Session
Description:
Governing design in the age of intelligence begins with how deeply social media now runs through our daily lives. Algorithms that rank and recommend content influence how we interact and make decisions, shaping how we learn, socialise and behave, and every interaction feeds back into the system that adjusts itself in return, which has turned digital platforms into a public issue carrying long-term intergenerational implications. Institutional responses worldwide still concentrate almost entirely on the age at which an account may be opened, keeping the architecture of those environments, and the opportunity for young people to take part in shaping it, out of the conversation. This phenomenon extends well beyond ‘access’, as design decisions sit upstream and the capacity to influence them varies enormously between nations. Thus, understanding this new era calls for an intergenerational and interdisciplinary approach, drawn from everyone who shapes, governs, studies and experiences social media. The comparative analysis is anchored by ISOC Youth Ambassadors from Latin America, East Africa and South Asia, and read against the governance that shapes platforms in practice and the rethinking underway in education, from the AI competency frameworks to the offline spaces where judgement grows. Throughout the session, interactive segments invite onsite and remote participants to engage with different scenarios and compare what currently exists in their respective contexts. What remains afterwards is a common framework to determine whether a measure merely restricts access (banning who enters), or successfully reaches the design layer, and how far it enhances capacity, a question already on the table in most of their countries.
Governing design in the age of intelligence begins with how deeply social media now runs through our daily lives. Algorithms that rank and recommend content influence how we interact and make decisions, shaping how we learn, socialise and behave, and every interaction feeds back into the system that adjusts itself in return, which has turned digital platforms into a public issue carrying long-term intergenerational implications. Institutional responses worldwide still concentrate almost entirely on the age at which an account may be opened, keeping the architecture of those environments, and the opportunity for young people to take part in shaping it, out of the conversation. This phenomenon extends well beyond ‘access’, as design decisions sit upstream and the capacity to influence them varies enormously between nations. Thus, understanding this new era calls for an intergenerational and interdisciplinary approach, drawn from everyone who shapes, governs, studies and experiences social media. The comparative analysis is anchored by ISOC Youth Ambassadors from Latin America, East Africa and South Asia, and read against the governance that shapes platforms in practice and the rethinking underway in education, from the AI competency frameworks to the offline spaces where judgement grows. Throughout the session, interactive segments invite onsite and remote participants to engage with different scenarios and compare what currently exists in their respective contexts. What remains afterwards is a common framework to determine whether a measure merely restricts access (banning who enters), or successfully reaches the design layer, and how far it enhances capacity, a question already on the table in most of their countries.
Policy Question(s)
How can governance audit the algorithmic and generative AI systems shaping youth experiences beyond access limits, and who must bear the burden of proof?
What mechanisms can integrate young people’s lived experiences into the co-creation of "safety by design" standards, particularly in contexts where state regulatory capacity to mandate them is limited?
Technical literacy delivers basic awareness, but true resilience requires critical digital literacy. What must this critical curriculum include, and how can states and communities sustain it beyond the classroom?
Expected Outcomes
The session opens by taking a real headline that restricts young people's access and applying it, live, to the adults in the room, so they meet the question from the seat usually reserved for the young and the hierarchy between who decides and who is decided about dissolves before the discussion starts. Participants leave able to test different measures against a shared framework, whether it merely restricts access or reaches the design layer, and how far it builds capacity, rehearsed at the close through anonymous profile cases. Live polling becomes a mirror the room reads together, surfacing how its assumptions shift as each case is revealed, so what remains is shared understanding rather than a record of anyone's answers. The lasting output is that framework, a portable reading others can reuse, and a short public synthesis making visible the governance work youth already lead and keeping the conversation going.
Format
Roundtable
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: The roundtable’s format enables the process to unfold in a series of steps over 90 minutes. By doing so, the room first builds a shared language across regions and disciplines, then applies it to real cases, and only then does the framework answer for itself and travel home with participants. A 30 or 60 minute slot would stop at that first stage and leave people restating what they believed, with no room for the deconstruction that rebuilds the argument. The format also challenges the hierarchy that shapes these debates, since young people are absent from the tables where digital rules are written, and that absence is why the rules reach for the door and miss the design behind it. Placing Youth Ambassadors alongside those who write and study these rules connects perspectives siloed elsewhere, creating a space where participants move beyond fixed roles toward a shared sense of responsibility.
Duration (minutes): 90
Format description: The roundtable’s format enables the process to unfold in a series of steps over 90 minutes. By doing so, the room first builds a shared language across regions and disciplines, then applies it to real cases, and only then does the framework answer for itself and travel home with participants. A 30 or 60 minute slot would stop at that first stage and leave people restating what they believed, with no room for the deconstruction that rebuilds the argument. The format also challenges the hierarchy that shapes these debates, since young people are absent from the tables where digital rules are written, and that absence is why the rules reach for the door and miss the design behind it. Placing Youth Ambassadors alongside those who write and study these rules connects perspectives siloed elsewhere, creating a space where participants move beyond fixed roles toward a shared sense of responsibility.
Hybrid Format: The hybrid component is designed as one interconnected space where onsite and online participants build a single dialogue together, so the two audiences integrate their knowledge. Blind votes go through Mentimeter as one anonymous stream, which keeps a participant's position in the room from ranking whose reading counts. A shared collaborative board then holds the framework as it takes shape, written into the same workspace from both sides, so understanding accumulates where everyone can see and edit it. The online moderator keeps a live queue of remote cases and hands each first response to a remote voice before the room replies, while a chat-to-floor relay brings a typed question to the table within the minute. Each tool carries one function, and participants leave having practised integrating different forms of knowledge through the tools themselves.
Organizer 1: Fernanda Rokha Sanchez-Umaña, Internet Society
Organizer 2: Doreen Nandutu Nabuzale, Uganda DNS Forum
Organizer 3: Ankita Rathi, Internet Society
Organizer 2: Doreen Nandutu Nabuzale, Uganda DNS Forum
Organizer 3: Ankita Rathi, Internet Society
Speaker 1: Doreen Nandutu Nabuzale, Civil Society, African Group
Speaker 2: Fernanda Rokha Sanchez-Umaña, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Maarten Botterman, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Roberto Zambrana, Technical Community, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 2: Fernanda Rokha Sanchez-Umaña, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Speaker 3: Maarten Botterman, Technical Community, Western European and Others Group (WEOG)
Speaker 4: Roberto Zambrana, Technical Community, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Moderator
Fernanda Rokha Sanchez-Umaña, Civil Society, Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC)
Online Moderator
Doreen Nandutu Nabuzale, Civil Society, African Group
Rapporteur
Ankita Rathi, Civil Society, Asia-Pacific Group
What will participants gain from attending this session?
