 Welcome to the World Summit on the Information Society 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. And I am delighted to be joined by Yaroslav Ponder, ITU Senior Strategy and Policy Advisor. And people tell me that informally you're known as Mr. Wissis. It's the first Wissis since the Sustainable Development Goals were set last year. And one of the big challenges of course is aligning the Wissis Action Lines with those SDG goals. How are you going to go about it? In fact, we are not seeing this as a challenge. This is a great opportunity. And our community was already preparing for this opportunity since 2015 when we developed in the collaborative effort and the Wissis SDG matrix, which puts in a very nice and easy to understand framework how the Wissis Action Lines in fact can address and the achievement of the SDGs and how the ICTs can accelerate the achievement of the SDGs. This is the reason why we are not talking in the Wissis about the challenges. We are much more positive and we believe that we will be able to turn these targets, which were set in September 2015 at the SDGs summit into the great opportunities and the most important into the partnerships which will lead towards the concrete work on the ground. And talking about the work on the ground, we are always have to see what is happening also at the global level, but also at the regional and the national level. And this makes us believe hearing here at the Wissis Forum so many best practices, stories and projects that in fact the work is going on, but we have to only provide the concrete orientation how this work, which is underway, can be addressed in the context of the SDGs and strengthened in order to help the nations to achieve the SDGs on time. And how are you going to monitor that exactly you are on track and on time for the 2030 deadline? This is something which we are addressing within the UN system and tracking the all targets with the statistics provided by the governments, but also we are trying to see how the new sources of the statistics, particularly addressing the challenges of the SDGs, could help us understand where the policymakers and also the implementers can use in order to strengthen their efforts in particular areas. Of course, there is a lot of challenges to be addressed. We are still working heavily on the connecting, the unconnected. We have identified during the UN General Assembly overall review several and divides, including the gender divide, which was placed very high as the cross-cutting issue on the agenda of many WSIS action lines facilitators. And now this is the time when we are also with the communities, organizing ourselves in order to make sure and that we have on the annual basis at the WSIS Forum, the good understanding if we are on the track or some corrective measures have to be implemented. So of course, we'll have another WSIS Forum in 2017, but 2016, what sort of spirit have you seen here at the Forum? This is definitely a big change. The outcomes of the UN General Assembly decided to hold this WSIS Forum on the annual basis. And we have already planned that for the next decade, we'll be using this platform together with all UN agencies as the key place to discuss the role of the ICTs for the SDGs. So we are kicking off a very nice journey of the building, the community and in fact attracting the other community working on the development issues and to be able to understand that the ICT is a real enabler of the development. And this brings us to the cross-sectoral planning and moving from the vertical orientation towards the horizontal approaches, addressing not only the one sector, but having incorporated ICT component in the health sector, in the education sector and the others. And we believe that this is a right moment to use the WSIS Action Line framework to make the real change. And from the participants and from those who are coming in different levels, from the Ministry of the Infrastructure through the Ministry of Modernization through the Ministry of Education, Culture and Health, all those stakeholders are here. Also the private sector working in those sectors are coming here to exchange their great stories and lessons learned and sharing them with the other nations. And this makes this forum very unique. That's not only we are talking about the high-level guidance, but also we are going towards creating the partnerships which will help us to advance and achieving the goals set by the Sustain Development Goals Summit. And collaborative partnerships, there's really a buzzword here. Have you actually seen this in action? Have you seen people being brought together, sharing experience, sharing know-how, sharing best practice? Yes, exactly. So this year we welcomed more than 250 leaders who are addressing the meeting in the collaborative high-level policy sessions. All these guidance, now exactly today and tomorrow, is addressed within the framework of the Action Line Facilitation meetings where the real partnerships are discussed, where the proposals and the opportunities are tabled to the all stakeholders that everybody can be part of those. And this brings us to the concept of inclusiveness, which was proposed once the WISIS was intercepted in 2003 and 2005, where we were committing towards the building the Global Information Society, but inclusive one. And so that's why it makes us happy to see so much of excitement and very nice flow from the high-level guidance towards the real implementation and real action on the ground. And we hope that in the next WISIS for us we'll have even much more real examples of the implementation of the actions generated by the WISIS Forum. Also during the WISIS Forum we have the new components which are fostering the collaboration and fostering the outcome-oriented discussions. We will have the innovation track, we have also the hackathon track where the experts are ready joining the forces in order to work on some concrete deliverables. And we hope that this will be the spirit which will be evolving in the future at the WISIS Forum, attracting much more stakeholders and grassroots working on the ground and willing to learn, but also to share with the others their experiences. Yaroslav Ponda, ITU Senior Strategy and Policy Advisor. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much. And please do join us on the ITU YouTube channel, where there are many interviews with experts here at the WISIS Forum 2016.