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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>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Good afternoon, everyone. We'll start in a few minutes.
Welcome to our session and stay with us.
Thank you very much for being with us this afternoon. Can we close the door, please?
I'm Olga Cavalli, I'm the director of South School of Internet Governance and we have this workshop on The Role of Internet Governance Content in Shaping our Digital Futures, this is organized by the French government, ICANNWiki and the South School of governance. I have the pressure of being with my colleagues here this afternoon, I'll briefly introduce the speakers and introduce the workshop to you.
Our speakers are Emmanuel Adjovi, welcome, our other speaker is Charly Berthet from the French Digital Council.
Sorry, I cannot see ‑‑ honestly, this is too big. I'm short. I have to ‑‑ it is not very comfortable.
Not the first time that happened to me this week.
Come here.
Caterine Garcia Van Hoogstraten, she's from the faculty of Public Management, Law and Security from the Hague University of Applied Science and from the Netherlands.
We have our dear friend, Dustin Phillips. Johannes Ruhl, we have the Government of France ‑‑ am I missing anyone? Yes? No?
Why are we here? More than half of the Internet users live in Developing Countries and I have a reference here, 66%, maybe more. Think of the Internet growing in the borders, in the areas with no connectivity today, that number may change in the future and be even more. I would like to ask you here in this room, who of us is a native English speaker? Four.
Who of us is a native English speaker. We have ‑‑
>> (Speaking off microphone).
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I have been speaking English not all my life but most of the years of my life. I'm not an English-speaking person, my mother taught me Spanish. We have 50 people approximately and we have less than 10% native-English speakers, but we're using English as our common language for working. Which is fine. We all accept this. This is a big barrier for many people. Many of us live in Developing Countries, I can tell you in Latin America if someone says I do speak English, well, that may mean for many people that they can read, that they can perhaps write at a certain pace but if perhaps a native speaker speaks fast, maybe they cannot follow. Maybe they have some difficulties in participating, speaking in a dialogue, speaking in a workshop like this, speaking in a conference. That's a big limitation.
Also think about the content we generate on Internet Governance. It is ‑‑ it has complexity related with policy, sometimes it is related with technology terms, technology issues, and if you really are not into the language that may mean an important barrier.
For some of us that do care about diversity in the Internet, we think that the language and the content in ‑‑ the relevant content in the language, the quality content in other languages, it is a relevant issue for real inclusive, diverse Internet Governance ecosystem. Some of us here in the room have been working ‑‑ I don't know all of you ‑‑ apart from our speakers, I know some of you. I know some of us have this as a main concern.
I personally am involved in several capacity‑building capacities focused in Latin America, the region that I come from. We have training programs with simultaneous translation and we produce content in other languages and we let our colleagues from Latin America having more tools for relevant inclusiveness. Talking about this, I would like to address some questions to our panelist.
Think about high quality, sometimes the content in ‑‑ I'm thinking about a website I usually check, the content, relevant content is in English, sometimes when you try to find the same content in other languages, it is not that much, it is reduced, it is ‑‑ it doesn't even exist.
How can we improve that? What can we do to improve that? How can we give some steps towards that? I can tell you that I have been worried about this for many years, and many people tell me ‑‑ not now, years ago, they would come and tell me hey, you do speak English well, what is your problem? Well, it is not my problem, about you it is a problem of many other colleagues from Argentina, Latin America, they don't speak English, maybe they didn't have the opportunity to learn the language the way I did or maybe they don't have the gift. Sometimes it is an issue of being more adaptive to one language than others. I'm worried because I want all my people to have the same access to the knowledge I have.
For example, an example, when I started participating in ICANN in 2006 was my first meeting. All of the meetings were in English. When I requested translation, they told me I was totally crazy and it was very expensive. Now ICANN has simultaneous translation in most of the languages in six languages with I think is remarkable. I always commend the organization for having done that effort and also the documents that they produce are also mainly translated into this language. I have recently published a call for applications for ‑‑ I'm a member of the Board of ISOC and we're seeking for new members for next year. I insisted and translated the call for applications into Spanish and French because apart from English, I thought it was good for other colleagues to have that information in other languages. We don't have to lose the hope, we have to always insist. There are many tools that also help our work in translating and generating the content and having said this introduction, I will stop talking.
Our colleagues have many ideas to share with us.
Till ask to our dear panelist one question. I will ask them to talk 3 minutes approximately and we will open the floor for comments and then we have another question for our panelist.
The first question is: How can we improve the diversity of Internet Governance to promote an inclusive ecosystem of this Internet that we all like?
You can present your colleagues.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: I'm from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and I'm the French representative GAK, today we raise an important question on the diversity and in general, how can we put some balances in the multistakeholder model. For that, we have first question, let me ‑‑ it is also for me ‑‑ so we have Emmanuel Adjovi, head of international Society of The international organization in France and he's responsible for Internet Governance, cybersecurity and digital economy. He's the international organization of the GAK representative and a visiting professor to Telecom.
>> EMMANUEL ADJOVI: I want to start by introducing my organization, international organization of Francophonie, it is an intergovernmental organization with 84 State members and we have 58 full members and 26 observers. The first job of our organization is to promote diversity, linguistic and cultural diversity. This is the first job of our organization.
How can we improve Internet Governance content? The main action which must be done to improve Internet Governance content should be to balance the power in Internet Governance. The first step can be to develop the diversity, implement national strategy and develop a diversity of Internets, establish a body of authority, the diversity of the decision‑making bodies and monitor development. This is important because diversity is the way to establish, to set up this to organize the inclusive participation, attending Internet Governance.
Thank you.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: The second contributor, Charly Berthet, a lawyer working as Chief Officer of Legal and Institutional Affairs at the French Digital Council and specializes in the matter of Digital Rights and currently representor for the French Parliamentary Mission on Artificial Intelligence.
