Would have loved to participate in this important event in person, but unfortunately logistics make it impossible. RightsCon is put on by Access Now, a powerful organization I admire. I attended the 2011 RightsCon in Silicon Valley.
The online event looks to be quite good but is always second best to the in person connections and inspiration. I’ll try to make it happen next year!
I’ll share notes from the conference here.
In the latest FabUpdate I learned about RightsCon which is coming up next month and will be hosted in Lusaka! I don’t think going in person is a good idea (not least because Emily’s birthday is on cinco de mayo and she would kill me if I went to Africa) but I can participate remotely. Charmingly it is “pay as you can” for the online part. @Ted @martin-at-kamusi this might be interesting for you too, and if you also attend virtually we can share notes here.
I have a call scheduled with Dirk of FabRiders next week. He is working in a similar space but his super power is facilitation, so this might be a good complement to what we are talking about here. Also he says he is involved in launching a Discourse site for riseagainstbig.tech and wants to set one up too for FabRiders!
Zambia! I can practically walk there!
RightsCon seems like an interesting venue to discuss “sovereignty” issues — vis-a-vis censorship, algorithmic bias, and other ways that corporate services serve rights-abusing agendas. Looking at the sponsors… There might be a “biting the hand that feeds them” issue. What do you think?
TBH: RiseAgainstBig.tech didn’t seem very serious, from looking at the website — seemed static, like it could have been years old. So that’s good to know.
Good questions both. I will explore! My own impression of riseagainstbig.tech is that it’s a newish volunteer driven initiative, and they are still in the process of setting it up. They are building airplanes in the sky.
I figured. If I were them, I’d put some “Under Construction” language on the site and invite people to be notified when the initiative is ready for more eyeballs, and perhaps invite people to get involved. (They kind of do that with the contact form.)
Devastating news - rightscon 2026 was cancelled at the last minute! 
There was a survey for people who had registered for RightsCon to see how we were impacted and what we would like to see happen next. It’s interesting - they seem to be exploring some changes to their system, e.g. to always host it in the same place if it can be done safely and reliably vs their current system of hosting it on a different continent every year. Or doing an online-only conference later this year.
It occurred to me while writing in an answer (below) that a Discourse powered community would warrant looking into for RightsCon. A place with safe, private spaces where we can connect on an ongoing basis.
I had a cursory look around the RightsCon and AccessNow websites, and did not see anything of the sort. Though they do have a very comprehensive and extremely valuable help page that I will post here as a separate topic in community. They have a 24/7 digital security helpline and lots of community resources for people and organizations wanting to harden their security.
I haven’t been to a RightsCon for many years. My situation recently changed (I got laid off from my product manager job at discourse.org) and I am seeking to set myself up so I can help privacy minded people and organizations to gain digital sovereignty by self-hosting. I was excited to reconnect with folks at RightsCon after many years working on open source and online community, to look for opportunities to help. If I could have I would have come to Lusaka! But it wasn’t possible for reasons on my end. I was grateful for the opportunity to participate online. I am so disappointed it fell apart in the end and do hope that some online convenings still happen - it can still have an impact to move things forward. Maybe not as a conference per se with everything happening at once but lots of scheduled convenings throughout the calendar on different topics? I like what fabriders is doing.
Also some sort of online community where we can share news and opportunities, and get together in trusted, private spaces. Discourse would be a great platform for that and I’d love to help. Right now I’m using it to bring people together around digital sovereignty, and offering help for those who want to self-host but don’t have the confidence to set up their own self-hosted servers. see https://discourse.tobiaseigen.org.