Day 1 / Tuesday, 20 November
8:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Registration
Registration
9:00 AM - 9:30 AM
Opening Plenary
Opening Plenary
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Panel Discussions
Panel Discussions
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CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS
How to resist harsh cyber security laws Room: Community Square A The objective of this panel discussion is to review the evolution of cybersecurity laws in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to answer the following questions:
_ Moderator: Reem Al Masri 7iber - Jordan Judge Hania Helweh Lebanon Attorney Hassan Al Azhari Egypt Attorney Omar Atout Jordan |
LANGUAGE AND LOCALIZATION
Digitizing gender and sex in the Arabic speaking world: successes & challenges Room: The Grid Speakers from feminist organizations and collectives–Jeem, A Project, The Knowledge Workshop, Sawt il Niswa, and WikiGender–in the region will talk about their experiences in creating digital content in Arabic about gender, sex and sexuality. The panel will go over the needs, successes and challenges that exist in relation to developing feminist content in the region that has been plagued with censorship, arrests and intimidation of minorities. _ Moderator: Dalia Othman Jeem Rola Yasmine A Project Azadeh Faramarziha Sawt il Niswa & The Knowledge Workshop Farah Barqawi WikiGender |
11:00 AM - 11:15 AM
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
11:15 AM - 12:45 AM
Panel Discussions
Panel Discussions
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CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ONLINE
“Spreading and expanding?” – Independent digital media’s struggle to reach readers Room: Community Square A How can independent alternative media compete with bigger entities to get to social media users, especially after social media have become a primary source for content production? Do experimental and alternative editorial policies enough to permit a real marketplace of ideas – and hence, competition with mainstream media giants? _ Moderator: Lina Atallah Mada Masr Yazan Melhem 7iber Shady Zalat Mada Masr Josette Khalil Megaphone |
COMMUNITIES
Reflections from Jordan, Iraq, Tunisia, and Lebanon: lessons learned from organizing and mobilizing online Room: The Grid Technology should empower us to build campaigns by people for people with ongoing development and accountability plans. Because of the absence of offline public spheres, cyberspace has become a new platform for civic engagement. Speakers from the region will introduce the local political frameworks they are subject to and why online spaces are taken as a viable choice and alternative for advocacy. A discussion will run on the impact algorithms play in the type of content advocates use in their campaigns while also touching upon their challenges. _ Moderator: Alaa Sayegh Amira Abdel Aziz Collective Routes - Egypt Maythem Hassoun Al Nimaa - Iraq Yomna Fawaz U Consulting - Lebanon Feryel Charafeddine CALAM- Tunisia Emna Sayyadi Access Now - Tunisia & Egypt |
12:45 PM - 2:00 PM
Lunch Break
Lunch Break
2:00 PM - 2:55 PM
Afternoon Sessions
Afternoon Sessions
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CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Talk
Tripartite aggression on online freedom in Palestine (Arabic) Room: Community Square A Read Description in Arabic _ Farah Mustaklem 7amleh |
LANGUAGE AND LOCALIZATION / Workshop
Open source tools for collaboration in translation (Arabic) Room: The Studio Read Description in Arabic _ Wafaa Haykel Meedan |
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COMMUNITIES / Workshop
Introducing Proxy: playing for youths' online mobile safety (English) Room: Workshop Room Participants will play PROXY, the board game developed to teach Lebanese youth about online mobile privacy and security. The game, which will have been developed for four months and tested by various groups of young people in Lebanon and at MozFest, is a competition between the “hacker" and a team of three activists, each with a unique identity and skillset. A brief explanation of the board game's development and design process will be followed by participant play-testing and feedback. The session will function as a prototyping session but also open room for discussion around the effectiveness of board games in persuasion on privacy and security issues. _ Azza El Masri SMEX Mohammad “Jace” Kassem Helem |
CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ONLINE / Talk
What do we want? (Arabic) Room: Mini Theater Read Description in Arabic _ Donia Shohdy CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Round Table
The role of traditional and social media in social mobility: Social mobility of the Moroccan Reef (Arabic) Room: The Grid Read Description in Arabic _ Abdel Latif al Hamamouchi Al Maati Monjeb |
3:05 PM - 4:00 PM
Afternoon Sessions
Afternoon Sessions
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CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ONLINE / Workshop
Using Wikimedia Commons as a medium to project cultural heritage and history (Arabic) Room: The Studio The session will focus on using digitised materials as well as pictures to promote the culture and heritage of a country. The session will first focus on how to digitise indigenous materials and how to openly share or upload unto a platform like Wikipedia and its sister projects to promote and allow free usage of such content. Wikipedia with monthly viewership of about 40 billion people has proven to be a platform of great resource in the 21st century hence skills to upload and share content on there could be a great resource for communicating the national agenda of a country. _ Zeineb Takouti Wikimedia Tunis Emna Mizouni Wikimedia Tunis |
CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Lightning Talk
GDPR's impact on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) (Arabic / English) Room: The Grid The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on May 25, 2018 and replaced all the data protection laws in all 28 European countries. The GDPR also represents the most significant change to data protection law in more than two decades in terms of strengthening the control that individuals have over their data in addition to improving transparency about how that data is processed. However, the reach of the GDPR will not be limited to Europe, and thus different regions, including MENA region, will be affected on different levels by the new set of regulation as business, economic and personal levels. The importance of such law comes from the need of guaranteeing the actual protection of personal data in terms of privacy, data breaches and fully data management. _ Wafa Ben Hassine Access Now Ala'a Shehabi The RELIEF Center, UCL |
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COMMUNITIES / Presentation + Q&A
