So, I trust that we’ve all seen the agenda before. I think the main topic is the E-Code visa. And we’re very happy to help.

I mean, it’s quite apparent that in addition to the already visa-free countries, you’re going to invite people from non-visa-free countries. And so, I think as soon as you have a preliminary list, and even if some of them don’t manage to come at the end, it doesn’t hurt to start the process early.

Just so you know, in fact, we definitely came to do it early. We decided some of this confirmation, and then we publicized it. And then we did the communication we do now, which I’ll talk about later.

Our overall intent is by the call for proposals closes in June, so people are starting to get a sense of whose sessions are in. Opening up the process at the end of July, so by August people start applying to give an initial expression of registration and confirmation.

Okay, so we have four or five months or something like that in order to secure the visa process.

We’ll kick it off from then. Obviously not everyone will apply in August. We’ll start from then. The idea is to get as many initial voice… First, they come to us, then we’ll be routing them through the system… And that’s one reason why they’re here also now. So, we come to that later, but if you have a degree of clear support and confirmation, then we’ll also start doing the public communications on this in terms of around the same area, the overall type of the location is Taiwan. But also, start to tell people that this is the timeline for your visa support once your sessions are through, even though…

I don’t think we need to be… we need to be a joint organizer in order to be an inviter for your speakers. So, these two are orthogonal. I mean the joint sponsorship and so on, that’s for the next minister to finalize. But the inviter is, only pertains to the, we being the competent authority, right, for the digital transformation and digital democracy and so on. And there’s no other competent authorities for this, so this is our responsibility. So, the inviter part, there’s no problem at all.

And as for public communication, I’m at all ears. Like what kind of… what type of communication are you looking for?

And I think, and I let Vakau and Reetz come to this as well. We hope even, there’s public communication, many people think that it’s good for the new minister and to announce it publicly, but even privately before that to just, I think just what you said, like the ministry is committed to the success of RightsCon, and this is either being followed up by the new ministry or the new minister rather, and here are the details already in progress.

That’s good for us, and I let like, Reetz and Vakau speak to this. But in the sense, we want to just feel that degree of clear comfort, and then we will start publicly going out there. We can deeply also, we spoke to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs earlier today. We had a good meeting with them. They had some suggestions and ideas as well, overall. But I think the main thing they also said was, yes, you know, moda’s definitely the most important to you if you’re feeling comfortable.

Yeah, they have an INGO office. I think that’s going to be the true cross-minister. While we can provide PR support and so on, it is the moda INGO office that coordinates with, for example, the municipality holding the venue, or the other INGOs doing similar things around the same timeframe and so on.

And I trust that they already gave you the contact window. So, I think the INGO window from the moda is going to be like your one of the most friendly windows. And on our side, the Department of Democracy Network is still around. So, the DN will be your contact window for the rest of the ministry.

So, for example, if some of your sessions pertains to the administration of digital industries or administration for cybersecurity and so on, you will route through DN and DN will find you the points of contact.

I know for one, but I recently wanted to speak to any other part on this communication, what’s helpful for us. I just, you know, my team of us, the point of moda, had this discussion about the importance of the data. And I think it’s really important that we have this general, some ideas on trying to say, oh, maybe it’s good to have an inter-ministerial or inter-departmental meeting. We can speak to that later.

I think from our side, it’s really on what moda is comfortable doing right now in terms of either private or public communication. Just roughly what we would do is if things are very like from our end, we would start publicly communicating anywhere as early as seven days from now.

May 16th is when we are planning to go.

May 16th. Okay.

I think what would be great for us is to have some sort of, you know, whatever moda is comfortable with of a written communication, either a welcome note or maybe a public statement, just to get that peace of mind before we announce it to our community.

And you can also start some parts of that, meaning that it can be one part of it is the written communication privately, a general basic response, and then something more specifically attributed to the team that’s in place by the end of the month or early June, whatever works best for the department and the ministry overall and politically because we want to make sure that we have a lot of data.

Okay. So, May 16th is your public announcement about the fact that it’s taking place in Taiwan.

Yes, exactly.

And later in May will be like the call for proposals or…?

Call for proposals are already open. It’s already open.