>> CHARLY BERTHET: Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Just to answer your question, I'm not a native English speaker, and my English is quite rusty because I don't practice it often. Please excuse us.
I should start by presenting my institution, I think it is a good illustration of how diversity can be put at the service in our case of public policy, of policy deliberation. While the French Digital Council is an independent and versatile commission, it gathers entrepreneurs, academics, representatives of Civil Society, activists, thinkers, you name it for the third, and they're all appointed by the French Prime Minister for the digital expertise and not only, but there is always some members that don't strictly come from the digital world. We have had artists, farmers, the reason is simple, we have to think a digital society that's made for everyone, not just the happy few.
The council is committed to a major purpose, it to help the government elaborate, shape, implement digital public policies and it is worth noting that for the first time in five years of existence, the chairperson of the council was actually going to be a woman. It always has been gender equal, but we have had Maria Grant as the chairperson, as a Chairwoman, and this is a good sign for diversity.
Our role is really to capitalize on this wide diversity in order to identify problems, issues that need to be addressed and to propose innovative solutions to tackle them. Apart from this mission, the council has really meant to be an interface between the government and the digital society at large, we like to consider ourselves as a public lobby, a lobby for those that don't have one, those that don't have the time, the money to assert their interests in front of public authorities.
Just regarding digital inclusion, we believe the Internet has changed. Like you said, when ICANN, we can take ICANN as an example, 75% of the Internet users at that time lived in Developing Countries and mostly North America and Europe, nowadays more than 66% of Internet users live in Developing Countries and the numbers keep growing. By 20 it 30 we expect an overwhelming majority of users will access the Internet from Asia, Africa, Latin America, most being non‑native English speakers.
Yet, today, the government model does not quite reflect this diversity. We know that because the figures are public, 40% of ICANN community leaders come from North America, more than 60% are native English speakers and women are only a small amount of community leaders. It is impossible to ignore the revolution of the Internet users. This Internet community has changed, it will change again and it is happening very, very fast. For ICANN, for example, we know that things are moving, things are changing, but the governance in general, the governance structure of the Internet in general, they do things where they keep pace with the rapidly changing context. We favor the proposal, for example, for the benefit of the creation of an office for Diversity & Inclusion within ICANN which would gather and analyze data regarding diversity and could make, for example, concrete proposals to effectively enhance diversity within ICANN.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Thank you very much.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I will go to my left. You're from Peru, the mother tongue, it is Spanish and I guess she speaks also ‑‑ how do you say, Netherlands or ‑‑
>> CATERINE GARCIA VAN HOOGSTRATEN: Dutch.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: And English, perhaps other languages. So she's also a very multi‑lingual person, but she can bring us her perspective, especially being an academic and producing content all the time about this issue.
Welcome to our workshop.
>> CATERINE GARCIA VAN HOOGSTRATEN: Thank you, you forgot to mention. I'm also visiting professor from the School of Internet Governance, and that's actually a great venue to meet different students from the Americas and the world that attend our school.
Of course, being based in the Hague, based in the Netherlands, I also have the chances to meet ‑‑ at the Hague University, for example, we have students from 25 different nationalities. I'm currently teaching different courses in concerns to Internet Governance, cybersecurity, privacy, technology information. I notice that one of the main challenges is to try to in order to make the knowledge, the knowledge sharing more closer to the students, the international students is always to be able to translate it and make it closer to the reality.
I always use case studies. I always use case law of their countries of origin. I think whenever I use case law that considers the country of region of our students, already is the first step towards connecting the content with your own reality. What I want to make ‑‑ the point I want to make here, it is the point of connection. How do we connect content with a target group? So then my first best preacts to share here would be always to use case studies in which ‑‑ and case law, in which the students are familiar with because whether there are courses concerning Constitution law that has already been dealing with cybersecurity issues, privacy issues, or even if we have forgotten that it is now for instance well discussed in Latin America, different Constitution course, they have already given a solution or decision on cases dealing with right to be forgotten for instance.
If you make that connection, you're able to reach out and to do a strong capacity building and that's my second point.
I think how do we start whenever somebody asks me what do you do at the University, and I think if we think of professors, academics as capacity builder agents I think that's a very good way to acknowledge that's our role, that we are there not only for teaching courses but also to make the connections I mentioned first and from time to time, of course, in my courses I also use originally for lawyers we use a lot of Latin terminology because many of the case law, for instance, due process, everything that has to do with criminal law is still very much related with Latin roots. I also try to use that in order to socialize with the students and I ask them so how do you know these institutions in your own language. Then once again, making connections, making connections besides case law, besides case studies, trying to look for the connections in their own language of the students and I think that's been so far very successful in the seminars I'm involved and I think all in all it is very much about the work of capacity building that we do from the academia. We have a very important role there and also, of course, to have at least when you write articles, you try to at least have the asterisk also written in two languages in order to reach out to the target audience you're trying to reach.
I think that would be my recommendation so far. Connecting, using case law, case studies of the country of origin and all the wording that's there is related to the reality and the context of the target audience. I think it cannot be more beneficial for them as well.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much. It comes to mind an anecdote I want to share, when we organized the School of Internet Governance in Washington D.C. in the organization of American states there was students from United States or English speaker, they were students from Latin America and many from Brazil. Instantly when they knew each other, there were three groups instantly created, one in Spanish, Portuguese, one in English, it was just spontaneous and they gather together because of the language skills very, very quickly.
Thank you for your comments.
Can you share your ‑‑ you're a very good Spanish speaker ‑‑ you don't speak Spanish, you have ‑‑
>> You have held this session so long, my accent is the closest it gets to you. Thank you, Olga.
