Agenda

This opening panel translates the 13-country Mapping into a single, honest picture of where civil society stands going into 2026. Researchers walk through the patterns that recur across the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia: civic space narrowing through law rather than force, SLAPPs and foreign-agent rules used to drain organisations, and a disinformation environment that erodes public trust faster than fact-checkers can rebuild it. It also looks at the uneven arrival of AI - turned against activists as deepfakes, bot farms and surveillance, yet also being adopted, cautiously, as a tool for their own work. The aim is not to catalogue bad news but to name the shared threats clearly enough that the rest of the two days can respond to them. Panelists connect findings from their own countries, showing where the pressures look identical and where local context changes the picture. Participants leave with a common frame of reference - the same map - before they split into the parallel sessions that follow. It sets the evidence base for everything else at MEGAPHONE & e-society 2026.

A stolen laptop, a hijacked email account, or a leaked WhatsApp group can start a chain reaction in which a frozen bank account, a smear campaign and legal exposure all follow within days. Most organisations improvise their way through it, and improvisation burns time, money and trust. This hands-on workshop looks at the digital failures that most often trigger a crisis (data loss, weak account protection and insecure communication) and treats them as operational risks rather than IT topics, using plain language and real regional cases.

You will map your own organisation's top digital risks, then turn them into a first 24-hour response plan with clear owners, tools and escalation paths. You will also stress-test it with a peer. No technical background is needed. You will leave with checklists, templates and one safeguard you can put in place within the week.

Polarisation is one of the forces pushing citizens out of public life across the region, and civil society is not immune to it. This session is about the hard skill of dialogue - talking with people you may deeply disagree with but who could still become allies on a specific cause. It draws on facilitated methods for lowering the temperature and finding the narrow ground where cooperation is possible. Participants explore how framing changes outcomes: the same issue, put differently, can open a conversation or slam it shut. The focus is practical and reflective rather than abstract, using real situations from the room. It asks participants to examine their own reflexes and bubbles as much as their opponents'. The goal is not false consensus but the ability to keep a conversation open long enough for something to shift.

What does a lawsuit do before a court ever reaches a final decision? In this experiential workshop, two groups - river defenders and an investigative newsroom - move through parallel five-year legal cases. Two different contexts, same legal proceedings. Participants track how escalating proceedings affect fear, daily work, relationships, resources and public-interest activity, before unpacking what makes such litigation strategically powerful and what meaningful support can look like.

What if the impact of your projects carries the antidote to donor fatigue and growing skepticism? Today, both funders and the public are facing deep fatigue. Simply communicating your finished tasks and reports isn't enough anymore to cut through the noise.
Your work doesn't just create a single isolated outcome—it triggers an Impact Chain. Communicating this chain gives you a practical strategy to overcome fatigue, build genuine influence, and build on audience-specific values in a language they understand.

Young people are mobilising around democratic and social issues in ways many established CSOs struggle to understand, let alone match. This session unpacks how Gen Z actually uses social platforms - not as broadcast channels but as spaces for identity, humour and fast collective action. It treats young people as partners and co-creators rather than a 'target audience' to be reached. Practitioners already doing this work share what has moved people from scrolling to showing up, and what has fallen flat. The session looks honestly at the gap between institutional communications and the tone that lands with a younger audience. Participants examine memes, formats and campaigns that sparked real-world participation across the region. They leave with concrete ideas for working with, not just talking at, the next generation of activists.

When civic space shrinks, going informal can offer flexibility, autonomy and sometimes protection but informality does not make risk disappear. Instead of treating formal and informal as two fixed organisational models, this interactive session asks what happens when we see them as tools we can combine, adapt and move between. Through real cases and participants’ experiences, we will explore what different actions require, what risks different structures create, and what other ways of organising we can imagine.

Elections are often the moment when democratic space is either defended or lost, and civil society is frequently the last credible watchdog in the room. This session looks at how CSOs monitor elections and use civic tech to detect manipulation, document irregularities and hold the process to account. It draws on regional practice, including tools built by civic-tech groups to make monitoring faster and more transparent. Participants learn what meaningful monitoring actually requires - from methodology to volunteer coordination to communicating findings credibly. The session connects election integrity to the wider picture of captured institutions and disinformation. It also looks at how monitoring data becomes advocacy after the votes are counted. Participants leave with models they can adapt for their own electoral contexts.

An interactive simulation exploring how disinformation and propaganda influence civic space, public trust, and decision-making. Participants will navigate evolving scenarios, assume different stakeholder roles, and develop collaborative responses to information manipulation and fear-driven narratives.

Over the past decade, the session leader - a journalist and storyteller from Belgrade - spent much of his time hitchhiking across the Balkans, Europe and the Caucasus, taken for a ride by hundreds of people of every background, faith and worldview. Many of those drivers held views diametrically opposed to his own - misogynistic, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-everything - and no doubt many of them felt the same way about him. In ordinary life such encounters end within minutes, in anger and a slammed door; but stuck together through a four-hour drive in the dark and the rain, that escape route disappears, and something else becomes possible. What emerges, again and again, is that things are rarely what they first seemed - for either side.
Through storytelling and an open discussion, this session shares what those journeys taught about reaching people you would otherwise never connect with: how to listen more carefully, how to stay persistent in understanding where someone is coming from, and how to identify and challenge your own prejudice and the weight of your own beliefs. It is an invitation to carry these tools back into everyday activism, journalism and life.

