IGF2024

Summary

The opening session of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia focused on shaping a multi-stakeholder digital future and addressing global digital challenges. Speakers emphasized the importance of bridging digital divides, including gender gaps and disparities between developed and developing nations. They highlighted the need for affordable digital infrastructure, digital resilience, and inclusive governance mechanisms.

The adoption of the Global Digital Compact was noted as a significant milestone, recognizing the IGF as a primary platform for discussing internet governance issues. Speakers stressed the importance of ethical AI development and governance, calling for transparency, fairness, and accountability in AI systems. The potential of digital technologies to accelerate human progress was acknowledged, alongside the need for guardrails and collaborative governance approaches.

Several initiatives were announced, including Saudi Arabia’s efforts to build AI training infrastructure and UNESCO’s new Internet Universality Indicators and Guidelines for AI use in the judiciary. Speakers called for increased investment in fundamental research on network information theory and AI. The role of the multi-stakeholder model in driving internet governance progress was repeatedly emphasized.

Participants highlighted the need to address challenges such as cybersecurity threats, online hate speech, and the potential misuse of AI. They stressed the importance of protecting human rights in the digital space and ensuring that technology serves humanity. The discussion underscored the critical role of international cooperation and capacity building in achieving an inclusive, secure, and equitable digital future for all.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– The importance of inclusive, ethical and responsible development of digital technologies and AI to benefit all of humanity

– The need to address digital divides, including gender gaps and disparities between developed and developing countries

– The role of multi-stakeholder collaboration and governance in shaping the future of the internet and digital technologies

– The potential of digital technologies and AI to drive economic growth, innovation and sustainable development

– The importance of protecting human rights, privacy and security in the digital realm

Overall purpose:

The overall purpose of this discussion was to open the 2024 Internet Governance Forum and set the agenda for addressing key challenges and opportunities in global internet governance and the development of digital technologies. Speakers aimed to highlight the need for collaborative, inclusive approaches to shape a digital future that benefits all.

Overall tone:

The tone was largely optimistic and forward-looking, with speakers emphasizing the transformative potential of digital technologies while also acknowledging challenges that need to be addressed. There was a sense of urgency about the need to act now to shape the future of the internet and AI in positive ways. The tone remained consistent throughout, with different speakers reinforcing similar themes about collaboration, inclusion and responsible development of technology.

Speakers

– Announcer: Event host/moderator

– Li Junhua: Undersecretary General of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs

– António Guterres: UN Secretary General

– Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha: Minister of Communications and Information Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

– Doreen Bogdan-Martin: Secretary General at International Telecommunication Union

– Krzysztof Gawkowski: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of Poland

– Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni: Minister of Digital Transition

– Torgeir Micaelsen: State Secretary of the Ministry of Digitalization and Public Governance at the Government of Norway

– Kurtis Lindqvist: CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

– Tawfik Jelassi: Assistant Director General at United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

– Ke Gong: President of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations

– Palwasha Mohammed Zai Khan: Senator at the Senate of Pakistan

– Ivana Bartoletti: Global Chief Privacy and AI Governance Officer at Wipro

Additional speakers:

– Sarah: Character in the introductory narrative

– Father: Character in the introductory narrative

The opening session of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2024 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, convened high-level speakers from various sectors to discuss critical issues in internet governance and digital development, focusing on shaping a multi-stakeholder digital future and addressing global digital challenges.

Digital Inclusion and Bridging Divides

A central theme was the urgent need to address digital divides, including gender gaps and disparities between developed and developing nations. Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Saudi Arabia, emphasised closing digital, gender, and AI divides. Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary General at the International Telecommunication Union, highlighted that a third of humanity remains offline, calling for targeted interventions and investment in affordable digital infrastructure and services. Ivana Bartoletti, Global Chief Privacy and AI Governance Officer at Wipro, stressed the unacceptability of the digital gender gap.

AI Governance and Ethics

The governance and ethical development of artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as a crucial topic. Alswaha called for an AI governance model addressing compute, data, and algorithmic divides. António Guterres, UN Secretary General, introduced the Global Digital Compact as a blueprint for humanity’s digital future, emphasizing that “Digital technology must serve humanity, not the other way around.” Tawfik Jelassi from UNESCO reported on the development of guidelines for the ethical use of AI in the judiciary. Bartoletti emphasized the importance of AI governance for ensuring fair, transparent, and accountable systems, also mentioning the European AI Act and Wipro’s participation in the European AI Pact.

Multi-stakeholder Approach to Internet Governance

The importance of a multi-stakeholder approach was a recurring theme. Guterres recognised the IGF as the primary multi-stakeholder platform for internet governance issues. Kurtis Lindqvist, CEO of ICANN, affirmed the proven success of the multi-stakeholder model. Torgeir Micaelsen, State Secretary of Norway’s Ministry of Digitalization and Public Governance, viewed the IGF as an opportunity to shape an inclusive digital future and announced Norway as the host for the next IGF.

Digital Transformation and Economic Development

Speakers highlighted the significant role of the digital economy in global development. Alswaha noted that the digital economy represents 15% of the global economy and highlighted Saudi Arabia’s efforts to build AI training infrastructure. Palwasha Mohammed Zai Khan, Senator at the Senate of Pakistan, reported on Pakistan’s strides towards digital transformation. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Minister of Digital Transition, discussed how digital technologies are reshaping governance and service delivery, mentioning the Manhattan Declaration on inclusive global scientific understanding of artificial intelligence.

Cybersecurity and Digital Resilience

The importance of cybersecurity and digital resilience was emphasised by several speakers. Li Junhua, Undersecretary General of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, highlighted the need to address challenges posed by sophisticated cyberattacks. Krzysztof Gawkowski, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs of Poland, prioritised ensuring the relevance of cybersecurity systems. Ke Gong, President of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, pointed out the responsibility of engineers in designing resilient systems against cyber threats.

Key Initiatives and Future Actions

Several initiatives were announced during the session. UNESCO reported on new Internet Universality Indicators and Guidelines for AI use in the judiciary. Bogdan-Martin mentioned the Partner to Connect Digital Coalition and its targets. Speakers called for increased investment in fundamental research on network information theory and AI. The upcoming WSIS Plus 20 review in 2025 was highlighted as a significant milestone.

The discussion also touched on challenges such as online hate speech, the potential misuse of AI, and the threats posed by deep fakes. Protecting human rights in the digital space was a recurring concern, with speakers stressing the importance of ensuring that technology serves humanity while balancing innovation with privacy concerns.

Conclusion

The opening session of IGF 2024 set a comprehensive agenda for addressing key challenges and opportunities in global internet governance and digital technology development. While there was broad consensus on major issues such as digital inclusion, AI governance, and the multi-stakeholder approach, speakers offered varying perspectives on specific strategies and focus areas. The discussion underscored the critical role of international cooperation and capacity building in achieving an inclusive, secure, and equitable digital future for all. As the forum progresses, the focus will be on translating these high-level discussions into concrete actions and policies to bridge digital divides, ensure ethical AI development, and promote a resilient and inclusive digital ecosystem.

Intro: Sarah. Father, look at the bright star. That star is Suhail, my dear. It has always guided us to rain and good fortune. I want to touch it, Father. Can I? You won’t reach it alone. I’ll help you. That is the vision of the land with the power of its nation. Was that a vision, Father? No, my child. That is reality. A reality to a connected future where we build bridges with the world. And now I’m handing the light over to you. Welcome to Saudi Arabia.

Announcer: Please welcome to the stage Mr. Lijian Hua, Undersecretary General of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Li Junhua: His Excellency, Mr. Abdullah Alswaha, Minister of Communication and Information Technology of the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Distinguished Ministers, Excellencies, distinguished participants, I have the honor to invite the UN Secretary General, Mr. António Guterres, to deliver his video message.

António Guterres: Excellencies, I am pleased to greet the Internet Governance Forum and thank the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting this gathering. I also thank my Internet Governance Leadership Panel for their extraordinary work throughout their mandate. Dear friends, Digital technology has fundamentally reshaped our world and holds enormous potential to accelerate human progress. But unlocking this potential for all people requires guardrails and a collaborative approach to governance. In September, world leaders reached a critical milestone, the adoption of the Global Digital Compact. The Compact is the blueprint for humanity’s digital future. It’s the first comprehensive framework of its kind, based on a simple but important principle. Digital technology must serve humanity, not the other way around. And the Compact breaks new ground in three ways. First, it expands the vision of the World Summit on Information Society to not only bridge the digital divide but recognize technology as a global public good. Second, it aims to address rapidly emerging challenges that have been missing from the global digital debate, from combating hate speech and protecting vulnerable populations online to ensuring that data benefits societies instead of contributing to further concentration of economic power. And third, the Compact includes the first true universal agreement on the international governance of artificial intelligence. It commits governments to establishing an independent international scientific panel on AI and initiating a global dialogue on its governance within the United Nations. It brings all countries to the AI table and it supports efforts to build AI capacity in developing countries. Dear friends, the Global Digital Compact also recognizes the Internet Governance Forum as the primary multi-stakeholder platform for discussing Internet governance issues. As the World implements the Compact, the work and voice of your Forum will be critical. Together, let’s keep building an open, free and safe Internet for all people. And I thank you.

Li Junhua: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary General. Let me echo the Secretary General’s appreciation to the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its warm hospitalities in welcoming all of us and hosting this important event. The world today faces unprecedented challenges. Effective digital governance plays an important role in navigating this complex landscape. Digital technology has proven its power. It impacts us individually and as a society, affecting our economies and reshaping our future. It is critically important to ensure that the digital technologies work for the people not against them. Ladies and gentlemen, this year’s Internet Governance Forum marks the eve of the pivotal moment for global digital governance. In 2025, the United Nations General Assembly will conduct a 20-year review of the outcomes of the World Summit on Information Society. The 20-year review will provide an opportunity to align the WSIS principles and outcomes with the broader dialogue and commitments on digital governance and sustainable development, including the recently adopted Global Digital Compact. The WSIS review will also consider extending the IGF’s mandate. The IGF has now expanded from a single event to encompass 174 national or regional and youth forums. Through the community-driven platforms, the IGF tackles the key issues like cybersecurity, environmental sustainability, AI governance, human rights, gender equality, and digital infrastructure resilience, informing decision-makers worldwide. Since 2006, over 320 prominent individuals have served the IGF through its multi-stakeholder advisory group. This group has been a crucial conduit of community input, translating the will of the people into tangible preparations and outcomes. Likewise, the leadership panel in the last two years has made the IGF a stronger and more inclusive organization. land ever, ensuring our values and missions continue to drive impactful dialogue and solutions at the highest level. I’m truly proud of what we have achieved together. Through the IGF, you stand as a guardian of an accessible, affordable, safe, and resilient Internet. Together, we are working through the challenges of the rapidly changing digital landscape, such as sophisticated cyberattacks and the swift rise of generative AI, while maintaining the Internet as a force for good. As we prepare for WSIS Plus 20 in 2025, I invite all of you to unite like never before through the IGF platform to advance meaningful change. First, you will continue the efforts that are needed to ensure that IGFs bridge the digital divide by serving both developing and developed countries, building capacity across sectors and boundaries, and fostering cooperation between the global North and global South. Second, I encourage all of you to strengthen local Internet governance by supporting national and regional IGFs as multi-stakeholder forums to address local needs and inspired solutions. Finally, it is crucial that the recommendations and actions emerging from this platform support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, the RIAD IGF presents an important historical opportunity to build on past outcomes and create a strategic roadmap for a stronger, more inclusive digital governance ecosystem. As we stand at the crossroads of the digital transformation, our action this week will shape the digital landscape for the generations to come. The challenges we face are formidable, so is our collective potential. Let us seize the moment in RIAD this week. Thank you.

Announcer: And now, it is our pleasure to invite His Excellency, Engineer Abdullah Swaha, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to the stage.

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha: I would like to devote my speech on, first of all, making sure, on a multilateral perspective, in a multi-stakeholder fashion, we appreciate the importance of governance and how I would argue it is one of the most fundamental levers for us to innovate together for shaping a better tomorrow. The world is talking today about internet governance, digital governance, AI governance, cyber governance. So what is governance? In very simple terms, governance goes back to the first industrial revolution, the steam engine, out of which there was a component called the governor, which basically controls power and creates balance for steam to make sure that we can benefit humanity for the greater good. But that definition is 563 years off, because it’s actually the heart of the Arab and the Muslim world during the Islamic and Arabic golden age, in which we introduced to the world gears in a system called the sapia, which is an irrigation system by al-Jazari, which basically controlled the flow of water for, once again, power and distribution of resources for the greater benefit of humanity. So why is it very critical? We are today talking about digital divide, but before we talk about that, we must zoom out and talk about the global divide and then zoom in on the way forward, talking about AI divide and the need for a new AI governance model. So let’s talk about the global divide. Globally, we have 8.2 billion population. If you look at the north and the south, 1.3 billion up north and 6.9 billion in the south. But if we look at the distribution of wealth, and let’s use global GDP as a proxy, there’s roughly $110 trillion worth of GDP output in the world. How are we doing? $45 trillion for the global north and $65 trillion for the global south. That does not seem too bad. But where’s the disparity and the divide is that when you look for per capita, it translates into $35,000 per capita up in the north and $10,000 in the south. So for every dollar being made in the global south, in the north, somebody makes $3.5. That doesn’t sound right. And it’s not a surprise that as a result of that, it’s going to take us 134 years to close down the digital divide in gender and the global gender divide. And it’s not a surprise that the global gender divide is costing humanity $7 trillion. And talking about another $7 trillion, global trade barriers today are costing us as much and the cost of inaction in climate change is $6 trillion. Mind you, that’s the size of five to six G20 nations. Let’s talk about the digital world. Are we doing any better? In the north, we have 1.1 billion people connected, 91%. Great job. In the south, we have 2.5 billion people left behind with only 4.4 billion connected. And when we’re talking about 15% of the global economy happens to be the digital economy, $15.5 trillion, how does that fare in terms of per capita execution? Once again, in the global south, it’s $1.4 thousand, and in the global north, it’s $5,000. Yet again, for every single dollar in the south, $3.5 in the north. That doesn’t seem right. And it’s not a surprise that the cost of this divide in the digital world means a third of the world being left behind. We still have $5 million shortage when it comes to the talent in cybersecurity. We have the governor of Sadda here. We have a $3 million shortage in data and AI specialists. And we have still a long way to go in terms of the gender digital divide. And this is why, in collaboration with you, the ITU, UNDESA, the Digital Cooperation Organization, and in Saudi Arabia, leading by example, we have launched initiatives like Connecting from the Skies. And I see the commissioner of CST here of how we partnered with ITU to say connecting the world from terrestrial networks is going to cost humanity half a trillion dollars. We could connect it from the skies in partnership with ITU. The Digital Cooperation Organization. representing 10% of the global population, 800 million, and I see here Dima El Yahya doing a fantastic job leaving no one behind by creating a digital future for all, and Saudi leading by example by jumping from 7% women empowerment to tech to 35% beating the Silicon Valley EU average and even the G20 average. And can I have a big round of applause for all the amazing women that we have here. You are such a role model to all of us. So let’s recap. Within the digital world we’re talking about folks being left behind, but we have to talk about the next chapter, the AI age, how we move from the digital age to the intelligence age. Is it any better? Here we spoke about a digital divide, a skills divide, a governance divide. What’s happening within the AI age? It’s projected over the next five years a billion folks will benefit and harness the benefit of the intelligence age, the AI age. But three new divides we must be able to address today, and they are the compute divide, the data divide, and the algorithmic divide. And why are they so critical? And the reason why they’re so critical because of a fundamental law that all AI models right now are adhering to called the scaling law, which in very simple terms means the more compute you have, the less noisy the model. The more data sets and tokens you have, the less noisy the model, and the more parameters and intelligence nodes and knobs, the less noisy. Think of it as painting a picture. If you have too many crayons, too many colors, and the ability to draw it perfectly, it will be less noisy. And that’s why in partnership and collaboration with you, in today’s IGF and for the next 20 years, we must agree on a governance model that is able to tackle these three challenges, the compute divide, the data divide, and the algorithmic divide. Because the cost is even so large and there’s so much at stake. We’re talking about a gap of compute capacity about 63 gigawatts where only a handful of nations can be able to deliver that. We’re talking about a 10 million shortage between data scientists, cybersecurity professionals, and AI professionals to close down the divide. And we’re talking about 7.5 billion people left behind. And we’re no longer talking about the global north or the global south. We’re talking about, if we’re talking about 8 billion people, 8 out of 10 of you will be left behind. And this is why this is relevant to all of us. And if we did not achieve multilateralism and multistakeholder in the past, we must agree on consensus in this IGF. And we need, once again, to tackle the algorithmic divide, the data divide, and the compute divide. We need an algorithm to make sure that we are helpful, honest, and harmless, to make sure that there is no bias that leaves anyone behind, or an AI or a data scientist that is inserting and hard-coding a guardrail to exclude any of us. We need to make sure that the data is accessible, accurate, and accountable, and no synthetic data that is being modeled to exclude one group versus the other. And what are we doing about that? We’re doing a lot of things in collaboration with you. Sadaia, in partnership with the UNESCO, have launched the iCare Center, how we have aligned with all of the members of the UN to make sure that AI research and ethics delivers on the honest, harmful, or harmless, and helpful AI models and algorithms for the world. How we make sure that the Digital Cooperation Organization have launched the Generative AI Center of Excellence, making sure that we leave no one behind in the global south. And we have a very loud voice. And for closing down the digital and AI gap in skill sets, we’re partnering with the ITU and UNDESA with the equals. When it comes to compute, 63 gigawatts worth of power, a handful of nations, we have a fiduciary duty to make sure that this general-purpose technology leaves no one behind. It has to be scalable. It has to be secure and robust, respecting your sovereignty and serving the world. And it has to be sustainable. It cannot add insult to injury to the $6 trillion cost of ineffective action to climate change. And this is why, in partnership with you and with the global leaders, the kingdom is leveraging its land, capital, captive market, and energy in partnership with global players like Google, Grok, and SambaNova to build one of the largest AI training and inference nodes to service humanity. And we have to move from digital public infrastructure to AI public infrastructure. Because if we take the case study for telemedicine, it’s good enough that we cut waiting times by delivering the largest virtual hospital. And I want to congratulate the Minister of Health for this achievement under the guidance and support of His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman, delivering 50 million virtual consultations, not for the kingdom, for the region. But the next evolution is taking the first full robotics heart transplant to be able to close down the shortage of heart surgeons around the world. And this is why it has to be digital public infrastructure with AI public infrastructure. And is Riyadh the right place to achieve it? History is a great predictor of the future. When the world in 2020 was hit with COVID, this was the capital that drove consensus to $5 trillion stimulus that moved up to $11 trillion to save the global economy. We pledged with the G20 nations $21 billion to accelerate vaccines. And we drove for the first time, not agreement, but a commitment to implementation on the OECD principles of trustworthy AI. And if you’re talking about the past couple of years, the work that we have done with UN DISA, with the UNESCO on ethics, with the DCO, with the Gen AI Center of Excellence, and as a proud member of the global community that signed on the pact of the future, the pact for the future for the global digital compact as an input parameter to the WSIS, to IGF. And this is why it gives me great honor and a pleasure to present to you from Saudi Arabia an initiative, an announcement today that we must deliver an AI model and a governance model that is inclusive, that is innovative, and impactful to close down the new divides. And with that, I would love to invite His Excellency Lee, His Excellency Sharaf, and Dima to make this historic announcement. Thank you so much.

Announcer: Please, in the middle, please. Please welcome on stage Ms. Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the Secretary General at International Telecommunication Union, to the stage.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin: Honorable Ministers, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Salaam Alaikum. It’s great to be here today in Riyadh. I want to take this opportunity to thank Saudi Arabia for being such incredible hosts. And of course, I want to thank His Excellency, Minister Aswaha, and your team for making us all feel at home. Let me also congratulate Saudi Arabia on their successful bid to host the FIFA World Cup in 2034. So, ladies and gentlemen, let me start with the question, where were you in 2005? 2005. Well, Jeneline Marber was farming vanilla beans in Papua New Guinea. She had never sent an email. She had never made a video call, and she’d never used the internet. A couple of years ago, Jeneline received digital skills training from the ITU and from FAO, and today she has a thriving e-commerce business selling her vanilla beans all over the globe. Jeneline’s story is the story of millions of people. It’s the story of digital opportunities, and it’s the vision that we had 20 years ago at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. I was there in 2005, and I know many of you in this room were also there. Back then, 1 billion people were connected, and here in Saudi Arabia, it was about 13 percent of the population. Of course, those numbers have changed dramatically over the past 20 years, but, ladies and gentlemen, we have to ask ourselves, how are we measuring progress? Can we accept today that 84 percent of people in high-income countries have access to 5G connectivity, while in low-income countries, it’s just 4 percent? How can we accept that the digital gender gap is actually getting bigger in least-developed countries, and how can we accept that a third of humanity is offline today? Well, for me, I can’t accept that. Here at the IGF in Riyadh, I think we have an incredible opportunity, an unmissable opportunity to strengthen the incredible collective endeavor that we started just two decades ago, and to do this, I think we have to focus on three key areas, and the first is affordability. We have to bring those costs down. Mobile Internet is 14 times more expensive in Africa than it is in Europe. The average, on average, a smartphone can cost up to 40 percent, 40 percent of a monthly income in some countries. We need investment. We really need investment in affordable digital infrastructure and services, and we need that now. That’s what the Partner to Connect Digital Coalition is all about. We have a target to get to 100 billion by 2026. We’re halfway there, and we need you to help us achieve that goal. The second focus area is digital resilience, resilience in infrastructure, resilience in governance mechanisms. This is actually something that was highlighted in the WSIS process in Action Line C2 on secure and reliable infrastructure. Digital infrastructure, including fiber optic and wireless networks, subsea cables, satellite Internet, is fundamental in helping people connect. Even so, challenges continue to escalate. Cyberattacks increase 80 percent year on year. In 2023, over 200 subsea cables were reported as damaged worldwide. And in the face of worsening climate crises, nature and natural disasters are increasingly impacting physical infrastructure. And that’s why we need to address this issue of resilience, and we have to do it through the lens of connectivity, of redundancy, security. And when I say security, I mean physical and cyber, and of course, robustness and quality. With the Global Digital Compact as a key milestone on the journey to the WSIS Plus 20 review next year, I think we have an incredible opportunity to strengthen that foundation to build a more resilient and digital future. And then the third piece, which His Excellency so eloquently described, is digital inclusion. Digital inclusion in all its dimensions, including skilling. We must move from conversation to concrete action. ITU data shows that 68 percent of the world is online, and that means, as I mentioned, a third of humanity is offline. A third of humanity is digitally excluded. Eighty-nine million more men than women are using the Internet in 2024. And in least developed countries, only 35 percent of the population has access to the Internet. Digital inclusion, again, as His Excellency so well described, is an economic imperative. It’s one that requires closing not just one divide, but several digital divides between urban and rural, older and younger populations, with people that have different abilities, gender, economic means, and also educational levels. Beijing Plus 30 review starts next year, and it’s the perfect opportunity to address that digital gender gap and to target interventions to close that gap. Because, ladies and gentlemen, when we work together, we can make real progress. Stories like Gentleman’s remind us of what’s possible. It reminds us of what is at stake. It reminds us of what’s at stake if we fail to preserve that multi-stakeholder foundation on which the Internet we want must be built. Ladies and gentlemen, look around you in this room. Look at the expertise. Look at the experience, and look at the dedication in this room where we have gathered governments, the private sector, academia, civil society, and, of course, the technical community. Think about the theme that the IGF 2024 is addressing. Building this multi-stakeholder governance is how we turn digital dreams like Gentleman’s into a reality. Our shared digital future hangs on the balance, ladies and gentlemen. So, let’s make this IGF count. Thank you very much. Shukran. Jazeera. Thank you.

Announcer: Please welcome on stage, His Excellency, Mr. Krzysztof Gawkowski, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Affairs of the Republic of Poland.

Krzysztof Gawkowski: Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, I feel extremely honoured to participate in the opening of IGF 2024. The IGF 2024 programme focuses on four key areas, each of which is essential to the ensure of the digital space evolves in an inclusive, responsible and sensible way. The Internet has become the bloodstream of the modern economic system, driving growth, levelling the playing field and connecting people around the world. It is a space that enables access to knowledge, communication, innovation, trade and cooperation and helps to solve global changes. On the one hand, the Internet opens the door to new opportunities, giving access to the resources of information that were previously inaccessible to many. On the other hand, it is also a place where previously security and equality changes arise. It is up as how we use the powerful resources. Join a first must focus on ensuring that the Internet reflects the values that are fundamental to us – openness, fairness, respect to human rights and equality. We need to ensure that the digital space is a place where freedom of expression, access to information and privacy are protected and where marginalised groups are not excluded from access to the opportunities offered by the development of technology. The Internet as a tool has great potential, but at the same time means responsible governments that ensure a balance between progress and the protection of fundamental rights. As the digital world develops, we must remember that it is up to us what values will be promoted and what the consensus of our actions in the space will be. We must work together to create an Internet that promotes equal opportunities for development and social justice. It is not just about technology, but also about our shared vision that can shape the digital future in line with the values of the global community. Poland holding the presidency of the Council of the European Union from January to June 2025, we will have a key role in shaping the digital future of Europe and the world. This will be a great responsibility for us, but also a unique opportunity to promote values that the foundation of the European Union – freedom, human rights, democracy and security. We will focus on key areas – cyber security, development of the artificial intelligence, the effective implementation of the digital regulation and the reduction of bureaucracy to support the digital transformation. We want the rights of the Internet users to be protected at all times and their data to be safe. We will strive to effectively implement the digital regulation by supporting initiatives to promote digital education. It is up to us what the future AI will be and how it will serve the society. We have the power to shape how AI will be developed. It is up to us to choose if it is a tool that benefits humanity or an area without rules of the ethical principles. We must ensure that the development of AI takes place with respect to human rights and for the common good. It is important to support initiatives to promote transparency of algorithms and ensure that AI is used in a fair, ethical and friendly way for every person. Cyber security is the foundation of effective digital policy. In the face of growing threats in cyberspace, ensuring their relevance, our system becomes a priority. Cyber security is not just one aspect of digital policy, but its foundation. Without cyber security, it is impossible to safely develop innovation, to run business activities or to provide access to public services online. For this reason, we need strong international cooperation. I am sure that we can achieve these goals only by working together. Next year, we will be extremely important from the point of view of Internet and Entry Digital Space Governance. Together, we will review the 20 years of the World Summit of Information Society and we will develop recommendations and action plans for the coming years. The renewal of the IGF mandate will also be dedicated next year. Finally, I would like to thank you for your attention and congratulate the host country for organizing this important event. I wish all participants a fruitful and rich discussion full of inspiring exchanges of view. I believe today’s meetings will always ask the most difficult questions, to which we will find wise answers. This confirms the importance of dialogue within the IGF, a dialogue that allows us to shape together a digital future based on values that unite us all. Thank you very much.

Announcer: We now invite Her Excellency Ms. Amal El Fallah, the Minister of Digital Transition for her remarks as well.

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni: Excellency Mr. Abdullah Israd Institute of Communications, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mr. Liu Junhua, Under-Secretary General of the United Nations. Esteemed participants, ladies and gentlemen, As-salamu alaykum. I feel really honored to participate to the opening of this AGF session. Allow me first to congratulate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for this amazing hosting of the 19th edition of the Internet Governance Forum, an annual event organized by the United Nations bringing together global experts to discuss and shape international policies and trends in Internet Governance in a collaborative manner involving government, the private sectors, and non-profit organizations. And I seize this occasion to congratulate, once again, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, leadership, and people for hosting the FIFA World Cup 2034. This achievement is a significant addition to the Kingdom’s growing record of milestones achieved in various fields in line with the objective of Vision 2030. Today’s high level session topic is a crucial one as it tackles transparency and explainability in AI, a subject which concerns each one of us and all together. It is to mention that the Kingdom of Morocco is one of the first countries to announce the official implementation of UNESCO’s recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence, an implementation which confirms the Kingdom commitment to implementing the provision of this recommendation which aims to benefit from technology and reduce the risks associated with it. Ladies and gentlemen, Morocco is positioning itself today as a leader on the African continent in the field of artificial intelligence. Thanks to the enlightened vision of His Majesty King Mohammed VI, may God assist him, who called on the importance to be optimally leveraged the enormous development opportunity digital transition provides. Please allow me to recall some important involvement towards AI development at the global level from Moroccan point of view. Last June, for example, we organized a high level forum at the African level that provided the African consensus of Rabat as a call to action for trustworthy AI. Morocco hosts also a category two center under the auspices of UNESCO, the first of its kind in the African continent, and this center is called AI movement that I had the honor to be the president, the executive president, and now I am the honorary president of this center of category two of UNESCO. The same category two of UNESCO, I care, was accredited to Saudi Arabia in parallel and we are collaborating together in AI and ethics since that time. I would also like to recall the report issued by UNESCO last May in Rabat on the extent of Morocco’s readiness to benefit from the opportunities offered by AI. The report recalled that the Kingdom of Morocco has developed its digital ecosystem, particularly regarding communications, access to data, safe use of the Internet, and protection of personal data, which are key elements for addressing the issue of AI. And as we are addressing today AI from an ethical perspective, I must mention that Morocco has been a key player in AI international ecosystem. I recall the Manhattan Declaration on inclusive global scientific understanding of artificial intelligence, which I had the honor to be one of its signatories last September, along with 21 top AI scientists and researchers. A declaration that took place on the sidelines of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly in New York. Also Morocco has mentioned about two months ago the national digital strategy called Digital Morocco 2013-30, a strategy which has received the gracious endorsement of His Majesty the King Mohammed VI, may God assist him. This strategy encourages stakeholders to develop high value-added services and offer and based on AI, as it supports companies and startups in the field of AI operating in high value-added sectors. I’m quite sure that this panel will be a fruitful one and I hope that the discussion and exchanges will enable us to foster concrete international collaboration in a way to create a unified approach to AI ethics and regulation. Thank you very much.

Announcer: Please welcome on stage Mr. Torgeir Micaelsen, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Digitalization and Public Governance at the Government of Norway.

Torgeir Micaelsen: Excellencies, members of Parliament, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting this year’s Internet Governance Forum in this grand venue. When I see how this is accommodated, I’m convinced that IGF 2024 will turn out to be successful. The overarching theme for our deliberations here in Riyadh is building our multi-stakeholder digital future. This is indeed an appropriate and fundamental guiding principle when we together consider how to develop digital solutions and the Internet to the benefit for the global community and for the next generations. The IGF has been a stalwart advocate for an open, accessible and inclusive Internet since the first forum in 2006. The Norwegian government firmly believes that all interest parties shall be involved in the process of governing the Internet, preserving its openness and shaping its future. A close international cooperation and inclusive digital governance is key in order to connect the unconnected and release the full potential of the Internet for everyone. Because the Internet’s impact has never been more significant, it shapes the everyday life of people and businesses all over the world. It stands at the heart of our digital future. Hence, we need to work together to develop and deliver a trustworthy and safe Internet for mankind. Technology development is not without risk, including for our democracies. The current discussions on AI, the too-often practice of Internet shutdowns, as well as domestic and transnational disinformation campaigns are cases in that point. We need to establish frameworks which ensure responsible technological innovations and development, respecting human rights and privacy. Human rights are not only valid in the physical world, they must also be protected in cyberspace. After all, the Internet should be the place where all individuals can exercise their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. Norway remains dedicated to preserving and promoting these rights in the digital realm. Looking ahead, I furthermore emphasize that we all need to take into account sustainability and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals when we transform societies through digitalization. The IGF can facilitate dialogue on the role of digital technologies in addressing broader sustainability challenges. We must make sure that the impact of the Internet and digital technology overall contributes positively to these important goals. Sustainability also remains one of Norway’s main priorities. We will seek innovative solutions to reduce the digital infrastructure’s environmental impact and utilize the same infrastructure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in various sectors of society. Let us all commit to reducing the environmental footprint of our digital endeavors, working towards a greener, more sustainable digital future. The United Nations Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact have been presented by the UN Secretary General and successfully adopted. I notice with satisfaction that the Global Digital Compact recognizes the IGF as a primary multi-stakeholder platform for discussion of Internet government issues. Next year, the VICEs Plus 20 review will be conducted by the UN. This is an opportunity to reflect on the digital era’s achievements, challenges, and evolving needs. It is a moment to re-evaluate and to set new goals for a more inclusive, right-based, and equitable digital future. Beyond VICEs Plus 20, the IGF should remain the primary global arena for the multi-stakeholder dialogue and open, inclusive, and informed discussions on Internet governance challenges and opportunities. The IGF should continue to develop policies and practices that ensure that the Internet remains a force for positive change innovation, and global connectivity. Norway wishes to contribute to further develop the IGF as a vital and inclusive arena for all stakeholders. Next year, the IGF will be convened in Norway. On behalf of the Norwegian government, I wish you all welcome to the IGF that also marks the occasion of the Forum’s 20th anniversary, which is a pivotal moment for shaping and enhancing the multi-stakeholder dialogue for the years to come. Together here in the vibrant city of Riyadh, as well as in my home country next year, we shall strengthen diversity and collaboration through inclusive digital governance, which is crucial for a vibrant and sustainable digital ecosystem. So, let’s shape the future together. Shukran. Thank you for your attention.

Announcer: We now invite Mr. Kurtis Lindqvist, the CEO of the Internet Corporation, for a sign names and numbers.

