IGF 2010
VILNIUS, LITHUANIA
16 SEPTEMBER 10
1615
OPEN FORUM 6
UNESCO
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Note: The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during Fifth Meeting of the IGF, in Vilnius. 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 session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> JANIS KARKLINS: In the field, which is related to internet and falls in the realm of internet governance. As you know, UNESCO organised two workshops on freedom of expression and social networking. And therefore we decided to dedicate this open forum session to other issues which are on our agenda, namely multilingualism in cyberspace, open access to scientific information, open educational resources, and accessibility for people with disabilities.
And we will take the session in three parts. The first part will be on multilingualism, then the access to educational resources and scientific information, and the third part will be devoted to accessibility for people with disabilities.
You probably saw on the invitation to the open forum that Mr. Desari was supposed to be here and speak about his vision on the role of UNESCO and internet governance and the future of IGF. Unfortunately, due to the change of time of the session where he was supposed to moderate from the morning to the afternoon, he is not able, he was not able to come to this session and, therefore, he will not be with us.
We have today a number of distinguished speakers. I would like to start by introducing Mr. Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN. He was chairman and chief catalyst of twicki.net. He was cofounder of a derivative and risk management company which went public on NASDAQ and later was sold to another company. So he is the author of the best selling book, coauthor of the best selling book "The Starfish and the Spider." I have this copy of the book with the author's dedication thank you, Rod which lays out a new organizational theory for considering all organisations as existing on the continuum between centralized and decentralized with different implications and strategies for each firm based upon their position on that act.
I know that Rod will tell you the latest news which is about 30 minutes old. And Rod, the microphone is now yours.
>> Thank you very much, Janis, for that very gracious invitation. I'm delighted to be here today with you. Janis was formerly the chairman of ICANN's government advisory committee and really loved that led that group through very significant growth and accomplishments including not only adding more countries and territory around the world but some of the largest countries in the world. We now congratulate you, Janis, on your appointment as UNESCO's assistant director for communication and information.
From Mandarin, Chinese, around a billion speakers to a Russian dialect with only two speaker, the world has roughly 6500 languages. And language is a fundamental component of our common heritage. That linguistic heritage must transfer online if the internet is to be truly global and to be open and accessible to all people.
Our economies, our communication, our social and cultural lives are all linked by the internet, the most powerful communications tool in the history of mankind. And everyone on the planet has a right to be a part of that.
Internationalized domain names are very important. UNESCO shares a commitment to full nationalization of the internet to preserve our heritage and to ensure that mankind's greatest communication tool embraces all people from around the world.
ICANN works toward a common good: A stable, secure, and unified global internet. It fulfills this goal by maintaining the security and stability of the domain name system, which is one important component of the global internet.
As a multistakeholders, multi seen by the world, for the world, reflecting its increasingly global work. Our economies, our communications, our social and cultural lives are linked by the internet. And a truly global internet means that anyone can connect to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
For many millions, the introduction of nationalized domain names means that they can do so in their primary language and their native script.
Five of the top ten languages used on the internet today rely on non Latin scripts. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russia. Millions more fall in the broad category of other languages not in the top ten, and many of them rely on non Latin scripts.
In late 2009 after many years of work with the community and in collaboration also with the IETF, ICANN launched a fast track process to introduce internationalized domain names. In May the top Russian name in Cyrillic was entered in the domain name system route or the DNS route.
For the first time, people whose primary language is written in Cyrillic could navigate online entirely in their own language script. Arabic, Chinese, Sinhalese, Sinhal, and Thai scripts followed, Chinese. Billions can now access the internet using only their primary language.
Since we opened the programme, 33 requests representing 22 languages are being processed through the fast track system. 14 IDN country code top level domains are now in the route representing 11 countries and territories. The 22 languages include Arabic, Chinese, Russian, three of the ten most used languages. They have internet penetrations of 20 percent, 33 percent, and 43 percent respectively. So there still is much room for continued development and growth within these language groups.
We expect to receive requests from many other countries and territories and we welcome UNESCO's plan to provide linguistic support to those who would participate in the fast tack process but who need linguistic help in preparing their request
ICANN has staff to assist those in general need of help in applying. Internationalized domain name official multiple benefits. It helps to foster innovation and creativity and to provide better branding opportunities for local conditions. And in this case, countries and communities.
It increases conveniences and consumer choice and generates educational opportunities. And most important, it opens the internet to millions until now who have been hindered by the need to use Latin scripts and, in many cases, switch their keyboard modes to type in a domain name and then have to switch it back in doing their e mails, documents, or other work.
One of the great things about ICANN is its ability to partner with a wide range of international parties to achieve specific goals. Our partnership with UNESCO laid out in a cooperation agreement last December enables our close collaboration in supporting the introduction of top level internationalized domain names and making the internet accessible to the world's language communities that UNESCO does so much to support.
In keeping with that agreement, UNESCO is committed to working with ICANN to provide linguistic support for countries and territories applying for their IDN, ccTLD strings through the fast track process.
UNESCO and ICANN are considering joint activities to further facilitate the introduction of domain names including helping communities to develop their own IDN tables, the list of characters to be used with their IDN.
This requires ICANN and UNESCO to work closely with language communities to increase local and regional awareness of IDN's and to help with IDN implementations in all regions.