Social media through the lens of neuroscience (Arabic) Room: Workshop Room How can behavioural neuroscience inform interventions to effect norm change on social media? Social media creates environments that produce open and dynamic interactions that in rare cases are likely to make people abandon old habits and attitudes. Neuroscientists are beginning to capitalize on the ubiquity of social media use to gain novel insights about cognitive processes that support them. The session aims to explore the cross-enrichment that might result from a connection of behavioural neuroscience with social media, asking what innovations these dialogues might propose to change practices in digital communities. _ Samah Karaki CNRS/Social Brain Initiative |
CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Presentation + Q&A
Social engineering - Detection, analysis, and prevention (Arabic) Room: Mini Theater Social engineering proved to be very effective method against people with a lack of technological background, specially journalists and activists usually considered as hot targets and information sources. Through the presentation of famous campaigns used to infect targets with cyberthreats, the speaker will shed light on how can we distinguish profiles of social engineering attack, how can we analyze it visually and what are the available easy to use tools to verify the legitimacy of a profile, email, link, etc. while also talking about the importance of human-error and how cyber campaigns tend to exploit these errors. _ Ragheb Ghandour |
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CULTURE AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ONLINE / Lightning Talk
Arabic non-fiction webcomics (Arabic) Room: Community Square B This talk will set the tone for a project that would include programmers, journalists and comic artists to create an online platform or a website for non-fiction, Arabic webcomics. Non-fiction webcomics–including memes–is a new language the current generation has created to freely cover issues of politics, religion, sexuality, and more. Their greatest advantage is that they don’t necessitate any real skill, making them a tool equally used by all. Adding to the fact that we lack Arabic content in almost all fields, it's important for young people to be able to document their events and history, thus non-fiction webcomics. _ Rawand Issa |
CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Round Table
Rights to access to information: lessons from Tunisia and Lebanon (Arabic) Room: Community Square A _ Moderator: Eman Jaradat JOSA Amine Ouichka Open Gov TN Assaad Thebian Gherbal Initiative |
4:00 PM - 4:15 PM
Coffee Break
Coffee Break
4:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Afternoon Sessions
Afternoon Sessions
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CULTURE + KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ONLINE / Lightning Talk
The deep architecture(s) of today’s artificial intelligence and their influence on the production of knowledge (Arabic) Room: Workshop Room The most prominent field of Artificial Intelligence in use today is based on pattern recognition, the automatic detection of regularities found within a designated training dataset. As the content, design and source of these datasets are often not critically probed by practitioners from different fields, this mediated statistical modelling paradigm risks exponentially reproducing and perpetuating biased and discriminatory social judgements while potentially encroaching on the privacy of unconsented data providers. Who teaches machine ‘learning’ and how? What are the advantages and dangers of building recognitive and predictive models that are trained on the judgements of an unjust past? This session explores current developments within AI in view of the datafication that enables them and their influence on the cognitive political economy of our time. Through returning to the history of mathematical logic, anthropomorphism and their relationship to the emergence of the concept of intelligence across time, I will look into how the predominant rationalization underlying the architecture(s), uses and dissemination of today’s artificial neural networks and behavior-based robotics, end up, in many cases, mystifying knowledge rather than expanding it. How do we begin to think of an AI-aided future? While learning from the work of thinkers/practitioners from different fields and times, such as Jaber Ibn Hayyan, Wendy Chun, Rodney Brooks and Adel Fakhoury, I will be searching for an AI-aided knowledge production where where accountability and attestation are, more so, collectively possible. _ Jessika Khazrik Amnesty Tech |
COMMUNITIES / Lightning Talk
Ethics education at engineering schools in the MENA region (Arabic) Room: Mini Theater This session will highlight the importance of including digital rights and ethics discussions in engineering schools curriculum. Tech makers make important impact in developing and conceptualizing the products we use, therefore being aware of their "technical" decisions impact is crucial. In a study based in Tunisia, analysis of locally developed mobile applications found a huge lack of awareness in users privacy. The session would be an opportunity to showcase these findings and expand the discussion to cover other areas such as algorithms bias. _ Yosr Jouni FABT CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Fireside Chat
What we know about cell network surveillance (English) Room: Community Square A Although many activists may know that the government stores all their SMS communications, the location tracking capabilities of IMSI-catchers are still not very well understood. We will go over what we know about IMSI-catcher capabilities–how they work, who’s manufacturing and distributing IMSI-catcher hardware and software–what we know about how law enforcement and others are using them as well as mitigation strategies and why most IMSI-catcher detection apps don’t work. |
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CULTURE + KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION ONLINE / Presentation + Q&A
Housing Monitor (Arabic) Room: The Sudio Presentation of a housing initiative in Lebanon, specifically a platform that mobilizes technological tools (interactive map, digitized oral histories, animated personal experiences, reporting tools, networking tools) with the aim to document, advocate and organize around the right to adequate housing and shelter, a basic human right. We would like to lead a discussion about the limits and possibilities of an online monitor and how it can relate to offline ground work, to ultimately build enough leverage to influence policy. _ Nadine Bekdache Public Works Studio Mansour Aziz Shfra |
CONSIDERING POLICY IN DIFFICULT CONTEXTS / Lightning Talk
The internet in the time of currency crisis: the case of Iran (English) Room: The Grid Iran has been publishing new laws to preserve the personal data of Iranian users while simultaneously taking direct action to censor platforms like Telegram, and promote government owned platforms like Soroush, and government forks of Telegram such as Telegram Talaee. These efforts are actively undermining international digital rights standards, and eroding the privacy of personal data of Iranians at the same time the government is making grand launches of new laws and policies that makes them appear as protectors of digital rights. This talk will explore the dissonance that exists within Iran between practice and rhetoric when it comes to online freedoms. _ Mahsa Alimardani Article 19 |