So, people are submitting proposals without knowing what they’re going…

What I can share is we told a lot of people, I can notice they already changed their communication a bit to generally let people know it’s in East Asia. We already reached out to many of the key governments and companies taking part in RightsCon to already advise them privately and we’ve been noting that we’re executing this change and we believe that Taiwan is the best place to organize RightsCon to identify any concerns, feedback.

We have spoken to the government, so you know, to the U.S., the U.K. U.K. is in progress, sorry, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, and a bunch of other folks as well. We also reached out to some of the intergovernmental institutions, different U.N. agencies, OHCHR. We’ve spoken to industry. A bunch of folks, I think Google Meta, Amazon Briefly, a bunch of other people as well, and got done that there. And that’s one idea that if you do this public communication in between the call for proposals, you update people already.

And privately, our regional teams are also talking to people who are applying for the call for proposals. If any of them had a particularly location sensitive issue, like they were deeply planning to do something specific in Korea, or they have any other concerns about Taiwan that they can privately engage or modify their proposals, we can extend the call for proposals deadline, that is June 5th, I’m sorry, I keep missing it.

We will extend it by one week. And you’ll…

Because sometimes change, they won’t…

Okay, I see. Good. So, for public communication, so say you announce through, I don’t know whether you still use Twitter now, but… Yes, X.com.

So, say you post on X that’s May 16th, and you would ideally, what was the ideal shape? Like moda retweets you and saying that we endorse, or that the minister provides you with a quote that you use in the PR communication? Like what are the performance…

I’ll tell you this. What we will be doing for sure, just in platforms, we’ll be public tweeting socials, plus email outreach to all RightsCon, all AccessNow subscribers. That’s already, I think, 30 to 50,000 folks. That’s executive director. We have a lot of directors list, others there.

We are very open to what works for the ministry. The minimum we thought, like a tweet or a generic ministry statement, or a quote out on X, like whatever social media makes sense. If we think with the minister, and you know, a lot of that is subject to communication and political preferences, very open to whatever works there. We can do that by itself, or we can do some of that again in June.

We, in fact, just in order to think, we do one round of announcements now. We do further follow-up in June and perhaps in August on APrIGF, and we’ll keep a momentum of content going out there. But on who does it in the ministry, how might we work with you?

Yeah, so I think the moda Twitter account makes more sense because it represents the ministry, not any particular minister. I’ve already renamed my threads and Instagram and Facebook from digitalminister to digitalminister.one, which is a real website, by the way. Thanks to the new GTLDs.

And also, my Signal handle is now digitalminister.01. Right. So, but for the @modaTAIWAN Twitter account, that there will be continuity. So, what I think, if it makes sense for the DN folks, is that the DN can work with John to draft a tweet for X Taiwan moda to quote retweet you, and containing language that indicates this continued ministerial support. And from the ministry, not from the minister. And then we will run it by the new minister’s team.

Because, well, many of these people, I mean, we use public servants for all the director generals, so all of them are still around. And so, they will run it through the directors and director generals and they will run it by the next minister’s team. And once they have the OK, then we can quote retweet on May 16th. So, that’s that part.

And as for endorsement testimonial and things like that, I mean, I’m happy to be quoted as the Taiwan’s 1st Digital Minister, spelled as “1st” so that is not misconstrued as the first minister, like prime minister.

So, “Taiwan’s 1st Digital Minister (2016-2024).” And in that regard, I’m happy to be quoted any time after May 20th, even on the day of May 20th. And so, that’s another kind of my personal endorsement as a, I don’t know, WhyID signatory and AccessNow supporter and everything, right? And so, for that quote from me, I would also welcome your input, and which will work out way before May 20th, but goes out May 20th.

That’s exactly how I find it from now until, say, end of next week, lock out these things internally, privately, confirm the overall communications plan, and then we can put it in.

So, we have a quote tweet and we have a personal endorsement. What else would you like? Or is that sufficient?

I think in terms of the e-quote process, what would be the next step for us? Would it be when the new ministers…

Yeah, we need a list of people and their origin countries, countries of origin. We are already establishing this BOCA relationship internally. And we’ve actually done something like that before. And as soon as we know the general shape of how many people, their respective countries, the vast majority will already be visa-free with Taiwan anyway, right? So, and then, we start the pipeline.