Today we signed a new letter of intent to further our relationship. And we just signed this 30 minutes ago, which is the next step forward from our effort under the cooperative agreement that we signed on December the 10th. And this will lead to a specific project to develop new IDN country code strings in Cyrillic. It's a joint effort that will be specifically undertaken by UNESCO and ICANN. This is the letter of intent which we will be putting up for public comment and discussion within the ICANN community and then working together with UNESCO on converting this hopefully into a project with significant benefits to users in the Cyrillic script language groups.
In conclusion, as we meet today, people who have never used the internet are joining the online community. The world is a network of villages. They each, in many cases, have their own languages. But we are becoming connected through this amazing global system. Millions of people, the next we are of internet users, will be able to use their primary language scrips to do so.
We are very grateful to UNESCO for their leadership on cultural preservation and more specifically for their excellence and cooperation as we open the door to the internet world. Thank you, Janis.
[ APPLAUSE ]
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you for your kind words toward UNESCO. From my side, I say we are very, very committed to continue our work in facilitating in practical terms the process your organisation has embarked on and provide services to our member states and make sure that when and if they apply for IDN ccTLD strings, the procedure is smooth and they do not meet any difficulty.
And I would like to underline and explain why maybe UNESCO and Icon agreed to work on the Cyrillic country code string sort of list because Cyrillic script is the closest in terms of visual similarity to Latin script. And therefore, there are specific requirements which need to be fully observed to prevent a situation when technical innovation and advancement makes or creates the possibility or opportunity for fraud on the internet. So therefore, UNESCO decided, together with ICANN, work to develop a list of the country names in Cyrillic or abbreviations which then could be used if accepted by a country in the fast track process. So that is the explanation.
Let me now turn to our next speaker in this segment, Mr. Baher Esmat, director of regional operations, Middle East, and one of the key persons within ICANN who works on internationalized domain names. Since Rod already described what IDN process is about, maybe I will ask you the question not that much as an ICANN staff member but as a citizen of Egypt.
>> MR. BAHER ESMAT: Egypt, the country who was one of the first who received dot Egypt in Arabic. There is an average Egyptian citizen. What that means, an internet user, what that means in practical terms, what has been what kind of reaction after introduction of dot Egypt in arabic was in event, how that was received by the internet community and what are the plans, what you can share. What will change in the lives of Egyptians and users with the introduction?
>> Thank you, Janis. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Very glad to be here with you today talking a little bit about our experience in Egypt in relation to IDN's. Answering Janis's question, basically IDN's for an internet user in Egypt or in the Arab region practically means that people or entities or, as we call them, registrants can register full domain names in Arabic language, in Arabic characters. So instead of going to the browser and entering addresses in ASCII characters or Latin characters, they can practically today use addresses in Arabic characters.
It also means that people would start witnessing advertisements and addresses in newspapers and any materials, you know, any sort of billboards on the roads etcetera in pure Arabic characters.
This is for the majority of the population of Egypt, is very important. English is still the second language in Egypt, and although the majority of the internet users in Egypt today which are almost like 20 million users, the majority of them speak and understand and can deal with an English keyboard, the next 10 or 20 millions that are yet to come online may not be comfortable using the English keyboard. They may not be able to use the English keyboard. They may own computers with an Arabic only keyboard. It is much more convenient to the majority of the population in Egypt that has yet to come online to utilize the IDN's and to benefit from this development.
The other aspect also from practical terms, IDN's or Arabic domain names in the case of Egypt also opens the door for business opportunities, for more innovation, in application development, in localized services. Small businesses may come up with for whether to get into the business of selling domain names or whether to get into the business of trying to tools that would make the end in terms of dealing with different applications or services. So I guess it would open the door for more innovation. The innovation in internet. In the Arabic region and most of the developing world. I think it is also bringing new opportunity for.
>> These are for the first, two in regard to the Egyptian IDN, in the past three months, the registry has been working hard with the internet community, with businesses, with
The process for registering names in Arabic, sometime in June they started what we call the sunrise process where they can register their names in Arabic under Egypt's IDN, dot level domain. This sunrise period ended sometime in August. It was like for month, two months. And then they started the next phase where business are registered documentation, they could also go and register names of their companies and businesses and also NGO's, any sort of entity today can register their names in Arabic.
The next page which hasn't started yet which is called the land rush, just to open the door for every individual, for every.
>> So in the event there have been a lot of discussions and interactions with people.
>> The home community is very excited. Until things pick up, because you can almost hear from the current internet users today.
Why do we need the names in Arabic? We are looking for the rest of the population that haven't come to the internet yet. I guess that is to answer your point. Than you, Janis
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you. I believe this is a very exciting development for Egypt and for other countries who have just received these international domain names.
Let me now address the other area where UNESCO is active in the area of multilingualism, namely in monitoring and measuring the development of multilingualism on the internet. In this regard, I would like to introduce Mr. Daniel Kmenta, president of Fondis, from Saint Dominique. He holds his Ph.D. in computer science. After creating software house specialized in APO, whatever that means, maybe you can explain later, he joined IBM in France and worked 12 years as a telecommunication. In 1998, he joined the Latin union in Santo Domingo as scientific advisor and head of RDLEC project for creation of Latin America and Caribbean network. '93, he launched the focus on questions. Mr. Piementa is an active member of civil society and has participated very Alaska. He is one of the authors of the addition. Balance and perspective: Edited in two languages. Copies are available outside the room. It was released earlier this year. And now I would like to ask Daniel to share with us his thoughts and findings of this report, which was the second edition. The first edition was produced in 2005. So we will most probably hear about the dynamics of multilingualism on the internet. Daniel, the floor is yours.
