Fourth edition and after · 2019–2020
APSIG 2019 and 2020
The last edition held in person before the pandemic, the operating handbook it left behind, and the 2020 school that moved online.
The fourth Asia Pacific School on Internet Governance ran from 7 to 10 July 2019 at the Asian Institute of Technology in Pathum Thani, in room B108. It was the last edition held in person before the pandemic, and the edition for which APSIG documented its own operating method most fully.
34 participants from 14 economies — fewer economies than 2018, but in greater depth.
Support mix: 10 full, 10 partial, 8 registration-fee, 7 self-funded.
8 national schools held delegate seats.
Alumni of the Year: not presented in 2019.
Faculty
Five lecturers taught the 2019 school: Kilnam Chon (South Korea), Woodrow Hartzog (United States), Koichiro Komiyama (Japan), Xiaodong Lee (China) and KS Park (South Korea).
Register
Participants, lecturers and secretariat recorded together, as APSIG published them.
- Anupam Agarwal — India
- MD A Halim — Bangladesh
- Iqbal Ahmed — Bangladesh
- A. Khalil Azizi — Afghanistan
- Satish Babu — India
- Darika Bamrungchok — Thailand
- Martin Burrows — Fiji
- Shuai Chen — China
- Kilnam Chon — South Korea (lecturer)
- Haritha Kithmal Jathun Dahanayaka — Sri Lanka
- Fan Junwei (Felix) — China
- Kashif Farooqi — Pakistan
- Feng Jinwen — China
- Dr. Govind — India
- Mohammad Abdul Haque — Bangladesh
- Woodrow Hartzog — United States (lecturer)
- Jumiati — Indonesia
- Sundus Kamran — Pakistan / Thailand (secretariat)
- Imtiaz Karim — Bangladesh
- Maheeshwara Kirindigoda — Sri Lanka
- Koichiro Komiyama — Japan (lecturer)
- Nuttha Kraisit — Thailand (secretariat)
- Xiaodong Lee — China (lecturer)
- Liu Shucai — China
- Lukman Nul Hakim — Indonesia
- Ahmed Bakhat Masoos — Pakistan
- Rom Kant Pandey — Nepal
- KS Park — South Korea (lecturer)
- Nasim Parvez — Bangladesh
- Zelsthein Mauli M. Pasaribu — Indonesia
- Samali Perera — Sri Lanka
- Shah Zahidur Rahman — Bangladesh
- Abdelhamid Al Rahamneh — Jordan
- Gnanajeyaraman Rajaram — India
- Ibrahim Rayhana — Afghanistan
- Shreedeep Rayamajhi — Nepal
- Fatou Sarr — Senegal
- Sein Ma Ma — Myanmar
- Shamsullah Shams — Afghanistan
- Shaila Sharmin — Bangladesh
- Lipasha Shrestha — Nepal
- Santosh Sigdel — Nepal
- Nisarat Tansakul — Thailand (secretariat)
- Mohammad Kawsar Uddin — Bangladesh
- Hong Xue — China
Two points where APSIG’s own 2019 records do not agree. The register above holds 45 names, of whom five were lecturers and three secretariat; the published participant figure is 34. Senegal also appears in the register but not in the published list of 14 participating economies.
Who ran what
2019 assigned named operational responsibilities across the cohort rather than to staff alone — presentation materials to Gnanajeyaraman Rajaram, time keeping to Iqbal Ahmed, remote operation to Nasim Parvez, class evaluation to bdSIG through Nasim Parvez, the Alumni of the Year process to Rom Kant Pandey, and the meeting room and audio-visual setup to Nisarat Tansakul with Sundus Kamran. The Alumni of the Year award itself was not presented that year.
Birds of a Feather
Three Birds-of-a-Feather tracks were opened. The Smart Speaker track was developed in full, producing a substantial briefing on conversational artificial intelligence and the multilingual internet with a reading list of roughly thirty items. Tracks on gender and on youth were created but never filled in.
Onward
Members of the 2019 community carried proposals to the Internet Governance Forum: Waqas Hassan on disability and accessibility, under the title How disABLE are we?; Babu Ram Aryal on the sustainability of national and regional IGF initiatives; and Priyatosh Jana on the multilingual internet. Yeseul Kim, Satish Babu and Nadira Al-Araj had proposals accepted at RightsCon. Waqas Hassan filed the edition’s IGF participation report in January 2020.
