September 6 2026 Agenda
From TCU Wiki
September 6 Pre-GG Morning Activities | 9:00 - 12:00
These activities occur in the morning, before the start of the Global Gathering
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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:
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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.
8:30 - ?: GG 5K Run!! 🏃🏽♀️🏃🏽♀️ | |
September 6 GG Activities | 12:00 - 21:00
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Networking Hour Meetups 12:00 - 13:00 |
| 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. | |
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Circles, Villages and Offsite Meetups
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| Circle 1 | Age Verification Systems and Digital Identity Systems: The Collaborations and Strategies (Part 2) | Intergenerational Conversation: Resisting Digital Authoritarianism Across Contexts | |
| Circle 2 | Mapping the Militarisation of Tech | AI Disinformation in Pre-Election Contexts Across The Global South | |
| Circle 3 | Moderation, Maintenance, and Money: The Care Work of Community-Governed Tech | Your Email, Delivered! Lets start a Discussion on Email Compliance and Deliverability | |
| Circle 4 | Secure and Private Design and User Research for Human Rights Tech Meetup | Building Stronger Digital Security Communities: A Conversation Between Moldova, Ukraine and Beyond | |
| Circle 5 | Deeply Rooted: Co-Creative and Relational Practices for Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural and Natural Heritage | Care for the docs! Challenges and Concerns within Digital Security Documentation Community | |
| Circle 6 | Do You Sleep at Night? How to Not Wear Out Your Sysadmin | ||
| Circle 7 | |||
| Villages | |||
| Calyx Village | reserved | reserved | |
| APC Village | |||
| Digital Security | Games for Digital Rights & Security Education | Availability Over Confidentiality: Digital Security Lessons from Ukraine's Blackouts | Hands off my stuff! Tactics and strategies against physical device searches |
| Circumvention Tech | |||
| Spyware Village | |||
| Ecosystem Resilience | Closing the Loop: Lessons from Sunsetting an Organization | What Does a Win Look Like in Our Ecosystem? | |
| Regional A | |||
| Regional B | |||
| Regional C | |||
| Offsite Meetups | Please note that these meetups are being organized by participants themselves, and the TCU/GG staff have no oversight on these activities. | ||
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Booths, Sept 6You 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". | ||||
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| Booth 4a | |||||
| Booth 4b | |||||
| Booth 5 | |||||
| Booth 6 | |||||
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| 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 6 Global Gathering After Hours | 18:00 - 21:00
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Closing Party |
| Time: 18:00
Location: Center of venue |
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| Other Evening Socials | |
| If you would like to organize an evening social, 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. |
Partners
Village and Circle Descriptions
Villages are "all-day hubs" focused on specific topics. They house both Booths and Circles.
| APC Village | ||
| Calyx Village | ||
| Circumvention Tech Village | ||
| Digital Security Village | ||
| Ecosystem Resilience Village | ||
| Spyware Village | ||
| Regional A | ||
| Regional B | ||
| Regional C |
| Age Verification Systems and Digital Identity Systems: The Collaborations and Strategies (Part 2) | This is part 2 of a two part Circle focused on Age Verification and digital Identify Systems
This Circle focuses on age verification, the harm-reduction pathways that civil society and technologists can advance, and how to respond to the narratives of privacy and safety that are often used to justify these systems. Participants will identify opportunities for cross-regional collaboration and co-develop strategies for engaging with the evolving digital identity ecosystem, with attention to both policy advocacy and the design, deployment, and implementation of technical systems. |
| AI Disinformation in Pre-Election Contexts Across The Global South | AI-generated disinformation is becoming a defining feature of general election cycles across the Global South, and without governance frameworks in place, the integrity of electoral processes is compromised. Drawing on emerging research in the context of Kenya's 2027 election, this circle brings together defenders, journalists, and researchers to map where policy is failing, share frontline experiences, and identify cross-regional pressure points for collective advocacy. |
| Availability Over Confidentiality: Digital Security Lessons from Ukraine's Blackouts | During Ukraine's long blackouts, supporting journalists and human rights defenders meant constantly looking for compromises between availability and security. Being able to work at all often came first, but security stayed part of every decision, and the work never stopped - we just had to adapt. This Circle shares real, hands-on lessons on backup power, staying online, and the hard choices teams had to make. |
| Building Stronger Digital Security Communities: A Conversation Between Moldova, Ukraine and Beyond | Civil society organizations across the world are facing increasingly complex digital threats, yet many countries are still developing the local communities and partnerships needed to provide sustainable digital security support. Moldova and Ukraine offer complementary perspectives: Ukraine has built a strong digital security community through years of responding to cyber threats, while Moldova is strengthening collaboration between civil society and digital security practitioners to build local capacity. This Circle will bring together participants to discuss how digital security communities can grow through collaboration, peer learning and cross-border partnerships. Rather than presenting a single model, the discussion will invite participants to compare experiences, identify common challenges and explore practical opportunities for regional and international cooperation. |