Kurtis Lindqvist: Honorable Ministers, Excellencies, distinguished participants, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I’d like to thank the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting this year’s IGF, and congratulate our hosts on this very successful Forum. It’s a privilege to join you here in Riyadh at the 2024 Internet Governance Forum. The IGF remains a cornerstone of global dialogue on Internet governance, a platform where governments, civil society, business and the technical community collaborate on an equal footing. Over nearly two decades, this Forum has exemplified the strength of the multi-stakeholder model, helping to shape a resilient and inclusive Internet that benefits billions around the world. I can remain steadfast in its commitment and support to the IGF. As we approach the World Summit of Information Society, the WSIS Plus 20 Review, I’m reminded of my time as a national delegate at the 2005 WSIS in Tunis, a pivotal moment in shaping the Internet we know today. The significance of this moment cannot be overstated. Likewise, the WSIS Plus 20 Review in 2025 has the potential to influence the future of Internet governance and determine the trajectory of the multi-stakeholder model. Now more than ever, we must come together to ensure this model remains central to our efforts. We have already seen in the text of the Global Digital Compact that Member States recognize and express support for the importance of the IGF. The role of the technical community and the multi-stakeholder model. This is a good foundation for next year’s negotiations. The multi-stakeholder model has a proven track record with ample success that many in this room can attest to. During the COVID pandemic, the Internet was a lifeline for billions of people, providing access to education, healthcare, business, connection and so much more. It withstood unprecedented demand without faltering, a testament to decades of collaboration, technical resilience and shared governance. This includes the critical contribution of organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force, whose work on technical standards has been fundamental to ensuring the Internet’s stability and growth. Beyond the pandemic, the multi-stakeholder model has driven progress across multiple dimensions of Internet governance. Take for example the strides we have made in fostering a multilingual Internet. Through efforts like internationalized domain names and universal acceptance, we have enabled people to access the Internet in their native languages and scripts, furthering inclusivity and broadening access. Looking forward, we must build on our achievements to create a future that is inclusive, equitable and accessible for all. Today, 5.6 billion are connected to the Internet, yet billions remain unconnected. Many who are online still face barriers such as affordability, accessibility and digital literacy. Innovative approaches, collaborative effort and a renewed commitment to inclusivity are required to overcome these obstacles. For the Internet to remain globally connected, secure and resilient, it is essential to include the technical community, including the organizations that safeguard and manage its critical resources components in these conversations. The IGF provides a unique opportunity to address these challenges collectively. It is a space where diverse perspectives come together to shape the Internet’s future. We can use this moment to reaffirm our commitment to the principles that have guided the Internet’s success while evolving to meet the needs of a rapidly changing digital landscape. The Internet’s success is rooted in its global accessibility, seamless interoperability and robust resilience, which is only made possible through open, collaborative governance and a single, globally coordinated system. These principles must be upheld to ensure innovation, security for all users and the continued growth and inclusivity of the Internet. The Internet is one of civilization’s greatest achievements. It connects people, drives innovation and fosters economic growth and social progress. However, its future depends on our collective actions. Let us work together to protect what makes the Internet work, its openness, global interoperability and inclusivity, and ensure that it remains a global public good and a force for innovation, economic growth and social progress. Thank you and I look forward to the important discussions this week.

Announcer: Please welcome on stage Mr. Tawfiq Jilasi, the Assistant Director General at United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO. Mr. Jilasi, the Assistant Director General at United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.

Tawfik Jelassi: Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, peace be upon you. I would like to start by expressing his mercy. Distinguished participants, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a great privilege to address you here this morning at the 2024 edition of the Internet Governance Forum on behalf of the UNESCO Director General, Madame Audrey Azoulay. This event continues to serve as a unique multi-stakeholder platform to foster global dialogue, collaboration in order to shape the digital future that we all want to have. Let me begin by expressing our heartfelt gratitude to the host country, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for graciously hosting this event and for the warm welcome. I would like also to acknowledge the tireless efforts of the IGF Secretariat for organizing this important gathering. To answer the call of the day, I would like to invite you to join me in a moment of silence. question of the ITU Secretary General, Doreen Bogdan-Martin. She asked us this morning, where were you in 2005? I can answer her question. Like many in this room, I, too, was in Tunis at the WSIS Summit as a guest speaker coming from academia at the time I was a university professor. Clearly, this year marks a very important moment for global digital governance. The Honorable Minister al-Swaha has very eloquently shared with us the many challenges that the world faces, including the digital divide. But he also talked quite convincingly about the emerging AI divide. Our gathering today, right after the adoption last September in New York of the Pact for the Future and the Global Digital Compact, our event today offers a major milestone for a bold vision for the years to come, a vision shared in the principles that we all share, human rights, openness, accessibility, and inclusivity. We believe that IGF 2024 will facilitate a collaborative implementation of the transformative agenda of the Global Digital Compact. In his opening remarks, the United Nations Secretary General, Mr. Antonio Guterres, reminded us this morning that technology should serve humanity, not the other way around. UNESCO is honored to contribute to this collective effort with two initiatives that we should launch in this event. The first initiative is the New Generation Internet Universality Indicators of UNESCO. Based on the Romex framework, ROM are standing for a human rights-based approach, O standing for an open internet to all, including through multilingualism online, and also catering to minority groups, including indigenous communities, A referring to accessibility, and M to the multi-stakeholder approach. The Internet Universality Indicators of UNESCO have already been adopted by 40 countries worldwide, and they continue to guide evidence-based policymaking and national digital assessments. The second initiative that we will unveil at this IGF meeting are the UNESCO Guidelines for the Use of AI by the Judiciary. This is grounded in the landmark 2021 recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence, a recommendation that is currently being implemented by 60 countries worldwide. To complement these efforts, UNESCO is working closely with a couple of its associated research centers. Minister Al-Falah Segrouchny this morning mentioned the AI Movement Center in Morocco, which is focusing on AI in Africa. The second center is the International Research Center on AI, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Irkai. And we are working together to develop a repository of ethical AI tools. This initiative is based on the use of open-source capabilities for the public sector, the media, and for judiciary operators, enabling stakeholders to navigate the opportunities and challenges that AI offers in the judiciary system based on the rule of law. It was clearly stated this morning, especially by the minister, that despite collective efforts, many challenges persist, including the one third of the global population that remains today offline. Women and girls, in particular, especially in underserved communities, face unique barriers with only 65% of women connected to the internet. These disparities underscore the urgent need for targeted interventions to bridge the digital divide, which is also a knowledge divide and an education divide. The statistics are equally striking. Although 93% of judicial operators are familiar with AI tools, only 9% of them report having organizational capabilities and guidelines to be trained for the ethical use of AI. To address this gap, UNESCO has been training so far over 8,000 judges, prosecutors, and judicial operators in 140 countries, empowering them to adopt AI in a responsible, ethical way in order to safeguard human rights. Ladies and gentlemen, the digital future we envision, one that is inclusive, sustainable, and human-centered, will not build itself by itself. The IGF stands as a great multi-stakeholder platform to foster collaboration and drive meaningful change. Let’s continue leveraging this unique forum to build an internet of trust, an internet that empowers us all, that bridges divides, and that advances a truly human-centered digital future. Thank you very much, and I wish you all success and success in this important global conference. Thank you.

Announcer: We now invite Mr. Ke Gong, the president of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations. Thank you.

Ke Gong: Global leaders, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. It is my profound honor as an engineer and a researcher from China to address this esteemed gathering at the opening session of IGM 2024. The overarched scene of IGM 2024 is building our stakeholders’ digital future, resonates deeply with the mission of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, in short, WFEO. As the largest engineering organizations globally, encompassing hundreds of national and international professional organizations, WFEO, with its millions of engineers all over the world, is at the forefront of shaping the internet’s future. At WFEO, we recognize that the internet is more than a technological marvel. It is a transformative force for social, economic, and environmental progress. Its potential to bridge the divides connecting people and foster innovation is unparalleled. However, this potential can only be fully realized if the internet remains accessible, secure, and inclusive. As engineers, we bear the responsibility to ensure that the technology we create serves the best interest of the society. This responsibility includes designing resilient systems that safeguard against cyber threats, uphold user privacy, promote digital literacy, and equitably distribute the digital benefits to all people, especially the marginalized communities. In the days ahead, we aim to contribute unique perspective and voices of engineers to policymaking and standard setting processes. particularly on the discussions about digital infrastructure, cybersecurity, and the pivotal role of engineering in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Taking this opportunity, as an academic researcher, I wish to highlight the fundamental importance of basic research in network information theory and intelligence theory. Just as Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory laid the groundwork for electrification, we must acknowledge that many challenges we face today stem deeply from the lack of solid, comprehensive theoretical foundation to explain the ever-evolving Internet and the sophisticated models of artificial intelligence. Therefore, it is imperative to invest more attention, more resources, and more efforts into fundamental research in this domain. All of us know, only with collective efforts, we could better develop and govern the Internet as a global resource that benefits all people and the globe. I would like to leave you with an inspired African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Thank you.

Announcer: Please welcome to the stage, Ms. Palwasha Mohammed Zai Khan, Senator at the Senate of Pakistan.

Li Junhua: Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. Honorable parliamentarians, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, assalamu alaikum. I’m deeply honored to express my profound gratitude to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, IGF, the Interparliamentary Union, and the Shura Council of Saudi Arabia for convening this significant parliamentary track. It seeks to strengthen digital cooperation in our interconnected world. Today, digital transformation is fundamentally reshaping governance, resource allocation, service delivery, and public engagement. This evolution demands effective governance of digital technologies to ensure outcomes that are inclusive, safe, and equitable while acting as a catalyst for human resource mobilization, most importantly in developing countries, and socioeconomic development. Ladies and gentlemen, digitalization also presents profound challenges to the democratic principles and human rights, particularly within governance processes such as elections, public debate, and trust in institutions. It is imperative that we as parliamentarians and leaders move beyond merely sharing these challenges. We must make tangible commitments to address these socioeconomic issues through laws and policies that prioritize inclusivity, accountability, and people-centered outcomes, especially in the face of transnational complexities and governance gaps. Parliamentarians must strengthen the present multilateral mechanisms for governance of digital technologies and similarly extend support to countries that are lacking governance capacity. A whole-of-society approach is essential, one that collaborates with local leaders, companies, and digital innovators to develop vibrant and inclusive digital ecosystems rooted in sustainability, accountability, and rights. Ladies and gentlemen, Pakistan is making significant strides

Palwasha Mohammed Zai Khan: towards embracing the digital era through strategic initiatives and policies under its vision of Digital Pakistan. Our strategic initiatives include the Digital Pakistan Policy 2018, Cyber Security Policy of 2021, the Draft Artificial Intelligence Policy, and the Personal Data Protection Bill. These efforts are complemented by investments in infrastructure, innovation, and frameworks like the Computer Emergency Response Teams to enhance cyber resilience and foster trust in a digital landscape. Through these endeavors, Pakistan is building the foundation of an inclusive, accountable, and sustainable digital future, demonstrating how nations can position themselves as global digital leaders. Ladies and gentlemen, as parliamentarians, our collective commitment must be to collaboration, capacity building, and adherence to international standards. Together, we can bridge global governance gaps and enable an inclusive digital transformation that benefits all of humanity. In the end, allow me to say that there could not have been a more iconic setting for hosting this very important forum, such as the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where the fast march to information technology and development unite with deep traditionalism and the heart of religion. And this creates a beautiful fusion. I also would like to thank the Shura Council especially and the Government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for allowing us a chance to visit the two holy mosques where I will head after this because of this invitation. Thank you and good luck.

Announcer: We now invite Ms. Ivana Bartoletti, the Global Chief Privacy and AI Governance Officer at Wipro. Global Chief Privacy and AI Governance Officer at Wipro

Ivana Bartoletti: Excellencies, colleagues, honourable members of parliament, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a real honour for me to be here with you today. I think we’ve said it and we’ve heard it many times this morning. We are at a watershed moment in the relationship between humanity and technology. It’s a fantastic moment for us to be in. Over the last few years, we have seen some amazing things that technology has done for us. Incredible. I have the privilege to work for a large company and I have seen how much technology does for us. Think about precision medicine. Think about tools that can help reach people with education, with medicine, with health, in places where they could have not been reached before. And think about tools that can support with personalised education, including those who have learning disabilities. And think about the potential in medicine, as was said earlier, with robotic making operations and supporting our health systems. So the potential is fantastic and we know it. And the fact that we talk about the challenges… ahead is not because we don’t love these technologies, it’s the opposite. It’s because we want them, we care, and we care about them so much that we want them to work for everybody. And this is the most important thing that we are here to deliver. How digital technologies, artificial intelligence, can work and benefit the entire of our humanity. And sometimes over the last few years we’ve also seen some pretty bad things. We’ve seen the Internet, the space that was created for us to be closer, sometimes to have too much fake news, hate speech. I was addressing the European Parliament just a couple of days ago on deep faith, and the danger they could be used for, especially in silencing women and the most vulnerable in our societies. So there are a few things, just three messages that I want to leave you with today. The first one is the digital gender gap. Look, the digital gender gap is not acceptable. Think about artificial intelligence and how that digital gender gap is related to one of the challenges that we are facing in AI, which is fair AI that does not lock people out of essential services, of loans, and of opportunities. Think about bias in artificial intelligence systems that can softwarize and perpetuate and crystallize the society as it is today, whilst we work together to work towards a more brighter future. Bias in AI is very much related to the lack of diversity and gender diversity that we have, and it’s really important that we tackle this, because if we perpetuate the existing world into decision-making around tomorrow, we’re gonna fail. So gender divide is a priority. The second one, privacy. Look, there is no contraposition, no dichotomy between privacy and innovation. I’d like a strong message to come from us here today and say that pitching privacy against innovation is a mistake, and it’s something that we must not do. Companies like mine and the private sector, we can work together in ensuring that privacy-enhancing technology can be leveraged to ensure that we safeguard the dignity of people whilst providing innovation for all. So privacy and innovation can go hand in hand, and we must consider privacy as a fundamental public good that allows anyone to feel safer, happier, and more respected in our digital space. And the third one is the governance of artificial intelligence. Look, we’ve been talking about this for a very long time now. We have the European AI Act in Europe, and Wepro is one of the 150 companies that are part of the European AI Pact. We have regulation, we have guidance, and we’ve seen massive strides, including here what was announced today, which is really, really important. Governance of AI is not nice to have. Fair, transparent AI, accountable, the possibility for people, for individuals to access meaningful information about how their data, their information is processed and used through artificial intelligence. The possibility for people to know that if they’ve been prescribed a medicine, if they had an operation with AI, they need to know where the liability is. All these are fundamentally important things to build that trust in artificial intelligence that we need if we want to innovate and transform for the public good. Transparent, fair, and accountable. The digital compact is a fantastic step because it translates what human rights means in the age of artificial intelligence. But I want to encourage us to go a little bit further and be able to work together, private sector, government, to see how we are going to bring together privacy, security, and AI, to invest in research so we can do that better, to create tools so that even smaller companies can leverage the best when it comes, for example, to privacy-enhancing technologies in AI. This is a fundamental opportunity that we have right now and I do believe, and I do believe, that the time to shape the relationship between humanity and technology is exactly now. I am delighted to be here. I look forward to this week because I think that we all have an opportunity to shape our digital ecosystem so that it brings benefits to everybody and helps towards creating a better world. Thank you.

Agreement Points

Importance of digital inclusion and bridging divides

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Ivana Bartoletti

Palwasha Mohammed Zai Khan

Ke Gong

Closing digital, gender, and AI divides is crucial

A third of humanity remains offline, requiring targeted interventions

Digital gender gap is unacceptable and must be addressed

Digitalization presents challenges to democratic principles and human rights

Internet should remain accessible, secure and inclusive

Multiple speakers emphasized the critical need to address various digital divides, including access, gender, and AI capabilities, to ensure equitable development and protect democratic principles.

Need for robust AI governance

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

Ivana Bartoletti

António Guterres

Tawfik Jelassi

Need for AI governance model addressing compute, data and algorithmic divides

Governance of AI is essential for fair, transparent and accountable systems

Global Digital Compact provides blueprint for humanity’s digital future

UNESCO developing guidelines for ethical use of AI in judiciary

Speakers agreed on the importance of developing comprehensive AI governance frameworks to ensure fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI systems.

Multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance

António Guterres

Kurtis Lindqvist

Torgeir Micaelsen

Tawfik Jelassi

IGF is primary multi-stakeholder platform for internet governance issues

Multi-stakeholder model has proven track record of success

IGF provides opportunity to shape inclusive digital future

Need for collaborative implementation of Global Digital Compact

Speakers emphasized the importance of the multi-stakeholder model in internet governance, highlighting the IGF’s role and the need for collaborative efforts.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers highlighted the significant role of the digital economy and the need for resilient digital infrastructure to support its growth and security.

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Digital economy represents 15% of global economy

Digital resilience in infrastructure and governance mechanisms is crucial

Both speakers emphasized the responsibility of specific groups (parliamentarians and engineers) in strengthening digital governance and security measures.

Palwasha Mohammed Zai khan

Ke Gong

Parliamentarians must strengthen multilateral mechanisms for digital governance

Engineers responsible for designing resilient systems against cyber threats

Unexpected Consensus

Importance of fundamental research in network and intelligence theory

Ke Gong

Importance of investing in fundamental research on network and intelligence theory

While most speakers focused on policy and governance issues, Ke Gong uniquely emphasized the need for investment in basic research, which could have significant implications for addressing current challenges in internet and AI development.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement among speakers included the importance of digital inclusion, the need for robust AI governance, and the value of a multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance.

Consensus level

There was a high level of consensus on these key issues, suggesting a shared understanding of the critical challenges and potential solutions in global digital governance. This consensus implies a strong foundation for collaborative efforts in addressing digital divides, developing AI governance frameworks, and strengthening multi-stakeholder processes in internet governance.

Different Viewpoints

Approach to addressing digital divides

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Closing digital, gender, and AI divides is crucial

A third of humanity remains offline, requiring targeted interventions

While both speakers emphasize the importance of addressing digital divides, Alswaha focuses on a broader range of divides including AI, while Bogdan-Martin emphasizes the need for targeted interventions to connect the unconnected.

Unexpected Differences

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around the specific approaches to addressing digital divides and the focus of AI governance.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers is relatively low. Most speakers agree on the importance of addressing digital divides, ensuring inclusive digital development, and establishing proper AI governance. The differences lie mainly in the specific aspects each speaker chooses to emphasize, rather than fundamental disagreements on the issues at hand. This suggests a generally aligned vision for the future of internet governance and digital development, which could facilitate more effective collaboration and policy-making in these areas.

Partial Agreements

Both speakers agree on the need for AI governance, but Alswaha focuses on addressing specific divides in compute, data, and algorithms, while Bartoletti emphasizes fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI systems.

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

Ivana Bartoletti

Need for AI governance model addressing compute, data and algorithmic divides

Governance of AI is essential for fair, transparent and accountable systems

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers highlighted the significant role of the digital economy and the need for resilient digital infrastructure to support its growth and security.

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

Digital economy represents 15% of global economy

Digital resilience in infrastructure and governance mechanisms is crucial

Both speakers emphasized the responsibility of specific groups (parliamentarians and engineers) in strengthening digital governance and security measures.

Palwasha Mohammed Zai Khan

Ke Gong

Parliamentarians must strengthen multilateral mechanisms for digital governance

Engineers responsible for designing resilient systems against cyber threats

Key Takeaways

Digital inclusion and bridging divides (digital, gender, AI) is crucial for equitable development

AI governance and ethics are essential to ensure fair, transparent and accountable systems

A multi-stakeholder approach is vital for effective internet governance

Digital transformation has significant potential for economic and social progress

Cybersecurity and digital resilience are critical priorities

Resolutions and Action Items

Implement the Global Digital Compact as a blueprint for humanity’s digital future

Establish an independent international scientific panel on AI

Initiate a global dialogue on AI governance within the United Nations

Renew the IGF mandate in 2025

Conduct the 20-year review of World Summit on Information Society outcomes in 2025

Implement UNESCO’s recommendation on the ethics of artificial intelligence

Develop and implement UNESCO Guidelines for the Use of AI by the Judiciary

Unresolved Issues

Specific strategies to close the digital gender gap

Concrete plans to connect the remaining one-third of humanity that is offline

Detailed frameworks for balancing innovation with privacy protection

Specific measures to address the compute, data and algorithmic divides in AI development

Suggested Compromises

Balancing privacy and innovation through privacy-enhancing technologies

Combining traditional values with technological advancement, as exemplified by Saudi Arabia’s approach

Leveraging both digital public infrastructure and AI public infrastructure to address global challenges

We are today talking about digital divide, but before we talk about that, we must zoom out and talk about the global divide and then zoom in on the way forward, talking about AI divide and the need for a new AI governance model.

speaker

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

reason

This comment reframes the discussion from just digital divide to a broader global divide, introducing AI as a new dimension. It’s insightful because it connects different levels of inequality and suggests a more comprehensive approach.

impact

This comment shifted the focus of the discussion from purely digital issues to broader global inequalities and the emerging challenges of AI. It set the stage for a more holistic conversation about technological governance.

We must agree on a governance model that is able to tackle these three challenges, the compute divide, the data divide, and the algorithmic divide.

speaker

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

reason

This comment identifies specific aspects of the AI divide, providing a framework for understanding and addressing the challenges. It’s thought-provoking because it breaks down a complex issue into manageable components.

impact

This comment provided a structure for subsequent speakers to address specific aspects of AI governance and inequality. It deepened the level of analysis by introducing concrete areas for policy focus.

Digital technology must serve humanity, not the other way around.

speaker

António Guterres

reason

This succinct statement encapsulates a fundamental principle for technology governance. It’s insightful because it places human needs at the center of technological development.

impact

This comment set a ethical foundation for the discussion, influencing subsequent speakers to consider the human impact of technological advancements.

We need investment. We really need investment in affordable digital infrastructure and services, and we need that now.

speaker

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

reason

This comment highlights the urgent need for practical action beyond policy discussions. It’s thought-provoking because it shifts the focus from theoretical governance to concrete investment needs.

impact

This comment brought a sense of urgency to the discussion and encouraged participants to consider practical steps for implementation of digital initiatives.

There is no contraposition, no dichotomy between privacy and innovation. I’d like a strong message to come from us here today and say that pitching privacy against innovation is a mistake, and it’s something that we must not do.

speaker

Ivana Bartoletti

reason

This comment challenges the common assumption that privacy and innovation are at odds. It’s insightful because it reframes the relationship between these two important aspects of digital development.

impact

This comment introduced a new perspective on the relationship between privacy and innovation, potentially changing how participants view the balance between these two priorities in policy-making.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by broadening its scope from digital divide to global inequalities and AI governance, introducing specific frameworks for understanding these challenges, emphasizing human-centric approaches, highlighting the need for urgent practical action, and challenging assumptions about the relationship between privacy and innovation. They collectively moved the conversation from general principles to specific areas of focus and action, while maintaining an emphasis on ethical considerations and human impact.

How can we address the compute divide, data divide, and algorithmic divide in AI?

speaker

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

explanation

These new divides in the AI age are critical to address to ensure equitable access and benefits from AI technologies globally.

How can we develop an AI governance model that is inclusive, innovative, and impactful?

speaker

Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha

explanation

A new governance model is needed to address the challenges and opportunities presented by AI on a global scale.

How can we bring down the costs of mobile internet and smartphones in developing countries?

speaker

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

explanation

Addressing affordability is crucial for bridging the digital divide and increasing internet access globally.

How can we improve digital infrastructure resilience against cyberattacks, physical damage, and climate impacts?

speaker

Doreen Bogdan-Martin

explanation

Enhancing the resilience of digital infrastructure is essential for maintaining reliable connectivity and services.

How can we effectively implement the Global Digital Compact and strengthen the multi-stakeholder foundation of internet governance?

speaker

Krzysztof Gawkowski

explanation

Implementing the compact and reinforcing multi-stakeholder governance is crucial for shaping a fair and inclusive digital future.

How can we develop and promote privacy-enhancing technologies that support both innovation and privacy protection?

speaker

Ivana Bartoletti

explanation

Balancing innovation with privacy protection is essential for building trust in digital technologies and AI systems.

How can we invest more in fundamental research in network information theory and intelligence theory?

speaker

Ke Gong

explanation

Developing a solid theoretical foundation is crucial for addressing challenges in internet and AI governance.

Summary

This discussion, led by Fares Shadad from Gartner, focused on top business and technology trends in governments for 2024 and beyond. Shadad highlighted the challenges governments face, including global turmoil, cyber threats, and increasing citizen demands. A significant internal challenge is the presence of legacy systems, which are costly to upgrade. However, generative AI is emerging as a potential solution, potentially reducing modernization costs by up to 70% by 2027.

The presentation outlined several key trends. These include managing trust in digital services, institutional resilience, experience management focusing on citizen-centric solutions, and executive data advocacy. Workforce productivity is another crucial area, with AI expected to enhance human decision-making in 70% of government agencies by 2026.

From a technological perspective, Shadad discussed adaptive security, digital identity ecosystems, AI for decision intelligence, and digital platform agility. By 2026, over 70% of government agencies are predicted to use AI to enhance administrative decision-making. Cloud adoption is also accelerating, with 75% of governments expected to expand platform services for modernization by 2025.

Data management emerged as a critical theme, with more than 60% of government organizations expected to prioritize investments in business process automation by 2026. The discussion emphasized the importance of being “data ready” to accommodate technological innovations and improve government services.

Overall, the presentation highlighted the rapid technological changes governments are facing and the strategies they are adopting to meet these challenges while improving citizen services and operational efficiency.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– Challenges facing governments, including global turmoil, cyber threats, citizen demands, and legacy IT systems

– Business trends in government, such as managing digital trust, institutional resilience, and experience management

– Technology trends in government, including adaptive security, digital identity ecosystems, and AI for decision intelligence

– The increasing importance of data management and cloud adoption for government agencies

– The role of AI, particularly generative AI, in modernizing legacy systems and augmenting workforce productivity

Overall purpose:

The purpose of this discussion was to present and explain the top business and technology trends affecting governments in 2024 and beyond. The speaker aimed to provide insights into the challenges governments face and how emerging technologies and strategies are being used to address these challenges.

Tone:

The overall tone of the discussion was informative and engaging. The speaker maintained a conversational style throughout, occasionally asking rhetorical questions to involve the audience. The tone was consistently enthusiastic about the potential of new technologies to solve government challenges, while also acknowledging the complexities involved. There was no significant change in tone throughout the presentation.

Speakers

– Fares Shadad: Represents Gartner

Additional speakers:

None identified

Expanded Summary of Government Technology Trends Discussion

This comprehensive summary details a presentation by Fares Shadad, a Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, on top business and technology trends in governments for 2024 and beyond. The discussion highlighted the challenges governments face, emerging solutions, and key trends shaping the future of government operations and services.

Challenges Facing Governments

Shadad emphasized that governments are grappling with multiple challenges in the current landscape:

1. External pressures: Global turmoil, cyber threats, and increasing citizen demands for improved services and quality of life.

2. Internal challenges: Legacy IT systems, which are costly and difficult to upgrade, pose a significant obstacle to modernization efforts.

3. Balancing act: Governments must navigate the complex task of addressing external pressures while meeting rising citizen expectations for better services.

These challenges underscore the need for governments to adapt quickly and embrace innovative solutions to remain effective and responsive to citizen needs. Shadad posed a rhetorical question: “If you could wish for one service from your government, what would it be?”

Legacy Systems and Modernization

A significant point emphasized in the presentation was the challenge posed by legacy systems:

1. Outdated technology: Many government agencies rely on decades-old systems that are difficult to maintain and upgrade.

2. Modernization costs: Replacing these systems is often prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.

3. Innovation barrier: Legacy systems hinder the adoption of new technologies and impede digital transformation efforts.

By 2027, generative AI is expected to be used to analyze and plan improvements for legacy systems, potentially reducing modernization costs by up to 70%.

Business Trends in Government

Several key business trends were identified as crucial for governments moving forward:

1. Managing trust in digital services: As governments adopt new technologies, building and maintaining citizen trust in digital services is paramount.

2. Institutional resilience: Governments need to develop the ability to adapt quickly to changes and unforeseen circumstances. This includes addressing potential energy constraints resulting from increased computing power needs. By 2026, some governments might experience monthly electricity rationing due to the growing energy demands of advanced technologies.

3. Experience management: There is a growing focus on citizen-centric solutions and increased citizen involvement in service design and delivery. By 2026, 87% of government CIOs are expected to increase investment in producing positive citizen experiences.

4. Executive data advocacy: Increased emphasis on data governance and management at the highest levels of government. This trend also reflects an evolving IT workforce, with an anticipated shift from data analysts to data scientists, and from data scientists to AI engineers.

5. Workforce productivity: AI augmentation is emerging as a key tool for enhancing government workforce efficiency and effectiveness.

These trends reflect a shift towards more agile, citizen-focused, and data-driven approaches to governance and public service delivery.

Technology Trends in Government

Shadad outlined several technology trends that are reshaping government operations:

1. Adaptive security: AI-driven security measures are becoming crucial for protecting government systems against evolving cyber threats. By 2028, multi-agent AI use in threat detection and incident response is predicted to increase from 5% to 70%.

2. Digital identity ecosystems: Governments are developing robust systems to authenticate online transactions securely.

3. AI for decision intelligence: By 2026, 70% of government agencies are expected to use AI to enhance human administrative decision-making and measure resulting productivity increases.

4. Digital platform agility: Cloud adoption is enabling scalability and innovation in government services. By 2025, 75% of governments are predicted to expand adoption of cloud platform services for modernization.

5. Data management and process automation: Over 60% of government organizations are expected to prioritize investments in business process automation by 2026.

These technological advancements are poised to transform how governments operate, make decisions, and deliver services to citizens.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Government

AI, particularly generative AI, emerged as a central theme in the discussion, with several key applications highlighted:

1. Legacy system modernization: Generative AI will be used to analyze and plan improvements for legacy systems, potentially reducing modernization costs significantly.

2. Decision-making enhancement: AI will augment human decision-making in administrative processes, improving efficiency and accuracy.

3. Cybersecurity: Multi-agent AI systems will significantly increase threat detection and incident response capabilities in government agencies.

The adoption of AI technologies presents both opportunities for improved efficiency and challenges in terms of implementation and resource management.

Conclusion

The presentation by Fares Shadad provided a comprehensive overview of the challenges and opportunities facing governments in the realm of technology adoption and digital transformation. The key takeaways emphasize the need for governments to prioritize modernization efforts, embrace AI and cloud technologies, and focus on building citizen trust in digital services.

As governments navigate these trends, they will need to balance innovation with practical challenges, such as energy consumption and workforce development. The rapid pace of technological change presents both significant opportunities and challenges, placing governments at a critical juncture in their digital evolution.

Moving forward, governments must remain adaptable, citizen-focused, and technologically progressive to meet the demands of an increasingly complex and digital world. The successful integration of these trends and technologies will be crucial in shaping the future of public service delivery and governance.

A survey mentioned at the end of the presentation further underscored the importance of these trends and their potential impact on government operations and services.

