Newcomers Session | IGF 2023

Anja Gengo

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is not just an annual meeting but a continuous process that promotes a multistakeholder model and facilitates discussions on various internet governance issues. It serves as a platform for different stakeholders, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and the technical community, to engage in dialogue and exchange ideas.

The IGF has been organised by various member states, including the current host, Japan. Its main objective is to provide an open, inclusive, and transparent space for all stakeholders to address the challenges and opportunities presented by the internet. By adopting a multistakeholder approach, the IGF ensures that decisions about internet governance are not solely left to governments but involve all relevant actors.

The IGF Secretariat, based in Geneva, Switzerland, plays a crucial role in supporting the IGF process. It operates in a neutral manner to facilitate discussions and help coordinate the activities of the forum. The Secretariat is keen on receiving feedback from participants to continuously improve the process and address any concerns or suggestions they may have.

The IGF Leadership Panel was appointed following the Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. They recognise that digital technologies are rapidly developing, and mechanisms for governing those technologies should keep pace. The Panel emphasises the need for the IGF to advance its modalities and ensure that it remains relevant in the ever-changing digital landscape.

In addition to its role in facilitating discussions, the IGF contributes to capacity development and sustainability through various initiatives. One such initiative is the Youth track, which works with young people from different regions for capacity building in the area of internet governance. Another initiative is the Parliamentary track, which engages legislators in discussions on internet governance and helps them develop policies that align with the goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In conclusion, the Internet Governance Forum is a dynamic and inclusive process that goes beyond its annual meeting. It promotes a multistakeholder approach to internet governance, with the aim of addressing the challenges and opportunities brought about by digital technologies. Through the support of the IGF Secretariat, the collaboration of stakeholders, and the implementation of capacity-building initiatives, the IGF contributes to the development of sustainable and inclusive governance frameworks for the internet.

Anja Gengo:
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. I hope you can hear me well. So, to everyone who has joined us online from the different parts of the world, for the majority of the world, it is very late or very early, so we thank you for the great effort you are making. Good. Those of you who are here are the ones who are participating for the first time in person. I hope we can have a nice and friendly conversation about what the IGF is, what it means, how to participate. And well, we have four days ahead of us, and well, we can participate and collaborate in these four days, but we are also going to talk about how to continue collaborating between the sessions. I am Anja Gengo, I work at the IGF Secretariat. The Secretariat is an office based in the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Its main task is to support the process in a neutral way. The Secretariat has been in operation since the beginning of the IGF. The person in charge of our office, unfortunately, has not been able to be here with us due to some changes at the last minute, but surely you already know him, all of you who have been here yesterday, and you will see him later, especially at the opening ceremony. Do not hesitate to contact me or others. How was all this started, and as I said, what are the ways for long-term engagement? I will guide you through this history of almost two decades long through a couple of slides, but I hope that most of the time of this morning’s session can be reserved for a dialogue with you. The Secretariat is very interested to learn about your feedback on the current process, the way, for example, you’ve heard about the IGF, reasons to be here, and of course your expectations from the forum. This is always very valuable for us to improve the process for the time to come. Now, to go to a little bit of a history of the IGF, as you can imagine, the concept of the United Nations traditionally is multilateral, so it’s first of all member-state-centered and people-centered process. In early 2000s, the concept of multi-stakeholder model was, I think we have some interference probably from Zoom, so I’ll ask our technicians to mute the online participants. We’ll certainly have, as I said, time to give floor also to online participants, and I hope that you can give me a couple of minutes to just introduce the topic, and then we’ll give you the floor. Thank you. As I said, in a traditionally multilateral intergovernmental process, introducing the concept of multi-stakeholder model was something that I’m sure you can imagine was exotic at the time, and as the Internet was on the rise in early 2000s, sort of the late 90s, and was becoming more and more part of people’s daily life, the community, not just the member states, but the community, different stakeholder groups, called for a process to govern the Internet while at the same time keeping it accessible, affordable, safe, secure, of