This is the second time we were in a similar discussion bringing Best Practices in the second IGF in a row. I'm very thankful for the opportunity of being here.
I’d like to highlight the importance of the initiatives of the South School of Internet Governance, which is the place for a contact to leave a bit more of a Brazilian reality and to delve more into a sharing experience with Latin American of friends, identifying common problems as things that we can transpose from one country to the other and it is due to this terrific work by Olga and Dalila Rahmouni.
Brazil has 207 million inhabitants and we're around 350 million Portuguese speakers around the world. In Brazil, it is not very easy, and it is not very easy to convince people to try to explore another language. It is usually enough to speak to the 207 million that you have as your neighbors.
Yet, I believe you can see in last year in the international events and the IGF a growing presence of Brazilians and this year we have around 30 young people selected by different institutions sent here exactly to mingle, interact, explore that. I think that's Best Practice number one, invest in the young people that are going to look at the future.
I remember, I haven't mentioned it, but I think it is an interesting thing to highlight in a Forum like that, when I was ‑‑ I happened to be in the post of the faculty in my school for two years and we had a program called science without borders which offers Brazilian students an opportunity to study abroad, a fully funded opportunity to study abroad. We did fill all of the positions to Portugal, we filled all of the positions to Spanish‑speaking countries. Out of 20 to 21 positions for English‑speaking countries, we returned 19 of them. Of course, we have to think in bound language issues, producing content in your own language, and we're working on that, but also this interaction has to be promoted. It doesn't happen ‑‑ it is not streamlined if we don't deploy initiatives like the capacity initiatives we're talking about here.
I haven't ‑‑ the relevance of the content that Olga mentioned at the beginning is very interesting. It is cruel also, for example, that for an ‑‑ I have been ‑‑ I haven't been ‑‑ I haven't written a full paper in Portuguese in four years or so. I have written blog posts, smaller reports, executive summaries, but not full papers for the last four years. This is cruel. I'm depriving those essentially funding my work, research, from that output. This is not a right output, but yet there is ‑‑ there is the outreach and there is the relevance of the publication in the academic world we're forced to engage in this environment and that is a cruel outcome that we're forced to live with. I'll leave it here for the time being.
I'm sure we'll have another opportunity to interact.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Claud, I write most things in English, why, because it is the way that you can reach more people, it is to write in English.
It is cruel but if you write in Spanish, someone says why don't you translate it? Could be good to have it in English, then we can spread it more widely. I didn't think about it. Thank you for bringing this up. Very interesting.
Jennifer, you want to say something? Jennifer is from a very interesting organization, DotAsia, I would like to stress the fact that DotAsia was the first organization I can remember that brought young people to the IGF. Is that right? There are many programs, they're fantastic, I really like them, I also like to promote young participants, and they did that in Egypt and for me, it was ‑‑ I told Edmond at the time, this is very good. They were the first ones, and now there is a program from Internet Society, program from fellowship on ICANN and the youth program from ISOC with a youth program.
You were really pioneering that idea of bringing young people that Claude has just stressed as a major change so let us know what you think and also you have another challenge, because your mother tongue must be Chinese, then you have the it challenge of the script, it is not only the language, but it is also written in a different script.
Welcome.
>> Jennifer Chung: Thank you for the kind introduction.
Good afternoon, I'm Jennifer Chung, I do work for an organization called DotAsia and we're the sponsoring and registry operator for the top‑level domain name DotAsia. Being a non‑profit organization as Olga mentioned, we have a lot of community works and initiatives where we do try to promote adoption of the Internet across the Asia‑Pacific. A really flagship program that we have is the youth program. We did bring a lot of young delegates to IGF and we will continue to do so and also to Forums of ICANN and others as well. What we really want to stress, I want to echo my colleague Claude here, investing in young people, it is very important when you think about it, the next billion coming online, the native tongue is not English. Mine is not English. It is very difficult to get people aware of the possibilities and opportunities to participate in something like Internet Governance. For them to be aware of it in the first place, and then the second place, it is for them to learn the processes in a language not their own is even more difficult. Even English speakers, they don't think about this in everyday life. So three points I would like to put forward in our, I guess, learning through youth capacity building, the content needs to be in a simple language. It needs to be in language that laypeople understand. It needs to be in a language that's local, of course, because when you have translation you lose a nuance of what makes each language special, the characteristics of the language, and thirdly, it has got to be tailored to the target audience. When you talk to young people, you need to be at their level and speak their language. When you talk to perhaps young professionals, it will be a different sort of way to engage them, and, of course, when talking to people already working, government officials, IGOs, that's another ‑‑ yet another way of tailoring that language to include them into this conversation. Maybe I'll just leave it here and give it back to Olga.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you, Jennifer. You bring another anecdote I want to share. I participate in many calls with native English speakers. They usually ‑‑ what I ‑‑ I beg to them is not to use very ‑‑ how can I say it in English ‑‑ local expressions, I don't note them. Also you may come from Australia, from England, United States ‑‑ United States is a huge country, so many different languages and accents, special words. What do I do, every time they use the special words that I cannot understand, I ask what is that? Of course, I can go and Google that. It is easy now. Immediately they say I'm sorry, that means this, this, this, I usually share the way that I say that in Spanish. I usually tell them, well, if you're learning in Spanish, I would put you in the position of ‑‑ I would talk like I talk with my friends very quickly with all of the Spanish we use in Argentina, it is a bit different. You will have a challenge moment. You won't follow me. Immediately people realize that.
We also ‑‑ I think you made a very good point. try to make it in plain language without local expressions in whatever language you're using and try to be in a simple way explaining right to the point. that's a very good point.
Dustin Phillips, you're a native English speaker. Tell us your experience.
By the way, let me tell you, Dustin and Jackie ‑‑ you want to say something? No?