The pipeline, I assume that you will update monthly or something with new conference speakers and so on. And the end will be the competent authority will be the window to issue those e-code invitations.

And if there’s any legal issues or diplomatic issues, we are on good terms with MOFA anyway. We’ll sort it out internally with the Foreign Service.

And just so you know, I think for many of these things, what we’ll also just do is based on common understanding, share that back in writing, just so we are confirmed. Even for us, then, we can be clear and confirm that everyone else is clear and documented.

But I think that overall makes sense. I think what we have, I think we could do like tranches, meaning different versions of the list of people and different countries. Starting first maybe with even the Access Now and RightsCon organizing team, because that’s very clear who will be there roughly, like for sure. I think, in fact, chairs also will be identified by June. So, we’ll have all the co-chairs of the tracks already identified their countries of origin clear. And we hope to have all of them come for RightsCon so we can share that.

And from late June, July onwards, we’ll start having RightsCon regular participants for sure. But we’ll have that set.

And I trust that you already have the list of visa-free countries with Taiwan as well as the e-visa countries, with interesting exceptions like Colombians need to have a valid Shenzhen visa first and things like that. But it’s all very spelled out on the BOCA website. So, for the ones that are outside of that list, maybe we just do a kind of monthly refresh or something like that.

I think that’s great. In fact, working on these protocols roughly now, so it’s predictable for the Democracy Network team, for our team, and for BOCA to make sense. I know Reetz would be our main point of contact on visa issues right now. She has that honor of managing that. She was keen to work out that exact process, so it’s very clear. So, it could be a meeting time every month. That’s very clear. So, people are planned ahead. The predictability is there. If there are any issues, we can resurface it. Because that’s most helpful to us, knowing who is a clear point of contact. And the fact that you already clarified Democracy Network, as a particular official contact, that’s important.

Okay. And so far, you’ve been mainly contacted with Rosaline? Yeah, so I think that just continues.

Anything else?

I think just naming a few things. I know we had some questions on visa support. But before that, just noting, in many other ways also for the ministry, we will be here for each specific idea. We’re also using that as a bridge to RightsCon events, so they’re already trying to put in some content programming. Very open to ideas around the bridges.

So, you know, relevant to the ministry, we are planning a day zero discussion around. We’ve done this at RightsCon in Costa Rica. We had a meeting of cyber ambassadors. Like organized a society for the first time, 30 cyber ambassadors and cyber policy leads.

We’re thinking of doing a mini version, or not a mini version, like a trial version of that in Taipei on day zero, APrIGF. So, very open to support, or even advice and ideas. We’ll start doing invitations shortly. Two people, we were waiting on this visit and the .Asia team to confirm some of the details. That’s done.

But any other ideas for APrIGF and how we can connect it in? End of time, because we know that’s closer in time from the ministry. And then we have some overall discussion on items for RightsCon that I’ll come back to. Just on APrIGF, I wanted to check…

So, how close are your connections with the TWNIC people who runs the APrIGF?

Yeah, we are in a single chat with them and .Asia as well. So, we are co-organizing events on day zero and .Asia.

So, Kenny and JoFan, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, and they have plenty of experience organizing TWIGF and all that. They’re all very seasoned Internet governance people. And so, I trust that if you’re already in contact, there’s not much that I can add maybe except as the panelists.

Yeah, but I think you’re already in very good hands. And TWNIC received plenty of not just budget funding for APrIGF, but also political support. We also see APrIGF as kind of a launch pad so that TWNIC can focus on getting more people, senior people and junior people alike to IGF-like gatherings around the world. Because previously, we do send people to IGF, but not in a very systemic fashion. It is more like when the topic concerns us, we send people.

But Internet governance, as you know, requires this long-term relationship building. So, a more regular participation makes a lot of sense. So, the TWNIC is willing to support more long-term fellows like these. And I imagine that they will introduce many of them in your episode or however you call your meeting.

And this came to mind just now. I think we are interested for RightsCon on conducting some of the logistics and details on the potential financial support sponsorship side of things, you know, their processes, timelines where the people have to manage and respect that I wanted to hand over to my colleague to talk a little bit on that part.

