Let’s get started. I don’t have anything after this. I have plenty of time.

Great.

I’ll give you a quick introduction. I don’t know, are you familiar with Access Now or RightsCon?

RightsCon. A lot of my friends has been to RightsCon.

In fact, I keep telling people, more people know RightsCon than they know Access Now.

That’s exactly right. The same with also Freedom Forum in the Human Rights Foundation. [laughs]

Yes, exactly. They are friends. As an organization, we are very young. We’re around now 11 years old. I joined the organization five years ago. I’m a lawyer by training but I work in the tech sector. I worked in Google previously. What Access Now does is very international.

It’s a society organization that tries to protect and extend the digital rights of users at risk. We now more broadly see our mandate to protect human rights in the digital age with a focus on things like privacy, data protection, online freedom of expression, pushing back against excessive content regulation, network neutrality, and openness and open cultures that make the Internet possible.

We are now a 75-member organization across the world and over 75 people on the team, roughly, split into teams that work on digital security, which is the core of access. That’s how we know so many people in Taiwan as well.

We try and provide free help to activists, democracy organizers, protest mobilizers, people who do transparency, whistleblowers, anyone who needs, basically, assistance on encryption or worry about malware, or being attacked. We have a digital security helpline that works 24/7 to provide them free help.

My friends from the Open Culture Foundation have worked with you.

Ellie and many others of our team have often come to Taiwan. There’s a large community as you know who works with these issues. Very, very happy to work with them. In addition to that, we have teams that work on policy and advocacy. I work with the policy team. I’m a director of policy covering the Asia-Pacific region as well as global cybersecurity.

We work as policy people with government, regulators, other stakeholders like elected representatives, sometimes the courts, and elsewhere on protecting digital rights and government policy globally. In Asia-Pacific, we operate from Pakistan to Japan to Australia to elsewhere.

We have staff mostly based out of South Asia and Melbourne and we work on policy issues here. Then we also have teams that work on grants. We support small NGOs and activists across the region. We have money, that SIDA, Swedish International Development Agency, provided that allows us to give money to other organizations in the global setting.

What’s the range of the grants?

It ranges. We do quick, strategic, I’d say, rapid-response rounds of $500 to $5,000.

Microgrants. OK.

Then we do larger ones as well. We do programmed grants ranging from 8 to 15 and then from 15 up to 30.

That’s more substantial.

We sometimes do multi-year grants as well. We do crowdfunding also but if you want a long-term crowdfunder, we’ll get you started and then we’ll introduce you to other people. That’s what we’ve done in the region.

Of course.

We’re trying to grow that further as well. We also with other NGOs, also provide emergency funds. For example, if an activist is under physical threat or attack in the digital space in their country, along with many other NGOs, we’ve got a small fund where they allow them to be able to fly out immediately, get free assistance.

We support that sort of thing as well and do much more. The more nimble quick micro-grants and stuff in the tech space. Imagine if a NGO has been attacked or targeted, they need quickly to buy new cell phones, or new server space online, or they need to buy encrypted devices, we can quickly help and assist with that. That’s the sort of things we do.

Very valuable work.

We’ve been very, in fact, again helped in that by not just working with Taiwanese groups but the insights they’ve had. The bigger thing that many people know us for is RightsCon. Nikki is the head of RightsCon. She is the director, so I’ll let her introduce this.

Sure. RightsCon started in 2011 as the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. We’ve been running it ever since then. It’s grown quite a bit since then. At its core, it is about convening multi-stakeholder groups to talk about human rights in the digital age. We’ve seen over the last few years quite a transition from traditional digital rights conversations to human rights in the digital age.

In Brussels, we grew quite a bit. We had around just over 1,200 participants in 2017 that came. That was when we marked a transition of more and more human rights groups, humanitarian actors. Others that hadn’t traditionally seen themselves in the digital rights space were coming because technology was continuously impacting their work.

Since then we’ve seen a lot of growth in terms of RightsCon. We had our most recent event in Tunisia. We had nearly 3,000 registered participants and 400 sessions that happened across the four days of the summit.

That brought participants from 130 countries but also all of the major private companies, a lot of governments, and academia, press. It’s very much a civil society-owned summit. We run the summit, but 50 percent of the participants are civil society.

I saw the breakdown.

Yeah. We do, through our program is call for proposals. The entire program is community-built. Participation in that is from all sectors. We just closed our call for proposals for Costa Rica.

Costa Rica.

Yeah. We received 1,300, which is 500 more than we did for Tunisia.

Not too bad.

It’s a good problem to have. There’s growing scope in terms of the conversations that we can have. We really focus on outcomes, so we think that connecting people is really important. We also really think that, moving forward, the shared agenda is our utmost priority.

Across the program, we have private meetings, satellite events, workshops, panel discussions, but also roundtables. Things that…

I was just telling the Human Rights Foundation that the OFF should learn from that. [laughs]

Yeah. I think we…

More side events, more workshops.