Jackie and Dustin, they work a very interesting project which is called ICANNWiki, go to the website and see it, it has content in English and some of us are contributing with translations into Spanish, Swahili, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese. You will say that.
They do something also very, very nice. It is not only words, they do ‑‑ how do you say in English ‑‑ very nice cartoons. If you go to the booth, if you go to the booth that they usually have here or in ICANN meeting, they take a picture of you and do a very nice cartoon. It is a visual language that says a lot, not only words but images.
Dustin, the floor is yours.
>> DUSTIN PHILLIPS: Thank you.
What you mentioned about the cartoons we produce, actually it is an important aspect of making Internet Governance more diverse. I had a lot of other things I could talk about but I have been on this panel with Claude and Jen several times and they stole everything else I have to say.
It is having a sense of community. There are different ways to build community, but it can be hard to enter a community where it is largely driven by native English speakers using their slang terms that others may not understand. Providing a resource that's accessible, but also builds community, that's what we try to do at ICANN Wiki, the premise of the project is similar to Wikipedia where we build all of our content collaboratively through the community and we encourage this content development through fun give aways and fun incentives such as the caricatures and then if you come to an ICANN meeting you stop by the booth, you can contribute content others find useful, you get the cartoon printed off and maybe later down the road at the conference you have something to break the ice with because you both have this cartoon and maybe you don't have other relatable experiences.
Just providing fun, innovative ways to build and drive communities that there are certainly other ways we can do this, but we truly believe when you're on boarding new people and had bringing in newcomers, you really need to provide them with a sense of community and show them that their work, their contribution is valued within the community. Because if they feel like an outsider, and they don't feel like their work is being appreciated, then it is less likely that they'll continue to return and develop their skills to a point where they are contributing meaningfully.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: What's your feeling ‑‑ how long have you been working for the project? How do you feel this translation, the content in other languages, how do you feel it from the side that most of the content was in English and it is evolving towards other languages?
>> DUSTIN PHILLIPS: Both Jackie and I have been working on the project for two and a half, three years. When we started, we had a handful of languages and Articles in Spanish and Chinese. But really not anything substantive.
We had 600 Articles in English and we approached the translation in different ways. We had organizational partnerships where we would have in‑kind translations, which is great, it is important to get that content out there but what we found effective and engaging is to reach out to locals in each region and to develop small regional communities that work together to develop content and translate content that's not on their language, but also locally relevant. Having the initiative driven by local stakeholders, they're able to determine which content will be more valuable for their community whereas if Jackie and I were to sit in our office thinking we think these 100 Articles are relevant and pay to have them translated, it is great that the content is available in other languages, but it may not be the most relevant content for them. Another aspect, in addition to translating it, making it relevant, it is making it easy to find. There is a lot of content out there on Internet Governance, but it is hard to find it. Somebody may be interested in cybersecurity and they may not realize that 30 minutes away there is an event in their region, their language happening that would be of interest to them and they may not realize that there are several organizations in their region working on issues that they care about that they could get involved with. You have to have the content available in a local language that's relevant and accessible and easy to find.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I think this relates with what was being said in working with students, young people, people in a community, bringing the content towards their interest because that will make much more into their interest.
>> Exactly.
If you would allow me, I would like to ‑‑ as of this year, actually, I invited ‑‑ Dustin was around the Hague area. So I said come on, I'm teaching Civil and Political Rights for four years in a row. Since this year I started an Internet Governance hub in the course. I took the chance that Dustin was in the Hague for that time, we actually hosted an Internet Governance hub of students of one of my courses and I think it was quite successful because we have a representative of the IGF participating, they got a sense of I want to also highlight, the sense of community that comes in creating a hub in any course that's created or linked to Internet Governance and so they had the Chapel length to present themselves on topic so we have the same format that we have here and it was ‑‑ it was I think a very good experience and I think so far that we managed to create that sense of community by creating and having an Internet Governance hub in one of my courses. We're going to follow this tradition every year now. And I'll share later on when this happens and usually if you want to collaborate with us with the Internet Governance hubs that we have at the Hague University of applied sciences, contact me, please.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I will give the floor to my dear colleague Dalila Rahmouni to address questions from the audience.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Questions, comments, experiences to share.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Tell your name.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Introduce.
>> Digital defender partnership. I want to say I believe these discussions are very important. Basically the language is the precondition for meaningful engagement. If you don't speak the same language with the people with whom you're trying to work on the same initiatives, that creates a lot of problems, for example, for us we currently have the Internet freedom network for southeastern Europe and Eurasia and we have some kind of a regional gathering, it creates it's problem, the understanding, that the speakers we invite, they're the people who use English like on a daily basis and they're fine with this language, but then people coming from this region, mostly they are Russian speaking, using national languages and this is a bit difficult for them to understand because even though there is simultaneous translation provided, sometimes the concepts are lost. Is this what you meant? Not really and then it is very time consuming to explain the concepts and I also wanted to relate to the example which was already brought up about Articles and papers, I honestly hated to write all of the short summaries in other languages, but then during one of the discussions with a colleague from abroad, they said that this is basically the only way for some people to find some papers on this topic at all and I understood that probably all of the time that you're spending on this, this summary, it is not really wasted, because it is the way to find that something is written on this topic and somehow even to ‑‑ you can use then the Google translator for the whole contents.
Also, I was for some time teaching courses on ICT for development in Internet Governance and we have had mixed groups of people, this was the English-speaking course and we have had people from abroad and Ukraine in one group a and when you need to explain the concept of what's Internet Governance, but people even don't get all the terminology in English. You come back to your own language explaining what this means and then trying to explain the concept itself.
It is really very important to discuss this issue and to bring them to this type of meeting.
Thank you.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Let me tell you, your English, it is very good.