>> Thank you very much. As we all know, it's impossible to check the status of some issue without having indicators. We need to know where we stand and where we go. And the only way is to measure diversity on the internet. So that's the subject I'm going to address. APL, by the way, it's a very famous language of programming which was created, so it is not used today but I see a lot of people with DPM. I'm going to talk about what he stands, which is headed by someone that you know very well.
There is a reference, the last report and the first one was written by Mr. Polean, it was in 2005. Let's get a rough figure of reality about linguistic diversity. It is estimated that 40,000 languages have existed in the world. Today some people say 6,500.
>> I'm still alive. From the 6,000, only 500 are localized. We keep that up, which I don't think is and it works in 45 languages. And I'm speaking in English. So it's really it is getting very close to English.
There is a figure from outside, you can see the decrease of the web page in English. During many years, it was written as a steady figure for English. That was not information in. We don't know exactly, but probably it was around 30 to 40 percent of with the patient can do in English.
The digital divide is much deeper, one or two magnitude. Take the example of Africa. It has a little better than a percent of users, so ten times less than the actions. And if you take we got between 0.06 and 10 times less.
So the digital divide is than of access. And I don't want to give bad news, but IDN is very interesting, very important. And yet IDN you need the speaker to be educated. It's a very complex task to add a language on the internet.
The good thing about it, it is just a tiny part of the programme. We are really beginning with very few information. And we do believe that if intelligence for everyone, they have to speak the language of everyone.
There is a very strong paradox today which I want to make you aware is that the capacity to create indicator for Lang, four, five groups working on that. And the interest gets very high, one, two years ago. And now what happened is we just know something about the user. We are not any more capable to, and much less the behavior of the user in terms of internet.
Why is that? It is like that because the web has become infinite. The size of the Web is so huge today that search engines. They only could do 10 percent. Technology is required to make indicators is took.
What do we have today? Internet users per language, some educated and. What do we need? We don't. What language do you use with what web Site page? How do you. We have no information today. Creating average indicator is urgently required to support all the progress that has been made. It has to be a collaborative and ambitious effort. So to join the force of the very few people working on that subject and to create a project with ambitious results.
If you use one technology, I don't think it is the right time to talk about different technology to measure. If you're interested, you read the papers but some of them including crawling the web with language recognition. We need to multiply the different research lines so we have some possibility to know what's happening with language on the internet.
I'm concluding now. So my concept of the big research project and we believe that probably the best way is to applied to the big research programme which has a framework so you can have 15 universities working together and sufficient funding, working with partners. We have already approached UNESCO and some universities. And I'm making the call for people here and more remotely who is interested, who got competency, who got capacity in that subject, please contact me. We really want them all together working in that subject because we aren't need indicators. I am part of the working group of indicators. And we are joined but we are not capable to give data.
So it's really a very strange situation. You guys are getting interested on the subject when we, the measurer, we are no more able to produce data.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you, Daniel, for a very interesting presentation. I can assure you that in person of UNESCO, you will find reliable partner, because this is one of the subject areas where UNESCO is working and that is one of the priorities of our Alaska. I hope they'll be able to cooperate in the future as well, on questions and answers, linguistic diversity on the internet. I would like our audience to Daniel, Rod, and Bahrat. So we can discuss issues related to work of UNESCO in the field.
We have two microphones. I would like to invite those who want to ask, please use those microphones at the beginning of each. Use your name and your affiliation.
>> LUIS POZAR: My name is Luis Pozar. I am French. I am part of an organisation
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Would you please speak slightly louder that we can hear you.
>> LUIS POZAR: Disturbing the other ones. I am Mr. Pozar. I am French. I am part of an organisation that discusses the use of languages on the internet. On Daniel's presentations. I think the best proof of the importance much contents is that in countries which have been using native languages for a number of years. That's what makes a success happen. Thank you.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you.
>> From an association in Italy. Why do you say there is so few content, for example, in the African languages. Is it a problem related to the function related to the fact that many they do not have enough of it. In norm.
>>> Do you think that the integration with the internet, and the second question is related to, as well we might have some dark side on the filed of democracy. It is not pluri party in which they could I don't know, launch the domain name in the local alphabet so that the people. Is it something in which there's been a reflection?
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Daniel, would you like to answer the question?
>> DANIEL: We have been measuring for 12 years and we have seen a very strange phenomenon at the beginning, kind of a personality between users and contend, why does the user curve go like that, the content curve will follow, in English, in French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese. In spite of the blocked content and so on, what we have seen is a drop. The user can bring and the content. So there is something to be understood here. My explanation the average of digital leader was here. We just consumed, chatting, only a small part of the internet. You can include social networking sites.
So I really think that the first answer to your question is digital interest. We regular to be exploded so that people understand it as not as a budgets
Because many of the language are oral language. Because if you use French, it is not your natural language. Your mother tongue is an oral language. So obviously, it does not go easily on the internet of yesterday. On the internet of today and tomorrow, we really have to take of overall contents, not only having diapered information or if are you capable today to do research pictures and recognize you, why not both speak rec list also.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Let me ask you as a follow up question to this one. When you measure languages, how many languages you can recognize by doing automatic search? For instance, all small African languages, they are written with Latin character. How many languages can you recognize.
