Date: May 5, 2026
Location: Online / Zoom
Participation: Requires registration (fill out the form below)

Online Program

(Please note that the online program is slightly different from the original online program. The program is being updated. More updates will follow.)

8:00 AM EDT / 14:00 CET – Opening; House rules

8:20 AM EDT / 14:20 CET – Opening speech “One Shutdown After Another: A Brave New World” – Dmitri Vitaliev, Founder & CTO of eQualitie

8:40 AM EDT / 14:40 CET– Panel discussion: “Infrastructural Colonialism: Foreign Vendors Building African Splinternet.”

• “Russian Big Tech: Building and Exporting a “Sovereign Internet” to Africa” – Alena Epifanova, Research Fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) in Berlin
• “The Great Firewall Lands in Africa: Ethiopia and the Export of Chinese Internet Control” – Marla Rivera, Founder & Director, InterSecLab
• “When the Splinternet Arrives: What Digital Sovereignty Means for Africa’s Election Integrity” – Mable Amuron, Researcher – Tech and Society at Thraets Foundation, Kampala, Uganda
• Charlotte Escorne (topic to be updated)

9:40 EDT / 15:40 CET – 5-minute break

9:45 AM EDT / 15:45 CET – Fireside Chat (topic to be updated)

10:20 AM EDT / 16:20 CET – Keynote Speech “From Gourmet Tools to Self-Serve Building Blocks: Scaling Resilience with Shared Language and Reuse” – Vinicius Fortuna, Creator of the Outline VPN

10:50 AM EDT / 16:50 CET – Panel discussion: “The Splinternet as a Hybrid Warfare: Accountability in Times of Shutdowns.” Moderated by Patryk Pawlak, Project Director for the Global Initiative on the Future of the Internet (GIFI)

• “From Outage to Accountability: Building Evidence with Limited Data” – Nils Berglund, project lead for the Global Initiative on the Future of the Internet (GIFI)
• “Digital Memory in the Dark: Grassroots Archiving and Forensic Verification During Network Interference” – Kehinde Adegboyega, Executive Director of the Human Rights Journalists Network Nigeria (HRJN)
• “The Workaround Trap: How Internet Shutdowns Push African Communities Into Greater Danger” – Joana Mhone, Patch and Vulnerability Specialist at Telekom Networks Malawi (TNM); Internet Society Youth Ambassador (2026)
• “Rethinking Digital Sovereignty Beyond Internet Outages” – Daouda Diagne, Director of the Computech Institute, Dakar, Senegal

11:50 AM EDT / 17:50 CET – 5-minute break

11:55 AM EDT / 17:55 CET – Showcases of resilient technologies; demonstrations and Q&A. Moderated by Dmitri Vitaliev, CTO of eQualitie

• “Disruptive Free/Open-Source Technologies to Unleash Internet Freedoms: Raspberry Pi, WireGuard & PiVPN” – Providence Baraka, Founder and Program Associate at the Bingwa Civic Tech Lab, DRC (pending confirmation)
• “Avoiding Censorship: How Deflect Uses Geneva AI to Make Censored Websites Reachable Without a VPN” – Jeremy, Deflect Lead at eQualitie, Canada
• “ShortMesh – Authy Breakout 2025” – Wisdom Nji, Founder and Lead Software Engineer at Afkanerd
• “The Alert That Reached 11,000 Households in Seconds – Without a Single Byte of Internet” – Bobby (pending confirmation)
• “DUTA: Engineering Information Resilience in the Era of Internet Shutdowns” – Hammer, Founder and Director, Project Ainita, Sweden

12:55 PM EDT / 18:55 CET – Closing remarks.

RSVP

SplinterCon Online is open to vetted participants. Please fill out the form below if you want to join. For security/sensitivity reasons, all registrations will be vetted.