It was very quick! It was difficult for me to follow.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. Let me congratulate you for organizing this session. I'm from Senegal, I represent African Civil Society on Information Society, it is a platform of 500NGOs across the continent and we really believe that if there is one failure from the WSIS it is the one of digital linguistic diversity and it is a paradox because Internet should have been a way for us to understand each other because we can understand very quickly, we can also put on the web, but what we see, digital ‑‑ the diversity, it is not going at the same speed of the Internet and we in Africa, we're confronted really with the issue of language because if you look at the IGF itself, if you look at the call for proposals and all of these things, everything is English. Last year, for example, I wanted also at WSIS Forum, and the WSIS, it is in English, if you want to apply, if you don't have a project in English, you're out and it is a problem. I don't know where we can solve it and who will solve it. It is really a big issue. For example, I'm trying to get my website in French and English. If you go in Africa, we have four official languages or five and we have African languages, and how can we make Internet digests, Internet Governance digests for the population? It is a huge market but all of the people are out of the process because they don't speak English. I'm just launching this call, joining my voice to yours to tell that it is an issue that's unsolved and no one wants to solve it and business is making business, it is normal. We understand. In fact, we started 25 years ago at same levels, 0 Internet connection, 0 access to Internet, and now some are 80%, some are at 20%, and if you look at Africa, we're really left behind. We're trying, for example, to translate everything, courses, curriculums in Arabic, in French, in port disease, and we're not talking about African languages, and it is a huge issue and we're really ‑‑ if there is in I initiative on this side, it is really welcome, because it is ‑‑ it is the most important digital ‑‑ it is not literacy, it is how we can consume what's produced in the Internet and as a leader of the African NGOs, I can tell you what is produced is not digested by the people. I'm not talking about Africans that are not ‑‑ it is not ‑‑ even the certain servants, they don't understand and I'm just asking what are the solutions.
Thank you very much.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: A comment, I think a challenge we can add to our conversation is that there are countries with several languages, some are official, some are not, I come from a region that we're lucky, we speak the same language almost in all of the countries, Latin American, Portuguese, it is a close language to Spanish, we can speak something in between H but I see in Asia and in Africa countries that in the same country you have many, many different languages and die elects. That adds a new dimension.
Sorry, I'm interrupting you.
You want to add something?
>> If at least we can ensure that the official languages are taken into account in the global foras, it would be a good move. This is not the case. Even for the WSIS prize or applying just to have a paper at Internet Governance Forum, for example, if you don't speak English, you are out. It is just the reality.
>> I think it is important to develop the ideas in Africa and local content in the original language. Because in Africa, we have 2,000 languages, then we develop the ideas in original language, such as Swahili, others, so on. I think it is the way to serve this.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: We have a queue.
Let me give our floor to ‑‑ one second.
Am I missing someone? Go ahead. Thank you for such a vivid participation.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from South Korea. I want to share experience as a youth in this room.
My first time to get engaged with the Internet Governance was the ICANN meeting, before that, even though Korea is a leading country for the Internet, we don't know ‑‑ we don't know about the Internet Governance at all. After participating in the youth programs like NexGen, ICANN, other programs, I can't ‑‑ other young people from all over the world, they have an interest in the Internet Governance of things. I think that there is things with the young generation meeting together, I think mostly right now in the Internet Governance field, in most ‑‑ the people, they're younger, they're ‑‑ they're older than the young generation, but once we get together together, gather together, I think we have a fresh idea. With.
For example, recently in South Korea, we have also the language problems as well, even though the mother tongue is Korean, but partially we also use Chinese. For the Chinese characters, some countries use for the official language such as China, Hong Kong, Japan, even South Korea, so even though they ‑‑ there are a lot of conflicts but when the younger generation gather together and we figure out the better solutions, because we don't know about very complicated backgrounds. This is my point, that ‑‑ the youth program, it is really helpful.
For this time, I'm here at IGF with the fellowship from the Korean government, the agency named Korean Internet and security agency. It means, the Korean government, they realize the needs that young generations needed for the next generation of the Internet. Even though this is my wish, you know, if you find out some young people in IGF, the other Internet meetings, please encourage them to participate more and more.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm from Sierra Leone. The idea of digital divide will be with us for a while. There will be a number and it will stop until the content is localized. What I agree with is that we need to localize the development. For example, what some groups in some of my villages, the villages, what they have done, they have adapted WhatsApp, they can't write, but they know how to press the video, they know how to press the audio. They have their own groups, but they're sending messages by video and audio and they're now starting to use certain symbols that they have generated to indicate certain items balls they're mostly farmers and they need to send messages back and forth. They're not using English, not any language and using video and audio and they have symbols that they have now adapted. I can't share all of the videos about you it is one thing, we have to localize it, that's the only way. Otherwise, these five big languages are not going to solve the problem.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Thank you very much.
Can you introduce yourself, please.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Hello. I come from Brazil. I'm a part of the CGI program, youth. I would like to say thank you for introducing the group from Brazil, the participation, they're doing a great job for youth to go to events since 2015 with a partnership through Internet Society, a youth at IGF program.
I'm here thanks to the scholarship provided by them in this case.
Continuing, I would like to highlight the job of youth observatory, a special interest group from ISOC. It is composed of youth and for youth people in this scenario of unclogs for everyone, each part of the globe. It began with youth from regions of Latin American, Caribbean and we have youth from all over the globe. In the year we have many participatory events and we offer scholarships for the youth to go and participate actively. With the youth perspective, the content of the barriers and the website, it translates for versions that we use, English, Portuguese, Spanish, yes, okay.
