On August 15, 2025, Liberation Day, Cyber Diplomacy Organization VANK will launch its fifth pre-event campaign ahead of the official debut of its international policy and communication platform, Weform.
This final pre-event campaign, held just one week before Weform’s opening, aims to remind the public of the platform’s vision — that citizens can be real proposers and participants in global issues — while marking the start of its official launch with a meaningful finale.
Weform is a new global governance platform developed by VANK based on its experience operating the international petition platform Bridge Asia and the citizen policy participation platforms Woollim and Yeollim. This platform provides an “open diplomatic space” where ordinary citizens can meaningfully engage with international issues: anyone can present their views, collaborate with others to develop them into policy proposals, and potentially see those ideas reflected by international organizations or governments.
The theme of this final pre-event campaign is: “What kind of consultative body could Korea take the lead in creating?” The goal is to explore how Korea can go beyond simply participating in the international community to directly proposing and leading frameworks for cooperation.
With existing international consultative bodies often dominated by advanced Western nations and showing limits in representativeness and openness, this campaign invites citizens to consider alternative values and directions that Korea could offer.
In reality, international consultative bodies such as the G7 have often set agendas and made decisions based only on the perspectives of a few countries, sidelining or excluding the voices of Global South nations and ordinary citizens. This has led to structural criticism that such bodies are ill-equipped to effectively respond to complex global challenges such as the climate crisis, inequality, human rights issues, and the digital divide.
Against this backdrop, Korea is increasingly recognized as a country with the qualifications and conditions to lead more inclusive and horizontal international cooperation, thanks to its strengths in democracy, economic power, healthcare and technology, and peacebuilding experience.
Through this campaign, VANK has created a space for citizens to directly think about and propose the principles and methods by which Korea could lead international cooperation, as well as the topics that could form a global consensus. With Weform preparing to connect citizen proposals to actual policy after its launch, this campaign is expected to serve as both a starting point and a symbolic declaration.
VANK head Park Ki-tae said, “Having established itself as a cultural powerhouse, Korea is demonstrating strong soft power as Hallyu music, dramas, and films — from the Netflix global No.1 animation K-Pop Demon Hunters to its OST reaching No.3 on the Billboard 200 — take the world by storm. Now is the time for Korea to adopt the vision of becoming a great power that can design and implement the global order.”
He added, “Based on the network of 7.5 million overseas Koreans and 200 million Hallyu fans worldwide, Korea will leverage its pop culture influence to become a soft power powerhouse capable of exerting real influence in international politics and diplomacy.”
VANK youth researchers Jeong In-sung and Park Ji-eun, who planned this final pre-event campaign, emphasized its special significance. Jeong In-sung said, “A consultative body created by citizens can be based on imagination completely different from the existing diplomatic order. A Korea-led consultative body could focus on citizen-centered topics such as technology, culture, human rights, and ecology — and we wanted to design that possibility together with the public.”
Park Ji-eun added, “This campaign marks the starting point of a new narrative in which citizens can become planners of international policy. Once Weform opens, more citizens will be able to directly propose ideas, and a greater variety of international agendas can take shape. We hope many will take that first step with us.”
Previously, VANK’s first four campaigns gathered public input on: The Theory of Peace in East Asia, Improving perceptions of Africa, Responsible development of the Arctic Sea Route, and G7 reform and Korea’s potential participation. With this fifth campaign concluding the pre-event series, the official launch of Weform on August 15, 2025 will usher in a system where any citizen can freely propose and participate in a broader range of international agendas.
All campaigns can be found on VANK’s official Instagram (@vank_prkorea), and anyone can participate through a Google Form. Through the official launch of Weform, VANK plans to open a new era of global governance in which citizens play a central role in forming and implementing the international community’s agenda.
Meanwhile, VANK has pioneered programs for training Korea’s first digital diplomats and national promotion ambassadors, creating an era in which any citizen can become a diplomat. Through its citizen policy proposal platform Woollim and communication platform Yeollim, VANK is building a governance model in which citizens serve as co-designers and implementers of Korea’s policymaking process.