Building on our Digital Futures Gathering held in 2022, this year’s convening had a focus on digital violence. We envisioned the Digital Futures Gathering as a radical, collaborative space for confronting digital violence and imagining futures rooted in justice, care, and collective power. We invited over 55 participants from Europe working in different civil society organisations, including volunteers and freelancers, ranging from frontline services, helplines, survivors, feminist and social justice activists, digital rights experts, to children’s rights advocates to gather across movements, geographies, identities, and generations to ask: Who is digital justice really for?
By digital violence, we refer to any form of harm and/or violence – individual, structural, or institutional—enabled or amplified through digital infrastructures (internet and communication technology, ICT), disproportionately impacting women, girls, LGBTQIA+ people, racialised communities, disabled people, and/or otherwise marginalized communities, and children. It includes direct violence, systemic exclusion, data-based harm, and the reproduction of violence through economic and technical systems.
Agenda Design
The the two-day event was structured in collaborative working sessions with an agenda combining planned sessions and participant-driven discussions, with additional topics being placed into time slots based on input at the meeting. Sessions were dialogue- and outcome-oriented rather than being presentations or lectures. We centred how participants were feeling, what they brought to the event, and what they needed to co-dream the futures that we all envision, rather than focus on how to make our digital realities that a few wealthy men in Silicon Valley have created for us a little less harmful.
A lot of strength comes from putting care for each other at the centre – through an awareness team looking out for everyone’s wellbeing, through healthy and tasty food, through breaks, moments of connection, and room for quiet time. Holding a space for feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, or hopelessness, was just as much part of the gathering as was training our futuring muscles with all of our senses – the smell of cedar, the taste of za’tar, and the sound of joyful music, as well as through dancing, laughter, and meditative breathing.
The Organising Team: Facilitation & Co-Conveners
One of the main objectives for this gathering was to build trust and strong foundations between groups working to end gender-based violence and digital rights groups to advance knowledge exchange, but also to collectively work on ending digital violence. Building trust and nurturing connections takes time and need spaces that hold and also remove tensions and barriers. To lay the groundwork of building these connections, Ouassima Laabich took us on a journey through her facilitator’s notebook, by starting us off with connecting to our ancestry – naming which teacher or ancestor inspired our life, and which ancestor do we want to be in the future. Over the course of the two days, participants had the opportunity to address their own topics in four different session clusters, created as open spaces for all those who wanted to offer a session of their choosing.
Part of the design of the event was also the participatory process in regular meetings leading up to the event, facilitated by Ouassima Laabich. Just like in 2022 (see more info on the onion skin invitation model), we reached out to four organisations to become our co-conveners for the gathering. Together we collected a participants list from our respective networks and reached out to people from those communities to suggest other participants.
Sessions & Discussions
Session cluster I: Holding Multiplicity
The first day was focused on holding multiplicity and what we still need to speak about. After starting the day focused on the collective intelligence with introducing every participant and their work, grounding exercises, we gathered in smaller groups in the first session clusters. These sessions were all designed and held by the participants and included the following topics:
- a workshop on “Reporting Futures”
- a workshop on “Digital Tools that actually work – Co-creating Safety”
- A storytelling circle on “Building for the future”
- a workshop on “Tackling online sexual exploitation in pornography”
- a circle about “Digital Rights in Hostile terrain: a strategy circle for criminalized communities”
Session cluster II: What we still need to speak about
The second session cluster included sessions about:
- “Pleasure Utopia”
- collecting, writing, and creation of an anger manifesto
- a grief circle: “Decompress, share, be witnessed”
- “Connecting knowledge & expertise – how to organise for instead of against“
- “Feminist tech infrastructure – how to build the systems that we need”
Session Cluster III: Practices for the Otherwise
In the first session block of the second day, we discussed, among other things:
- “Translate our Hopes and Dreams into Policy”
- “AI and Social Justice”
- “Technology as a silver bullet to social problems”
- “Learnings from the women’s rights movements in the 1960s and 1970s”
- “Learning from our failures”
- “uncomfortable alliances”
Session Cluster IV: Collective Sense-Making
In the last session cluster, the focus was mainly on how to move forward and how to nurture and maintain the community, collaborations, and ideas that came out of this gathering during these two days. These sessions included:
- “How to unpack how child protection narratives are being used for privacy issues“
- “How to build internatinal solidarity“
- “Embodied liberation“
- “Community Flash grants“
- “Digital technology to help our bigger work“
- “Collective mapping of GBV-tools“
Post-event & next steps
The idea of the Digital Futures Gatherings is to start conversations and enable connections, build trust, and encourage cross-movement collaborations. In our recap of the event as well as in the deep dive article the spirit and the ideas of the second digital futures gathering can be followed and sensed.
Between fall 2025 and spring 2026, a selected group of participants will continue working on ideas and projects they developed during the gathering with the help of community flash grants. More information on this will follow in spring 2026.