So continuing, I would highlight the importance of ICANN initiative for Portuguese language because today we have in Brazil initiatives like an institute that are doing a great job translating content and creating content for us. We are making more active participants in the environment, my question is more technical, Dustin Phillips, I participate in the Portuguese version, it is not clear for me, it is more technical, it is not clear how can quality control work for each language? There is ‑‑ the content, they grew very much. We have ‑‑ okay. How this works, very good, how to have this work.
And the idea that the drawing is very interesting, it is fun, maybe I'll get one of mine.
This is all. Thank you.
>> DUSTIN PHILLIPS: We would love to get you a caricature, first of all.
Secondly, I think there are two ways to answer this question. I think I'll answer it from a general perspective of quality control and then I'll hand it over to Claude because he's been involved in our Portuguese translation initiative and like I mentioned, we truly give the local communities the autonomy over that content creation as long as they follow our primary guidelines, which are that the content needs to be factual, it needs to be written from a neutral perspective, and it needs to be well‑referenced and related to Internet Governance in some meaningful way. As long as our contributors operate in good faith and follow these basic principles, then we don't curate very much at all. We step in when somebody clearly violates our terms.
In terms of providing the kind of quality control in the different language sites, it is a control for different types of Portuguese, different scripts of Chinese we're not experts on that. It is better to delegate that to the local communities, and when we had our edit‑athon in Copenhagen, it was cool to see the Portuguese‑speaking community that we had them kind of break off in their own group and discuss how they were going to handle the standards of the Portuguese language and so maybe Claude can speak on that a little bit more.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: We have Jennifer in the queue and ‑‑
>> I'll speak to this topic. In Copenhagen, it was my second, third contact with ICANN and we started looking at different aspects, interesting aspects, Portuguese in Portugal and Brazil are not necessarily the same and the community of language of Portuguese speaking countries, the term Internet Governance itself, it is (speaking Portuguese) in Brazil (speaking Portuguese) in Portugal. We started to look at this from a more linguistic perspective. It will be released and flow more easier when we have the standards and this thing happens to all ICANN constituency, when we have a fixed structure, I think we can go easily with that.
>> I want to give the floor to Jonathon. I kept you waiting, there was dialogue in the room. Welcome.
>> Jonathan Zook: I'm from the innovator network foundation. I want to say something a bit controversial.
That is that language may not be at the core of lack of understanding of Internet Governance because if you look at English speaking countries it is a very small minority of people that know anything about what's going on in Internet Governance, even though they could read all of the documents, if they wanted to.
It may have more to do with the channels of communication.
In other words, the people that are reading the documents in English‑speaking documents, those analogues people in other countries very often speak another language, French, English, something like that, because of cultural differences in terms of where people go to get their information, you know, whether it is radio, television, groups, et cetera, you know, like user groups and things like that, it means that the information isn't coming to them and that it is a bigger problem, in fact, than the inability to read it once they see it, just something to think about. .
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much, Jonathan.
Any comments?
>> Claude: I was going to say to Dustin that we need French Wiki, an ICANN Wiki.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: We have to move to the second question.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: You want to present the seconded question?
The second question, thank you, Jonathan, for bringing the controversy to the dialogue. That's the idea to shake us a little bit.
How can the different stakeholders’ country bought to the Internet Governance model and content? Before moving to our panelists to give comments, let me say that I have made a big mistake in forgetting important languages in Latin America, the pre‑‑ how do I say it ‑‑ the preColombian languages, they're from the communities that still live in our region, which are many, and their languages are ‑‑ thanks to the Internet, they're having now a space where they can develop and their communities can live there. I'm not so the much familiar with it, but I made a big mistake in forgetting them, they're part of our language diversity and culture in Latin America and, of course, the same has happened in other regions in the world.
We have heard from academia, I wondered about our colleagues from experts in French, I wondered if you could give us insight in how the content in French could be developed, especially from the experience of your organizations.
>> I want to say that today Internet Governance is multilevel governance, it is not yet multistakeholder system. When one goes out of ‑‑ I don't usually call atmosphere ‑‑ one can see that the experience of the multistakeholder model are not yet conclusive. In many countries at the national level, business and Civil Society representatives are not involved in Internet Governance. At the international level, particularly at ICANN, government, Civil Society have a marginal role in Internet Governance. It is necessary to have this multistakeholder system and we need to have inclusive, democratic Internet Governance. For this, it is important to highlight the capacity building. It is very important points.
Other points from my experience is the idea developing, and we need to set up a national geography to empower people in Internet Governance. I think this is where I want to leave.
I give the floor to another person.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I'm writing. Sorry. You made a very, very interesting point. it is important. How ‑‑ because sometimes you provide the content, but that's not enough. You need someone that perhaps shares with you and helps you dive into the content and finding what was said your interest in the content, maybe it is too general but you can always find the interest in the content and then it needs some experience from other colleagues that are in the ‑‑ I always try to do that with my students and with my colleagues in Latin America and help them guide them through the different contents, but trying to focus on their interests.
Who wants to follow?
>> CHARLY BERTHET: Probably the experience of the French Digital Council.
Just to say that inclusiveness, it is a democratic requirement for Internet Governance especially, it is critical in determining the future path of the network, it has major consequences on the global economic balance, on the digital rights and the people and shaping really the contours of the digital society and to put it differently, the stakes are too high just to ‑‑ it affects everyone's life and it is too important to be just handled by gigs really. The facts are, very few people know about what's going on at ICANN, at IGF, at W3C, like it has been mentioned. If you ask any French business or association, the vast majority won't know what's going on in this organization.
Many don't even know that they exist. The cost of entry into this debates, it is extremely high for the reasons we have mentioned.
At the console we have laid out three proposals, broad proposals to reach the public. First, we need to think of ways to enable the people's meaningful participation once they arrive in the governance organizations. So we have talked about training, capacity building.
