Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2023 (DRAPAC23), Chiang Mai (22-26 May 2023)

From Monday 22 to Friday 26 May 2023, EngageMedia convened the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2023 (DRAPAC23) in Chiang Mai, Thailand — the first multi-day in-person Asia-Pacific civil-society digital-rights assembly to follow the Coronavirus pandemic and the largest single regional civil-society convening on digital rights, content moderation, surveillance, internet shutdowns, and AI in the Asia-Pacific in the corpus's frame, with 544 participants from 35 countries across the region and beyond. The assembly was convened with the DRAPAC steering committee and a wider partner network — the Association for Progressive Communications supplying strategic inputs and funding since the Coconet 2016 origin of the convening line — and structured around 161 co-created sessions over the five days. EngageMedia Executive Director Phet Sayo framed the opening around three concepts — lock-ins, lockdowns, and shutdowns — and around what he named as the assembly's central practice, "collaborative sense-making" across "a diversity of expertise" on a regional digital-rights agenda that had grown substantially through the pandemic years.

Context

DRAPAC is the signature regional-convening artefact of EngageMedia, the Melbourne-founded Asia-Pacific civil-society non-profit operating since 2005 across Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and a wider Southeast and South-Asian operational footprint. The convening line runs from a 2016 first gathering of digital-rights advocates from across Southeast Asia co-convened by EngageMedia and the Association for Progressive Communications, through Coconet I in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in October 2017 with 105 journalists, artists, technologists, researchers, and film-makers, and Coconet II in 2019, before the camp lineage was renamed and reformatted into the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly series. DRAPAC23 was the first edition under the renamed series and the first multi-day in-person assembly EngageMedia had convened since the pandemic forced its prior convening cadence into smaller online formats.

Sayo's pre-assembly framing essay, republished by Global Voices on 21 May 2023, set the substantive frame in three connected concepts. Lock-ins named the "technological and policy lock-ins that we now accept as normal" — the platform monopolies, vendor dependencies, and standards-shaping institutions in which civil society has limited participation despite their role in determining the human-rights contour of regional digital infrastructure. Lockdowns and shutdowns named the network infrastructure disruptions — internet shutdowns, fibre damage, telecom blackouts, exam-period and election-period restrictions — that the Asia-Pacific civil-society field has documented across Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the wider region throughout the pandemic years, and which Sayo placed alongside the pandemic-era expansion of surveillance capitalism into workplaces and classrooms. Around those, the essay named the substantive agenda items the assembly was structured to absorb: rising cyber-control laws; information disorder; hate-speech acceleration; mass censorship; data justice and protection gaps; AI adoption and AGI implications; and the shrinking civic-space conditions inside which Asia-Pacific civil-society organisations work. The essay's invitation — to "make sense with us, to bring a diversity of expertise" — established the assembly's working method as collective rather than expert-led.

The assembly's funder roster included the APNIC Foundation through its Fund for Connected Asia, alongside the Association for Progressive Communications' standing strategic-inputs-and-funding role across the EngageMedia regional convening line. The DRAPAC23 Fellowship cohort — 124 of the 544 attendees, drawn from marginalised and underrepresented groups in the region — was the principal access-and-inclusion vehicle through which the assembly's diversity of attendees was operationally underwritten.

What happened over the five days

DRAPAC23 was structured as a five-day programme of co-created sessions distributed across multiple working modalities. The highlights report records 161 sessions in total — 30 roundtables and focus-group discussions, 30 workshops, 49 panels and talks, 28 film screenings, 8 art exhibits, 4 parallel events, 9 cross-type sessions, and 3 evening cultural/musical and networking sessions — with session hosts and facilitators drawn from 31 different countries. The film component ran as the Cinemata Big Screen parallel mini-festival showcasing twenty-eight films on the complexities of digital rights across the Asia-Pacific, supplied by EngageMedia's Cinemata video-for-change archive.

The substantive programme spanned the assembly's named agenda items across the five days. The content-moderation and information-disorder thread produced the assembly's most-cited formulation — Red Tani, EngageMedia's programme director, placing the digital-rights field inside a climate-justice analogy ("the global North has an oversized responsibility for the climate crisis, and the damage is absorbed by the global South. When it comes to digital technology and its negative impacts, it's the same") — and routed APC's regional documentation, EngageMedia's content-moderation work, and the field's wider work on algorithmic bias affecting the Global South into a single working conversation.

The data-justice and AI-governance thread carried a decolonising-data-for-data-justice panel that framed data mining as an extractive, neocolonial, and capitalist practice, alongside sessions on data protection and data corporatisation. AI adoption and AGI implications — surfaced explicitly in Sayo's opening essay — appeared across the panels and talks block and in cross-thread sessions on platform-accountability and algorithmic content moderation. Shyam Krishna of the Alan Turing Institute was named among the speakers contributing to the AI-and-data-rights programming, supplying the international AI-research-institution register into the regional civil-society conversation.

