our own destiny. Because of the sizes, we have to work together to find the solutions for our unique challenges, and its solutions that may be far from the beaten track that other countries have taken. They will be right for us.
The Bible says do not despise small beginnings. The Caribbean IGF is the oldest in the world because its participants refused to believe that because they are from SIDS they were impotent or incapable of achieving anything of significance.
So the message to the SIDS is that we might be small, we might be developing, we might have a number of challenges, but we can think. We are creative, and we need to put our intellectual intention to work to forge what I write for us. We have to participate, and we have to be part of the global discussion.
If we are creative and think outside the box, much can be achieved. I wish you all a very, very productive proprietary meeting and a very successful IGF. Thank you all. I do apologize. I've been having my technical issues, but I'm so glad I had the opportunity to at least address with the participants in this forum. Thank you.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: All right, thanks, Bernadette.
Thank you, Bernadette and Tracy, for facilitating that. With that we'll take a break and have a quick photo shoot. With respect to the component in terms of discussions on the alliance, because we have people who have missed flights and are still on connections, what we will do is we'll have ‑‑ we'll organize a bilateral room later, that's if one is available, for us to have the discussion so that everyone can be in it. For now, I'd like to thank the current panelists. Please join me by giving them a big hand.
(Applause)
(A short break was taken)
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you very much. We're now resuming session, and we could call the lovely Miss Morris to the panel. As we get ready, this next can imagine we're having the SIDS in developing countries prep session. Bring your chair. We're also waiting for the Pacific Islands Forum permanent representative to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to come. We will begin because of time constraints.
So as you can imagine, we explore the myriad of issues, particularly challenges pertaining to this. We have the head IGF Secretariat Chengetai Masango and Miss Maureen Hilyard, elected representative of APRALO to the ALAC. We have AFRINIC CEO Mr. Alan Barrett and with we also have APNIC's Director General Paul Wilson. They will address us from the table there. One of the things we'd like to ask them to canvass is how do we broaden participation?
We've explored it before and mentions of ministerial meetings rolls out of infrastructure synergies and collaboration. We'd like to hear from Maureen Hilyard particularly in her role on the ALAC What are some of the difficulties you see in terms of engagement?
I know you've done work on outreach and your part of the working group on outreach. Tracy, are you still with us? Right. Also, members of the audience, feel free to raise your hand at any point to intervene to ask a question, change the direction of discussion. This is a free dialogue. So with that, the panel and the floor is open. Thank you.
>> MAUREEN HILYARD: I mentioned that I am with the ALAC ‑‑ last year I was with the elect ALAC, and I'm very honored to actually have that position, especially in relation to the fact that as a developing country, it's nice to be given an honor to be represented at a high level within the organization. I also sort of acknowledge, too, that for Pacific islands and other underserved countries, it's always really great to actually have the support of the U.N., and it's great to see (?) APNIC attending a lot of our regional organizations and supporting underserved countries and also acknowledging, too, the support that is given by Paul and his organization to encourage the involvement as he mentioned with fellowships and that sort of thing. If we want to get our people engaged and as has been mentioned already, in order to have our voices heard, we have to have people on the ground.
We have to have people at these events, and one of the things that's actually been ‑‑ that ICANN has actually tried to do is encourage through fellowships and other types of encouraging engagement so that people can participate in ‑‑ so that their voices can be heard, and also to make them recognize, too, that their contributions are actually valued. I think that this is one of the important things that I've actually tried to do to encourage Pacific engagement to, like, you know ‑‑ in order to sort of like get acknowledgment and sort of like funding to get to some of these events, which is a real challenge, of course, for people in underserved countries, is that they really do need to show their interest.
They need to front up, and it is one of the things perhaps that's sort of like within our region, for example, Pacific islanders are very humble, very (?) and good proponents of it, but they are very modest. It isn't in their culture to speak out over and above people who are considered the leaders and the acknowledged experts.
So when we say we want to have people from the grassroots actually participating, sometimes it's difficult to actually get them along. We just have to encourage, I think, with the use, with the development of technology and the expertise that now lies where it lies, there are people who may not be in sort of like chiefly positions that normally are the representatives.
The fact that they actually had the knowledge is giving them an opportunity to sort of like be acknowledged within their communities as having the right to speak. So, I mean, these are sort of like cultural challenges, but there is also other participatory funding, and other issues that sort of like impinge on people becoming engaged.
