The 2026 edition of the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI26) conference will take place in hybrid formats – online and in person in Calgary, Canada, on July 20, 2026.
It will take place alongside the 26th edition of the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), which will bring together privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives on research in privacy technologies. PETS will also take place in Calgary from July 20 to 25, 2026, with a concurrent virtual event.
FOCI gathers researchers, practitioners, implementers, and activists from technology, law, and policy who are working on means to study, detect, or circumvent practices that inhibit free and open communications on the Internet.
The goal of FOCI is to bring these groups together, recognizing that control over online speech has become inherently interdisciplinary, so that studying these problems often involves adopting a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective.
FOCI aims to catalyze new research directions and in-depth discussions concerning free and open communications on the internet by providing a space for work that might not fit at conventional computer science measurement and security conferences and particularly encourages early-stage research or extensions on previously published research.
FOCI welcomes studies on all aspects of digital speech control, including in the areas of:
• Surveillance, such as analyses of corporate or government surveillance; anonymity systems that aim to protect users from surveillance; and societal impacts of surveillance.
• Censorship, including the measurement or evaluation of Internet censorship; tools or systems that circumvent censorship; ethics or risks towards users in the research of censorship measurement or circumvention.
• Content moderation systems, such as analyses of tools employed by social media.
• Disinformation and misinformation online, including analyses of digital propaganda and social media trends.
• Press freedom, such as the deployment of tools to protect whistleblowers, and analysis of government or corporate repression of the press.
• Intellectual Property, covering the right to repair, and analyses of copyright/patent law.
In their Code of Conduct, FOCI conference organizers said their community strives to foster a space for rigorous, challenging intellectual exploration that is at the same time open, inclusive and diverse.
They urged FOCI participants to engage with one another encouragingly and constructively, and especially encouraged participants to interact with those whose viewpoints, research interests, cultural backgrounds, or experiences may be unfamiliar to them or outside their comfort zone.
The organizers said they expect that anyone participating in FOCI will, at a minimum, treat others with respect for their dignity and autonomy.
Correspondingly, they warned, behavior that violates these principles will not be tolerated, and may include consequences up to and including expulsion from FOCI.
The organizers called on anyone who feels threatened or harassed while participating in FOCI to reach out to the FOCI chairs, namely Dr. Jeffrey Knockel, an Information Controls researcher and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine in the United States; and Ms Mona Wang, an Open Technology Fund Information Controls Fellow, and researcher working to protect the privacy, security, and digital freedoms on the internet. They pledged that anyone complaining of such threats or harassment can expect that any concerns shared will be taken seriously and handled with both discretion and dispatch.
