Dear all,
I've been following the discussions on the ToR and the inventory with great interest. For those of you who don't know me, I work with the Internet Democracy Project, a civil society initiative in India. Our work focuses mostly on issues relating to human rights and Internet governance as well as the future of the global Internet governance architecture (
www.internetdemocracy.in).
As many of you must have seen, the Foundation for Media Alternatives, together with EngageMedia and Access is organising RightsCon in March 2015. According to the organisers, "RightsCon Southeast Asia’s agenda will focus on regional and global challenges that you will undoubtedly recognize to be of critical importance - like data protection, privacy, freedom of expression, infrastructure development, surveillance, and limiting risk in the ICT sector".
I was wondering whether it would perhaps be worthwhile to suggest to the organisers we have an APILP session before the Conference. I am sure it will attract a wide participation from civil society in the region, and hope the same is true of other stakeholder groups.
There are a variety of reasons why I thought RightsCon might be a good venue to run APILP:
- it is an event that seeks to contribute to the fostering of the Internet governance community in the Asia Pacific, as the APILP does
- the kind of issues that it addresses frequently benefit from both technical and non-technical expertise, and at least the US edition I attended managed to attract a wonderful mix of people in part because of that reason
- specifically to the Asia edition of RightsCon, it is likely to attract many from civil society who do not necessarily attend the more technical events many in this group are part of, and in that sense allows us to reach at least some of those who are not 'the usual suspects' (which has also been identified as a priority by this group)
- because of the mixed participation, it is also likely that many participants will feel they could benefit from capacity building on at least some of the issues addressed at the event as well as from learning more about the work of some of the more technical organisations in our region - and some of these participants might therefore be interested in attending an APILP pre-event.
- because it connects with a slightly different community of people, a successful APILP pre-event would likely also lead to an overall strengthening of bonds among people of different stakeholder groups in our region, which ultimately could lead to a strengthening of, e.g, the APrIGF as a Forum for discussion of Internet governance issues in our region as well.
One matter that I want to flag immediately though: many civil society representatives, while happy to e.g. write an application to support their attendance at a session, will likely not be able to pay to attend such a session, simply because they don't have the space in their budgets. If we start planning now, I would presume we would manage to work around such issues though.
What do others think of this proposal? I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Thanks and best regards,
Anja