I think that for in my role within at-large, what we're trying to do is to get as many people as possible to become engaged to take advantage of the fellowships that are available so that they can actually learn more about what the Internet is all about and how we can actually make it a more ‑‑ a more beneficial technology within our region and effective for us.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you, Maureen. If we could get Chengetai Masango to make a brief remark before he leaves, and I'll get Alan to speak.
>> CHENGETAI MASANGO: Thank you very much, Sala. Yes, everything that Maureen said and I know, especially for the small island states, it's very difficult because budget‑wise to fund ten people to come to a meeting. There's a lot more than funding ten people from Europe or ten people from Latin America countries because of the distances involved.
What we can do is just try and increase our capacity building. If that's getting them to establish national IGFs and some regional IGFs and we can use remote. The IGF can land national or regional IGFs or meetings with our Webex tool. You just have to contact us, and we'll give you access to it during the meeting. That might help.
Also, capacity building in the form of summer schools. I mean, they don't have to be in the summer, but yes, schools that can be attached to these national regional IGF meetings. We do encourage that, and as I said before, the IGF Secretariat stands ready to help you connect with people and come up with a program if need be.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you. And that leads us to our next two panelists, Mr Alan Barrett and Mr Paul Wilson who lead organisations that are pivotal in the establishment of a lot of the NRIs in terms of collaboration participation not limited to national and regional initiatives to the IGF but also other important meetings, other text meetings and that sort of thing. We have Alan here to share his view.
>> ALAN BARRETT: Yes. Let me try. So AFRINIC serves the whole of Africa as an Internet registry. It includes several small island states especially in the Indian Ocean and also a few in the Atlantic. We don't have too much of a budget so that we can help all that much, but we've participated in some country IGFs. We have offices in Mauritius, and there was a Mauritius IGF just a month ago.
We've helped in at least encouraging the establishment of Internet Exchange Points, and I'm glad to say that several of even the small islands, Mauritius Madagascar, Comoros, have Internet Exchange Points. It is challenging, though, because the ‑‑ the islands tend to be hard to get to. So we organize, you know, AFRINIC meetings twice a year and move around the continent, and not going to the same place too often. Even though we have that objective, we haven't often managed to have our meetings in the small islands except Mauritius.
That tends to be because of cost. It's hard to find a venue that will cater to the number of people that we expect. And also, we look for places, which are easy to travel to, and there aren't any major airline hubs in any of the small island states. So that's definitely an issue there. Thank you.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: I would like to ask Jacqueline Morris from the Caribbean to please share her perspective.
>> JACQUELINE MORRIS: Okay. Basically, I think what we have in the Caribbean is there are many of these events and activities going on. You have the (?) of Internet governance, but when we have an issue with a lack of numbers. So we find that we have the same people doing and participating across the board, and then they get burned out and tired.
I'm not sure why we're not getting that many young people to come in and take and do the next generation of it. We have found one here. This is Robert, and he's with us on the Trinidad and Tobago Multistakeholder Advisory Group. We're doing the Trinidad and Tobago IGF. Our second one will be in January 2018.
That has been an issue across the entire Caribbean. We started to look at instead of individual islands as the entire air Caribbean, so we get people from places where there's one person, we can get that one person involved in a Caribbean group. Sometimes you're interested, but you're the only person or one of two people in your entire country who is interested in this sort of thing.
So we found if we start treating ourselves as a region instead of individual countries, then we are managing to build a more sustainable group, and that's what we've been trying so far. The main thing is the lack of human resources that we have because everyone is involved in everything. We were involved in government things, we're involved in NGO things and technical things at the universities. We find there is ‑‑ there's a definite issue.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Sorry. That's a critical point that Jacqueline raised, and it's one that all organizations have to deal with in terms of sustainability.
Now, very recently within the Pacific Internet Governance Forum, we also had a side ‑‑ I shouldn't call it a side event. We also had the Pacific event in the government forum. As a precursor, we trained ‑‑ the community trained 20 locals. Twenty locals to facilitate future Internet governance forums across the islands of Vanuatu. That was very successful. It was rolled up within two days prior to the Pacific Internet Governance Forum.
When we had the Pacific Youth IGF, I'm just going to ask Maureen or Paul with this particular HP, this particular laptop, if you could just Google Internet Governance Forum video. While that's happening or what blew us away and I'm glad to see one of our youth representatives from Trinidad. Jackie, what's his name?
