Phet Sayo

Lao-Canadian civil-society convener and digital-rights, internet-governance, and AI-and-human-rights specialist; Executive Director of EngageMedia, the Melbourne-founded Asia-Pacific civil-society organisation, since August 2022. Sayo brings nearly three decades of programme-officer and programme-specialist experience in information, communications, and technology policy, internet governance, and artificial intelligence across South and Southeast Asia to the EngageMedia role, having succeeded EngageMedia co-founder Andrew Lowenthal in the directorship in the organisation's first generational transition since founding.

Sayo was born in the Lao People's Democratic Republic, immigrated to Canada in the late 1970s, is a Canadian national, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (June 1996). His prior career spans Programme Specialist at the United Nations Development Programme from 2000 to 2006, based in Malaysia and Thailand and including leadership of the International Open Source Network promoting free and open-source software as a viable alternative for development; fifteen years (June 2006 through September 2021) as Senior Program Officer for the Networked Economies programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in New Delhi, India, where his portfolio supported research projects and networks on digital rights, censorship and surveillance, the right to privacy in the digital age, intellectual property, ICT innovations, internet governance, platformisation and the future of work, and artificial intelligence for development; and a brief tenure as Advisor at the Commonwealth of Learning from September 2021 through May 2022 before joining EngageMedia. He is undertaking a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at Athabasca University.

Within the corpus's frame, Sayo anchors the Asia-Pacific civil-society Executive-Director register that EngageMedia has carried forward through its 2010s reframing from a film-platform-only project into a multi-pillar regional civil-society organisation, and is the corpus's first Asia-Pacific Person entry. His public-facing strategic framing of the regional digital-rights field — naming the mainstreaming of data governance, open technology, and platform accountability as the wins of the past decade, and making the operational case for reframing digital-rights advocacy through accessible entry points such as consumer rights and data protection in regional contexts where direct freedom-of-expression framings are politically constrained — is the principal Asia-Pacific civil-society voice the corpus tracks on the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly (DRAPAC) lineage, on regional civil-society convening, and on the multi-disciplinary problem set facing regional civil society in the post-2020 cycle (technological and policy lock-ins, network shutdowns and surveillance, cyber laws of control, information disorder, mass censorship, data justice, and the regional civil-society response to state and corporate AI deployment across Southeast Asia).