course human rights-centered, and the Internet is one, which is very important, so to avoid any fragmentation. So in early 2000s, because of these calls, the Working Group on Internet Governance was formed, and the Working Group was formed of different stakeholders coming from different backgrounds. Some of them you can actually meet here at the IGF. I think they are really valuable resources of information, and if you go to WGIC website or just to Wikipedia, you can check the names of those members and maybe approach them during this meeting to just get to know each other. But very long story short, the WGIC did come up with a working definition of Internet governance, and I hope you can see it on this slide, saying that Internet governance is the development and application by governments, the private sector, and civil society in their respective rules of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programs to shape the evolution and use of the Internet. This definition that is older than the IGF itself is the definition that is still in use today, and I’m sure from your experience as well, just as mere end users, first of all, you can also tell that it’s very much relevant to today’s digital public policy processes. Going further, within the World Summit on the Information Society of the United Nations, there were calls by different stakeholders, of course, including the member states, to establish a forum that will be inclusive, that will be multi-stakeholder, and that will enable everyone to get together and discuss issues that pertain to Internet governance. Through two phases, which are most important, happening in 2003 and 2005 in Tunisia and in Switzerland, in Geneva, finally the IGF was convened. The Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, specifically its paragraph 72, is what gave life to the IGF. It set its mandate. The convening of the IGF, formally speaking, happened in early 2006 by, at that time, serving Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr. Kofi Annan, and the very first annual meeting took place in late October, early November of 2006, in Athens, hosted by the government of Greece. Now, the rest is, of course, history. Today, we are sitting at the venue that is hosting the 18th annual IGF meeting and its edition. These five days of the annual meetings are far from being just organized by an event organizer. It’s a part of a process, and it’s organized by its host country, the government of Japan for this year, and also by various modalities within the structure of the IGF. The heart of those modalities is shown on this slide. I hope you can see it. First and foremost, the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group, or the MAG. The MAG is a multistakeholder body composed of 40 members coming from different stakeholder groups, different regional groups, with gender parity across the membership. It is chaired by a chair that’s elected through the membership and endorsed as such. The group is appointed annually by the Secretary General of the United Nations, and its core mandate, by terms of reference, is that it serves to advise the Secretary General on the program, on the agenda of the annual IGF meeting. Currently, the MAG is chaired by Mr. Paul Mitchell. That is the first chair coming from the private sector. This year’s meeting is particularly important with respect to the Multistakeholder Advisory Group composition, just because probably during this week, if not even today, the community will be informed about the renewed membership of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group, and not just that, also by its new chair. So we will have a rotation of the chair as well. So please stay tuned. The information will be at the IGF website, and I’m sure it will be announced also during the IGF meeting at appropriate places and sessions. The MAG is renewed, as I said, by approximately one-third of its total membership every year. So today, or in this week, we will learn who are the new 11 incoming MAG members, from which countries they’re coming, what are their backgrounds. So it will be very interesting to see how the composition will be refreshed in that sense. If you are interested to be part of the MAG, or to contribute, then the call for nominations usually opens during the first half of the year, for a couple of weeks. And any stakeholder, individual or organization, is most welcome to nominate eligible nominees that are then considered for possible appointment to the membership group for one term, subject to extension for up to three terms. As of last year, the structure of the IGF has been advanced and reformed to an extent. So today we speak also about the IGF Leadership Panel. The Leadership Panel was appointed last year by the Secretary General, following a process that came out of the Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, calling for the IGF to advance its modalities, given the fact that, as you can all witness, of rapid development of digital technologies, and it is on us to ensure that the mechanisms for governing those technologies are keeping pace with that development. So the Leadership Panel is a high-level multi-stakeholder body, composed of in total 15 members. Among the 15 members, as an ex officio members, are, for example, the MAG Chair, the Secretary General’s Envoy on Technology, but also the host countries. So, for example, the current host country holds a seat, as well as the future host country and the past host country. So we have that three-partite arrangement