The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, France, from 12 to 14 November 2018. 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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>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Good morning, everyone. We'll wait a couple more minutes as more people are coming into the session. Thank you very much for your patience.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you for your patience. Good morning. My name is Nadia Tjahja, Sunium and I'm on the steering committee for the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance. The youth coalition of internet governance wants more people to join the discussion and overcome the obstacles they experience. The skill set and also the network-related challenges. We have an open membership and open mailing list and open archives for everybody to be involved with. So what we aim to do is to empower youth who want to actively participate in the IGF intercession activities and initiatives. We support the IGF, Mac and the secretariat in facilitating the active involvement and engagement of more young people on an equal footing with other stakeholders in internet governance discussions, negotiations, strategies and processes. As a Dynamic Coalition we gather all these people together to form part of a discussion here within the IGF. So today I am here as your only representative for the youth coalition internet governance. My fellow colleagues have to excuse themselves. They were unable to attend this IGF session but thankfully I'm joined today by sue Sonia herring from SEEDIG. Last year we asked the question how can people rise to the occasion to contribute to internet governance and why is 2018 priority should there be. What we did in the last year is we -- after the meeting at the IGF we were invited to meet with the cabinet of commissioner Maria Gabrielle from the European Union to talk about priorities in internet governance and upcoming opportunities for upcoming youth in the EU. We discussed with the community which issues they wanted to see addressed by the commissioners' cabinet and talked about copyright issues, access to the internet, participation in the fake news debate and how the information disorder is being involved. Safer internet and also about EuroDIG and SEEDIG as major topics. We encouraged stakeholders to host events and promoted the activities involved with it. We advised and support youth organizations, companies and entrepreneurs to manage the activities for this week and aided with grant applications to ensure that people had the funding to be able to do the activities that they wanted to present.
Additionally we encourage young girls and women to participate and thrive with coding and promote the code week events in general.
Additionally we also represented at international conferences such as YouthDIG, EuroDIG, SEEDIG and the Council of Europe on youth participation. There are several other groups that were involved. So in the Asia Pacific the community outreach in AVAC to promotion youth participation had an internet governance boot camp. A model meeting. A youth internet governance camp, and the 9th Asia Pacific government forum and digital grassroots in Africa which is a youth-led initiative working with youth to engage them in addressing internet-related issues in the communities did literacy for the underrepresented. Organized schemes and many other things including youth IGF initiatives to the under-represented communities leaving for an open internet.
That being said I would like to give the floor to sue Sonia herring to represent SEEDIG and other activities.
>> SU SONIA HERRING: Hello, everyone, thank you for being here today with us. Brief introduction. I’m the coordinator and a member of YCIG and executive committee. So briefly I would like to read out a few messages from this year's SEEDIG and youth school which the capacity building program. At this year's annual meeting we had many, many sessions on different topics including digitalization in the region, digital skills, net neutrality, digital rights. Security. Data driven technologies and internet governance in southeastern Europe. So there is at least five or six messages from each topic so I'll only read out the ones from the session which was on internet governance in the region. So resources human and financial are essential for building sustainability into IGF initiatives and the impact of IGF initiatives is not easy to measure put concrete examples how the discussions had positive impact on organizations, countries. An example was the discussions at the Bosnia IGF on internet exchange points led to the creation of an internet exchange point in the country. So as you may all know on the global level, the discussion keeps revolving around what is the impact of the IGF or the national and regional IGFs. So both in Youth IGT Turkey and SEEDIG we are firm believers that these platforms for open and inclusive dialogue are very valuable and they do have impact, if not instant impact.
I would like to talk about this year's youth school. There are some members of the SEEDIG community in here as well. And thank you for joining. We had a full day of debates before the program we had online meetings. And webinars which included introduction to the IG ecosystem and its actors and during the annual meeting our activities with the youth school focused on internet business models followed the Cambridge Analytica scandal and we separated our students, our participants into two different groups and one part presented the internet business side and the other part the user side. I won't get into too much detail but as you know, they have clashing priorities and interests and we tasked them with coming up with a model that respects user rights and privacy while at the same time still helps maintain working business model profitable business model. All of this can be found online in detail or you can come up to me and talk to me about it if you're curious to hear more. Soon we will be launching the 2019 youth school applications. The applications are open to anyone from the region or residing in the region. And our region consists of 20 plus countries. So not just strictly southeast Europe.
