Jean F. Queralt

Born in Spain and with a full carreer in IT, I eventually realized that I was deeply linked to Asia and moved to Malaysia in 2012. After a while, I started volunteering full time for a number of organizations both in Malaysia and the Philippines. Supporting their IT needs became my personal action to be able to provide some level of protection and ensure data ownership of citizens, especially those who have less access to knowledge. I also walked dogs, screened STIs and walked streets to give food away.

For a long while however, I had been constantly disturbed by the level of intrusion information and communication technologies have in businesses and personal lives of people. In 2018, I took the leap of founding The IO Foundation to establish a more solid and targeted direction to address Digital Rights for users.

I have no doubt that it will take no time that we, ourselves, become full-time digital citizens; if we are not there already. TIOF intends to work with pertinent regional and international agencies in crafting and implementing a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights (UDDR) which aims to be grounded from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Long shot or not, I strongly believe it is a much needed step into the future.