We’re leaving to go back to Korea to go to the Summit for Democracy.

Great! I did a pre-recording for the summit.

Okay, great. Yeah, we’re looking forward to it. We’re not really sure what it’ll look like, but we’re looking forward to it.

And, yeah, we’re using this site visit as a way to really think of, you know, we’ve been planning RightsCon for East Asia since 2019. And so, really trying to use this site visit to really confirm what that RightsCon is going to look like for 2025. We’re taking a break for RightsCon in 2024.

So, just trying to give a longer lead time to be able to plan for that. So, yeah, really excited to think about what a partnership with Taiwan and moda could look like.

Yeah, we’ve now actually got a civic tech section at the Department for Democracy Network, and the g0v Summit, which is going to be pretty awesome, is going to be supported by my ministry as well. And so, something along these lines, like civic tech or rights-affirming technologies, whatever they’re calling it nowadays, I think this is really good.

I’ve been attending the FOC on the sidelines of the UN meeting by Blinken and friends, and I think this cyber ambassador thing is really taking off. So, it’s really good to see that you also support this vision and it’s included in the part of the FOC.

Yeah, it was great to have the FOC at RightsCon last year, too, and we hosted our first ever cyber ambassador. So, yeah, I think we actually met with folks from g0v today to talk about, and I think both Vakau and Reetz will be at the summit in May to do some outreach.

Jason LiuWe are co-hosting the summit this year in May.

Oh, you are?

Yeah.

Okay, excellent.

Access Now and g0v.

Great.

And also APrIGF will be here in August as well.

Yes. That’s another thing that it’s good to have a ministry, right? Because there’s a whole lot of logistics and everything, and we’re happy that our parliament seems to like, instead of flying us out, flying everybody in. They’re much more happy. So, they support APrIGF budget, no problem.

Yeah, that’s really great.

Yeah, we’re looking for, like, opportunity to fly in our I/O team. They’re based in New York, but they have been working with FOC colleagues and with our partners there, providing, I would say, advice for the policy and hosting organizations’ talk with other committees as well. So, if we can bring that in, then there will be more exchanges between Taiwan and our team as well.

That’s awesome. Yeah, great. Anything I can be of help with?

Yeah, I mean, I think right now we’re trying to, you know, and I think, you know, the RightsCon community is really diverse, and one thing that we’re really thinking a lot about is, like, the accessibility of RightsCon and, like, how do we host a RightsCon amidst, like, very rapidly shrinking civic space around the world.

We had a lot of challenges at our last event in person, so we’re really thinking about what does an accessible RightsCon look like in East Asia, and where should we host that to make sure that as many people from our community, probably about 150, 60 countries, can come. And so just getting input about what a RightsCon might look like.

Yeah, we can help with visa.

Yeah, we had a meeting with MOFA this morning, and they were really encouraging around what it might look like to bring people to Taipei for a RightsCon. So, yeah, hearing that is really encouraging, and just hearing about the opportunities for partnership I think is, yeah, is really helpful just to–

We’ve got a program where anyone who’s contributed to open source, open internet, Wikipedia, whatever, knowledge commons, for eight years or more, we give them residency here with health care for family and everything.

It’s called a digital gold card, and it’s quite useful. Actually, gold card has been around for a while. During the pandemic, many of my friends in Silicon Valley used a gold card to get to Taiwan and avoid this whole pandemic thing in the U.S., but many of them are very senior or highly paid or otherwise have PhDs to be qualified gold card holders.

So there’s this niche that is not being served, which is open source contributors who often don’t have this full-time credentials or PhD diploma. And so when moda started, we’re like, “Oh, this is our target audience.” So we’ve issued hundreds of these now.

Wow, that’s incredible. Yeah, that’s great.

So recently I’ve been helping our community to see what kind of challenges they might have in traveling or just to join the events.

Yes, I think we have seen not just with what’s going on, but just convenings like IGF. It’s been very challenging for people from the African continent, the Middle East region. And, of course, a lot of our community are human rights defenders who are at the forefront of the work that is going on. A lot of times they are criminalized by the countries that they are fighting so hard for.

So that is a barrier we’ve come across because with immigration laws tightening and everything, it’s been very difficult for these people who need to be setting the agenda to actually even fly and attend the RightsCon. So that’s been at the top of our list.

Yeah, which is why the Gold Card program I mentioned is important because they are a resident once we do this verification that they are actually a year or more senior contributor to online commons. And once they become a resident, it’s a matter of them traveling here to pick up their Gold Card. So there’s no way that their host country can say that they’re escaping somewhere.

And because this status is conferred by, for example, any international competition or the international event or an ambassadorial recommendation or a ministry recommendation, so for special cases it’s quite easy actually to find one of our representatives overseas or even myself to basically write a letter and say even though this person doesn’t have this public proof on a distributed ledger for eight years, I know that they have been contributing for eight or more years. And so I think this is quite important in just getting them here in the first place. And then also then they can serve as kind of ambassadors to get more people in for the traveling.

If we know roughly when in 2025 is this going to take place, we can maybe do some advanced planning, like this year, because this program is new as of this year. We actually provide reimbursement for their incoming ticket for the airplane travel and also local hotels, I believe, in our Administration for Digital Industries. I don’t know whether there will be a similar program in 2025, but if we know that it’s going to be needed, then it helps to have that in our budget sometime this year.

