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.

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 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.

It’s hard.

All rights.

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.

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.

Absolutely.

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

We’re going to do that for the conference.

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

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.

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.

Yeah, we’ve been…

June 9th, yeah.

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 ...

Absolutely.

Yeah. They’re close partners of ours.

Yeah, it’s not a big difference.

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

Yeah…

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

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, ...

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

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.

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 ...

Yeah. I think we…

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Great.