With the Asia Pacific regional Internet Governance Forum being held in the Pacific for the first time, we are proud to have organised the first Youth Internet Governance Forum in the Pacific. The mission shared by NetMission Ambassadors was brought to Vanuatu, a beautiful Pacific island nation. With regional participants from Australia and Taiwan, we were warmly welcomed by local youth participants from Vanuatu, mostly students at the University of South Pacific. This year we had an even balance of male and female representation. This year APrIGF resolved to output a “synthesis document”, a document which would capture the sentiment on issues on Internet Governance of the Asia Pacific. The highlight of yIGF this year was to “Formulate the youth input into the synthesis document”. In accord with the important mission of making young voices heard, the program was developed with the aim of working with participants to allow them to effectively contribute to the APrIGF synthesis document.
Our regular activities included an Idea Wall session, where participants put down their ideas about Internet Governance; a role-play session where participants took on various roles such as local ISPs and government to discuss a topic, which this year was “How to improve gender diversity”. It was interesting for us as outsiders to hear from our local participants as to how they used the Internet and their challenges. For example, for many people, their usage of the Internet was largely limited to social media and content platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. There were also some concerns about the Internet eroding cultural values and norms. We also heard how a lot of the education at the University of South Pacific was conducted through the Internet, including remote lectures and submission of assignments, and how crippling poor Internet access was in these applications.
Our sessions were further brought to life by the appearance of special guests. As a veteran of the Internet Governance community and chair of the APrIGF MSG,
We are very grateful to our hosts for this opportunity to
The report of yIGF 2018 Vanuatu 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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.