The gender-justice and feminist-internet programming weight at the assembly was high — the Whose Knowledge? observer account recorded that women's participation at DRAPAC23 was higher than at any other digital-rights conference its author had attended, with sessions on online-based gender violence, harassment, the digitisation of identity, and feminist technology and open-source practice. The Numun Fund (the first dedicated feminist-technology fund for the Global South), PurpleCode Collective, Body & Data, and The Bachchao Project were among the featured organisations on this track. Shmyla Khan of Pakistan's Digital Rights Foundation was among the named speakers, anchoring the South-Asian feminist-digital-rights cluster.

The repression-and-resistance thread examined internet shutdowns, surveillance, and freedom of expression across the region, with Myanmar's military coup — and the country's three-year-running pattern of network shutdowns, mobile-data restrictions, and hate-speech monitoring under the State Administration Council — a focal point for sessions on countering hate speech, monitoring freedom-and-censorship trends, and on community-radio infrastructures as locally-controlled alternatives for populations facing digital repression. EWMI and the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact were among the featured organisations on this track.

The reparations-and-sustainability thread carried sessions on shifting funding models away from aid-dependent vertical philanthropy toward horizontal, feminist grantmaking centred on marginalised communities — picking up the cross-regional South-South sisterhood frame the Whose Knowledge? observers brought into the assembly and connecting the Asia-Pacific feminist-internet organising line with parallel Latin-American feminist-internet practice. Claudia Pozo of Whose Knowledge?, as Language Justice Co-Lead, was among the South-American contributors to the assembly's programming.

The assembly closed with the Statement of Solidarity, drafted across the five days and published on 29 June 2023 (with EngageMedia's own highlights reporting the publication date as 28 June 2023) over the signatures of 77 organisations and 46 individuals from across the 35 participating countries. The statement named the assembly's core diagnoses — millions remaining unconnected to the internet; the rise of repressive and reactionary governments and policies; threats to human rights and fundamental freedoms; violence and hate-driven silencing of voices; misinformation and misleading rhetoric; data corporatisation; climate-crisis impacts on digital infrastructure; and the marginalisation of gender and sexual minorities, people with disabilities, refugees, and indigenous peoples — and called for the internet as "a public good" with universal access rights and unrestricted information flow, "rights-based and human-centred policies" prioritising people over profit, "inclusive multistakeholder processes" for digital-rights policymaking, and cross-regional collaboration for accountability and justice.

Significance

DRAPAC23 is the corpus's first Event located in Southeast Asia, the first Event located in Thailand, the first Event located in the Asia-Pacific region beyond the existing South Asian Project Panoptic / Cyber Harassment Helpline event anchors, and the first multi-country pan-Asia-Pacific civil-society annual-convening Event of any kind in the corpus's events register — closing the Southeast Asia convening anchor (previously zero), the Thailand event anchor (previously zero), the pan-Asia-Pacific multi-country convening sub-type (previously zero), and the EngageMedia regional convening line as a corpus-named event surface (the EngageMedia body had named DRAPAC as its signature regional-convening artefact, but the corpus had no Event entry standing in for any DRAPAC edition).

Inside the corpus's regional shape, DRAPAC23 pairs with the 13-edition Paradigm Initiative Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum cadence for pan-Africa and with the six-edition SMEX Bread & Net unconference cadence for West Asia and North Africa, completing the trio of corpus-anchored regional civil-society digital-rights annual convenings — EngageMedia-and-DRAPAC for the Asia-Pacific, Paradigm Initiative-and-DRIF for pan-African (Anglophone-and-Francophone Africa), and SMEX-and-Bread & Net for Arabic-language WANA — that together cover three of the four principal regional shapes of the make-AI-good movement's grassroots and civil-society layer outside the corpus's North-Atlantic core. The Latin-American counterpart in the corpus remains under construction.

Within the EngageMedia convening line itself, DRAPAC23 is the moment at which the Coconet camp lineage (2016 first gathering; Coconet I Yogyakarta 2017; Coconet II 2019) crystallised into the larger and more institutionalised DRAPAC assembly format. The five-day, 161-session, 544-participant, 35-country scale of the Chiang Mai edition was an order of magnitude larger than Coconet I's 105-participant Yogyakarta camp six years earlier, and supplied the Asia-Pacific civil-society digital-rights field with a working-method demonstration — the "collaborative sense-making" frame Sayo named in his opening essay — for an annual cadence at pan-African DRIF / pan-WANA Bread & Net scale. The DRAPAC Series has continued through DRAPAC24 in Taipei (2024) and DRAPAC25 in Kuala Lumpur (2025), with the assembly cadence now established as the principal regional civil-society digital-rights convening in the Asia-Pacific.

The Chiang Mai edition's pre-opening framing essay — Sayo's lock-ins, lockdowns, and shutdowns triad — is also the corpus's first instance of an Asia-Pacific civil-society Executive Director publicly placing AI adoption and AGI implications alongside platform lock-in and network shutdowns as joint operating concerns for the regional digital-rights field, and the Whose Knowledge? observer account is the corpus's first cross-regional South-South sisterhood frame linking Asia-Pacific feminist-internet organising with Latin-American feminist-internet practice — both registers the corpus's existing organisational entries had named but had not previously anchored to a specific Event.