As we’ve grown, we just haven’t really increased any of the plenary-style sessions, which makes it a very much different dynamic. Our focus is really about decentralizing some of the conversations that happen, making sure that people who don’t normally get to go to these global forums have a voice and that their voices are equally heard in the conversations that they need to be.

We do a diversity audit of every session. We look and say, “Whose perspectives are missing? How can we bring them to the community?” Those are some of the core priorities behind our summit.

We’re here, and we we’re just in South Korea, because we’re looking for a venue for 2021.

Awesome.

This year’s will be in Costa Rica. We recognized we haven’t brought it back to Asia since 2015 when it was in The Philippines and it was much smaller then. Now that it’s reached the size it has, it seems very important to bring it back to Asia. We have, as you were both saying, active Taiwanese community that comes, and also not as many from the region as we would like given the size and scope of the issues that are represented here.

We’re looking at both Taiwan and South Korea as potential hosts.

South Korea is great. I just went back from there as well, and I’m going to travel there two more times. They are the host of, next year, the Open Government Partnership Summit.

Yeah…

Yes, we heard. We know the team there as well.

That’s right. We’ll be there as well for the IACC, on anticorruption. I’ll probably be there as well. I think South Korea is great.

It’s my first time going. We have a lot of really positive exchange.

It’s a really good. It’s just that for South Asian destinations, Taiwan is slightly closer to the other South Asian countries, but if you have a truly global audience, the air travel to Seoul and to Taipei is probably the same.

Yeah, it’s not a big difference.

The thing for us is we have decided very clearly we’re bringing to Asia-Pacific. We even had a discussion with the management team and we are very clear, Asia-Pacific 2021 for sure. Of the two locations, these are the ones we really prioritized.

What we’re doing in this trip is meeting with stakeholders, understanding what would be best for them, not just for the conference. Obviously, we are a bit selfish. We have thoughts about what’s the best way to organize RightsCon, support that makes it possible.

As Nikki mentioned, it’s become…Just in my time at Access, the scale of RightsCon has risen to a new level. When I started, it was 800 people for RightsCon South East Asia. It’s now 3,000-plus people. If it’s in Asia-Pacific, it’ll be significantly higher.

Things like official government support and things like passport assistance, figuring out things like that…rather, visa assistance, those things like…

Have you talked to both the Oslo Freedom Forum Folks but also the Open Tech Fund, and also Reporters Without Borders, who are all based in Taiwan now and run their annual conference in Taiwan. I think they will be able to get you orange-to-orange comparisons.

As for the things you mentioned, visa, venue, and things like that, I think they eventually chose Taiwan instead of doing Taiwan, Korea, Taiwan, Korea for the much lower cost of venue and much better food.

Both countries have broadband. All the network connectivity is great. I don’t think there’s much of difference otherwise.

Just so you know, in fact, we’ve been in touch with Oslo Freedom Forum a few times…

Yeah. They’re close partners of ours.

Members of our team work closely with OTF on their summit as well. We have not had an organizer level conversation with anybody, but we will. Exactly, we’ve heard this from people. I know many South Asian participants, for example, have said that they found it very easy to be able to travel to Taiwan, to be able to get support.

Even countries who normally don’t get, say, online authorization, if there’s been support from the government, they’ve been able to…

The Foreign Service delegate – hey, who is here – to fix visa issues in record time. [laughs]

I noticed that. That sort of thing is helpful for us. The thing that we’re doing is getting people’s feedback. Just in our processes, we are creating all of this. We’re also asking different stakeholders who may not be from the region in terms of how can you travel, what would be good for you, what’s your perception.

As you know, many people are frontline activists. They want to know and be… informed about what they face, what they don’t face, but by March, make a decision. What we generally now try to institutionalize is at the closing of the RightsCon this year, we will announce the RightsCon for next year.

We normally, in fact often now, very clearly also have senior representatives from the community and government there to make a strong statement, because we also want it to be owned more and more by the community, and you have a government to buy into that.

It’s not just us coming and government having to attend the conference. From Brussels onwards, it’s been the government saying, “We listen to people. We’ll support it.”

It’s co-creation. I see that.

Exactly. That’s the plan that by end of March, we come to that closing. That’s what we have come here to do the meeting about, and we’d love to hear from you in terms of what do you think would be good for us from your perspective. Is RightsCon something you want to see brought here? We’ve heard you say Seoul is good, but obviously, we also want to know and interested in Taipei.

From our perspective also, with regards to your mandate and agenda, what would fit or not fit for the next for next year?

It would totally fit. I’m this conservative anarchist that brings Internet multi-stakeholders into everyday democracy. I would say the mayor of Seoul is doing more or less the same thing. On the transparency side, we’re very similar. His mayor hall is totally transparent, while my office, which is not this building, by the way. They arranged this building to have official meeting. This is my office.

