From 23 to 27 October 2017, EngageMedia, the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), and the Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) along with key regional allies, hosted COCONET, a Southeast Asia Digital Rights camp.

COCONET, named after the coconut plant that is widely grown and used in the Southeast Asian region, also means Connecting Communities & Networks and aimed to enhance regional networking and build collaborations to expand and popularise digital rights issues. The event connected members of the digital rights community, media and technology-makers, and grassroots digital activists, to build the Southeast Asia digital rights movements.

The event was co-designed by a regional consortium including SafeNet (Indonesia), Empower (Malaysia), Thai Netizen Network, Witness, Myanmar ICT Development Organization, and the Cambodia Center for Human Rights.

More than 100 people from varied backgrounds including journalists, human rights campaigners, women’s rights activists, digital security trainers, documentary filmmakers, writers, social media activists, and even artists participated in the event. The vibrant group had a lot to share, communicate and exchange in more than 80 sessions that took place over the period of five days. The camp was structured in an unconference style, with the participants creating and executing the agenda.

Here is a glimpse of the participants at CAMP COCONET:

Read blogposts reflecting on the successes of the event here, and a collection of interviews with its participants:

• Video and Technology for Human Rights Documentation at COCONET
• Video interviews with some of the amazing people at COCONET
• PBS Thai Report: Activists from Three Different Countries
• Pocket Power: A Mobile Video Production Workshop at COCONET
• COCONET: Learning from each other to achieve the social justice we all want by Srinidhi Raghavan at APC
• Rangoli as a way to explore networks by Nayantara Ranganathan via Internet Democracy Project
• DRF attended 5-day Digital Rights Camp in Indonesia
• COCONET Southeast Asia Digital Rights Camp. 
Interviews With Nine Digital Rights Activists by Asher Wolf
• Kamp COCONET, Wadah Berbagi Pengalaman Aktivis SE-Asia Tenggara

Here is the COCONET 2017 public report (PDF 6MB) to show you what happened in the first COCONET event and some of the outcomes achieved.

Collaborators

Funders