The Action Point team was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in the 2015 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. This Festival has become Southeast Asia’s largest and most renowned cultural and literary event of the year. Held October 28 to November 1, this year’s conference was highly anticipated by 27,000 participants, 200 volunteers, and dozens of artists. The theme, “17,000 Islands of Imagination,” portrayed the diverse creativity of Indonesia, and was the continuation to the Frankfurt Book Fair,the world’s largest book trade fair, where Indonesia was featured as the Guest of Honor.

International attendees flocked to the island of Bali for the conference, not only providing economic benefit to the local community, but also locking-in prime attention worldwide. The Festival was sponsored by dozens of partners – the Embassy of the United States in Indonesia, the Australian Embassy Jakarta and the Fairmont Sanur Beach and Reader’s Digest, to name a few.

The mission of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival is to create a world class festival that celebrates extraordinary stories and amplifies brave voices; tackles global issues and big ideas. In fulfilling it’s mission, the Festival has also raised issues that the local government deems sensitive, including conflicts over the 1965 massacre of an estimated 500,000 to 1 million Indonesians labelled communists. Facing pressure from officials, some of the event topics and panel discussions were cancelled.

With a conference full of writers, these cancellations sparked heated discussion about freedom of expression on news sites, blogs and social media. The Guardian published several articles on the issue (here, here and here), and The Sydney Morning Herald also took a position against government censorship (here, here, and here). Advocates posted comments and photos of their slogans to the Ubud Writers Festival’s Twitter account with the hashtag #uwrf15. Human Rights Watch highlighted the issue as well, with a blog post by researcher Andreas Harsono “Dispatches: Censorship is Back in Indonesia.”

Recognizing that its credibility was under fire, the Festival committee responded to these conversations by creating new events focused on censorship issues. In addition, posts on the topic were retweeted by the official conference Twitter account to raise the profile of the issue and keep conversations going. This Festival was a powerful demonstration of how effective the Internet is in raising awareness and disseminating information to a global audience, and in shaping public opinion.