The 2019 operating method
Alongside the programme, APSIG published its working documents for 2019. Together they amount to a handbook for running the school, and they are the most reusable part of the founding record.
Cohort model
The cohort was planned at forty places plus two, composed as follows.
| Group | Places | Plus |
|---|---|---|
| Full support | 9 | 3 lecturers |
| Partial support | 10 | 1 |
| Registration fee only | 6 | 1 |
| Self-funded | 10 | — |
| Secretariat | 2 | — |
Support tiers
Four tiers were defined precisely: no support; registration fee only; partial support, covering the fee and a twin-share room; and full support, covering the fee, the room and airfare at standard fares.
National school delegates
Each national school on internet governance held one full-support seat and one registration-fee seat. In 2019 those seats went to the All SIG chair (Satish Babu) and to afSIG, cnSIG, lkSIG, inSIG (two seats), npSIG (two seats) and pkSIG.
Procurement
Venue selection was run as a documented comparison between AIT and the Sukosol, covering room charges and meeting packages, followed by a request for proposals to host. The resulting AIT contract was split into accommodation, local costs, meeting costs and catering — one dinner, three lunches and six coffee breaks.
Attendance policy
APSIG maintained a record of improper cancellations — accepted candidates who did not respond, or who withdrew at the last minute without notice — so that fellowship decisions in later years could take prior conduct into account. Repeat attendance across editions was expected to run at forty to fifty per cent, and was treated as a feature of the model rather than a problem.
Questions left open
The 2019 documents logged their own unresolved issues, which read as a fair summary of what a school of this kind has to keep solving: how to fund the cohort dinner; whether a core group of ten to fifteen members should attend every year, and what programme that would require; how to keep returning members engaged when there are not enough presentation slots for them; and whether to pair each lectured class with a case study to form half-day workshops.
2020 — planned in Kathmandu, delivered online
Two versions of the 2020 edition exist. The programme was first built for Kathmandu, then rebuilt for delivery online when travel became impossible.
As planned
Two days at the Park Village Resort in Kathmandu, on 25 and 26 September 2020. The first day was to cover the internet governance ecosystem, access and diversity, names and numbers, the digital economy, privacy and data protection, artificial intelligence and blockchain, gender and youth, and a multistakeholder role-play. The second was to cover regional challenges following APrIGF 2020, the IGF+ model, ethics and emerging technology, fact-checking and local content, online safety and IoT security, jurisdiction and intermediary liability, and lightning talks, closing with certificates.
As delivered
A Day 0 on 21 November 2020 opened the school with welcomes, fellow introductions, and a session on core internet technologies with Sunny Chendi of APNIC. Three teaching days followed on 26, 27 and 28 November, each with two sessions running from 11:00 to 13:45 (UTC+05:30).
The inaugural session was given by Anriette Esterhuysen, then chair of the IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group. The teaching sessions were:
- The internet governance landscape and ecosystem — moderated by Joyce Chen, with Manju Chen, Bronwyn Mercer, Jaewon Son and Afifa Abbas
- Artificial intelligence, smart cities and human rights — Don Le, Somony Sam, and ARTICLE 19
- Access, gender and the digital divide — Atsuko Okuda, Namita Aavriti, Marwa Azelmat
- Internet governance issues and emerging challenges — Rajnesh Singh, Jia-Rong Low, Jennifer Chung
- Social media, content and data governance — Mishi Chaudhary, Shita Laksmi
- Diversity and disability online — Gunela Astbrink, Muhammad Shabbir, Gayatri Khandhadai
- The digital economy — Jiro Kokuryo, Rajat Kathuria, Jennifer Chung
- Cybersecurity — Nicole Chan, Raman Jit Chima
Committees
Programme Committee — Dr. Govind (chair), Yeseul Kim, Waqas Hassan, Sunny Chendi, Gnanajeyaraman Rajaram.
Fellowship Committee — Mubashir Sargana (chair), Md Jahangir Hossain, Manmeet Pal Singh, Shamsullah Shams.
What fellows agreed to
2020 fellows committed to attending preparation and debrief sessions, all programme tracks, and networking sessions with speakers; to writing a blog post of at least three hundred words; and to engaging on the community mailing list. These terms are the direct ancestor of the fellowship obligations APSIG uses today.