Next week the human rights and tech community will convene once again this time in Lusaka, Zambia. Annually RightsCon brings together practitioners across civil society, industry, governments, and the technical community. This is my tenth Rightscon and the Social Web Foundation’s second. Like last year, our participation in RightsCon is part of a broader commitment to ensuring that the development of digital infrastructure remains closely connected to public-interest values and to the communities most affected by technical design decisions.
This year, I will be participating in three sessions that reflect different but closely related strands of this work.
The first session, “Human rights reviews in internet standardization – what is at stake?” on human rights reviews in internet standardization, focuses on the processes through which technical standards are developed and the implications those processes have for rights protections. Standards bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the IEEE play a central role in shaping the digital environment, yet their work often remains difficult to access and unevenly influenced. The discussion will consider how and when human rights and privacy considerations are incorporated into these processes, what is at stake when they are not, and what conditions are necessary to enable more meaningful and representative participation in standardization work. We’ll be in AG03 at 11:30 am on May 6.
A second session, “A little less talk and a lot more action: Mobilising for feminist tech industry standards” hosted by the United Nations Population Fund, turns to the question of “safety by design” in the context of technology standards. While this concept has gained increasing prominence as a corporate and policy framework, the session situates it within a broader set of concerns about whose experiences and priorities are reflected in how safety is defined. By grounding the discussion in feminist principles and human rights obligations, the session creates space to examine how current approaches may fall short, particularly for communities that are disproportionately affected by technology-related harms, including gender-based violence. Catch us in A101 at 10:15 am on May 7.
The third session, “From platforms to people: Reclaiming the internet through the Fediverse” hosted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and featuring co-panelist Bruce Schneier, focuses on the Fediverse as an alternative model for social networking infrastructure. The session will explore how federated and interoperable systems can support a more open and rights-respecting online environment, and what challenges remain in translating these models into systems that can operate at scale. In this context, the Fediverse is understood not only as a set of technologies, but as an evolving ecosystem shaped by governance choices, standards development, and the practices of its participants. The session is in AG01 at 15:15 on May 7.
Taken together, these sessions reflect the range of spaces in which questions about rights, governance, and infrastructure must be addressed as the social web develops. They also underscore the importance of sustained engagement across technical and policy communities. For SWF, RightsCon provides an opportunity to situate our work within this broader landscape and to contribute to ongoing conversations about how the new social media can better reflect and uphold human rights.
Social Web Foundation