September 5 2026 Agenda

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September 5 Pre-GG Morning Activities | 9:00 - 12:00

These activities occur in the morning, before the start of the Global Gathering

	Satellite Events and RSVP-Required Workshops
	Each morning, we provide space for private satellite events, and a handful of workshops that are open to participants but require you to register before the start of the event. Currently accepting RSVPs for: 09:00 - 12:00: Making Sense of Chaos:  Lessons from the Front Lines of Washington DC (9:00 - 12:00) 09:00 - 12:00: Journalism Security Salon 09:00 - 12:00: Latin American Breakfast by FAULAC

	Wellbeing Morning Activities
	Wellbeing Morning Activities take place offsite, before the start of the GG each day, and do not require prior registration. You can also volunteer to host a Wellbeing Morning Activity by following these instructions. 9:30 - 11:00: Sound Bath Grounding 🔔🌿

September 5 GG Activities | 12:00 - 21:00

	12:00 - 13:00 | Networking Hour and Featured Meetups
	Each day we host a networking hour at the venue. Take advantage of the many food vendors we have while meeting folks in the digital rights space! This includes a handful of meetups that take place in the venue.
Where	Meetup
	Caribbean + Diaspora Meet Up
	South Asian Digital Liberation Meetup
	Francophone Meetup

	Circles, Villages and Offsite Meetups You can find detailed Circles, Villages, and Meetup descriptions the end of this page. Please take notes in each Riseup pad linked in each title. Follow these instructions, to organize a Circle in the slots marked "TBD" in the venue OR to organize an offsite afternoon meetup.
Circles, September 5
	13:30 - 14:30	15:00 - 16:00	16:30 - 17:30
Circle 1	Internet Shutdown Contingency Planning Help Desk (+ shutdown circumvention trainer meetup)	Running and Using Local LLMs With Hardware You Already Own	Backing Up for the Machine? Independent Data Preservation in the Age of AI Scraping
Circle 2	Co-Designing Practical AI Bias Detection Tools with Journalists in the Global South	Knowing What You're Looking for: AI Slop and OSINT Work in Conflict Zones	Algorithmic Harms & Activist Resilience: Lessons from the Netherlands and Spain
Circle 3	Spill the Tea! What Digital Threats Are You Seeing?	When the World Moves On: Breaking the Silence After Crackdowns and Elections	From Shutdowns to Silent Control: Identifying Emerging Digital Authoritarian Practices
Circle 4	Deleted, Demoted, Disappeared: Now What?		How to Stop Social Media Companies from Financing Threat Actors
Circle 5	Exploring Models and Best Practices of Building Sustainable Tech Collective Infrastructure
Circle 6		You Own Infrastructure! Great! How to Protect it from the Bad of the Internet With the Help of Scenarios
Circle 7
Villages
	13:30 - 14:30	15:00 - 16:00	16:30 - 17:30
Calyx Village	Reserved		Reserved
APC VIllage	Navigating AI Use and Ethics in CSOs
Digital Security	Living in the Crosshairs: Operational Survival Under Ubiquitous Surveillance	Driving Action From Collective Alerting	Starlink Best Practices
Circumvention Tech	Strengthening Rapid Response Efforts to Censorship Events	Lights in the Tunnel: Co-Creating an Accountability Framework for VPN Transparency
Spyware Village
Secure Communications Village	Can Signal Become Phishing-Resistant?	What Does a Girl Gotta Do Around Here to Get People to Download the Tool Before the Internet Shuts Down?	Reserved
Latin American Village	Hackear y Crear: Cesafíos y Estrategias Feministas Para Enfrentar Las Infraestructuras Tecnopolíticas Que Amenazan a las Democracias en América Latina	Illegal Trade in Personal Data: Presentation of a Report and Stories to Raise Awareness	Digital Territory: Rethinking Security for Environmental Defenders in Latin America
Regional Perspectives		Holistic Security for Immigration Rapid Response Work in the US
Ecosystem Resilience	Practical Security and Safety Strategies for Events and Community Spaces
Offsite Meetups	Please note that these meetups are being organized by participants themselves, and the TCU/GG staff have no oversight on these activities.

	Booths, Sept 5 You can find detailed Booths descriptions at the bottom of this page. In the venue (IRL), each booth has a number, found on the top-center of each booth's "window".
	13:00 - 15:00			15:30 - 17:30
Location	Name	Run by		Name	Run by
Booth 4a
Booth 4b
Booth 5
Booth 6
Booth 7
Booth 8
Booth 9
Booth 10
Booth 11
Booth 12
Booth 13
Booth 14
Booth 15
Booth 16
Booth 17
Booth 18
Booth 19
Booth 21
Booth 22
Booth 57
Booth 78
Booth 79
Booth 80
Booth 81
Booth 82
Needs to be added
Needs to be added

September 5 Global Gathering After Hours | 18:00 - 21:00

	Calyx Institute Karaoke Party!
	Time: 18:00 Location: Main Stage Get your song list ready and come prepared for the return of karaoke at the Global Gathering!!! This is the time to unleash your inner entertainer and let us see your moves!