>> I have one for sit and research. Mothers. So very small number of language.
>> He was able to measure small language. That's why I got this figure in Africa.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you. Now Mr. Rod Beckstrom will answer the question about IDN's.
>> ROD: Okay. So the question was about international to bad names, language and scripts accessibility. It provided in relation and what occurs at the nation state. I want to provide a little broader concept.
When you registered for the event, I hope you had one of these in your back, this is out is, there's we only work on issues related to the Let's ignore that for a moment. Major activities are around. We'll work on consumer choice and competition.
The feeling is to create a healthy ecosystem or to participate in the ecosystem because ICANN is only one small part of the system. There are many players whether it's WIPO, ITU, ISOC, UNESCO, etcetera. And we work in an eco system. International domain names are all about giving consumers choice globally and to competition. And to foster innovation. ICANN works with every single country in the world, with no exceptions, every single country. And we do so equally and we do it thoroughly. It's up to the people. Let's with respect to the debate name system, we seek to help and offer choices. So we should people should be able to be sometime and say, oh, that's going.
That's not fracturing the internet. That's unifying the internet when you can join together the platform.
Our position is to be the technical coordinator of the domain name system and then to offer choices and what people and societies and countries plan to do with those.
>> JANIS: I would like just to add my perspective to the question, IDN's are introduced in addition to the traditional ASCII. We have no request or any knowledge that countries would say that IDN ccTLD would replace the existing ASCII string. So we cannot really say that countries can impose on the internet users, just IDN string that know the language, they would read it anyway because IDN strings will be accessible for everybody. And that is an additional advantage. Today, in china, for instance, was given a name in Chinese which belongs to a single root. The Chinese network was separated from international. Inside china, users typed in Chinese, but from outside, these Web sites were not accessible.
So therefore, the advantages that IDN's will provide unification of all these different networks and different languages provided that you know the language. And I think that this misconception is exactly there, that what's the difference between existing system when you go to the Web site where you can identify. So you just close the page. With the idea, at risk. The only thing, you will not be able to identify from where the page originated. You will not be able to identify the country from where it comes.
So otherwise, there is no difference from user perspective. You don't know the language, you close the page, you cannot read it. Personally, I do not share your point of view that that may rise kind of discrimination or limitation of freedom of speech from a technical point of view.
There is another request from a floor member, if you could take the microphone, please introduce yourself. And after your question, we will then move to another set of issues.
>> DEIRDRE WILLIAMS: Thank you very much. My name is Deirdre Williams. I come from St. Lucia Community College in the West Indies. My question for Mr. Beckstrom, it's probably a big question and also a naive question but I would like to ask it anyway.
The existing system runs on the Latin alphabet. No problem there are symbols which look exactly the same as the symbols in the Latin alphabet. And I'm wondering how you make the policy decision which manages a request from a country using a, but which has characters as though they look they came from the Latin alphabet. Is that clear?
>> Yes. It's a very good question. I am not the engineer or the technical. One of the points is avoiding visual confusion. There are a set of techniques that are set up for doing that that are technical and human by the way, IDN's were not some idea of ICANN. They were the use of the users at IGF and people around the world. And I've worked on other standards. Maybe we can explain in more detail the answer.
>> Thank you, Rod. Basically in the policy process that led to the implementation of IDN's, the technical community have been involved heavily, not only with the policy development process. As Rod mentioned, one of the phases or the steps of the IDN fast track is what we call the string evaluation whereby a technical panel which is composed of technical and security people, they are not ICANN people, they look into the springs and make sure that both. Hence it does not cause any stability or stability problems. Because this is stability and security, somebody that we should and must.
We mentioned before, this panel, we signed the agreement, letter of intent with ICANN. And the work which will be done under this project is exactly to develop a list of country codes in Cyrillic which would not create any visual who are very closed top. This is our modest con. All internet user. So let me thank, Daniel, if you want to leave. This is time. If you want to stay, you're welcome to stay. Now we are moving to the second part of our for. They will be talking about UNESCO's work.
>> This work is ongoing. The director of information. Division of communication information system of to provide you with an update on Ott projects. I will turn over the mike.
>> Good afternoon. What I will do is try to highlight some of the new initiatives that have been launched by UNESCO that identify many of the work that we're doing for many, many years now. In fact, let me highlight at the outset that universal access to information and knowledge at the very heart of UNESCO's work for six decades now. And whether it be our programme of freedom of expression, whether it be, whether it to be it is deeply related to our concern to promote international language and knowledge.
With the advent of the internet, of course, in the year of convergence, we have to reposition the work. We have no develop elaborated for this current time. Obviously, I would like to put look forward to any inputs or comments and feedback that you may have.
(What we are planning to do is to try in which, culture, communication, have a huge amount of resources, but unfortunately they are not very user friendly when we just put them on.
(Background noise)
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Competing sessions.
>> So the whole idea is that this, we can actually track the changes that are being done to the documents. I think this is a very, very useful initiative. There are lots of interesting ideas that went on. But UNESCO. You can actually kick on the work. You change, you make amendments, it becomes your document. But we can always see behind. It might not come for some years now, we have an opening training platform. I would urge you go to the, in a variety of areas where we have lots of content also from partner UN agencies. You can see there have been more than one million visitors.