Farah Shaddad: Again, on behalf of the organizers, I’d like to welcome you for this session today, where we’re talking about the top business and technology trends in governments. Okay, 2024, and probably 2025 as well, it seems like it’s trending on the same path, all right? My name is Farah Shaddad, I represent Gartner in today’s session, and I’ll be happy to walk you through a few statistics. Okay, we have some trends that we see coming, okay, that already some of it took place and probably more to come. But let me ask you this, I mean, usually I’d love to have a session to be more interactive, okay? I’d like to ask you a question, okay? Apparently it will be a rhetorical question because I will not be getting some feedback from you. If the genie just showed up, okay, and granted you wishes, but not three, only one, okay? One wish is granted to wish for your government to give you something. What is the service that you would require from your government that you feel that it is missing, that you will ask your government to have? Okay. I mean, for the audience who’s here, would you like to share something? Innovation? Okay. Technological innovations, maybe, to adapt more to technological innovation in the government and the services that the government provides, right? Okay. Focusing on security, amazing. I mean, this is very good two points to start with, but we need to remember something very important, the challenges that the government’s at, okay? I mean, look no further. I mean, if you look around you, you see the challenges are taking place around us. Let’s take a look at some of the challenges that we see around us, right? Global turmoils, cyber threats, regional conflicts, local pressures, increasing citizen demands, okay? This is some of the factors that are affecting our lives on a daily basis. Do we agree to it? Of course we do. It’s all around us, all right? One, I mean, one pressure and one challenge that governments see nowadays is basically several challenges coming from everywhere, okay? Not only from the external factors that we see here, okay? But sometimes it’s the pressure of the citizens, as we said. Citizens are asking for more products, more services. They care about the quality of life, and the government is sitting in the middle to be able to accommodate what’s happening outside, all the pressure that comes in from the outer world, and at the same time to accommodate the demand of the citizens all around. So therefore, for today’s presentation, we’re discussing the business side of the story and maybe the technical side of the story, where are the trends helping, I mean, trending and the challenges, and what the governments are doing. What are the governments are facing? One thing for a fact, okay? One of the biggest challenges that the government has, which is an internal challenge, is basically what we call in the world of IT is the legacy systems, okay? Is the legacy system a concept that is familiar to you? It’s the old computer systems, because you have a lot of organizations, I mean, a lot of government organizations, ministries, hiyat, other semi-government entities, they have been using IT for the longest time, right? So they have built so many, they invested so many money, time, resources into building their systems, all of a sudden, it became a legacy with a lot of challenges, a lot of demands on the services of the governments, so some of the systems that they have, it became some sort of old, needs to be updated, all right? One of the biggest challenges that the governments have today, how can we upgrade, okay? From our exposure to a lot of government entities all over the world, upgrading those legacy systems is not an easy task, bloody expensive. Luckily for us, we have a new technology nowadays, and we will talk more about it today, that probably will help us. All of us probably used by now, I mean, in abundance, chatGPT, right? Okay, chatGPT is an application of generative AI, so what has generative AI has to do with government legacy systems? Think about it, okay? Because of our exposure, all right, by 2027, generative AI will be used to look at the legacy systems and entities, government entities, to help the government entity identify what is this legacy system, what are the details of it, and how to plan to improve it as well. Isn’t that powerful? It’s an amazing revolution, because the alternative to that is basically to suffer, for the entity to suffer, and to spend a lot of money, and bring a lot of consultants to know the history of 30 or 40 years of the legacy systems, to be able to upgrade it, or maybe change it, or modernize it, okay, is the key word here. So by using generative AI, and helping modernizing the old legacy systems at governments, we’re saving up to 70% of the cost. So we have generative AI on one side, and we have the traditional way of modernizing our legacy systems. Gen AI is something else. Do you think this is a good takeaway, for you to know, and to take home with you? Definitely, it’s something to consider, using generative AI, and looking at your legacy systems for future enhancements, or modernization. Okay, as I said, governments are in, they are in so much demand, and they are sitting in the middle, trying to accommodate all the pressures coming from everywhere, okay? The first pressure is the demand by the citizenships, the citizens, okay? The citizens, they’re acquiring more services, they wanted a better quality of life, and they wanted more and more of the government. So that said, the government, the decision makers, the policy makers, they’re pushing the IT people, and every time I mention CIO here, we’re talking about the IT organization within the government. So they’re pushing CIOs to become more innovative, to be able to serve the citizens in a more proper, or more advanced way. The second pressure, okay, which is, how to accommodate all the pressures coming from everywhere else, which is the economical part of it, and how to ensure the quality of life based on the economical factors, and provide the citizens with, with a good quality of life. The third, okay, is basically to make things happen. All right? I mean, we know, as citizens, we know that our governments are investing in technology, investing in changing, investing in everything. Conferences, visions, what have you, it’s part of our government’s promises. But the pressure is here is to diverge and to come up to see the value on the ground. We, as citizens, we need to see the value manifest and to be taken advantage of, all right? So this is the pressure that is on governments as well to show the value, okay, to the citizens. So, as I said, we’ll tackle the subject of today from two different perspectives. I’ll share with you some numbers and some trends, what’s going on from a business perspective and a technology perspective. Okay, for trend number one, okay, managing trust and digital, all right? So probably by today, we have reached a point where we trust how to make a transaction on our cell phone, maybe to buy a plane ticket or to order our food. This is a transactional that has gained a lot of our confidence. We know that when we transfer our money from one account to another account, it is a secure transaction, 100%. How about other technologies that it’s being adopted nowadays? Let’s mention the computer vision. Let’s mention the racial profiling issues. So there are so many technologies that might affect the trust and citizenship and the citizens and taking advantage of the services or to bring the lack of trust in citizens. So we see that governments are looking on to enhancing this trust and citizen’s eyes to be able to gain more ground on adapting technologies. The second we see is the institutional resilience, okay? Institutional resilience is basically we have to have our governments ready, strong, to be able to accommodate any changes so fast, okay? To be able to accommodate this in a manner that it could recover and adapt so fast to the changes around it, whether it’s coming from citizens, economical regulations, or what have you. So the government entity, it has to be resilient, all right? So by 2026, which is basically just around the corner, okay, in a year time, we’re predicting that G20 members will experience a monthly electricity rationing, okay, basically to worry about electricity consumption. The reason of this trend is basically adopting technologies nowadays as electricity and energy demanding, okay? For a quick example, it’s basically we’re talking about cloud adoption, whether AI solutions, all of that requires a lot of computing power. A lot of computing power will require energy. So energy is one of the issues that we see that it has been trending that government entities are looking at where, how to save, and how to accommodate that, okay? Enough that we see a lot of government entities and energy and, I mean, technology providers are looking into traditional energy sources and non-traditional resources. We’re talking about sustainability of energy, okay, whether it’s renewable energy, or nowadays we started to hear back the nuclear energy as well, okay, to be able to accommodate the energy demand that the computing power needs, okay? Some technology providers are looking at building nuclear plants to be able to feed the energy. The next trend that we see is basically experience management. Experience management is basically looking at the citizens, okay? Whatever that we need to do, it has to be a customer-centric or a citizen-centric solution, or solving a citizen issue directly through the citizens. When we say citizen-centric, it’s basically, I mean, bringing the citizens to be part of the solution, and they are on the table making the decision to be able to resolve or to come up with issues, okay? So by 2026, again, 87% of the government CIOs, will increase investment in producing positive citizen experience as a critical business outcome, all right? So we’re investing more and more into bringing in the citizen to be citizens to be able to come up with solutions that serves the citizens, okay? The next, okay, executive data advocacy, which is basically, we need to focus on more, okay, on data, the power of data is where everything lies. So managing data from top, from the decision makers, okay, to filter down on how to govern and how to manage the data is very important, all right? Nowadays, we see a trend that it is where governments, they are focusing more on organizing their data, they govern the data, they’re making it ready to be able to adopt any new technological or maybe advancements that they need. So by 2027, 50% of data analysts will be trained to become, okay, data scientists. And the current data scientists, they are being trained to become AI engineers, okay? So basically, this shift is basically, is taking place because of the power of the data and how to manage data and to make sure that it is ready to be adopted, all right? So that it’s a very powerful trend here is basically people are moving, so data analytics, it became like a norm, okay? In every organization you talk to today, they have a certain level of maturity when it comes data analytics. So the next step up is basically, is how to utilize this data in a more productive and more intelligent way to be able to manage the challenges that we have mentioned earlier. Okay, workforce productivity, all right? We’re talking about government entities. The challenges that we have, all right, is basically the productivity of the workforce on such entities. Whether finding the right skills, whether upskilling, whether how to measure the productivity and how to move forward to be able to accommodate. what is demanded on the organizations and the governments and making things happen. So by 2026, 70% of the government agency will use AI to enhance human administrative decisions making and will measure the productivity increase achieving that way. So basically, we’re augmenting the workforce with AI solutions and AI agents to be able to help elevating the productivity without replacing our workforce, of course, okay? So this is something, it’s a trend that we see that it’s happening today, okay? Whereby AI will be augmenting the workforce to achieve the productivity that we’re seeking to elevating that level of productivity. Okay, with that said, okay, this is the pretty much what we see as a trend all over when it comes to business challenges, okay, in the government sector all over. Let’s look at the subject from a technological perspective. And we all know that is with technology, okay, a lot of advancement, a lot of innovation has taken place, it’s rapidly changing and the poor governments in the middle, somewhere they have to deal with it as well. So we see a trend of how to accommodate the technological advancements and moving forward. To start with, okay, the concept of adaptive security, okay, with cybersecurity is a very important aspect, okay? Big challenge to a lot of organizations, government and otherwise, all right? So the concept of adaptive security, whereby utilizing AI to enable how to predict, okay, how to manage attacks, incidents related to cyber attacks or cyber incidents, or to use, okay, to adapt with whatever attacks are coming in or incidents or possible even incidents because there is an intelligence part of it here. AI is part of the story and to be adaptive, to be able to move, to learn from whatever happens and to adapt to a better secured networks and systems as well. This is where the concept of adaptive security comes in. So by 2028, multi-agent AI and threat detection, incident response will raise from 5% to a 70%. Imagine, okay, from 5% to a 70%, AI will take place and helping, okay, with the detection and incident response, okay? Then we move to the digital identity ecosystem. Okay, we see governments all over the world, they wanted to make sure they’re taking the lead when it comes to digital identity. What is a digital identity? It’s basically, it’s the concept of, I mean, authenticating and verifying that you are who you claim that you are in your transactions, all right? Okay, you don’t have to go to any place anymore or show any ID to be able to go through a transaction. So the digital identity is a trend all over, it’s taking place just for the governments to adapt, to be able to serve the citizens, to protect its interests and services in a way. So people, I mean, as we all know, I mean, people living in Saudi Arabia, okay, and the digital identity part of the story is extremely mature. And with Apshar and Nafad is something that we see as an example. Every time this subject mentioned somewhere else, okay, they refer to Saudi Arabia’s success and when it comes to digital identity adoption and application. So by 2026, more than 500 million smartphones will handle transactions related to digital identity and transactions. So this is the prediction, more than 500 mobile smartphone will handle, again, digital identity related transactions, okay, using your digital identity. Next is basically AI for decision intelligence, okay. When it comes to AI, adoptions of AI is something, I mean, it’s trending all over the world and definitely we need governments, I mean, they have to take decisions. We need to make more intelligent decisions. That’s why we need data. Data, to make sense of data, is basically we’re bringing AI into the story to be able to help us, okay, with the prediction and to making a better decision, okay. So by 2026, over 70% of the government agencies will use AI to enhance human administrative decision making and will measure the productivity increases achieving that way. So again, bringing in AI to be able to elevate the level of decision making. Next is basically digital platform agility. When we’re talking about platforms, okay, we’re not talking about websites or applications. We’re talking about more powerful platforms that serves, okay, our purposes. I mean, today, as a government entity all over the world, okay, I have challenges whereby to be able to scale fast, to innovate. Everybody’s asking me as a government entity to be agile, to be able to accommodate the citizens’ requests, citizens’ demands, and to cope with the technology, citizens’ demands, and to cope with the security threats and cope with everything else, and to be innovative and to scale up so fast at the same time. So the digital platform agility is one of the trends that we see a lot of governments are thinking seriously and moving to the cloud, okay, and using high power generated infrastructures to be able to accommodate the need for scalability and innovation and agility as well. So 75% of government by 2025, which is next year, immediately next week, in two weeks’ time, okay, well, 75% of the government will expand the adoption of platform services for modernization, okay, with hyperscale cloud providers delivering half of the workload, okay? This is the magical world here, is basically by next year, a lot of government entities, okay, 70% of them, 75% of them, will adopt cloud providers and hyperscalers to be able, okay, to move or innovate I mean, to move their 50% of their workload to the cloud, okay, to be able to accommodate the innovation and the requirements and the agility as well, all right? Does that sound like a ring? If you are living in the kingdom, and if you’re involved in one of the wonderful measures that measures the maturity of the digital transformation, maturity of organizations in the kingdom here, is Qiyas. Qiyas is basically, one part of its mandate for next year is basically the 50% mark that we’re talking about here. The 50% mark of your workload needs to be on the cloud. So this is part of the trend, and we see it happening in front of our eyes in one of sample governments like in Saudi Arabia. Next trend that we see all over, again, the data management story. Data management story is basically whereby we have to organize ourselves to be able to make ourselves data ready to be able to accommodate any innovations, technological innovations. So when we are data ready, that means we know how to store our data, to manage it, know how to govern it, to make it available for any innovations that we have. So by 2026, more than 60% of government organization will prioritize investments in business process automation up from 35%. So currently it’s a 35% adoption. It will move up to 60% by 2026, by adopting what we call the process automation, which is basically making sure that our data is very well managed and help us in our process automation. Short and sweet, this is currently what we see as trends when it comes to business challenges and technological challenges that trends that the governments are seeing nowadays. Thank you so much for bearing with me for the past few minutes. It’s been a pleasure. One thing that is required for me to share with you is basically a survey. This is something that the organizers asked to do, is basically to fill up a survey on the data.

Agreement Points

Legacy systems are a major challenge for governments

Fares Shadad

Legacy systems are a major internal challenge for governments

The speaker emphasizes that legacy systems pose a significant challenge for government organizations, requiring expensive and difficult upgrades to meet modern demands.

Governments face multiple pressures and challenges

Fares Shadad

Governments face pressures from global turmoil, cyber threats, and increasing citizen demands

Governments need to balance external pressures with citizen demands for better services

The speaker highlights that governments are dealing with various external pressures while also trying to meet increasing citizen demands for improved services and quality of life.

AI is becoming crucial for government operations and decision-making

Fares Shadad

Workforce productivity is being enhanced through AI augmentation

AI for decision intelligence is enhancing administrative decision-making

Generative AI will be used to modernize legacy systems, saving up to 70% of costs

The speaker presents multiple arguments supporting the increasing importance of AI in government operations, from enhancing workforce productivity to improving decision-making and modernizing legacy systems.

Similar Viewpoints

The speaker emphasizes the importance of building trust in digital services and developing robust digital identity systems for successful government technology adoption.

Fares Shadad

Managing trust in digital services is crucial for government adoption of new technologies

Digital identity ecosystems are being developed to authenticate online transactions

The speaker highlights the need for governments to be adaptable and resilient, with cloud adoption and digital platforms playing a key role in achieving this agility.

Fares Shadad

Institutional resilience is needed for governments to adapt quickly to changes

Digital platform agility through cloud adoption is enabling scalability and innovation

Unexpected Consensus

Overall Assessment

Summary

The presentation by Fares Shadad focuses on key business and technology trends in governments, emphasizing the challenges of legacy systems, the need for balancing various pressures, the importance of AI adoption, and the crucial role of digital trust and identity systems.

Consensus level

As this is a monologue by a single speaker, there is no consensus to assess among multiple speakers. However, the speaker presents a coherent and consistent view of the challenges and trends facing governments in terms of technology adoption and digital transformation. The implications suggest that governments need to prioritize modernization efforts, embrace AI and cloud technologies, and focus on building citizen trust in digital services to meet future challenges effectively.

Different Viewpoints

Unexpected Differences

Overall Assessment

summary

No disagreements identified as there is only one speaker presenting information.

difference_level

None. The transcript contains a single perspective without opposing viewpoints.

Partial Agreements

Similar Viewpoints

The speaker emphasizes the importance of building trust in digital services and developing robust digital identity systems for successful government technology adoption.

Fares Shadad

Managing trust in digital services is crucial for government adoption of new technologies

Digital identity ecosystems are being developed to authenticate online transactions

The speaker highlights the need for governments to be adaptable and resilient, with cloud adoption and digital platforms playing a key role in achieving this agility.

Fares Shadad

Institutional resilience is needed for governments to adapt quickly to changes

Digital platform agility through cloud adoption is enabling scalability and innovation

Key Takeaways

Governments face significant challenges including legacy systems, external pressures, and increasing citizen demands

Key business trends for governments include managing digital trust, institutional resilience, citizen-centric experience management, data advocacy, and AI-enhanced workforce productivity

Major technology trends in government include adaptive security, digital identity ecosystems, AI for decision intelligence, cloud-based digital platform agility, and data management/process automation

Artificial Intelligence, especially generative AI, will play a crucial role in modernizing legacy systems, enhancing decision-making, and improving cybersecurity in government

Resolutions and Action Items

By 2027, generative AI will be used to modernize legacy systems in government entities, potentially saving up to 70% of costs

By 2026, 87% of government CIOs will increase investment in producing positive citizen experiences

By 2026, 70% of government agencies will use AI to enhance human administrative decision-making

By 2025, 75% of governments will expand adoption of cloud platform services for modernization

Unresolved Issues

Specific strategies for balancing external pressures with increasing citizen demands

Detailed plans for addressing potential energy constraints due to increased computing power needs

Concrete steps for transitioning data analysts to data scientists and data scientists to AI engineers

Suggested Compromises

None identified

By 2027, generative AI will be used to look at the legacy systems and entities, government entities, to help the government entity identify what is this legacy system, what are the details of it, and how to plan to improve it as well.

speaker

Fares Shadad

reason

This comment introduces a novel application of generative AI in government systems, highlighting its potential to revolutionize the modernization of legacy systems.

impact

It shifted the discussion towards the practical applications of AI in government, particularly in addressing the long-standing challenge of legacy systems. This opened up a new perspective on how emerging technologies can solve traditional problems in government IT infrastructure.

By 2026, which is basically just around the corner, okay, in a year time, we’re predicting that G20 members will experience a monthly electricity rationing, okay, basically to worry about electricity consumption.

speaker

Fares Shadad

reason

This prediction highlights an unexpected consequence of technological advancement – increased energy consumption – and its potential impact on government policies and infrastructure.

impact

It broadened the scope of the discussion to include environmental and resource management concerns in the context of technological advancement, linking IT trends to broader societal challenges.

By 2026, 87% of the government CIOs, will increase investment in producing positive citizen experience as a critical business outcome

speaker

Fares Shadad

reason

This comment emphasizes the growing importance of citizen-centric approaches in government services, reflecting a shift in priorities for government IT leaders.

impact

It steered the conversation towards the importance of user experience in government services, highlighting a trend towards more citizen-focused governance and technology implementation.

By 2026, 70% of the government agency will use AI to enhance human administrative decisions making and will measure the productivity increase achieving that way.

speaker

Fares Shadad

reason

This prediction illustrates the expected widespread adoption of AI in government decision-making processes, emphasizing the augmentation rather than replacement of human workers.

impact

It deepened the discussion on AI’s role in government, moving from general applications to specific use cases in administrative decision-making and productivity enhancement.

By 2028, multi-agent AI and threat detection, incident response will raise from 5% to a 70%.

speaker

Fares Shadad

reason

This dramatic increase in AI adoption for cybersecurity highlights the rapid pace of technological change and the growing importance of AI in protecting government systems.

impact

It shifted the focus to the critical area of cybersecurity, emphasizing how AI is expected to play a transformative role in this domain within a relatively short timeframe.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by highlighting several critical trends in government technology adoption, including the use of AI for legacy system modernization, citizen-centric service design, administrative decision-making, and cybersecurity. The comments consistently emphasized the rapid pace of technological change and its wide-ranging impacts on government operations, citizen experiences, and resource management. They also underscored the need for governments to be proactive and adaptive in their approach to technology, balancing innovation with practical challenges like energy consumption and workforce productivity. Overall, these insights painted a picture of governments at a technological crossroads, facing both significant opportunities and challenges in the near future.

Summary

This discussion focused on defining and implementing transparency and explainability in AI systems, as well as balancing innovation with ethical governance. Participants from various countries and organizations shared their perspectives on these challenges.

Key points included the need for globally agreed definitions of transparency and explainability, with transparency relating to how AI systems are designed and deployed, while explainability concerns justifying AI decisions. Several speakers emphasized the importance of standards and frameworks to guide ethical AI development, with examples given from Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and international bodies such as ITU and UNESCO.

The discussion highlighted both the potential of AI to accelerate progress on sustainable development goals and address global challenges, as well as technical and non-technical barriers to achieving transparent and explainable AI. These barriers include the complexity of AI models, data privacy concerns, and the need for more AI expertise and public understanding.

Participants agreed on the need to prioritize trust, safety, and accountability in AI governance moving forward. Suggestions for future action included focusing on frugal and inclusive AI development, enhancing global collaboration, supporting capacity building in the Global South, and closing digital divides. The importance of considering cultural and linguistic diversity in AI development was also stressed.

The discussion concluded with calls to create human-centric AI systems that benefit humanity while addressing ethical concerns and potential risks. Participants emphasized the need for ongoing dialogue and cooperation among all stakeholders to shape responsible AI governance and harness AI’s potential for sustainable development.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– Defining transparency and explainability in AI, and their importance for building trust

– National and international efforts to promote ethical AI development and use

– Challenges and barriers to implementing transparent and explainable AI systems

– Leveraging AI to achieve sustainable development goals and address global challenges

– Priorities and actions needed to advance responsible AI governance by 2025 and beyond

The overall purpose of the discussion was to explore how different stakeholders define and approach transparency and explainability in AI, examine real-world examples and challenges, and identify priorities for advancing responsible AI governance and development globally.

Speakers

– Latifa Al-Abdulkarim, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, King Saud University (Moderator)

– Gong Ke, Executive Director of the Chinese Institute for the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategies, Chinese Academy of Engineering

– Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)

– His Excellency Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi, President of the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA), Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

– Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Executive President of the International Center of Artificial Intelligence of Morocco, Ai movement within the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University

– Li Junhua, United Nations Secretary-General

– His Excellency Abdullah bin Amer Alswaha, Minister of Communications & Information Technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Expanded Summary of AI Transparency and Explainability Discussion

Introduction:

This discussion, moderated by Latifa Al-Abdulkarim, brought together experts from various countries and organizations to explore the challenges and opportunities surrounding transparency and explainability in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The conversation focused on defining these concepts, examining their importance in building trust, and identifying priorities for advancing responsible AI governance globally.

Key Definitions and Concepts:

A crucial starting point for the discussion was establishing clear definitions of transparency and explainability in AI. Doreen Bogdan-Martin, representing the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), provided a helpful distinction: transparency relates to how AI systems are designed and deployed, while explainability concerns justifying AI decisions. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Executive President of the International Center of Artificial Intelligence of Morocco stated that it’s important to justify the decision given by the system for better explainability.

National and International Efforts:

Participants shared insights into various initiatives aimed at promoting ethical AI development and use:

1. Saudi Arabia: His Excellency Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi, President of the Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA), highlighted the country’s development of national AI ethics frameworks and initiatives. He also mentioned Saudi Arabia’s collaboration with international organizations such as ITU, OECD, and ISESCO in AI governance efforts.

2. China: Gong Ke, Executive Director of the Chinese Institute for the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Strategies, Chinese Academy of Engineering, mentioned steps being taken to promote responsible AI deployment, including the concept of “double increases and double decreases” in AI development.

3. Morocco: Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni discussed Morocco’s efforts in AI, particularly addressing the challenges posed by linguistic diversity. She highlighted the country’s three languages and the complexities this presents for inclusive AI development.

4. International bodies: Doreen Bogdan-Martin discussed ITU’s collaboration with partners like IEC, ISO, IEEE, and IETF through the World Standards Cooperation (WSC) group, focusing on multimedia authentication, deepfakes, and misinformation. She also mentioned the development of an AI readiness framework in collaboration with ITU and the launch of the “Green Digital Action” and the COP29 Declaration on Green Digital Action.

5. United Nations: Li Junhua, United Nations Secretary-General, highlighted the UN’s efforts in AI governance, including the formation of an interagency working group on AI.

Technical Barriers and Challenges:

Several speakers identified key challenges in implementing transparent and explainable AI systems:

1. Complexity: Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni noted that the complexity of AI models makes them difficult to explain, particularly deep learning systems.

2. Data privacy: Gong Ke highlighted data privacy concerns as a challenge for transparency.

3. Regulatory gaps: Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni pointed out that regulations struggle to keep pace with rapid AI advancements, emphasizing the need for flexible regulatory frameworks.

4. Talent shortage: The lack of AI expertise was identified as a major barrier to implementation.

5. Linguistic diversity: Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni raised the issue of language diversity posing challenges for inclusive AI development, citing the example of Morocco’s three languages.

Leveraging AI for Sustainable Development:

Participants emphasised the potential of AI to accelerate progress on sustainable development goals (SDGs) and address global challenges:

1. Doreen Bogdan-Martin stated that AI could accelerate progress on SDGs by 70%.

2. Li Junhua highlighted AI’s ability to enable real-time data analysis for policymaking, address structural inequalities, aid disaster response, and help with climate prediction and resource mobilisation.

Priorities for Future AI Governance:

As the discussion progressed, speakers proposed several priorities for advancing responsible AI governance:

1. Trust, safety, and accountability: His Excellency Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi emphasised the need to focus on these aspects alongside collaboration.

2. Frugal, trustworthy, and inclusive AI: Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni advocated for this approach to AI development, emphasizing the concept of “doing more with less.”

3. Global collaboration: Li Junhua stressed the importance of cooperation among all stakeholders.

4. Closing digital and AI gaps: Doreen Bogdan-Martin highlighted this as a priority, particularly for developing regions.

5. Capacity building: Gong Ke emphasised the need to build engineering capacity, especially in developing regions, mentioning the World Federation of Engineering Organizations’ 10-year engineering capacity building program for Africa.

6. Standards development: Doreen Bogdan-Martin stressed the importance of standards in AI development to ensure interoperability and responsible practices.

Data Quality vs. Quantity:

The discussion also focused on the approach to data in AI development. While some speakers implied the need for extensive data to leverage AI’s potential, Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni challenged this notion, advocating for focused, high-quality datasets over large quantities of potentially unreliable data.

Conclusion:

The discussion concluded with a call for creating human-centric AI systems that benefit humanity while addressing ethical concerns and potential risks. Participants emphasised the need for ongoing dialogue and cooperation among all stakeholders to shape responsible AI governance and harness AI’s potential for sustainable development.

Several thought-provoking questions were raised for future consideration, including the validity of the Turing test for modern AI systems, the development of context-specific metrics for explainability and transparency, and strategies for creating more frugal, trustworthy, and inclusive AI systems.

Overall, the discussion highlighted the complex challenges and significant opportunities presented by AI technology. While there was broad consensus on the importance of transparency, explainability, and responsible development, the specific approaches to addressing these challenges may vary based on regional contexts and priorities. This underscores the need for continued international collaboration and dialogue to shape the future of AI governance.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: I will go first to describe the general theme of this interesting session. So in this session, we want to know how AI actors, users, and regulators define transparency and explainability in the context of AI. And is this definition a consensus definition? While going through some real-world examples to show the significance of using transparency and explainability, we also want to dig into the technical and other challenges that make AI systems hard to explain. And since we have a very interesting diverse group here, moving from national to regional and global perspectives, we want to discuss the regulatory roles, the shortcomings in the roles, as well as the improvements that we want to achieve, foster international collaboration, and encourage digital dialogue on the roles and expectations from different stakeholders. Finally, this is a question from me. I want to ask ourselves whether the Turing test for AI is still valid for today, or we need a different version to trust, a new trust version for the Turing test to check whether we have trustworthy AI systems or not. Hopefully, some ideas will come from the IGF here in Riyadh. So let’s dive right in. And I will start with you, Doreen. As ITU plays a pivotal role in setting global standards for technologies, how should the term transparency and explainability in the context of AI be defined? And how to promote specifically transparency and explainability in those standards, which is, I know, a very challenging topic. Please. Thank you.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin: Thank you, and good morning again, ladies and gentlemen. I guess, Latifa, picking up as you were a member of HLAB, you know, it’s worth highlighting that, during the discussions stemming from the Secretary-General’s high-level panel on AI—a prominent advisory body—many terms lacked clear, internationally agreed definitions. This recognition underscores the need for greater global consensus and shared understanding of key concepts in the AI domain. I mean, things like fairness, like safety, like transparency. But obviously, when it comes to transparency and when it comes to explainability, they’re both absolutely critical in building public trust, which we need to do when it comes to AI. And we want to ensure accountability for AI systems and AI applications. So for us, I think when it comes to transparency, it’s about that disclosure when it comes to the how. And we want to make sure we understand how systems are designed. We want to understand how those systems are trained. And also to understand how they’re ultimately deployed. So those are the elements we keep in mind when it comes to the how in respect to transparency. When it comes to explainability, it’s a bit more towards the outcomes. It’s the how and the why AI systems produce specific outcomes. And as I said, both are absolutely critical when it comes to building that trust piece. And we want to make sure, as many speakers have noted in the previous opening session, that AI doesn’t get used for the wrong purposes, that AI doesn’t perpetuate biases, that we avoid potential harm. So we need to make sure that those two key features are built in. From the ITU perspective, we put standards at the core. We think that standards are the cornerstone of responsible development of artificial intelligence. Those standards play a key role when it comes to safety, when it comes to transparency, when it comes to ethical use. And that can also help us ensure that we unlock AI’s full potential. And I guess the last thing I wanted to mention, and it’s a specific example, we have launched a group as part of the World Standards Cooperation, the WSC, so we’re working with partners like IEC, ISO, IEEE, IETF and others. And we’re focusing in that group on multimedia authentication. We’re looking at deepfakes and we’re looking at misinformation. And I think that’s a good example of partnerships, of collaboration to ultimately make a difference. One other piece is the points about transparency and also explainability are also core to a recently adopted resolution that came out of our Standards Conference, where we had our first AI standards summit. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you. Thanks very much. And this is really very interesting. And I think it’s totally aligned with what we exactly are looking for in terms of harmonizing those standards and specifically working and building studies to know the metrics that we need for those explainability and transparency for each context or application. That is quite different when we are discussing those two principles. And the most interesting part that those standards and those global efforts are aligned with many national efforts. And specifically, if I want to ask Your Excellency Dr. Abdullah about Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has made significant strides when it comes to promoting the ethical use and development of AI. Could you please share more about the Kingdom efforts and initiatives in advancing AI ethics, transparency and explainability? Thanks.

Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi: Thank you, Dr. Latifa. First, I would like to welcome my fellow panelists to Riyadh. And it’s a great pleasure to share the stage with such distinguished visionaries and thought leaders. First, let me just talk about the beginning of our journey in Saudi Arabia and the area of AI that started back in 2019 when the Saudi Data and AI Authority was established. So, we placed a strong emphasis on embedding the ethics into the core of all AI initiatives since then. We focused more at the beginning on the AI ethics framework. And basically, Saudi Arabia was among the early countries adopting the UNESCO recommendation on AI ethics. So, a year after that, back in the Global AI Summit, the second one back in 2022, we announced our National AI Ethics Framework. And the beauty of that framework, it was associated with the incentive program that was announced earlier this year. The idea of the program to encourage the governmental entities to register in a platform and also to undergo a number of surveys. And based on their performance, based on their maturity level, they are granted badges. And on this stage, two months ago, we celebrated 20 entities from the public and private sectors and granted them badges. And also, this framework, the National AI Ethics Principles Framework was also recognized as a champion by the ITU WSIS a while ago. So, this signifies our commitment here in Saudi Arabia to align also with the international community in those initiatives. And also, the government has introduced a unique initiative by establishing the International Center for Artificial Intelligence Research and Ethics. And proudly, the UNESCO has recognized the center as a global and regional partner to advance the AI ethics locally and worldwide. Only a few days ago, the UNESCO has published its report on AI in Saudi Arabia that highlighted a number of unique achievements and initiatives on AI ethics. And this is a great achievement of Saudi Arabia, completing the RAM methodology requirements among 10 countries worldwide.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Congratulations, Your Excellency, for all these efforts and incentives that we are doing here in Saudi regarding the ethical use of AI and targeting transparency and explainability in specific. And maybe the most interesting part that we are also considering the cultural aspects and providing context-based AI systems while at the same time following all these ethical guidelines that we are working on here in Saudi Arabia. Talking about culture, it’s very interesting to know and more about you from your side, Dr. Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, about Morocco. Morocco is a nation bridging the Arabs, African worlds and putting at a crossroads of culture as well as economics and technological exchange. How is the Ministry setting this benchmark, I would say, for ethical AI practices and specifically for transparency and explainability?

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni: Thank you very much for the question. Yes, Morocco is Arabic-African. We have we are close to America, we are close to Europe, so we are the gate of many, many things. And Morocco is also very well known with inclusion and diversity. This is very challenging for AI today to have multilingualism and multicultural approaches because if you deal with LLM, for example, the most spread technology today in AI field is, for example, chatGPT. I know there is a very interesting experience in Saudi Arabia about LLM. In fact, if we want to be inclusive enough, we should target all the languages over the world. In particular, in Africa we have like 800 dialects across the continent, and we cannot ask everybody to speak English. It’s just something impossible today. I mean, we can speak English as second language, but the native language is not English, and we have to deal with that. In Morocco, for example, we have three languages, in the north, in the middle of the country, and also in the south. They understand each other, but it’s quite different from one region to another one. So how to apply AI in this context? Because language is also the vector for culture. If you don’t speak the language, you cannot understand the culture of the region, of the country, of the continent, et cetera. So in my ministry, we have a department, as I said, which works on how to make models for a multi-language environment. And we face a lot of challenges, for example, some of these languages don’t have structure, don’t have semantics, don’t have basic building blocks to deal with, computationally speaking. So this is one aspect. Now, if we go back to transparency and explainability. Transparency, for me, is like to explain, and not to explain, because I will be confused with explainability, but it’s relays on how the system can meet each expectation, how it functions, et cetera. When it comes to explainability, it’s a bit more technical. We have to justify the decision given by the system. For example, in scoring, in many cases, in justice, in medicine, in health, et cetera, you deal with scoring. The scoring should be justified on technical parameters of the system. You have to justify your decisions. In legal systems, for example, you cannot just provide judgment, you have to explain the judgment in health, et cetera. So in Morocco, as you know, we have been involved in many global, multilateral initiatives towards AI, in particular, with UNESCO and United Nations, and I can go back to all these initiatives if you have room. But the idea is that Morocco is a very, very aware of the necessity, if we want to build towards AI, we need to provide transparency and explainability to citizen and to stakeholders.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much, and you highlighted very interesting point, the one that is related to the language, and the importance of considering inclusion even in all the language, and all the data sets in all the languages, that is gonna be very crucial, as well as taking the definition of transparency and explainability, and making sure that transparency is throughout the whole AI life cycle, while explainability is reasoning and justifying the outcome. However, even for that reasoning and justifying for the outcome, we still have some challenges when it comes to trustworthy. We don’t want to provide too detailed answer, and then that will increase the trust maybe for the end users at the end. That’s very interesting discussion. Take me back to… Take me to you, Mr. Li, to wondering and knowing more about how can we leverage those principles of transparency and explainability in AI system to strengthen institutions, governance, and capacity building, specifically for national levels.

Li Junhua: Well, thank you. Thank you, Madam Moderator, for raising this important question. Perhaps at the outset, I just want to say a few words about UN DASA. We are custodian for the Sustainable Development for 2030 Agenda. So for the UN Development System, the ultimate objective is to assist the member states to achieve the 2030 Agenda or Sustainable Development Goals. So in this exercise, we definitely need the regional and the national institutions to work together to accelerate these efforts. So by saying that, we definitely underlined the importance or highlighted importance for this AI technology to stimulate and accelerate the national efforts and the regional efforts. Of course, also at the global level. For instance, last May, we had this ECOSOC special meeting focusing that how AI technology can sustain and stimulate sustainable development. We need to harness the strategy and the synergies together. And then also, why this transparency and explainability is so important in capacity building at the global or national level. First, the General Assembly actually adopted two important or landmark resolutions on AI technology. And among those two resolutions, there are a few important but common elements. Perhaps I could just share with our participants. Number one, they highlighted very much the explainability of the AI for the national efforts. Because to us, explainable AI plays a vital role in developing capacity for demystifying the algorithm. This enables the policymakers to know that whenever the decisions undertaken, it can be explained to the public constituencies. So we can leverage the enthusiasm and participation by our constituencies at the national level and it also enhances the regional networking. And then also, second important element from those two resolutions is that capacity building should go expand or go beyond the technical training to include ethical and regulatory dimensions. So that actually, I don’t need to further explain that. Whenever there’s such a need to use the AI technology, we need to be the very ethical and transparent. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so, so much for mentioning this particular part. We definitely need to work on those capacity building cross domains. It’s not only about technical. Everyone thought that this is a technical, for example, forum. a technical forum. It’s for everyone who should be part of the future, who should help and contribute in shaping the future or the digital future that we want. Dr. Gong Ke, I know that you are leading the Chinese Institute for the new gen AI and I’m sure that you have your inputs and opinions when it comes to how can we leverage AI ethics and capacity building in specific to transparency and explainability in AI. Thank you.

Gong Ke: Thank you. Based on the observation of my Institute in the past years to the Chinese practices, I think there are five essential steps to promote the transparency and responsible deployment of AI system. First, we need to building wide consensus through a multistakeholder dialogue by the institutional approach to engage policymakers, industrial leaders, academia and civil society to develop a shared understanding of transparency and explainability. And based on this, the second step is to provide a clear guideline and setting operational standards for AI transparency and explainability to encourage the development of ethical AI practices through an open science approach as recommended by UNESCO. The third one I’d like to mention is that a building capacity and the literacy for of AI by investing education and training programs for public servants, policymakers and industrial professionals and public to understand AI technology and its social implications so that to enable them to implement the guideline and the standards. And another very important step is to develop technical tools and the methodologies to evaluating and verifying the transparency of AI system. Last but never the least is promoting international collaboration to establish interoperability of norms and the best practices sharing to ensure the alignment with the global standards. I think in this regards, IGF can play a crucial role in this process.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you very much. You mentioned a lot of very interesting points here that has been also part of the GDC adoption and recommendations. The consensus, we need definitely scientific consensus in terms of the definitions so we at least globally can we agreed on certain definitions. The policy dialogue and interoperability and the focus exactly on the main requirements that I believe that we are lacking in globally is the focus on having experts into mainly who could tackle the technical solutions for transparency and explainability in AI. And this is very important and we’d like to work on it and to have more experts in this field. This will help us in finding and reaching trustworthy AI systems. Talking about all these requirements within the capacity building, I know that we are in Saudi Arabia doing our best into ensuring safeguards without limiting AI potential. I would like to hear from you, Your Excellency Dr. Abdullah, about how exactly we are doing this and mainly how we are balancing between the AI governance while we are innovating.

