E-participation in the EuroDIG/Report


 * Title: How effective is direct remote interaction in EuroDIG?

This report was published by the Diplo Foundation on August 2011, the book of abstracts can be found here and the published version could be found here.

Summary
EuroDIG is the annual Internet governance regional meeting for all of Europe. It was established in 2008, with support from the Council of Europe and other stakeholders, following the commissioning of the Internet Governance Forum by the Secretary General of the United Nations in 2006. Its debates and messages have the purpose of being fed into the global forum.

Like similar Internet Governance meetings, EuroDIG has at the heart of its mission a commitment to raise awareness and be inclusive of all stakeholders. To attend that, following the example of the Internet Governance Forum, remote participation mechanisms were introduced in 2009. First seen as a tool to increase awareness of the issues and debates, their potential to improve inclusiveness was soon realized, and a greater effort to promote remote interaction has been supported since.

This report describes the evolution of remote participation in the EuroDIG and provides an assessment of the current situation, focusing on the issue of inclusiveness by direct remote interaction. It also provides steps to improve and put in greater perspective the effectiveness and reach of remote participation hubs, and outlines further directions to research the networks of people and organizations mobilized in the process.

Understanding the EuroDIG
The Internet Governance Forum is an annual meeting commissioned by the United Nations since 2006, following a mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society, with the objective of creating an international environment where the complex and intertwined issues related to the Internet could be openly discussed. Two of its founding principles are multistakeholderism and inclusiveness, meaning the forum should organize itself to be inclusive of all interested sectors of society, governments and corporations. Its mission, in turn, highlights the importance of raising awareness of the global population to the issues and discussions taking place there.

After the establishment of the forum, the idea of regional meetings for local coordination, and also in preparation to the forum, gained strength. It served both commitments of inclusiveness and raising awareness, since the global forum by itself could become a little isolated from local issues, and because local stakeholders might not have the resources to participate effectively in a larger and usually distant meeting. The regional meetings inherited those basic principles and missions of the forum, and are currently eight in number.

EuroDIG, the Europen Dialogue on Internet Governance, is the European annual regional meeting started in 2008, organized with support from the Council of Europe and other stakeholders.

Understanding remote participation
There are many ways in which participation in a meeting may take place remotely. The more intuitive one is direct output, that is, text, audio and, or, video of the meeting is made available through the Internet, ideally in real-time. On top of that, we can have direct interaction, where input from remote participants is fed into the meeting. Indirect internal participation is also possible, when remote participants whose input is being fed to the meeting interact among themselves. And finally we have indirect external participation, whereby communication takes place in media not specifically purposed for the meeting, such as blogs, microblogs and social networking tools, and not necessarily among people whose input is being directly fed to the meeting.

In this division, we can relate direct output and indirect external participation with the function of raising awareness, while direct interaction and indirect internal participation can be traced to inclusiveness of stakeholders. In the case of the EuroDIG, these were introduced incrementally, albeit in different moments, as we shall see in the next session.

Footprints: Evaluating direct interaction in previous EuroDIGs
Remote participation in the EuroDIG started during the second event, in 2009, with publicly available streaming of sessions and parallel on-line discussion in microblogs, blogs and wikis. More inclusive interaction, however, was first present during EuroDIG 2010, when remote participation hubs were first organized with support from Council of Europe offices.

Remote hubs are very local meetings where a hub coordinator, that is, someone experienced in Internet Governance issues and procedures, sets up a public space with Internet connectivity and invites people to gather and follow the sessions of the main meeting through live video streaming. Besides participating remotely, hubs are expected to conduct debates that bring forward perspectives particular to their location and there promote awareness of Internet Governance issues.

In 2010, they were stationed throughout Europe and nearby Asia in 10 different cities : Baku (Azerbaijan), Yerevan (Armenia), Sarajevo (Bosnia), Toulouse and Strasbourg (France), Tbilisi (Georgia), Chisinau (Moldova), Bucharest (Romania), Belgrade (Serbia) and Kiev (Ukraine). Communications software was made available for them to interact among themselves and with a moderator present in the meeting, who was in charge of bridging both discussion spaces.

These hubs followed the remote participation model from the Internet Governance Forum, with hub organizers locally responsible for coordination of session attendance and discussions, and remote moderators at the main event responsible to feed into it the hub's questions and comments.

The present report will focus on revisiting two readily available sources of information, in preparation to more detailed future research: transcripts from the sessions and a previous survey with remote hub organizers.

Digesting transcripts
Unfortunately, transcripts from said communications software — chat logs — were not saved or are not publicly accessible, preventing us from evaluating indirect internal participation. Only the transcripts of the meeting sessions are available, and even those were not carefully standardized or precise. Our focus, then, will be direct interaction of remote participants with the sessions taking place in Madrid.

Below are featured the respective quantities, plus the relevant excerpts, of remote interactions extracted from those transcripts. There are two sessions of uncertain remote participation, they are WS7, for which there is no transcript available, and the WrapUp , though during it some numbers on remote participation were reported.

Existing survey results
After EuroDIG 2010, the remote participation organisers sent a survey out to the hub coordinators, and their replies were summarized in a report, together with information from remote moderators.

The main results of this short report indicate a good, but not excellent, level of satisfaction from hub organizers with the experience of remote participation, both on the technical and the human side. More interestingly, it also includes numbers on the volume of remote participants and of questions asked by them, even if only for part of the sessions. The numbers for questions are sometimes at odds with the transcripts, as we shall see below.