>> It's time that we completely it is a community of practice, who have taken ownership of this programme. You can see the wide variety of areas which we work. And you can see that.
The second key area is open access. Open access, will have been some interesting sessions. Scientific information is exchanged. Most countries cannot have access to these. We are now currently under the request of our membership, we are undertaking a global. It is creating a case of an open it can be actually connected.
I'll skip the screen shot. This is what it is going to look, whether it be for people with disabilities and so on. We have some institutions. We have information cataloguing and for museums and so forth. This is very much in there is an open source area. We, to help access through all the resources. We've taken into consideration all the feedback. Now we're going to start the next phase which is actually building the book.
So that's in a nutshell my presentation. I hope there will be questions. I know there are several people in the room who work in these areas.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Now I will invite Mr. Abel Packer, CEO of the Access Initiative, to tell us what the initiative is about and what are what's in the speaker's opinion are prospects of similar type of initiatives and particularly in line with our presentation in UNESCO activities.
But before that, I would like to say that Mr. Abel Packer is an advisor of communication and science at the University of Federal. He practiced in consent operation. Scientific electronic laboratory online.
He holds the bachelor's degree in science and master's degree in library sciences. Abel, the floors is yours.
>> ABEL PACKER: Thank you very much, Mr. Janis, for the opportunity. I introduced to you programmes, this network which was launched in Sao Paolo in '97 by the state research council.
The general objective was to contribute to the development of research by improving the communication of its results. The specific objective was to improve communication, which was innovation at that time. And we have had, as his article in "Scientific American" that launched the idea. So the idea was to move it from the classical mechanism of publication to combine it where all the we are making changes and publish the findings in a paper. Also adopt the system, and this started to move with you on to that. And we had the support in Brazil form the national sigh. We have now in 2010, 650 journals. And this is to show you the way the network goes. We have 18 collections, 16 of those are in national. And we divide the certified collections.
We want to increase the visibility of the journals, which is as best as possible, the international incident, of course; accessibility, which is widely available we have another issue, dedicated for many years. Now we are trying to say we have it so good, we need to have so good insurance.
Increase the usage and recognize to increase the impact, which actually means the conversation, citation the collection creates an environment which is stimulating access, interaction, and exchange of information. The idea, it will work as publishers and collective initiative.
We start in 2002. So we played leadership in this. Of course, in that time, there was not going to open access then.
I go very fast to introduce to you because all are we can see that we have the network. The network are decentralized, adopts methodology and the technical process. Each national collection can get information so you can build global. We do operate one. And we have, can search Argentina, Brazil, or can I search an entire collection.
It is updated daily, these numbers, so every day you went, you can see new journals, new issues, and new articles. And we are developing services on that can you create your own library or if you are a teacher, you can create geography and so on. This is more or less the scheme of how that works. It is a network, centralized collection. Each journal is independent. And the associated journal will have supporting web services related to it. You can reach the collection by any place, by an index, but an author, and so on. So we work in three languages.
All sites have article browsing and bibliometric data which is an important issue to actually measure the impact of the journal. So we'll go more fast now. This is an example that replicates in the network of distribution of the areas, the most important areas actually, social science, health sciences.
Here is an example of the one journal. So we have all the current capacity and services to work and navigate. And you can see here a collection of the issues of the journal. They show as an article is reviewed, it is ready to be printed. It can create a flow of information. So SOS, it is read. And we guarantee the address. It is still, after this publishing, the link is the same. So for example, this article journal is in two languages. It is indexed in Google.
So you can search in Google before the article is actually published. So this is an example for any article that we have, which facilitates. And it is, of course, a big contribution to the editors in Latin America that they are not capable how to get it.
And the day you have those services for each article including access to the curriculum of the authors when we have a national database or several kind of journals, a journal that has measured. And you have the collection in this case, which is hundreds of years of the journal. So in addition, it is a preservation, a strategy for scientific information.
This slide shows, in the case of Brazil today, that mostly download of the article is 12 million article, which is really a big operation. We estimate that in the overall network, we were not able to get it all. We estimate that the average is between 17 million, 20 million downloads which is real lay big operation.
This is an example of, I have a lot of data here. To show that the quality and improved of the setup for the reason for the time. We took that they are indexed in JCR. And we saw measure the citation, they received it and the citation that they received from the international journals. And the whole site.
And we discovered, of course, that you have a collection that is national oriented and another one that is international oriented. So the idea is to put all this collection we have seen in the global flow of information. So 80 percent of the journals are increased. This is to see the number of articles they received. I'll skip this, this, this.
All the development is done in believe it or not, the database is operated in UNYSYS, which we adopt, of course, but is very efficient. We receive a lot of impression to change the database, but still now we could not find another one so efficient.
So the biggest challenge we face today is keeping going. It's part of the network. It's part of the collections. Increase or maintain usage factor and particularly increase the quality. The interesting thing is that you enter, you see more articles. As you receive more articles, automatically the quality improves. You enter in issues, you have before.