His Excellency Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi: As you know Dr. Latifa, the AI landscape is evolving rapidly and this evolution includes a lot of opportunities and also it reduces a lot of serious risks. So our approach here in Saudi is based on continuous monitoring of the evolution of AI solutions and also intervening with the right governance tools to make sure that the principles that I talked about are taken into consideration. So the balance is a very serious issue and we have to make sure that the innovation goes along and with the right governance and regulatory tools. For example, recently with the rise of the synthetic data like misinformation, disinformation, we have nationally introduced the deep fake guidelines for the developers and also for the users to be taken into consideration when using or developing such systems. And also, for example, with the evolution and emergence of multiple large language models similar to chatGPT, we have introduced the national AI guidelines framework in order to help the developers choose the right methodology and also to follow certain guidelines in developing these solutions taken into consideration the ethical principles that we talked about. So on the other hand, we have also introduced nationally the national AI adoption framework where we encourage the governmental and private sector organizations to adopt AI and to scale the AI solutions within their sectors. So recently we have celebrated the establishment of 25 AI offices within governmental organizations and those offices will take the care of balancing between innovation as well as the regulation taken into consideration the national AI ethics principles framework and also the framework we have just announced, we have just talked about the gene AI framework and so on and so forth. In addition to that, also we have published the national AI occupational guidelines framework that sets the guidelines for the human resources departments to deal with new jobs, new job titles associated with artificial intelligence. Jobs like the AI engineering, the AI data science, the data science, the data analysis, the AI developers. So we set the guidelines, the performance, the data analysis, the job titles and also the applicants. Also on the other hand, we have introduced the national academic framework for the academic institutions to be used in making sure the curriculum developed or used take into consideration those guidelines and we have introduced eight levels starting from the elementary level, level number one, going through the undergrad, reaching to the PhD level, level number eight. So the idea is for the academic institutions to take these guidelines into consideration when introducing new programs on AI. Last but not least is the is the introduction of the establishment of the International Center for AI Research and Ethics that was accredited by the UNESCO as we mentioned before and I think these initiatives make Saudi Arabia number three worldwide after the US and the UK according to the OECD policy observatory. So this signifies our commitment, dedication and aligning with international community and introducing new rules and regulations for AI.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much Your Excellency and well deserved after going through all those frameworks and that is some related to the curriculum and occupational and for the capacity building itself while the others also taking care of how exactly the adoption of AI giving that at this very I think it was announced a few months ago and we have already 225 AI offices and government entities. Congratulations on this achievements. I believe this is really give a clear example of how can we balance between innovation and regulation and of course we need to keep on monitoring of our progress and reflect that on our guidelines. Ms. Doreen, I believe that you have very interesting examples also in balancing giving that you are working on many use cases related to the SDGs and I would like to hear more from you about how can transparent and explainable AI systems those goals. Thank you.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin: Thank you. Maybe, Your Excellency, just to also pick up on the work we’ve done in terms of the AI readiness framework. I think that’s also a great example of how we can work together with countries to help them find ways to leverage artificial intelligence. When it comes to the sustainable development goals, I think it’s important to recognize that only 17% of the targets are on track, so we’re not in a good space in terms of achieving those targets and goals by 2030. But we’re optimistic because we fully believe that leveraging digital technologies, and in particular artificial intelligence, can actually help us to accelerate progress on the 17 SDGs and on the 169 targets. We’ve done some joint work with UNDP, and we showed that if you invest in digital and you invest in AI, you can actually accelerate progress by some 70%. So that’s our big push, is to get all stakeholders to put digital first, put AI first, so that we can make significant progress. In the context of our artificial intelligence for good, AI for good, which we started back in 2017, we have seen very concrete examples and solutions. We need to leverage those solutions. For instance, it was a great story of Mohamedou, who was a winner of our AI innovation factory, he comes from West Africa. He’s been able to take data together with AI, work with farmers, and actually the farmers he has worked with, they’ve seen an increase in their yield by some 200%. So very concrete examples of what we can do when we leverage AI. I think in the UN system, it’s also important to recognize that we do work together, something that the USG has just mentioned. We have an interagency working group on artificial intelligence that ITU co-chairs with UNESCO, and we have documented more than 400 use cases of how we as a system are leveraging AI to achieve the SDGs. So whether it’s something in the space of climate, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s school connectivity, whether it’s gender, we have demonstrated very clearly how you can use AI to achieve the SDGs, and I think that’s something that we absolutely have to build on. And then when it comes to climate and sustainability, we heard lots of interventions about that this morning, and I think we have to remember in the digital ecosystem, in the digital space, we are emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, and some estimates show that we’re around 4% come from the digital sector. We know that artificial intelligence is hungry for energy, also thirsty for water, but if we use it correctly, artificial intelligence can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10%. And I think also that’s a space where standards is critical. So we’re very focused on the standards component, developing international standards with our partners. We have launched the Green Digital Action Coalition. We had a digitization day at COP 29 where we launched the Green Digital Declaration, had about a thousand or so signatories to that declaration. And we do need to come together to advance sustainable green solutions when it comes to digital and when it comes specifically to artificial intelligence, so that we can be reducers and not emitters. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Doreen, and I’m sure that Mr. Li could elaborate more on this in particular to maybe addressing climate actions under the UN.

Li Junhua: Well, thank you. I’m so glad to hear from Doreen about this SDG implementation. We are off the track, left behind our objectives, but so definitely AI technology could inject a stimulus, a new stimulus, in our efforts. I just want to give you three specific examples how AI technology can help us to leapfrog. First, AI in the real-time data analysis. That helps the policymakers to understand the overall situation, how this 17 goals interlinked together. For instance, like education, how much impact generated from education on the gender equality, and also how much impact on the renewable resource energy impacts on our climate efforts or climate agenda, climate action. And second specific area is that the AI system can address the structural inequalities. For instance, if there would be an urgent situation or a contingent situation, we need to allocate the resources to the disaster reduction or disaster relief. That’s the important thing for the policymakers to make the right judgment on the decision. So that’s where AI can help. In a third area, just now you mentioned the climate action. Well, AI-driven models can do the climate prediction and the resource mobilization. So that is very important for the policymakers and also national efforts. And when they articulate their national efforts, it will be integrated to the global or regional efforts together. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much for going through all these examples related to connectivity, climate, sustainability, and energy. And very important point that you have just mentioned about when do we need AI to move and take actions when it comes to urgent situations. And this is what we need to prepare ourselves about it from now to get ready for such situations before it happens. I wish that it’s not happened anyway. For you, your excellency, Dr. Amal, we have heard a lot of opportunities, a lot of enormous potentials for AI in different use cases and different national and regional and global level. However, we both know that there are a lot of barriers too. I would like to hear from you about those barriers, whether they are technical or non-technical barriers, and how can we address them? Or if there are solutions already, then how can we elaborate on those solutions?

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni: Thank you very much. Let me start with non-technical barriers. It’s easy. We have to conduct mindset changing in our countries to make adoption of AI easier, because it’s a huge problem to convince stakeholders to develop AI systems for different reasons. The first one, because we don’t have enough talents, skills in AI, and this is something we should solve. It’s a huge problem over the world. We know there is a technical word to say that, the war of talents, you know. It’s a big problem to solve first. And also, people are afraid from AI because they think AI will dominate the world, AI is more intelligent than human beings, etc. Now, let me talk about the technical problems. I think the first one technical problem is the complexity of the models. As you know, Europe has developed the AI Act until 2020, and then ChargePT came on the table, and the AI Act stopped. It’s just like, you know, something very disruptive happened on the AI landscape, and we had to reconsider all that we have done before. So, like, five years’ work on the AI Act is stopped, and now we think that we will get the new AI Act for 2025, but it’s not sure. And so, this is maybe, we can think that we will have unforeseen situations in AI, and this means that we have to prepare ourselves to change our regulation as quick as possible to follow the technology. And this is not easy because, you know, regulation takes a lot of time compared to developing algorithms or new models. The other thing is that these large language models, for example, deal with millions and sometimes billions of parameters. So, it’s not possible to control what going on in the system by human being. It’s just, and in addition, the system learns, their ways change, and what’s going on in the system is not foreseeable by human being. The second thing is that most of AI systems can be considered as black boxes. We have inputs, we have outputs, we have lots of, lot of things happening within the box and nobody can explain. This is why explainability leads to accountability, etc, etc. So this is also a huge problem. The high dimensionality of data, we have a lot of dimensions to deal with, and we also have hybrid data. You, sometimes you deal with text, with digits, with images, with videos, and so on. And this is also, it’s not linear, and people, human being cannot think when it’s not linear. So most of data, by the way, came from sensors or radars. So this is something also that makes AI system very difficult to predict, the non-linear decision-making, because we focus on correlations, and when we have more than three correlations, we are lost. Sometimes you can go to seven, but you should be very skilled for that. So this is also makes some difficulty in explaining these systems. Data transparency. And about data, I would like to say something, because we think that we need huge data to do systems, to make system function. It’s not true. It’s, you know, like when you put all together from Internet, you have a good data, you have bad data, you have false data, you have whatever. You don’t need all this. You need good data, very well calibrated, and this maybe solve problem of climate change, if I go fast, because you have to set your data set as clean as possible. It’s enough. If you want to talk about justice, you don’t need data about health. If you want to talk about agriculture, you don’t need mining data, and so on. It’s a conversational system, works with all data it would be gathered on Internet, but other systems in different sectors, we don’t need all this data. We need specific and specialized data. A model can also behave unpredictably when deployed in different context. If you put models that work with Arabic, they will not work at the same in other dialect or in other language. So when you change the context, you should make accurate data, and you should change sometimes deeply the data you use.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: I totally agree with you and I’m sure that Dr. Gong has a lot to exchange with us, giving his expertise within the GenAI, and I’m sure within the use cases that you are dealing with in the Institute, please.

Gong Ke: In view of the limited time, let me focus on the technical barriers. It’s just mentioned by our colleague from Morocco. The technical barriers, many lines from the complexity of the AI model, and also from the data privacy, it raises a further challenge to the transparency of the models. So to address these models, I think it is, among many others, to further encourage and promote a technical innovation is a must. For example, we need to advance the AI model from today’s pure data-driven model to a new model which will be jointly driven by data and knowledge, in terms of knowledge of graph, decision-making trees, and many others. And also, we need to adopt and further develop privacy-preserving technologies, like differential privacy, federated learning, and homomorphic encryption to protect sensitive data while enabling transparency. I think further technical innovation in a possible and ethical way is a must.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you. Thanks so much for mentioning all this. We have heard about the complexity of the model, the complexity of the data, and the complexity of regulations, and how much we need flexible regulations. And this is maybe the call for, again, support even for the AI Act, as it’s now used as a sandbox for monitoring and evolving and changing, amending the current regulations. And we need to support, again, I totally agree with you about how having more skills for responsible AI that works on the technical side, to have more solutions, I would say technical solutions for responsible AI, including the privacy-preserving technologies. I’m looking at the time, I just want to make sure that we have at least preserving some time, because I want to make sure that we are not closing this session without knowing what are the actions. We have discussed the potentials, the challenges, but what can we provide for the IGF in 2025 and beyond. I would start with you, Your Excellency, Dr. Abdullah.

His Excellency Dr. Abdullah bin Sharaf Alghamdi: We started this idea back in 2019, and that time we sought support from other countries. You remember we paid some visits to our friends in Estonia, and also in South Korea, to benefit from their experiences either in data governance, or in data centers, or in also AI as well. So after five years of experience, I think Saudi Arabia now stands ready to share its expertise with other countries as well. I remember back in the first Global AI Summit back in 2020, we hosted the consultation session for establishing a UN AI advisory body for the General Secretary. So we hosted that consultation sessions during the pandemic, and a few years later, in 2023, the UN Secretary General announced the establishment and the launch of the advisory body, and you being a very active member of this body, Dr. Latifa. Also, in the second Global AI Summit, we announced a number of collaborations with international communities, with the ITU, we worked together, and we also launched the AI readiness framework, and thanks for the ITU for being steadfast in this partnership. And also with the OECD, we also announced a partnership to enhance the AI policy and incidents observatory, and this was also announced during the GAIN24. As well as, we worked with the international, with OECD also, we worked with them to establish GenAI Center of Excellence here in Riyadh, in order to help the member countries develop AI-based solutions, and also to take into consideration the ethics framework as well. Also, we worked with the ICESCO to announce in this very stage, two months ago, the Riyadh Charter for the Islamic World. As you know, Saudi Arabia is the heart of the Muslim world, more than two billion Muslims looking at Saudi and their practices in AI and large language model, Arabic large language model. So we have established, we have launched the Riyadh Charter with the ICESCO. Also, under the umbrella of the International Center for AI Research and Ethics, ICARE, we organized a number of workshops with the GCC countries, with the Arab Leagues, in order to increase the awareness towards the UNESCO RAM, the Readiness Assessment Methodology. And also, as I said before, Saudi Arabia was amongst the early countries adopting this methodology, on implementing the methodology. And as I said, we are proud, really, to be number one regionally according to the global AI index and also number one globally in the AI government strategy according to the same index. Going forward, our priorities for the year to come, year 2025, I recommend to minimize the declarations and focus more on actions, this first thing. And I think we need to focus on three main points in order to overcome the gap between governance and innovation. We have to focus on trust, we have to focus on accountability and also, sorry, safety and accountability as well, and also we have to focus on collaboration. So trust is based basically on, as the esteemed members mentioned, is based on clear governance for the explainability, the transparency, and for the safety, we have to make sure that we have the proper proactive measures and also we need to make sure that we have the proper guidelines in order to make sure that we implement the safety measures and also to mitigate the risks associated with AI products. Collaboration is essential between the governmental entities, industries, and also the academic institutions to make sure that they share the same goals. And these priorities, Saudi Arabia will be positioned as a global leader to develop AI-based solutions for the benefit of humanity.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much, Your Excellency, and of course we will keep on exchanging our expertise with the global and aligning with global initiatives. Dr. Amal, from your perspectives, what steps or empirical methodologies maybe should be prioritized in 2025 to bridge the gap and accelerate the use of transparency and explainability into AI systems?

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni: I would like to relay on His Excellency’s diagram, I found it very accurate for this question. So he talked about algorithm, computing, and data, and I would like to build on this. For example, for computing, we would like, I mean, I think we should do more with less. With data, I would like to push for data protection and data calibration. I can explain each concept separately. And for the algorithms, I will connect algorithms to models, it’s mainly the same, I mean, models and algorithms. And I would like to go for trustworthy, and inclusive AI. To do that, we need, of course, governance is very important, regulation, but the objectives of all this together is to get this inclusion in AI and to be as economical as possible towards our environment with frugal AI. This means that we do not have to use huge data for nothing, or build very big models for nothing. Or, I mean, we should customize our algorithms, our models, and our data sets to do more with less. This is my recommendation.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much. Always we are calling for low compute model for saving energy, and this is also targeted with your suggestions, I would say, and priorities for actions. Mr. Li, please, considering the adoption of global digital compact, the rapid advancement of AI, what steps or specific actions should we prioritize to harness AI’s potential for sustainable development and inclusive growth in this transformative era?

Li Junhua: Thank you. From UN’s perspective, I would like to flag out three or four key areas. First, just as His Excellency highlighted, number one, we need to emphasize on the global collaboration among all stakeholders, because the collaboration and cooperation among all stakeholders would be key for the digital transformation. Second, I would argue that the key areas to utilize this IGF platform, as all the distinguished speakers this morning highlighted again, this is a primary, open, and inclusive platform, so we need to dig the potential of this IGF. And third area, I would like to argue, is to allocate additional efforts to support the capacity building in the global south, especially at the local community levels, because without the open access by them, it’s hard to imagine that we can benefit for everyone. Last but not least, as the Minister has argued, we need to uphold a very responsible use of the data. I don’t need to further elaborate it. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much. Ms. Doreen?

Doreen Bogdan-Martin: Thank you. Perhaps to pick up on last point on humanity, because I think at the end it’s all about humanity. It’s all about the betterment of humanity. I had the honor and privilege of meeting Pope Francis a couple of weeks ago, and we spoke about technology and humanity, and he reminded us that artificial intelligence doesn’t just need a brain, it needs a heart. It needs empathy. So let’s remember that. And of course, when we think about our digital world, what does it mean when we still have a third of humanity that is not yet connected? The Secretary General often reminds us that we have to make sure AI does not stand for advancing inequalities. So when it comes to what to prioritize, I think we really have to prioritize closing the gap, closing the digital gap, closing the AI gap. As the Minister said this morning, that gap is a compute gap, we have a data gap, we have an algorithmic gap, and as you just said, we have a capacity building gap. We’ve got to close those gaps if it’s going to benefit humanity. We also need to be focusing on standards. We need to focus on responsible standards for AI. And then I guess the last point is about governance. We need to have more inclusive governance discussions, like here at the IGF, at the WSIS Forum, at AI for Good. We need all stakeholders at the table to discuss governance that benefits all of humanity. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much. Dr. Gong?

Gong Ke: So let me raise two points. Firstly, I’d like to echo what Undersecretary Lee has mentioned, capacity building. Capacity building is so important for the further deployment and application of AI in an inclusive and responsible way. The capacity divide is behind the divide of data, the computer, and the algorithm. Here I’d like to highlight the engineering capacity. Engineering capacity is so important. The World Federation of Engineering Organizations, with the support of UNDESA, UNESCO, and many other United Nations organizations, is carrying out a 10-year-long engineering capacity building for Africa program. We need your support. And secondly, I’d like to mention the combination of digitalization and sustainable development to make a dual transformation or twin transformation of sustainability and digitalization. So in China, we say to move AI from chat to product to benefit people and to achieve double increases and double decreases. The double increases is to increase the quality of the production and to increase the efficiency of the production. The double decreases is to decrease carbon footprint and to decrease the cost. So I stop here. Thank you.

Latifa Al-Abdulkarim: Thank you so much. I think this is the best words to close our discussion today. And for our audience, please take these actions for the next IGF to build safe AI systems and secure human-centric, which is going to be a solution for most of the issues that we are discussing here, a human-centric digital future, and leave no one behind. And don’t forget, AI has heart too. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, we now invite you to enjoy a delightful lunch break. Please remember to return here in 90 minutes as we look forward to resuming the program promptly.

Agreement Points

Importance of transparency and explainability in AI

Doreen Bogdan Martin

Abdulah Bin Sharaf Alghamdi

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Transparency relates to system design, explainability to outcomes

Saudi Arabia has developed national AI ethics frameworks and initiatives

Complexity of AI models makes them difficult to explain

The speakers agree on the critical importance of transparency and explainability in AI systems, emphasizing the need for clear guidelines and frameworks to ensure responsible AI development and use.

AI’s potential to accelerate progress on Sustainable Development Goals

Doreen Bogdan Martin

Li Junhua

AI can accelerate progress on SDGs by 70%

AI enables real-time data analysis for policymaking

AI can address structural inequalities and aid disaster response

AI models can help with climate prediction and resource mobilization

Both speakers highlight the significant potential of AI in accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly through improved data analysis and decision-making capabilities.

Similar Viewpoints

These speakers emphasize the need for responsible AI development that prioritizes trust, safety, and inclusivity, while also promoting collaboration and clear guidelines.

Abdulah Bin Sharaf Alghamdi

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Gong Ke

Focus on trust, safety, accountability and collaboration

Develop frugal, trustworthy and inclusive AI

China is taking steps to promote responsible AI deployment

Unexpected Consensus

Challenges in AI regulation keeping pace with technological advancements

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Abdulah Bin Sharaf Alghamdi

Regulations struggle to keep pace with rapid AI advancements

Saudi Arabia has developed national AI ethics frameworks and initiatives

Despite coming from different regional perspectives, both speakers recognize the challenge of developing regulations that can keep up with the rapid pace of AI advancements, highlighting a shared concern across different governance approaches.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The speakers generally agree on the importance of transparency, explainability, and responsible development of AI, as well as its potential to accelerate progress on sustainable development goals. There is also consensus on the need for capacity building, particularly in developing regions, and the challenges posed by the rapid advancement of AI technology in relation to regulation and governance.

Consensus level

There is a high level of consensus among the speakers on the main issues discussed. This strong agreement suggests a shared understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by AI across different regions and perspectives, which could facilitate international cooperation in developing governance frameworks and standards for AI. However, the specific approaches to addressing these challenges may vary based on regional contexts and priorities.

Different Viewpoints

Approach to AI regulation

Abdulah Bin Sharaf Alghamdi

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Saudi Arabia has developed national AI ethics frameworks and initiatives

Regulations struggle to keep pace with rapid AI advancements

While Alghamdi emphasizes Saudi Arabia’s proactive approach in developing AI ethics frameworks, Seghrouchni highlights the challenges of regulations keeping up with rapid AI advancements, suggesting different perspectives on the effectiveness of current regulatory approaches.

Unexpected Differences

Focus on data quantity vs. quality

Doreen Bogdan Martin

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

AI can accelerate progress on SDGs by 70%

Develop frugal, trustworthy and inclusive AI

While Bogdan Martin emphasizes the potential of AI to accelerate progress on SDGs, implying the use of extensive data, Seghrouchni unexpectedly argues for a more frugal approach, suggesting that we don’t need huge amounts of data but rather well-calibrated, specific data sets. This difference in perspective on data usage was not explicitly anticipated in the discussion.

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around regulatory approaches, the balance between innovation and governance, and the approach to data usage in AI development.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers is moderate. While there are differing perspectives on specific issues, there is a general consensus on the importance of responsible AI development and the need for transparency and explainability. These differences in approach could lead to varied strategies in AI governance and implementation across different regions, potentially impacting global coordination efforts.

Partial Agreements

Both speakers agree on the need for responsible AI development, but they differ in their approaches. Bogdan Martin emphasizes the importance of standards, while Seghrouchni advocates for frugal, trustworthy, and inclusive AI development.

Doreen Bogdan Martin

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Standards are key for responsible AI development

Develop frugal, trustworthy and inclusive AI

Similar Viewpoints

These speakers emphasize the need for responsible AI development that prioritizes trust, safety, and inclusivity, while also promoting collaboration and clear guidelines.

Abdulah Bin Sharaf Alghamdi

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Gong Ke

Focus on trust, safety, accountability and collaboration

Develop frugal, trustworthy and inclusive AI

China is taking steps to promote responsible AI deployment

Key Takeaways

Transparency and explainability are critical for building public trust in AI systems

Standards and ethical frameworks are essential for responsible AI development

AI has significant potential to accelerate progress on Sustainable Development Goals

Challenges remain in AI implementation, including model complexity, data privacy, and regulatory gaps

Future AI governance should prioritize trust, safety, accountability, and global collaboration

Resolutions and Action Items

Develop more inclusive governance discussions involving all stakeholders

Focus on closing digital and AI gaps, especially in developing regions

Promote capacity building, particularly engineering capacity

Advance technical innovation in privacy-preserving technologies and explainable AI models

Encourage the development of frugal, trustworthy, and inclusive AI systems

Unresolved Issues

How to effectively balance innovation with regulation in rapidly evolving AI landscape

Addressing the global shortage of AI talent and skills

Developing universally agreed definitions for key AI ethics terms

Ensuring AI benefits all of humanity without exacerbating inequalities

Suggested Compromises

Develop flexible, adaptive regulations that can keep pace with AI advancements

Customize AI models and datasets to specific contexts to reduce computational requirements

Balance comprehensive data collection with privacy concerns through targeted, specialized datasets

Transparency, for me, is like to explain, and not to explain, because I will be confused with explainability, but it’s relays on how the system can meet each expectation, how it functions, et cetera. When it comes to explainability, it’s a bit more technical. We have to justify the decision given by the system.

speaker

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

reason

This comment provides a clear distinction between transparency and explainability in AI, which are often conflated. It highlights the nuanced differences in how these concepts apply to AI systems.

impact

This clarification set the tone for more precise discussions about transparency and explainability throughout the rest of the conversation. Other speakers referred back to this distinction in their comments.

We have launched a group as part of the World Standards Cooperation, the WSC, so we’re working with partners like IEC, ISO, IEEE, IETF and others. And we’re focusing in that group on multimedia authentication. We’re looking at deepfakes and we’re looking at misinformation.

speaker

Doreen Bogdan Martin

reason

This comment introduces concrete actions being taken to address pressing issues in AI, specifically around deepfakes and misinformation. It shows how international cooperation is being leveraged to tackle these challenges.

impact

This example of practical collaboration shifted the discussion towards more action-oriented approaches and inspired other speakers to share their own initiatives and partnerships.

In Morocco, for example, we have three languages related to Amazigh, in the north, in the middle of the country, and also in the south. They understand each other, but it’s quite different from one region to another one. So how to apply AI in this context?

speaker

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

reason

This comment brings attention to the challenges of applying AI in multilingual and multicultural contexts, highlighting an often overlooked aspect of AI development and deployment.

impact

This insight broadened the discussion to include cultural and linguistic considerations in AI development, leading to further comments on inclusivity and the need for diverse data sets.

We need to leverage those solutions, whether it’s the visually impaired girl from India, Jayatri, who gained her independence by having access to AI glasses. It was a great story. Mohamedou, who was a winner of our AI innovation factory, he comes from West Africa. He’s been able to take data together with AI, work with farmers, and actually the farmers he has worked with, they’ve seen an increase in their yield by some 200%.

speaker

Doreen Bogdan Martin

reason

This comment provides concrete examples of how AI can positively impact individuals and communities, particularly in developing regions. It illustrates the practical benefits of AI beyond theoretical discussions.

impact

These real-world examples shifted the conversation towards the tangible impacts of AI on sustainable development and inspired further discussion on how AI can be leveraged for social good.

We think that we need huge data to do systems, to make system function. It’s not true. It’s, you know, like when you put all together from Internet, you have a good data, you have bad data, you have false data, you have whatever. You don’t need all this. You need good data, very well calibrated, and this maybe solve problem of climate change, if I go fast, because you have to set your data set as clean as possible.

speaker

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

reason

This comment challenges the common assumption that more data is always better for AI systems. It emphasizes the importance of data quality over quantity, which is a crucial consideration in AI development.

impact

This insight led to further discussion about responsible data practices and the need for focused, high-quality datasets rather than indiscriminate data collection.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by broadening its scope beyond technical aspects to include cultural, linguistic, and ethical considerations in AI development and deployment. They highlighted the importance of international collaboration, the need for practical applications of AI for social good, and the significance of responsible data practices. The discussion evolved from theoretical concepts to more concrete examples and action-oriented approaches, emphasizing the real-world impacts of AI on sustainable development and the importance of inclusivity in AI systems.

Is the Turing test for AI still valid today, or do we need a new version to check whether we have trustworthy AI systems?

speaker

Latifa Al Abdulkarim

explanation

This question addresses the evolving nature of AI and the need to reassess our methods for evaluating AI trustworthiness.

How can we develop metrics for explainability and transparency for each context or application of AI?

speaker

Latifa Al Abdulkarim

explanation

This highlights the need for context-specific measures of AI transparency and explainability.

How can we address the challenge of AI systems behaving unpredictably when deployed in different contexts or languages?

speaker

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

explanation

This question points to the need for research on making AI systems more adaptable and reliable across different cultural and linguistic contexts.

How can we advance AI models from pure data-driven to jointly driven by data and knowledge?

speaker

Gong Ke

explanation

This suggests a need for research into integrating knowledge graphs and decision-making trees into AI models to improve their performance and explainability.

How can we further develop and implement privacy-preserving technologies like differential privacy, federated learning, and homomorphic encryption in AI systems?

speaker

Gong Ke

explanation

This area of research is crucial for balancing transparency with data privacy in AI systems.

How can we develop more frugal, trustworthy, and inclusive AI systems?

speaker

Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

explanation

This research area focuses on creating AI systems that are more efficient, reliable, and accessible to a wider range of users.

How can we better support capacity building for AI in the Global South, especially at local community levels?

speaker

Li Junhua

explanation

This research area is important for ensuring equitable access to AI technologies and benefits across different regions and communities.

How can we close the gaps in compute, data, algorithms, and capacity building in AI?

speaker

Doreen Bogdan Martin

explanation

This research area is crucial for addressing inequalities in AI development and deployment globally.

How can we develop responsible standards for AI that benefit all of humanity?

speaker

Doreen Bogdan Martin

explanation

This research area is important for ensuring that AI development aligns with ethical principles and societal values.

How can we combine digitalization and sustainable development to achieve ‘double increases’ in production quality and efficiency, and ‘double decreases’ in carbon footprint and cost?

speaker

Gong Ke

explanation

This research area focuses on leveraging AI for both economic and environmental sustainability.

Summary

This discussion focused on digital exclusion in the era of AI, particularly in relation to marginalized groups and developing countries. Panelists explored challenges and potential solutions for bridging the digital divide between the Global North and South. Key issues identified included lack of infrastructure, limited internet access, language barriers, and inadequate digital literacy, especially in rural areas.

Speakers emphasized the need for human-centered approaches in AI development, involving local communities in design processes. They stressed the importance of creating content in local languages and investing in education and capacity building programs. Success stories were shared, including youth-led initiatives to improve digital literacy in schools and communities.

The discussion highlighted the lack of AI policies and regulations in many countries, calling for international collaboration to establish universal guidelines. Panelists also addressed the challenge of including both youth and older populations in AI adoption. The potential of AI to support sustainable development goals was discussed, though concerns were raised about the risk of data-poor languages being left behind in AI development.

Participants agreed that multi-stakeholder collaboration, including governments, private sector, and civil society, is crucial for addressing digital exclusion. Key factors identified for ensuring digital inclusion in AI included education, public awareness, capacity building, and human-centered approaches. The discussion underscored the urgency of taking action to prevent further widening of the digital divide as AI technologies advance.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– Digital exclusion and the AI divide between Global North and South

– Challenges of AI accessibility in rural communities and for marginalized groups

– Need for inclusive, human-centered design of AI tools and policies

– Importance of education, capacity building, and digital literacy

– Role of youth and international collaboration in shaping AI policies

Overall purpose:

The goal of this discussion was to explore digital exclusion in relation to emerging technologies, particularly AI, and discuss ways to make AI more inclusive and accessible, especially for underserved communities and the Global South.

Tone:

The tone was largely constructive and solution-oriented. Speakers acknowledged significant challenges but focused on sharing ideas, success stories, and recommendations for improving AI inclusivity. There was a sense of urgency but also optimism about the potential for positive change if the right steps are taken. The tone became more interactive and collaborative when audience members joined the discussion near the end.

Speakers

– Moderator: Facilitator of the discussion

– Maxwell Beganim, African coordinator for Anglophone region for Open Knowledge Foundation Network, former steering committee member for IGF and Youth IGF in Ghana, former executive member of Internet Society Ghana chapter

– Jaewon Son, Doctoral Researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

– Speaker 3: Doctor from Chad

– Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi: Technical expert

– Speaker 4: Maxwell, researcher on AI

Additional speakers:

– Florent: Professor of law at the University of Zurich

– Ram Mohan: From Identity Digital and Critical Infrastructure company

– Mbongi Nimsimangasori: Postdoctoral researcher with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa

Digital Exclusion in the Era of AI: Bridging the Divide

This discussion focused on the critical issue of digital exclusion in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), with particular emphasis on its impact on marginalised groups and developing countries. The panel explored the challenges and potential solutions for bridging the digital divide between the Global North and South, highlighting the complex interplay of technological, social, and policy factors that contribute to this growing disparity.

Key Challenges

The speakers identified several key challenges contributing to digital exclusion:

1. Infrastructure and Access: There is a significant lack of affordable and reliable internet infrastructure in many areas, particularly in rural regions of developing countries. This fundamental gap in connectivity forms the basis of digital exclusion.

2. Language Barriers: The dominance of a few major languages in digital content and AI development poses a significant barrier to inclusion. As noted by the doctor from Chad, explaining concepts like artificial intelligence in local languages can be challenging, highlighting the need for localised content.

3. Digital Literacy: Limited digital literacy, especially in rural areas and among older populations, hinders the adoption and effective use of AI technologies.

4. Policy Gaps: Many countries, particularly in the Global South, lack comprehensive AI policies and regulations, creating uncertainty and potential risks in AI development and deployment. Jawan specifically highlighted the lack of AI regulations in universities.

5. Data Inequality: Ram Mohan emphasized the growing divide between “data-rich” and “data-poor” languages, which could lead to the marginalisation of minority languages in AI development.

Proposed Solutions and Approaches

The discussion yielded several potential solutions and approaches to address these challenges:

1. Inclusive AI Development: There was strong agreement among speakers on the need for inclusive, human-centred approaches in AI development. Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi emphasised the importance of putting humans at the centre of AI design to ensure respect for human rights. This approach involves engaging local communities and end-users in the design process of AI systems.

2. Localisation and Language Development: Speakers stressed the crucial role of creating content in local languages to improve digital literacy and make AI more accessible. This includes developing AI tools and interfaces in indigenous languages. The moderator highlighted the need for multilingualism in AI, citing Tanzania’s linguistic diversity as an example.

3. Education and Capacity Building: Investing in education and digital literacy programmes was seen as essential, particularly in rural areas. Maxwell shared success stories of youth-led initiatives like K-Works for Schools, which have helped bridge digital gaps by providing computer labs, internet access, and digital skills training to students in Zimbabwe.

4. Infrastructure Development: Speakers emphasised the need for technology transfer and infrastructure development from the Global North to the South. Rashad suggested using community networks and low-cost satellite technologies to improve internet access, as well as leveraging public-private partnerships to expand infrastructure.

5. Multi-stakeholder Collaboration: There was consensus on the importance of collaboration between governments, the private sector, and civil society in addressing digital exclusion. This collaborative approach was seen as crucial for developing effective AI policies and governance frameworks.

6. Youth Involvement: The discussion highlighted the importance of including young people in shaping AI policies and tools, recognising their role as both users and future leaders in the field.

7. Promoting Open-Source AI: Rashad suggested promoting open-source AI platforms to increase accessibility and foster innovation.

8. Environmentally Friendly AI: Rashad emphasized the need for AI tools to use less energy and be more environmentally friendly.

Specific AI Initiatives

Several specific AI initiatives were mentioned during the discussion:

1. Drone Tech Project in Chad: A project using drones for medical deliveries in remote areas.

2. AI Translation Tool in Benin: An initiative to develop AI-powered translation for local languages.

3. K-Works for Schools in Zimbabwe: A youth-led project providing computer labs and digital skills training to students.

Areas of Agreement and Disagreement

While there was broad consensus on the importance of addressing digital exclusion, speakers emphasised different primary factors and approaches:

– Jawan focused on the need for technology transfer and universal guidelines for AI use.

– The doctor from Chad stressed the importance of developing local language content for digital literacy and creating safe online spaces for internet users.

– Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi highlighted the lack of affordable infrastructure and the need for human-centred design in AI, as well as the importance of affordable and energy-efficient devices.

– Maxwell emphasised the success of youth-led initiatives in bridging digital gaps.

