5th webinar aftermath and video material

On 21th January the GIPO initiative, represented by Kasia Jakimowicz and David Osimo from Open Evidence, presented the initial concept of Towards Federation Roadmap during the webinar. As the GIPO Observatory Tool is designed as an automated service to, both, final users and other observatories, the GIPO's Towards Federation Roadmap is aimed at analysis of the possible scenarios of collaboration with other initiatives, trying to tackle these questions: How can we develop a sustainable basis for a collaboration between online observatory networks to increase sustainability in a longer-term perspective? What are the main areas and pending needs of cooperation between observatories?

The objective of Towards Federation Roadmap is to define, based on the analysis of the existing initiatives, what could be the concrete features of this collaboration (federation) and how they can be implemented (roadmap). To increase the sustainability and effectiveness of the project, the GIPO aims to provide a framework to enable cooperation among platforms and, by that, to build bridges among observatories in order to avoid the risk of parallel redundant efforts.

The presentation covered 1) mapping and categorizing the landscape of Internet Governance repositories and platforms, 2) brief explaination of the concept of interoperability, including the concept of taxonomy vs. controlled vocabulary and technological requirements, 3) the concept of federation and 4) possible areas and scenarios of collaboration.

To sum up:

The main component and the basis of Towards Federation Roadmap is a concept of specialisation, where each member focuses on its unique excellences and provides them as a service to the other partners. For instance, DiploFoundation has expertise in development of IG taxonomy, whereas the GIPO or NetMundial Solution Map are good in strategic engagement etc.

We could think about federation where different organisations are active in different layers of information, "an information layer approach":

• data layer - sources and observatories share data and each observatory becomes a source for the others,
• analysis layer - where the GIPO provides text analysis and semantic enrichement and other observatories provide human curation,
• presentation layer - all the observatories present the information in any way they envisage.

The presentation and the concept raised interesting questions and comments from keynote speaker, Diego Canabarro representing The Brazilian Internet Observatory, who share the perspective of the collaborating observatory.

Further comments have been raised by Tereza Horejsova (DiploFoundation: Geneva Internet Platform and Digital Watch) and Cristina Monti (European Commission).

From all the comments the list of Action Points and Next steps for GIPO and Towards Federation Roadmap has emerged:

• to enhance the survey of Towards Federation Roadmap by inclusion of IG schools as a user group (such as School of Internet Governance),
• to include general population as an important GIPO user group - as the GIPO initiative can serve as an educational tool on IG issues for general public as well,
• to review the categorization of stakeholders,
• to continue promoting common semantics for all the projects,
• to direct the Federation Roadmap into the notion of capacity development and sharing resources with the underdeveloped world and Global South,
• to enhance collaboration towards further development of DiploFoundation taxonomy for general usage and granurality,
• to continue efforts to solve multilingualism issues - in particular to focus on how to share resources and know-how.

See the video material below:

Presentation from the webinar is available here.

If you want, you can still participate to the survey.

For further details and collaboration:  Kasia Jakimowicz (kjakimowicz (at) open-evidence.com)