Second, we need to create a framework that allows these organizations to find those people in order for the people to know about the organizations. How can the organizations proactively find the people effected by Internet Governance, and thirdly, it is mentioned, we need to think of channels of communications in order to reach a larger public, not only the happy few.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Thank you very much.
Any observation?
>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: Thank you for the opportunity. I would like to draw upon two very insightful comments from our friends one about the localization of content then, I have been young for a long time now. When I started being young, we looked at content in a way, there was a method, a dynamic of looking at content. You brought an insight of ‑‑ an absolutely different way of looking for and producing content, generational habits matter a lot here. When we look at the way of producing content for this generation, it might not be a good idea to look at the way that the past generation produced and used this content. The insight is perfect in this way.
Another problem that was pointed out concerning the participation is that it is already less tragic that Portuguese is not a language, second language, it is ‑‑ and also to acknowledge not only the historical perspective, but others, Brazil, other languages in Latin America, but the thing is, the work in Internet Governance is not on site. The work in Internet Governance is intersessional by nature, it happens between sessions and then there's a problem. If we do have an effort for translation in the sessions, when together, it is much harder, the effort is much harder to do it enter session airy. At this moment, if you're not English, you're out. There is an attempt to include on site, if you don't know English, you're out of the intersessional work.
I was checking out the Twitter feed for the session, I was a bit worried, because everything that was Tweeted in my last intervention, it was very negative, very precise is exactly what I said. It makes me look very pessimistic, disagreeing a bit with my friend panelist, that the multistakeholder governance, it is not yet there, I cannot disagree. There are no ‑‑ there is no evidence to make me disagree.
I would like to see that in our time Civil Society already has a much higher voice than it used to have 20, 30 years ago.
It is far from what we need and still far better than what we had.
We're preparing, for example ‑‑ I understand your challenge, Caterine, and I have been discussing about offering short videos of Internet Governance for Latin America, we can do it in Portuguese, we can cover Portuguese, English, French, we can't cover all of them but in Africa you would have a much larger challenge than that.
To overturn the pessimistic note that I left in my last intervention, I would leave you with this one.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Let me tell you, you made my day with one of your sentences, I have been young for a long time. I love it. I don't have to pay copyright for that?
>> CLAUDIO LUCENA: I'm a free culture kind of guy.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I have been young for a long time. I love it.
You want to add something now?
>> CATERINE GARCIA VAN HOOSTRATEN: For the dialects, thank you for catching that, all the preColombian languages, dialects that we have in Latin America, I have to say that I have recently learned about how Peru, we have a colleague from the University using computational technology, they have a research group which they're now persisting with all of the dialects and the goal, the aim is to later on get these persons, these communities access to the digital committee. He hasn't started with this but he's crowdsourced it, it brings me to the point that we can crowdsource, you know, the understanding of Internet Governance and those little steps that may look very challenging indeed because it is not only Africa that has many, many dialects, but also if we look at one of the dialects within the region, it has different variations so they speak in the Andes of Peru, it is different than what is spoken in Bolivia, so on, so forth.
Initiatives like this one, where you combine technology for good, and crowdsourcing these amongst the communities, I think I may have a positive vote for this and I think it is important to share that as well.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much.
Other colleagues want to add something at this point? Comments from the floor?
I want to share experience I made with one group of students I had once. I used to teach in the diplomacy career of Argentina. A thing sometimes we do with our students is that they have to write reports. Before I started to work with them, the reports were made in paper. I kept the paper. I put a note, reviewed them. That's it.
I thought about the contents that were very interesting, some of them, because they had to be related to issues from Argentina, Latin America with relationships and international commerce and I thought why not putting them into Wikipedia. The project came from doing a paper, working a paper and the obligation was to do it in Wikipedia. Before publishing it, it was before reviewed by the teachers, the major issue was, it has to be written in Spanish because one thing that we realized was that the content in Spanish, in Wikipedia, is not as large as you can imagine because the Spanish‑speaking population is quite large, but you could have more content perhaps in German than the population is less than in Spanish than Spanish or Portuguese.
The idea was to enhance the content in Spanish and they were so happy that their work was published for the general public to access for the general community. It was very successful.
Unfortunately, some authorities didn't like that in the long term, we did that for several years and Article 7 has been updated since then. And the possibility of keeping on doing that with time. Perhaps if we at the University think about stakeholders and think about universities that we usually produce content or produce the reports or papers, and if we can get them online with the corresponding licensing which is whatever it is, I'm not an expert in that field, that has to be taken into account as well, if the content is available for the general public online, that makes it much more valuable and I like wick peeled I can't a lot. I think it is a valuable, very useful, I think Wiki is a valuable tool.
We have some minutes left.
We have more comments from our colleagues.
Jennifer, yes, please.
>> JENNIFER CHUNG: Thank you for giving me the floor again.
I thought I might provide just a little bit of insight from Technical Community. I think that might be interesting here because DotAsia is considered part of the Technical Community because we're a registry. Maybe answering the question you had, given the second one, about different stakeholders contributing to the Internet Governance model. I feel like a lot of people feel that the Technical Community, you know, you can involve them in the technical capabilities, infrastructure, implementation of certain policies, but it is actually really very important to include all stakeholders across Civil Society, governments, business, academia and the Technical Community throughout the entire policy development process from scoping, drafting, refining the public Consultation and implementation, because if you have the policy concerns, you will be able to best fined a multifaceted and multistakeholder solution if you include everybody at the table.
Now, I don't disagree with what my colleague Claudio and the colleagues who also said that it may not be the perfect or ideal way we think about if you think about the multistakeholder model, this is something that hopefully we can refine and make better and improve upon.