As closing remarks we organized youth IGF Turkey this past Thursday and our topics included data-based entrepreneurship, networks and security, introduction to internet governance and other topics. And of course the GDPR and the equivalent of GDPR in Turkey. And in the coming years I hope to see youth from Turkey in room as well. It doesn't seem to be happening just yet. And as YCIG with Nadia and a few other members, we brought together a working group to increase youth participation at IGT2018. We started the working group early this past summer and our aim was to actively lobby for the inclusion of key participants and youth interest sessions. We mapped out I think it's around 10 or eight sessions that were direct youth or children interest. And then we also sent out a call through our membership to find out which youth experts would be attending the IGF in person this year and we tried to bring together workshops which didn't have -- which were talking about youth but didn't have youth as key participants and tried to bring them together with youth experts. We reached out to the session organizing teams, to be honest, with feedback, replies, weren't that many and weren't that productive maybe, I don't know what the right word here is. But yeah, in total we reached out to maybe eight workshop organizers and we received replies only from three of them. And two of them mentioned that youth experts were welcome to attend and join discussions from the floor, which this is my personal opinion, I find it completely unhelpful because as you all know, no one needs an invitation to join from the floor workshop. Everyone is open to raise their hand and talk anyway. So that felt as a non-answer. And then towards the end, like in the past few days, we received a few outreach or replies asking if we had very specific suggestions on youth experts like tailored things such as do you have an 18-year-old person who works in social media. Or between this age range who is not working, who is not a professional, and my main point is I think we need more of you and we need more adults to collaborate with us to make youth participation active, meaningful youth participation at the IGF a reality and beyond lip service. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much, Sonia.
(Applause)
I would like to give the floor to Harris to talk about YouthCIG
>> I was a participant in 2017 and also in Georgia this year by Council of Europe. It is a messages that is at the end of the pre-event for the messages are drafted by young people that they have their first touch with internet conversations.
So this year messages were split into five categories. Accessibility, literacy, internet that works for everybody and digital inclusion. Also regulation of the internet. So in accessibility ensuring the quality of participation of young people different backwards and under privileged. And donors and private companies should be increased. Also answering a systematic approach for youth participation in structures of the common stakeholders. Such as youth representation in decision making bodies. In literacy so no one should tolerate misinformation. More resources should be allocated to promote critical thinking on information disorder. Also education is a vital part for increasing literacy. So that people can make informed decision online in order to get most of their time on the internet and stay safe. Internet can be even more indispensable in lives in the future. Everybody should have the right to save the future of the internet and insure it remains a global resource that is open and benefits humanity.
In order to achieve this, the development of the internet should be pursued in an inclusive multi-stakeholder process. Regulation of the internet and other privacy and legal protection against cyber crime. Regulation involves rules which govern the internet and be enforced by government. Militaries -- powers and protects the rights of the end users. Legal protection against cybercrimes should be comprehensive. All crimes committed on land should be dealt with the same seriousness as those committed off line. Cybercrime should be have tools to pertain -- (inaudible) in order to foster digital inclusion, computer content and services should be usable and accessible by design on a basis. Preventive and proactive measures are necessary to protect groups not limited to child, women, ethnic minorities and LGBT groups. Users should have more call about calling hate speech line website. We need to be more robust in ways to tackle this and humanitarian --
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much. I really appreciate these messages. These messages were made by your colleagues. Your colleagues have come together to meet with other stakeholders from different groups from different areas and perspectives. They come from different academic backgrounds to have open discussions about these. If you have the time, please take the time to read through the messages one more time and come back and join these discussions just like we'll have here today later about what you can do for youth participation and how would you like to see youth participation evolve within IGF structures and what topics should be on the agenda? What topics can young people be involved in and should young people be shaping while we are improving and continuing our discussions? So that being said, having looked at the messages from last year I would like to invite a participant from EuroDIG to present the upcoming EuroDIG for 2019.
