Higlights of IGF 2016

•  Many sessions throughout the week provided the community with vibrant spaces to explore the important question of how to harness renewed global interest in increasing meaningful, empowering access to the Internet in a way that supports development efforts in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Participants reiterated that digital literacy and the development of local and culturally diverse and relevant content is fundamental for inclusive growth. An emerging consensus has developed amongst the IGF community that the Internet’s core values of openness, freedom, resilience, safety, and decentralisation are fundamental for enabling inclusive and sustainable growth - as is also expressed by UNESCO’s Internet Universality framework.
  
• Many delegates emphasized that international cooperation and strategic partnerships cultivated through the IGF can help bridge digital divides and provide crucial new opportunities for people living in poverty, women and girls, children, persons with disabilities, older persons, indigenous peoples, marginalised groups, as well as rural communities that still lack acceptable and quality access and training in the use of ICTs and the Internet. 
  
• The IGF has remained a critical platform to facilitate dialogue on human rights and their connections with Internet policy and governance; while discussions about the importance of human rights on the Internet have similarly become increasingly prominent at the IGF. This year, increased attention has also been paid to the importance of civil and political rights - including the ways in which the promotion and protection of these rights can support sustainable development.
  
• The successful transition of the IANA functions to the multistakeholder community in October of 2016, only a few months prior to the 11th IGF, marks an important milestone for the multistakeholder Internet governance community. The transition was finalised after many months of careful planning and deliberation by community volunteers; leading to productive exchanges about the post-transition IANA and the new community-based accountability mechanisms to ensure transparent and stable management of this crucial Internet function. At the IGF, various workshops and sessions endeavoured to learn from the successes and challenges of this important multistakeholder exercise.
  
• A number of sessions addressed the growing challenges stemming from increased use of the Internet around the world, along with the ways in which such use may threaten the security and development benefits of the Internet. Stakeholders stressed the need for cybersecurity measures to be implemented in cooperation with all stakeholders and international expert bodies; with the IGF providing a unique space for such collaborative efforts. Security 3 professionals, law enforcement agencies, programmers, and business people, among others, have to work together in order to address new threats and challenges to online security for both individuals and organizations. Cyberattacks, cybercrime and issues related to privacy and surveillance are challenges that require urgent collaboration and cooperation as well.
  
• In the Internet’s tradition of allowing for unlimited creation of new opportunities, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence have the potential to bring about groundbreaking benefits to mankind and our quality of life. The challenge is to foster this continuous development and to enable the IoT to further grow into the Internet and Internet governance processes. Issues and challenges such as standardisation, interoperability, and security are very similar to issues the Internet dealt with in its young history, and offer substantial opportunities for multistakeholder cooperation and mutual learning.
  
• National, Regional and Youth IGFs (NRIs) have been emerging spontaneously ever since the IGF was convened in 2006. They are independent in their work, and organized in accordance with the core IGF principles of being multistakeholder, bottom-up, inclusive, open, transparent and non-commercial. The NRI network nearly doubled since the 10th IGF; growing from 37 NRIs at the end of 2015 to a current record of 72 recognised NRIs. The NRIs are active and immensely useful contributors to the IGF community’s intersessional activities. The linkages between the NRIs and the global IGF have increased significantly thanks to many joint work activities such as the organization of sessions held during the 11th IGF, collaborative work on developing publications containing guidelines, and best practices on how to establish and run a successful NRI. Records from the NRIs’ regular fortnightly meetings also serve as valuable and tangible inputs to the global IGF; providing more local and issue- specific perspectives to policy challenges.
  
• In 2016, the IGF furthered its work on Policy Options for Connecting and Enabling the Next Billion(s). This year, the intersessional initiative focused on local and regional specificities to enabling meaningful access and also investigated how ensuring meaningful Internet access can support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). CENB Phase II of this seminal work builds on the IGF community's work on this topic in 2015 (Phase I). Together, over 120 substantive contributions from a diversity of stakeholders and stakeholder groups are reflected in this initiative, which helps to illustrate the need for not only enabling more people to access the Internet, but also for them to benefit from and be empowered by the developmental potential of the Internet.
  
• The IGF Best Practice Forums (BPFs) continue to offer unique platforms to investigate topical Internet policy challenges by collecting community input and experiences in a flexible and bottom-up manner. The BPFs gather knowledge that exists with different groups, organizations, experts and individuals, to make it available as a useful resource to the broader community in the form of tangible best practice outcome documents. Through their substantive outreach efforts and continued calls for input and contributions, the BPFs enabled more diverse and varied participation in IGF processes, including from a richer variety of regions and stakeholder groups. By continuously involving new people in their work, the various BPFs also contributed to enlarging the global footprint of the IGF. As a part of the 2016 community intersessional activities, the third cycle of BPFs focused on Gender and Access, Understanding the Commercial and Economic Incentives behind a Successful IPv6 Deployment, Contributing to the success and continued development of Internet exchange points (IXPs), and Building Confidence and Security in the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) through Enhanced Cooperation and Collaboration. BPFs worked throughout the year in an open and inclusive way via open mailing lists, regular virtual meetings and BPF workshops during the 11th IGF meeting.
  
