[ADM] Comms Handbook material

[JFQueralt]

Dear Alya,

It was great to meet you and get to know you.
Thank you once again for taking the extra time to meet with me for Aeon's spoon and to hear a little bit about TIOF.

As promised, here's the written version.

TIOF - www.theiofoundation.org - is an international non-profit organization working towards the application of human rights in digital spaces or digital rights. While registered in Estonia, the organization was conceptualized and founded in Asia, locally, The Philippines. Like SOLS, we initially came from the environment of humanitarian work and as we dig deeper into developing digital tools for effective and efficient humanitarian response, we realized our vision responds more into human rights and specifically human rights in the evolving digital environment.

Our world is changing and as society evolves even more advanced due to the influx of information technology development, more and more, we are entering an era where every thing becomes new again and we are caught in the space where new social constructs need to be looked into to respond to the growing variations of society. TIOF wishes to respond to these growth and provide an environment where solutions can be discussed ahead rather than later in time.

Our programs are summed up into three categories: awareness, action and strategic. Awareness programs are mostly focused on raising consciousness on digital rights and other aspects surrounding it while action programs are programs that provide solutions to certain problems. For instance, we do conduct meet-up sessions on various tech developments to increase civil society understanding of such. This is quite similar to the google suites workshop we had under ngohub. On action programs, we do develop citizen reporting applications that allow people to report certain social concerns or humanitarian feedback wherein which can be processed within key stakeholders for respective action. Strategic programs on the other hand are those that involve policy development such as, on a very large scale, the proposal of Universal Declaration of Digital Rights (UDDR). You can think of the UDDR as the UDHR in the digital space.

Right now, we have two active activities in Malaysia which I would like to reach out to you - as a start. First is TechUp which is a monthly one-day workshop that links up tech companies or tech individuals to civil society and the other is BHR or Business and Human Rights which is an international project in itself. I'll leave my colleague @isaac Adams to give you more inputs on TechUp while I wish to go deeper on BHR in this email and request SOLS 24/7's collaboration.

The Business and Human Rights in the Tech Sector project we implement in Malaysia is part of a global BHR in Tech project implemented in 7 other countries and in partnership with Global Partners Digital, Ranking Digital Rights, Internews Network and Open Technology Institute. Specifically, the project aims to make CSOs aware of BHR specifically its implementation in the Tech Sector. Countries signing on the UNGP, Malaysia included, committed to the passage of a National Action Plan on BHR. We hope to complement this work by providing a venue for understanding specifically with civil society organizations. It is in this regard that I reach out to you and invite you for collaboration. There are two ways we can make this happen, 1) we come to SOLS and provide some in-house intro session BHR or 2) we wish to invite you, your representative or the right person in SOLS to participate in our upcoming Introduction to BHR session on May 25. During which we hope to facilitate a round-table discourse with other CSOs about BHR and how we can possibly work together and move onwards.

We're also reaching out to SUHAKAM and Tech companies, and if you have potential recommendations, we would be happy to connect with them.

I am currently based in the Philippines and could do a call conference should you need further information. My colleagues Jean, Maryam and Isaac are however based in KL and could be available anytime for a further meetup. @Maryam would be the right person to sit down with and see further the collaboration with SOLS specifically on BHR.

I hope my email was able to provide some more input on the subject. I see this as an opportunity for us to initially work together while looking more sustainable partnerships which serves both SOLS and TIOF.

warmest,
Len