Statement: The Forced Cancellation of the Design from the Margins Workshop in Lusaka
On April 29, The De|Center made the difficult decision to cancel our in-person Design from the Margins workshop in Lusaka, Zambia. The convening was scheduled to take place from May 2–4, ahead of RightsCon 2026. The Zambian government cited “security” and content-based concerns as the reason for the last-minute cancellation of the event. As we could not determine how that decision might be enforced, and what scrutiny our digital rights work might face, we could not reasonably guarantee our participants’ security. We made the decision to cancel our in-person workshop, several hours before RightsCon’s own cancellation was announced.
Moving quickly, we informed our attendees, many of whom were already en route, because the safety and wellbeing of our community came first. It always will.
This comes with a huge financial loss for an organization like ours, as well as for the many participants who already invested time, energy, and money to be there. We are doing everything we can to support folks, cover expenses, and make sure people are okay. We are gutted on so many levels — but also more stubborn than ever.
What this workshop represented
This decision was not made lightly. Throughout the year, this event has been one of the central focuses of our team’s work. We expected it would further frame much of our coming year’s advocacy, even as we kept the details private to protect participants’ security. We were – and remain – intensely proud of the participants, composed of experts from marginalized and criminalized communities. They planned to travel from around the globe, alongside public interest technologists, guardrail advisors, and tech companies eager to help translate community insights and human rights documentation into tangible harm-reduction features, or policy shifts, in their products and tools.
The Design from the Margins workshop was set to be a powerful convening. After previous, hugely impactful workshops focused on the LGBTQ community in MENA, this was the first time The De|Center would have convened a global community, united by common lived experiences of tech-facilitated harms, together in one room.
This workshop was informed by the core insight of the Design from the Margins methodology that those who face the most intense, unremitting threats to their human rights in digital spaces know the most about the flaws in our tech. The convening would have positioned us to collectively innovate toward advances in privacy, safety, and security for all.
The outputs of our past research and workshops have contributed to industry-shifting changes. These include app cloaking, disappearing messages, locked and hidden messages, and more nuanced operating-system-level protections and security framings. These features are now used by millions of people on platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Grindr – as well as FLOSS and smaller privacy-focused tech products. The full scope of where our work has influenced products, policies, and safety practices is too long to list here.
This workshop would have given several tech companies new to Design from the Margins a powerful, personal introduction to the transformative power of our communities’ expert insights. The gathering would also have provided concrete new data and inspiration to companies and public interest technologists who have been working with us for some time – from harm reduction in times of device searches and meaningful changes against surveillance threats, to how to respond to increasing state tech policy that threatens anonymity and privacy for all of us.
What international travel means for our community
Participants were traveling from across the Global Majority and beyond. Most come from communities that face criminalization, surveillance, and persecution in their daily lives. We will not list their backgrounds because the risks are ongoing.
For organizations like ours, which are part of, and serve, communities already navigating hostile environments, the cascading effects are not abstract. They are measured in the safety risks our participants face to life and limb, and in the trust that must be rebuilt when plans made in good faith collapse.
These are people for whom attending an international convening is not a routine professional trip. It requires visas, security planning, risk assessments, and more than a little trust. Our deep and global network of technologists, researchers, advocates, and legal and policy experts had all finalized their travel arrangements.
Months of intensive work went into building this event. Our team worked tirelessly on programming, research, nuanced content, logistics, immigration processes, travel coordination, and participant safety protocols. We prioritized funding travel and accommodation for participants from marginalized communities in the Global Majority, virtually all of whom would not otherwise have had the resources to attend. This choice was a deliberate one rooted in our values. If Design from the Margins means anything, it means that those most impacted are fully present, resourced, centered, and guiding our process.
How civic space shrinks in real time
The cancellation of RightsCon, mere days before it was set to begin, is itself a serious concern for the digital rights community. Access Now’s RightsCon statement highlights the “foreign interference” that meant RightsCon 2026 could not proceed, including reports that diplomats from the People’s Republic of China had pressured the Government of Zambia over Taiwanese civil society participation. For RightsCon to continue, the event would have been required to “moderate specific topics and exclude communities at risk.” The seriousness of that risk was not contained to RightsCon, but also connected and nearby events, like ours.
That context reinforced our decision. Our workshop was built for participants from marginalized and criminalized communities, many of whom already face surveillance, persecution, and state hostility in their daily lives. Any possibility that digital rights work, specific topics, or at-risk communities could become the subject of heightened scrutiny was not abstract for us; it went directly to the safety of our participants and the integrity of the space we had built. This meant the only responsible decision was to cancel early and effectively, and ensure the safety of our community at all costs.
The violations of the fundamental freedoms of peaceful assembly and association and interference with freedom of expression and civic space are clear. These are precisely the rights our workshop was designed to protect and advance. The situation again raises urgent questions about the safety of vulnerable communities on global stages, freedom of expression, and the shrinking spaces available to safely advocate for our rights. These are questions at the heart of our work, and we will remain engaged in that fight.
These kinds of last-minute shutdowns and clampdowns impact smaller organizations, grassroots groups, and the most marginalized communities — the very people who are fundamental in building the rare spaces where trust, safety, and movement power are possible. The disruption is not only administrative or financial. It fractures carefully built relationships, drains limited resources, and forces communities already navigating risk to absorb the cost of political decisions they did not make. That devastation is by design.
What we lost
The financial impact of this cancellation is severe. The De|Center has absorbed a large sum of non-recoverable costs: flights, accommodation, visa fees, logistics, time, and preparations that cannot be undone. For a small organization, this is a massive hit. This was money raised and allocated specifically to ensure that the people most affected by the harms our work addresses could be in the room. We are working with our very dedicated funders, supporters and vendors to minimize the impact on our continued operations. We are grateful to those who have reached out to offer support and check-in on our team.
We are in sympathy and solidarity with all the individuals and small organisations who are taking similar heavy hits from RightsCon’s cancellation, as well as the AccessNow team dealing with the shock and undoing of months of work. Our thoughts are with those who were already en route when the news was announced.
Beyond the financial cost, there is the loss of the magic of our in-person planning and connection, of what happens when communities that are too often spoken about are instead given the space to lead and set the directions together. We will work hard to bring people together again and continue our work.
What happens next
We are committed to continuing this work, and indeed, even as we pull the workshop together, our team has continued other research, advocacy, and movement-building efforts. The fruit of our effort has been seen on global stages and behind closed doors, where it is being implemented in some of our largest platforms and most trusted privacy-focused tech.The 2026 Design from the Margins workshop will convene virtually in the coming weeks, bringing the substance and rigor of what was planned in Lusaka to that format. A virtual event does not replace what an in-person convening makes possible, particularly for communities where trust is built face-to-face, and where the relationships formed in a room together carry people through years of dangerous and isolating work.
We intend to reconvene in person when we have the resources and the conditions to do so safely for all.
You can support this work
If you are able to support our work as we recover costs and continue this industry-shifting work, please reach out. Sign up for our newsletter to stay connected with how we challenge power, center communities at risk, and push for better tech futures.
We remain, as ever, in solidarity with our community. The work continues. It always will.
— The De|Center
linkedin.com/company/de-center