>> Thank you, Nadia, for giving me the floor. We heard last year EuroDIG has been in Georgia, it was a great success. We had also a youth program prior to EuroDIG called YouthDIG and with around 30 participants from I guess 17 different countries in Europe. But first of all let me explain what EuroDIG is. It's a European dialogue on the internet governance. So actually it's the European version of IGF. But there are some differences between the IGF and what EuroDIG is. EuroDIG, the people itself created the workshop. Workshop creation is the process. So everyone can join in the organizing team and the creative workshop themselves.
And we also encourage youngsters to join the workshops, so that's why we organize two days before EuroDIG itself YouthDIG. YouthDIG is a youth program for youngsters between 18 and 30 years old from all European countries. And what we do there is we -- YouthDIG or EuroDIG or conference like the IGF can be quite overwhelming for youth. That's what I also personally -- yeah, my personal feeling was. And so that is why at YouthDIG we give a quick introduction of the subjects that's being discussed. And also give a quick overview of the program and try to connect with other youngsters and also subject matter experts to connect prior to EuroDIG itself.
So I invite you all to join and at this moment the workshop or we can already submit issues for our workshop proposals. I guess it will close this month, yeah, and the end of this month. And after that the workshops are being created and will be planning a meeting on the 15th of January in the Hague. And that will be also at the location where EuroDIG will be next year in 2019. EuroDIG will be in the Hague in the Netherlands from 19 until the 20th of June. And the application for YouthDIG opens around April. So thank you for your attention and I hope to see you around this week and also later in the Hague. Thank you.
(Applause)
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much. And I really hope that if you are organizing something yourself. That you will also come and present that on our mailing list or on our Facebook page. We would love to send people to come to your events and as much as we hope that next year we will be able to present some of your topics here at this session. So that we can show how young people are getting involved and what kind of messages we can create together. We want to work on the local level. We want to work with people from all kinds of different backgrounds, not only the people who are capable of managing to get to a particular location to bringing all these messages from these remote locations or from popular -- where there are interesting discussions to come together.
These events are so incredibly important and incredibly great opportunity to network, to get involved and to participate in internet governance. This is really such a grand chance to do something and to have your voice heard. I do hope that you will get engaged and for those who are engaged, come and reach out to us for us to be there with you, to encourage the rest of the community to be there with you, and to see if we can cooperate together and see if there are any synergies together.
That being said normally in this part of the agenda there is an elections update. This year we would have a new steering committee. However, we're still in the middle of the elections. There were no nominations for the African group so normally we have a steering committee which consists out of five individuals. Each representing a respective region based on the United Nations regional groupings. So these groups are the African group, the Asia Pacific group, the Eastern European group, the Latin American and Caribbean group and western European an others group. No candidates for the African group nor for the Latin American and Caribbean group. They extended nominations for a few more days. When there were no further nominations we went ahead of the elections and that's where we are all this moment in time. We hope to announce the new steering committee over the mailing list in the next few days. As per our statutes within the next two weeks we'll open nominations and I hope you'll reach out to your communities and encourage people from the African group and from the Latin American and Caribbean group to nomination themselves for you to nominate your friends to get involved so we can actually get an active participation from all these different groups together and that we can shape an IGF agenda and international agenda that can really support young people in their different communities.
So we must move forward and therefore I would like to have a discussion about how the wiser community can rise to the occasion to promote meaningful youth participation, to advocate for their rights and opportunities of young people and create an environment which young people can easier engage in internet governance processes. To open the discussion, I would like to give the floor to the Council of Europe to give some brief remarks about youth participation.
