Accessible, united, friendly int@rn@t for everyone

A conversation with Krzysztof Szubert, Poland’s Plenipotentiary for the UN Digital Summit – Internet Governance Forum 2021

Photo: Jakub Szymczuk/ press materials

Krzysztof Szubert Businessman, economic activist and public official. In the years 2017-2018, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Digitisation and Government Plenipotentiary for a Digital Single Market.

For the first time in history, Poland is hosting the UN Digital Summit 2021. You are Poland’s Plenipotentiary for the event.

We have been applying for the right to organise this prestigious event for many years. We did organise lower-rank regional and domestic summits in the past, always attended by guests from UN agencies and other international institutions involved in debates regarding the internet’s future. Having received sufficiently high scores in terms of organisation and substance alike, we were awarded organisation rights at long last. I have had the pleasure of being a member of the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) advising the UN Secretary General on the programme and schedule of Internet Governance Forum meetings, and contributing to previous events – the last in person forum in Berlin (2019), and the previous one in Paris (2018). With such experience under our belts, we tried to represent Poland in a way that would lead to us being awarded organiser rights. We succeeded.