Unresolved Issues and Future Considerations

Several important questions remained unresolved and warrant further discussion:

1. The balance between waiting for government policy on AI and allowing industry to lead development.

2. Strategies for preserving and developing AI for minority languages with small speaker populations.

3. Ensuring older populations are not left behind in AI adoption.

4. Addressing the growing divide between data-rich and data-poor languages in AI development.

5. Developing Afrocentric AI tools, as suggested by an audience member from Zimbabwe.

6. Investing in public aspects of development, as emphasized by the doctor from Chad.

Conclusion

The discussion underscored the urgency of taking action to prevent further widening of the digital divide as AI technologies advance. It highlighted the need for a multi-pronged approach that addresses infrastructure, education, policy, and inclusive design. By fostering collaboration between diverse stakeholders and prioritising human-centred approaches, there is potential to harness AI as a tool for sustainable development and social inclusion. However, significant challenges remain, particularly in bridging linguistic and cultural divides and ensuring equitable access to AI technologies across different regions and populations.

Speaker 1: My name is Maxwell Biganim and I am in Ghana. I currently serve as the African coordinator for Anglophone region for Open Knowledge Foundation Network. I also used to be a steering committee member for IGF, Youth IGF in Ghana, and also an executive member of the Internet Society Ghana chapter as well. I am very happy to be here this morning. Thank you.

Moderator: Thank you very much everyone. So before we move further to our discussions, can you hear me? I hope you can, okay. Yeah, I can’t hear myself. So before we move further into our discussion, so we all, we have always recently have been in these discussions about emerging technologies. We have all this AI, the computational, all these technologies and all that, but then we have been facing an issue that the marginalized group and let’s say people also from the global south have left out when it comes to all these emerging technologies. So there is that this divide that is currently existing, especially when it comes to women, people with disabilities, but also people who are living in rural areas. So in this session today, we are going to explore this now digital exclusion that is currently existing, especially in relating to all these emerging technologies and specifically AI. So the whole discussion is going to revolve around that. So I’m going to be asking questions to my panelists. I mean, they’re going to be asking, I mean, responding to different questions that I’ll be asking them. So just to start with a discussion. So I want to start with my on-site speakers. Start with you, Jawan. In your opinion, what is the most pressing challenge of digital exclusion in AI era? And how can we address it.

Speaker 2: Thank you for your question. I think due to the AI divide between Global North and South, without any cooperation between Global South and North, it will be further that it’s not only that Global South would not be able to proceed further and also bring more economic divide and so on. So I was thinking that like more policies on technology transfer, for example, where the Global North would bring some of the infrastructure technology and helping them to understand how to use the AI skill so that there will be more workforce where they can utilize such a technology and develop further into economic prosperity will be very beneficial in this case. And also I was thinking that one of the main challenges in these days in AI is that there are no much discussion between people and also technology companies that are making those technology where when there is any agreement about how the data will be used and so on, usually it’s between the companies and country and there are not much discussion about how do we bring all the policies to the different stakeholder and the public. So I think there should be more discussion how do we involve all the multi-stakeholder including the public. Yeah.

Moderator: Thank you so much, Xiaowan. So I want to move to you, doctor. So in 2030, we were expecting like to be there when it comes to the sustainable development goals, right? And so how do you think AI can help achieve the SDGs while addressing digital exclusion, especially for marginalized group?

Speaker 3: I think it’s important to keep being, I mean, optimistic, but from now till 2030, only six years, I mean, left is quite a challenge, I’m saying so. And especially when it comes to reflect realities in the global south, it’s quite impossible to be honest. But we have to work very deeply in education, for instance, to give the possibility to local communities education skills in digitalization, for instance, or even in different sectors. For example, in the sector of economy, creating jobs, employments, but we have also to invest on how they got infrastructure because you see how the north is working to equip, I mean, very importantly, academic institutions and provide the needed, materials to younger generations to be educated, I mean, in the context of the current AI and all these innovations, I mean, aspects. So in countries like Chad, for instance, where I come from, we need to invest more into public aspect of development, for instance, contribute to create awareness, contribute also to regulate the use of digital devices. But also to protect, I mean, internet users, because it’s important to create a safe place where internet users can feel free to get to be educated or to work online or to be consulted by any doctor or any institutions over the world. It’s important, I mean, to create the same space when it comes to access. how do you get to be educated. All right, so I wanna pick up from the same point that you just said, you talk about employment. And so now I wanna understand, now we have all these rural communities, what do you think are the key challenges? Let’s say taking example of Chad, what do you think are the key examples? I mean, are key challenges in ensuring that the AI tools reach even the rural communities that in Chad? Like, what do you think are the existing challenges? I have the honor to discuss with Honorable Emma Tsoefel, for instance, the ICT Minister of Namibia, who is here. I am very happy to meet her back again. We discussed about this issue several times and it is a challenge because this one, I mean, concern more our local long years because we have communities that only speak the local languages while internationally we use devices or technology into other languages internationally recognize it. So first of all, we need to create in term of digital literacy content using our local languages for, I mean, to allow or to help communities to understand what the message is. For instance, I cannot explain to someone from my community what artificial intelligence means. It could be very difficult to get a word that I can use it to explain what even technology means. But these people, despite the lack of education, they have today a smartphone, tablet, they use WhatsApp, they use Facebook, for instance, they get to be online without knowing anything. So it’s important to develop our. local languages and via this we can create content that our languages are in the top of the program and create capacity building program for instance even to those who have never been to school, the seniors, I mean people of the third age and younger generation, this one is the most important things because our governments and private sectors have to invest more into education by providing I mean the materials needed, equip them and then promote a very sustainable capacity building program even to lecturers and students who are in research program because even these people are disconnected today from the reality. So how can we imagine it will be possible to teach those people who have never been to school if we have not access to information, education as a high level priority?

Moderator: Wow, thank you so much. I think I can really relate to that. I like the point about multilingualism in AI. I come from Tanzania for the record and in my country we have almost 121 tribes and each tribe have their own languages and our national language is Swahili for example. Among all those 121 we still have people who don’t even know the national language so they don’t speak Swahili. So at some point if we would say someday we come with an AI tools that are in Swahili for example they wouldn’t understand because they don’t even speak Swahili so we have been having challenges of making like reaching the rural communities having access to all this digital knowledge, this AI knowledge and all that. So I think there’s really a big work that we have to do for countries like mine. I want to come to you, Rashad. So you have been having technical experience and all that. So I want you to talk about how can we ensure AI and other technologies can be designed well to ensure that there is inclusivity and accessibility, especially for undeserved communities.

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi: Okay. Thank you so much, Miriam, for the question. I also like the point of making it inclusive because in Africa, we face a lot of issues when it comes to technology, and we need to have access to Internet, and many people don’t have access to Internet. Like when we are talking about also access, we have the lack of affordable and reliable Internet infrastructure. So in my country in Benin, many people don’t have access to Internet. Even those who have access to Internet, they just use it for social media. So to address that, maybe we can set some community network or maybe some low-cost satellite technologies that can help everybody to have access to Internet. So we need a lot of collaboration to fix that. So to come to your question now about how we can make AI more inclusive and accessible for everyone, firstly, we need to have access to Internet, so access to the technology. It’s why I was talking about making more infrastructure so that everybody can access to Internet. So to ensure that inclusivity and accessibility really fit in our life today, AI and emerging technologies. we need to design them with a human-centered approach, like we need to put the human at the middle so that this technology can respect human rights. This means that we need to involve local communities and also users to design the system so that they can know how it works, and they can also make contribution to design the application and also the technologies as well. I can take one example. If we want to design an AI tool, we can support like use AI to translate our local language. We need to take in account the diversity of African culture and also the socioeconomic challenge. We are talking about Tanzania. We have a lot of tribe, same in Benin, same in Chad. We need to take those in consideration when we are designing some AI tool as well. Another aspect is more about how we can make AI to use less energy so that it can be more green. When we are talking about AI, sometimes it’s about a lot of algorithm and also a lot of energy use. Tool like AI model need to be optimized for mobile device so that we can respect the environment and those AI tool will be green as well. Also, another thing we can do is to promote open-source AI platform so that everybody can have access to this platform, and know how it works, and also can contribute. By doing that, communities, especially youth, innovators, and startups can co-develop. or develop a cost-effective solution for specific issues we are facing in Africa and other parts of the world as well. So that will be my contribution. Thank you. Thank you.

Moderator: Thank you so much, Rashad. I really liked the point when you talked about the human-centred approach when we are developing all these AI systems, because assuming, if you assume the needs of someone without clearly understanding the needs that they really have, and then you develop solutions for them, it may not meet their needs, because you have created something that may not be useful for them. So it’s really important that we engage all these communities. Now we have talked about all these marginalised groups. Have them in the room, understand their needs, like, what do you want? How can we assist to ensure that you guys are not left behind in all these discussions and all that? So we have talked about all these challenges. Now I want to, for you, Maxwell, now I want you to talk about the success stories. Can you share success stories where youth-led initiatives have bridged digital gaps and improved inclusion?

Speaker 4: All right, thank you very much. I think this is, I’ll just share my own success stories on some of the projects that I have led in that. And thank you to the wonderful three speakers that I’ve spoken. And I think I’m also so much educated right now. Yeah, so when it comes to the success stories, I think it’s first important for us to understand the problems that exist, which is the digital divide in many, most of the communities that I have had the opportunity to work with. Firstly, there’s this project that I started with a colleague, and it is called K-Weeks for Schools. And I realized that most of the senior high schools in Ghana, for example, had computers. and their computers were not functional. And those that were also functional were just left abandoned. There were no softwares, there were no applications that students could engage. And so we came up with this project called K-Works for Schools, where first we go into the institutions and then we train teachers to understand the concept of digital literacy. We take them through just about an hour of digital literacy, how they can understand it, how they can also look at all the parameters of digital literacy. And as teachers, don’t forget that they are custodians of knowledge. And so once the teachers appreciate digital literacy, it becomes easy to transfer in their classroom. So then after we then decided to do the installation of K-Works. K-Works is actually an offline educational resource that enables students to have access to contents like Wikipedia, TED, and all of that. So we also took an advantage of also training the students. So because the students were very many, we decided to sample the class reps so that they will also serve as ambassadors or digital ambassadors to their other colleagues. And we train them on how to use the digital literacy, the K-Works, and also had digital citizenship masterclass for them. Now we realized that based on just one that we started, a lot of schools started reaching out to myself and my colleague to expand this project. So we decided to do it in addition for other senior high schools. And it was gaining the traction and I’ll share some materials later. Then we decided that no, the senior high schools cannot always only be the ones that benefit. And we decided to take it back to the basic schools where we train them on digital literacy. Some of the schools that we actually went, they didn’t even have computers, but we also understand. that once people have the understanding, it shifts their mind in thinking along that tangent. So that was also very important and a very good success stories. As I tell you, K-Wigs has moved from Ghana to African region and now we are even training ambassadors in various countries to also do some of this project as well. So that is just one of the projects that we did in bridging the digital gap as well. And also there is also a project called The Life Project that we worked on with Paradigm Initiative. And that was to also target atypical people, people that ordinarily do not have access to digital literacy or digital skills where we’re able to mobilize people who have left school, people who are no more in school to train them to have some of these skills. And I think it was very, very, very successful project because now some of them are into graphic design and some of them are into a lot of areas when it comes to digital device. So because of time, these are the two fundamental or the two key success stories that I want to share with us all in terms of bridging the digital divide.

Moderator: Wow, thank you so much. Congratulations for the great work that you’re doing. Now, I wanna open this few minutes to the floor. If you have, can you please share if you have in your specific countries, if you have policies that are helping regulate AIs in your AI in your countries, is there something like that that anyone on the floor that would like to share? Anyone from the floor sharing from your respective countries, any policies that ensure that there’s equitable access in AI, or maybe we can start, do you even have any policies that you would like to share? Okay, thank you so much for the great work that you’re doing. I’m gonna open it up to the floor. have policies for AI in your countries? No. Okay. So there is a great work we need to do. So maybe I can come back to you, Jawan, now. Now we have seen here, let’s say from the floor, my country, we don’t, they don’t. So how can we ensure like international collaboration and help in ensuring that we have proper regulations of like AI in our respective countries and all that. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah. In my university in Germany, even like, while it’s the first university that actually had the email server in Germany, however, they also doesn’t have any regulations about what is acceptable to use AI or not. For example, in research or your studies or tests. So I always thought like, why? Like, we are always talking about like, we should have all the adopter in AI. We should like make them aware of it as so on. But what are the, I don’t know, the universities and like international organizations doing for them to know what is right and wrong? I think in this case, the international cooperation or I would say the international alliance comes in hand where there should be a universal guideline and regulations about how the people are knowing like what’s okay and not to use AI, for example. For example, I think yesterday in the youth session, they were talking about AI and education. So that while we talk about marginalized people who doesn’t know how to use AI, however, are we ready for them to actually use AI in universities or in companies where like just providing the AI is. not the end of everything. However, I think it begins with all the problem about the privacy and everything where we do not have actual like internet governance ready for them to include everyone in the end user having a right to say about how they use the data or not. So I think in that case, international cooperation should really focus on first thinking of how do we integrate all the end user and stakeholders in this governance. And second of all, having the proper regulations have a universal guideline about how we deal with such a problem.

Moderator: Great. Thank you so much. I’m coming back to you, doctor. You’ve done some research on AI, right? I want you to help me share examples where AI was successfully implemented to solve this, the digital exclusion. Is there any instance maybe you can help us share?

Speaker 3: Well, very largely when it comes to achieve this, for instance, using or benefiting from the use of AI, for instance, in Chad, we have drone tech, which is an initiative that provides support to rural communities when it comes to, I mean, assist them in social, I mean, how do you call, issue, for instance, or when there is a social crisis, for instance, we we intervene to bring, I mean, resources or materials, I mean, to help the community. So for instance, during the crisis between Sudan and, yeah, in Sudan, for instance, we have refugees that were in the border of Chad. and we’re seeking for help. So we use it, I mean, those drones to bring, I mean, support today to the refugees, but also in terms of education, we have initiatives that help, I mean, children to understand better alphabet and vocabulary or even talk to people, for instance, in different languages using these tools. So it’s important to invest in this issue because we have so many challenges to address. And for that, we need a multi-stakeholder collaboration because none of the stakeholder alone can act and, I mean, address these challenges only if we contribute together as one in a strong multi-stakeholder, I mean, body. So I call the, or even urge, I mean, the UN and its partner and our governments, I mean, to take this one into serious, I mean, engagement, especially in countries of the South. It is essential, I mean, to align ourselves with today’s realities when it comes to also tackle the modernization challenges, we are a little bit far and we only solve this with digital inclusion, for instance, and digitalization of the society because I’m seeing the worry in 10, 20 years, perhaps we’ll be having perhaps AI tools that will be able to give 100 or let’s say 95% of consultation, let’s say medical consultation and even provide like a prescription while in countries of the South, developing countries. If you explain this to someone. it could be very strained. So we need to work a little bit hard to align ourselves with the realities in advance.

Moderator: Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Dr. Rashad. Now we have talked about all these challenges. We have seen we don’t have proper regulations when it comes to AI within our specific countries now. But we have also seen the divide that is currently existing between the rural communities and the urban communities. So what steps do you think we can take to ensure that we are bridging the digital divide between the rural and the urban

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi: areas? Okay, thank you for the question. I think we have a lot to do. We have many issues when it comes to inclusivity. And from a technical perspective, I think we can maybe first explain the infrastructure because we need to have infrastructure first so that we can have access to the internet and those technologies. So to do that, maybe we can also do community work. You know, in Africa, many countries do not have access to 5G yet. So we can also, by expanding the infrastructure, working on 5G technology or develop some satellite-based internet. You know, Starlink is growing in Africa and it’s sometimes more affordable for some people in a remote area. So we can leverage on public-private partnership to do that as well. After expanding our infrastructure, we can also promote energy access. Like, you know, in some rural communities we don’t have available electricity and when we talk about Internet and connectivity, it’s more about access to electricity. If you don’t have electricity, you cannot have Internet. So it’s really crucial to have access to energy so that we can promote digital inclusion and using also renewable energy like solar and wind to do that. Another way it may be to have affordable device and solution because the issues of money is also crucial. So we need affordable device so that people can buy this device and those device also can, should be energy efficient device so that it will not use a lot of energy. And we can also do a lot of local content like localize the content and service. Like, you know, we have issues about language barrier. So the solution should be more localized and we can develop a lot of content when it comes to our local language on those technology as well. And we can also leverage on our communities to do that. Like, if you want to do the solution, we need to do it with our community so that we can empower the local youth and also encourage the entrepreneur to do a lot. I see in the room we have many entrepreneur here. So it’s really important as an entrepreneur to build the solution that we really need to our communities with them. Thank you.

Moderator: Thanks so much Rashad. And since we are out of time, our time is almost over now, I want to go last to you, Maxwell. So what do you think? What role do you think young people can play in shaping AI policies and tools to ensure that they address the needs of diverse populations?

Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think that this is a very important question. I think first, we need to be very inclusive or in the design approach of all these policies around AI should be very inclusive, where young people do not only participate, but are involved in crafting some of these policies as well. And I think that for young people to be able to also be included when it comes to capacity building and capacity enhancement, how to even understand and leverage on the languages of AI as well, you don’t necessarily need to be a programmer or a deep developer or hardcore developer to be able to understand the parameters within which the artificial intelligence or AI works. And you would agree, or we would all agree that AI has come to stay. And so in order for young people not to be, maybe I’ll use this term as AI immigrants, they should be able to understand the parameters, it should be also included in mainstream education for young people to understand. When we talk about AI, then young people cannot think critically around some of the use of AI as well. So I think the inclusive approach is very important in crafting and shaping this in order to allow young people to be involved. And even at the high level discourse or at the high level, plenaries and conversations around this, we need to also get the input of young people in shaping the policies as well. Yeah, so these are the thoughts that come in mind. And also there should be programs that would be structured in a way to also make sure that the capacity of young people are built to understand AI.

Moderator: Thank you, Dr. Maxwell. So now we have hard panelists. I wanna open the floor again to my participants. Is there anything, any question that you have to the speakers, any contributions, something that you want to add from this ongoing discussion? Yes, please.

Audience: You mentioned a lot about young people, but I’m wondering as opposed to the young population, what can we do to the elder to make sure that they have equal access to AI or internet? Because a lot of older people nowadays, they have ingrained ideology opposing AI, and they also due to their physical or cognitive issues, they have trouble getting access to the internet. And some of them are also lacking enough money. So how do you think we can address that issue? Who wants to respond?

Speaker 3: Thank you for the question. Well, for those who are professional, I think it would be a little bit easy to support the process, because we can just, I mean, call companies to have like a capacity enhancement program. to these professionals, any time there is a certification or any programs comes out, we can organize such capacity enhancement program to reinforce their capacities in certain subject. But for those who are unprofessional or never work or don’t have a quality education, we can work on digital literacy by creating, as we say, content using local languages to help them understand the use of these tools or, I mean, digital devices or whatever in program that can help them, I mean, in their age, in case. Yeah, so that’s why it’s important to keep working very hard to initiate a program that support younger generation to be very well-educated and then align itself with our today’s realities or the 21st and mid-century realities in general.

Moderator: Anyone who wants to add? Okay, so I think, but I think something that I wanted to add on, I think it’s really important to understand. I’ll say, let’s say from my country per se, we can’t go directly and start introducing AI because there’s still a very large group of people that are not digitally literate. So we have people that can’t even turn on computers. They can’t even do a simple Google search and stuff. So I think at some point to help, let’s say, with the elders in that kind of a situation, we might need to start with the basics. So we can’t go to AI if they don’t even get the basics of computers. They need to understand this, the basic stuff, and then moving forward, that will at least be easier. I guess. Yeah. Any other questions from the floor? Any contribution? Yes.

Audience: So thank you very much for these interesting contributions. My name is Florent. I’m a professor of law at the University of Zurich. So I come from a very privileged country, but I think it might be interesting also for you to know that we also have minority languages. We have a language in Switzerland which is spoken by less than 20,000 people. It’s even split up in different dialects. They have difficulties understanding each other. So developing AI tools for these language groups is a huge challenge, just because there’s a lack of data and lack of users as well. But maybe given that there are some developed countries that face similar problems, there is a chance to cooperate amongst continents on these, I think, very important issue. Great, insightful contribution. Yeah. Thank you. My name is Ram Mohan, and I’m with a company called Identity Digital and Critical Infrastructure. One of the things that I’ve been quite concerned about with AI and digital inclusion, especially in the area of languages, as the prior intervention was, I think we are now in an era of data poor and data rich languages. And I think if you look forward in the next five to 10 years, AI systems which train on language sets are going to train disproportionately on data rich languages. They’re going to lead data poor languages to the side. And I think if we don’t take action now, we’re going to start having a risk that the data-poor languages will disappear from the digital infrastructure and the people who speak and use those languages are also going to go away. So I’m quite concerned about that. I wonder if you have a perspective on it. Alice, do you have any contribution on that? It’s not a contribution, but perhaps I can add a little bit more to this question and ask our professor from Switzerland because when I was in Lyon during my PhD program, I used to go to Geneva where I’m more connected with certain programs. So do you think, professor, that AI use or let’s say digitalization can be an opportunity to develop minorities, I mean languages, I mean the less spoken, I mean let’s say languages, because if we work on that, we have no choice only to create programs that will develop these languages, add more vocabularies, create programs that is very limited this vocabulary in this language. So how do you think we can work on that?

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi: Thank you very much. Tough question. I’m not sure I do have any ideas how to work on that, but I fully agree that I think it’s important groups into this technology. Yes, okay. Because even right now there are risks to be left behind and there’s simply a danger of just these languages getting extinct because maybe as opposed to some in some of the African countries speak German or Italian on top, so they are able to communicate in other languages, which raises of the language getting extinct. To use that language into these technologies might be a means to promote it and give people chances to communicate technologies. So I think it’s super important, but no solution so far, I’m sorry.

Moderator: Okay, and contribution, yes, at the back. Can you please pass the mic at the back? Over there. Thank you for an interesting presentation, I must say. I think one of the aspects really is that I resonate with what you’re all saying.

Audience: My name is Mbongi Nimsimangasori. I’m a postdoctoral researcher with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. So one of the issues is I originally come from Zimbabwe and one of the issues especially that we face in our country is that these, I don’t know if I may say policy contradiction, right? So the question is, should we wait for government to actually introduce policy or should we let the industry to lead, right? I must say that especially within the media sector who already have AI robots, right? And particularly from an institute called the CITE, it’s called the Center for Technology Innovation, right? It’s mainly a new site, right? They’re already developing an LLM for one of the main languages in Zimbabwe which is Isindere language, right? So that’s one of the critical aspects should we actually wait for government because government is actually delaying and for them to pass these policies, to pass these laws takes so much time, right? So, we have these institutes actually developing these specific, going ahead with AI policy and all. So, in Zimbabwe as well, if I may say that one of the resolutions in terms of consultations with the Internews and the Media Institute for Southern Africa was to sort of develop an Afrocentric, you know, AI tools, right? So, it’s one of the critical aspects that perhaps we can take a lead from as well, right? But I must say that we’re still far from actually developing policy, you know, considering the slow pace at which everything is actually going. But this site, as I mentioned, has really taken a very critical role in actually developing this LLM within, and including actually minority languages, especially within that. We had an uproar recently as well where that particular robot that could not even pronounce its Independent names or African names, and a lot of people are actually complaining around that, right? So, I think coming up with this LLM would really probably assist in that as well. So, that’s my main contribution and very interesting work that everyone is actually doing here in AI as well.

Moderator: Thank you very much, everyone, for the contribution. This is really an amazing discussion that’s going on here, and we have less than five minutes. So, allow me to please close the session, and I would like to tell my speakers to please tell me if you are to describe in a single word what would be the critical factor that would help in ensuring a digital inclusion in AI? Like in one word, what would be a factor that you think this is very critical for us to achieve digital inclusion in AI? Yes. Okay. Thank you. education? Chair Wong? Public awareness. My online speakers. Capacity. Capacity. Human-based approach. Human-based approach. Human-based approach. Human-based approach. Human-based approach. Human-based approach. Human-based approach. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much for attending and joining us this session today, and we’re looking forward to seeing you in other sessions. Thank you. Thank you to the panelists, too.

Agreement Points

Need for inclusive AI development

Speaker 2

Speaker 3

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

Speaker 4

Need for technology transfer and infrastructure from Global North to South

Importance of developing local language content for digital literacy

Need for human-centered approach in AI design

Including young people in shaping AI policies and tools

The speakers agree on the importance of inclusive AI development, emphasizing technology transfer, local language content, human-centered design, and youth involvement.

Addressing infrastructure and access challenges

Speaker 2

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

Need for technology transfer and infrastructure from Global North to South

Lack of affordable and reliable internet infrastructure in many areas

Expanding infrastructure and promoting energy access

The speakers agree on the need to address infrastructure and access challenges to bridge the digital divide and promote AI inclusion.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasize the importance of creating content and services in local languages to make digital technologies more accessible and relevant to local communities.

Speaker 3

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

Importance of developing local language content for digital literacy

Developing localized content and services

Both speakers advocate for inclusive policy-making processes in AI, emphasizing the need for universal guidelines and youth involvement in shaping AI policies.

Speaker 2

Speaker 4

Need for universal guidelines on acceptable AI use

Including young people in shaping AI policies and tools

Unexpected Consensus

Potential of AI to preserve minority languages

Audience

Speaker 3

Potential for AI to help preserve and develop minority languages

Importance of developing local language content for digital literacy

There was an unexpected consensus between an audience member and Speaker 3 on the potential of AI to help preserve and develop minority languages, despite the challenges posed by data scarcity for these languages.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement include the need for inclusive AI development, addressing infrastructure and access challenges, developing localized content, and involving diverse stakeholders in AI policy-making.

Consensus level

There is a moderate level of consensus among the speakers on the key challenges and potential solutions for digital inclusion in AI. This consensus suggests a shared understanding of the complexities involved in bridging the digital divide and the need for multi-faceted approaches to address these issues. However, there are still variations in the specific solutions proposed, indicating the need for further dialogue and collaboration to develop comprehensive strategies for AI inclusion.

Different Viewpoints

Approach to addressing digital exclusion

Speaker 2

Speaker 3

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

Need for technology transfer and infrastructure from Global North to South

Importance of developing local language content for digital literacy

Lack of affordable and reliable internet infrastructure in many areas

Speakers emphasized different primary factors for addressing digital exclusion: technology transfer, local language content development, and infrastructure improvement.

Unexpected Differences

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement centered around prioritizing different approaches to address digital exclusion and AI governance.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among speakers was relatively low. Most speakers presented complementary rather than conflicting viewpoints, focusing on different aspects of the same overarching issues. This suggests a multifaceted approach may be necessary to address digital exclusion and ensure inclusive AI development.

Partial Agreements

All speakers agreed on the need for inclusive AI governance, but emphasized different aspects: universal guidelines, multi-stakeholder collaboration, human-centered design, and youth involvement.

Speaker 2

Speaker 3

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

Speaker 4

Need for universal guidelines on acceptable AI use

Importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration on AI governance

Need for human-centered approach in AI design

Including young people in shaping AI policies and tools

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasize the importance of creating content and services in local languages to make digital technologies more accessible and relevant to local communities.

Speaker 3

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

Importance of developing local language content for digital literacy

Developing localized content and services

Both speakers advocate for inclusive policy-making processes in AI, emphasizing the need for universal guidelines and youth involvement in shaping AI policies.

Speaker 2

Speaker 4

Need for universal guidelines on acceptable AI use

Including young people in shaping AI policies and tools

Key Takeaways

There is a significant digital divide and AI divide between the Global North and South that needs to be addressed

Lack of infrastructure, affordable internet access, and digital literacy are major barriers to AI inclusion in developing countries

Developing AI tools and content in local languages is crucial for digital inclusion

A human-centered, inclusive approach is needed in AI development to ensure it meets the needs of diverse populations

Youth and local communities should be involved in shaping AI policies and tools

There is a lack of AI regulations and policies in many countries, especially in the Global South

Resolutions and Action Items

Promote technology transfer and infrastructure development from Global North to South

Develop more localized AI content and tools in indigenous languages

Implement digital literacy programs, especially in rural areas

Include youth and marginalized groups in AI policy development

Expand internet infrastructure and promote affordable access

Create universal guidelines for acceptable AI use

Unresolved Issues

How to effectively regulate AI across different countries and contexts

How to preserve and develop AI for minority languages with small speaker populations

How to ensure older populations are not left behind in AI adoption

Whether to wait for government policy on AI or let industry take the lead

How to address the growing divide between data-rich and data-poor languages in AI development

Suggested Compromises

Balancing rapid AI development with careful consideration of inclusivity and ethics

Collaborating across developed and developing countries to address shared challenges like minority language preservation

Starting with basic digital literacy before introducing advanced AI concepts in some communities

We need to create in term of digital literacy content using our local languages for, I mean, to allow or to help communities to understand what the message is. For instance, I cannot explain to someone from my community what artificial intelligence means.

speaker

Speaker 3

reason

This highlights the critical challenge of language barriers in AI adoption, especially in diverse linguistic regions. It emphasizes the need for localized content to make AI accessible.

impact

This comment shifted the discussion towards the importance of multilingualism in AI development and sparked further conversation about language diversity challenges in different countries.

To ensure that inclusivity and accessibility really fit in our life today, AI and emerging technologies, we need to design them with a human-centered approach, like we need to put the human at the middle so that this technology can respect human rights.

speaker

Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

reason

This comment emphasizes the critical importance of human-centric design in AI development, ensuring technology serves human needs and respects rights.

impact

It refocused the discussion on ethical considerations in AI development and the need to involve local communities in the design process.

I think we are now in an era of data poor and data rich languages. And I think if you look forward in the next five to 10 years, AI systems which train on language sets are going to train disproportionately on data rich languages. They’re going to lead data poor languages to the side.

speaker

Ram Mohan

reason

This comment introduces a crucial perspective on the long-term implications of AI development on language diversity and preservation.

impact

It deepened the conversation by highlighting a potential future challenge in AI and language, prompting further discussion on how to address this issue.

Should we wait for government to actually introduce policy or should we let the industry to lead, right?

speaker

Mbongi Nimsimangasori

reason

This question raises an important point about the balance between government regulation and industry innovation in AI development.

impact

It introduced a new dimension to the discussion about policy development and implementation, highlighting the tension between waiting for government action and allowing industry to lead innovation.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by highlighting critical challenges in AI adoption and development, particularly in diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. They broadened the conversation from technical aspects to include ethical considerations, policy challenges, and long-term implications for language and cultural preservation. The discussion evolved from identifying problems to exploring potential solutions and considering the roles of different stakeholders in addressing these challenges.

How can we develop AI tools and content in local languages to improve digital literacy and inclusion?

speaker

Speaker 3 (Dr. from Chad)

explanation

This is crucial for ensuring AI technologies are accessible and useful to diverse populations, especially in rural areas and developing countries.

What policies and regulations are needed to govern AI use and development across different countries?

speaker

Moderator and Speaker 2 (Jawan)

explanation

There is a lack of clear policies in many countries, highlighting the need for international collaboration on AI governance.

How can we ensure multi-stakeholder collaboration, including local communities and end-users, in AI development and governance?

speaker

Speaker 2 (Jawan) and Bendjedid Rachad Sanoussi

explanation

This is important for creating AI systems that truly meet the needs of diverse populations and respect human rights.

What strategies can be employed to bridge the digital divide between rural and urban areas?

speaker

Moderator

explanation

This is critical for ensuring equitable access to AI and digital technologies across different geographic regions.

How can we address the needs of older populations in accessing and using AI and digital technologies?

speaker

Audience member

explanation

This highlights the importance of considering all age groups in digital inclusion efforts, not just youth.

How can we prevent the disappearance of data-poor languages from digital infrastructure as AI systems advance?

speaker

Audience member (Ram Mohan)

explanation

This is crucial for preserving linguistic diversity and ensuring AI doesn’t exacerbate existing language inequalities.

Should we wait for government policies or allow industry to lead in AI development and implementation?

speaker

Audience member (Mbongi Nimsimangasori)

explanation

This highlights the tension between policy development and technological progress, particularly in countries where government action may be slow.

Summary

This discussion focused on implementing the Global Digital Compact (GDC) and its impact at the country level. Panelists from various UN agencies, governments, and civil society organizations shared insights on priorities and challenges in digital cooperation.

Key themes included bridging digital divides, fostering partnerships, building local capacity, and aligning the GDC with existing frameworks like WSIS. Panelists emphasized the need for inclusive approaches that reach marginalized communities and rural areas. The importance of multi-stakeholder collaboration was highlighted, with calls to involve local organizations, academic networks, and the private sector in implementation efforts.

Several speakers noted the GDC builds on WSIS principles while addressing emerging issues like AI governance and misinformation. There were suggestions to better integrate GDC implementation with WSIS processes to avoid overburdening countries. The discussion touched on opportunities to leverage new technologies for expanding access to digital services and content in diverse languages.

Participants stressed the need to measure impact through concrete results aligned with GDC objectives. Ideas included tracking progress on connectivity, digital literacy, and economic development. The role of forums like the IGF in fostering dialogue on emerging issues was noted. Overall, the discussion underscored the importance of translating global frameworks into local action to achieve meaningful digital transformation that leaves no one behind.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– Implementing the Global Digital Compact (GDC) at the country and local level

– Connecting the GDC to existing processes like WSIS and the SDGs

– Addressing digital divides and ensuring inclusive digital transformation

– The importance of partnerships and multi-stakeholder approaches

– Building digital capacity and skills, especially in developing countries

The overall purpose of the discussion was to explore how to turn the high-level principles of the Global Digital Compact into concrete action and impact at the country level. Panelists and audience members discussed priorities, challenges, and opportunities for implementing the GDC.

The tone of the discussion was generally constructive and collaborative, with panelists highlighting ongoing efforts and opportunities for partnership. Towards the end, some audience members injected a sense of urgency and pushed for more concrete actions and integration of existing initiatives rather than creating new processes. Overall, there was a shared commitment to advancing digital cooperation but differing views on the best approaches.

Speakers

– Yu Ping Chan: Head of Partnerships and Engagement at UNDP

– Robert Opp: Chief Digital Officer of UNDP

– Margarita Gomez: Executive Director of Southern Voice

– Cynthia Lesufi: Minister-Counsel of the South African Mission to the United Nations in Geneva and other international organizations

– Olaf Kolkman: Principal of Internet Technology Policy and Advocacy from the Internet Society

– Deniz Susar: Representing Mr. Juwang Su, Director of Division for Public Institutions at DESA

– Gitanjali Sah: Strategy and Policy Coordinator of the International Telecommunications Union

Additional speakers:

– Anriette Esterhuysen: From the Alliance for Progressive Communications

– Isabel De Sola: From the Office of the Tech Envoy

– Alex Mora: Researcher from Cal State University working on research and education support

Revised Summary: Implementing the Global Digital Compact at the Country Level

This discussion focused on the implementation of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) and its impact at the country level. Panelists from various UN agencies, governments, and civil society organizations shared insights on priorities and challenges in digital cooperation. The conversation covered several key themes and highlighted both areas of agreement and differing perspectives on implementation strategies.

Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. Aligning the GDC with Existing Processes

Robert Opp of UNDP noted that GDC objectives align with existing UN agency work. Cynthia Lesufi from the South African Mission to the UN emphasized that the GDC reinforces WSIS principles while addressing modern challenges like AI governance and misinformation. Anriette Esterhuysen from the Alliance for Progressive Communications argued for merging GDC implementation with existing WSIS processes to avoid overburdening countries.

Dennis Susar from DESA highlighted the importance of the WSIS Plus 20 review process and its connection to the GDC. He also mentioned the role of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in relation to the GDC, suggesting it could serve as a platform for ongoing discussions and implementation efforts.

2. Local Implementation and Multi-stakeholder Partnerships

Olaf Kolkman from the Internet Society emphasized the importance of local action, stating, “Think global with the GDC, but really the action has to be local.” This focus on grassroots implementation was echoed by several speakers, including Gitanjali Sah from the ITU, who stressed the role of community radio and highlighted the historical context of digital development work.

The discussion underscored the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships. Cynthia Lesufi emphasized the significance of public-private partnerships for digital initiatives. Olaf Kolkman explained that the Internet Society works through local chapters and partnerships. An audience member raised the need to involve local NGOs working at the grassroots level.

3. Addressing Digital Divides

A major point of agreement was the critical importance of closing digital divides. Yu Ping Chan from UNDP emphasized the need to address all aspects of digital divides, including infrastructure and capacity. An audience member named Nenna expanded the conversation by pointing out the multifaceted nature of digital divides, including policy, gender, rural-urban, and age divides.

Several speakers noted the importance of reaching marginalized communities. An audience member specifically mentioned the need to connect pastoralist communities, while Alex Mora, a researcher from Cal State University, suggested leveraging research and education networks to connect schools in underserved areas.

4. Capacity Building and Skills Development

Capacity building and skills development emerged as a key priority. Robert Opp noted that this was a primary request from countries, with a particular focus on building AI ecosystems and capacity. Deniz Susar, representing DESA, mentioned that the GDC commits to prioritizing digital competencies for public officials.

5. Specific Digital Initiatives and Challenges

The discussion included mentions of specific digital initiatives, such as UNDP’s work in Kenya and Bangladesh. Isabel De Sola from the Office of the Tech Envoy raised the importance of data governance and content diversity, suggesting potential partnerships focused on translation and diverse content creation.

6. Technical Difficulties and Audience Participation

The session experienced recurring technical difficulties, which impacted the flow of the discussion. Despite these challenges, there was active audience participation through the Slido platform. Questions from the audience covered topics such as strategies for reaching marginalized communities, the role of research and education networks, and methods for ensuring meaningful participation in digital transformation efforts.

Areas of Agreement and Unresolved Issues

There was strong agreement on the importance of closing digital divides, the need for capacity building, and the value of multi-stakeholder partnerships. Speakers also generally agreed on the importance of building on existing processes and focusing on marginalized communities.

Unresolved issues included how to effectively merge GDC implementation with existing WSIS processes without creating additional bureaucratic burdens, specific strategies for addressing intersectional digital divides beyond infrastructure, and methods for ensuring meaningful participation of marginalized communities in digital transformation efforts.

Key Takeaways and Action Items

1. The GDC aligns with and builds upon existing WSIS processes and UN agency work.

2. Implementation needs to focus on local and grassroots efforts, involving multi-stakeholder partnerships.

3. Addressing digital divides requires a holistic and intersectional approach.

4. Capacity building and skills development, especially in emerging technologies like AI, are crucial for digital transformation.

5. There is a need to leverage existing networks and initiatives, particularly in research and education, to advance digital cooperation.

Suggested action items included integrating GDC follow-up with the WSIS Plus 20 review process, developing KPIs to measure success in GDC implementation at the country level, increasing efforts to involve local NGOs in digital initiatives, expanding digital readiness assessments to local and rural areas, and strengthening collaboration between UN agencies on digital cooperation efforts.

Conclusion

The discussion highlighted the complex challenge of implementing a global framework like the GDC at the local level. While there was broad agreement on the importance of digital cooperation and development, the conversation revealed the need for careful consideration of local contexts, existing processes, and the multifaceted nature of digital divides. Moving forward, balancing global objectives with local needs and leveraging existing networks and partnerships will be crucial for successful implementation of the Global Digital Compact.

Yu Ping Chan: All right, we’re trying this one more time, and this is your last chance to vote on the first question. Which GDC objective is most important for your work on global digital cooperation? You scan the QR code and you vote right now. And right now, it looks like we have basically a two-way tie between objective one, which is close all digital divides, and number six, which is everything in the GDC. Okay. And then all answers are locked. Let’s go to the next question. In one, two words, what is the most important action that must be taken in the first year of the global digital compact to ensure meaningful action at the country level? And I know everybody likes to give long UN paragraphs, but here we’re really asking for one, two words so we can show them on the screen. Scan the QR code and give us one, two words. Participants, panelists as well, I think you’re required to take part. I especially like the stop talking suggestion. I think that has to be followed by stop talking and take action. I confess, that was me. Nice. All right. A couple more moments for anybody else. Shows online as well. And that’s interesting. So we see a number of suggestions on the screen. Benefit sharing, ensure alignments, strategies, strong partnerships. But capacity building seems to be the number one response, as you can tell by the boldness of the text. Cooperation, stakeholders, infrastructure, participation, more actions, project. So keeping these in mind, I’ll ask the panelists to just turn around very quickly, have a look at what the audience has responded as the most important actions, and then to bear that in mind as they’re answering the questions so that we can, as suggested by one of the panelists, not just talk, but actually take some actual action at the country level. Oh, and ensure alignment. There was a last-minute contender up there. Okay. So having had that reflection from our participants, we’re going to turn to our panelists now and really have their views on how you turn global digital cooperation, the objectives of the GDC, into what we really need, which is implementation at the country level. And from the perspective of the United Nations Development Program, where I come from as the head of partnerships and engagement, that’s particularly important because we’re present in 170 countries and territories around the world, and we really want to see where global discussions land in impact, particularly at the country level. And so that’s what we’re really hoping today’s conversation with all of you and with our distinguished panelists will bring some insights and highlights and prioritization to these types of efforts. So with that, I’m going to turn to our distinguished panelists. I’m going to introduce them all first, and then I’m going to ask them questions all in turn, one after another. So today we have with us Ms. Cynthia Lasufi, Minister-Counsel of the South African Mission to the United Nations in Geneva and other international organizations. We have Ms. Gitanjali Shah, Strategy and Policy Coordinator of the International Telecommunications Union. We have Mr. Robert Opp, Chief Digital Officer of the UNDP. We have Mr. Olaf Kochman, Principal of Internet Technology Policy and Advocacy from the Internet Society, as well as Mr. Dennis Souza from the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, sitting for Mr. Zhuang Zhu, who was unable to make it at the very last minute. So our distinguished panelists will answer first round of questions, after which we’ll open up to conversation with the audience. And I really encourage participants both online as well as in the room to ask our panel any questions that they might have really about having this conversation that we so urgently need about turning global digital contact into real concrete action. So we’re going to start with the first round of questions. And the first question actually goes to Robert Opp, Chief Digital Officer of the UNDP. Rob, UNDP supports digital programming in more than 120 countries around the world, as I mentioned. What are some of the key challenges and needs that countries face in their digital transformation? How does the GDC speak to some of these needs and opportunities? And how does it connect with other ongoing processes, for instance, the WSIS plus 20 review?

Robert Opp: Well, that’s three questions in one.

Yu Ping Chan: But… A chance to ask as many things as possible.

Robert Opp: Okay. Well, it’s great to be here. And thanks to those of you who have come to this discussion. In terms of answering the question, UNDP, as Yu-Ping just said, has a footprint across 170 countries, and we have digital programs in most of those countries. And the kinds of things that we hear in terms of requests for support fall into a few big categories. One of the ones is… One of the categories is around requests for support in strategy building, policies, roadmaps, in terms of how to roll out digital transformation at a societal level. So, we have been responding to those requests by engaging in dialogues around digital readiness assessment and things like that, to understand where countries are and where they want to be. Second big category is around sort of what are the kinds of technologies I should put in place to improve different digital public services and really connect people, close the digital divide in terms of both the connectivity side, but as well as the kind of services available. Third category is around capacity building. So, that’s interesting that it came up on the screen. Very frequently, everyone is asking for more capacity across the board, whether that be in government or in society at large around innovation ecosystems as well. Everyone’s looking for more digital capacity. And then, fourthly, the more recent requests that we have, which is part of the kind of wave of discussion around AI, is how do I build my AI ecosystem? And so, it involves all of those other three things I mentioned, but there’s a very specific request line around artificial intelligence and how I can make it work for me and my country. So, those are the kinds of things that we hear. Your second question was on how does it relate to the GDC. And the good news is that the Global Digital Compact actually covers all of those themes in one way or another. In the technology space, the first time an intergovernmental agreement has mentioned digital public infrastructure, and that’s something as an approach that we work a lot with in countries. There’s also quite a few mentions in the Global Digital Compact on capacity building and, of course, artificial intelligence as well, including the need for capacity for AI. So, the GDC, I think, as an overarching umbrella, is a good step forward in terms of acknowledging some of the things that are facing us and facing countries around the world today. And then in terms of the WSIS Plus 20, I think it’s an important thing to have a signal from the GDC to where WSIS needs to go. So looking forward, we need to, in WSIS Plus 20, update the action lines, update the basis on which we’re going to work for the next period that we decide on, and take those signals that are coming out of the GDC, and as I mentioned, out of the countries, and ensure that they are embedded in WSIS Plus 20. So I’ll leave it there, Yuping.

Yu Ping Chan: Much Rob, and may I also apologize, because I failed to see that another of our panelists has actually joined us online, Margarita, are you there? Could I also ask that she be upgraded to panelist as well, for the technicians in the room? Margarita Gomez is the executive director of Southern Voice, one of the co-organizers of this event. I’m just checking to see whether she’s been upgraded online. While we are waiting for that to happen, perhaps I can turn the next question to Cynthia. Cynthia, the question that I have for you is, what opportunities does the GDC offer for supporting inclusive digital transformations, particularly at the country level?

Cynthia Lesufi: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to join this important panel, for sitting as a country, for sitting with the UN agencies to talk about this important topic, and I also want to thank all of you for joining this session. It’s quite an honor for South Africa to join this. Yuping, in terms of the question, let me start first by stating that actually, the Global Digital Compact, in its form, it offers a variety of opportunities to support digital transformation in countries from where we are sitting. It also structures in such a way that it empowers countries by focusing on key priorities that drive inclusive digital transformation. For instance, the Global Digital Compact, it promotes adopting inclusive digital policies for universal and affordable internet access, particularly in rural and underserved areas. Coming from South Africa and from the region where the issue of connectivity is a problem, we believe the GDC, it is structured in such a way that it starts to address this. The other thing that it focuses on for countries, what it does is that it fosters global partnerships to provide affordable devices and services and reduce the barriers for low-income population. Again, this talks to the region that I come from, which is Africa. But the other important thing which Rob spoke to is the issue of skills capacity building. Where we are sitting, we actually want to emphasize the fact that the GDC, in its current form, it does touches on issues of skills capacity building issues. Again, we’re looking at this in a way that our view is that it enabled marginalized groups to use the digital tools effectively. But also, it also allows countries to access, to train their workforces in emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, cybersecurity, and also it promotes inclusive digital economies. The other thing that we have also noted as South Africa is that the GDC, in its current form, it also encouraged the public-private partnership, which from where we are sitting, it strengthened the collaboration among government, the private sector, NGOs, and international organizations on inclusive digital initiatives. We also believe that through this, then what it does, it also helps countries to leverage resources and expertise for infrastructure development and digital transformation project. But also, the other thing that we have also identified that we believe GDC is talking to is to mandate that countries assess their progress by identifying the gaps, and as far as digital transformation is concerned, and that where we are sitting, it assists countries to take decisive action to enhance their digital transformation journeys. The other thing that is also important is that the GDC also, from where we are sitting, urge countries to learn from global success stories and adopt proven strategies to accelerate digital inclusion initiatives. I think I should stop at that. Thank you.

Yu Ping Chan: I think we could have listened to Cynthia for a lot longer because I think her answer was extremely comprehensive and really touched on a lot of these elements that already were reflected by the participants and you, the audience, as to the important parts of the GDC that we really need to pick up on. So Cynthia, thank you so much for really a great answer to that. I think it’s also particularly important given that South Africa is actually taking on the presidency of the G20 next year. And so that perspective of leading from the South and the global majority is particularly important. So the next question we have is for Olaf. So the question for you is that the Internet Society works to ensure that the Internet is open, globally connected, secure and trustworthy. How does the GDC contribute to your mission and what do you think the role of stakeholders, particularly the technical community, should be in realizing the ambition of the GDC?

Olaf Kolkman: Yeah, good question. The question is essentially what can the GDC do for you, but I’d like to turn that around. What can we do for the GDC? I see the GDC as a joint vision, where we are asked to work towards a common goal. But I’m also a strong believer in the bottom-up fashion and the bottom-up nature of partnerships, of developing solutions that locally work, that are locally tailored, that bring together the people for their local needs. And while the GDC points something on the radar, I strongly believe that you need to develop these partnerships in a bottom-up nature. And, of course, when you do that, you need to have local stakeholders at the table, the people who understand the technology, that can bridge that to the people who understand, say, the rights in a locality, that understand the needs in a locality, and that can also find the funding in that locality. So, we do that in practice as the Internet Society, for instance, when we are connecting communities. And when we are connecting communities, generally we are part of the funding structures for those, but not always. And we seek a technologist that can build the technologies. We tie them to the local communities to make sure that we know what the requirements are, but we also talk, say, to the municipalities to get right of way to a tower that might be somewhere on which an antenna can be mounted. And those are the tiny examples of places where people get together and do stuff. So I think that once we have those experiences locally at municipal level, we can share them at national level to exchange experiences. And I believe that is the model of the IGF where we have all the regional and national IGFs where people come together and share their experiences in their fora on how did you come to a solution. And that type of norm entrepreneurship, the norm and technical entrepreneurship, I believe creates solutions that are more sustainable than anything that we can invest and invent top-down. And to me, that is where the IGF, of course, plays a humongous role. And I’m happy to see that that role is recognized in the GDC concept. And the GDC defines a number of objectives that keep the eye on the ball, of course. One of them is, of course, the connectivity of all humans to the internet. We still have 2.8 million to go, mostly in the Global South, as you heard the Saudi minister say during the plenary. That’s a high effort, and that’s where we, as internet society, are, of course, focused in our work. So I would say the GDC helps us think globally, but the action needs to be local. Thank you.

Yu Ping Chan: That is a great tagline. Think global with the GDC, but really the action has to be local. And I think that’s something that’s been emphasized in quite a lot of the comments as well. And I think that’s a really good way to segue into the question to Margarita. Margarita, Southern Voice is a network of currently 70 think tanks in the Global South working to accelerate SDG progress. So really reflecting on this connection to what Olaf has just said about acting local, what are you hearing across your members about priorities for implementing the Global Digital Compact? And where is that the most opportunity at the country level, the local level?

Margarita Gomez: Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here and thank you everybody that is joining online and in person there. So as you mentioned, so we are a network of 70 think tanks in 35 countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. And we work to close the gap between evidence and action. We also connect researchers, practitioners and decision makers to work together and to enhance South-South cooperation, South-North collaborations, to rebalance knowledge and symmetry in global debates and sustainable development. So always we are having this conversation. How can we connect? Yes. Can you hear me better?

Yu Ping Chan: Interrupt you, but it seems like there’s some difficulty with her sound. Can you just hold on a minute?

Margarita Gomez: Yeah, can you hear me better now? Hello, can you hear me better?

Yu Ping Chan: Because I hear a lot of buzzing in her sound quality and we’re not really hearing the message clearly. So maybe could we have a little bit more of a clearer fix on the sound? Yeah. Online panelists? Okay, they’re saying that it has, they can’t really control it and it’s coming from something else.

Margarita Gomez: I think that online is-

Yu Ping Chan: Marita, I think if you could just continue and we apologize for that. We can read the transcription here so we can actually follow along with your important points. So Marita, can I ask you to continue?

Margarita Gomez: Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Sorry about that. I think that, yeah. I hope that you can hear me better now. So I’m going to continue. And yeah, I think that-

Yu Ping Chan: You’re heard now.

Margarita Gomez: Thank you. Thank you so much. I think that’s-

Yu Ping Chan: Okay, go ahead, Marita.

Margarita Gomez: Thank you. Yeah, and the questions and having this panel focusing on what can we do at the local level- to connect with the global debate. I think that is very relevant for the conversation that we always have with our members. And before to prepare for this panel, we were discussing what are the key priorities? And there is this temptation to say, there are many priorities. We need to focus on the infrastructure, we need to focus on access, but we were really trying to identify the top priorities and one of the top priorities for our members, for the Global South that we hear very often is how can we bridging the digital divides? We think that this is one of the important areas that we need to focus our efforts in order to really have progress in health, education, security, financial inclusion, that is one of the important issues for gender, also inclusion, governance. And that’s one of the priorities that we hear often that is important for our members and for the countries where they are based. The second priority that we have identified if the inclusion of women and girls, what we see is that the gap is getting bigger in terms of having more women and having more girls connecting and being part of the digital transformation. When we talk about the Global Digital Compact, we see that there is an important effort to connect these priorities that are coming from the Global South with this global framework. Now, we have seen that they have put in the center some of these digital divides that exist in the different topics and priorities of the GDC. Just maybe to think a little more about what we can do at the local level. that is where countries and not municipalities, as Olaf was saying, but also states and national governments can have more advantage and can work more on that. So the first one, in terms of closing and tackling the digital divides, are reducing the barriers of meaningful use of digital use. Then digital literacy. So we know that in many countries in the Global South, there is a gap already of literacy. And when we talk about digital literacy, this is becoming even bigger. So we think that this is something that governments at the national level can do better because they know the context. They have also the partners, the right partners to do this. The inclusion of women and girls. That’s another issue that we’ve seen that local governments can have more advantage. And then also the participation and inclusion of marginalized groups in the design of the technology to be part of this revolution that is happening. And maybe just my final point is that these are things that local governments can do better, but there are other things that are needed also to happen at the global level in order to make these changes happen. And I just want to mention two of them that we think that is important. One is having a little more support of the global entities in terms of infrastructure, in terms of really sharing good practices, and also having more regulation and more inclusive governance. We think that this is important. something that is needed to happen at the global level. And in order to really move the needle in this topic, we need to collaborate in both levels. One that is the local level, and then the actions that we need to take at the global level. Thank you so much. And I hope that the sounds wasn’t too terrible.

Yu Ping Chan: No, it was much better towards the end Margarita, and thank you so much again for your patience on that. And so with Margarita’s comment that we should also look to the global level, we’re turning the conversation back here in the room to reflections from DESA as well as ITU, two of the global UN entities working on the global stage. And so the next question goes to Dennis from DESA. How does the GDC help accelerate SDG progress? And that’s something that DESA has really been looking at, tracking and measuring the progress that’s been made on the SDGs. And what has DESA seen in terms of the biggest needs and opportunities in this space?

Deniz Susar: Thank you, Yuping. And thank you also for inviting DESA to this panel. I am representing Mr. Juwang Su, Director of Division for Public Institutions, as you mentioned. The GDC highlights several areas critical for country level implementation, many of which align with our work at DESA. Due to time constraints, I will focus on our contribution related to WSIS and the WSIS Plus 2 in overall review. So as many of you know, Paragraph 68 of the GDC emphasizes building on WSIS processes and forums, such as the IGF and its national and regional initiatives and the WSIS Forum to advance the GDC implementation. And it also looks forward to WSIS Plus 2 in review in 2025, where UNDESA will serve as the secretariat. UNDESA is responsible for three WSIS action lines, C1, promoting ICT for development. C7 e-Government, and C11 International and Regional Cooperation. Related to this action line C1, GDC makes many references to the role of ICTs for SDGs, such as importance of data governance, AI. At UNDESA, with our regular program for technical cooperation, we support capacity building initiatives to advance sustainable development in developing countries. This program provides technical assistance, policy advice, and knowledge sharing platforms to enhance governance, digital transformation, and institutional capacities. One of the key focuses is promoting ICTs as enablers of sustainable development by improving digital governance, fostering inclusivity, and building institutional readiness to leverage digital tools and technologies. We have many projects, same like UNDP, in many countries. Related to this action line C7 e-Government, paragraph 13E of the GDC commits to prioritizing digital competencies for public officials and institutions, enabling the development and implementation of inclusive, secure, and user-centered digital services. The United Nations e-Government Survey, which looks at e-Government development of 193 countries, and starting from 2018, we also went local. We started looking at the most populous cities in each country. However, we have received many questions about why we cannot expand to several cities in a single country. So, we are also creating partnerships with entities, either government or non-government, to advance this work into several cities in a single country. So, we share our e-Government survey methodology, and we look at it at the local level. So, this work is also growing extensively in the recent years. There are many countries that we are going to local, and I agree with Olaf’s comments on that. The last section on C11 is the partnerships. to GDC, acknowledge the IGF as the primary stakeholder platform for internet governance. And by paragraph 29, we commit to supporting the IGF by increasing diverse participation from developing countries. As you see here, we are also working on that already. We’re in the IGF, this region, for the first time. UNDESA is the institutional home to the IGF. And also, we’re bringing global, and national, and local, and youth IGFs. So with that, we already also work on the GDC principles. So I just want to conclude saying that our work aligns closely with the GDC principles. And we will continue to integrate its commitments into our efforts.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you so much, Dennis. And actually, on that particular note, that the UN agencies are really looking to see how we can drive forward implementation of the GDC to our existing work. And these ongoing programs that are really reaching country level, local level, as Dennis has explained, that’s a good way to actually go to our last panelist, Ms. Kitanjali Shah, who also, many of you would actually know, is known affectionately in some places as MISPASISTS, because of her very strong role and leadership in the process itself. And really, reflecting again on that, the role of the IGF, the role of the WSIS in implementation of the GDC, Kitanjali, can you speak to what ITU sees as the priorities in delivering the GDC vision at the country level, and the opportunity that the WSIS Plus 20 review that will be happening next year in the General Assembly has to drive progress towards these key goals?

Gitanjali Sah: Thank you, Yoping. It’s a pleasure to be here. And thanks for organizing this very multi-stakeholder panel where we heard different voices. And to complement what Dennis and Rob said, that through the WSIS Action Lines, the WSIS Action Lines provide a very sound framework and capture the whole gamut of digital technologies, right from cybersecurity to ICT infrastructure. And they have a whole range of technologies. So it’s a beautiful framework. And it’s really a win-win action, because if different UN agencies based on their respective mandates are implementing different action lines. So WHO has e-health, UNEP does e-environment, ITU and UNDP do cyber capacity building. So it’s really a one UN, UN in action framework. And as you can see, we are all here at the IDF. So the IDF and the WSIS Forum are perhaps the best examples of how multi-stakeholders are bringing stories from the ground to the global level, and sharing knowledge and sharing information on how digital cooperation really happens with different stakeholders. So ITU as the UN agency for digital technologies, our existing mandates and actions are directly aligned with the objectives, principles, and commitments of the GDC. ITU is already actively supporting member states and sector members in implementing the GDC. During our ITU governing body meetings, including the council, council working group on WSIS and SDGs that Cynthia is the chair of, we have actually identified the key actions that ITU should be taking, an ITU action plan, and mapping it with the existing WSIS frameworks and the 2030 agenda. Of course, we must not forget the global development goals as such a key role in achieving sustainable development goals. So at the ITU internally, have an internal ITU GDC implementation plan, and we are working with GDC based UN agencies to also come up with an action plan, a GD action plan. This would, we are calling it the Geneva Digital Kitchen, and we meet very often to kind of brainstorm and to explore what we can contribute to New York and to the implementation of the GDC as the UN in Geneva as well. So recently, many of you attended the WTSA, the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, where of course, ITU member states and membership prioritize AI, AI standards, AI governance, responsive, inclusive, impactful AI for sustainable development. Now at the country level as well, ITU has several country offices, A3 offices, regional offices, where we are working with important partners like the UNGDP on capacity building programs, on policy guidance, and AIDB to address the digital divide by ensuring universal connectivity. That’s the main thing that ITU strives to achieve, especially for marginalized and underserved communities. Initiatives like the GIGA, where we are connecting schools with UNICEF, Partner to Connect, the DPI initiative, again with the UNDP, partnership across the digital divide. These are all important initiatives that are already contributing to several aspects of the GDC. At the same time, cybersecurity is a really crucial issue for the ITU, fostering an open, safe, secure digital environment is of course a priority. It’s covered under Action 9C5, those of you who follow the framework, but it’s always an impact. This opportunity obviously provides us with an opportunity to ensure that all of this is strengthened, especially at the grassroots level. Of course, ITU’s ongoing efforts with the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, OHCHR, and other stakeholders are advancing these objectives to developing relevant standards and guidelines to protect privacy, security, and freedom of expression. So just to conclude that WSIS Plus 20 provides us with this opportunity to ensure that this milestone that GDC has provided during the WSIS Plus 20 process is taken into consideration and we build on this to provide a future of WSIS beyond 2025. Back to you.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you so much, Gitanjali. And then so before I go to our external stakeholders, I’m going to ask Robert to round up the UN family considerations and sort of reflections as to the work that the UN agency is doing in this area and ask you how UNDP is addressing some of the opportunities that we have spoken about that have been reflected from our audience participation and that you’ve heard from some of the other panelists. So what are the insights that you have heard from the various countries that UNDP works in and what do you see as, again, the most urgent priorities in this space?

Robert Opp: Yeah, so I think, well, so all the panelists have mentioned different aspects of it. You know, there’s, I mentioned before that we are getting signals from countries in these sort of different areas, policy. and strategies technology space and capacity building as well as AI. So in the policy and strategy space we have done digital readiness assessments in 53 countries. That is a multi-stakeholder process itself where it is a combination of government, private sector, civil society and other actors feed into the sort of perceptions around what is the strengths and weaknesses of particular contexts or particular digital ecosystems. We’ve also started doing AI readiness assessments which respond to that signal that we’re getting from countries on how can we embrace AI and embrace the benefits and that is something that we do jointly with UNESCO as well. On the technology side of the digital public infrastructure work you just mentioned at Gitanjali we’re working in about 25 countries with digital public infrastructure and trying to understand how to put people at the center of that and to that end we have just recently also launched together with the UN technology envoy’s office a set of DPI safeguards. That is a set of best practices that accompany the implementation of digital public infrastructure in a way that puts people and their rights at the center and so that was launched recently at the UN General Assembly this year and is now something that is available and we’re working to implement across countries around the world. And then the capacity-building space is a kind of a tapestry at the moment. We do work with ITU on a number of capacity building efforts. There’s also I think a fairly strong role for private sector and civil society when it comes to capacity building and so for example in Kenya we are starting a collaboration with the government of Kenya, Microsoft and Huawei on digital capacity building for civil servants. So there’s a lot of work going on out there across all of these areas. Your second question was on insights and I would say you know one of the bigger insights and I hear it coming out of the panel here these cannot just be top-down things. These have to be also bottom-up and you have to take into account signals from people, you have to involve people, you have to be on the ground, you have to be local. You really need to I think in order to get a set of actions that work for everybody and are inclusive you really need to have those voices included. I think that’s probably the biggest thing and in our work with because UNDP works with community level and city level and national governments sometimes it is our role to remind those government authorities that we need to have those voices in the room as well. So I’ll leave it there.

Yu Ping Chan: back to Margarita from Southern Voice to really reflect on that question of voices in the room and Margarita my question for you is where do you see the opportunities, catalytic opportunities for GDC implementation? Have you really seen this for instance from your research work with the Global South and how does Southern Voice plan to continue working with its network and wider partners in this?

Margarita Gomez: Thank you so much and a great conversation, great points that my colleagues has already shared too. I’m going to highlight three catalytics or opportunities that we that we see in the global south and the first one has already been highlighted by some of my colleagues there that is the potential of partnerships and what we see is like at the national level there is the potential of bringing to the conversation other partners and to have more synergies and collaborations so we need the government we need private sector also engaging in these conversations and there is one part that we see from the global south when we talk about partners is this how can we learn from what others countries in the global south are doing in terms of using technology, giving access, innovation that can be adapted and that can be also an inspiration for other countries in the global south so that will be one the potential of these partners is bringing others to the conversation. The second one and this is something that we were discussing too if we needed to do one thing as a government and different actors collaborating in this is maybe as to put in the center the inclusion and also the reduction of these digital divides that exist is maybe guaranteeing or trying to assure that we can have access in public spaces, we can give access in public spaces to as many as many citizens that is possible in these countries and this is an effort again a collective effort that needs to happen to give access in schools public service and we have already some examples that happen in this term so we have the GIGA initiative that has been trying to connect schools, hospitals and different public areas in order to guarantee this access, mainly to the ones that have less access and that we might be leaving behind. And that’s the second opportunity that we see. And the third one is also what’s already mentioned, that is how can we enhance local innovations and also engage local communities to the design development of these technologies that we are using. Even there are already some efforts that we have seen of people designing artificial intelligence, logarithms, bringing communities and local knowledge that is also very important. And in terms of what we are doing, so one of our core work is to connect the local agendas and the local efforts that is happening in different countries to the global agenda. And that is something that we are working with our members to identify these local needs in order to connect also with the global debates. And as a southern voice, we are engaging in different spaces in this agenda to bring and to put it at the center the needs, the priorities and the agenda that is important in these topics from the global south in order to connect with these global debates. Thank you so much.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you so much, Margarita. Actually, the key words that you highlighted, partnership, inclusion, local innovation and knowledge, but you speak to what you actually had mentioned in the previous intervention. And we will ask them now to elaborate a little bit more on how this types of society intend to continue to work with these types of partnerships.

Olaf Kolkman: Certainly. We do this in many ways. We have a network of chapters throughout the world. We talk about the interaction on a local level between policy makers and perhaps society people. We find those people back in our local chapters. There are 141 million members globally. And in addition to the specialists themselves, we have a lot of good specialists. We have partnerships through our grant making program that provides characters, but also individuals that want to deploy initiatives about to the education skills. But we can do it. If we can do it then should be successful. Even in big ways. If we can do it then some chance can shine. If we can do it then we must make sure there is the openариng for our sustainable way of life. I don’t know if I can distribute the truth back. At the same time I think we drive the truth wrong. I think we drive the truth wrong. We got to judge the truth. Thatǵs okay give you a little more time. Or do you want to say something,ored something else? may I… Just… just going to say a few words. After youÕve speakled about the complete human thing, it has been explaining that for a lot of people because machine learning exists. It allows the electricity bill that generally is probably less than my age. Interesting infrastructure built here, open ceilings, so that we can get everything around the place.

Yu Ping Chan: Sorry to interrupt, but we really canÕt hear anything online. IÕm wondering if the technicians in the room can work on the cameras. The technicians in the room can work on the connection. IÕm wondering if the technicians in the room can work on the cameras. I’m dancing with this. Online participants here love singing, which is very, very entrancing, I have to say. Testing, one, two, three. That’s a bit better, it’s still a little run through. We’re back. Oh, we’re back. Are we back, online people?

Olaf Kolkman: I can stop singing now. You missed something online.

Yu Ping Chan: That’s much better. Okay, back to you, Ola.

Olaf Kolkman: Yeah, I don’t know where I was, but your partnerships are key to everything. It has been said before, alone a youth runs fast, with an elder slow, but together they go far. It has been said before, and that’s partnership for you. And partnership is not only knowledge, or not only money, it’s knowledge as well. And as I was saying, the Internet Society tries to make those connections on the knowledge level, but also through our foundation at the funding level. We ourselves work together with the Giga project of UNICEF, connecting schools, but in Jacksonville, Florida, for instance, we worked with a local bank to connect students to their school. The school put up a mast, so that the kids could go to the kids’ children’s laptops, so that in the poorest areas of Florida, students could get connected. And on bridging that technological policy divide, that is something that is part of our daily work. We try to make connections at the standardization level, so that’s at a very global level. We try to provide tool sets, so that people can analyze whether their policies will impact the open, global, secure, trustworthy, and unfragmented Internet. We have the Internet assessment toolkit for that. And we try to keep that Internet safe, so we will intervene in technical or policy discussions at the local level, where we think that the security of the Internet is under threat. And these are all wicked problems. Building the Internet out to the last billion, the next 1.8 billion people are probably okay, but the last billion people, that is a wicked problem, and we cannot do that alone.

Yu Ping Chan: And another catchphrase, we can’t do it alone. And so picking up on that, and asking who else we can do it with, I’m turning to Cynthia now, and asking her where she thinks that the GDC can connect with other important work that’s underway. For instance, with South Africa’s G20 presidency, and the WSIS review that many other speakers have discussed already as well.