• Using their first-ever shared main session at IGF 2015 as a starting point, IGF Dynamic Coalitions held regularly monthly meetings and coordinated closely before IGF 2016. Over the course of the year, DCs have made significant progress toward synchronising their work and adopting fundamental common standards of transparency and inclusiveness (open archives, open membership, open mailing lists), and have developed agreed-upon targets and deadlines for the publication of substantive papers. They have also jointly participated for the second time in a survey exercise to gather feedback on their papers. While there are currently 16 DCs, the community of DCs is also growing: two new coalitions, on ‘Community Connectivity’ and on ‘Innovative Approaches to Connecting the Unconnected’, emerged in 2016. Several more have recommitted to their activities, notably the coalitions on Internet and Climate Change and the Youth Coalition. Other groups, on defining “publicness” in the digital age and on schools on Internet governance, are in an exploratory phase and have expressed interest in launching DCs of their own.
  
• The participation of Governments and policymakers has increased significantly this year, with far more open forum sessions held than in any previous IGF. Organizers of these 32 open forums – a session type traditionally reserved for governments, IGOs and relevant international organizations – included the Governments of China, Cuba, Egypt, Germany, Indonesia, Japan and Mexico, as well as the African Union, European Commission, Organization of American States (OAS), and OECD. A delegation of 12 members of the European Parliament, the largest ever to come to an IGF, was also in attendance.
  
• The IGF brought together a number of UN and intergovernmental organizations as organizers of Day 0 events, open forums, and workshops. Over the course of the week, WIPO, which actively participated in the meeting this year, the ITU, UNESCO, the office of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, the World Bank, and the OECD all held or coorganized sessions. As an indicator of the expanding relevance of Internet governance in diverse policy areas, for the first time UN Women and UNICEF also organized IGF events - on SDG 5 and the use of ICTs by women, and children’s rights research, respectively.
  
• WIPO's participation in the 11th IGF again demonstrated the numerous areas of convergence between intellectual property (IP) and Internet governance. A balanced and well-functioning IP system contributes to inclusive and sustainable growth on the Internet by providing guarantees and incentives for innovation to take place and for creators to flourish.
  
• The World Economic Forum (WEF) made significant contributions to the meeting. It participated in a Main Session on the IGF’s intersessional activities, and held both a Day 0 event and open forum on connectivity, which brought in a number of partners including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Global Connect, and the Alliance for Affordable Internet, as part of its ongoing Internet for All initiative.
  
• In order to help orient first-time participants to the IGF and to help them understand the organizational processes, as well as to foster their integration into the IGF community, a set of continuous activities throughout the 2016 programme was developed under the Newcomers Track by the MAG and the IGF Secretariat. Communication with new IGF participants will be continued intersessionally through a dedicated IGF newcomers mailing list. 
  
• For the first time in the IGF workshop proposal process, proposers this year were invited to define their workshops with thematic tags, including write-in tags of their own choosing. As part of an approach to structuring the programme in a bottom-up way, the most popular tags 5 were used to determine the sub-themes for the 2016 meeting. This saw the inclusion of youth issues and sustainable development as new, discrete sub-themes. Although they did not constitute their own themes, tags on trade, digital literacy, and connecting the unconnected were also frequently used and were some of the most discussed issues in workshops.
  
• As an initiative of the MAG Working Group on New Session Formats, and with support from the Secretariat, the IGF this year introduced new session types in the programme, including lightning and unconference sessions. The experimental session formats provided an opportunity to engage with IGF participants, in particular young people, within settings that were informal and immensely lively. The 20-minute lighting sessions proved to be very popular. Held every day of the meeting during the lunch breaks, in a communal and central outdoor area of the venue, the sessions covered topics as varied as broadband affordability; Internet governance challenges in the Middle East and North Africa; the accountability of algorithms; and access to knowledge and culture online. High-scoring workshop proposals with compatible formats, which were not originally selected during the IGF 2016 workshop evaluation process, were re-formatted for the lightning sessions programme. Workshop proposers seized this opportunity enthusiastically and the 24 slots allocated to the lighting sessions were quickly filled. Unconference, in which participants proposed topics for presentation and discussion on a communal board, gave space to unplanned sessions on digital violence; African Internet rights; and free trade and Internet governance in Latin America.
  
• The IGF Village included a record number of booths, with having 40 exhibitors presenting, (double since last year); and gave exhibitors from across the stakeholder spectrum the opportunity to advance their work, network and create partnerships among the IGF’s participants.