ellenstrickland's blog

It’s been seven weeks since the Christchurch Call was made from Paris, led by Prime Minister Ardern, committing tech companies and governments to address terrorism and violent extremism online. From and since those meetings, companies and governments made a range of collective and individual commitments to action.

The “Christchurch Call’ meeting is being held in Paris on 15 May 2019. With this important conversation happening, we’ve been thinking about how we can help as many voices be heard as possible in these discussions.

This week our CE Jordan Carter and I have been attending the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Paris, an annual event where governments, business, technical community, academics and civil society organisations come together under the aegis of the United Nations to talk about Internet policy issues.

This week we launched our latest Position Paper, "Solving Digital Divides Together". Policy Director Ellen Strickland looks at why we are talking about digital divides, and where InternetNZ wants to go next.

We think that, as members of a global Internet community, societies need to protect human rights, especially rights to privacy as well as freedom of expression. We also want to put forward our thinking about a new right, related to privacy and technology. But to get there, we need to talk about the GDPR.

I wanted to invite people one last time to get involved and let you know the next steps, where the NetHui community will start bringing the 2017 programme together.

The purpose of the conference attendance community grants round is to help the New Zealand Internet community participate in relevant conferences and events related to the development of the Internet.

Every year we enter into strategic partnerships with organisations that align with our vision and goals. We work with these partners on a range of issues and provide funding so that they can keep doing what they do best.

We're pleased to announce our strategic partners for the 2016/2017 financial year. We're providing them with $280,000 over the year to ensure they are able to make improvements to the Internet and technology sector.

We are very excited to have Niels ten Oever visiting New Zealand next week. Niels is an international expert in human rights in a digital world, and is the Head of Digital at Article 19, an international organisation dedicated to defending freedom of expression and information.