Day 2 opens with a genuine on-ramp for anyone who feels behind on AI - which is most organisations, not a few. This beginner-friendly session explains, in plain language, what today's AI tools can and cannot reliably do for everyday nonprofit work. Participants see practical applications for email, meetings, document drafting, translation and research, and try them out. Just as importantly, the session is honest about limits, risks and the ethical questions that come with these tools. It frames AI as an assistant to be supervised, not an oracle to be trusted. No technical background is assumed and no one is made to feel foolish for asking basic questions. Participants leave able to use a few tools confidently and to reason about when not to.

Every organization is being told to adopt AI, or to reject it. Most of us have already had that conversation. This workshop starts from a different place: the questions we ask about any technology before, and while, we use it. Who built it, and for whom? What does it cost us, in money, data and labor, and who pays the rest? Who is missing from the picture? Together we will compare how organizations with very different resources and contexts approach these tools, from refusal to necessity, and map where we stand on that spectrum and why.

CSOs get generic fundraising advice from AI because every conversation starts from zero. This workshop shows how to set up your AI so that every fundraising task starts from full context and with the right strategy. It covers 7 layers of a setup: global instructions, context, skills, tools and connectors, models, the prompt, and review. With a proper setup, you’ll get better fundraising models, campaigns, copy, pitches, and proposals. Participants leave with a reusable starter kit: a setup checklist, an organization pack template, 5 skills, and a model cheat sheet.

Most small organizations don't start using AI because they're not sure where to begin - not because they don't want to. This session is about that starting point. A small newsroom from a Ukrainian frontline city will share how they got started with almost nothing, driven by curiosity and one small task. Then you'll do the same - you'll find one real challenge from your organization, turn it into a question you can ask AI, and shape a first step small enough to try next week. No list of tools - just a simple method for working with AI.

Communications teams in civil society are chronically stretched, and AI can genuinely lighten the load - if used with judgement. This session shows how to apply AI to the comms workflow: drafting and adapting messages, repurposing content across channels, and understanding audiences faster. It focuses on keeping the organisation's authentic voice rather than flattening everything into generic AI prose. Participants work through practical examples of turning one piece of content into a campaign's worth of material. The session also flags where AI comms can go wrong - tone-deaf output, factual drift, and the reputational risk of getting caught cutting corners. It reflects the reality of small teams fighting well-resourced disinformation. Participants leave with prompts and a workflow they can use on their next campaign.

A hands-on session where the point is not the tool but the shift in mindset: technology as something activists can shape, not just consume. Using no-code tools, you build a working AI assistant during the session, and see how the same approach powers tasks like a monitoring alert, a newsletter, replies from your FAQs, or tidier files. No coding needed, and you leave with something that actually runs. It demystifies AI by getting your hands dirty rather than watching a demo, and matching a tool to a real problem in your own work. You leave with the confidence to build the next one yourself.

Most project ideas fail on an assumption nobody checked: that people will show up, sign up, or give. This workshop gives you a simple process for testing an idea before you commit time and budget to it. You will turn one real idea into hypotheses, map them by importance and evidence, and plan experiments that show what people actually do rather than what they say. The method is adapted for nonprofits from Testing Business Ideas by David Bland and Alex Osterwalder. Bring a project you are planning or an idea for your next proposal.

Civil society runs on platforms it does not own and rarely scrutinises - and that dependency is a quiet strategic risk. This session offers a political-economy overview of the platforms activists rely on: who owns them, what compliance arrangements they have with which governments, and what alternatives exist. It is grounded in regional realities such as Turkey's heavy dependence on Instagram and Serbia's dilemma over Viber. The point is not to shame anyone into abandoning tools overnight, but to make dependency a conscious, informed choice. Participants assess their own platform stack for single points of failure and exposure. Participants leave with a clearer view of the ground their digital work stands on, and where to diversify.

A fast, focused demo of a small language model in a civil-society context. Unlike large cloud models, SLMs can run locally and cheaply, which matters for organisations worried about cost, data privacy and surveillance. The demo shows what an SLM can realistically do and where its limits are. Participants see a concrete use case rather than a sales pitch. It is a chance to ask practical questions about deployment and data handling. Participants leave knowing whether an SLM is worth exploring for their own work.

Young people meet politics every day through their feeds, long before they enter a polling station. In Moldova, that raises a simple question: how can civic education speak to them in the spaces where they already spend their time? VotEDU is a mobile app that helps young people understand how democracy works before their first vote. This short demo shares the choices behind the tool, from language to design, and asks what civic groups elsewhere can learn from Moldova’s experience. The goal is simple: start earlier.

A short, practical demo of a civic-tech tool; the specific tool is still to be selected. The format is a quick walkthrough plus time for questions, so participants can judge relevance to their own work. Suggestions from participants for what to feature here are welcome.