Misinformation, and increasingly disinformation, is distorting people’s ability to make sense of the world around them, threatening the democratic process around the globe. While not a new phenomenon, the problem is compounded by both the speed that information travels in our networked world, and the technological and cultural “filter bubbles” that we live our lives in. This is a problem that impacts all of us.

We are a community of people focused on the challenge of misinformation and what can be done to address it. Our physical gatherings seek to strengthen the trustworthiness of information across the entire news ecosystem: journalism, platform, community, verification, and reader experience.

We bring together participants from different backgrounds because our goal is to connect leaders and catalyze actionable steps on how the various sectors can work together.

Building on the strength and momentum of our first two MisinfoCons at MIT in Boston and at the Mozilla Festival in London, we’re thrilled to announce that MisinfoCon 3.0 will be hosted in Kyiv, Ukraine. Brought to you again by the Hacks/Hackers Foundation, this event will be produced in concert with the great folks at IREX. Featuring a consortium of powerful players in international policy, technology and media literacy, the gathering will help take important strides in both exploring the global implications of misinformation as well as identifying methods of fighting it.

This convening will be unique in that we’ll first be featuring luminaries from the space presenting their work while later facilitating a “hackathon”-like component to collaboratively generate new solutions-oriented ideas — think of it as an amalgam of the best parts of MIT and London. In addition, we will have a keen focus on the challenges of misinformation and fake news in Eastern Europe, an area rife with these issues.

Some of our featured participants include:

• Anneli Ahonen, East StratCom Task Force, European External Action Service (EEAS)

• Brian Bonner, Chief Editor, Kyiv Post

• Mehri Druckman, Ukraine Director of Programs/Global Training and Technology Advisor, IREX

• Yevhen Fedchenko, Co-founder, StopFake.org

• Renee Hobbs, Founder and Director, Media Education Lab

• Clare Melford, Co-Founder, The Global Disinformation Index

• Dmytro Potekhin, Founder and CEO, FakesRadar.org

• Dan Shefet, Attorney, Cabinet Shefet

• Jeffrey Trimble, Deputy Director, BBG

• Veronika Víchová, Analyst of the Kremlin Watch Program, European Values Think-Tank

The gathering will aim to contribute something unique into the movement of people working on solutions to misinformation. For this event, we’ve identified three areas that we believe are critical to work on together:

• Information/Media Literacy and Critical Thinking: Can and should some responsibility be placed on the consumers of information/media? What role do libraries, galleries, school and afterschool programs, nonprofits and public spaces play? How should platforms and newsrooms respond? And what does “literacy at scale” look like to help the millions of people who are just coming online?

• Geopolitical Responses to Misinformation: What are the policy and regulatory and self-regulatory implications of each of these responses? What do they look like and how do they vary from region to region? What promising strategies exist that could be experimented with elsewhere or globally?

• Data and Metrics: What data is needed to help understand the problem? Is that data available? If not, what are the opportunities to make data available, either openly or in a way that is accessible to researchers, policymakers, media and civil society practitioners? How can open data initiatives, researchers and platforms work together instead of at odds?

For each of these themes, we're featuring key people and organizations who can help us understand the state of play, and then — in typical MisinfoCon tradition — we’ll break into smaller groups to make practical, tangible progress on each of these areas.

Questions? Please get in touch.

Join us at Misinfocon Kyiv on May 29-30.

Form a team, large or small. You have afternoon of May 29 and most of May 30 to work on the projects for a final presentation at the end of the day May 30.

Upload your submission before 2:45 pm on May 30, 2018 for our final presentations.

• Ideas
  All ideas are welcome. Just by participating, everyone is a winner. Let's build key relationships to improve credibility in these times.