"Youth Leaders for Community Development through Internet Governance" Program Team: Veronica Cretu and Nicu Cretu have participated in the Second Internet Governance Forum in Rio, Brazil, in the period of November 12 -15, 2007

Below, on this page we want to provide you with comments, observations on the sessions and workshops which have been of most interest for us, Moldova team.

Learn about the workshop organized by DiploFoundation together with the "CMB" Training Center; find out our views on the Workshop on Internet Users’s Voices on Internationalized Domain Names by ICANN, about the Session on Fulfilling the Mandate of IGF … , ICANN Open Forum, ISOC Open Forum, Emerging issues session ... and finally about the Workshop on Security which has been facilitated by Veronica Cretu, together with Robert Guerra of Privaterra, Canada.

Veronica Cretu, made a presentation on the GKP supported initiative during the DiploFoundation IG Capacity Building Program: a model for regional training Session. Here are more details about the workshop:

During the second day of the IGF, one of the early morning sessions focused on a model for Internet Governance Capacity Building Program that has been presented by DiploFoundation, Malta (www.diplomacy.edu/ig)

Even though today IGF focuses mostly on Access, Openness, Diversity, Critical Internet Resources and Security along with some other issues, DiploFoundation continues bringing to the IGF discussions its rich experience and perspective on the importance of Capacity Building Programs, especially for people from the developing countries. The Workshop panelists discussed a wide range of aspects of the IGCB Program as well as provided examples of how IGCB started being replicated at the national level.

The workshop started with a brief introduction of the IGCB Program made by Vladimir Radunovic, IGCB Program Coordinator. Vladimir has presented the concept of the Program, the main goals and objectives and was followed by Carolina Rossini, who spoke from the position of the IGCB program participant; Virginia Pague - has shared from her IGCB program tutor perspective: she highlighted the role of the online tutor as a facilitator of the learning process of the IGCB Participants. Finally, Veronica Cretu, spoke both from the perspective of the online tutor who has been in the program since 2005, as well as from the perspective of the replicator of the Diplo’s online IGCB Program to an offline Internet Governance Community Development Program in Moldova (www.cmb.md/igf)

All the speakers (both the panelists as well as some of the former participants who were present in the room) have emphasized several major strong components of Diplo’s IGCB Program training methodology:

- multistakeholder participants with diverse backgrounds and professions (during the last 3 years Diplo has trained 276 from over 80 countries. Several former participants started playing a more active role nationally and/or internationally on the Internet Governance arena as a result of the Program);
- knowledge and experience exchange among the participants as the learning base (Diplo provides basic materials on the main IG issues, but what is more important is the knowledge and the experience of the program participants being integrated into the program discussions – valuing the local needs and local experiences and analysing issues from the regional persepective);
- multilingualism (Diplo launched this year a bilingual IGCB Program: English – Spanish – it was a pilot project which turned out to be extremely successful. Diplo looks forward to develop more content in several languages with the help and support of the communities which are interested in having IG related materials in their local languages. So far, Diplo has it’s Internet Governance Booklet being translated into French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, very recently the Portugese version has been finalised, and the Romanian Language version will be ready by the end of this year)
- tutoring and per-topic discussion facilitation by peers (all these have been actively facilitated by 10 Program tutors and 7 optional topic facilitators during the IGCB 2007 compared to 6 tutors back in 2006, and 3 tutors in 2005);
- online communication through the platform based on web2.0 communication tools (but Diplo has tested the Second Life Program for some online meetings as well in 2007);
- regional implementation of the IGCBP methodology brings in focus the local content and problems, and further encourages regional partnerships and initiatives (this is another positive side of Diplo’s IGCB Program: for any initiative one of the most crucial aspect is to be sustainable and replicable and Diplo has already a good example of a project in Moldova that has been derived from the main IGCB Diplo Program)

To conclude: Diplo’s IGCB Program will continue looking for partners who are interested in helping Diplo IG team develop and improve the Program for the years to come in order to provide as many people from the developing countries with the opportunity to learn more about the most emerging issues related to the Internet as well as to involve them in the global and local debate on IG and not only …

If we don’t train people in these main IG areas, how can we then discuss issues related to Access, and Openness, and Security and Diversity and Critical Internet Resources and many more … ??!!