Coming up: Ditigal Citizen Summit 2017

The second edition of DEF’s Digital Citizen Summit will be held at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi on September 21-22, 2017. This year, the two-day summit will focus on issues related to access to the Internet, freedom of expression online, privacy, digital literacy and empowerment. Among several groups that will be hosting sessions — ranging from tech demonstrations and workshops to panel discussions and lightening talks — at the Summit are Point of View, Feminism in India, Hidden Pockets, Internet Democracy Project, Amnesty International India, The Dialogue, Centre for Communication Governance NLU, Score Foundation, Bytes4All, Centre for Social Activism and Altermundi.

Based on recommendations from last year’s Digital Citizen Summit, a Working Group Committee (WGC) was formed this year to aid the selection process of session proposals and paper abstracts that were submitted for this year’s Summit. WGC members include Al-Amin Yusuph from UNESCO), Anja Kovacs from Internet Democracy Project, Smitha Krishna Prasad National Law University, Nikhil Pahwa from Medianama, Saikat Datta Centre for Internet Society, Basheerahmad Shadhrach from Web Foundation, Rueben Dieckhoff from Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Advocate Apar Gupta, Htaike Htaike Aung from Myanmar ICT for Development Organization, George Abraham from Score Foudnation, and Osama Manzar from DEF.

The WGC meeting was held at the UNDP office in New Delhi on July 19, 2017. WGC members went through all the proposals that were submitted and made a selection of successful entries, giving recommendations to make proposals stronger, which involved merging sessions in some cases, or recommending diverse speakers for some panels in other cases.