Join Open Knowledge at RightsCon 2026, Zambia

Unfortunately, RightsCon 2026 has been cancelled.

From 5–8 May 2026, a delegation from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and our Network will be in Lusaka, Zambia, for RightsCon 2026.

Renata Avila, Solana Larsen, Burcu Kilic, Poncelet Ileleji, Vusumuzi Sifile and Nikesh Balami will be taking part in various activities and are available to connect, strategise and have a coffee together. Find us and discuss ways to collaborate.

Here are the details of our participation:

Open Knowledge Booth – Can machines read your mind?

🗓️ Thursday, 7 May
🕰️ All day
📍Community Village

Step into the Open Knowledge Foundation booth and experience consumer brain-sensing devices firsthand. Explore what neurodata really is, what these technologies actually measure, and why openness and accountability matter as frontier technologies shape our future. Follow @OKFN on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Mastodon and X, where we will be posting soon the way to book a testing session.

Rebuilding public spaces with Digital Public Goods: How openness can challenge market power

🗓️ Thursday, 7 May
🕰️ 12:45 – 13:45 (local time)
🔖 Session link

What if we stopped trying to “fix” toxic social media platforms — and started rebuilding digital public spaces from the ground up? This session will explore how Digital Public Goods, open protocols, interoperability, and open-source technologies can challenge the dominance of Big Tech gatekeepers and create healthier, democratic online spaces.

We will be hosting a conversation discussing precisely that, featuring speakers from Wikimedia, Inria and Article 19 on the future of our digital public sphere, closely connected to the work we do at the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) and our recent joint effort to explore knowledge as a critical digital infrastructure.

The tech we want: read this before you build – design choices and shared power

🗓️ Wednesday, 6 May
🕰️ 10:15 – 11:15 (local time)
🔖 Session link

We will also be hosting a workshop around #TheTechWeWant initiative, where you can grab a copy of our recently released publications — Read This Before You Build: A field guide on how to build public interest tech with communities and Who Decides? A Quick Guide to Governance — and go through the methodology we tested on how to build and govern simpler, long-lasting, impactful digital technologies. Special thanks go to the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, which made it possible to create and publish our field guides.

Small, local, just: Reimagining AI for people and planet

🗓️ Thursday, 7 May
🕰️ 16:30 – 17:30 (local time)
🔖 Session link

This interactive workshop will challenge the myth that AI is immaterial by exposing its real environmental and social costs, from extraction and energy use to labour and ecological harm. We will share our Open Knowledge approach to it and how we are innovating with local technologies and communities to reimagine what AI could be, sharing examples from our newly launched AI Learning Labs and other efforts, such as experimenting with MCP servers to implement traceable AI answers for public open data portals.

Open Data Editor for Inclusive and Transparent Data Practices

🗓️ Thursday, 7 May
🕰️ 09:00 – 10:00 (local time)

In this tech demo session, we’ll walk through how Open Data Editor (ODE) detects and corrects common data issues in real time, and showcase practical use cases across gender equality, environmental advocacy, health data, and indigenous rights. ODE is a free, open-source desktop tool built for non-technical users to clean, structure, and publish high-quality datasets. Offline-first, privacy-friendly, and lightweight, it’s designed for low-resource and low-connectivity environments.