I’ve seen it.

We’ve torn out the walls. You can directly walk in from the street. That’s also pretty transparent. [laughs]

In any case, the culture is similar. What I’ve heard from, as I said, the Open Tech Fund and Oslo Freedom Forum organizers is that they found that because Taiwan has absolute freedom of expression, we’re the only jurisdiction according to CIVICUS Monitor that a journalist’s word is exactly worth the same as the minister’s word.

There is no censorship that a minister can force a journalist to do anything. Even Japan or South Korea have certain legal mechanisms for that sort of thing, but Taiwan is the only one in Asia, and along with New Zealand, the only two in Asia-Pacific, that is completely free.

That ensures that even if the speakers, they might say something that is very contradictory to what we in the government believe, they will face no consequence. That is their main impression, and we are committed to keep that, this absolutely open score CIVICUS Monitor. That is one advantage, I would say.

As for my participation in Costa Rica, I have a lot of civil society friends who always come, no matter what. I usually just rely on their…They also write collaborative notes and things like that, so I’m keeping in touch.

I think it’s not just for my learning experience. I think it’s also if other people would like the government of Taiwan to make certain commitments there, for example around the announcement of our National Action Plan for Open Government, which the first draft for comment will be published by then, which is being co-created with the civil society.

Unlike other national action plans which are two years long and often spans different administrations, ours takes effect on May, which is the inauguration day of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s second term and runs for four years, exactly ending on the term.

There’s no problem of transition, and all the promises are the same as the presidential mandate, which makes it on a higher level than, frankly speaking, most NAPs for other countries. That’s something I can substantially share for our co-creation process and so on.

Of course, our civil society people would say this co-creation process doesn’t include the people that they know, that this is the first trial, we’ll make it better on the second trial and so on, put pressures and things like that. In their words, we’re worth the same as theirs. I think that would be a contribution, if it makes sense to you, to that RightsCon.

Absolutely.

I don’t have other things to share from a government perspective.

I can understand. What I thought I’d share is I know the people who are potentially organizing something. They would like to invite you.

I know their interest was in a session. I think there are a few community members, who were thinking of a discussion around particularly surveillance trends and even government approaches to activists and other actors in the region.

Maybe getting some of the strong members in the conversation. They were particularly looking to get people who have been in organization communities and activism, and who also have then perhaps been in government.

I’m still board member of International NGOs of Activism. I’m wearing two hats.

That’s the reason right there, just especially from someone who is frankly not also from the West or the global North on this, who understands these approaches, then takes part in that conversation. If I remember correctly, it’s either a panel or a workshop.

It’s a private meeting, I think. We sometimes with these discussions, to ensure that they’re productive, sometimes happen privately. The goal that we’ve been discussing was to have…We run a series of private meetings for this region at RightsCon, but to then try to bring some of those discussions, to publicly present them afterwards in another session.

The thing we might organize, which is not yet officially in the proposals, but what we, myself, organize is we normally do. Look at what Digital Asia have done in Hong Kong, although she has now moved to Singapore. They normally have a meeting of Asia-Pacific civil society and academia.

We would then do this also to just, A, increase visibility for people from this region and these global places because, again, there’s not enough, very frankly. B, for people to see common trends - Asia-Pacific is such a very diverse region, but there are actually surprisingly, interesting common problems or trends people notice.

I see.

Not necessarily the same problem, but common developments or common development trends.

We might even add a more formal policymaker meeting that people from the region talking about this because we see this very often. European policymakers build out a Latin America. North American policymakers travel even to Africa sometimes. That rarely happens in Asia-Pacific, so that’s one more thing we might be ready for.

What Maya has proposed right now is one very specific private meeting that would potentially do that. Again, it would be up to her and others to make this come through.

I was in Buenos Aires and I’m quite familiar with that. There was a RELIAL meeting. We did, more or less, the same with the local stakeholders. I remember that the Transparency International, I think, of Buenos Aires, which is also participating in OGP. We all wear five hats. [laughs]

It’s a very fresh perspective from Asia-Pacific because they don’t usually get that perspective. I totally agree.

That’s one thing for sure. That process will get done. What we might do is just to help with that, we send a formal invitation from the RightsCon team mentioning RightsCon and wanting to participate. The specific programming, we can follow up and send, at least.

We are visa-free, too, in Costa Rica, so that’s fine. We don’t have to apply for a visa. That makes traveling easier. It’s June, right?

June 9th, yeah.

Let’s see. It’s not a parliamentary inquiry session. I’m free to travel.

That’s with Parliament going on, that’s the most important thing for ministers or MPs is if Parliament is in session, traveling is difficult.

I can travel then. I just have to justify the carbon emission to the population.

This is where, in fact, we can talk about the greener project.

Yeah, we’ve been…

Awesome. [laughs]

Especially because we’re having it in Costa Rica, but also as the conference gets bigger, we’re grappling with the footprint of it as well. We made a commitment to look at sustainability, both in the program and the production.

