September 15 2020 MENA Notes

From TCU Wiki
MENA Meetups

Facilitated by Wafaa and Rima

For this first MENA Monthly Meetup, 12 people from 10 countries in MENA and around the globe were participanting. 


Current Personal and Professional Challenges

  • I am really interested in understanding if there other types of meetings this group have? What is the format? What are the collaboration dynamics? What does it look like to partner and grow the community here?
  • During the meeting there was internet disruption in Algeria, couple of researchers attended the meeting was following this up but they lack context, how we can communicate regularly on such topics?
  • Some international blocked news websites in the MENA launched their website using TOR thanks to the support of OTF, the audience seems to have difficulties understanding you can’t use it on chrome.
  • Do you think people find it easy to use TOR? maybe it’s time to think about more interactive tutorials.
  • We noticed that people engage better in visual content and gifs, loclab is excited to collaborate with the right organization to create this content.


How the IFF community can help you with your challenges? What are the topics we should discuss next?

  • There’s not enough reporting about internet censorship in the Arab world, lack of reporting on surveillance, digital attacks. We need to collobrate more on this.
  • There’s a need for more interactive digital security guides around protests.
  • We need to discuss topics like mental health, stress & anxiety and exile.