>> COUNCIL OF EUROPE MEMBER: Hello, everybody. I work at the Council of Europe. For those of you who are not familiar with what the Council of Europe is, it is the intergovernment organization of the content with 47 member states. Which means that, of course, it serves the interests of the 47 member states. You might wonder why this organization is present here among the other stakeholders. The answer is going to be simple. The organization itself did many, many things in regard to support of the presence of young people in the internet governance, I would say, but also in the whole larger aspect of what it means participation of young people. You may also wonder why the banner you are having on your left is widely presented and the fact also is simply would say, the Council of Europe had ran a campaign on the no hate speech movement, which was very successful campaign that we did for a couple of years, the campaign just concluded its activities in the spring this year. The conclusions of the campaign are -- can be found in print because I brought them with me. And this is one of the key activities that we had among the ones that we are working youth with because we consider the empowering of young people being an essential element in the participation processes.
What we continue to do is the fact that we want to deepen a bit the way we've been doing, meaning that we want to see exactly how young people can continue their involvement in the internet governance and in order to do so, I just would like to let you know that we launched the call for authoring a handbook of what does it mean youth participation to internet governance. For those interested in finding out more information, the call is public has been launched. Those of you contributing to such publication please get involved and get in contact with us, with the institution, but also with the colleagues that are around. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much.
(Applause) So now I lay a question before you, how can we young participants, rise to the occasion to promote youth participation? Where can we advocate for rights and opportunities for young people in internet governance and how can we create an environment in which young people can easier engage in these processes? The floor is open to you. This is a discussion for you to really share what are your insights. How are things done in your communities? What are the struggles that you meet and see if anybody else is meeting these same struggles or perhaps they have overcome those? What kind of things can we do? As we see here we are not alone. There are many opportunities available to us for us to actually give a voice, give a say, the Council of Europe here today says we're reaching out to you. We have a call open. Come and talk to us about what can be done. The thing is we can only know about these opportunities as we share it and therefore I open this floor to you and I hope that you will take this opportunity to share this and then afterwards we can share this back in our local communities and tell them all the opportunities that are starting to arise during the sessions of the entire Internet Governance Forum. Please, are there any questions, comments, concerns?
>> AUDIENCE: Hello, I am jumping ahead. I am here on behalf of the Council of Europe department but also co-organizing YouthDIG that has been mentioned many times now. I won't go into that too much. I just want to point out something that we maybe all don't really want to hear that much is that there needs to be in order for us to come here, need to be conscious effort by various organizations to make that happen. So for example, EuroDIG and its strategic plannings makes an effort to bring in young people and fund even more with the Council of Europe, to facilitate the capacity building moments but wouldn't have happened just because young people gather. There has to be some form of continuous lobbying, as you point out, which can happen if we continuously work together. I find it a bit troubling that now this has become a very Euro-sent Rick discussion in the room but I also pointed out there are no candidates for those groups of Latin America, Caribbean and African countries. I feel as much as I love being involved in Europe and will keep being involved in Europe, our bigger question might be how to incorporate those who are not European and don't have those fundings around them that makes it possible for us to show up here.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much for your comments. Was there another comment over there? Yes.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you. I'm from Indonesia and I would like to talk about what was mentioned previously on the session that just recently sent requests on specific youth experts. I went to the session this morning and they didn't have any and the report was not also quite comprehensive because it is shown things that appear on the public very famous and it was also covering western part of the globe, as well as on the European and American, which was presented in the report. Unfortunately was not really inclusive at the moment.