We think that there’s a lot of connections that can happen between the traditional environmental communities and the digital rights community and also because increasing surveillance on environmental defenders and things like that, but in production as well.

Our venue is the most environmentally sustainable venue in the region. We’re committed to offsetting the carbon footprint of all international travel.

Oh, yay.

We’re going to do that for the conference.

I will say that publicly, because that justifies my travel. Taiwan is an island after all.

Absolutely, and if that’s of interest, there’ll be a lot of programming this year about climate crisis and…

Very much so.

Absolutely.

Climate emergency, as we call it here.

Exactly. That’s a big focus area this year. That’s something that we’re trying for the first time. We’re usually very honest with the community about, “We’re trying this, and we’re going to see what initiatives work,” and we get feedback on it.

I think it’s something that will carry into all future summits as well. How do we make it sustainable? How do we think about our impact, recognizing the importance of convening, being in person, and connecting, but also the footprint that has.

You’re branding the rights…It’s not Human Rights Council. [laughs] It’s very inclusive, environment’s rights, not human/animal rights. [laughs]

All rights.

Certainly, for us, the thing is it’s also learning from the communities. The climate change community, their approach to activism, politics. Engaging on policy is something many of us in the digital rights space who are meeting, we need to understand.

Even my own organization I work, my policy team hears this all the time in our weekly meeting. Look at how the climate change or environmental justice communities takes issues publicly. They will do both policy nuance, but also make it a mainstream political issue that democracies care about.

We need to similarly on digital, not just be in our space. Digital is now everywhere, which means also sometimes the opponents for rights are everywhere, much bigger established interests. Or even it’s just apathy. People don’t realize what they need to stand up for, so we need to do more of that.

That’s why you and Brett Solomon, our executive director, Brett’s been very keen to say RightsCon is really now not just digital rights. It’s human rights in the digital age. The conversation is really, really broad. Everyone needs to be able to be there, even to just understand where we may be going wrong.

This is great. I wonder how you can do so in four days. [laughs]

It’s hard.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to fit everything in. It’s a good problem to have. Every year everyone’s like, “The program’s too big,” and then they submit 1,300 sessions. It’s a good problem to have.

I will be able to confirm my travel schedule. I’ll be honest with you. Our parliamentary session ends on the end of May, but the parliamentary inquiry ends around end of March, beginning of April, something like that. During the parliamentary inquiry session, of course, I cannot commit on anything. [laughs]

We will be able to get back to you of my physical attendance sometime early April. By the time we’re in Berlin, I’ll probably be able to make that decision, but not after the end of April. Sometime in April, I’ll get back to you on that.

If I cannot travel in the flesh for some reason, hopefully not coronavirus…

…then I’m committed to telepresencing. Sometimes, we just record a five-minute telepresence recording, which actually is quite popular because it doesn’t take much from your program.

For a Singapore museum, there’s a new museum in New York, they even had a interactive “Ask the Minister” thing. They asked me the question around the future of cyberspace, the future of environmental solidarity, and the future of sovereignty. I wear three jackets, answering from three different sector, like tri-sectoral answers, because I can wear three hats. [laughs]

There’s nine recordings, and each is less than three minutes. People can, just pressing, hitting the lottery kind of stuff. [laughs] We can do something like this because this is very inexpensive. It’s just Gauss projection, but it looks like Star Wars. I’m happy to contribute that way if, for some reason, I cannot travel in the flesh.

That’s really cool. We went to, in South Korea, the modern art museum, but also, this year, we added in a new program category around futures, fictions, and creativity, and the way that the art world can contribute to thinking about some of the challenges that we’re working on.

It’s been really cool to see the different ways, some of the contributions that have come in around the different artistic ways to think about some of these issues.

Interactive non-fiction. [laughs] I also did one with the Architecture Biennale, with the German team. They did a interview called Project 2038. My interview’s already online. They asked everyone to talk in a sci-fi fashion, looking backward form the year 2038, how we averted the great climate crisis, the great other crises, and our part in it. [laughs]

It’s a very speculative design way to look into future history. We have to say, “Oh, in the ‘20s, Etherium community developed the Serenity Project,” and speak everything future tense in past tense.

It’s also nice to see it doing it in a dystopian time we deal with. It’s not just like, “Oh, everything has gone horrible.”

That’s right, “How we saved…”

I think that maybe people in our tech policy communities, we are rightfully very dystopian right now, but that’s not helpful. From a political context, many elected representatives need to give what the positive vision could be.

That’s right.

The positive vision doesn’t need to be industry talking about innovation, economic growth. It could even be, “How did we solve this hard problem?” We’re not doing enough.

That’s how the art, which is the dystopian, and the design, which is the more solutions, can work together. I think this is also something worth exploring.

Absolutely.