Yeah, we are actually right now trying to map live from different ministry or different government agencies in Taiwan - what kind of programmatic cooperation we can have within the week of response because that’s how we do with different governments with previous RightsCon, so it’ll be great just to hear your plan for next year.

Yeah, so as I mentioned, anything that’s related to the IGF or Internet Governance in general is a focal point for TWNIC. And we channel most of our relevant budgets into TWNIC to these sort of things, and TWNIC is also independently rich by selling the TW domains. And so, yeah, I would encourage you to talk more with TWNIC. That’s one very obvious, your natural ally.

The other natural ally I believe is the human rights academic community. I mean g0v summits runs in the National Academy for a reason and the reason is that the National Academy has traditionally been the main convener for not just the g0V hackathons but anything related to online right, digital right and things like that.

So, getting in touch with the National Academy and the Information Institute as well as the Information Innovation Unit… I mean the head of the unit is our next Digital Minister, so I think that makes a lot of sense. While the National Academy may not, by itself, have a lot of conference related budgets, the network is everywhere, and so they can then connect you with your natural partners and you will be there physically tomorrow anyway. So that’s another obvious community.

Aside from these two I don’t know whether anyone from the end would suggest more like natural allies to connect. But if anything occurs to your mind you have each other’s email.

And just so you know, the call for proposals period is also open for RightsCon just in the consideration of, not necessarily for funding, although some of it might have funding or like budgetary integration, but if the moda team including the Democracy Network and others are thinking of specific sessions and ideas even if it’s very early stage, you know we work with you to make it.

And I know Audrey you’re very familiar with this, like RightsCon works on the call for proposals. People have to submit something in order to get into the program. We can work with moda on this particularly part for the remaining of the month and so to like think of initial proposals or ideas to put in. But both directly for moda and also the…

So, 10,000 people, right? So which venue in Taipei do you have…

Fun questions.

I mean, 10,000 is non-trivial amount, I’m curious.

The main one that we’re really looking at is the Marriott but today, I’m going to go see the TICC. Originally it was supposed to be at the renovation but they’ve kindly said that they might postpone the renovation. So, I will go and look at it today and if it works for us, those are our two big contenders.

The total participants including online will be around 10,000. In Costa Rica, we had 2,900 in person and remainder online. Tunis had a larger in-person component before the pandemic that was 3,500-3,700 people but then no online there.

But yeah, we assume that the in-person component will be around 3,500. Just so you also know, we have got feedback that RightsCon is now becoming very big. People wanted to be a little bit focused so we probably keep it at that number in person. But we will have quite a few online people at that. So, 3,000 is the venue size.

Yes, the venue said the cap is at 3,000.

Oh, okay. Yeah, still not trivial. Okay. Yeah, the TAITRA which runs the TICC, we also work with them quite a bit. They are obviously more like external trade focused, but I am sure that if you are already in touch with INGO and Foreign Service, they also work very closely with TAITRA. So, that is another natural ally. And if you already announced that you will be in Taipei City, then it means that Taipei City government becomes your host city. And so, some like municipal visits, that will also work in your favor.

Yeah, when we announced the public code platform code at gov.tw, I think, well, all of the six municipalities participated but Taipei City was the first to just donate source code to the platform. So, the current Department of Information Technology’s Head, Chang Shi-mo, an entrepreneur and very enthusiastic about public code and open source in general. So, I think we will be very, not just sympathetic, very enthusiastic to your cause. And so, the DOIT and Taipei City government in general, I think securing a quota on them, that will be also something very good.

We have to work on that already to get them to be supportive. Even if it doesn’t go out in the initial main communications in June and July.

Yeah. And the difference is that then in your announcement, you can say specifically “Taipei City”.

We’re having a lot of careful terminology discussions.

Thank you. Anything else you’d like to discuss?

I know this is the top one, but I wanted to make sure that from our end, is there anything else that you wanted to bring up?

I think we have shared the partnership proposal with moda before, where we listed all the previous partnership experience with other governments. And just curious to hear your thoughts, what kind of partnership you are thinking for the next RightsCon…

Yeah. I think the only point that we’re probably not the competent authority is briefing our overseas missions. The reason is that while the ministries usually have a dispatch within the oversea embassies, for example, usually the Science and Technology Council have a S&T team, or the Ministry of Economy always have an economic division as well.