>> JACQUELINE MORRIS: Robert Martinez.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Robert Martinez. I'm really, really stoked we have youth participants from the SIDS region here with us. What we saw was when the youth was dialoguing on critical issues impacting them on the Pacific Internet governance landscape, they made representations to various stakeholders within the region. There's some to the regulators and there's some to other industries and some to Civil Society and some to the conveners of the Internet governance forum. The results were staggering, and so you're right, Jackie. We need to grow more. We need to multiply ourselves.
Yeah. Does anyone else want to speak to bringing a new voice to the table?
>> ROBERT MARTINEZ: I'd like to say one more thing. One of the things this reminded me of is that spaces that we use are sometimes a little forbidding for young, new people to come in to a room like this and it feels very ‑‑ intimidating to try to say what you have to say.
>> ROBERT MARTINEZ: Even from the perspective of still being involved the initiatives in Trinidad and Tobago as well as the Caribbean, I think the physical spaces and sometimes the language - even though underlying concepts are things that people can eventually easily grasp, I think there needs to be some way to meet young people halfway. Whether it's through, you know, outreach initiatives or some ways of reaching people that may not be that familiar with these kinds of concepts and this environment to kind of welcome people in.
I think, you know, there's a lot of good that can come from this. There needs to be some kind of engagement and find some ways to make it cool and you know ‑‑ yeah. Get it out there.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Fantastic. Fantastic. Paul, did you want to comment?
>> PAUL WILSON: On engagement, as I mentioned before, I think as a member of the technical community I'm very interested in APNIC bridging between what we do and the interested others and bringing stakeholders together and improving information flow and so on. I think that's actually really, really important in a resource‑ constrained environment.
No one is able to build their own, and they shouldn't try to build their own empire to try and solve all problems that face all members of the community. It's not necessary because there are plenty of activities going on in the Pacific, for example, we've got IGF events and we've got Asia‑Pacific regional IGF and Pacific IGF.
We have ICANN has an interest in the Pacific in the underserved regions. We've got activities going on under the auspices of various groupings. We have IPTU ITU and the most important thing is to enrich those activities so we're not reinventing wheels continually and trying to spend money repeatedly and inefficiently to try and duplicate it, which already can be used.
In our case the Internet technical community, one of the powerful mechanisms that we have that is kind of traditional is called the NOG, network operators group and there's one in the Pacific as well as other sub regional and regional NOGs around the Asia‑Pacific. That's another very good mechanism for promoting interest, for promoting cross‑fertilization between the different communities and identifying individuals and leaders that can come out of particularly if there can be pooling of resources for fellowship support and individuals that have some promise to travel and also assist with that thing, that process.
The keyword is eco‑system.
(Captioning for this session will end in a few minutes)
>> PAUL WILSON: We're working in some way in parallel and overlap with common interests within this eco‑system and to exploit that to take advantage of that to the best extent we can is important in providing engagement. It's the approach we try to take at APNIC, is to cross‑fertilize and not reinvent wheels.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you, Paul. So with that, please join me in thanking all of the panelists.
(Applause)
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: And that concludes our prep session for SIDS states for the IGF 2017. It's our hope there will be a lot more workshop proposals coming to us for 2018 from the seeds regional and developing countries. So with that, thank you very much.
Miss Marilyn Cade would like to say something.
>> MARILYN CADE: I'd like to make a comment about something that I hope you will address in your further session, and it follows on the comment Paul made. I do think there's a terrific tendency to start over sometimes as opposed to add on.
And I am really encouraging the NRIs, the national IGFs this year, to think about a day zero event for a specific community, whether it's youth or it's business or even government. In Nigeria this year, they did a two‑day program for their judges and lawyers.
So I think if we can keep thinking of it like a sunflower and we add on, we build the identity to the comment made from the gentleman and from Jackie.
We build the identity and the awareness. Then you know people and then those people can introduce you to more people. And then you can become the spirit guide yourself. So just think one other comment, Sala, workshop proposals are vulnerable to the vagarities of the MAG and the MAG's attitude, depending on who the MAG is at the time.
So I would urge you to plan ahead to have a scheduled event on day zero as you have done and publicize it and also, I'm sure you can get some workshops approved. It's important to have something sure and day zero is sure.
>> SALANIETA TAMANIKAIWAIMARO: Thank you. That concludes our session, and we apologize to the next workshop facilitators for eating into your time. Thank you. Thank you, everyone, for coming. We'll be in touch and create a mailing list.
(Session concluded at 11:00 a.m.)