The Asia Pacific Youth Internet Governance Forum 2020 Virtual Camp (yIGF 2020) was held from 18 to 20 September 2020 online due to the global pandemic . With the advisory support from APrIGF secretariat (www.aprigf.asia) and the Multi-stakeholder Steering Group (MSG) of APrIGF, and the dedication of the NetMission ambassadors from NetMission.Asia, the yIGF 2020 was completed successfully.
This year, yIGF was held as a 3-day virtual meeting with a series of virtual social meetups during the week when APrIGF 2020 was happening. Participants were engaged in discussing hot issues related to Internet governance with other youth leaders from the region and the experienced speakers from the IG community. We believe that the youth participants have gained tremendous insights by interchanging insightful ideas with our honorable guests, which might help encourage future initiatives and youth engagement in the Asia-Pacific regions.
YIGF is usually a 4-days-3-nights camp in which participants are assigned a role as one of the interest groups such as government, private sectors, and civil society organizations. During the camp, they are encouraged to think from a new standpoint and different perspectives. It also serves as a preparation camp for them to understand various internet issues via interactive activities & games as well as further directly participating in the local and global internet policy discussion platform.
More information about past youth IGF could be found at https://nma.asia/yigf.
Topic Discussions on data privacy and protection, and misinformation and disinformation
In this 3-day virtual camp, the participants had conducted two discussions on Internet issues on privacy, data protection, and misinformation. The panel discussions are (1) Privacy Umbrella – Violation of Data and Privacy in the COVID-19 Era and (2) Misinformation and Disinformation Regulation in the Context of a Public Health Crisis.
The participants have explored the following key issues with our invited guest speakers, Rajnesh Singh, Elliott Mann, and Aditi Agrawal on the related privacy issues we are currently facing during the COVID-19 pandemic:
- How the Government should act to proper technology related to data and privacy.
- How to promote data and privacy protection..
- How the stakeholders collect the data and how they keep track of everyone.
They have also raised their concerns towards the following issues with our guest speakers, Prateek Waghre, Nat Gyenes, and Viviane Vinagre, on the topic of misinformation and disinformation in the context of the global health crisis:
- Information Disorder
- The Policy for misinformation and disinformation
Participant Engagement
Since the event was held virtually due to the pandemic, our interaction with our participants is limited. To guarantee the best experience for our participants, we opened 5 WhatsApp groups in total for better communication and coordination with our participants. We believe it was effective to achieve the following objectives:
- Enhancing participants’ engagement during the event
- Better understanding of the multi-stakeholder model
- Engaging the participants in our IG community in the future
Additionally, we also initiated a #yIGF2020 challenge on social media like Twitter. Participants are encouraged to post about their expectations towards the virtual camp on their personal social media handle.
Testimonials from yIGF 2020 Participants
Let’s shape the future of our digital world together with Youth IGF.
Zin Myo Htet (University of Yangong, Myanmar)
| “Thank you NetMission Team for organizing the yIGF Virtual Camp 2020. It was extremely interesting. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot of new things related to Internet Governance.”— Shivam Sharma (Bharat Institute of Technology, India) |
| “The yIGF is really helpful for youth with no technical background just like me. It allows me to explore the world of Internet governance from different perspectives. Let’s learn, share and create for our society together.”— Phyo Thiri Lwin (Yangon University of Economics, Myanmar) |
The report of yIGF 2020 Virtual Camp is now available on our website, you may click here to find out more.
NetMission Ambassador
NET (Networking Opportunity, Empowering Youth, Talent Development) is a model to achieve the mission of youth empowerment in internet governance, ambassadors who have received year-round training and gained oversee conference experience will form a working group to work on community projects like HKYIGF, yIGF, APIGA. We hope these kinds of community works can raise public awareness of what is internet governance.
If you are interested in youth engagement in Internet Governance, please kindly visit our training materials.
For more event photos and videos, please visit NetMission Facebook page and NetMission Instagram profile.
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