I thought it, and I would also ask, in the context of RightsCon, and then for Taiwan and Taipei more specifically, what else, if you were to advance the process, would the government or others need from us? For example, there’s really no people who say, “Oh, come to us with this particular process, talk to these other agencies, and they’ll manage it.”

In some countries, it’s just saying, “Just talk to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They’ll arrange everything.”

The Foreign Service handles that, I’m sure. I will also say that each municipality have a different focus. For example, I think Taoyuan City is very much focused on human right. They run participatory budget with participants of all the migrant workers, like not residents.

They don’t have voting power, but they can do a participatory budgeting process about how the migrant workers and, indeed, any immigration policy budget is allocated, like “nothing about them without them.” I think this is truly creative, and it is outside traditional participatory democracy landscape because they probably won’t ever have the right to vote.

I think Taoyuan has this focus. Taichung City has a referendum focus. I’m sure about that, because their mayor won through referendum. [laughs] I’ll probably have to change that word in the record.

For environment, of course, Kaohsiung City have a strong marine, like marine debris. NRC Council is right there. If you want to talk about environmental protection and so on, Kaohsiung really is the place. What I’m trying to say is that if you talk only within the Taipei City ecosystem, you’re just, frankly speaking, one of the many international NGOs.

There’s a limited space for Taipei for the large events like this, but Taoyuan, for example, is extremely convenient now that the Metro is working. It’s just half an hour or something. Taoyuan, Taichung, or Kaohsiung, anything that the high-speed rails reaches, I would say that their municipality would then have extra bonus programs.

For example, Taoyuan may want to show their newly built venue space if they can construct it in time for yours. Probably they will. [laughs] They would be able to show off their new expo center, international architecture-designed, sustainable, green building, whatever, [laughs] to a international audience.

That will be much more favorable when you’re talking about venue discounts and things like that. For Taipei then, that will be everybody gets the same price. The OTF, I think, chose a New Taipei City venue for similar reasons.

That’s very helpful. It would be other ministries at the central level who, if we come back or we’re developing this further, we should speak to through you or others about the program, the agenda, or support? We’re assuming, of course, with the example of immigration, it’ll be both Interior and Foreign Affairs who would be involved on things like visa processing and other things like that?

Visa is Interior, but for international speakers, they would need Foreign Service’s blessing. [laughs] You can, of course, talk directly through Foreign Service, but you can also just email Jill because Jill is also Foreign Service. [laughs] That’s the visa part.

For the civil society engagement part, our National Action Plan for Open Government is coordinated by the National Development Council, or the NDC. NDC handles all the logistics, including inviting the independent review mechanism experts and things like that. They naturally have connections.

It’s not limited to human right, because it’s also procurement, accountability, Open Contracting Partnership, whatever. They probably have more experience connecting you to the local civil society organizations, no matter which focus you want to focus on for the next year.

Great.

Is anything RightsCon related, Nikki, that you wanted to ask further? I wanted to just check.

You know what? I think that this was really helpful. As we mentioned, as it grows, it’s really important to get government support wherever we decide to go. It seems like it would a positive contribution to bring RightsCon here, so that’s helpful.

Definitely.

That’s helpful for us to know. If there’s anything else that you think we would be thinking of as we make the decision between South Korea and Taiwan?

Maybe it’s good for us to tell you when it will be. It would be roughly June 2021.

May or June 2021, depending on the venue that we select and availability.

We’ll complete our internal process this month, try to do announcements with whichever, with the parties concerned in June at Costa Rica. Then it’ll come physically May and June, too.

That’s awesome. Just to check my understanding, this will, for the next year, also be a roughly four-day event.

Yeah.

Unless the people insist.

Unless I get pressured into a five-day event.

In fact, because a lot of people are doing stuff right before, right after. In practice…

So a week of actual… [laughs]

Yeah.

To be honest, it’s a week. It’s a week. It can be even more. In some cases, for example, people have started their other, bigger events, and people might even plan up to 10 days being there. For us, operationally, it’s four days.

It’s four days, but there are a lot of events that happen on the Monday and the weekends, and it builds of the amount of people that come to RightsCon and take advantage of that, too.

We might staying two, three days after RightsCon to do other meetings. We normally have our own big internal organization meeting right after that. As a 70-member international team, it’s very rare we’re all in the same place, so we also just do strategy, understand what’s going on there. In practice, people are there often between 7 to 10 days.

The venue would then need room for these, too.

Yes, but some people even organize things at other locations, so long as it’s nearby and connected. That’s one reason why we’re finding place which is good where there maybe even other options nearby. People can do their pilots or satellite events, or, yes, ideally, one fantastic venue that can hold many, many things together.

It’s like an ecosystem. There’s the programming that we put on that we control, and then there’s the programming alongside that the others do.

Sometimes we can offer space to that, but other times we offer resources to help direct people into where they should host that. It’s turned into be quite an ecosystem of events that happen around the main programming that we host.

