September 9 2025 Agenda

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Join us for good food and music

12:00 to 13:00: Lunch and Networking Hour

Check out the various food vendors and connect with participants in a beautiful setting.

	Self-Organized Socials
	Arrange or check out the list of Self-Organized Socials taking place off-site (but close by) locations, ranging from meetups to numerous activities. https://pad.riseup.net/p/GGSocials
	A Sample of Today's Socials:

	Circles and Villages You can find detailed Circle descriptions the end of this page. You can also organize your own self-organized Circle or Booth in the empty spaces (marked SOC TBD) by following these instructions.
Circles, September 9
Location	13:30 - 14:30	15:00 - 16:00	16:30 - 17:30
Circle 1	Which free software alternative for which needs	From Seas to Skies: The New Frontiers of Internet Governance	AI Risk Mitigation from the Trainer and Civil Society Organization Point of View
Circle 2	VPN Providers: Building a Unified Front to Ensure Our Collective Sustainability	Leading AI Detection: Deepfakes, Provenance & Protection	Who’s Writing Our Story? Documenting the why as well as the how
Circle 3	Election Hold	Inside a Cross-Border Investigation on Surveillance and Censorship Tech	Mapping the Global Spyware Landscape: Perspectives, Gaps & Possibilities
Circle 4		Device Searches Around The World: Building For Deniability
Circle 5	The Practice of Joy: Sustaining Hope in the Tech Justice Movement
Circle 6
Villages, September 9
Location	13:30 - 14:30	15:00 - 16:00	16:30 - 17:30
Luminate Village	Effective Altruism: How can civil society and philanthropy respond?	Effective Altruism: How can civil society and philanthropy respond?	Effective Altruism: How can civil society and philanthropy respond?
Calyx Village	Secure Messaging in 2025 and What Comes Next?		Sketch It Out: Unblock Your Brain and Spark Creative Flow
Circumvention Tech Village		VPN Guild
APC Village
Open Measurement Village
Digital Rights Sustainability Village	Brainstorm on Alternative Funding Models (Part 2)	Numun Fund Session Part 1	A Listening Session on the Digital Rights Funding Collapse
Regional Topics A
Regional Topics B	TFGBV, Disinformation, and Platform Accountability in the Indo-Pak Conflict of 2025
Name to Come
SWANA Cafe
Queer Rights Village

	Booths Each booth has a number, which can be found on top, center above a booth's "window". You can find detailed Booths & Villages descriptions at the bottom of this page.
Booths, September 9
	13:00 - 15:00			15:30 - 17:30
Location	Name	Run by		Name	Run by
Booth 1
Booth 2
Booth 3
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 79
Booth 80
Booth 81
Booth 82
Booth 83a
Booth 83b

	Global Gathering After Hours
18:00 - 21:00	Karaoke!!! Our favorite pass time!

Partners

Thank you to all of the partners and sponsors that have made the 2025 Global Gathering possible!