Yeah, that’s really helpful to hear. It sounds like based on our conversation with MoFA this morning, that there’s a few different avenues that we could potentially explore to make sure that people can access RightsCon, which is really encouraging because I think that we’re – yeah, for us that’s the most important aspect of RightsCon is making sure that people who don’t typically have access to those convenient spaces are present.

And I’m curious with the Freedom Online Coalition, have you seen a lot of those sort of multilateral organizations wanting to come to Taiwan and be a part of meetings here?

Oh, yeah, definitely. Yes, and also because we have ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its convenants as our domestic laws, so although we’re not a UN member yet, we have implemented laws for children’s rights and disability rights and so on. So when it comes to review our annual plans, actually a lot of those UN experts and panelists and so on, they fly in as experts, like individual experts. We do the same for the Open Government Partnership, independent reporting mechanism as well.

So this is something that MOFA is very comfortable with because we have to do it every year for many, many topics. And so if, for example, Freedom Online Coalition or OGP or anything is following a similar protocol, then any international expert is kind of automatically trusted by MOFA as somebody who travels in to help us to convene.

Yeah, that’s great to hear. I mean, as you know, like Freedom Online Coalition, they usually do their annual meetings around RightsCon and Open Government Partnership as well. So for us, I think making sure that all of our partners would be comfortable with wherever we host RightsCon, I think that’s –

Yeah, exactly. To travel as one.

Yeah.

All of them will have access now.

Yeah, exactly. What would an ideal partnership be?

Yeah, so I think an ideal partnership is recurring. This is something that’s very good for us because moda has been pioneering this idea of public digital infrastructure. And our budget is unlike a previous budget where software or open source or whatever were sorted in science and technology. Because if it’s in S&T, then you’ve got to publish, and the funding is gone after you publish. Then it becomes an industrial thing, right?

But we actually convinced all the relevant authorities that public code, that is to say open source deploying the government, public code is a matter of public infrastructure. And therefore, our public code investments are now using infrastructure money, the same money that people spend on highways and bridges and things like that.

To make that work, we need to prove, for example, like just today, Ukraine open sourced their super app, Diia. But what’s in it for Ukraine other than public diplomacy? It only creates value if other countries contribute to that code base. So there’s a lot to say about adoption, right? Because the public events, the cutting of the ribbons is usually on donating the code base. But the actual value is derived by actually taking up this internationally and form this supermodular, de facto standard around public code across governments. So if Access Now, for example, actually I did sign on the WhyID, right?

Yeah!

Which basically–

Which was an outcome of RightsCon in 2019.

In which I as a fellow signatory made a point that it should never be just about serving a top-down need of a jurisdiction. It needs to be designed, bottom-up, to be privacy preserving, preferably zero knowledge, interoperable, taking care of people who were normally excluded, instead of excluding even more people. But these are the public infrastructure concerns.

When you want to build things that interoperate across jurisdictions. So by saying we’re doing like a four-year investment on the kind of open and interoperable DID wallet, that satisfies the WhyID declaration, then we are converting essentially an advocacy position into an infrastructure investment position. And so you would be here to guide us on the infrastructure design instead of just to say WhyID to Taiwan, we’re learning how to say yes to DIDs that are actually rights affirming and rights preserving.

So we have many public infrastructures of this shape and many of which are in Democracy Network now, including the DID wallet. So all of these things, I think it’s good to provide a copy to you. And maybe you can see which ones coincide with your topics next year or the year afterwards. And then we can say for the next four years or next five years where we have public infrastructure budget, let’s build a continuous relationship to make it actually to be rights preserving for all involved.

Wow, yeah, that’s great. I feel like there’s a lot of opportunities for that long-term collaboration with RightsCon and people within the RightsCon network, but also with Access Now because we’re expanding especially lots of our work in East Asia in particular.

But yeah, I think that that kind of practical output of an advocacy effort is exactly the kind of things that we want to do by bringing RightsCon to particular places. So I think that there’s a lot of alignment there.

I think D.N. is also planning an Indo-Pacific public code summit or something like that as part of the infrastructure plan.

Yeah, it’s part of our infrastructure plan. So I think in 2026 we’re hoping to have a workshop first. And in 2027 we’re hoping to have an Asia-Pacific conference as well.

Oh, wow, that’s great.

So the experience with RightsCon will also be very helpful for us to have other experiences as well.

Yeah, so we can build each other’s branding essentially.

Yeah, that’s great. That’s really great. I think we’re all a bit taken aback because we’ve never seen a government come in with so much support.

[laughter] Yeah, every year we go to a lot of different governments to talk about RightsCon, and it’s been a really refreshing day of having so much really– sort of seeing the mutual value of a space like RightsCon.

Yeah, I think it’s part of our identity now. If you go to MOFA or really any other ministry, we would cite the Freedom on the Net, the Democracy Index, Civicus, and so on. And so people really care if we even just drop one point in Freedom House or any other report because it’s now part of our identity. So you see this whole-of-government support.

Well, and that aligns so much with the mission that we have with RightsCon. So it’s just, yeah, it’s really refreshing to experience that. It’s wonderful.

Wonderful.

Well, we’ll definitely keep in touch around what next steps look like for us. We’re doing a lot of decision-making and hoping to come to a decision pretty quickly. But I think, yeah, it would be great to have more conversations about what a potential partnership could look like.

Yeah, definitely.

I’m based in Taipei, so I’m very keen to–

Yes, to access.

[laughter] Okay, excellent. Have a safe flight.

Thank you so much. Thank you for meeting with us.