I would then suggest that the already existing hubs, like the Taiwan City, there’s the NGO hub. In Taichung I think there’s also the, I forgot the name, but they were originally called the INGO. But I don’t know what they’re calling it now.

In Taoyuan, they’re encouraging human-rights-based organizations, both domestic and international, to be headquartered there because they have a human rights focus, and things like that. I think a venue that’s somewhat close to that space would work out the best, because then the local CSOs can have side events, or pre-events, or post-events, or whatever.

Doing that without a lot of logistics, because they probably don’t have a lot of resource to do logistics if you choose this high-end, expensive exhibition center. Right? [laughs]

Exactly.

The ecosystem is also important to consider. Our own Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Summit, which I’m support is a impact hub network thing, which is May, this year, is in Taoyuan for precisely this reason, with the help of the Taoyuan City.

If you want to talk to the organizers, so far I work with Taichung, Kaohsiung, and Taoyuan on three subsequent Asia-Pacific Social Enterprise summits. We know the city contact points for all those three cities. If you will like to contact them, Jill has the contact.

Yeah, that would be amazing.

Beyond rights, the only thing I was going to mention is we want to be increasing our level of Asia-Pacific work. We’ve so far tried to support, as you know, very actively through security awareness work and others in the region, we’re trying to engage more on policy, public mobilization, community engagement, human rights issues at the international, regional, and even national level.

The only thing I probably could say from my perspective is from your role looking at Asia-Pacific on digital, is there any issue that you think you want iterate to us, or where Access can be helpful, or where we can do more? Or if, for example, just broadly speaking, we can be more supportive to the people you work with?

I’m just giving you a vision of what we think so far, and in the regions we’ve been a bit more intensive, looking at India and Australia, because we had staff based there. Looking there more deeply, and data protection is important for us.

Also, pushing back on surveillance, particularly in democracies. At least helping democracies control over-broad surveillance, and make sure that democratic lawmakers and other institutions prevent sometimes the tendency to over-survey activists and others that are happening there.

Yeah, that piece.

I just want to say, so far, that’s been mostly as administrative, because we think there are particularly opportune moments there. We’re very aware that it’s a conversation elsewhere as well, including in South Korea, including sometimes Japan.

It’s a bit more challenging for us in Indonesia or elsewhere. Other places, where, what we can do has been Hong Kong. We have probably spoken about both mass surveillance as well as the Internet shutdown attempts in Hong Kong and elsewhere there.

The other issue for us that’s very big for us in this region is, unfortunately, Internet shutdowns, which might seem a bit alien to Taiwan, but unfortunately in India, Hong Kong, Pakistan, Indonesia it’s powerful…

It’s a nearby jurisdictions, yes.

We are trying to have people in governments speak up to this, really pushback on that. Beyond that, the issue is more extensively on privacy and data protection, not just on surveillance but making sure there are good data protection laws in countries to hold corporate entities on data to account. Make sure the data apocalypse that’s happening is reigned back a bit in.

I’m sorry. Data what?

Data apocalypse, it’s sort of like near explosion of people’s personal data being made available in ways that they don’t have control over.

Ah, OK.

Give them a sense of not just agency, but government accountability and oversight in that space. That’s something that’s very important for us.

The other issue for us is definitely cybersecurity, at both the national and global level in Asia-Pacific. Both in terms of increasing government commitments to global cyber norms, actually creating them. They’re seeing this message that, “Oh, we will run this operation because you ran this operation against us.”

But try and at least say, “Look, cyberspace is a global commons. We need rules that protect everyone on this.” But also ensuring that these re not just military or intelligence-dominated. Citizens, developers, tech organizers, they’re able to have to a voice in that. Right now, it’s very either big company, or big military, or some type government-based in terms of conversations.

These are some of the priorities for us in the region. The other thing, very honestly, we’re also trying to do is drive more connection on digital rights of the Asia-Pacific tech community, and by that, I mean particularly tech companies, hardware manufacturers.

Some of them are starting to engage on the issues such as free speech, privacy, but that’s rarer. It’s normally enclaves of these developments. Sometimes in India, sometimes in Hong Kong, sometimes very rarely in Singapore. In Taiwan, particularly at least on open government, very active conversation.

We’re trying drive more engagement on that, because most tech development right now frankly is happening in Asia-Pacific. The majority of the world this is China, India, Taiwan, Australia, Indonesia. Most of the more modern, interesting tech developments are also happening here, in terms of app creation, coding more generally, even the tech sector, but there’s not enough engagement of the digitalized community on that, in our view.

This is sort of our limited approach to Asia-Pacific. What I’m asking is what can we do more about that to support it?

I really like what you just said about the norm, the cyber norm work. Because if there’s like four horsemen of the data apocalypse, I think the ignorance of norms is certainly the champion. [laughs]

Yeah.

We’re going to be speaking at UN open-ended work group on cybersecurity next week, and we’re here for that.

