Digital Citizen Summit is a global multistakeholder platform to discuss and deliberate on digital rights and citizenship to advocate for accessible, affordable, and meaningful Internet.
This annual event, meticulously organised by a synergy of technology and social innovation experts, brings together a diverse and dynamic gathering of scholars, academics, practitioners, civil society organisations, and government representatives who share a profound interest in technology, digital citizenship, and social innovation.
Since its inception in 2016, the Digital Citizen Summit (DCS) has been built around the broader discourse of how individual rights are refracted through, inflected and impacted by complex digital ecosystems.
Traversing the landscape of social media and internet rights in 2016; access, rights, and privacy in 2017, DCS 2018 explored the key challenges of privacy, surveillance, intimidation, censorship, and misinformation emerging within the online environment, revealing the underside of a hyper-connected world while half the population continues to be lack the basic access to such resources. In 2019, it was decided to restructure the DCS to do a deep-dive on a particular issue to engage subject-matter experts and practitioners across its multiple dimensions in order to develop meaningful stakeholder engagements and leverage and advance the collective work done by different stakeholders in a given area. Accordingly, DCS 2019 explored the intractable online information landscape of misinformation and disinformation and the compounding legal and social challenges it has thrown up in terms of developing a solution for its effective regulation that works within a rights-based framework.
Reaching a milestone, 5th iteration of DCS in 2023 was organised in collaboration with the Government of Telangana in Hyderabad, focused on building a vibrant and inclusive democracy through shared internet resources.
Through its past editions, the DCS journey has demonstrated the diversity of issues currently at stake in the space of digital rights and range of stakeholder engagements that would require confronting outstanding challenges.