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	Other Evening Socials
	Digital Rights Game Night Time: 18:30 Location: Meet at reserved picnic tables in venue near food vendors. Join us for a game night featuring a variety of digital security and digital rights games! Bring your own games to playtest and get feedback, or play one of ours. Whether you're an avid gamer, a digital security trainer, or this is your first time picking up a deck of cards, you are welcome to join
If you would like to organize an evening social to add to thist list, please follow these instructions. This can be dinners, hangouts, or visits to nearby locations. In some cases, we may be able to accommodate your request in the venue itself.

Village and Circle Descriptions

Villages are "all-day hubs" focused on specific topics. They house both Booths and Circles.

Village	Run by	Village Description
APC VIllage
Calyx Village
Circumvention Tech
Digital Security
Ecosystem Resilience
Latin American Village
Regional Perspectives
Secure Communications Village
Spyware Village

Circle and/or Meetup Title	Description
Algorithmic Harms & Activist Resilience: Lessons from the Netherlands and Spain	This circle builds a critical conversation around a new research project that examines how AI-embedded systems in the Netherlands and Spain are actively harming social justice activism, specifically targeting migrant rights, Palestine solidarity, gender justice, anti-racism, and climate work amidst rising far-right polarization. Participants will share and analyze how these algorithmic restrictions may be showing up in their contexts, and collectively workshop potential strategies to counteract them.
Backing Up for the Machine? Independent Data Preservation in the Age of AI Scraping	As governments delete public datasets and archives scramble to rescue them, a new tension appears: the data we work hard to preserve becomes training fuel for AI. The Internet Archive is being scraped at scale, Mozilla's Data Collective draws on rescued datasets, and the line between "saving knowledge" and "feeding the machine" blurs. This circle gathers people who hold the problem (organizations whose data is at risk) and people who hold the practice (archivists and infrastructure builders) to compare backup protocols - independent versus institutional - and confront what we are really preserving for, and for whom.
Can Signal Become Phishing-Resistant?	Targeted phishing campaigns against journalists, activists, and civil society increasingly abuse legitimate Signal account recovery and device-linking workflows rather than exploiting software vulnerabilities. In this session, we will examine the current threat landscape and explore potential improvements to account security that could significantly reduce the risk of remote account takeover.
Caribbean + Diaspora Meet Up	This meetup brings together human rights defenders from the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora community. We will discuss how we can create ""digital safety in numbers"" across our region and share examples and stories of our digital rights experience. We will also explore mutual support and collaborative resources.
Co-Designing Practical AI Bias Detection Tools with Journalists in the Global South	AI tools are increasingly being used to generate and reshape news content, creating new and urgent challenges for fact checking and bias mitigation, especially during election periods. This Circle will explore how journalists, fact checkers, and technologists can collaboratively design practical tools to detect cultural and contextual bias in AI generated stories, with a focus on supporting election coverage in low resource and multilingual environments. Participants will share experiences from their contexts and give direct input to help shape an early prototype of Bias Lens, an open source fact checking tool being developed through Baraza Media Lab as part of a Mozilla Fellowship.
Deleted, Demoted, Disappeared: Now What?	What happens when artists lose access to the platforms that shape visibility, income, and cultural participation? In this collaborative discussion, Don't Delete Art and Repro Uncensored invite participants to explore the growing challenges of censorship, deplatforming, and algorithmic suppression for creatives online, and to imagine collective systems across regions that can reduce bottlenecks and provide effect support.
Digital Territory: Rethinking Security for Environmental Defenders in Latin America	Environmental and territorial rights defenders face digital threats that existing security models weren't built for. This circle brings together frontline knowledge to co-build a situated understanding of digital risk, considering context, organization, and power.
Driving Action From Collective Alerting	Protection providers and security experts often spend their limited capacity urgently translating the latest threats into alerts that are relevant to the diverse communities they serve so they can independently identify and mitigate those threats or seek support when they can't. But, affected individuals often have trouble acting on these safety alerts because they may not understand what they mean, not know whether they apply to them, not grasp the risk level, not know where to get assistance, or lack the time/resources to take the suggested action. This circle will chart a path to a future where threat intelligence is rapidly and easily transformed into a range of alerts that allow diverse at-risk communities make informed security decision. Participants will explore what is necessary to make alerts actionable, identify the parts can/not be adapted and reused across different communities, and explore strategies and tactics for reducing duplication, and better connecting and building on other efforts
