Hong Kong Youth Internet Governance Forum 2021
On 22 December 2021, our NetMission Ambassadors hosted a virtual Hong Kong Youth Internet Governance Forum (HKyIGF) online. In the midst of the continuous global pandemic, our physical mobility has been held off, though other issues in cyberspace continue.
This year, HKyIGF was held as a 2-hour virtual meeting with the theme of Reimagine the future of our Internet. This webinar featured a series of sharing or workshops by our honorable speakers, and a panel discussion on the topic of Netizen’s reaction to the global outage: Problems behind big tech monopoly.
The Internet has become a part of our lives since we can practically find and do anything on the Internet nowadays. In the past two years, the Internet has become the primary means we rely on to maintain the daily tasks of our lives. While technology and the Internet have encouraged more digital activities, concerns over fraud, cybercrime, security, and privacy are rising.
In the forum, we explored the future of our Internet together with our invited speakers of different stakeholder groups and academic backgrounds in the context of the ongoing pandemic.
This year, we emphasized the information and knowledge offered by the guests at the workshops and panels. The topics of the sessions ranged from sustainability to the future of education. We have invited Jenna Fung (Program coordinator of Asia Pacific Youth IGF) to deliver an introduction to Internet governance; Edward Choi (Head of Research and Advocacy of V’air Hong Kong) to share their experiences in achieving sustainability through green tourism in Hong Kong; Clive Lee and Samuel Lau from Phoenix Foundation to share their practice in nurturing positive Internet behaviors and mentality of students; Christine Or (Project Manager of DotAsia Organisation) to demonstrate their findings on the impact of digitalization on climate change through their pilot research practice — EcoInternet Pilot Study Report 2021. Guest speakers demonstrated the practices of their specialty and illustrate the possibility of the future of the Internet with us.
To make our event more accessible to young people of our region without time-bounced limitations, we eliminated real-time interaction as one of the major event elements. We tried to make our content informative and timeless in terms of the channel and format we adapted to illustrate and demonstrate our ideas and best practices. Our webinar was streaming on Facebook, up until April 1st, 2022, the recordings have reached 489 people, 35 post clicks, 12 likes and/or reactions, 5 shares, and a total of 47 engagements were made.
The panel discussion of this year was mainly about the global outage of the giant social network — Facebook and its subsidiaries, including Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc., the problems of big tech monopoly. We have invited Aris Ignacio (Dean of College of Information Technology at Southville International School and Colleges), Jaewon Son (Doctoral Researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), Svaradiva A. Devi (APNIC48 fellow), and Maryam Lee (Strategic Program Manager of The IO Foundation).
The recording and report for HKyIGF 2021 are now available on our website. You may access the recordings of the event at https://nma.asia/hkyigf2021-recordings and the report at https://nma.asia/hkyigf2021-report.
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.