through the Leadership Panel, which allows us to bridge the process from last year to current year and then to future year. And with that, keep the continuity of the discussions and the process. Just yesterday, I think it was the last session hosted in this room, so if you were here, you had a pleasure to meet most of the members of the Leadership Panel and to hear from them. There will be other opportunities during this week, plenary open sessions, and that’s a good opportunity to listen to what the Leadership Panel has in plan for advancing the IGF, its modalities, for making it more impactful, more visible globally speaking, and for helping us to engage those that are not currently engaged and ensure that we are leaving no one behind. The profiles of the Leadership Panel members are visible, hopefully, to you on this slide. You can see that it’s very diversified. The chair of the Leadership Panel is Mr. Vint Cerf, well-known father of the Internet to all of us, and his vice chair is Ms. Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize winner, and I’m sure also a person that’s well-known to all of you. And then finally, you can see that part of the working mechanisms of the IGF, as I said at the beginning, is the office where I work. For example, the IGF Secretariat, this is the entrance at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, where we are based, and the role of the, as I said, the Secretariat is to ensure that all these mechanisms do work within the framework of the IGF principles and procedures. Now, what are the IGF principles? The IGF is an open, inclusive, bottom-up, transparent, non-commercial, multistakeholder process that runs throughout the year. Its funding is extra budgetary, so in other words, it doesn’t have regular financing channels, but it depends on support from various donors, whether it’s financial or in-kind. The IGF is very transparent when it comes about also its financing, the way it functions, so if you visit the IGF website, you will see who are the donors to the IGF’s trust fund, who are also the in-kind donors and supporters. Just in case, if you would have questions later, I can tell you that among the biggest donors, of course, are certain governments and also the technical community, then the private sector, but there are also those that come from a completely non-commercial domain that can be nested under the civil society. So it’s a very interesting composition of the supporters of the IGF, and we are very grateful to all those friends who are making sure that the IGF functions for almost the past two decades. I mentioned to you at the beginning that the IGF is a process, so not just the annual meeting, and that process, of course, includes a couple of components, but two are major, which I think would be valuable for you to memorize. One is called the intersessional work. Everything that’s happening between the two annual meetings is called the intersessional work. It’s a community-centered, community-driven work, and I will be speaking about its concrete form in just a couple of minutes. And then another integral part, very important, of that process is, of course, what’s happening today and what’s going to happen this week here in Kyoto at this venue, the IGF annual meeting. Different member states have, different governments have hosted the IGF so far, and the 18th annual IGF meeting, as you can see, is hosted by the government of Japan. For the next year, we will formally announce the host very soon, so please do stay tuned. In this room, we will learn where the IGF will be going next year in 2024. But on this slide, you can see where we were in the past 17 years so far. It’s great to be back in the Asia and Pacific region, as you can see, after a long period since we met, I think, in Bali, that was the closest to this region. This is just to illustrate quickly the dynamic atmosphere at every IGF, but I’m sure that especially those of you who attended the wonderful gala night just last night already felt that dynamics and just the energy that is produced by so many people gathering at one place who really care about the Internet and who are strong and passionate believers that the Internet, its associated tools and services, can really transform this world and bring better life to all people. This annual meeting, of course, is not just about discussions. Of course, the IGF is not a decision-making forum, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t produce concrete outcomes and outputs. I’m sure from your experience you would agree one of probably the greatest value and benefit individually and also for organizations participating at the IGF in person here at the annual meeting is the fact that you can network and exchange good practices, maybe not so good practices, but learn from those practices and ensure that going back to your respective communities you can make a change and make an improvement. There are also tangible outputs, so toward the end of this meeting you will be able to consult at the IGF website what we call the IGF messages. Those are the messages, action-oriented, and the tangible outputs that emerge from the reports of the session organizers. In other words, more than 300 sessions that feature this year’s program of the 18th annual IGF meeting will result in concrete messages that are developed around the main sub-teams of the IGF. The main sub-teams, I’m sure that by now you all know them by heart. The Internet we want empowering all people is the overarching theme of this year’s IGF. Under