HSE roundtable at the Istanbul UN Internet Governance Forum 2014

This year at the annual UN Internet Governance Forum, IGF in Istanbul, besides the HSE professors and usual dignitaries, Alexandra Permyakova, a Master’s student on the Electronic Business programme at the Faculty of Business Informatics got the chance to go along and take part in the Forum. The HSE delegation organised a roundtable discussion on Empowering displaced people and migrants through online education services. 

The forum is usually attended by representatives of governments, big business and international organisations. The participants were Ajay Mishra from International Electro Communications, and from HSE Mikhail Komarov, Associate Professor at Department of Innovation and Business in Information Technologies , Svetlana Maltseva, Acting Dean of the Faculty of Business Informatics, Andrey Shcherbovich, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Svetlana Vassilieva, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law. Other participants were Patrick Ryan from Google, Ivan Shapran from Nortal, Yulia Morenets from TAC - together against cybercrime, Nasser Ketani from Microsoft and HSE Master’s student Alexandra Permyakova. The discussion organised by HSE, Empowerment of displaced people through online education, was about educational services and access needed by migrants, the transformation of education services and the search for better practice in their realisation and use.

The HSE participants were invited as experts and speakers to other roundtables on Open and Big Data, Coalition in Internet Things and on New Economics for the New Networked World.

'We were lucky enough to take part in the events thanks to the Ambassadors Program which is organised by the Internet Society (ISOC) which works on developing internet access,' explained Alexandra Permyakova. 'I represented ISOC at their stand, published materials on the ISOC delegates blog at the Forum and took part in the Collaborative Leadership Exchange programme which worked in small groups on issues connected with internet governance. After working together each group chose someone to give a short summary of the questions that arose and how they could be answered using the combined forces of the international community. I also took part in a workshop called Dynamic Coalitions on Network Neutrality as a long distance moderator. I had to interact with other long distance participants in the section. Vice President of Google and one of the founding fathers of the internet Vint Cerf also joined that section. To see him close up and listen to what he had to say meant a great deal to me.'

During the forum the participants discussed and proposed ways to resolve the problems on The Internet and Human Rights, Enhancing Digital Trust, Policies Enabling Access, Growth and Development on the Internet and others. Many initiatives put forward for discussion will be taken up in the near future in governing the internet ecosystem. The next IGF will take place in Brazil.