So we have some problems with etiquette in terms of increased etiquette in communication, or a big problem we have is to build a public/private mix. If you, for Africa probably one day to India, we could have more than a thousand journals, or about 1,500 journals. So this becomes a huge operation that needs to keep track of it. So we have the issue of technology and the issue of policies.
The prospective is the idea online publishing is a public service of the journals. So if you can enter in a place and have a system to publish your journal with the state of the art technology, you go down the prices and you can make the system affordable. We are working it in books. And the idea is how to improve or to get him. We suspect it will come in and play an important role to move it on.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you for your presentation. And now it is time for comments, questions on the two last presentations. Please, the microphone is there. Please introduce yourself and make your comment or ask your question.
>> Audience: Andrej, economics. I would like to ask how is the freedom of expression connected to accessible. What's the scientific connection between them?
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Would you elaborate a little bit on the question? What is the background? I saw you yesterday, you participated in the session on freedom of expression or the day before yesterday. Simply communication and information sector works on a number of subjects. One of them is freedom of expression. Another of them is access to information. So there is the link from institutional perspective. Did that answer your question?
>> Is that only from an institutional perspective, not for substantial issues? For example, applicable to the internet. For example, when in the internet, strictly my opinion, it's not possible to have freedom of expression but not the information accessibility. Otherwise, it's not possible for information accessible without freedom of expression when they have post comments, for example, scientific information, can you also leave the comments.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: You see, UNESCO stands for freedom of expression and free flow of information. And today when we are speaking about access to scientific information, that access may be limited, limited by a fee one would need to pay to access the scientific or article. So what UNESCO is doing promoting or for the moment collecting information about existing points of access free of charge to scientific information to create this database and to provide everybody who is interested in the possibility to access free of charge to scientific information in the domain of his or her research.
So this goes exactly in the direction of the corps mandate in terms of promotion, freedom of expression and free flow of information. So I hope that answered your question.
>> Audience: Thank you very much
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you for asking.
>> Audience: I'm a professor at Sarbonne University.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Would you
>> Audience: Speak a little louder. I have competition. I've been participating in UNESCO's work on open education and resources. I'm very pleased to hear what you've presented today because we were worried on the side of serious society about the evolution of the OER, the mention of UNESCO. You've been pioneers and have been for a while. The whole thing was silenced. And yet there was a whole background there. So they're glad to see me down. It seems like a good way of using the capital, expert knowledge.
My question coming from this perspective, the biggest resistance we find comes from governments. I think there's still a lot of outreach to do to help government frame policies so that their public universities, for instance, or their research institutions will accept to move on to OER instead of a traditional way of more secretive way, more proper method way of putting knowledge at the disposal of people. I think we have a lot. I really think that UNESCO to be. I would like to hear your positions about that.
>> Thank you. A very, very good question, very relevant. I would respond by saying that the way UNESCO is handling this issue for the moment is to have an extremely intensive and dynamic dialogue with our member states because member states are not convinced, nothing will move. So we've already lost the conversation with the member states. Just a few weeks ago, we had our first information meeting, which is quite new to all the sectors but there were so many that came. We got extremely positive feedback both on open education resources.
And I think the next step will be to come up with framework as you mentioned to convince governments to ask at least public institutions to provide all the resources they have online and for free as well as, of course, tap into other resources and depositories. So point well taken is to Web sites. Looks like the magistrates are very we're just hopeful and optimistic.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you. Maybe you asked a question, and that will be the last one in this session and then we will move on to the next subject I think.
>> Yes. Thank you very much. I find it interesting, both the presentations. I have a question related to the initiative that I didn't know about, I must confess. I think it's a very interesting initiative because, take it back to the dynamic condition and language diversity this morning on the panel. And we discussed the fact that I mean, more are moving toward a dominant language, so English.
So it's very important for all the languages not to lose the functionality of being languages of research and all the functionalities. So the work done by Ciello appears to me very important in that direction to foster multilingual database of research. And I, of course, encourage the fact that it can be more languages represented in the project. And my question is to UNESCO, if UNESCO does encourage the researchers, researcher in the university we work with UNESCO with UNESCO to use this platform, in any case to use their own language to publish. And if yes, how do you encourage that. In other cases, if you think you could do it. Thank you.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you for your question. We will this is a good encouragement for us to think about it. We are now in the phase of development of this platform. And we will certainly take on board your suggestions and we'll think the way how to make sure that, how to reach out to the scientific community and how to encourage scientists to use this platform whether to download or to put at the disposal of others their publications. So thank you. Thank you for your presentations.
If you want to change your seats, this is the time. Otherwise, you're welcome to stay. We are moving now to the next part of our session. And we will be talking about initiatives on developing inclusive information policies, using SAT's and education for a person with disabilities. We will enlist interventions of two speakers. One is the director for communications, otherwise known as G3ict. And then we will listen to the presentation of Anya Kovich, from the centre of internet and society from India.
Mr. Axel Leblois is the founder and executive director of G3ict for technologies and advocacies, initiative of the global alliance. Prior creating G3ict, they spent over 20 years at the helm of information technology in the United States including the CEO of computer world communications, president of worldwide information systems and so on and so forth. So saving time, I will immediately give the floor to you. And please inform us about the initiative and the ways we can incorporate in the issue which from UNESCO perspective is extremely important.