Cynthia Lesufi: Thank you, Philippine, for this important question. Perhaps before one can ask that question, it’s really key for us to ask another question. You know, to then say, what do we make of the WSIS Plus 20 review process? From where we are sitting, as South Africa, we look at the WSIS Plus 20 review process as a framework for all stakeholders, and then based on the WSIS outcome documents, to address opportunities and challenges posed by the current digital landscape, including universal connectivity and sustainable digital transformation. Moving forward, it is also important to look at the GDC as a next step for WSIS, right? Where we are sitting, we believe that WSIS has primarily responded to the initial wave of globalization and digitization, and also concentrating on infrastructure and efforts to build the digital divide. While the GDC, we view it as a reflection of the advanced state of the digital ecosystem in addressing its complicities in the era characterized by widespread of digitalization, misinformation, emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain. And we also believe that it is important for us to ask another question as to our role in the digital divide. how GDC reinforce WSIS. For us, these both initiatives, they aim at enhancing ICTs and digital technologies to transform humanity. And we also believe that the GDC builds on the principles of WSIS by incorporating ethical and the rights-based approaches to digital transformation. While WSIS focuses on action languages, the GDC seeks to centralize sets of principles and commitments agreed upon by all stakeholders. And again, as South Africa, we also believe that really WSIS has laid the groundwork for global ICT discussions. And we also believe that the GDC as an initiative, it builds upon those principles by focusing on modern challenges, such as the regulation of your platform providers, the regulation of AI and ethics, and the online misinformation. And we also believe that the GDC could also be seen as the next step of WSIS’ legacy through aligning digital governance with the broader 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Now, you know, now moving to the South African G20 Presidency. I was, as a country, we are informed by the general culture of inclusivity and consultation, which is, again, at the center of the WSIS and the GDC. And this is informed by the values of the values and the spirit of our constitution. With South Africa as a G20 Presidency, we seek to reinforce the notion of multistakeholder approach. And I want to believe that this is also important for both processes. And we are doing this through enhancing a dialogue and engagement with various states, international organizations, and civil society. And with its presidency, the South African government also intends to place Africa’s developmental agenda at the top of the G20 Presidency. And we aim to build on the success of the past three presidencies led by the Global South. As South Africa, we also believe that this presidency will provide us with an opportunity to advocate and mobilize support for developing economies of Africa and the Global South, particularly championing the developmental agenda. In conclusion, of us as South Africa, we believe that the G20 Presidency has a pivotal role in advancing the WSIS and the SDG agendas by focusing on the digital inclusion, sustainable development rights based on governance and global accountability. And we also believe that with our G20 Presidency, we can leave a lasting impact on global transformation, particularly for developing nations. And lastly, we believe that with our leadership, we can also fulfill the principles of WSIS, but also position South Africa as a key advocate for more equitable and inclusive digital future. Thank you. Thank you so much, Cynthia. And with that, we end our panel and we’re going to audience interaction and questions and answers for our distinguished panelists. Before we start that, we have another question for you to answer via Slido, and if I could have share screen again. So, having heard everything from our panelists, but also thinking about your own experiences and your own perspectives, in one to two words, can you tell us how we will know that we are succeeding and delivering impact at the country level? Again, not just talking about action this time around, reflecting on everything that you’ve heard, but the need to hear these voices and to act on these needs and priorities. So, in one, two words, how will we know that we are and delivering impact at the country? Okay. Hello. There we go. Two responses have been in, digital quality and results. Other suggestions? Other reflections? For those just coming in, we’re taking an audience survey via Slido. You scan the QR code and you give us one to two words on how we will know that we are succeeding in delivering impact at the country level. I see someone says that more than one to two words. I appreciate your commitment.

Olaf Kolkman: in one or two words, because the DTC, the action items or the objectives are, in fact, the KPIs that we’re looking at. And it’s not one KPI, it’s a bunch of them. And I think that once you’ve seen results at each individual objectives, they’re not really, not all of them have been

Yu Ping Chan: This is a good point that Olaf is making, that really the measure is really capturing the objectives of the GDC itself. Dennis wants to come in a little bit before we open the floor to participants. Go ahead.

Olaf Kolkman: I’m looking at the screen and I’m seeing most of the business action lines there, economic development, additional quality, SDG acceleration. And I just want to make this last point that you understand, we still think that GDC is a very comprehensive framework moving forward, which will guide us into the business plus 20. But the business framework is also still valid since 2003 and 2005. We think that existing mechanisms just still work, such as IGF, this is forum, STI forum, technology facilitation mechanism, et cetera. One last thing I want to mention is, for example, in 2005, we didn’t have AI, social media or a number of things were not there. But paragraph 72G of the Tunis agenda, where IGF gets its mandate, I quote, identify emerging issues, bring them to the attention of the relevant bodies and the general public, and where appropriate, make recommendations. So one of the keynotes of IGF is to discuss emerging issues. And AI was in the discussions of IGF since 2015. And UNESCO started discussing AI ethics in 2018. So we think that IGF and all this has enormous agenda setting, and how issues have normally first popped up in IGF, and then produce concrete partnerships and brought us here. So I think that’s an important point I just wanted to input here. And I think

Yu Ping Chan: that’s a point that a lot of us, resonates very strongly with a lot of us, and really reflects to the importance of the IGF process, feeding into these global conversations, and in some ways, prefiguring the conversation that then happens at the global level, because it was here at IGF that you heard it first. Olaf, go ahead. And then I’m going to turn to the floor.

Olaf Kolkman: I use the term norm entrepreneurship. That’s exactly what’s happening.

Yu Ping Chan: Norm entrepreneurship. All right. So we’re going to the floor now for reflections. I saw Henriette raise her hand, and then I see Isabel. So Henriette, go ahead. Henriette from the Alliance for Progressive Communications.

Anriette Esterhuysen: No, no, no, no, no. Thanks, Ola. Thanks, everyone. I kind of feel we’re still beating around the bush. You know, I hear, I want to pick up on what Cynthia was saying about the alignment between GDC and WSIS, but I want to hear more than that. I want to hear that the WSIS plus 20 outcome will integrate GDC follow-up and implementation with the WSIS. And if there’s a need to update WSIS action lines, to merge them with some of the new emerging issues that the GDC raises, then ask WSIS to do that. Ask the WSIS facilitation agencies to work that. Improve cooperation within the UN system. We know it’s not as good as it should be. But I think ultimately, if you want country-based actions, you have to respect countries and you have to, as the international system, not just dump new agendas on them all the time. I can speak for African countries. I was at the African WSIS plus 20 prep comp. They are implementing those WSIS action lines. They’re doing their best. It’s an imperfect and even process. They’re now concerned about also integrating GDC. Make it easy for them. Merge these processes. I think anything beyond that is serving our international intergovernmental bureaucracy rather than serving what we’re trying to achieve at member state level.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you, Henriette. Turning over to Isabel from the Office of the Tech Envoy. And then after that, we have Nnenna online and then a colleague here. Isabel, go ahead.

Isabel De Sola: Thank you so much. And I’m devastated to go after Henriette. I’m Isabel D’Soula from the Office of the Tech Envoy. And I just wanted to say that I think this is such a good question on the screen is how do we know that we’re succeeding? From the Office of the Tech Envoy, I really wanna take this question back and see how we could connect some of our work on implementation to KPIs. And I couldn’t get my camera to work, but I would like to add one to the screen, which is two actually, data governance. So two words, Yuping. I think that we have an opportunity in the GDC to advance some pretty groundbreaking principles for international data governance. And the task is probably one of the most complex and most important of the GDC that will require a multi-stakeholder approach. So for the IGF and its role as an ideation center as a place for exchange, I really hope that the IGF will contribute to that process, which is just about to kick off in Geneva in January. And a second two or three words is about diversity of content. And that relates to the WSIS agenda. So this is something that we’ve been working on for 20 years but where I’ve recently learned there could be real potential for partnerships with the private sector. 80% of content online 20 years after the WSIS is still just in seven languages. And 50% of that content is in English. And now we have maybe some technical tools that could provide shortcuts to translating loads of content online. Those technical tools are in the hands of a certain sector also present here at the IGF, and they’re doing their part. I understand Google is taking 110 new languages into its AI-powered translation model. But here’s a place I think where the WSIS and the GDC could dig deeper together and say, all right, the progress we’ve made with the WSIS on languages is this. And in the GDC, we call on tech companies to support us in this, that, and the other in nine areas. And perhaps that’s a nice low-hanging fruit for the two frameworks to work together and deliver, as this question suggests, results. Thank you.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you, Isabel. And we go to Nenna online and then we’ll come over here to our colleague here. Nenna?

AUDIENCE: Thank you. you. I hope you can hear me very well. Very quietly, Nana. Is it

Yu Ping Chan: okay if we speak a little bit more loudly? Can you hear me?

AUDIENCE: Yes, but not a little faint, but go ahead, Nana. Yeah, I think we’ve had a lot of sound issues. I just wanted to come back on the divides and the intersectionality of the divides. At this stage, we’re not just talking about digital divides. That is infrastructural part of it alone. But I think we should pay close attention to the digital policy divides, digital gender divides, digital rural and urban divides, digital age divides. So that’s just what I want to pitch in here. And maybe our panelists, our resource people can zero in on this. After 20 years in IGF, speaking about digital divides alone is not enough. But I think we should all as a global digital community, be aware that divides are intersectional, and our response to them must be intersectional. And I think that it is important to put this here, because we’re talking about digital cooperation. And most of our UN family members are here, so that we don’t just run with our own individual mandates at the expense of the mandate of other agencies. But we should have that collaboration ahead as a focus, because our divides are intersectional, and our response to them should also be. Thank you very much for having me.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you, Nana. Let me reassure you that I think the collaboration between UN agencies, as you can see from the presence on the stage, has been strong and continues to be growing as well. So over here to colleague in the room.

AUDIENCE: Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for your good presentations. Though we had these hiccups of the, you know, internet, and you hoping that because it’s IGF forum that tomorrow, everything will be better than this. I’m Julia Fosha. I come from Kenya. We mainly work in the northern part of Kenya called Masbit. It’s a very dry place, and the place is remote. We do have a school, for example, called Tego School, which, you know, not only internet, we do not even have electricity in the first place. So I was wondering, Rob said he’s going to work with the country, mainly for the civil servants. In Masbit, most of the people are pastoralists, and they are mainly affected by drought. Like we had drought for the last four years. It only rained early… No, end of last year and early this year. I tend to agree with what Mr. Oph had said, that let’s really look at the local part of it, other than, you know, the whole population. Because if you look at the civil servants who come from Masbit, or from the marginalized places, they are very few. And we really need this taken down to the students, you know, to the ground local levels. So kindly, I would also request, if you are able to work with us, who are the CSOs… like the local, local NGOs who deal directly with the people in the grassroots. I think that can touch more people other than just going to the towns. Thank you.

Yu Ping Chan: Gitanjali has a response to that. And I think that is exactly a reminder of the perspectives and the people that we need to reach if we truly want to be impactful. Gitanjali? We have one more person in the queue. Maybe Gitanjali first. He’s been waiting. Go ahead.

Alex Mora: Hi, I’m Alex Mora. I am originally from Brazil. I work here in Saudi Arabia in the Cal State University, and I’ve been working on the research and education and support for scientific research for more than 25 years now. And from all the perspectives I heard here today, I’d like to add on the last commentary from our colleague here that I miss a lot of the integration or collaboration involving organizations that are working on those in this area of research and education. For instance, in each country, there is some sort of research and education organization working to connect schools, universities, all sorts of educational, let’s say, facility. And those facilities could be, I think, on my view, education is the main thing that could change people’s lives instead of only giving the access to Internet. Because if you give them the communication capabilities, but along with that, if you give access to good information and relevant, meaningful material that they can improve their own lives and do new things for themselves, you can empower communities, remote locations, people that are disconnected. So a lot of good things can come from that. So I think all efforts should always try to look involving the local people who work on research and education. And one good channel is the research and education networks. In each country, you have a lot of people working to do the same thing you are talking here. They are striving to bring fiber across the Amazon River. They are building connections through satellites. And that’s not only for scientific purposes. It’s also to connect schools and make people have access. So if you join efforts with those people and they have global coverage, I am also on the leadership of the GNA, Global Network Advancement. And this group is working to integrate the whole backbone of all NRENs in the whole world to work as an integrated system that every scientist, educator in the world can have access to make things better for science and education in every country. So this, I think, is important to see how we can leverage that capacity. They are very hardworking people. They work on trust. They collaborate. And they do a lot of incredible things. So you could check out the website in the field where they publish a lot of things they do. And the accomplishments are there. So if you join efforts with those kind of organizations, I think it would be very helpful.

Yu Ping Chan: And again, I think that’s a good reminder. that we should be looking to where there are efforts and really these partnerships with local bodies and local organizations are already doing this good work. So thank you for that and that perspective on who we really need to be focusing on and at the local level as well. So I saw that Gitanjali and Rob both wanted to come back in on what they’ve heard so far. And I will also open it up to the other panelists as well. So Gitanjali first and Rob.

Gitanjali Sah: So Yuping, this discussion really takes me back to 2006 when I was working with UNDP and UNESCO at the grassroots level. And I think Olaf and Rob, you really remember how together as a passionate community, the Open South movement started after WSIS. It was so passionate on the ground. The indigenous is bringing indigenous languages and cultures to the digital world. The community radio stations. I mean, I don’t know if any of you were involved in that movement, but in 2006, Anirudh, you remember, you know, when we had started empowering the local villages to run their own community radio stations and to be empowered, you know? So really this whole digital ICT movement dates back to a lot of achievements, you know? So we’re talking about AI, new technologies right now, but think of the grassroots level work that we have all done together at this level. You know, it reminds me of the first offices in India which were converted into telecentres where the postman had the role of the trainer as a telecentre manager. You know, we should be having this accessibility. So you know, we used to balance twice a day because we had a lot of time and we didn’t eat. I’m sorry to interrupt again, but the sound is, again, very bad online. So this was in South Asia, you know? So this one also reminds you that, as Anirudh said, we have been working since 2000, you know, on the ground to make all of this possible. And this is why today we are talking about AI and new technologies and all of that, because a lot of work is going on. Because a lot of work has gone into it.

Yu Ping Chan: We are running out of time. So I’m going to ask the panellists to really be very short in their responses and to also ask if anyone online in the room has any, literally two sentences, comments or responses. So very quickly to the panellists, two sentences. Oh, now, okay. Everyone gets two sentences.

Robert Opp: I just wanted to respond quickly to the two comments made here that are extremely valid in terms of looking at rural areas across the country, local and the education system. You know, what I’m talking about, I kind of left it at the upper level, but in Kenya, in fact, we are now working on local district digital readiness assessments because we know that the disparities are out there. The education system in Africa, we have 13 countries with innovation offices into local universities because we also know that’s the source of a lot of the digital skilling and the kind of the pipeline of the future. And yes, and then we have lots of things around the world as well on extension to local spaces like Bangladesh has something in the order of 9,000 local digital services centres and things like that. So just to say, acknowledge excellent points and there’s a lot going on.

Yu Ping Chan: There’s a lot of two sentences. Hold up very quickly, two sentences. Points.

PANELIST: First, Henriette I assume made a good point. Don’t invent too many processes. Build on what you have. We have the idea. It’s solid. We need to tweak it. We need to grow and evolve it, but build on it. Second point, academic networks and brands have been part of the technical community since the dawn of the internet. We have been on the edge of that education So we’re working on this. And it’s really important for us to be able to do this. And it’s working. It’s working. It’s really important. Thank you.

Yu Ping Chan: Thank you. I just wanted to say, which I agree with. I think this is going on for years and years. And we’ve been going to some cheap meetings. And we’ve had some people who have been doing this for years. Thank you. Thank you.

Agreement Points

Importance of closing digital divides

speakers

Robert Opp

Cynthia Lesufi

Yu Ping Chan

Unknown speaker

arguments

Need to close all digital divides, including infrastructure and capacity

GDC offers a variety of opportunities to support digital transformation in countries from where we are sitting

Digital divides are intersectional and require collaborative response

summary

Multiple speakers emphasized the critical need to address various aspects of digital divides, including infrastructure, capacity, and access.

Significance of capacity building and skills development

speakers

Robert Opp

Margarita Gomez

Deniz Susar

arguments

Capacity building a key priority based on country requests

Need for digital literacy and skills development

GDC commits to prioritizing digital competencies for public officials

summary

Several speakers highlighted the importance of capacity building and skills development in various contexts, from general digital literacy to specific competencies for public officials.

Value of multi-stakeholder partnerships

speakers

Cynthia Lesufi

Margarita Gomez

Olaf Kolkman

Isabel De Sola

arguments

Importance of public-private partnerships for digital initiatives

Importance of partnerships and local innovation

Internet Society works through local chapters and partnerships

Potential for partnerships on content diversity and translation

summary

Multiple speakers emphasized the importance of partnerships involving various stakeholders, including government, private sector, NGOs, and local communities.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized the importance of building on existing processes and grassroots efforts rather than creating entirely new initiatives.

speakers

Anriette Esterhuysen

Gitanjali Sah

arguments

Need to merge GDC implementation with WSIS processes

Focus on grassroots implementation and community radio

Both speakers stressed the importance of focusing on marginalized communities and empowering them through education and skills development.

speakers

Unknown speaker

Alex Mora

arguments

Need to reach marginalized communities like pastoralists

Importance of education and empowering communities through skills

Unexpected Consensus

Integration of AI in development efforts

speakers

Robert Opp

Cynthia Lesufi

Isabel De Sola

arguments

Focus on building AI ecosystems and capacity

GDC reinforces WSIS principles with modern challenges

Potential for partnerships on content diversity and translation

explanation

There was an unexpected consensus on the importance of integrating AI into various aspects of digital development, from building ecosystems to addressing content diversity challenges.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement included the importance of closing digital divides, the need for capacity building and skills development, and the value of multi-stakeholder partnerships. There was also consensus on building on existing processes and focusing on marginalized communities.

Consensus level

The level of consensus among speakers was relatively high, particularly on broad principles and goals. This suggests a strong foundation for implementing the Global Digital Compact, but challenges may arise in the specifics of implementation and prioritization of resources.

Different Viewpoints

Approach to implementing the Global Digital Compact (GDC)

speakers

Anriette Esterhuysen

Cynthia Lesufi

arguments

Need to merge GDC implementation with WSIS processes

GDC reinforces WSIS principles with modern challenges

summary

Anriette Esterhuysen argues for integrating GDC implementation with existing WSIS processes, while Cynthia Lesufi sees the GDC as building upon and reinforcing WSIS principles to address modern challenges.

Unexpected Differences

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement revolve around the approach to implementing the Global Digital Compact and the specific priorities in addressing digital divides.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers is relatively low. Most speakers agree on the overall goals but differ in their emphasis on specific aspects or approaches. This suggests a general consensus on the importance of digital cooperation and development, with variations in implementation strategies based on different perspectives and experiences.

Partial Agreements

All speakers agree on the importance of addressing digital divides, but they emphasize different aspects: Robert Opp focuses on infrastructure and capacity, Margarita Gomez highlights digital literacy and skills, while the unknown speaker stresses the intersectional nature of digital divides.

speakers

Robert Opp

Margarita Gomez

Unknown speaker

arguments

Need to close all digital divides, including infrastructure and capacity

Need for digital literacy and skills development

Digital divides are intersectional and require collaborative response

Both speakers emphasize the importance of local partnerships and networks, but they focus on different types of organizations: Olaf Kolkman on Internet Society chapters, and Alex Mora on research and education networks.

speakers

Olaf Kolkman

Alex Mora

arguments

Internet Society works through local chapters and partnerships

Leverage research and education networks to connect schools

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized the importance of building on existing processes and grassroots efforts rather than creating entirely new initiatives.

speakers

Anriette Esterhuysen

Gitanjali Sah

arguments

Need to merge GDC implementation with WSIS processes

Focus on grassroots implementation and community radio

Both speakers stressed the importance of focusing on marginalized communities and empowering them through education and skills development.

speakers

Unknown speaker

Alex Mora

arguments

Need to reach marginalized communities like pastoralists

Importance of education and empowering communities through skills

Key Takeaways

The Global Digital Compact (GDC) aligns with and builds upon existing WSIS processes and UN agency work

Implementation of the GDC needs to focus on local and grassroots efforts, involving multi-stakeholder partnerships

Addressing digital divides remains a key priority, requiring a holistic and intersectional approach

Capacity building and skills development, especially in emerging technologies like AI, are crucial for digital transformation

There is a need to leverage existing networks and initiatives, particularly in research and education, to advance digital cooperation

Resolutions and Action Items

Integrate GDC follow-up and implementation with the WSIS Plus 20 review process

Develop KPIs to measure success in GDC implementation at the country level

Increase efforts to involve local NGOs and grassroots organizations in digital initiatives

Expand digital readiness assessments to local and rural areas

Strengthen collaboration between UN agencies on digital cooperation efforts

Unresolved Issues

How to effectively merge GDC implementation with existing WSIS processes without creating additional bureaucratic burdens

Specific strategies for addressing intersectional digital divides beyond infrastructure

Methods for ensuring meaningful participation of marginalized communities in digital transformation efforts

Balancing global frameworks with local needs and contexts in digital cooperation initiatives

Suggested Compromises

Update WSIS action lines to incorporate new emerging issues raised by the GDC

Leverage existing research and education networks to advance GDC objectives rather than creating new structures

Balance focus between high-level policy work and grassroots implementation efforts

Think global with the GDC, but really the action has to be local.

speaker

Olaf Kolkman

reason

This concisely captures a key tension in implementing global digital initiatives, emphasizing the importance of local context and action.

impact

It shifted the conversation to focus more on local implementation and partnerships, with subsequent speakers emphasizing bottom-up approaches and local innovations.

I want to hear that the WSIS plus 20 outcome will integrate GDC follow-up and implementation with the WSIS. And if there’s a need to update WSIS action lines, to merge them with some of the new emerging issues that the GDC raises, then ask WSIS to do that.

speaker

Anriette Esterhuysen

reason

This comment directly challenged the panel to address the practical integration of multiple global frameworks, highlighting potential redundancies and burdens on countries.

impact

It prompted more specific discussion about how to align and streamline global digital initiatives, particularly in relation to country-level implementation.

At this stage, we’re not just talking about digital divides. That is infrastructural part of it alone. But I think we should pay close attention to the digital policy divides, digital gender divides, digital rural and urban divides, digital age divides.

speaker

Nenna

reason

This comment expanded the conversation beyond basic infrastructure to highlight the multifaceted nature of digital divides, introducing more complexity to the discussion.

impact

It broadened the scope of the conversation about digital divides and prompted consideration of intersectional approaches to addressing these issues.

I miss a lot of the integration or collaboration involving organizations that are working on those in this area of research and education. For instance, in each country, there is some sort of research and education organization working to connect schools, universities, all sorts of educational, let’s say, facility.

speaker

Alex Mora

reason

This comment introduced a new perspective on leveraging existing educational networks and infrastructure, which had not been prominently discussed before.

impact

It sparked consideration of additional partnerships and resources that could be utilized in implementing digital initiatives, particularly in the education sector.

Overall Assessment

These key comments collectively shifted the discussion from broad, high-level principles to more specific, practical considerations for implementing digital initiatives. They emphasized the importance of local context, the need to streamline global frameworks, the complexity of digital divides, and the potential of leveraging existing networks. This resulted in a more nuanced and action-oriented conversation about realizing the goals of the Global Digital Compact.

How can the WSIS Plus 20 review process integrate GDC follow-up and implementation?

speaker

Anriette Esterhuysen

explanation

This is important to streamline processes and make implementation easier for countries, especially in Africa.

How can we advance international data governance principles through the GDC?

speaker

Isabel De Sola

explanation

This is a complex but crucial task that requires a multi-stakeholder approach and could benefit from IGF contributions.

How can we leverage partnerships with the private sector to increase diversity of online content and languages?

speaker

Isabel De Sola

explanation

This could help address the issue of limited language diversity in online content, building on WSIS goals and GDC principles.

How can we address the intersectionality of digital divides (policy, gender, rural/urban, age) in our response strategies?

speaker

Nnenna

explanation

This is crucial for developing comprehensive and effective solutions to digital inequalities.

How can we better involve and support local NGOs and grassroots organizations in implementing digital initiatives?

speaker

Julia Fosha

explanation

This is important for reaching marginalized communities and ensuring impact at the local level.

How can we integrate and collaborate more with research and education organizations in digital cooperation efforts?

speaker

Alex Mora

explanation

This could leverage existing networks and expertise to improve access to education and empower communities.

Summary

This discussion focused on the development and governance of interplanetary networks, particularly in the context of space exploration and communication. Vint Cerf introduced the history of interplanetary communications, dating back to 1964 with NASA’s Deep Space Network. He emphasized the importance of governance as space activities become increasingly commercialized.

Yosuke Kaneko discussed the concept of the interplanetary internet, highlighting key principles such as common protocols, open forums, and multi-stakeholder policymaking. He stressed the need to inherit good practices from terrestrial internet governance. Samuel Grasic explained Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) and its applications beyond space, including in remote terrestrial areas and underwater environments.

Professor Mohamed-Slim Alouini discussed terrestrial applications of DTN technology, such as providing non-real-time internet access to remote villages and underwater communication. The speakers emphasized that while interplanetary communication faces challenges like long delays, the technologies developed can benefit underserved areas on Earth.

The discussion touched on governance issues, including the need for a framework to manage collaborative efforts in space and address commercial interests. Vint Cerf highlighted the importance of considering existing space treaties and the need for new governance models as space activities expand.

Questions from the audience addressed topics such as equitable access to space technologies, human rights considerations, and international cooperation. The speakers emphasized the open nature of the interplanetary network architecture and invited participation from diverse stakeholders, including those from non-spacefaring nations.

Overall, the discussion underscored the importance of proactive governance planning for interplanetary networks and the potential for these technologies to benefit both space exploration and terrestrial applications.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– The origins and development of interplanetary networking and communication

– Technical challenges and solutions for interplanetary communication, like delay-tolerant networking (DTN)

– Terrestrial applications and benefits of technologies developed for space communication

– Governance considerations for interplanetary internet and commercialization of space

– Inclusivity and access issues related to interplanetary networking

Overall purpose:

The goal of this discussion was to introduce the concept of interplanetary internet to the Internet Governance Forum, explain its technical aspects and challenges, highlight potential terrestrial applications, and begin a dialogue on governance issues that will arise as space exploration and commercialization increase.

Tone:

The tone was primarily informative and educational, with speakers providing background and technical details in an accessible way. There was also an underlying tone of excitement about the possibilities of interplanetary networking. During the Q&A, the tone became more interactive and collaborative, with speakers encouraging participation and emphasizing the need for multi-stakeholder involvement in shaping the future of interplanetary internet governance.

Speakers

– Roberto Gaetano: Session moderator

– Vint Cerf: Internet pioneer, involved in interplanetary networking project

– Yosuke Kaneko: Chair of the IPN SIG (Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group)

– Samo Grasic: Lead of the pilot project working group of Interplanetary Special Network Internet Group

– Mohamed-Slim Alouini: Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), UNESCO Chair focusing on connecting the unconnected

Additional speakers:

– Filipe Santos: Software developer from Brazilian Internet Steering Committee

– Aouke: Works for KPMG in the Netherlands

– Kanbaro Sainbro: From the United Kingdom Foreign Ministry

– Alan Veloso: International cooperation advisor for the Brazilian Space Agency

– Kunle Olorundare: President of Internet Society in Nigeria, member of special interest group in Internet Society

Revised Summary of Interplanetary Networks Discussion

Introduction:

This Internet Governance Forum (IGF) session, moderated by Roberto Gaetano, focused on the development and governance of interplanetary networks. Experts discussed technical challenges, governance issues, and potential terrestrial applications of space communication technologies.

1. Origins and Development of Interplanetary Networking:

Vint Cerf, an Internet pioneer, introduced the history of interplanetary communications, dating back to NASA’s Deep Space Network in 1964. He emphasized the importance of governance as space activities become increasingly commercialized, highlighting the need to consider existing space treaties and develop new governance models.

Yosuke Kaneko, Chair of the Interplanetary Networking Special Interest Group (IPN SIG), discussed the concept of the interplanetary internet. He highlighted key principles such as common protocols, open forums, and multi-stakeholder policymaking. Kaneko also mentioned a recent WRC resolution on lunar frequencies, indicating progress in interplanetary communication regulations.

2. Technical Challenges and Solutions:

Samo Grasic, lead of the pilot project working group of the Interplanetary Special Network Internet Group, explained Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) and its applications. DTN addresses challenges in deep space communication, such as long delays and disruptions, and has potential applications in various terrestrial and underwater scenarios.

Professor Mohamed Slim Alouini from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, who holds a UNESCO Chair focusing on connecting the unconnected, discussed energy efficiency and wake-up receiver technologies for remote sensors. He also suggested the use of free space optics as a potential solution for spectrum scarcity in interplanetary communication.

3. Terrestrial Applications and Benefits:

The speakers highlighted the potential for interplanetary network technologies to address terrestrial development challenges. Specific examples include:

– Providing non-real-time internet access to remote villages

– Underwater communication

– Supporting sensor networks in remote areas

– A reindeer herder project utilizing DTN technology, as mentioned by Samo Grasič

These applications demonstrate how technologies developed for space communication can benefit underserved areas on Earth and explore remote terrestrial regions.

4. Governance Considerations:

The discussion touched on several governance issues, including:

– The need for a framework to manage collaborative efforts in space

– Addressing commercial interests in the context of the Outer Space Treaty

– Adopting governance models and technical standards similar to those used in the terrestrial Internet

– The importance of multi-stakeholder governance and open standards for interoperability

Yosuke Kaneko mentioned COPUOS (Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space) as a forum for non-spacefaring nations to participate in discussions about space governance.

Vint Cerf noted the limited capacity of deep space communication resources, suggesting potential constraints on access that will need to be addressed in future governance frameworks.

5. Pilot Projects and Participation:

Samo Grasic discussed the pilot project working group and encouraged participation from interested individuals. He mentioned that people can get involved by joining the IPN SIG and participating in their mailing lists and meetings. The ipnsig.org website was cited as a resource for learning about DTN and interplanetary networking.

Conclusion:

The discussion underscored the importance of proactive governance planning for interplanetary networks and the potential for these technologies to benefit both space exploration and terrestrial applications. Key takeaways included the need for multi-stakeholder governance models, the potential of DTN technology for connecting remote areas, and the importance of addressing technical challenges in deep space communication.

Unresolved issues include developing legal and regulatory frameworks for space commercialization and allocating limited deep space network resources. The speakers encouraged continued development of DTN and bundle protocols through collaborative efforts and invited participation from diverse stakeholders in shaping the future of interplanetary internet governance.

Roberto Gaetano: I didn’t think that we needed, but apparently, we start thinking, well we’re ready here online. So good afternoon. As often with the first session in the split rooms, we have some details to fix. I hope I can, I hope everybody can hear me, remotely I mean. Can we start? Okay. So this is the section. Can I take your? Hello? We can hear you. Go ahead, Roberto. It’s been served. Okay. I see that now you can hear me. I was apologizing for the delay. This is the first session in the split rooms, and we had some setup problems. We will be talking about the interplanetary networks and having a focus on the internet governance. The first speaker is Vint Cerf, that doesn’t need an introduction. He will talk about the origin of the project, why the interplanetary networks are important, and what were the whereabouts that brought to the start of this project. Vint, you have the floor.

Vint Cerf: Thank you so much, Roberto, and good afternoon, everyone. I’m speaking to you from Washington, D.C., in my basement office. It’s a pleasure to join you. I just wish I could be there in person. Let me just give you a brief history of this project. Interplanetary communications began in 1964 when the Deep Space Network was built by NASA with the intent that these large 70-meter antennas be used to communicate with spacecraft that could go anywhere in the solar system and perhaps even beyond. As some of you know, there are two spacecraft that are well outside of the solar system now, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. The space program continued. Landings on the moon happened and so on. By 1997, the project successfully landed a small rover on Mars, the so-called Sojourner. There had been another successful landing in 1976 of two Viking spacecraft, and then for 20 years, nothing worked. It was very exciting to see the Sojourner land successfully on Mars, and I was so excited about it, I flew out to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to meet with the team that was handling communications for the 1997 Sojourner mission. And at this point, several of us began speculating about what we should be doing that we are going to need 25 years later, and we concluded that we should start on the design and implementation of a solar system internet. And so that project has been going on. In the 2010s, the project expanded outside of NASA and included the Japanese space agency JAXA, the Korean space agency KARI, and the European space agency ESA. And since that time, during the 10s and 2020s, the four space agencies have been collaborating together with the Consultative Committee on Space Data Systems. Their primary focus of attention has been on the design of a new suite of protocols called the Bundle Protocols to overcome some of the challenges of deep space operation. We’ll hear considerably more about that. The reason I wanted to take this moment for a preamble is also to say that the reason that we’re at the Internet Governance Forum is because governance has become a very critical part of the project. As we look towards commercialization, and many of you are well aware that there are commercial companies, SpaceX, for example, and Intuitive Machines, just to name two, that are actively pursuing activities in space. And in particular, NASA has offered to purchase habitats and the like, and even to buy the product of mining on the moon. And it’s the consequence of commercialization which leads us to the importance of governance. And so the point of this session, in part, is to bring you up to speed on where we are technically, and also the demands that we now foresee for governance as a consequence of commercialization. So, that concludes my little preamble. Let’s move on to the next speaker.

Roberto Gaetano: I can’t hear. Channel three. Yeah. But it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Vint, for your introduction. And now I’ll give the floor to Kaneko Yusuke, who is the chair of the IPN SIG, and who will talk about the activities of the IPN SIG and how the work proceeds. Kaneko, you have the floor. Okay.

Yosuke Kaneko: Good afternoon, everyone. And I am sitting in Washington, D.C., as well. And I hope I had joined you in Riyadh, but unfortunately, I’ll be connecting remotely today. But it’s a pleasure to be here. And good afternoon, everyone, to whomever made it to this session. So, as Vint just set the floor, I want to briefly kind of address the concept of the interplanetary internet a bit more in detail. For some of you, this might sound like science fiction, but this kind of interplanetary internet has been around for quite some time, as just Vint mentioned. And many of the space agencies around the world have been putting a tremendous effort into turning this concept into reality. And today, we stand on the cusp of an exciting reentry into space exploration again. We’re heading back to the moon, more than 25 years after the first inception of the interplanetary internet concept. And over 50 years since it first landed humans on the moon. And that was back in 1969. And this time, for our next visit to the moon, we are going with international partnership and along with the industry. And this is absolutely the way the interplanetary internet will also be built. And it will advance with the private sector’s involvement from its early stages of development. And we really want to realize a common and open and shared network infrastructure, even in interplanetary space. So, next slide, please. So, one of the examples toward this endeavor, which is an acronym of lunar internet, which is a collaborative architecture and framework to provide communication and also positioning and navigation services for activities on the lunar surface. So, the lunar net will essentially become the foundational infrastructure for us to communicate with the astronauts. and the moon and the infrastructure that we deploy on the lunar surface. And what’s fascinating is that the development is actually moving forward along with the industry, specifically with the recently selected intuitive machines toward this endeavor. Slide please. So in order to build this interplanetary internet in space, we kind of asked ourselves, what are the key governance principles that we need to pay attention to? And what are the lessons we can learn from history of the internet and the evolution of internet governance? The general approach we sought about was to inherit the good lessons and the good DNA that has matured over the long history of the internet to the model of the interplanetary internet. And so next slide please. So our dynamic coalition came up with several key principles that might inform the future of the interplanetary internet. And I would have very familiar language in here, such as having a common way of doing things. We know we need technical approaches like communication protocols and standards to realize interplanetary networking, similar to how TCPIP became the global standard for every transmission on this planet. And open forums, such as the mechanisms we have at the IETF will become a real critical enabler to refine the networking technology. And the hierarchical management, a way in which we manage identifiers like IP addresses and domain names in the internet will also become an important aspect in space networking architectures. And of course, the multi-stakeholder policymaking process, which is probably the most important part that I want to emphasize today is a unique governance model, which is at the heart of internet governance. And to me, this made the internet so successful and sustainable as we know it today. So we consider this as a critical DNA that we want to inherit from the internet toward the longevity and the sustainability of this network infrastructure in space. Next slide, please. So regarding, talking a little bit about the technical aspects, when we’re talking about interplanetary communication, there are two major problems that needs to be solved. Problem number one is that the speed of light is too slow. It takes 20 minutes to send a signal to Mars and another 20 minutes to get a reply back. So you need to compensate somehow with these high delays. And then the second problem is planetary motion. The earth and the moon and the planets always move around. So sometimes we call this orbital mechanics, and that means that a spacecraft can easily hide behind a planet and your communication can be easily disrupted. So TCPIP doesn’t work very well in these scenarios. So these issues needs to be addressed technically. And there’s a technology called the DTN and the bundled particle that Vint just mentioned is one of the particle suites that actually implements this networking technology. And I think you will hear more from my next speaker Samuel on the developments on DTN. And I think I have one more chart and that should be the last. Yes, and I just want to draw your attention to the governance report that we have published last year, which really gives more details in our thinking process and recommendations on how to approach governance in the interplanetary internet. And you can also find a postcard of our dynamic coalition if you go to our booth at the venue. So don’t miss that out as well. And I think I’ll stop here and turn it over to Roberto. Thank you.