Consolidated data
Presented here are data on remote interaction according to the transcripts and the report, as well as data on interaction with the audience, also sourced from the transcripts, which will be used as basis for comparison to evaluate the relative effectiveness of remote participation.

For the sake of completeness, and to offer a more concrete view of what we're calling interventions, we present all excerpts originating from remote participation found in the transcripts. Inspecting the text also gives a rough idea of the volume of questions reported by moderators that actually got conveyed to the meeting.

How present is not present?
But what conclusions can we draw from such incomplete and imprecise data? Well, first and foremost, that there is a need to standardize and create procedures to ensure data collection so the efficacy of remote participation can be better assessed. Still, a few important remarks can be made from looking at the information available.

For one, even if only for the sessions where we have data from remote moderators, the discrepancy between the number of questions reported by them and the number of questions that made it to the session — which can be accounted by inspecting the excerpts of the transcripts — is troubling. In effect, over a third of the questions seem to have never been conveyed to the session.

Second, if we take the sum of 185 participants in remote hubs, as reported by hub organizers, against the sum of 291 people attending the event , and compare the number of interventions per capita from each group, as counted in the transcript of events and excluding the Wrap-up session, then remote participants only managed to make one intervention for every five from the audience, approximately. Therefore, if we were to trust the data available, we could say that, in this sense, remote participation was five times less effective than attending the event.

All this points towards a situation where contributions from remote participants are significantly less likely to have an impact on the workshops and panels, and consequently on the messages from EuroDIG, that is, the resulting document that summarizes the output to be taken to the Internet Governance Forum.

Given the factual — and hardly avoidable — inequality of on site participation in the event, it would be fair to demand a stronger reinforcement of the inclusiveness aspect of remote participation, together with a more careful and complete reporting of what takes place in each session, both in the remote interfaces and on site. Of course, EuroDIG 2010 was the first to even include this aspect of remote inclusion, and the progress and results are admirable, but that should not be an excuse to be dutiful in its improvement, specially if it is deemed a necessary quality of the event.

Right here, right now
Currently, the process for the 2011 EuroDIG is underway. From its inception, the opportunity for remote participation has been greater, due to the possibility to contribute during planning meetings and in the composition of the agenda and program. The on-line process so far has included a survey on the priority of areas and topics for the event, direct interaction during the first and second planning meetings, a call for issues and workshop proposals, and a comment system on top of an agenda draft composed from previous input.

Though these initiatives contribute much to inclusiveness, it is still uncertain, however, the range and depth of improvements to be made during the event itself, such as measures that address the shortcomings discussed here.

On the data front, these could include training remote moderators and hub organizers to raise their care for consistent and detailed data collection, perfecting the software and mobilizing the technical team so that chat logs and attendance statistics are sharply recorded, advising the event organization to keep and publish on site attendance records on a session basis, require that session transcribers indicate clearly in the text whether an intervention originates from the panelists, the audience or has an element of remote participation. And, most importantly, make the data available publicly in an orderly fashion.

On the participation front, even from a conservative stance, hub organizers should more actively demand that their questions and observations be represented, and remote moderators should be careful not to let the flow of face-to-face discussion close the windows for them to intervene. Technologically, remote hubs could share video presence among themselves, and in the main meeting, where the remote moderator would first intervene and then pass the word to the remote participant.

...Connecting
Beyond making sure remote participants get represented during the event's preparation and sessions, it is also important, for the sake of both inclusiveness and awareness, to be mindful of each hub's connections within its country and with other stakeholders in general. Keeping that in mind, we propose a few questions that should be asked to hub organizers and, or, participants, to evaluate an individual hub's contribution to inclusiveness in his local context. These could be incorporated the survey sent out to hub organizers after the event, but would be ideally asked in advance of the event, perhaps during hub subscription.

These questions should allow a researcher to investigate whether a hub might be missing out some segment of local stakeholders, or population, as well as understand the local ties between stakeholders and their struggle for participation, specially in view of the selectiveness of those few who have the means to be be present in the event. The following are some sample questions that reflect this concern.


 * Regarding your country, can you tell which stakeholders (corporations, both for-profit and not; universities; government agencies; social movements; etc.) do you consider most important to Internet Governance issues there?
 * Can you tell whether those stakeholders were represented in the remote hub? Which ones?
 * Which regional stakeholders had strong ties to international ones? Could you describe those connections?
 * Was the hub in contact with other hubs directly? How so?

A more complete set of questions for both remote hub organizers and participants is being developed and is open to collaboration, it can be found on-line.

Messages
In conclusion, remote participation is a major instrument to effect EuroDIG's commitment to inclusiveness, and has been progressing steadily. There is still a lot of room for improvement, beginning with a more careful and complete recording of both the remote activities and those on site, so that more faithful and meaningful comparisons can be made to evaluate its effectiveness.

As it progresses, we must address the visible disadvantage of remote participants to those attending the event when it comes to bringing their points of view together. Again, having quality information is an enabler of these improvements.

Finally, since remote hubs are the primary means of direct interaction with the main event, we should look forward to more in-depth research on their relational structure, both in fostering possible collaborations among them and in terms of their position and connections within their local stakeholder environment.

This short report was made possible thanks to the invaluable assistance of Marília Maciel, the continuous support of Priyanthi Daluwatte and the advice from Gao Mosweu, it was concluded as part of the research implementation phase of Diplo Foundation's Internet Governance Capacity Building Programme 2010.