the overarching theme we have eight sub-teams, which you can see are very diverse. We’re discussing matters related to connectivity and access to human rights online, artificial intelligence, other emerging technologies, but also matters related to, for example, digital governance, to sustainability and environment, safety and security, data governance, and so on. So there’s plenty to choose from. I know it can be also overwhelming when you look at this very robust and rich agenda, but it is only reflective of the world that we are living in now, and that is that with respect to online environment, different communities have different issues, and a global forum needs to be inclusive of all those. And I hope that your inputs coming from your respective communities will help us to understand better those local specificities and ensure that this global community then is informed and can act upon that information. Yes, this year’s forum for now marked record number of registered participants. We are now close to having 9,000 participants who have registered to participate in the IGF. Of course, the largest number of them over, I think, 75% is in-person participation, and the rest is online participation. In terms of the participation and the backgrounds of the registered participants, it is really diversified, and we have stakeholders coming from all stakeholder groups, different disciplines, so representatives coming from the government, international and intergovernmental organizations, civil society, including the academia, private sector, technical community, and other related industries and disciplines. Now to move to this first component that I mentioned of the IGF process, which is called the IGF intersessional work. So I want to just concretely say what does that mean, and especially what are the ways of engagement, what’s the value of being engaged in that type of a work, and what you need to do if you’re interested in any of these topics. So the intersessional work, the work that’s happening in between the two annual meetings of the IGF, whose results are then discussed at the annual meeting, takes different forms. We have, for example, the best practice forums and the policy networks. Both are multi-stakeholder-driven community networks focused on particular issues, through which stakeholders work together to unpack mapped issues and to look at good practices, maybe not so good practices, and while not issuing concrete recommendations, we are very much focused on the intersessional work on good actions that can be taken to bring progress on recognized issues. So for example, for this year, the best practice forum on cyber security looks at cyber security related agreements and norms at national and international levels, trying to identify where are the gaps, and I think in this week the BPF on cyber security has a dedicated session, so you can certainly visit that session to understand what has that work resulted so far in. But the way the best practice forum, for example, functions throughout the year is that its modus operandi is its public mailing list. Everyone is most welcome to join the public mailing list. From the MAG, from the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group, usually a couple of MAG members act as co-facilitators. The IGF Secretariat holds a PAN as a neutral editor, and all together we work with community stakeholders from around the world to discuss the issues. We usually meet at least once monthly, and of course we meet at the on-site meeting once annually speaking. Just like best practice forums, the policy networks are very similar in terms of the working modalities. The only difference is the scope. While the best practice forums look good practices, best practices, the policy networks have a much broader scope. They look at what are the issues, what’s the status quo, what could be done to change it, how could that be done, who could do good actions to resolve certain issues. And for this year, the MAG decided that we have three policy networks that are focused on meaningful access, on Internet fragmentation, and on artificial intelligence. You are most welcome to subscribe to the mailing lists and to join these networks at any point in time. The PNs, the policy networks, they also have dedicated multi-stakeholder working group of experts, so they are very much of help to drive the work toward the right direction and to engage other stakeholders from the world in order to ensure that we have an inclusive process reflective of all issues globally that exist. Now I mentioned to you that the BPFs and PNs are dependent every year on the MAG, but also on your input, because through the public call for inputs every year, the MAG basically advises on the final agenda of the annual IGF meeting on the sub-teams, for example, looking at where is the pulse of the community, what’s relevant for the community, and they also decide on what are the topics that it seems the community finds most relevant and marks as a priority, and then they orient the intersessional work of the BPFs and PNs toward those topics. But unlike these two forms, the dynamic coalitions is something that’s more consistent, more independent in terms of the MAG and the IGF working mechanisms. They are run by experts coming from different disciplines, different stakeholder groups, different regions, and some of the dynamic coalitions, which are issue-oriented, exist for years. Some of them exist close to the duration of the IGF so far. As I said, they’re issue-oriented. They are very