What is yIGF?

Organized and facilitated by NetMission.Asia, the Youth IGF occurs in conjunction with the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) annually, to raise awareness and build the capacity for youth to join the Internet governance discussions. Based on the mandate of IGF to bring people together from various stakeholder groups as equals, YIGF provides an open platform for the young generation to express and interchange their ideas and own thoughts on internet governance freely.

This year, yIGF will be held as a 4-day virtual meeting with a series of virtual social meetups during the event week of yIGF 2021 and APrIGF 2021. Participants will be engaged in discussing hot issues related to Internet governance with other young talents from the region and experienced speakers from the IG community. More information about past youth IGF could be found at https://nma.asia/yigf.

Objectives

• Build the capacity of young adults to participate in internet governance discussion.
• Encourage youth to attend and bring contribution to actual internet governance discussion.
• Provide a platform for cultivating ideas to drive social change and further actualizing the initiative for a healthy and harmonious internet.
• Develop a youth network on internet governance.

Date: 17 – 20 Sep 2021 (03:00-06:00 UTC Time) Meeting Venue: Online Only Theme: Envisioning a sustainable Internet for today and tomorrow Eligibility:  1) Undergraduate or Graduate students in tertiary education in the Asia Pacific; or 2) Young professionals who are based or come from the Asia Pacific region aged between 18 and 30;  3) Internet Governance events’ alumni or fellows in the Asia Pacific region. Application Deadline: 5 September 2021 (Sunday) 23:59 UTC

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Program Overview & Agenda

Core Elements of yIGF

The yIGF is a platform for youth across the Asia-Pacific region to voice out their opinions on Internet Governance. To empower youth with relevant knowledge and capacity to participate in Internet governance discourse, we feature the following elements at our event this year:

Roundtable discussion All youth participants will be given the opportunity to explore hot topics, such as how the ramification of Internet hardware impacts geopolitics and what cryptocurrency is doing to our planet, with industry experts and young talents from the Asia Pacific. This year, we are going to discuss the following topics: Topic 1: Ramifications of Internet hardware on the environment and the geopolitics As the global demand on the internet increased, the use of undersea cable was highly suggested to ease the internet user’s activities online. The idea of building undersea cables may be the best way to solve the problem. However, there are concerns about the environmental effect of the extensive deployment of submarine optic fiber networks. Likewise, in terms of political commitment, there are certain conventions that the concerned states shall abide by to protect the environment. So how are we going to meet our primary need for the Internet but minimize its negative impacts on our planets at the same time? Topic 2: Is Cryptocurrency harming our planet? What is Cryptocurrency? How was the energy consumed by Bitcoin? What is crypto mining? What are the impacts of e-waste by the Bitcoin network? What are the arguments of cryptocurrency supporters? People in our generation fancy cryptocurrency, but in this session, we are going to talk about some real issues behind our fantasies.

Meetup with industry experts The policymaking process of the Internet governance world heavily depends on the multistakeholder participation model. To get our participants to better understand the ecosystem in our IG community, participants will be given the opportunity to meet with industry experts from different stakeholder groups, including government, civil society, technical community, academia, etc. This session aims to help participants to get a better idea of what and how different stakeholders deal with a particular issue during the policy-making process.

Dialogue with the APAC youth leaders In this session, young leaders and representatives of different youth initiatives or Youth Internet Governance Forum (YIGF) from the Asia Pacific region will be gathered. It aims to facilitate a consistent conversation among the youth community in the region and keep the younger generation in the community informed about the Internet governance discourse that is going on in the region.

Youth policy statement & presentation Participants will form groups to do their group presentations by the end of the virtual camp, in order to bring out their opinions and possible policy suggestions on the theme of “Envisioning a sustainable internet for today and tomorrow”. The ideas, examples, policies, or solutions suggested by participants through the roundtable discussion and their presentations will be recorded to establish a Youth Policy Statement. The statement will be included in the Report of yIGF 2021, which will be submitted to and published on the official site of the Internet Governance Forum by the United Nations.

Virtual social Meetups We value the social elements of an event. To maximize our participants’ experiences in yIGF 2021 Virtual Camp and APrIGF 2021, we will host 2 different virtual social meetups during the event week of yIGF 2021 and APrIGF 2021 respectively. We hope our community members could mingle with each other through both topics about Internet governance

*Should you have any inquiries, please feel free to send your message to info@netmission.asia.