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Circle Descriptions

Circle Title	Circle Description
AI Risk Mitigation from the Trainer and Civil Society Organization Point of View	Civil society organizations are rapidly adopting AI, outpacing their ability to mitigate the associated risks. Let's discuss, as a community, effective strategies for building this capacity while still leveraging the opportunities AI presents.
A Listening Session on the Digital Rights Funding Collapse	This circle is a space to share stories, identify emerging patterns, and begin mapping the impact of the funding collapse on our communities and networks. Whether you’ve been directly affected, are supporting impacted groups, or are simply trying to make sense of what’s happening—come share your story. Over the past year, the digital rights ecosystem has been shaken by an unprecedented wave of funding cuts. Organizations across the globe—especially those led by and serving marginalized communities—have been forced to downsize, pause programs, or shut down entirely. This isn’t just a budget issue; it's a structural crisis with long-term implications for our collective safety, resilience, and ability to defend digital freedoms.
Brainstorm on Alternative Funding Models (Part 2)	This is part 2 of a three part circle series. As the digital rights field faces a historic funding crisis, many of us are asking: What now? We all are looking for alternative funding, but how do we organize for that? How do we prepare our organization to become more agile on fundraising? What options of alternative funding exist—from reimagined grantmaking models to untapped donors, ethical partnerships, and community-powered support. Together, we’ll surface bold ideas, share examples from adjacent movements, and identify who might be ready to fund this work—even if they haven’t yet. This session is about expanding our collective imagination and beginning to chart a path toward financial resilience rooted in solidarity, innovation, and justice.
Device Searches Around The World: Building For Deniability	This session gathers real-world experiences of device searches: for example, at borders, police checkpoints, and during detention. In the circle, participants can share (as much as they feel comfortable) what was inspected, why, and how these searches played out in different parts of the world.||Together, we'll examine these stories to exchange safety strategies, then move beyond individual tactics to envision the systemic changes our tools need. Drawing on our team's long history of advocating for harm reduction on platforms, we want to bring the desires, experiences, and expertise of the GG community into the conversation. We'll explore how to build harm reduction and deniability directly into device and app design -- from invisible messages and self-destruct functions to offline and online coded communication -- and think of new paradigms of what can be possible.
Effective Altruism: How can civil society and philanthropy respond?	Building collective knowledge about effective altruism, and the impact the movement is having on AI policy, among philanthropic organisations and civil society. Learning about the findings from previous work and explore how to take these learnings forward to explore strategies for responding to this movement’s incursion into the fields in which we work.
From Seas to Skies: The New Frontiers of Internet Governance	Beyond traditional areas of network and telecommunications governance, new tensions are increasingly reshaping what internet governance means: who is actually governing the new technologies that increasingly facilitate our internet connections? As companies like Google, Amazon, AWS, and Starlink expand their control over submarine cables, cloud infrastructure, and satellite networks, the longstanding approach to governing the internet stack through a set of well-known bodies like ICANN and the IETF is becoming more fragmented and contested. This circle will explore both the traditional venues of Internet governance and what is at stake there for the IF community as well as map how governance is shifting from traditional internet governance and technical standards bodies to new venues, and what civil society can do to prevent the consolidation of power over the internet.
Inside a Cross-Border Investigation on Surveillance and Censorship Tech	Join Amnesty Tech and InterSec Lab for a look at their groundbreaking collaborative investigation into surveillance and censorship technologies, which will be launched during the Global Gathering. Learn about the findings on how powerful digital tools are being traded and deployed across borders to suppress civic space. Together, we’ll explore: + The methodologies used to analyze and safeguard highly sensitive leaked data. + The secure platforms and workflows enabling cross-organizational collaboration. + Key investigative findings and their implications for the global digital rights community. Engage directly with investigators, learn replicable practices, and discuss the broader ecosystem enabling rights-abusing technologies to flourish. It’s also one of the first chances to respond collectively to the investigation’s revelations, as it launches in real time at the Gathering.
Leading AI Detection: Deepfakes, Provenance & Protection	Deepfakes are rapidly evolving—and so are the threats they pose. In this session, we’ll unpack how generative AI is being used to create increasingly realistic audiovisual content, and explore two key strategies for mitigating harm: provenance and detection. We’ll also spotlight emerging threats to those on the frontlines of media and human rights and invite participants into an interactive conversation to share experiences and strategies for collective defense.
