We are so excited to share with you that RightsCon Toronto will take place from Wednesday, May 16 to Friday, May 18, 2018, at the Beanfield Centre at Exhibition Place in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
We’re confident that this fantastic venue and location will be a welcoming home for the global RightsCon community.
Soon, we’ll be sharing with you important programmatic information on RightsCon Toronto, including our program advisors, local champions, public call for proposals, and ticket sales. You can subscribe to our alerts (the RightsCon Rundown) to get updates and find out how to get involved.
Since 2011, we’ve brought the digital rights community to many power centers around the world. For our seventh event in the RightsCon Summit Series, we are thrilled to convene in Canada’s largest city. Not only is Toronto a dynamic tech hub, it’s also one of the world’s most diverse cities.
As a country that strives for values of diversity and inclusion, Canada stands counter to the recent global trend toward isolationism and exclusion. By moving RightsCon to Toronto, we’re committing to creating a platform where our community can address the most pressing tech challenges in a context of respect for diversity, inclusion, and human rights.
Of course, digital rights in Canada are also under threat. That’s why we’re partnering with local organizations to focus on the biggest challenges and debates Canadians are facing. Our aim is to learn from each other, forge new relationships, and together create strategies for solving the issues that are impacting people in Canada and around the world. It is our global community that makes RightsCon one of the world’s leading summits on technology and human rights.
Here is a small taste of the technology issues that are impacting human rights globally, which we expect to address at RightsCon Toronto:
- Freedom of expression, and the state of global journalism
- Diversity and digital inclusion
- Smart cities, biometrics, and the internet of everything
- Fostering internet connectivity and protecting network neutrality
- “Fake news,” and grappling with a “post-truth” narrative
- Government hacking and mass surveillance
- Technology for defending the rights of indigenous groups
- Civic tech, democracy, and digital inclusion
- Hate speech and countering violent extremism
- Algorithmic accountability and transparency
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Internet governance and cross-border jurisdiction
- Government hacking and surveillance
- Strengthening digital security and encryption
- Privacy and data protection
- Innovation policy and tech as as engine for economic growth
- Digitization of health, environment, land, and labor
At RightsCon Brussels 2017, we brought together more than 1,500 participants from 105 countries, with representatives from more than 700 organizations, for what became the world’s largest digital rights event. (It was pretty amazing — you can see our official outcomes report here!) For RightsCon Toronto, we want to help convene even more people and groups from different countries and sectors, as technology becomes more and more integrated in our daily lives.
We invite everyone, everywhere, to share their concerns, ideas, and solutions, so that together we can chart a pathway for defending and extending our fundamental rights and freedoms across the globe.
We hope you’ll join us.
For more information or questions about RightsCon, how to get involved, or how to become a sponsor, contact Nick Dagostino at [email protected].