Another thing that I wanted to highlight because we didn't really talk about it here, maybe just throw this idea out to the people here in the room, it is the idea of Internet Governance being a broad and narrow approach. Maybe the narrow approach would be talking about governance of the infrastructure, governance of the Internet and then you're talking about the more broader approach when you talk about Internet Governance on the Internet so you talk about something that's more. Maybe rights come into play, policy decisions come into play and maybe, you know, there is a political consideration as well.
I just want to say that this development process really needs to be holistic and include everybody at the table from beginning to end so that we can actually find a solution that best fits everybody, not just maybe put ‑‑ for example, the Technical Community at the very end when having to deploy, not include the policy and Civil Rights concerns which, you know, is extremely important in this day and age.
Thank you.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much, Jennifer.
You want to add something? We have 10 minutes. You have more comments? Positive comments?
>> A positive one. Yeah. It is the end of the day. I don't want to look bad from now on!
A 30‑second update. A positive one, Olga.
As a result, not only ‑‑ as a result of the dialogues that we're holding, in the multistakeholder spaces, there has been from last year to this one an initiative that was ‑‑ I want to acknowledge the contribution and the effort of Brazil with CGI but also with the Portuguese branches, and, of course, I'm sure that there is other involvement and it is my sin not to acknowledge personally the involvement of other Portuguese speaking countries, but there are, absolutely, involvement of them. We're holding on ‑‑ we're organizing a seed group to organize from May to June, 2018 an Internet Governance Forum for the Portuguese speaking countries, it is a positive comment rather than the pessimistic one I read in Twitter. I credit it to this space and the discussion we have had in the IGF.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Before I give the floor to Dalila Rahmouni, I think that the Portuguese speaking ‑‑ you know I love Portuguese as a language. I love it very much! I tried to speak as much as I can.
You have a real challenge. You're spread all over the world. It is not usually the issue with the languages, for example, the Spanish speaking people, Latin America, Spain, Americas and Spain, you are spread all over the world and it brings another challenge of distance thanks to Internet, everything is close now. I give the floor to you.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: I would like to just add for the conclusion to highlight the work of many actors in the ICANN, in the IGF, about the diversity to give you an example of a concrete action. Within the ICANN, we try to underline the necessity of having some groups and structure independent, a long‑term structure to implement a policy of diversity, the proposition, it is called Office of Diversity but we can give it another title.
Just to underline that what's important is to have a long‑term policy of diversity. We cannot make so, we need translation, we need someone in this group because he is African, from Latin American, I think to have something like this, the continuity of the diversity policy, we need a structure, a strategy, something very voluntary and if you want the proposition, it is in the ICANN website concerning the work and the Office of diversity, it is an objective to have a long‑term strategy on diversity.
Thank you.
>> OLGA CAVALLI: I have summarized the main points given rise today. The diversity indicators, the diversity of the decision‑making environment, the Diversity & Inclusion within ICANN and perhaps in other organizations, why not. Use of case studies which students are familiar with, the country, the communities, something that's released vent for them, what you understand better and what impacts you directly will be of your interest and you will be much into it and we produce the document and use the language of your own. It is important to have abstracts translated giving the idea of what's the content of the full document and the full document is not available in other languages, at least you have an abstract ‑‑ it is so different, the abstract of it.
Invest in young people. I love that, young forever ‑‑ what was it? I have been young for many years. I love that! That made my day!
>> I'm not tired yet!
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Me either! Content needs to be in simple language, plain ‑‑ so everyone can understand it. Targeted to the audience, if it is for young, target it to young people, if it is for the Technical Community that they understand and they're not bored because it is so simple, if it is for lawyers, governments, and find fun innovative ways like ICANN Wiki does with cartoons. Create content of relevance to the communities of the people. Translation, only in the way that others understand that diversity goes at a different speed than the Internet. I love that also. It is like a policy. How do you manage when there are many languages. The challenge of having several not only languages, but dialects in vast regions, how can we have that in mind? Official languages, should be addressed in the global fora as you rightly mention. Ideas and local content for Africa is really challenging, not only for Africa, but also for Asia. 2,000 languages in Africa. That's something! Encourage young people to participate as our colleague from the youth told us.
I love the WhatsApp messages and videos. That's a very novel way of sending content.
Capacity building, that's very important to highlight.
Empower people to interact in Internet Governance, not only give the content, help them. It takes time. But it is worth the effort.
Our colleague told us about three proposals to enable many full participation, create frameworks allowing the organizations to find people to do that and Channels of communications to reach a larger public, the importance to intersessional work, it is not only in the meetings but in between meetings, many things happen there. The value of crowdsourcing, we may agree that Internet Governance and multistakeholder is not perfect but we can improve it, that's why we're talking today and I would like to share a last comment, we have to develop a diversity side and gender balance side, what I have learned with time and learned from a colleague from Germany not among us anymore unfortunately, she told me, every time you look at something, try to develop this and analyze it, this is a very diverse world, we have people from all over the world here. It is ‑‑ if I look at this room with the diversity side, I see diversity, you look at the panel and there are men, you can say easily it is from a gender balance side it is not, so try to develop that. When you see that there could be value adding other panelists, other colleagues into the group, just propose it. Maybe you have a no as an answer, maybe you have a yes. Maybe if you propose the translation they say I don't have the resources, maybe you find someone that can help.
If we develop this intention, maybe we help this imperfect, dynamic model enhanced a bit more every day.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: That's why we're today four men, four women in the panel.
>> (Laughter and applause).
>> OLGA CAVALLI: Thank you very much.
If you're interested in the South School of Internet Governance it is a program and we have Fellowships for all the students. Go to our website, find me Olga Cavalli in social networks. There is a call for application for Fellowships, it is open for young people. We're all young forever like Claudio said, there is no age limit! We have about 200 fellowships for the next one which is at the end of April.
>> DALILA RAHMOUNI: Thank you very much to you. Thank you.