Mapping the Global Spyware Landscape: Perspectives, Gaps & Possibilities	Led by partners of the Spyware Accountability Initiative, this interactive Circle invites participants to collectively map the diverse range of work, perspectives, and lived experiences related to spyware and surveillance technologies around the world. Whether you’re working on investigations, victim support, policy reform, tool development, or community education—this space is for you. We'll explore the following together: + What does spyware work look like across regions and sectors? + Where are the critical gaps in accountability, protection, and response? + How can we better connect efforts, reduce duplication, and amplify underrepresented voices?
Numun Fund Session Part 1
Secure Messaging in 2025 and What Comes Next?	Join the Phoenix R&D team for a conversation on what secure messaging looks like in 2025—and where it's headed next. We'll explore current trends, emerging gaps, and how evolving privacy technologies and federated protocols are reshaping the landscape. This session invites input from developers, advocates, and end users alike to help define the future of secure, user-centered communication. Come share your insights and help us imagine what comes next.
Sketch It Out: Unblock Your Brain and Spark Creative Flow	Feeling stuck? Overwhelmed? In this guided circle, we’ll use simple sketching and visual thinking to unlock creativity, ease mental clutter, and see familiar problems in a new light. No drawing skills needed—just a willingness to explore with pen and paper. Through a series of playful prompts and reflections, you’ll learn how visual expression can: + Calm a busy or anxious mind Help externalize and reframe challenges + Tap into intuitive, nonlinear thinking + Make space for clarity, insight, and even joy Come as you are. Leave with a few lines on a page and a lighter mind
TFGBV, Disinformation, and Platform Accountability in the Indo-Pak Conflict of 2025	In May 2025, the Indo-Pak military escalations spilled into the digital sphere, where women and gender minorities became deliberate targets of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), gendered disinformation, and hate speech. Drawing on DRF's ""Digital Battlegrounds"" research and real-time monitoring from both sides of the border, this Circle will examine how online misogyny, AI-generated disinformation, and nationalist propaganda intersected during the conflict. Participants will explore platform accountability gaps, the role of algorithms in amplifying harm, and the urgent need for cross-border solidarity and policy reform in high-conflict contexts.
The Practice of Joy: Sustaining Hope in the Tech Justice Movement	In tech justice work, the harms and their impact of Big Tech often take center stage. Still, joy, humor, and creativity are also powerful tools of resistance, advocacy, and for sustaining hope in the present moment. This participatory circle invites you to reflect on the strategies that sustain hope and energy in movements and share moments when joy emerged in your work, even amidst struggle. This Circle reframes joy as a core strategy that sustains organizations and networks working on urgent issues, while disrupting oppressive systems, resisting burnout, and helping us imagine futures worth building Reflections and strategies shared will be put into a collective "Practices of Joy" Zine. This living resource will offer inspiration and concrete strategies for weaving it into our ongoing work.
VPN Guild	At last year's Global Gathering, a group of VPN developers sat down and asked: what if we actually joined forces? Not just to build better tech, but to push advocacy forward, share expertise, set real standards for security and privacy - and keep competition fair. That question sparked the VPN Guild - an industry-wide association of VPN services. Now we're circling back: is this experiment working, what challenges do we face, what new doors are opening, and how can we shape the future together?
VPN Providers: Building a Unified Front to Ensure Our Collective Sustainability	The fight for a free and open internet is multifaceted, with countless VPN-focused groups are working on parallel tracks. While this diversity is a strength, it can lead to fragmented efforts and duplicated work. This circle aims to bridge these gaps by creating a space for urgent, strategic collaboration focused on sharing resources, knowledge, and tools. Potential discussion points: What are our common needs as service providers? How can we create a practical framework for sharing and co-developing open-source VPN tools and infrastructure to avoid reinventing the wheel? What initiatives and technology are helping reduce the costs of operation? How can we present ourselves as a united front to attract more funding from governments and the private sector We encourage VPN service providers, researchers, technology developers, adopters, and funders to join this crucial conversation.
Who’s Writing Our Story? Documenting the why as well as the how	Who decides what gets remembered, and why? Join us for an interactive session exploring how we document our organizations, our movements, and the moments that shape our lives. We’ll dive into the politics of memory, the power of storytelling, and the practical tools we use to capture and preserve our work. From everyday digital records to community archives, we’ll reflect on how to safeguard our stories and facts, without losing critical context along the way.
Which free software alternative for which needs	Migrating from software provided by tech giants or VC-funded companies towards self-hosted open-source software is important to ensure your data is not held hostage.||But not all those are created equal: some are more complex to migrate to, miss features that some think essential, or have other limitations that are hard to find before migrating to it.||We shall discuss different experience with different free or open-source software so each can find the one that fits their use case.

Booth & Village Descriptions

Village	Run by	Village Description