The 2024 Summit for Democracy is set to take place next March in Seoul, under the auspices of the Korean government. This year's theme, “Democracy for Future Generations”, underscores a dual focus: exploring the pivotal role of technology and engaging the youth in safeguarding democracy for the times ahead. In line with this, the Korean government has entrusted my organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), with the task of consulting its partner networks on a couple of topics related to youth, technology, and democracy. The objective of these consultations is to formulate a series of recommendations that will inform and shape the final declaration of the summit.
As part of this initiative, we are looking to collaborate with the Youth Coalition on Internet Governance (YCIG) for a consultation focusing on how to integrate youth perspectives into digital policy-making. The consultation titled “Empowering Youth Engagement in Digital Governance” will explore current barriers to effective youth participation and innovative approaches for meaningful engagement.
Key Points:
- Consultation Topic: Empowering Youth Engagement in Digital Governance.
- Objective: Formulate recommendations for the summit's final declaration.
- Your Role: Provide insights, identify key topics and speakers.
This questionnaire is geared towards youth, defined broadly for the purposes of this questionnaire as those under 35 years old, who have participated in internet governance systems, processes, and events in the past. Participation can include engagement with the IGF, ICANN, the ITU, the IETF, and the IEEE- or significant engagement with digital policy through national policy-making bodies or at global gatherings such as Rightscon.
If you have never engaged on internet governance issues, please click on this
link to take a survey meant to better understand youth leaders' interests around internet policy issues and future modes of engagement. This questionnaire is meant to garner your insights into the importance of youth participation and engagement in internet policymaking, the challenges around engaging with these forums as a young person, and ways to improve youth engagement on these topics. Your response to this questionnaire will be used to inform a report for the 2024 Summit for Democracy and recommendations for how international organizations can better support youth to engage on these vital digital topics.
All of the answers to this questionnaire will be anonymized in final publication. Full quotes may be used, but will not be attributed. The survey data is stored in a safe and encrypted format. If you have any questions about this survey or the wider project, please contact Madelyn Johnson at
made...@ned.org.
The questionnaire below is largely qualitiative. Most of the questions are open-ended and meant to solicit full sentence answers from respondents. We are using this questionnaire as the first stage of a consultative research process to understand how youth are engaging with internet policymaking.
As we hope to solicit full answers from each respondent, we estimate that this survey will take you between 15-25 minutes to complete. We ask that you respond thoughtfully to each question that applies to you, but know that all questions are optional and can be skipped.
We are deeply grateful for your time and participation to help make the case for greater youth inclusion in the decision-making bodies that are shaping the future of technology and democracy.