>> AXEL LEBLOIS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And it looks like, I don't know if you feel the same, competition is tougher tonight than earlier this afternoon. In any case, I would like to start with kind of a human touch so that we understand the perspective in the topic that's working this afternoon. There is a quote from Daniel Chung, if anybody asks me what the internet means to me, I will tell him or her without hesitation to me, the internet occupies the most important part of my life. It is my feet that can take me to any part of the world. It is my hands which help me to accomplish my work. It is my best friend. It gives my life meaning."
So this is like a quote from someone who lives with, you know, very constraining type much impairment. And of course, the question is today, if you look at the world population, you'll see that 680 million persons live with severe disabilities. And if you add to that temporary disabilities which are minor impairments, you get to 18 percent of the population, just to give you an idea, in the United States, the official census that was done in 2005 gets to 17 percent of the population, 54 million persons. Brazil is 5.3. So those numbers are very significant.
And of course, the question there is, how do we make sure that information technologies can be used by persons with a certain type of limitation such as impairments, much. They are two concerns, one is making sure the products and services are designed for design principles as much as possible so nobody is excluded. But it is making sure technology is employed to allow the user to have access to information. So those are the two major challenges that are occupying us.
In 2006, the commission of physical disabilities was passed. Human rights treated in the century. And it defines a lot of possibilities in great detail. It was written with many different organisations and also civil society. It has been not represented. The, it means the treaty will be the universal framework for the right of persons with disabilities including the division of accessibility.
So what is important for us to understand is that all member states and all member states which are members of UNESCO, the vast majority have actually signed, notified the obligation. He doesn't have to talk about his condition.
So and I don't want to spend too much time tonight because time is limited, but you see some of the applications where it is specific, television, politics, services, living, education, emergency services, labour, personal mobile, and read. One of them sends like in addition to that, there are specific conventions. It's consistent an act of discrimination.
So it is a long term legal commitment on the fact of countries. It has to do with a lot of efforts to make education fully accessible to students and faculty.
We have to actually make exceptions so you can launch content in a digital format for persons who are already challenged and need special accommodations. I'm hopeful this will come to a conclusion in the short term.
There is a specific disposition that is modest, not only make sure the web and knowledge are accessible.
Last February, the federal communications commission in the United States did a survey of who are the persons in the U.S., who are the persons that despite the fact they have broadband coming to their home, the fact that it is fully accessible, don't buy it. 49 percent of them in the U.S. have personal disabilities. It's a huge number. It's an astounding statistic. So of course, they are seeing, gee, maybe there was some invisible factor. So it's important to understand. How is it going in countries?
Policy is challenging, starting to appear. For education, 70 percent of the countries responded yes, we are starting to put policies in place. It doesn't do much to put a policy in place. At least it's recognized. So they are calling for help. They are calling for support. That's why it's so important right now to listen to that because without implementation, this is like no other.
This is a huge gap. In 44 countries which have no policies for television. There again, that is a very simple thing to do. There are best practices. There are countries which have implemented accessibility. And it's not a big issue have an argument or text.
So there are gaps that are really interesting between the policy making here, the ratification, when they're ratified them. There are some real witnesses. And, one that it projects is okay,
(Too close to microphone) while 80 percent of the countries have no statistics or better on digital access by a person with disabilities. So how could they possibly actually measure, implement, and. So one of our international institutions, identify the areas where there are the most opportunity. It's a very.
UNESCO suggested perhaps we should work in partnership with some of the initiatives that we do, was very key to listen to the kind of network of experts. So they found that UNESCO was interested to explore. One was implementing the convention. It is strategy planning for their own purposes.
There were experts from around the world. And we really came out with a number of very intriguing ideas. UNESCO... did some brainstorming, did those recommendations of UNESCO's, not ours obviously. But that report, you can see, is available today, was released a week ago. And it's very interesting.
It shows that UNESCO is very keen to make itself accessible mainstreaming access in education, which is important given the policies of having disabled students in regular schools and making resources and creating accessible information and not an ecosystem.
I hope you have a chance to look at it. It is a very interesting report. I want to thank UNESCO for being so open, so eager to actually listen to all those voices.
So in 2010 2011, if I may, I think there are four things that we see happening. One. The possibility of having UNESCO incorporate some of its declaration process, accessibility questions so we start to have some data on country's achievements. UNESCO is putting together a tool kit for educators and develop some good practices and has a plan to maintain accessibility. It is fantastic opportunity for all of us.
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you, Axel, for your presentation. I would like to say that the printed version of the report is available outside the room on the table.
Now the last speaker of today's forum and in this section as well is Ms. Anya Kovich for the centre of internet society in Bangalore, India. She has a presentation that data goes back to 2007 when she started to wonder about the possible consequences of the reluctance of many people in India to closely engage with new technologies. She has a number of interests and today an I can't will share with us funding.
So Anya, please, the floor is yours.
>> Thank you, Mr. Chairperson. First of all, I should say it's good you didn't read my whole bio, because you would not have heard the word "accessibility" in there at all. So it's not actually me that's been doing this work. It's a colleague of mine who has been leading this study. And she unfortunately couldn't be here. So she's asked me to introduce the work on her behalf.
I have unfortunately not been. So what a research study has been trying to do is get more of a sense, to what extent ICT initiatives in the Asia Pacific region, education initiatives are actually ICK for people with disable of the UN declaration. The convention for the rights of people with pack. It promotes inclusive education. It is a development goal.