However, I think this all relates to my comment that we need to point out what our expert is and why do the rest of the stakeholder -- (inaudible) and we also need to bring them to our -- that we access. Our -- (inaudible). I love what the program where many youth champion in the local effort being shown and being presented of work that they have done with internet and how the internet really matters to youth champion at the local level. This is something very interesting that can be done in future steps and also approach to relevant stakeholders, the government and private business that has the capability, I think, to also impact the policy which should be done in local level, not only in the regional or international level. After all, we at the local level are the one who are with the current situation as well. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much. Are there any other comments, questions? Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm with the legal defense initiative from England. My first IGF. My question was about trying to foster an interest in internet governance and especially in terms of partnering with universities and perhaps having some sort of education network, not just in Europe, but worldwide as we've already mentioned that is quite important. And I was just wondering if you tried this in the past or if there was any possibility for the future. I know my university didn't even have anything in internet law or policy, and it has just been me trying to find organizations such as this to kind of keep developing my interest and my knowledge in it.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much for your question. So we haven't directly addressed this but there is -- I don't know if I would call them an organization but there is GIGANET. It is a group of educators, academics, who are involved in internet governance issues and I think they have their conference the day after the IGF. There are many of them who are walking around here. If you are interested, I can give you details how to sign up to their mailing list and then you can find out about opportunities within the academic sphere on what the academics themselves are doing in terms of organizing themselves with topics they're talking about and how they're fostering discussions and perhaps that might be an opportunity for you to explore how to engage with universities and setting up an education network.
>> AUDIENCE: If I could just follow up. Part of my question was more of having YouthDIG advertise more towards university students in order to garner more interest and more support from that strata of youth participation as well.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Okay. Thank you. For this year's IGF we launched a join us campaign in French to reach out to local French communities, to be able to attend here today. We hope to be able to extend that for other opportunities but we are only as strong as our members are. We hope that for any upcoming initiatives if people tell us that we can actually promote that in advance instead of campaigns we have some wonderful designers that are part of the community that can make beautiful posters and logos and help support in that regard. So thank you very much for your comment and that is certainly something we can take on board for 2019 to make sure that these initiatives, whether it's in Europe or also the other regions, are presented and promoted that way. Are there any -- Sonia, would you like to take over?
>> SU SONIA HERRING: I don't know if you were here in the beginning of the session, but like I said the youth school is particularly aimed at university students and master students and talking about this conversation getting a bit too Euro centric, I like to re-mention digital grassroots that a lot of founding members can't be here today. They attended last year with the contribution and created a truly international community of young people, which they connected online trainings and assignments and they had three cohorts. The third one was entirely in French. I just wanted to underline their impressive work since they couldn't be here to talk about it themselves.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: I believe you wanted to make a quick remark and we'll go into the back.
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, I did. I'm speaking on behalf of the Dutch youth IGF and what we did in the Netherlands, we had a group of 100 students and we discussed issues that we found important. And one of the issues was cyber security and then mainly how to deal with hacking. So one of the issues was responsibility and we had a hold afternoon discussing about how to deal with hacking as a community, so we invited law enforcement agencies, hackers, and a whole bunch of people and we discussed issues around that. But I'm from the Netherlands and that's my perspective. There are quite of few youngsters here in the room and I'm curious if we have the time to hear best practice or any other issues that are being discussed in other countries.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Great, thank you very much. I'll take a comment from the back first.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, my name is Poppi and I'm from South Africa. In terms of youth participation, I think we should allow the youth to have a voice. So we're having more faith in the -- when it comes to -- I believe the go child is overlooked and encourage for more especially in less-developed countries. And so we need more and more female youth partners in internet governance. Also just encourage learning in the digital space. Especially disadvantaged areas. That should be a more focal area. Lastly this allows young people to develop their thinking capacity and actively seek solutions for the problems that they encounter.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Are there any further comments from the room? Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Hi, I'm ago that from India and I'm a youth fellow here. We organized a first youth IGF in India three weeks back. It was a success. We had 150 participants 90 people were women. So I actually wanted to talk about the event just talk about how it went on. So we discussed a lot of issues that went on that are going on in India. We covered the basics of internet, internet governance. Connecting the next billion, and we had a discussion with technical people on privacies and safeguard in the internet. We wanted to increase the participation so we had 150 participants and people from various other IG organizations were to speak to help.
So we spaced a couple of challenges. India is culturally very diverse and multiple ethnic groups. Challenges and restrictions also. We wanted to make sure there were a lot of girls involved at youth IGF group. From your experiences I would like to know how do you increase the rate and make sure people are interested and how should we go about from the next year to expand youth IGF in India, thank you?
