The Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI), an annual workshop and community that gather researchers and practitioners from technology, law, and policy who study, detect, or circumvent practices that inhibit free and open communications on the Internet, is inviting papers for the 2026 FOCI workshop.
Recognising that control over online speech has become inherently interdisciplinary, and that studying these problems often involves adopting a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective, FOCI 2026 aims to bring together researchers, implementers, and activists working in the area of Internet freedom to catalyse 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. FOCI particularly encourages early-stage research or extensions to previously published research.
FOCI organisers welcome studies on all aspects of digital speech control. Some examples of topics that they consider relevant to FOCI include:
- Surveillance: e.g., analyses of corporate or government surveillance; anonymity systems that aim to protect users from surveillance; societal impacts of surveillance
- Censorship: e.g., 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: e.g., analyses of tools employed by social media
- Disinformation and misinformation online: e.g., analyses of digital propaganda; social media trends
- Press freedom: e.g., deployment of tools to protect whistleblowers; analysis of government or corporate repression of the press
- Intellectual Property: e.g., right to repair; analyses of copyright/patent law
They encourage community members to interpret this list broadly and feel free to submit works not specifically listed above.
FOCI welcomes the submission of papers containing the following types of content:
- Research papers that have a clearly stated methodology, including a hypothesis and experiments and/or analysis designed to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
- Position papers, particularly those that critique past work, should present detailed solutions, either proposed or implemented.
- Experience papers, papers that recount experiences (e.g., from experiments or deployments) and should highlight takeaways and lessons learned that might help researchers, implementers, or deployers of internet freedom tools in the future.
- Preliminary Work Papers that describe interesting and new ideas and early results, and we expect that such works-in-progress papers may eventually be extended as full papers for publication at a conference.
Organisers say that the programme committee will give greater weight to paper submissions that lend themselves to interactive discussion among workshop attendees.
All FOCI papers, which are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), will be made available online at https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/. Authors will retain the copyright of their work and are free to distribute and reuse the contents as they wish.
The programme offers a variety of paper length options, and so, submitters may choose the option that best fits their submissions, including Extended Abstract, Short Paper, or Long Paper.
References and appendices do not count for page length limits for submissions. Authors are encouraged to use the PoPETs template, and they do not need to fill in the values in the Copyright and Issue info sections of the .tex file for submission.
Submissions should be made online at https://foci26.hotcrp.com.
The deadline for submission of papers is April 20, 2026; notifications will be sent on June 5, 2026, and the hybrid FOCI co-located with PETS in Calgary, Canada, will be held on July 20, 2026.
For more information, please visit https://foci.community/.
