Internet Governance Forum 2019: Practice project of the M.A. Convergent Journalism

The Internet Governance Forum, which is organized by the United Nations and held in Berlin from November 25 to 29, 2019, was hosted in Germany for the first time this year. Our students (M.A. Convergent Journalism) were on site the whole week, accompanied the event closely and established contacts with internet experts from all over the world.

Our students accompanied the IGF by media.

Our students accompanied the IGF by media.

It was an exciting conference with many new challenges and impressions - and definitely a very enriching practical project for the students of the masters program Convergent Journalism. Partners were the Youth IGF Germany, the Gesellschaft für Informatik and Google. Central topics of the conference with about 3.000 participants from 163 countries were data governance, cyber security and digital inclusion.

After the "Contract for the Internet" of the Internet founder Tim Berners Lee was the focus of the conference on the first day of the IGF, the official opening by UN Secretary General Guterres and Chancellor Merkel took place the very next day. In the following days, the students conducted talks and interviews with Max Senges (Google), Sasha Rubel (UNESCO), Daniela Trucco (UN), Vint Cerf (one of the founders of the Internet) and many other experts in data governance. Whether panel discussions on the hot topics of fake news, hate speech and climate change or exciting workshops on artificial intelligence: the conference program was broad and very instructive.

The students of the department of Journalism and Corporate Communications accompanied the conference in the media throughout the week, produced three to five current videos and journalistic articles from the "Internet Governance Forum" in Berlin every day and published them via their own digital project channels and social media channels such as Twitter and YouTube. The students were supervised by department head Prof. Markus Ziener, Prof. Tong-Jin Smith, Jost Listemann and the video team of HMKW.

Here you can find a detailed report on the conference.