Internet Freedom Festival 2017

The 2017 edition of the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) will be held on 6–10 March, in Valencia, Spain.

Held under the theme 'Joining Forces to Fight Censorship and Surveillance', the event will be structured around eight main themes:

• Community: improving balance of gender, diversity, and inclusion; creating more sustainability in the Internet freedom ecosystem; strategies and best practices for community management; cultivating positive atmospheres to prevent intolerance and harrassment; enabling the sharing of common goals, weknesses, threats, and opportunities.
• Training and best practices: threat modeling and risk analysis; training content, resources, and methodologies across digital, physical, and psychosocial platforms; digital security curricula building; organisational security; pedagogy strategies and alternative training approaches; user behaviour and case studies; capacity building: training vs/and other types of interventions.
• Internet freedom: present and future: current state and overarching issues of the Internet freedom space; upcoming opportunities and threats; urgent issues that require immediate attention; reflections from the academia and latest on research results and findings; the role of technology in modern societies.
• Tools and technology: new tools and latest developments in circumvention technologies; tool monitoring: i.e. how do we ensure what we are using and propagating are still good?; tool contextualisation and transferability; hardware security.
• Policy and advocacy: how we talk about our work (to donors, governments, each other); how to influence donor priorities, i.e. help ensure the funding is where the real need is; how to help our partners build advocacy capacity.
• Regions and groups: regional case studies; collaboration between different groups in different regions; issue mapping; specific challenges for groups (e.g.: LGBTI); user types.
• Communications and design: design and implementation of communication plans and digital strategies; marketing and public relations best practices; design thinking, product design, and usability for Internet freedom projects.
• Journalism and media: organisational culture: engaging entire newsrooms or organisations on DigiSec, not just specialised journalists; risk evaluation depending on a journalist’s areas of coverage; training at the newsroom; beyond a newsroom: extending our DigiSec culture to sources; regional diversity: how challenges are different depending on regions and political climates; ‘media literacy’ as both a threat and opportunity.

The event will bring together software developers, digital security trainers, communications professionals, digital rights activists, journalists and media, and designers.

For more information, visit the event website.