concrete. For example, you have now, it says 24, but by the time we reach the 18th annual IGF meeting here in Kyoto, we have three more, so it’s 27 in total. And they are different. There are dynamic coalitions, for example, on blockchain, on public access in libraries, on environment, on domain name system, and so on. So you are most welcome to visit the IGF website, look at what the dynamic coalitions are doing, subscribe to their mailing list, or simply reach out to the IGF secretariat, and we will put you in touch with the coordinator of this work. And then part of the IGF process also relates to capacity development. By the mandate of the IGF and the Tunis agenda that I mentioned to you at the beginning, at the heart of the IGF is to build capacity in all countries, developed and developing countries. And the capacity development strategy is every year tailored to fit the needs of the global community, but I would like, just for the purpose of this meeting, to focus on two very important components that are also presented here at the IGF in Kyoto. They are the parliamentary track and also the youth track, where I’m very much focused on developing capacity and working with legislators, members of parliaments coming from different parliaments from around the world, through our parliamentary track. The parliamentary track that’s coordinated by my colleague Celine sitting in this room is coordinated and developed in cooperation also with the regional IGFs. That helps us a lot to reach the local communities much better, much more efficiently. For example, this year we had a series of capacity development workshops hosted at the Asia-Pacific regional IGF in Brisbane in Australia, but also at the African IGF in Abuja in Nigeria. And here at the IGF yesterday, a series of capacity development workshops and dialogues between members of parliaments and with members of parliaments took place. Today it continues as well, so I do advise you to please visit the IGF website, IGF 2023 menu parliamentary track, and just see which session takes place where today. They’re very interesting and it’s a good also experience so you can engage better maybe with members of your parliament in your countries. Part of the capacity development for us relates to sustainability of these processes and the sustainability of the processes of course relates to investing and working with young people. Through the youth track, the IGF Secretariat works throughout the year with many youth IGF coordinators and many youth-related networks and communities on Internet governance to design and then implement the youth track. So this year, young people advised us that their priority is to look into safe digital future and so we are unpacking basically that concept through a couple of capacity development workshops. Some of them, just like the parliamentary track, have been hosted at the regional IGFs or at the Asia-Pacific IGF. Well, we firstly actually toured the globe through regional IGFs starting at Eurodig, that is the European IGF in Finland, then we moved to the Asia-Pacific IGF which was hosted in Australia, then to Latin America region through the Youth LAC IGF hosted in Colombia and then we concluded with the African IGF that was hosted in Nigeria in September. The conclusion of the youth track took place just yesterday. We had a wonderful IGF 2023 Global Youth Summit where we tried to establish a framework for a meaningful dialogue between the current generation of experts and leaders and the next generation of experts and leaders. And that’s very important for us. It has been a message that’s been sent by youth throughout the years of the IGFs feedback process that young people are very much interested to be active players in this field but that they do not want to be isolated and that is important that we have a meaningful dialogue with them between the decision makers and the decision makers holding those positions here right now. Now, I mentioned to you already a couple of IGFs, not just one, and that all relates to the concept of the IGF initiatives, national, regional, sub-regional and youth IGF initiatives or we should call them shortly the NRIs. The NRIs emerge organically. If you look at the Tunis agenda, it doesn’t call for establishing a national IGF in a particular country or a regional IGF but it does very much calls for development of a multistakeholder model at local levels and building on that, learning from the IGF as a model, many multistakeholder communities or many countries and regions started organizing their own IGF processes, applying the same set of principles, frameworks, procedures in their local communities. That history of close to 18 years now resulted in having today more than 160 officially recognized NRIs by the IGF Secretariat. The IGF Secretariat is entrusted by the NRIs to run the recognition process, ensuring that the processes do adhere to the IGF principles and also to support the network so we work throughout the year on a couple of objectives including to be presented here through a couple of sessions at the annual IGF meeting but also on other types of objectives you can see on the IGF website which we always set at the beginning of the year in a bottom-up consultations with all the NRIs. Many of the NRIs are present at this year’s IGF meeting here in Kyoto and they will have their main session, a couple of collaborative sessions so I do invite you to consult the IGF website and join us on those sessions and meet colleagues doing these really great things also in their respective