More so than arrogance, I think ignorance is truly the thing. Ignorance, it’s not the natural state of things.

For example, I think it’s long enough that I won’t offend anyone by saying this. Long ago, there was no concept of unions. It is in the capitalist’s best interest to keep the workers ignorant of the idea of worker’s assembly, strike, or cooperatives.

The more the workers are ignorant about these ideas of rights, the more that they can extract a better bargaining position vis-à-vis individual workers. Because of this, I would say this current state of ignorance, whether in a ignorance of what we call negative liberties, like freedom from surveillance, in the Isaiah Berlin sense.

It is not because of lack of education. We teach that in our civics class. We have really good teachers. It’s because either surveillance status or surveillance capitalists try to create a counter norm, where even the word user…

My favorite saying is that whenever we see user experience, we need to replace that with human experience. User is the word that only the IT industry and the drug industry uses. There’s some similarities in terms of addiction. [laughs]

Instead of user experience, addictive design, and all those bad words, in my experience, just to think about human experience, itself, liberates people from a kind of user point of view, vis-à-vis the data collectors, be it public or private sector.

Just to verify that there is such a norm is what my main work in Taiwan is about, which is why our conversation’s going to be radically transparent, structured conversation in Akoma Ntoso format. Then people understand that whatever their right is being concerned, even in a drafting stage, even when it’s still being considered, there’s plenty of opportunity for them to make a informed voice about that.

Which is why all the legislative agenda around kind of censorship always gets a published pushback, but not at the parliamentary floor, like right in the drafting table. They never come to fruition, and so they don’t need amendments, such as for certain encryption things.

In any case, [laughs] that is my main point is that the earlier that we can share the policymaking context, the more people understand there’s certain norms in the world. We don’t have to do it purely from an individual’s viewpoint, which, by the way, isn’t the traditional paradigm here in East Asia. [laughs]

But rather in what I usually call data coalition or data co-operative, or data union. There’s many different words to say the same thing, which is essentially people who produce data band together and demand governance support and establish their own norm to negotiate with the public sector, which then co-negotiate.

As the people in Taiwan, for example, they just by measuring their own air quality, negotiated with the environment minister so that we can put the air boxes according to their governance norms to the industrial areas. Then we collectively push for the industrial plants to conform to the social norm.

This is what I mean by data coalition.

…that has impact. For example, that Taiwan is deployed in the concentration that people are driven.

In India, for example, there is an air pollution campaign. We would like to say, “Look, why cannot we…”

Exactly, exactly.

I just want to say that has international level impact, so it’s important.

Exactly. When I was in Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, they look at our Cofacts system, which is this information flag-as-spam, and then Wikipedia-like correction system that goes back even for encrypted channels like WhatsApp in Line here.

When you flag something as spam, you’re essentially donating a sample of memetic virus to the center of research, smart house. For them in a non-human-right-infringing way to basically say at the same sender if they still send unsolicited email, then it goes to the junk mail box instead of inbox. Which is certainly not exactly like less of free expression, but it makes the free-righters less economically incentive.

When the university people saw that, they just took that as a way from Cofacts. If you now go to cofact.org, you’ll see the Thailand version of the Taiwan you mentioned of the Cofacts. [laughs]

That’s exactly like the g0v thing.

[laughs] Right. You see the g0v. Yes, that’s right. In Italy, if you would go to g0v.it, you’ll see the Italy branch of g0v, [laughs] of the budget visualization.

Products and services are harder to sell across different jurisdictions with different social norms. Social innovation mechanisms is easy to sell if we bring all the stakeholder participants to the same place so they can reconfigure themselves into something that has the same social effect that fits within their local social narrative.

That’s one bridge across this individualism/collectivism culture bridge. It’s why I call it a transcultural approach.

Thank you. We know that we can do much more, but also that we want to support what our local communities are doing. We’re very rarely at a placement for an effective national community or even a set of national NGOs because there, but we’re trying to see where we can help and…

The Taiwan Association of Human Rights is very strong here, excellent lobbying power.

Yeah.

We’ll be meeting with the TAHR as well as with g0v, of course, but there’s one more group. Mozilla as well.

Yes.

We also will be meeting with the Mozilla team here, because I know that they are also invested considerably…

Very much so.

…and with the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation have been great supporters for rights globally, and even on to vision that you can build technology by respecting rights in the public interest. We’ve been very lucky to work with them. We meet those sort of actors here.

Does anyone else here recommend these…

The Information Society has the local forum, the Taiwan IGF.

I wasn’t sure who to speak to. If there’s a…

Taiwan IGF, they have a Facebook page. I think the administrative people, you can just write to TWIGF. I think they share a lot of staff. It’s just igf.org.tw. You probably have to add World Wide Web in the first half of it. Actually, no. igf.org also works. They know something about domain name systems. [laughs]

IGF is particularly interesting because it’s, by definition, multi-stakeholder. They already have, for example, sponsors Facebook, Google, Line, Netflix, the usual suspects. Anything that IGF already considers as worthy to explore in their own multi-stakeholder steering committee, you have your speakers lined out for that because that’s part of the IGF operation.