Exploring Models and Best Practices of Building Sustainable Tech Collective Infrastructure	Participants will explore existing collectives that have lasted the test of time, such as Framasoft, May First, and Riseup, as well as exploring that did not last. Looking at different case studies, we will uncover best practices and lessons learned. We will also imagine what an effective tech collective serving defenders should be like, especially for those working in the most repressive environments.
Francophone Meetup	Connect with individuals actively working in the Francophone areas. This is a fantastic opportunity to learn from diverse Francophone projects, gain valuable insights, and expand your professional network. This meetup is designed to foster meaningful connections and enrich the Francophone digital rights community.
From Shutdowns to Silent Control: Identifying Emerging Digital Authoritarian Practices	Since 2022, governments in Central Asia have increasingly shifted from visible internet shutdowns toward more targeted and less detectable forms of digital control, including selective blocking, throttling, platform pressure, cyberattacks, and regulatory restrictions. This Circle will use findings from Central Asian monitoring made by MediaNet team as a starting point for participants to compare developments across regions, identify emerging trends, and collectively map priorities for future documentation, research, and collaboration.
Hackear y Crear: Cesafíos y Estrategias Feministas Para Enfrentar Las Infraestructuras Tecnopolíticas Que Amenazan a las Democracias en América Latina	Este Circlo busca propiciar un diálogo amplio entre los movimientos feministas y los de defensa de los derechos digitales, con el fin de analizar cómo las infraestructuras tecnopolíticas impulsan nuevas formas de violencia de género facilitada por la tecnología (TFGBV, por sus siglas en inglés) que afectan a movimientos, especialmente en contextos políticos cada vez más hostiles. La discusión partirá de investigaciones recientes de organizaciones feministas y fondos de mujeres de ocho países de América Latina y el Caribe, que formará la base para examinar cómo este tipo de violencia afecta la participación democrática, e identificando características únicas y padrones. Las participantes también explorarán estrategias de cuidado colectivo, resiliencia digital y resistencia frente a estos desafíos.
Holistic Security for Immigration Rapid Response Work in the US	Across the US, the drastic increase in immigration enforcement activity has been met with an unprecedented development of hyperlocal rapid-response networks. These folks are doing the frontline work of monitoring, resisting, and documenting. Holistic community safety is essential in these continued rapid-response efforts. This circle will bring together individuals and organizations who are leading these security efforts to identify common challenges, share effective strategies, and coordinate on service delivery.
How to Stop Social Media Companies from Financing Threat Actors	Threat actors are increasingly turning to social media platforms as a source of revenue. Platforms have monetization policies in place to prevent the abuse of their monetization services, but as with content moderation, their enforcement leaves a lot to be desired. In this workshop, we will catch you up on latest trends in social media monetization and teach you how to check whether threat actors in your country are earn money from social media companies.
Illegal Trade in Personal Data: Presentation of a Report and Stories to Raise Awareness	In Latin America, there is an illegal market for personal data operating on Telegram, which appears to have links to public databases in countries across the region. The circle will begin the discussion by sharing key findings of a recent investigation into this phenomenon, including case studies from Argentina, Brazil and Peru. Participants will discuss and strategize around the most effective narratives for disseminating this type of information, and educating them on their rights and the promotion of digital security.
Internet Shutdown Contingency Planning Help Desk (+ shutdown circumvention trainer meetup)	Come create an Internet shutdown contingency plan driven by your needs, taking into account your threat model and capabilities. Participants will be introduced to the BRACE (Building Readiness and Circumvention in Emergencies) Framework, which includes a curriculum, methodology, and trainer-ready framework, designed to help CSOs build customized contingency plans for outages. Come make a plan for yourself, or if you're a shutdown circumvention trainer, come to connect with other trainers and talk about shutdown circumvention!
Knowing What You're Looking for: AI Slop and OSINT Work in Conflict Zones	How can we maintain the integrity of OSINT work when our processes and, increasingly, our own eyes can betray us? This Circle invites OSINT practitioners across disciplines - journalists, lawyers, digital rights defenders, academics, and beyond - to share their experiences navigating AI-generated content and disinformation in conflict zones, where synthetic media has increasingly been weaponized to distort documentation and accountability efforts. Participants are encouraged to bring examples and case studies for breakout groups, where we'll swap operational strategies for identifying and mitigating AI slop in our work.|
Lights in the Tunnel: Co-Creating an Accountability Framework for VPN Transparency	Participants will discuss and begin drafting a community-informed methodology for assessing VPN transparency and accountability. This includes what the methodology should look like, key policies or practices that it will assess, and the selection of VPN providers that should be evaluated. The Circle aims to strengthen and raise the bar for enforceable standards of platform accountability in the VPN ecosystem.
