EngageMedia

EngageMedia is the Melbourne-founded Asia-Pacific non-profit established in 2005 as an open-source platform for social-issue documentary from the region and now operating as the principal Asia-Pacific civil-society anchor on digital rights, open and secure technology, video for change, and AI-and-human-rights research across Southeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific. The organisation works at the intersection of video, technology, and digital-rights advocacy with staff based across Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, and an explicit operational and programmatic footprint that extends across at least Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Taiwan, and West Papua. Its self-framing — "digital rights, open technology, video for change" — captures the three-pillar programme structure that has anchored the organisation's work since its 2010s reframing from a film-platform-only project into a multi-pillar Asia-Pacific civil-society organisation.

Founding and structure

EngageMedia was founded in 2005 by two co-founders ("two youngsters met in a small house in Melbourne with the idea to build an online space for social issue documentaries from the Asia-Pacific") — one of them, Andrew Lowenthal, continued as Executive Director until 2022 before transitioning to the EngageMedia board. The organisation joined the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) member network in January 2010, placing EngageMedia inside the principal global network of civil-society digital-rights organisations and supplying the organisational connection that has anchored much of its later regional convening work.

Current Executive Director Phet Sayo was announced as Lowenthal's successor in June 2022 and took up the role in August 2022, bringing fifteen years of prior experience as Senior Program Officer at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in New Delhi, India and a background spanning information, communications, and technology policy, internet governance, and artificial intelligence. The team is anchored across the region — current team members include Meg Soriano (Program Coordinator), Khairil Zhafri (Human Rights Technology and Research Project Lead), and Ashraf Haque (Digital Security Specialist) per the Digital Rights Community series profile.

Programme structure

EngageMedia's work is organised across three named programme pillars that the organisation has carried forward through its 2010s reframing from a film-platform-only project into a multi-pillar regional anchor.

The Digital Rights programme defends and advances digital rights in the Asia-Pacific, with the Human Rights Technology Initiative as a named project enhancing digital security for human-rights defenders across the region and the DRAPAC VPN Project maintaining private Outline VPN servers for activists and journalists alongside a Telegram-based bot for distributing free VPN access keys, and with the Digital Security Community Wiki supplying a volunteer-curated digital-security knowledge resource in Southeast Asian languages.

The Open Technology programme helps civil-society organisations and movements work in more secure, ethical, and sustainable ways by using, promoting, and developing open-source alternatives to commercial platforms, anchored on the Open Tech Camp convening for activist-technologists across the Asia-Pacific.

The Video for Change programme runs the Cinemata free open-source video platform — a 6,500+-films archive of human-rights and environmental documentary on the Asia-Pacific — alongside the Video4Change Network that EngageMedia co-founded as the principal international peer network of organisations using video for social change.

Coconet and DRAPAC: regional convening line

EngageMedia's signature regional-convening artefact is the Asia-Pacific digital-rights camp lineage running from Coconet through the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly (DRAPAC) series. Coconet was co-convened by EngageMedia and the Association for Progressive Communications and grew out of a 2016 gathering of digital-rights advocates from across Southeast Asia. The first camp, Coconet I, was held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia in October 2017 with 105 journalists, artists, technologists, researchers, and film-makers and generated more than thirty post-camp collaborations; Coconet II followed in 2019 and consolidated the Coconet community as an active regional network of changemakers across the Asia-Pacific.

The convening lineage continued under the renamed DRAPAC Series. DRAPAC23 was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand from 22 to 26 May 2023 with 544 participants from 35 countries and more than 150 sessions across five days — and at its close the assembly issued a statement of solidarity signed by more than 100 organisations and individuals naming priorities for regional human-rights and digital-rights protection. DRAPAC24 was hosted in Taipei, Taiwan on 18-19 August 2024 with 287 changemakers from 150 organisations, sited ahead of the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) to anchor a regional civil-society conversation alongside the principal regional internet-governance institutional venue. The DRAPAC25 edition is scheduled for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 26-27 August 2025.

AI and human rights in Southeast Asia

Since 2019 EngageMedia has explored and researched AI from a public-interest perspective, with research output covering ethical guidelines for AI, data-justice frameworks within AI, and the political economy of AI governance across Southeast Asia. The line is anchored on a sustained collaboration with Dr Jun-E Tan and the June 2023 report Governance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Southeast Asia, which provides recommendations on policy-making and advocacy and on the roles civil society can play in regional AI governance.

The line continues through the October 2025 Tracing the Indonesian Government's AI Technology Procurement Track from 2021 to 2024 report, authored by Wana Alamsyah and Rizky Razmawardhana, which inventories Indonesian state AI deployment across the four-year procurement window and produces the corpus's most fine-grained Indonesian-government-AI-procurement evidence base; this is the kind of national-level procurement-tracking work that the Indian Internet Freedom Foundation's Project Panoptic does for facial-recognition tenders in India and is the closest Asia-Pacific civil-society counterpart in corpus terms.

Funding

EngageMedia is funded by a mix of philanthropic and government-aid sources including the Ford Foundation (general support granted 24 October 2016 to partner with filmmakers, journalists, technologists, and communities to develop traditional and digital media which engages audiences), and historically the Open Society Foundations, the Oak Foundation, and the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Posture in the movement

EngageMedia's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is its work as a Southeast-Asian-anchored multi-country civil-society convener combining video-activism, open-technology, and digital-rights-advocacy registers into a single regional organisational form. Its DRAPAC convening line is the principal regional civil-society digital-rights assembly in the Asia-Pacific, structurally parallel to Paradigm Initiative's Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum in pan-African convening and to SMEX's Bread & Net unconference in West Asia and North Africa — three regional anchors carrying overlapping but regionally-distinct civil-society-convening work on AI, content moderation, surveillance, internet shutdowns, and platform accountability. Its AI-and-human-rights research line — anchored on the Jun-E Tan collaboration and now extending into Indonesian-government AI procurement tracking — supplies the corpus's first Southeast-Asian civil-society analytical lens on regional state AI deployment and pairs with the Internet Freedom Foundation on the South Asian side to form the corpus's first two named Asian organisational anchors on AI procurement and deployment accountability. In the corpus's terms EngageMedia is the load-bearing Asia-Pacific civil-society anchor on the regional digital-rights and AI-and-human-rights tracks, the Southeast-Asian counterpart to the African and West-Asia/North-African regional anchors that the corpus has built up through 2024-2026, and the corpus's first organisational entry whose primary public-output channel is video and social-issue documentary rather than research, litigation, or policy briefing.