I think the administrative is NII.

It is NII. I’d come first to Taiwan for that.

The email address would be igf at nii.org.tw, but you can look it up on the great World Wide Web. Anyway, that’s the local community for IGF.

I’m trying to look at your other sponsors. There’s also the World Wide Web Foundation is running the Web – I think it’s the same thing, right – the Web conference, here, also in Academia Sinica this year. I will also be there. [laughs] I’ll be in the gov lab session.

When is that?

Let me look it up. Web Conference.

There’s really Web Foundation, because we know them well. I think they have separate organizations. I know Brett have spoken for them.

It’s April 22-24.

They do have a policy book, we work quite closely with them.

You do work with them, OK. Their local host is the Academia Sinica.

Sinica.

Academia Sinica has a lot of interest in not only working with data protection privacy but also co-data and they’re quite advanced in also encryption research and cybersecurity.

Co-creator of the EdDSA algorithm we all use, the elliptic curve expert Dr. Yang Bo-Yin is right there in Academia Sinica. He probably knows something about cryptography. [laughs] I think Academia Sinica would be one of the great partners if you do decide to have a host in Taiwan.

They’re not even reporting to any minister, because they’re report only to the presidential office. They’re above the cabinet, so that gives them kind of extra civil society street credibility, because minister or agenda can affect their academic research.

That is very helpful.

Is there anything we can help explain or talk about, take questions on either Access or RightsCon? I just wanted to make sure.

I’m sure that Jill may follow up, actually. When Jill gets you the relevant information for the previous posts of the Asia-Pacific Social Enterprise summits, maybe the municipal contact persons will want to ask more, and they probably will. [laughs] Jill will forward the contact to you, and also you’re cordially invited, also, to the social innovation summit. [laughs]

When is that?

That would be May. It’s kind of interesting, because it’s right between two South Korean conferences if I’m not mistaken. Ours is May 15 to 17, and Joel can send you an invitation. Literally the day after that, I’ll have to fly to Seoul, so we’re pretty close in terms of making events.

Even if you decide to run in South Korea, we can also do pre or post events in Taiwan. That’s a short flight.

…we ask the quality question to our South Korean colleagues and counterparts. If we did it in Taipei, how would it still be connected? That’s very helpful news for us. Whatever we do, we will work with both counties. We really don’t want to do it siloed off only in one country. We really are a community.

When the g0v and the South Korean communities decide to run hackathon together, they went to Okinawa.

That’s an excellent location.

Because that’s like equal distance to the three countries. [laughs]

…in Okinawa, because I know the Japanese government really encourages people…

That’s right, so maybe you can consider RightsCon Okinawa…

It’s a hard time for…

It’s a massive US military base…

Which makes it very controversial, I see.

Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us. This has been really helpful. We’ll definitely follow up with more information and invitations to Costa Rica, and keep you updated. As Raman mentioned, we’re hoping to make a decision by March.

I’ll meet you in Costa Rica in the flesh or digitally. [laughs]

I might be around here or coming here some time across, I would say, April, depending on how things work out. Will you be there? I’m based in Delhi.

When I’m on a plane or on Google Hangouts, I’ll be joking saying, “by airplane or a Google Hangout with you somewhere.” But I’m based out of Delhi. That’s how for me. Nikki is in Costa Rica, where she keeps moving, based on where the RightsCon is. That’s the thing there.

We have staff, as you know, in the Philippines and elsewhere. Feel free to reach out. You can contact me as well. Anywhere that we can always be supportive, that’s great.

If you’re ever in New York, in particular, please drop by and set up a meeting with Brett, our executive director. He’s there. We have a New York office there in Midtown. It’s a pretty simple but nice office.

I’ll be in New York this Saturday.

This Saturday?

Oh, wow.

I’ll be there Monday.

Just visiting DC this time, though.

That’s very funny because Brett, our executive director is currently in Taiwan on vacation.

Ah, OK. [laughs] I’m on a week-long DC visit. I’ll be in New York very briefly, taking only the Amtrak.

But if you’re coming back, I’ll be there in New York for two weeks. I am in New York Sunday afternoon for cybersecurity at the UN, and then we’ll be there until the 21st, I believe.

I’ll probably send a team, myself included or not, to around the UN NGA. Also, talking about probably the same topic.

Please do. As for the other NGOs, we take part actively. We are, in fact, hoping to do more, particularly on digital, so I’d be happy to figure it out and organize things there. We have now full-time UN-focusing staffer on our New York team. But with Brett, as well others on the team very actively take part. I do too, but except I am in Delhi, so it always a long flight.

OK, take care.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.