Living in the Crosshairs: Operational Survival Under Ubiquitous Surveillance	When total digital evasion is impossible, how do frontline defenders manage the day-to-day reality of targeted targeting? This highly collaborative Circle moves past standard baseline tools to share hard-won operational strategies, psychological coping mechanisms, and risk-mitigation tactics for working under unlawful state surveillance. We will map out collective cross-regional wisdom on moving from digital paralysis to resilient, ongoing activism.
Navigating AI Use and Ethics in CSOs	The use of AI tools, specially LLMs, seems unavoidable, almost common sense. But considering all the societal negative effects, from environmental concerns, to privacy, through labor and gender, how can CSO implement guardrails to the use of such tools that align with their strategy and ethics?
Practical Security and Safety Strategies for Events and Community Spaces	Participants will explore and share practical strategies for ensuring the safety and security of events and community spaces, particularly in contexts with limited resources. At a time when gathering together has never been more important, many organizations are navigating shrinking teams, tighter budgets, and increasing demands. This Circle will provide an opportunity to exchange experiences, identify creative approaches, and collectively build knowledge that helps us continue creating spaces where people can come together safely, securely, and confidently.
Running and Using Local LLMs With Hardware You Already Own	A local LLM (Large Language Model) is an AI model that runs on your own computer or private server instead of sending your prompts to a cloud service like ChatGPT. Join this Circle to learn how to build and use a local LLM on older hardware—such as a five-year-old gaming desktop—making AI both more private and more sustainable. We'll start by sharing our setups (if you have one), including hardware specifications, what works well, what doesn't, and how we use local LLMs within their limitations. From there, we'll explore practical tips, configurations, and real-world use cases. This Circle is focused exclusively on local, self-hosted LLMs running on widely available consumer hardware. Some discussions will be technical, but no technical expertise is required if you're primarily interested in learning about the capabilities and use cases.
Spill the Tea! What Digital Threats Are You Seeing?	Come share what digital threats you are seeing right now? What feels new, what keeps coming back, and what patterns are showing up across regions? This circle is a relaxed space to compare notes on digital threats and attacks in different communities and contexts. Activists can share what they are experiencing or hearing from others, while digital security supporters and trainers can share patterns they notice through support work. Together, we will explore how to make these observations useful for HRDs, and exchange practical strategies for facing these threats in different local contexts.
Starlink Best Practices	Facilitators of this Circle have been documenting the threat model, risks, and mitigations around the use of Starlink without detection. Come hear about what they have documented, share any lessons you have learned, and collectively discuss risks or mitigations.
Strengthening Rapid Response Efforts to Censorship Events	Join this session to discuss challenges, needs, and ideas for strengthening global collaboration on rapid response to emerging censorship events around the world. Participants will also learn about OONI's tools and methods for censorship rapid response.
South Asian Digital Liberation Meetup	This meetup brings together human rights defenders from South Asia to connect, exchange experiences, strengthen networks, and explore collaborative strategies for advancing digital rights, accountability, and justice across the region and beyond. Participants will also discuss and strategize around the region's unique digital landscape - as one of the largest markets for global digital platforms, where some of the egregious cases of digital violence have taken place (disinformation, hate speech, and online extremism). Together, participants will share insights and identify opportunities for collective action.
When the World Moves On: Breaking the Silence After Crackdowns and Elections	The circle brings together participants to explore why "post-crisis silence" happens after elections, and collectively identify ways to sustain documentation, communication, and action beyond peak moments of repression. It is in these quiet periods after the crisis that evidence is lost, accountability weakens, and cycles of abuse are allowed to repeat. Strengthening our ability to act after crisis moments is critical to building resilient movements and ensuring that violations are not forgotten.
What Does a Girl Gotta Do Around Here to Get People to Download the Tool Before the Internet Shuts Down?	Okay, seriously though - We've been asking communities around the world for the past one year what they need when the internet shuts down, and one of the biggest challenges, no surprise, is adoption. So come, contribute your perspective, and jam with us on creative solutions to overcome common adoption challenges together xD
You Own Infrastructure! Great! How to Protect It from the Bad of the Internet With the Help of Scenarios	It is all fun to install and own your own hardware. But then you connect it to the internet. Suddenly, you are exposed to a wide range of risks. Automated bots are constantly scanning your infrastructure. Automated account take-over attempts show up in your logs. Your end user is complaning the software is outdated. How do you update it? Then, one day, you receive your first abuse report or cease-and-desist letter, and while replying to that letter a notification comes in . You servers are down, you are under a DDoS attack. What does it mean to be a responsible hosting provider, and what does it take to deal with the darker side of the internet?

Booth Descriptions

Booth	Run by	Booth Description