Thank you.

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 ...

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.

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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?

We’re having a lot of careful terminology discussions.

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.

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 ...

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.

Fun questions.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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…

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Because sometimes change, they won’t…

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

Yes, exactly.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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.

Thank you so much.

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 ...

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 be there Monday.

This Saturday?

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.

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.

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 ...