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Does anyone want to answer that question? This is your floor, this is your discussion and your debate. Please go ahead.
>> AUDIENCE: My name is Daniel from Uganda. I like the idea of what the Indian team did. I think we should adopt the same in different IGF chapters around the world to see how it goes. So then we should be able to have experiences and share responses that can resonate with what the other colleagues are facing from the different countries. I think it's a brilliant idea to hold youth IGFs in different chapters and perhaps actually have youth IGF chapters perhaps in various institutions within the different chapters to see how we can have responses to such things. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: I think these are both wonderful comments. What I would highly encourage you to do is that in 2019 at some point there is an opportunity to propose topics that you can discuss during an IGF. One of the topics could be how can youth IGFs bring together. If you two would like to join together or if you know other youth IGTs that are contributing and you think would also want to be involved perhaps you can propose a topic to the IGF. If that gets selected by the body that sets the agenda, then you will be able to have the discussion and see -- and bring all these different insights together. I really hope that if you decide to go ahead with that or if you need any support with the proposal we will be here to foster that and next year whether I think that's in Germany. If you are able to come and that we can find ways to insure that all these different groups can come together and foster this discussion that you would like to raise. Thank you.
I saw earlier there was a comment or question. Please go ahead
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Alex Smith from the United States and do social impact work. I had a question similar to one asked previously about recruitment. So in North America, it is definitely a little more December late in our representation here. I was wondering in regards to university representation and connecting with different organizations that may be interested in fostering youth involvement in forums such as these, what are the best ways to do that?
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Does anyone want to share their experiences in regards to this? Please.
>> AUDIENCE: Well, hello, I'm Dominic and I'm also here on behalf of the Council of Europe. We have been working in internet governance as Mario just said before and I would say it has been quite successful when we look at, for example, the campaign but also important to see that there are certain barriers that make it more difficult for young people to effectively be part of this conversation. If I want to break it down I think probably there are two that would come to my mind very strongly. One of them is the content that is not very simple and spreads across young people and I think there is really a need to raise awareness first that the topic is relevant to young people to create interest. But then to also insure that there is this base knowledge. Because otherwise as was said before, the content is very intimidating so there needs to be a format that also prepares young people to interact. I think that's where these youth IGFs and local chapters can come in. And I think that's where the second kind of barrier comes in, because these events are designed for adults. And it is very important that the process can be made in a format that is also accessible to young people. And with that I think that the youth IGFs can really also play a big role in preparing young people not only with regards to the content, but also to the process and how can we meaningfully implement these and interact with their chapter on the IGF so we can have youth experts prepared and so we can also ask for them in the -- with a stronger voice? So if I want to sum it up, it's really being aware, being informed, and shaping the process so it is youth friendly and encourages youth participation.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much for your comment. On my own behalf from my personal experience the issue kind of I see it as two things. Firstly, when we talk about internet governance does everybody know what it means? When I started working in internet governance I specialized in information warfare. The fake news debate is the thing that you can keep me going on for hours and hours and hours. When we talk about those type of issues, you don't necessarily realize you work in internet governance. If you are working in data protection you don't necessarily know you're working in internet governance. When you reach out to students and people, sometimes it's more tangible for young people to say I'm engaged because I work on this topic whether than how to get them involved in internet governance. It could be law or it could be policy, not necessarily my thing. So for people to reach out and to talk to you about internet governance how are we shaping the discussion to recruit? I see that as one of the topics which could be difficulty in engaging young people.
The second thing is in terms of recruitment is always funding. When there is only limited funding opportunities, it depends on your community. If you are in a type of community where you are telling your friends I got this this opportunity, you should all do it, then you will have massive outreach and I've seen some incredible applications where you had from just one school maybe about 100 or 200 applications for one event. But then also people who don't share these kind of initiatives. As part of the community whether or not you are willing to share the opportunities that we share among each other. Firstly, you need to share it with us so we can share it with other people. When we do share things with you, it is also your responsible participation you then share with other people. So it is as much as a responsibility of one area as much as it's a community responsibility.
