The Asia Pacific School of Internet Governance started here in Asian Institute of Technology(AIT), Thailand from 11 to 15 September 2016. The APSIG  this year has more than 20 participants from the Asia Pacific region who represent various stakeholders and expertise.

According to organizers, “We have been developing the APSIG program since September 2015 as the two-year project in 2015~2017. We target experts and leaders of schools on Internet governance as well as other participants who engage on Internet governance. We have included regional issues in Asia Pacific as much as possible. The Program consists of seven Tracks in addition to Opening and Closing Sessions, Hot Topic Session, and Role Play Class. Each track consists of several 90-minutes classes. We expect that each class consists of 60-minutes lecture followed by 30-minutes discussion in general. A (multistakeholder) role-play class and a hot topic session may be offered optionally. We offer perspectives from various disciplines in this track. We hope they would help people to understand the Internet Governance which is  interdisciplinary with many disciplines. These perspective classes are typically offered in the first lectures on “Internet Governance” at Law School, Political Science Dept, Engineering Schools, and Economics Department/Business School, respectively. ”

Main Objectives of APSIG2016

• Develop professional courses on the Internet governance
• Open SIG Courseware Development: Archive video recording of lectures, presentation materials and other documents for public access,
• Support development of localized courses, and
• Collaborate with the relevant organizations including other regional and local schools on Internet governance.

Mohit Saraswat, a cyber security expert said ” APSIG certainly creates better opportunity of learning and understanding the global internet ecosystem. It can be a very useful tool for raising awareness not just at individual or technical level but can have an effective result in terms of seriously policy management and interventions.”

Similarly, another participant Aris Ignacio,   said, ” The learnings of the school was great, we are taking back the internet values of creating a better internet ecosystem. This kind of school should be run at national and regional level for better integration and use of technology lobbying.”

The APSIG is currently a pilot project envisioned by Prof. Dr Kilnam Chon which aspires to create a network of national SIGs in  collaboration of creating better learning opportunity and knowledge sharing platform in the region.