Online Program

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

8:10 AM EDT / 14:10 CET – Opening speech “One Shutdown After Another: A Brave New World” – Dmitri Vitaliev, Founder & CTO of eQualitie

8:30 AM EDT / 14:30 CET – Keynote “When Repression Meets Resistance: A Decade of Fighting Internet Shutdowns Globally” – Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Global Campaign Manager at AccessNow

9:00 AM EDT / 15:00 CET – Fireside chat with Arzu Geybulla and Alejandro Mayoral Baños, Co-Executive Directors at AccessNow

9:25 AM EDT / 15:25 CET– Panel discussion: “Infrastructural Colonialism: Foreign Vendors Building African Splinternet.” Moderated by Anna Romandash, independent journalist, Media Freedom Ambassador of Ukraine

• “When the Splinternet Arrives: What Digital Sovereignty Means for Africa’s Election Integrity” – Mable Amuron, Researcher – Tech and Society at Thraets Foundation, Kampala, Uganda
• “Negotiating Sovereignty Between China and the United States: Digital Connectivity in the Gulf of Guinea” – Charlotte Escorne, PhD candidate, University Paris 8 GEODE
• “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

10:25 EDT / 16:25 CET – 5-minute break

10:30 AM EDT / 16:30 CET – Fireside Chat “The Sky Is the Border: Direct-to-Cell, Satellite Internet, and Overcoming Shutdowns“ — Moderated by J. Alex Dalessio, Executive Director of eQualitie

• “Opportunities with Direct-to-Cell and Satellite Internet: From Advocacy to Practice” – Mahsa Alimardani, Associate Director, Technology Threats and Opportunities, WITNESS, and Farzaneh Badiei, Digital Medusa

11:00 AM EDT / 17:00 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

12:00 PM EDT / 18:00 CET – 5-minute break

12:05 AM EDT / 18:05 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

12:30 PM EDT / 18:30 CET – Showcases of resilient technologies; demonstrations and Q&A. Moderated by Dmitri Vitaliev, CTO of eQualitie

• “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
• “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
• “Avoiding Censorship: How Deflect Uses Geneva AI to Make Censored Websites Reachable Without a VPN” – Jeremy, Deflect Lead at eQualitie, Canada
• “DUTA: Engineering Information Resilience in the Era of Internet Shutdowns” – Hammer, Founder and Director, Project Ainita, Sweden

1:30 PM EDT / 19:30 CET – Closing remarks.