| Care for the docs! Challenges and Concerns within Digital Security Documentation Community | Digital security documentation is core to the community strategies to protect HRDs and at-risk groups under surveillance, threats and attacks. Documentation maintainers now compete with AI-generated content to deliver accurate, reliable, and localized information. What critical topics and attack trends need further documentation? Is the community willing to use AI to streamline maintenance tasks and, if so, how to safeguard content's accuracy? |
| Closing the Loop: Lessons from Sunsetting an Organization | Using our own recent decision to sunset the Center for Digital Resilience as a starting point, this circle will look at what goes into sunsetting an organization. How do you decide it’s time? How do you plan for it? Come with your own questions or experiences: this is meant to be as much a conversation as a case study. |
| Deeply Rooted: Co-Creative and Relational Practices for Safeguarding (Digital) Cultural and Natural Heritage | Cultural and natural heritage are under threat from a convergence of crises, and the digital governance frameworks meant to safeguard them often replicate the same extraction and erasure they claim to prevent. This Circle invites participants to co-build a living set of relational governance principles, material that will directly shape an open-access zine on safeguarding digital cultural heritage, currently being developed through an ongoing cross-sectoral collaboration. |
| Do You Sleep at Night? How to Not Wear Out Your Sysadmin | Runing infrastrucure is not easy. There can be hardware or power issue and your application is offline. Or there can be a failed software upgrade and your application is offline. There can be a storm and the WiFi antenna of your mesh network is collapsed. The neighbor complaining it can not access instragram. End users often quickly get frustrated - building pressure on sysadmins and operators. How to find the balance, how to set the right expectations for end-users. |
| Games for Digital Rights & Security Education | Calling all practitioners and enthusiasts for interactive and play-based education! In this circle, we'll exchange ideas and lessons learned in creating and facilitating educational games. You're welcome whether you have created your own games, designed creative training tactics, or are just interested in how to elevate digital literacy and raise awareness in fun activities. |
| Hands off my stuff! Tactics and Strategies Against Physical Device Searches | An open discussion about the latest tactics and strategies to protect our devices and the data they hold against physical searches. We'll discuss tools, good practices, and threat models like border searches, lost/stolen devices, abusive domestic situations, etc. |
| Intergenerational Conversation: Resisting Digital Authoritarianism Across Contexts | In this Circle, participants will explore how state-sponsored and tech-driven authoritarianism impacts different communities through shared experiences of digital surveillance, harassment, and censorship. We will intentionally bring an intergenerational lens, looking at how tech threats target different age groups, and how youth-led digital tactics can blend with seasoned organizing experience to build stronger collective defenses. Rather than focusing solely on regional differences, participants will identify common patterns and exchange community-led strategies that defenders can immediately adapt to their local realities. |
| Mapping the Militarisation of Tech | The battlefield is coming to our towns and cities, as technologies that we rely on every day are militarised. In turn, civilian technologies driven by our data and our lives, are moving onto the battlefield. The very same companies who build tools of war are expanding to deliver civilian infrastructure, and vice versa. We are being pushed into a militarised future we don't want. This circle will explore strategies to counter the narrative that data-intensive military tech will lead to better protection for civilians, by highlighting the risks to our rights to privacy, data protection, and freedom of expression. |
| Moderation, Maintenance, and Money: The Care Work of Community-Governed Tech | Community-led technology is often built around values like openness, access, privacy, and participation, but keeping it alive requires much more than shared principles. This Circle asks what it really takes to sustain community-governed infrastructure: who moderates harm, who maintains the code, who pays for hosting and security, who makes decisions, and how care work can be recognized before people burn out. |
| Secure and Private Design and User Research for Human Rights Tech Meetup | This Circle brings together design and research practitioners to discuss the state of user centered design and user research in the human rights technology and support/training space. Participants will define, discuss, debate and ideate what good and great looks like for users and beneficiaries of human rights technology as heard by designers, user researchers and digital security trainers that work directly with them. |
| What Does a Win Look Like in Our Ecosystem? | In resource-constrained, high-pressure environments, and our present day doom and gloom narrative, communities that don't pause, reflect on their progress and celebrate their wins are more prone to burn out. This Circle brings participants together to define, share, and circulate what a "win" looks like in the Digital Rights and Tech Justice community - across regions, contexts, and scales. In preparation for the circle, we will gather stories from partners and members of the community, explore their main elements and invite participants. Participants will collaborate with a guide to recognize 'wins' and contribute to guidelines on how to tell these stories. The circle will also have as a result different narrative strategies that can help participants describe their work differently and potentially refine the goals of certain projects.| |
| Your Email, Delivered! Lets start a Discussion on Email Compliance and Deliverability | Newsletters, campaign updates, and calls to action: many individuals and organizations in the digital rights space need their email delivered in order to reach their goals. There are many-technical and non-technical-mechanisms that affect the "deliverability" of your email. We'll discuss non-technical strategies and explain what SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, TLS-RTP, and MTA-STS can do for non-profits, activists, freelancers and solopreneurs. Access to some of these technologies is prohibitively expensive. Can we count on your support to advocate for cheaper access to the most cutting edge email standards? |
