Asia Pacific yIGF 2019 Vladivostok

The Asia Pacific Youth Internet Governance Forum 2019 (yIGF 2019) was held from 16 to 19 July 2019 in Vladivostok, Russia. The mission shared by NetMission Ambassadors was brought to Vladivostok, a beautiful city in Far-Eastern Russia with regional participants from the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. With the advisory support from APrIGF secretariat and the Multi-stakeholder Steering Group (MSG) of APrIGF, and the dedication of the NetMission Ambassadors from NetMission.Asia, the yIGF 2019 was completed successfully.

This year APrIGF resolved to output a “synthesis document”, a document that would capture the sentiment on issues on Internet Governance of the Asia Pacific. Hence we put the focus of yIGF 2019 on Cultivating a Sustainable Online Community: What Can We Do, in order to help formulate the youth input into the synthesis document and continue their engagement in Internet governance. 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 and actively participate in the workshops.

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 the topics. The two topics of the Role-play discussion this year, namely the real-name system and the community standard, were both closely tied with our overarching theme of yIGF; a Mini-Townhall which simulate the Townhall session of APrIGF and provide a platform for participants to exchange views on hot Internet topics.

This year, we are pleased that our youth participants were provided with an invaluable opportunity to closely interact with Rajesh Singh, a veteran of the Internet Governance community and the chair of APrIGF MSG, in one of our sessions and to contribute to a project initiated by Youth4IG. 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.

We are very grateful to our hosts for this opportunity to organise this exciting event. We hope our participants enjoyed it as much as we did. We hope our activities can help ignite further interest in Internet Governance for youth and encourage future initiatives and youth engagement in the Asia-Pacific.

The report of yIGF 2019 Vladivostok 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.