Also, of course, as we all know, internet and ICT tools and technologies have opened up new avenues of inclusion and participation.
There is, at the time same, all that information is there but it is not being used.
For secondary education, higher education, vocational training, building of educators, collaborative knowledge, creation and sharing platforms, etcetera, and with a specific focus on technology platforms and content which are open. The study is actually ongoing and consists of three parts. First there is a template for policy makers. It is the implementation of best practices.
Secondly, there have been documented around 30 case studies on a few countries in the Asia Pacific region. I will briefly go through each of these parts to explain more what has been done
For the two templates, for the templates, two have been design. One is for governments and policy makers, the other for disability organisations and educators. And the objective of the templates is, first of all, to secondly, to document prevalent practices relate to go the creation and dissemination of open educational resources. Third, to identify different models of intervention and policy and implementation spaces, especially those which are innovative and have a far reaching impact, and to result in the system which may relate to actions for persons with disabilities.
I will not cover all the questions that are there. There are issues relating to conversion, the organisations that are involved in conversion, policies on accessibility, ICT, and education, resources in library, academic institutions, schools, etcetera. But you can actually go and have a view of the templates yourself. The first one is the one for educators and disability organisations. The second one for policy makers and governments. And both of them are freely available online. So anybody for a look at the survey there.
The second bit of the study consists of the documentation of ICT case studies. This part has actually more or less been completed. It looks at the situation in ten different countries: India, China, Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan.
A variety of case studies have been included in this documentation process. The first group are those that focus on learning accessible content. The second one are inclusive knowledge communities where people with share resources on how they deal with their disability on a platform that is based on a social networking platform. So it's something similar like Facebook but specifically for people with disabilities.
A third group are those that focus on computer ICT training as a means toward an end. The fourth group are ICT policies towards inclusive education. Those can be either from the UN or national policies. Then fifth, learning aids for trainers and educators. And finally, inclusive or alternative learning models and paradigms.
There is also a variety of funding of the project. Some are state sponsored or subsidized. There are corporate. There are private/public initiatives. And also some from the social sector initiatives.
The case studies have been classified in three groups. The first are, primary education, looking at ICT interventions and physical and learning disabilities among children; including schooling accommodation and policy. Secondary, interventions in advanced school learning, assistive technologies, computer literacy also and comparative education for people with disabilities.
Third, education, accessible, formal or informal adult learning, learning material, education and training.
These are some examples. There are Cisco integrated school, which come under inclusive models in China. Mobile phones in classrooms for students comes under learning aids in Japan. And the open university of Sri Lanka, the Thailand cyber university project and includes the project I just mentioned. Some of the primary observations are outcome of all these studies is that there is a high focus on learning it and creating accessible content such as stocking books, speech converters, etcetera.
There's training in basic ICT, which is considered as important as using ICT for additional learning. The majority of, people with print. The number of learning environments that are exclusive is still higher than the ones that are integrated. And well as the lack of easily available learning aids for teachers, caregivers and parents. And the third. Analyze the policy frameworks. In china, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh, south Korea. This is still ongoing. I perhaps will skip the specific country explanation, so anybody who has an interest in a specific country is welcome to come and have a look afterwards.
But there are some preliminary findings that kind of summarize some things already. Disability specific litigations actually exist in all the ten countries. Constitutional provisions recognizing education as a fundamental right are also fairly common. Specific education policies are less common. Internet and ICT accessibilities, plans, policies, guidelines again is somewhere in between. But what is very interesting, I thought, is that corporate acts, in none of the ten countries have fair use provisions with the exception of Japan, which allows for provision, one of the big issues so clearly hasn't been addressed at all.
This is basically the overview of the study. I just wanted to also announce, if I may, the building on the work introduced as well, centre for internet in society and collaboration with the support from UNESCO and others is organizing an international conference on accessibility for disabled people in education in New Delhi in October.
The Web site is edict2010. And you're all very welcome to join us there. There is already a preliminary programme up on the Web site. Do spread the word. And we hope to welcome some of you there
>> JANIS KARKLINS: Thank you. At this point I would also like to inform that UNESCO has launched a new initiative on development of inclusive information policies using SAT's for education for persons with disabilities. This new initiative aims at enhancing inclusive information policies using SAT's for persons with disabilities.
UNESCO will collect and examine good practices around the world on the use of SAT's for persons with disabilities, a set of recommendations will be developed for the UNESCO member states. The work includes a number of issues such as preparation of digital documents in accessible format, free and open source software, open educational materials, and used ICT and policies introduced.
The figures we saw in the first presentation just testify that we, with this activity, we are contributing to the welfare of more than a million people on the planet. And that is very important for us to do.
Now the floor is open for questions, comments, if any at this late stage.
Anybody like to ask a comment? It seems not to be the case. What I would like to say, that all presentations which have been shown and made today will be posted on UNESCO Web site as well as audio recording of the session. And it will be available for those who are interested in reading and listening.
So thank you very much. Thank you for your participation. And on behalf of UNESCO, looking forward to cooperation with you and delivering for the good cause. Thank you very much indeed. I also thank all of you who had the courage to sit until the end of this open forum. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you for supporting UNESCO and I'm looking forward to seeing you again in a year in a similar open forum session. Thank you very much indeed.
[ APPLAUSE ]
(End of meeting)