We don’t. So, we usually piggyback on top of the Science and Technology Division and or the Economy Division. And so, we don’t really have oversea dispatch that can brief the missions. So, you will have to go through MOFA or the Economy Ministry, or Science and Technology to get them briefed. So that, I wish I can help, but we don’t have overseas missions.

Everything else, I think we already covered some of these. I don’t know whether in the RightsCon do we have our own agenda in addition to the ones you already know, you know, public code and decentralized identity. I think these are the two main ones. But if the next minister has new public infrastructures to push, I’m sure that’s a good thing.

I’m sure that RightsCon will be a great platform for privacy preserving technologies, and democracy renewal.

Excellent. And one thing we are also particularly keen is there’s a lot more discussion in RightsCon on climate. And I suspect that we have interest to the ministry in a way to already see ground to discuss some of these topics. Because of some of our cybersecurity related discussion at RightsCon, hardware supply chains generally are coming to more conversation between the digitalized community and others.

But that’s one more area, and particularly because we’re coming to Taiwan, we do want to involve an active conversation between the hardware sector that traditionally has been less active at RightsCon. But that’s one area in particular with a big flag, because I know it may partly be the mandate for ADI or others within the ministry, but that’s one area we hope to do more.

Yeah, within the DN there is the net zero section. And the net zero partnership section also works with MOEA and ADI and like everybody else on that. So, as DN is your primary contact, I’m sure that if you involve net zero section in the next working level meetings, they will also have some ideas on how to set it together.

Anything else?

Or any questions to the DN side?

We need to include the net zero section next time.

All right. If there’s nothing else, I will see you tomorrow at our national academy campus.

Yes, I understood. And again, we’ve been really, really excited about the support. I think to me, it’s been very easy to be able to say very clearly that, no, we must do this because we know that they will never support government in writing. But we’re very excited about this. We think that, you know, Taipei, Taipei City and Taiwan has a location over there. And I see this with the actors in tech communities.

And we want to make sure we get as many details as possible. And thank you for the patience with dealing with our very, very minute questions on some of this stuff. Because we can jot this stuff down and really initiate the public communication. We know some people will be very, very excited. Some people will be nervous overall in the community. But we think it’s really, really an excellent moment for involve everyone.

Yeah. As movement builders, what’s most important is just getting the details right, so that it can bootstrap more trust. It engenders more trust. So really, thank you for being detail-oriented because I am too. And looking forward to continuing our partnership.

And the last thing I leave you with this because as you know, we’re definitely bringing East Asian focus. One thing to you, but also to the democracy network overall is where you see role specific ideas for your East Asian counterparts from Japan and others, please don’t hesitate to tell us. We got a lot of interesting support from the programmatic ministries.

The foreign ministry has been looking at this and it’s a little bit more tricky and difficult and I would get interested, but just to point out a bit challenged with their current political structure they’re operating within. But we know the district government department’s interested in working with us, others are. But if there’s any East Asia focused tech leadership or meetings or sessions you want to organize, we encourage you to think about that because we will be talking to them.

So, any of the counterparts you work with from Japan, ROK or other governments as well as in Australia, New Zealand and others, just noting that can be of particular interest.

Yeah, I’m sure DN already has plenty of contact with the counterparts in East Asian countries and TWNIC even more because TWNIC works with other NICs, which are not always government supported. Some of them are more like people-to-people relationships or a registrar association or things like that.

And so, while of course we will think together around possible contacts, I would encourage also to deepen the TWNIC community engagement because they, like the .Asia community, they are very connected.

And just so you know, like we’re talking to them, there’s one, I won’t say clash, but we know it’s a fact, shall you know some of the NICs because I think APRICOT, the APRICOT conference on APNIC organizing, their meeting in Dhaka right before us. I know that was one like slide clash we’re managing there. But we think it’s workable. But just to let you know, like that’s something we’re conscious of already. Some of the NIC community will be jumping between Dhaka and Taipei or generally trying to like manage that calendar.

Yeah, yeah. It’s not too bad.

I mean, we have the Internet. We can do it virtually — through IPv6, preferably.

Alright, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thank you.