MisinfoCon is back: We’ll see you at the Mozilla Festival in London!

MisinfoCon at MozFest will happen on Wednesday, October 25, 9AM — 6PM in London, England

I’m excited to share that MisinfoCon community’s next in-person gathering has been confirmed for Wednesday, October 25th, in London, England as part of the Mozilla Festival’s pre-week events. All that to say, save the date!

Brought to you again by the Hacks/Hackers Foundation, this event will be produced collaboration with the recently announced Mozilla Information Trust Initiative. And we’ll be announcing more event partners in the coming weeks.

In keeping with “Con” part of MisinfoCon (which is a reference to anything from Community to Convergence), this gathering will aim to contribute something unique into the movement of people working on solutions to misinformation. For this event, we’ve identified three areas that we believe are critical to get working on together:

• Literacy and critical thinking: What is the potential to address misinformation starting in the classroom; from elementary school to university? What role do libraries, galleries, afterschool programs, nonprofits and public spaces play? How should platforms and newsrooms respond? And what does “literacy at scale” look like to help the millions of people who are just coming online?
• Geopolitical responses to misinformation: What are the policy and regulatory implications of each of these responses? What do they look like and how do they vary from region to region? What promising strategies exist that could be experimented with elsewhere, or globally?
• Data and metrics: What data is needed to help understand the problem? Is that data available? If not, what are the opportunity to make data available, either openly or in a way that is accessible to researchers? How can open data initiatives, researchers, and platforms work together, instead of at odds?

For each of these themes, we’ll invite people and organizations who can help us understand the state of play, and then — in typical MisinfoCon tradition — we’ll break into smaller groups to make practical, tangible progress on each of these areas.

A few of important logistics to note about this event:

• We see this as MisinfoCon’s opportunity to convene a Europe-focused event, and it’s unlikely we will support travel from afar
• We are taking advantage of the fact that people are already attending the Mozilla Festival, and encouraging those participants to come to London early (and conversely, we’ll be prioritizing space for people who are also planning to attend MozFest)
• This will be a one-day event, and — as such — it will be quite different in format, approach and outcomes from MisinfoCon at MIT

You may be asking, “Great, so how do I register to attend?” We will open registration window in late September. To be notified, you’ll want to ensure that you’re on the MisinfoCon mailing list.

Space will be very, very limited at this event due to the venue that is available to us in London. At MIT, we had about 180 people; in London we’ll be able to host about 80 people. All that to say, priority will be given to people who A) are working on solutions to misinformation in Europe and B) are already planning to attend MozFest.

And, last but not least, I’m excited to mention that we’ve confirmed that Dwight Knell will lead the production for this event. Dwight comes to us via his work at the Shorenstein Center helping with the Combating Fake News conference. Dwight will work closely with me, Jenny, Burt and the rest of the MisinfoCon and MozFest teams to ensure the event is, as they say in London, “top shelf.”

As always, shout with questions, and stayed tuned for more.

A special thank you to Mozilla for their support of my fellowship work on media, misinformation & trust, as well as their ongoing commitment to the MisinfoCon project.