Travelogues

I attended RightsCon in Manila 23-25 March 2015, which was the first to be held in South-east Asia. Rightscon is a tech conference about digital rights and related issues.

My itinerary for Manila and back was arranged by a travel agent in New York, and after a third try to fix the flights I got my tickets and accommodation in Manila for three nights.

I haven’t visited The Philippines since 2009 though I have many friends ever since. You know they are a lot and taking a large portion of friends in my facebook than from any other country.

It was quite early in the morning at 6am when I arrived in NAIA after a sleepless three-hour flight from Singapore. After sorting out my currency at the money changer with good service inside the airport, I took off.

I took a cab just in-front the gate, a metered official airport taxi as said in the booth sign. I jump- in and the driver didn’t turn the meter on. I am not accustomed with php currency and a bit confused when he asked for 600p. I admit I was such a poor negotiator back then. It ended up with 500p to bring me safely to Holiday Inn in Ortigas, Pasig. It’s quite a difference sum when compared to just 2sgd to reach the city from Changi airport in Singapore. That happens. He has a family to feed and I am alone in a foreign land.

There are many fellow participants that I know before though I know almost none of the organizers except from their emails. So it was a very good chance for me to be included for a talk at the conference. Indeed, I was amongst the first to send-out my presentation after being confirmed for the talk. They said so.

On the first day in Manila I was entitled to follow a whole day pre-conference about the Future of Internet in the Philippines which was targeted for the local participants. I can see the organizers were so eager to facilitate this event as good as it should be. They were really engaged in serious debates in this meet-up to resolve the differences.

There are friendlier people in this two-day conference than the one that I had formerly in Singapore. Not sure why it is. Maybe people were too geeky in a tech conference than in a social conference. Is geekyness mean they are more attached and dependable to their gadgets and becoming less sociable?

For me, this is one of the best conferences that I had attended about internet and related issues with multi-facetted parallel sessions which need a delicate mind to choose which session is best suited to your necessity.