NGI Panel: Communities, Digital Rights and the Future of the Internet

Join us on January 25th for a 60-minute online panel on Digital Rights within the NGI project. Discover grassroots communities’ priorities and challenges in shaping the internet’s future. Explore ways to create a more inclusive, human-centric internet. Community leaders from Access Now, Missions Publiques, Algorights, and Wikimedia will share their visions for a fair future of internet.

In parallel to the activities carried out as part of the NGI program, more and more grassroot communities are being established to pursue and influence the development of the internet of the future. Their vision is often aligned with the NGI principles and points towards a more safe, sustainable, fair, and human-centric digital environment, with open source and digital common at its core. But many of their requests, learnings and lines of action may not be evident at the policy level, and those can be very relevant add-ons to plan and shape the future NGI lines of action by following an inclusive, grounded, bottom-up approach.

This panel is proposed to learn about the priorities and challenges that these communities are currently facing in an attempt to combine the resources, tools and solutions made available by the NGI ecosystem, and the capacities, energy, skills and networks of these grassroot communities. 

The session aims at embedding a societal and community perspective within the NGI, thus extending its scope while exploring synergies and potentially collaborating in future initiatives. It will pave the way for co-envisioning and co-designing scenarios of desirable futures enabled by the internet.    

Agenda

• 11:00 – 11:10 | Welcome and introduction
  A. Higueras, Ideas for Change, M. Calisti, Martel Innovate
• 11:10 – 11:20 | The NGI initiative
  G. Lobo, Project Officer at DG CONNECT
• 11:20 – 11:35 – Expert panel
  Representatives of the grassroot communities presenting their work/community:
  Access Now; Algorights; We, The Internet; Wikimedia
• 11:35 – 11:55 | Debate and discussion
  Questions from the moderators and from the audience
• 11:55 – 12:00 | Wrap up
  G. Maccani, Ideas for Change

Speakers

• Manavpreet Kaur, Governance Committee Support Associate at Wikimedia Foundation
• Antoine Vergne, Organizer of ‘We, the Internet’ and Co-Director at Missions Publiques
• Lucía Errandonea,  Team Algorights, and Govtech Project Manager at GOBE
• Caterina Rodelli, EU Policy Analyst at Access Now 

MODERATORS:

• Anna Higueras, Head of Projects at Ideas for Change
• Giovanni Maccani, Senior Researcher at Ideas for Change