From 8 to 11 November 2024, Freedom not Fear, a self-organised conference on privacy and digital rights, will take place in Brussels.
We invite people from all across Europe to meet and work towards more freedom in the digitalised world, plan actions against increasing surveillance and against other attacks on civil rights.
Freedom not Fear 2024
8–11 November (Friday–Monday)
Mundo Madou (tbc) (Sat&Sun) • European Parliament (Mon)
Do you have a question that is not answered here? Please let us know at contact@freedomnotfear.org
Table of Contents
1 Participation – How can I sign up?
The FNF (un)conference on Friday, Saturday and Sunday is open for everyone. Signing up is not mandatory. That might be different for EP visits on Monday. We would appreciate it if you could still sign up with this form to help us plan capacities. In the sign-up form you can also indicate if you’d be interested in a possible EP visit on Monday, travel support or free accommodation.
2 Registration & Expenses
We are not asking for a registration fee, but we do ask for voluntary donations to cover expenses such as venue hire and faciliation, also to support others who can’t afford an expensive trip. During the event we will kindly request your donation for lunches and our networking dinner on Saturday evening as well as donations to support organisational expenses.
Please bring cash!
3 Travel & Reimbursement
We encourage travelling by train rather than plane.
When planning your departure, please keep in mind that there might be meetings scheduled on Monday afternoon with MEPs and other policy makers until about 15:00.
We’re trying to facilitate financial support for travel costs. Thanks to MEP invitations and a small grant we secured and donations from some generous individuals, we can likely offer some financial support for travel expenses to those who wouldn’t be able to (completely) cover their travel expenses themselves. Make sure to always keep receipts and tickets, we might need them for reporting.
If you need financial support, please indicate this in the sign-up form and submit before 30 September.
See below at “Official EP visit & meeting with MEPs” for more information.
4 Accommodation
We are not organising hotel accomodation this year and we ask participants to make their own arrangements. We do encourage couchsurfing and try to facilitate contacts among participants who can offer or seek a place to stay.
If you are looking for hotel recommendations, this is where we were in the last years:
Hotel Adagio Access Brussels Europe, 12 rue de l’Industrie, Brussels (OpenStreetMap)
5 Catering / Food
On Saturday evening, 9 November 2024, from 19:00, we will organise the famous FNF networking dinner again at social space DK. The food will be prepared by a group of volunteers and will cost us a contribution of 12 € (or more). Please register to take part in the dinner (or send a mail to: contact@freedomnotfear.org if you do not want to register)
Please bring cash to pay for the dinner
6 Official EP visit & meeting with MEPs
We plan to organise an visit to the European Parliament at the invitation of MEPs, as we have done in the past. EU Citizens may receive a travel reimbursement for participating in this EP visit.
However, we cannot guarantee enough spots for all participants at this point. If you want to be part of the visit, please make sure to indicate so in the registration form (deadline: 30 September).
We will review all registrations at the end of the sign-up period and allocate the available spots. Once you have been confirmed for the EP visit, participation is mandatory and comes along with some financial support for travel and accommodation. This will also require an official registration with your official ID and valid documents brought for the EP visit.
7 Self-organised MEP & policy-maker meetings
The European Union is changing. We feel it is more important than ever to share our ideas and concerns, network and develop strategies for digital rights advocacy.
We strongly encourage everyone to schedule meetings with policy-makers ahead of time, so that you can discuss with them the topics and sessions you brought to FNF. We are preparing a guide to help you with that. This is to be published here soon.
You can help others in getting in touch with policy makers? Please offer a session, prepare MEP meetings together and take others along!
8 Schedule
The rough schedule is:
- Friday, 8 November 2024, 18:00: opening by welcome team
- Saturday and Sunday, 9 & 10 November 2024, all day: your sessions
- Saturday night: joint dinner and evening programme
- Monday, 11 November 2024: self-organised meetings with MEPs, Commission staff and other EU policy-makers
9 Programme
FNF follows a barcamp format where the programme is being created on the spot by participants’ contributions.
We invite everyone to submit session proposals with this form before 25 October 2024: https://freedomnotfear.org/cfs
This helps us to create a first rough schedule, prevent conflicting schedules in case someone can attend FNF only at a specific time slot or bring people together who want to hold sessions on the same topic. A preliminary programme will be compiled and more sessions will be added spontaneously at the event during the morning plenary.
10 Language
The main language of communication and workshops will be English. However, it is possible to also offer workshops or sessions in other languages. If someone is not comfortable communicating in English at the event, please support each other with translations.
11 Awareness
At the event we ask everyone to be conscious of your own behaviour and respect needs for distance or other safety measures of people around you. We are aiming to have an awareness team. If that is an issue you are knowledgeable about or interested to contribute to, please let us know: contact@freedomnotfear.org
12 Stay informed
To stay informed about FNF-related developments and meet other participants & friends, sign up to the mailing list: https://listen.akvorrat.org/mailman/listinfo/akv-international
Historically, Freedom not Fear was founded by people from the German working group against data rention (AKVorrat) in 2006. The title “Freedom not Fear” is used by AKVorrat and like-minded groups for a series of activities related to human rights internationally. There have been events of all kind supporting human rights called “Freedom not Fear” from places all over the globe, including South America, the United States, Canada and Europe. The Brussels Freedom not Fear started as one such activity. During the first Brussels Freedom not Fear in 2011, it was decided to use “AKV-international” as the official mailing list for FNF instead of starting a new mailing list. Today this list is exclusively used by Freedom not Fear.
13 Donations
Since FNF has no official organisational structure, we need to collect donations via some other legal entity. This year, the non-profit association D64 – Center for Digital Progress from Germany is providing an account for donations – our heartfelt thanks for that!
Donations to the D64 account will reach us without any deduction. Please mark your donations clearly by stating “FNF” or “Freedom Not Fear” in the reference.
Bank details:
Recipient: D64 – Zentrum für Digitalen Fortschritt
IBAN: DE13 4306 0967 1134 4765 00
BIC: GENODEM1GLS
Bank: GLS Bank
Reference: FNF / Donation
https://freedomnotfear.org/2024/call-for-donations
14 How is FNF organised?
Freedom not Fear is traditionally organised by a group of committed volunteers with support from last year’s organisers and administrative support from some official body.
The organising team is newly set up every year and starts preparing the event around February. Looking for an adequate venue and accommodation, contacting MEPs and dealing with a lot of EP administration and communication is part of the tasks as well as calculating a budget, looking for donations and funding, writing texts, setting up forms, advertising the event and communicating with participants. Interested to join the organising team or donate for the event? E-mail us at contact@freedomnotfear.org.
This year the event is organised purely by volunteers with the help of German-based non-profit association D64 – Center for Digital Progress from Germany hosting our finances and supporting funding efforts. Therefore the event will be much more self-organised, we are not booking hotel accommodation nor professional lunch catering. However, if anyone has capacity to organise some lunch for Saturday and Sunday, and someone to organise some couch surfing / sleeping places in Brussels, you’re warmly welcome, please get in touch!