I see that it has elicited a lot of discussion but we only have a limited amount of time. I saw three or four hands. Can I ask you to keep your remarks very short and we'll take them one after the other starting from the right side of the room.
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you, I’m an IGF society ambassador. Digital grassroots. I wanted to add something. More than a month ago we have launched a petition to change dot org called youth inclusion in global internet governance. Representatives to internet governance bodies and we have also 400 signatures. To help us get more go to Internet Society booth. They have an iPad there where you can sign directly or go to digital grassroots booth and we can guide you with the link and you can help us get more signatures. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much. I remember there was a comment in the back.
>> AUDIENCE: I'm Carson from Tanzania. I think it's about time we create a general public knowledge that is adopted to the education when it comes to internet and internet governance that we see young children 3-year-olds who interact with online gaming and stuff. If we can implement some sort of strategy or some sort of public knowledge in which from a young age people can be trained on the importance of internet and how they can have the literacy skills to give the next generation and have competent people and better decision makers to lead the way.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Wonderful. You wanted to make a brief comment?
>> AUDIENCE: Yes, I'm from Asia. I'm one of the organizers of an ambassador program and IGF for the youth participation in the Asia Pacific region. I talk about recruitment and everything, youth participation in internet governance I have struggles, too. We have different levels of development. Some people concerned about internet access. Maybe already concerned about net neutrality or equality on the internet. So especially this year we have the ambassador program and make it more regional for Asia. We hope today in here some other organization especially from Asia we can make connections because we really need to get connected with other young people in the region and around the world so we can actually get engaged and sometimes start with raising the awareness so we can move working our programs and our regions together. Start from getting connect. I really hope after these sessions you guys, if you have time go to the booth we're from the Asia organization. Find me so we can see whether we can work on something. Thank you.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much. There was one last comment.
>> AUDIENCE: I'll just sit here. I'm from the Council of Europe. And the anti-discrimination movement. Your point was very correctly that I think we need to see that internet governance is much wider than not only about youth participation but also cross section with other issues. I think the entry point for young people is maybe not necessarily internet governance directly but concern with gender or non-discrimination or concern about participation in local issues. So I think we also need to really focus on where our young people, what are the teams of young people in general and the intersection with internet. I was on an session on gender and internet governance and gender and there are lots of young people there, young women speaking up about the issues of access and non-participation in society. Not having access to internet because of gender discrimination. There is where youth participation also really comes in and young women are there and many platforms where young people are speaking. We need to get those people in these IGFs.
>> NADIA TJAHJA, SUNIUM: Thank you very much for your comment. Going to the last few minutes of our session I would like to make a couple of comments that firstly remember we have our elections. We're looking still for a member from -- to represent the African group and someone to represent the Latin American and Caribbean group. We need to reach out to the communities and have someone that understands the atmosphere and region in which we're working to make sure we provide you with the advice and support you need in working with the bodies that are associated with that. As I'm a steering committee members that represents western Europe and others group I enjoy a good working relationship with the Council of Europe. We also reach out to the African Pacific, Caribbean group and the African Union. These are opportunities that are still open and we need people to be willing to engage with us to be able to be that liaison to allow young people to engage in those spheres and areas.
One thing that we do with, we have our own campaign at the end of our D.C. session the we missed you session. We take one photo of everybody who attended our session and we make a beautiful collage out of it and then we share online that we missed you and hope to see you at IGF2019. I want to invite all of you to join me for this photo so that we can say hey, everyone, we missed you at IGF 2018. I would like to close this session and thank everybody here for participating and like to thank the captioner who is live captioning this and I hope you have a wonderful IGF. I'm here the entire week. If you have any questions or concerns or if you want to reach out to me on projects or in collaborations or looking for partnerships, please do reach out. Whether or not I am your representative for your particular group we can find opportunities to engage with the entire world. Thank you all so much and have a good IGF.
(Applause)Those interested in the photo, if you could gather in the right corner so we can take the photo against that back wall.