Roberto Gaetano: Thank you, Kaneko, also for making my task easier because now Samuel doesn’t need to have any introduction. He will bring us back to earth and explain why people should care about this. And this is not so abstract and far away how it looks. Samuel, you have the floor. Thank you, Roberto. And welcome everyone.

Samo Grasic: Okay, so, yeah, my name is Samuel Graszczyk and I’m currently the lead of the pilot project working group of Interplanetary Special Network Internet Group. And I tell you a bit my slides actually because, I mean, after my experience that I got from the booth, because quite often people are asking, this is, you know, very futuristic. It’s kind of we’re looking really far in the future. Why does this concern me? So I will try to maybe very briefly address this question by maybe just explaining DTN protocol is and what can it do. So I think one of the very important aspect that sometimes I think it’s a bit overlooked when we talk about DTN as a building block for the interplanetary internet, is actually the aspect that this is an overlay protocol, which means that in this case, I would like to illustrate, for instance, we can actually run DTN bundle protocol over today’s internet. We can just use regular links as we do it right now. We can actually, yeah, we can use it for the high speed, high bandwidth links, optical links. So it’s actually quite universal. Of course, we can use it as well for the deep space where we have quite limited resources or limited bandwidth, really high delays, a lot of disruptions. It can handle deep space because it was, yeah, initially designed for. And then I would like to move to a bit more unconventional, maybe links and ways of communication that is there down with a snowmobile and antenna attached to the snowmobile. So this is actually from the project that I work where we actually use the LoRa, not LoRaWAN, but LoRa radio links for a really kind of a long distances, to cover really long distances in northern Sweden where we basically drag the entire network in a very nomadic fashion so people can move this network. And yeah, so this population of Sami reindeer herders has actually adopted the DTN technology and they can actually benefit from it already today. So they can actually track the reindeer and exchange messages with each other, even in areas where they don’t have conventional internet technology. I would like to then go a bit further back in time. The other project we work with actually, with the same population, we actually use the helicopter as a data mule. So we had that kind of small devices. Helicopters were actually flying in and out to these really remote villages that are still today not covered with the conventional internet. And people were able to send messages. Very delayed, it was actually literally maybe six to seven hours of delay for every message we sent, but it’s better than nothing. And then I would kind of like to finish maybe with two maybe a bit more obscure, kind of a transfer of data, for instance, having the USB stick and carry it around or having the large storage devices, it’s actually amazing how much we can actually do. If you put a hard drive, put it on a plane and fly it to another part of the world. So it’s actually a really high bandwidth option. And yeah, DTM bundle protocol can actually handle that. And the last one is just for illustrative purposes. I think we can use DTM over the smoke signal. So we can go back in time. We can actually apply it in action and thinking about developing a smoke modulator that would actually allow us to illustrate that DTM bundle protocol could handle that. And then why is this important? Why is this overlay characteristic so important? So on the top of this slide, you can actually see some of the potential users of this technology. And of course, space industry is one of the first one that comes to mind. As was already mentioned before, mining, it’s surely something that’s gonna be probably actual really soon. And I think this is, I think, a point in time where actually there’s a lot of commercialization happening in space and surely this will be very actual. I mentioned previously this remote areas and all the people that can actually benefit from this. Logistic is one of these. And lastly, maybe for instance, There are a photo of a scientist collecting the data from the probe. So I think, and this is where I think in my personal opinion, I mean, magic happens when it comes to DTN, because we can really seamlessly actually connect any of these users together. So that means, for instance, you know, if you’re a scientist collecting data from the boy somewhere using the USB stick and carrying it, if you apply a bundle protocol, you can actually use it, and for instance, you know, to collect the data from the deep space probe. So in some software that you’re using to collect the data for one thing, you can actually use it from that. So, and if you envision, for instance, you know, how the mining industry might move to the space, as we get more and more commercial actors into it, they will probably not be skilled in deep space communication, and applying DTN for their services already today, they can use them, they can harden them, and then in future, when the time will come, they can actually simply apply this technology in space applications. So this is kind of a brief to how I want benefits of DTN from another perspective. And my next slide is about the pilot project working group, what we do there, how we can join and things like that. So one of the main objective of the pilot project working group is to actually build operational DTN network, actual machines, actual protocols, and actually spread it globally. And it’s actually quite an interesting exercise. It’s actually brought, it actually brings in many issues that maybe was not really kind of seen or foreseen at the beginning, but, you know, it brings different issues from technical, you know, we need to adopt, we need to change the protocols sometimes, or get new mechanisms to, for instance, to get the neighbor discovery, to mitigate some of the bad kind of practices maybe from the building the internet. So we are currently in a stage where we’re kind of, we’re building the kind of second generation of our operational network where we kind of adopt it a bit and develop more mechanisms. And we do kind of cover, I mean, the entire globe, so we kind of encircle it. Just I see some colleagues here, like there is no Saudi, but I think it’s going to appear next week as we will discuss. So and yeah, I mean, all this kind of practice actually came, I mean, forced us to actually develop certain, or actually push some of even the governance issues. For instance, you know, right now we are actually trying to get the IPN, so it’s actually every node in the NTIA network gets its own identifier, and it’s kind of quite analogous to the IP address, but here it’s actually called IPN, so it’s, and for instance, to allocate those, there is a process, because before it was kind of flat space, now we’re trying to find, you know, how we will actually distribute these IPN numbers, and for that we will need to set up administrative authorities, so there’s really a certain governmental issue that needs to be addressed. In the group, actually, if you join the group, you can actually get the free IPN, this number, so if you would want to join, we’re developing, we’re actually adding some services as well to it, so we’re trying different services, adopt the internet services that we know from today, from the internet, and make them compatible so they can actually run more of the DTN. Some of the best projects were, so I mean, this project I mentioned before with the Raining Hearse, there were sensor networks that we’re developing, so DTN has quite a big potential, at least in my personal opinion, in the sensor networks, and especially low power applications, because you don’t need to be online, or you don’t need to have the radius on all the time, if you synchronize this, you can greatly reduce the power consumption. And the main, and the most kind of, the biggest thing, I think, in this group is actually, we’re having regular meetings every, maybe once, twice per month, and I would really kindly like to invite you all to partake in these meetings, especially if you’re more interested in technologies, so, and this group of people that we’re kind of having right now, it’s actually, they’re coming from space industry, from academia, from many different varieties, I mean, different backgrounds, so it’s a really nice environment if you actually want to be kind of introduced to the delay touring networks. So with this, I will hand back the microphone to Alberto, thank you. And that is a physical handing over. The last speaker of this session is Professor Mohamed Slim Maluini, from KAUST, the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, that is located here in Saudi Arabia, close to Jeddah, and he will talk a little bit about the projects in the university, and some terrestrial applications, mostly focusing on terrestrial applications.

Mohamed Slim Alouini: Thank you, Roberto. Indeed, I think I’m benefiting here from a very nice introduction made by Vin, by Kaneko, and by Samu, I am, as Roberto mentioned, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST, and I hold UNESCO Chair, focusing on connecting the unconnected. So now you may ask yourself, how does this relate to this session and to interplanetary communication? The fact is, as Samu explained, when you talk about interplanetary communication, just because of the very basic law of physics, you have to deal with delay. The example he gave is an excellent example. Even if you go for light communication, the fastest possible way to communicate, you need 20 minutes to reach Mars, another 20 minutes to get back the signal. So you have to have a 40-minute delay. And the current terrestrial developed networking protocols essentially has to be modified, adapted, upgraded to be able to deal with this delay. Now, how can we take advantage of this, you know, technologies that have been developed for this interplanetary science for terrestrial applications? It can be useful, actually, for very basic problems that we deal with in the Earth to connect some of the unconnected villages. So assuming you have a remote village, a hard-to-reach area, where basically real-time connectivity is not possible, because we don’t have enough funding to have a satellite link, we don’t have a microwave link. Now, can we still have a light version of Internet, a non-real-time version of the Internet? And the solution is yes. One of my PhD students sitting here, Salah, has worked, for example, on how to develop non-real-time, they are called the digital education library. So you can think of schools in these villages who have, let’s say, maybe some of you know about Khan Academy. So Khan Academy, you can download it. You can install it in the village. But of course, Khan Academy is updated on a daily basis. The village may not be updating this database on a daily basis, but can take advantage of like Simon mentioned, some form of transportation system. It can be buses. It can be helicopters. If you are on an island, it can be the ships that visit the island every now and then. And updates of the local network can be done through these mules visiting the island. And here we are using delay-tolerant networking protocols and paradigm to basically make sure that we are getting your local Internet, in this case focusing on education as an example, to basically give access to people in non-real-time. And you see here the synergy for how DTN paradigm that has been already deployed for or developed for integrated science can be used for very basic needs to connect. A second example, and when we talk about connected and unconnected, we are not talking only about connecting people. We are also talking about connecting all kinds of IoT device. Now, in many cases, you don’t have the infrastructure, again, to collect information in real time. It is costly. It’s complex. So let’s assume you are trying to monitor a particular environment for prediction of, let’s say, natural disasters. So you want to throw some IoT device in these hard-to-reach areas, and you need to capitalize on some kind of maybe network from the sky, a CubeSat that basically comes on a periodic fashion. So basically, you have a very small fraction of time where you have visibility or access to this IoT device, and essentially, you will be able to pick that information and update that information. Not real-time information will be obtained, but in many applications, it’s not absolutely needed to be able to collect data and predict events. Now, the third and last example I would like to share with you, and that’s a very nice complement to this session, which is focusing on interoperability science. is the underwater world. So you probably know that Earth is covered 70%, at least 70%. I think 73% of Earth is covered by water. And believe it or not, and the first time I heard about this, I was quite surprised. I was told less than 10% of the underwater world has been discovered. So there is a lot of engineering that has to be done to learn about this underwater world. And of course, communication, underwater communication, is a big part of discovering the underwater world. And here we have, again, physics that comes into play. Why physics? Because actually, to communicate underwater is quite challenging. There are two approaches. There is the optical approach, which is very limited. We are talking about a few hundred meters. High speed, relatively speaking, but only a few hundred meters that basically the range you can get with an optical lens. Or you can use acoustic. Acoustic communication can give you a bigger range. But we are talking only about a few hundred to a couple of thousand meters of range. That’s all. So when you are trying to discover this huge ocean, essentially, you will have to rely also, in many cases, especially for exploration and environment monitoring, to embed in the environment some basically sensors, some actuators, and to visit these sensors through AUVs, through ROVs, through basically underwater submarines, and collect and receive information using delayed torrent network parallel. So that’s another example where DTN, again, can be applied. And just to finalize my kind of intervention here, what are the other related technologies? Often, when you talk about delayed torrent networking and connecting this kind of remote IoT device, energy efficiency is a critical aspect. So sometimes you can have access to solar panel if you are above water, for example, for terrestrial application. And that can be your source of energy. But nonetheless, you may want to be even more energy efficient. So one technology that is very popular in this context is wake-up receiver. So wake-up receiver is when you throw IoT device or sensors in the middle of nowhere, and you want to be in a sleep mode. Essentially, most of the time, they will just collect information on a schedule. And then when the event of communication happens, you have to wake them up, and basically through an acoustic modem that’s underwater, an optical that is underwater, or RF that’s above water, or optical also above water, and then basically wake them up. Sometimes charge them. You can use a laser source or an RF source to charge that device and collect the information that has been basically gathered over weeks or even months if you are visiting that location in a very rare fashion. So DTN is an excellent point. We are borrowing that from the basically entrepreneurial world, but also wireless power transfer and wake-up receiver is another very important technologies in this context. Thank you.

Roberto Gaetano: Thank you, Professor Slim. Before giving the floor for questions, there are two considerations that I would like to make. The first one is it seems that when we are thinking about the Internet world, all what we are doing is to get bigger throughput, faster speed, everything in an instant mode where we are continuously connected, continuously online. And we are probably losing sight of the benefit of using technologies that don’t give instant response and don’t give those big throughputs, but that can better serve specific situations or remote populations that live in underserved areas, solve specific problems that cannot be solved via a bidirectional, immediate connection. And I think that this field has not been explored enough and I would welcome further research in this area and not just in the mainstream Internet. And this is, by the way, what universities like KAUST are doing, what groups are working on. And so that’s the first consideration. The second one is you might wonder, since we are here in the IGF and the IGF is basically about Internet governance, how all this relates to Internet governance. The question is, if I can make a quick parallel between the development of what is now the traditional Internet and these new technologies, is that in the beginning, the Internet was also developed by scientists and was regarding only some niche situation. And then all of a sudden, the commercial importance of the Internet came up and all of a sudden, we sort of woke up and we realized that the governance model for bringing together different interests and develop a framework where every stakeholder has the possibility to present their positions and their needs. And I fear that the same is going to happen with satellite communication, interplanetary network, there’s a lot of satellites, already of commercial interest. And I wonder if in discussing a future asset also in terms of governance of this environment, there are some stakeholder groups that are maybe missing because they will be late in realizing that they have still an interest in how things go. I’m thinking about Internet users that will be the last to realize that they have to do something in order to get into the governance of satellite communication or for other aspects. So this is why we are bringing these themes to the attention of the Internet governance bodies. And that’s why we are here at the IGF to try to start thinking about these things before it’s too late and before having to catch up in a hurry. And I see a hand up from Vint Cerf. And Vint, you have the floor. Thank you very much for that last point, Roberto, about why are we at the IGF. I wanted to reinforce your observation.

Vint Cerf: Also, I wanted to mention that Slim mentioned the use of DTN underwater. We have done some tests probably more than a decade ago using acoustic communications underwater and the DTN protocols, just for your information. The reason that we’re at IGF is because we expect the interplanetary network to be built by multiple parties in the same way that the terrestrial Internet is built by multiple parties. And we have to manage and govern that collaborative effort. It will be similarly needed in the deep space efforts. The other thing which I think is very important is that the commercialization of space exploration and habitation and space use creates an interesting challenge. Those of you who are aware will know that there is an outer space treaty in 1967 which said no one is allowed to own anything off of the Earth. There’s no place to register a mine on the moon, for example. You can own the equipment that you place on the moon, but you’re not allowed to own the property. My guess is that that will become somewhat difficult. And at some point, we’re going to have to be speaking question of ownership and commercialization. The question then will be, where do you register any ownership? How do you resolve disputes? what’s the jurisdiction in which those disputes get resolved. We don’t have good answers to that, but we think the IGF is a good place to raise the questions because that’s where multi-stakeholder deliberations take place. And the internet gives us at least some guidance and experience in solving those problems. So we expect to be a regular feature of the IGF as the rest of the years unfold. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vint, for this contribution. And I surely think that we may, for instance, try to get at least UN or USA involved in the discussion for this question that are also legal on the outer space. Now, may I ask if there are questions from the floor? Kaneko has his hand up, by the way.

Roberto Gaetano: Sorry, I don’t have a turn of the screen. Sorry, Kaneko. So you are the first in line, and then I have other contributions from the floor.

Yosuke Kaneko: Yes, I just wanted to kind of supplement on what Vint just said. And we do have the Outer Space Treaty. It was inaugurated in 1967. What it basically addresses is that all space activities are nation states’ activity, even though it is a private sector’s activity. So that is the current space regime that we live today. But as I mentioned, the lunar surface would become a hodgepodge of multiple stakeholders’ activity. So in the end, we’re just talking about interplanetary internet for now. But I would just urge everyone to think about that the actual lunar surface venue will become a multi-stakeholder activity venue in itself. So the interplanetary internet is just one of the aspects that we are looking at right now. So just want to make a brief comment on that. Thank you, Kaneko. I see we have two questions from the floor. Good afternoon.

Audience: My name is Filipe Santos. I’m here with the Brazilian new program from the Brazilian Internet Stealing Committee, GIDM.

Yosuke Kaneko: And I’m also a software developer.

Audience: And I have been following discussions of internet governance for some time. I had the privilege in attending IGF 2022, where several important topics about digital governance, inclusion, and Swiss and Mili were discussed. Building on those discussions, I would like to bring up some points to connect them with this exciting topic of free interplanetary internet governance. In 2002, a strong focus was placed on addressing digital divides on Earth. Ensure that connectivity reaches undeserving regions. How can apply those lessons to development of interplanetary internet to ensure that its infrastructures and benefits are equitably shared not just among the space-faring nations, but for the collective advancement of humanity?

Vint Cerf: Thank you. Thank you for the question. I think that probably Vint or Kaneko will answer that. Yeah. Go ahead. It’s Vint. Kaneko probably has some answers as well. First of all, the reason that we’re doing this network is first, very pragmatic. We need it in order to run the various spacecraft to gather data back from them and to send commands, but also to link habitats and laboratories on the moon and Mars and possibly the asteroids in the future. So we need that communication system. But we also are doing it in the same spirit as the original internet design, which was intended to be very collaborative. And remember that the information that’s gathered through the Deep Space Network can be made available to everyone on planet Earth on the planet Earth by means of its terrestrial internet. So the theory behind all this is to network everything and provide equal access to shareable information for everyone who could use it. So I’m glad that you brought it up. I think our general view is that the information gathered from space exploration should be available both for scientific reasons and increasingly for commercial reasons. I will say, however, that deep space communication is expensive. It’s not nearly as richly outfitted as the terrestrial internet. And so it may be that there have to be constraints on who has access to the deep space component of the interplanetary internet. I think we’re not ready for 8.2 billion people sending their cat pictures through to Mars, for example. So there will probably be a limited patient who has access directly to the deep space network or the interplanetary network.

Yosuke Kaneko: But its results should be broadly available terrestrially. Kaneko, maybe you have some more elaboration on that. Yes, Kaneko, if you have something to add, may I ask questions and answers to be sure that I have four other people queuing up for questions. OK, I’ll make it quick then. So basically, I completely agree with the comment. There’s going to be these discussions on digital governance in the interplanetary internet. Learn from these histories from back in 2002. And commonality of the infrastructure and equitable access, I think these are really key principles that we need to pursue for the interplanetary internet. And as far as how we can bring the non-spacing space-faring nations into this endeavor is that we have various forums in space. Like the COPIUS is one of them, like the United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, where the nation states show up and talk about policies and rulemaking and information sharing. So these could be one of the venues that the non-spacing-faring countries can join. And actually, information can be exchanged and can have access to these common infrastructures. So I think these are steps that we can take for now, as of now. And I think we should advance that in the future. Aouke, you have the floor. Thank you very much.

Audience: Yes, my name is Aouke. I was working for KPMG in the Netherlands. I do really understand the need for a governance of the interplanetary internet. While we’ve seen it in the past, and for sure, we must have a debate about that. However, what I have more difficulty with understanding is how can we make the delay from 40 minutes to a fraction? Is that a possibility? Or is one we have to deal with that? Because I’m a quite impatient person. And I don’t want to wait 40 minutes for my cat’s picture to be sent into space. No, thanks. It’s Vint. You can see Kaneko and I are both laughing.

Vint Cerf: Unfortunately, Dr. Einstein has pretty much prevented us from solving the problem you pose. The speed of light is finite. And as far as we know, we don’t know how to make photons run faster than the speed of light. The consequence of this is that the delay is inescapable. And before you decide that entangled photons will solve the problem, let me tell you that that doesn’t work either. Despite the fact that entanglement may be distance independent, you can’t use that for communication. You can only get correlation out of it. So I’m terribly sorry to tell you that we can’t solve your problem with today’s physics. So can we go to the next question? If you can come here, then you can use one of our microphones.

Audience: Hello. Thank you so much. Excellent presentation. I’m Kanbaro Sainbro from the United Kingdom Foreign Ministry. This is quite new to me, so I’m just soaking it all up. But I’m just wondering what’s on to account the human rights elements of. the sort of future interplanetary internet. Is that something which you think is relevant at this stage? If so, what are the key considerations which you need the multi-stakeholder community to help you on? Thank you. Maybe I can say a word on this. Yes, this is the main reason why we would like to bring this to the attention of the Internet Governance Forum and to the other internet governance organizations so that we can have a debate on this and make sure that the human rights are taken care in the development of a policy. Thank you for the question. Is there any,

Vint Cerf: Will, do you want to take this question as well? Yes, I would. Thank you. Just very briefly, keep in mind that the architecture of the interplanetary network is intentionally open. It’s designed to allow multiple parties to participate, to implement and share resources. However, I want to emphasize that the resources of the deep space network or the interplanetary network will probably be quite limited, at least in the early days. So we have to be very careful not to accidentally assume that human rights means everyone on the planet has access to and the use of, direct use of these assets. Instead, I think we have to make sure that they have access to that is carried to earth through the deep space network, but not necessarily everyone will have direct access to it because of its limited capacity.

Audience: Very short comment from my side as well. It’s like, I think what’s good maybe with the internet, I mean, or interplanetary architectures that by the definition, it’s kind of a distribute. It’s going to be probably very hard to centralize in a way that we centralize internet today. So that’s just, I think one interesting aspect to look into, so. Thank you. Two more questions. And let’s be sure that, I would like to raise them. Okay. Hello everyone. My name is Alan Veloso. I actually work for the Brazilian Space Agency. I’m an international cooperation advisor there. And I’m also part of the youth program from Brazil, from the Brazilian Internet Community. My question would be, actually, it has already been addressed about how do we get other nations to this project? Because if you count, there are only a handful of nations that owns the capacity to develop this project and to participate. So I would like to, if possible, to elaborate more on that, but bringing the international cooperation as a principle to this project, to the five principles that you mentioned before. And also I have a question that maybe it’s more technical related to the sustainability, because we know that some, I think that radio frequencies are a limited resource. So I don’t know if there are some key considerations

Roberto Gaetano: that we must acknowledge on this project while addressing the interplanetary internet. Thank you. Who takes this short question? It’s been, just very quickly.

Vint Cerf: The network is intentionally designed so that multiple parties can implement and operate it. I would also point out to you that the consultative committee on space data systems, unless I’ve missed my guess, is open to partition, even by countries that don’t necessarily already have lift capacity. The other reason that this is getting better is that lift capacity is now commercially available through SpaceX and others. And the consequence of that is that countries that normally would not have space capability now have the potential for participating, either by directly accessing lift capacity from companies like SpaceX and others, or by collaborating with others in order to share that capacity. So between that and the notion of a deep space network, it feels to me like countries that don’t currently have space capability have an opportunity to participate. Regarding your second question about sustainability

Audience: and scarcity of spectrum, indeed, the RF spectrum is more and more scarce, but typically for interplanetary communication, to my best knowledge, what we can go for is free space optics. So basically we’ll be using the optical band of the spectrum, which is plenty of steel, at least of available wavelength and spectrum to use. So I don’t think we have a problem from that perspective for interplanetary communication. Thank you, Slim. Next question. Conoco has to stand up.

Yosuke Kaneko: Yeah, briefly. Just briefly. Just briefly, yeah. Just briefly, I just want to add that on the capacity building part. Please come to ipnsig.org. We have a full repository of how DTN works and what the interplanetary network is, and it’s all free for use. So I think that this is a good source for people to join this endeavor. And regarding the lunar frequency that you’ve just mentioned, there was a resolution at the WRC last year to assess the lunar frequencies. And I think this is going to be a top of the agenda for the upcoming WRC in 27. So just a quick note on that. Thank you, Conoco. So next question. Hello. Okay, thank you very much. All right, thank you very much for that wonderful presentation.

Audience: My name is Kunle Olorundari from Nigeria. I’m a member of a special interest group in the internet society space, so to say. At the same time, I’m the president of Internet Society in Nigeria. And I’ve been following this discussion, this conversation even before now. And I’m happy that we are discussing this even at the level of Internet Governance Forum because I think it’s one of those things that we need to really take a deep look at. And also, I’m happy that the last speaker mentioned the issue of lunar frequency because it’s one of those issues that we’re looking at at WRC, by the way. I’m a member of the 7C agenda, so to say. So my question is this, because I’m so much excited about this discussion and I think probably there may be a way in which some of us will be able to contribute to the pilot projects working group. So I want to find out, if I want to join the pilot project working group, is this something that one can come on board for? Thank you very much.

Roberto Gaetano: Yep, we are- The chairman of the group, I’m sorry, it’s Vin. The chairman of the group is Sam Aoun, so you need to talk to him. Okay, maybe if you can take the answer offline because we are out of question. I will, there are also some cards explanatory of what is our activity that they are in the booth of the dynamic coalitions. We don’t have time for wrap up, so we just- Very quickly, so if you go into the ipnseek.org page and check the project working group, I mean, you can just join in, you can actually partake, it’s open, it’s free. So we welcome everyone, especially, I mean, people interested in the space that would like to get their hands dirty with this technology, so welcome. Thank you, thank you all for coming. We had an almost full room, so thank you for coming and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Well done, Kaneko and Sam Aoun and Roberto and Slim. Thank you so much. See you on the next one. See you. It’s already taken. I know.

Agreement Points

Need for multi-stakeholder governance model

Vint Cerf

Yosuke Kaneko

Roberto Gaetano

Need for multi-stakeholder governance model similar to terrestrial Internet

Importance of open standards and protocols for interoperability

Potential for connecting underserved populations on Earth

The speakers agreed on the importance of adopting a multi-stakeholder governance model for the interplanetary internet, similar to the terrestrial Internet, emphasizing open standards and inclusive development.

Technical challenges and solutions for deep space communication

Yosuke Kaneko

Samo Grasic

Mohamed Slim Alouini

Technical challenges and solutions for deep space communication

Terrestrial applications of delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technology

Underwater applications of DTN for ocean exploration

The speakers discussed the technical challenges of deep space communication and agreed on the potential of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) as a solution, highlighting its applications in various terrestrial and underwater scenarios.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized the importance of adopting governance models and technical standards similar to those used in the terrestrial Internet for the development of interplanetary networks.

Vint Cerf

Yosuke Kaneko

Need for multi-stakeholder governance model similar to terrestrial Internet

Importance of open standards and protocols for interoperability

Both speakers highlighted the versatility of DTN technology beyond space communication, demonstrating its potential applications in remote terrestrial areas and underwater exploration.

Samo Grasic

Mohamed Slim Alouini

Terrestrial applications of delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technology

Underwater applications of DTN for ocean exploration

Unexpected Consensus

Relevance of interplanetary networks to terrestrial development

Samo Grasic

Mohamed Slim Alouini

Roberto Gaetano

Terrestrial applications of delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technology

Underwater applications of DTN for ocean exploration

Potential for connecting underserved populations on Earth

There was an unexpected consensus on the potential of interplanetary network technologies to address terrestrial development challenges, particularly in connecting underserved populations and exploring remote areas on Earth.

Overall Assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement included the need for multi-stakeholder governance, the potential of DTN technology for both space and terrestrial applications, and the importance of addressing technical challenges in deep space communication.

Consensus level

There was a high level of consensus among the speakers on the technical aspects and governance needs of interplanetary networks. This consensus suggests a strong foundation for future development and collaboration in this field, but also highlights the need for broader international cooperation and consideration of societal implications.

Different Viewpoints

Access to deep space network resources

Vint Cerf

Audience

Instead, I think we have to make sure that they have access to that is carried to earth through the deep space network, but not necessarily everyone will have direct access to it because of its limited capacity.

How can apply those lessons to development of interplanetary internet to ensure that its infrastructures and benefits are equitably shared not just among the space-faring nations, but for the collective advancement of humanity?

Vint Cerf emphasized the limited capacity of deep space network resources, suggesting restricted direct access, while an audience member raised concerns about ensuring equitable access for all nations.

Unexpected Differences

Overall Assessment

summary

The main areas of disagreement centered around the balance between open access and resource limitations in deep space networks, as well as the methods for involving non-spacefaring nations in the development process.

difference_level

The level of disagreement among the speakers was relatively low. Most speakers shared similar views on the importance of developing interplanetary networks and the need for inclusive governance. The differences were mainly in the nuances of implementation and resource allocation. This low level of disagreement suggests a generally unified vision for the future of interplanetary networks, which could facilitate smoother development and governance processes.

Partial Agreements

All speakers agreed on the importance of open participation in the development of interplanetary networks, but differed in their approaches. Cerf emphasized the network design, Kaneko focused on providing free resources, while an audience member sought direct involvement in pilot projects.

Vint Cerf

Yosuke Kaneko

Audience

The network is intentionally designed so that multiple parties can implement and operate it.

Please come to ipnsig.org. We have a full repository of how DTN works and what the interplanetary network is, and it’s all free for use.

My question is this, because I’m so much excited about this discussion and I think probably there may be a way in which some of us will be able to contribute to the pilot projects working group.

Similar Viewpoints

Both speakers emphasized the importance of adopting governance models and technical standards similar to those used in the terrestrial Internet for the development of interplanetary networks.

Vint Cerf

Yosuke Kaneko

Need for multi-stakeholder governance model similar to terrestrial Internet

Importance of open standards and protocols for interoperability

Both speakers highlighted the versatility of DTN technology beyond space communication, demonstrating its potential applications in remote terrestrial areas and underwater exploration.

Samo Grasic

Mohamed Slim Alouini

Terrestrial applications of delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technology

Underwater applications of DTN for ocean exploration

Key Takeaways

Interplanetary networks are being developed to enable communication for deep space exploration and future space commercialization

Delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technology developed for space has useful terrestrial applications, especially for connecting remote areas

Multi-stakeholder governance models similar to the terrestrial Internet will be needed for interplanetary networks

There are technical challenges like long delays and disruptions that require new protocols and technologies

Ensuring equitable access and benefits for non-spacefaring nations is an important consideration

Resolutions and Action Items

Continue development of DTN and bundle protocols through collaborative efforts

Bring interplanetary network governance discussions to Internet Governance Forum and other relevant bodies

Explore terrestrial applications of DTN technology for connecting underserved areas

Open participation in pilot projects and standards development to interested parties

Unresolved Issues

How to ensure equitable access and benefits for non-spacefaring nations

Legal and regulatory frameworks for space commercialization

Addressing potential human rights concerns in interplanetary network development

Allocation of limited deep space network resources

Spectrum allocation for lunar communications

Suggested Compromises

Limit direct access to deep space network resources while ensuring broad access to data and information on Earth

Use optical communication to address RF spectrum scarcity concerns

The reason that we’re at IGF is because we expect the interplanetary network to be built by multiple parties in the same way that the terrestrial Internet is built by multiple parties. And we have to manage and govern that collaborative effort.

speaker

Vint Cerf

reason

This comment provides a crucial link between interplanetary networks and internet governance, explaining why this topic is relevant at IGF.

impact

It shifted the discussion towards governance challenges and the need for multi-stakeholder collaboration in space exploration.

DTN has quite a big potential, at least in my personal opinion, in the sensor networks, and especially low power applications, because you don’t need to be online, or you don’t need to have the radius on all the time, if you synchronize this, you can greatly reduce the power consumption.

speaker

Samo Grasic

reason

This insight highlights practical terrestrial applications of delay-tolerant networking (DTN) technology developed for space.

impact

It broadened the discussion beyond space applications to show how this technology could benefit Earth-based communications in remote areas.

The lunar surface would become a hodgepodge of multiple stakeholders’ activity. So in the end, we’re just talking about interplanetary internet for now. But I would just urge everyone to think about that the actual lunar surface venue will become a multi-stakeholder activity venue in itself.

speaker

Yosuke Kaneko

reason

This comment expands the scope of governance considerations beyond just the interplanetary internet to the broader context of lunar activities.

impact

It prompted participants to consider wider implications of space exploration and commercialization for governance frameworks.

How can we make the delay from 40 minutes to a fraction? Is that a possibility? Or is one we have to deal with that?

speaker

Audience member (Aouke)

reason

This question, while seemingly naive, led to an important clarification about the physical limitations of interplanetary communication.

impact

It allowed Vint Cerf to explain the fundamental constraints of physics that shape interplanetary networking, deepening understanding of the technical challenges.

I’m just wondering what’s on to account the human rights elements of the sort of future interplanetary internet. Is that something which you think is relevant at this stage?

speaker

Audience member (Kanbaro Sainbro)

reason

This question introduced an important ethical dimension to the discussion that had not been previously addressed.

impact

It prompted speakers to consider human rights implications and access issues related to interplanetary networks, broadening the scope of governance considerations.

Overall Assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by expanding it beyond technical aspects of interplanetary networking to encompass crucial governance, ethical, and practical application considerations. They highlighted the need for multi-stakeholder approaches, consideration of human rights, and the potential for space technologies to benefit terrestrial communications. The discussion evolved from a primarily space-focused conversation to one that drew important parallels with terrestrial internet governance challenges and opportunities.

How can we ensure equitable access to interplanetary internet infrastructure and benefits for non-space-faring nations?

speaker

Filipe Santos

explanation

This is important to address digital divides and ensure the collective advancement of humanity in space exploration.

How can we reduce the 40-minute delay in interplanetary communications?

speaker

Aouke

explanation

This is important for improving the practicality and user experience of interplanetary internet.

What are the key human rights considerations for the future interplanetary internet?

speaker

Kanbaro Sainbro

explanation

This is important to ensure that human rights are protected and considered in the development of interplanetary internet policies.

How can we incorporate international cooperation as a principle in the interplanetary internet project?

speaker

Alan Veloso

explanation

This is important to ensure broader participation and representation in the development of interplanetary internet.

What are the key considerations for sustainability and resource management (e.g., radio frequencies) in the interplanetary internet project?

speaker

Alan Veloso

explanation

This is important to ensure the long-term viability and efficient use of resources in interplanetary communications.

How can individuals join and contribute to the pilot projects working group?

speaker

Kunle Olorundare

explanation

This is important for expanding participation and expertise in the development of interplanetary internet technologies.