This year’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)+20 Forum took place from 07-11 July in Geneva, and marked a significant milestone of twenty years of progress made in the implementation of the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, which set the framework for global digital cooperation with a vision to build a multi-stakeholder, people-centric, inclusive, and development-oriented information and knowledge society.
IEEE was engaged in numerous sessions during the WSIS+20 High-Level Event. Here are some of the highlights:
This year’s WSIS event started with a keynote address by Kathleen Kramer as part of the WSIS+20 High-Level Dialogue, “WSIS Legacy in Motion: Honoring the Past, Shaping the Future” where she noted that, “To truly harness the potential of such advancements, to address the grand challenges of our time, and to ensure these technologies serve humanity effectively, two critical pillars must stand strong: robust STEM education, and a strong standardization ecosystem that enables timely development of needed technical standards.”
Next on the agenda was an IEEE Knowledge Café on “Strong Sustainability by Design, Place-based Policy and the SDGs,” where attendees explored in an interactive discussion how strong sustainability principles, technical standards, and policy approaches that are people and place-centered can work together to advance progress toward the UN SDGs. The participants reflected on how technology design and standards can better support ecosystem integrity and resilience, resource availability, and inclusive local development. Participants agreed on pathways for embedding sustainability-by-design into real-world systems–bridging global goals and global standards with specific local community-centered issues, goals, and opportunities to arrive at local context-based solutions.
The IEEE Young Professionals hosted an intergenerational dialogue on leveraging technology for innovation and global resilience, focusing on ethical AI, digital inclusion, and climate action. It explored regulatory challenges in AI governance, data sovereignty, and equitable access to digital technologies while fostering a collaborative, youth-led approach to responsible AI implementation. This discussion highlighted how young professionals and experienced leaders can co-create AI policies and standards that promote trust, fairness, transparency, and inclusivity in AI development and deployment, enabling a sustainable and ethically driven technological future.
The IEEE Workshop on “Global Standards for a Sustainable Digital Future” focused on how open, consensus-driven standards can provide the necessary foundation for digital transformation, sustainable development, and responsible technology governance, contributing to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the principles outlined in the UN Global Digital Compact (GDC), and in support of WSIS outcomes. By focusing on the potential of open standards to drive positive change, this workshop aimed to encourage collaboration and commitment to creating a sustainable digital future.
IEEE’s Karen Mulberry joined the eWorldWide group session on “Breaking the Fake in the AI World: Staying Smart in the Age of Misinformation, Disinformation, Hate, and Deepfake,” where she noted that addressing the issues at hand requires a multi-faceted and multi-stakeholder approach, with a strong emphasis on proactive design and robust verification mechanisms. IEEE’s work centers on creating globally recognized standards and initiatives that foster a safer, more secure, and healthy digital landscape, particularly for future generations. Karen highlighted that by working together, leveraging global initiatives, and prioritizing a greater duty of care, “we can ensure that the digital world serves as a tool for empowerment and connection, rather than a source of harm.
The Freedom Online Coalition (FOC), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) invited IEEE SA delegation member Karen McCabe to their session entitled “Embedding Human Rights in AI Standards: From Principles to Practice”, where she recognized the imperative and complexity of addressing human rights principles in the lifecycle of AI standards. Incorporating human rights into standards development presents technical, procedural, and institutional challenges that need to be taken into consideration. Bodies, such as IEEE, can create enabling conditions for responsible innovation platforms for dialogue, offering voluntary guidelines, and building communities of practice to help bridge gaps between high-level human rights commitments and day-to-day technical decision-making.
IEEE SA delegation team member Karen Mulberry, spoke at a UNESCO session entitled “WSIS Action Line C7: e-Science for Inclusive Futures: Access, Collaboration, and Foresight for the Next Decade” where she noted that technical standards are emerging technologies common language, a set of agreed-upon rules and benchmarks developed through transparent, bottom-up and collaborative efforts by experts worldwide that help ensure interoperability, promote safety, guarantee quality, and foster trust in new technologies. They help enable emerging technologies to scale, to be adopted widely, and to integrate seamlessly into our existing infrastructure, and transform exciting new concepts into reliable, everyday realities.
At the end of the WSIS week, IEEE Young Professional’s Yuhan Zheng facilitated a Leaders TalkX session where she led a discussion among government officials from Colombia, Costa Rica, Kuwait, and Uruguay on the collaborative role of governments and stakeholders in achieving inclusive and efficient e-services.
Kathleen Kramer also participated in the panel “High-Level AI Standards Panel” at the AI for Good Global Summit, which was held alongside WSIS+20, where panelists from international standards setting bodies and others explored the future trajectory of artificial intelligence and the critical role of technical standards in enabling responsible innovation and global collaboration.
The 2025 IEEE Delegation was led by Prof. Kathleen A. Kramer, IEEE 2025 President and CEO, and – in addition to an IEEE staff team – included volunteers Maike Luiken, Chair, IEEE P7800™ and IEEE Planet Positive 2030 Initiative, Dimitrios Kalogeropoulos, IEEE Representative to the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice, Rakesh Kumar, Chair, DataPort President, IEEE Future Directions (remote), Vinko Lesic, past Vice Chair, IEEE Region 8 Member Activities, and Grayson Randall, Chair, Humanitarian Technologies Board. Yuhan Zheng, Co-Chair, External Affairs, Climate and Sustainability Subcommittee (CSSC), and Polat Goktas, Chair, Digital Transformation & Innovation Hub Subcommittee, joined from the IEEE Young Professionals group.
IEEE’s participation in this year’s WSIS+20 continued to illustrate its leadership, impactful work of IEEE and significant practical contributions to advancing the implementation of the SDGs.