countries. And I want to recognize of course our host, Japan has an excellent national IGF that has its own evolution and just I think in early September they hosted their annual meeting which was excellent and I think set a very good preconditions for engagement of Japanese community in this year’s 18th annual IGF meeting. So I mentioned the leadership panel, I won’t keep your time now on that, you will have opportunity to learn from the leadership panel directly. I hope that you have visited the IGF village which is just near the registration area at this venue. The IGF village you have seen probably is composed of a couple of exhibition booths and it serves for the community to better connect with institutions, organizations that are doing excellent work on Internet governance and it’s a very good opportunity and a quick one to connect with work of these organizations and see how certain maybe partnerships and cooperation could be developed long-term speaking. There’s a system of bilateral rooms, I hope that you have seen that at the IGF website. If someone participating in person at this year’s meeting is of your interest to meet with in a bilateral setup, so in a private setup, you can reserve a room through the IGF website, the secretariat will facilitate the approval and you can meet with those stakeholders. And of course if you need any support to connect with anyone, please email us at igf.un.org, we’ll be happy to support you. Now I won’t go that much into the processes which are with the United Nations are very much related or have an impact on the IGF, but I will mention briefly of course the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and I’m sure you’ve seen the 17 SDGs really cross-cutting the agenda of the IGF. This community is very much outspoken about the SDGs being a great accelerator of sustainable development and all of us as session organizers, as session participants are doing what we can to ensure that the reflections on how the SDGs can be supported by certain digital public policy related processes are reflected in discussions at this meeting. I mentioned at the beginning the digital cooperation concept, I’m sure that many of you also heard about it, especially the Global Digital Compact, the Our Common Agenda. So those are all the processes that are very recent, they came out of the Secretary General’s office and the whole goal is to look at our digital future, long-term speaking, to ensure that we can all benefit from it. It impacted the IGF already and probably it will long-term speaking, for example the leadership panel is the outcome of the Roadmap for Digital Cooperation and you can see hopefully on this slide more about this whole concept about the roadmap and its pillars. The Our Common Agenda and Global Digital Compact, there will be discussion a lot with respect to these topics at this year’s IGF. Many sessions are indeed directly or indirectly focused on this. The GDC is gaining momentum certainly, the Member States will soon enter the negotiation process to understand what the GDC will be about and of course the IGF as the forum within the United Nations where all stakeholders as equals discuss matters related to Internet governance, public digital policy is directly engaged in these processes and reflected by the discussions happening within. Now I’m going to invite for your comments and questions, it doesn’t have to be a question but I would like to also hear from you how do you find this year’s IGF, is it overwhelming for you? If you have any questions for the Secretariat I’d be happy to respond, we have I think a couple of more minutes left. And I also invite you to connect with us, so to subscribe to our mailing lists, to connect with us through our email, igf.un.org is the email address of the IGF Secretariat and we would be happy to hear from you. You can also visit our social wall, connect with us on social media, we’re present on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. There is also the IGF mobile app, it’s very convenient and quick way to follow the schedule for example for this year’s IGF rather than going through a browser, so I hope that you’ve experienced it, if not then I do invite you to download the app and use it and tell us your user experience so we can do better for next year. So with that let me stop here and pause here and just to see if you have any questions or comments on what you’ve heard so far. I would assume that if yes, if there are comments we would use these microphones that are up front, correct? Yes. Good, I don’t see any comments, any requests for questions, I don’t know if we have anyone online that would like to ask anything before we wrap up here. Thank you. So we don’t have any requests from online participants, good. This is a compliment, that means that it was clear so far. First of all I want to sincerely thank you for being here and for being at the IGF, learning about it. It’s been a great pleasure to speak with you and to you this morning. As you know we will start preparing for the big moment of this year’s IGF which is to formally open this year’s meeting and I think everyone will benefit, especially the organisers and the technical logistical team, of a couple of more extra minutes to set the stage, prepare the room, so I will wrap up then earlier. Thank you very much. Please let us meet also outside, be free to approach or visit our office, 104, that’s the number of our office, we would be very happy and grateful to connect with all of you. Thank you very much for your attention.