The Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI '22) will bring together researchers and practitioners who study and develop technologies that directly affect digital speech online including censorship, surveillance, and disinformation/strategic communication. We solicit contributions from the fields of computer science, the social sciences, and law, and we welcome interdisciplinary submissions. This year, our key goal is to establish a sustainable foundation for FOCI by engaging our community. On August 9th, we’ll kick off our first FOCI town hall around the usual time FOCI, followed by a series of interesting talks on hot topics of this year (HotFOCI). Finally we will have our actual FOCI venue to be held later in the year (or early 2023) perhaps depending on the outcome of discussions during the town hall.
Roya Ensafi
Cecylia Bocovich
The town hall agenda will include discussion on a few aspects of FOCI that aren't ideal, such as deadlines that coincide with IMC for the measurement community. Our townhall will be followed by HotFOCI, a series of talks by our community members around their work in progress projects. To have a productive event we are seeking feedback from you. Please fill out the form on what topics we should discuss in our first town hall.
This year we are holding a virtual gathering on Hot Topics in Free and Open Communications on the Internet (HotFOCI) after our townhall. HotFOCI is modeled after HotPETs and will provide a venue for participants to lead discussions on new, in-progress, or unusual topics related to internet freedom. To emphasize discussion and audience participation, each talk should be kept to at most 10 minutes long and will be followed by a generous discussion period. We invite submissions on anything the FOCI community would find interesting, including but not limited to: works in progress, demos, future research directions, and untested ideas.
The goal of FOCI is to catalyze new research directions and discussions that might not be mature or established enough to appear at conventional computer science measurement and security conferences. We aim to foster the development of early-stage work across disciplines. We recognize that control over online speech has become inherently interdisciplinary, so that studying these problems often involves adopting a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective.
All papers accepted to FOCI'22 will be published as open access.
We welcome studies on all aspects of digital speech control. This includes (but is not limited to) the measuring, building, and deploying of:
(subject to change with the outcomes of the townhall)
Submitted papers must be no longer than six pages (excluding references and appendices), based on the
standard USENIX format. Please note, however, that reviewers are not required to read appendices, and papers
should be able to stand on their own without them. More specifically:
Papers must be formatted for printing on Letter-sized (8.5" by 11") paper. Paper text blocks must follow ACM guidelines: double-column, with each column 9.25" by 3.33", 0.33" space between columns. Each column must use 10-point font or larger, and contain no more than 55 lines of text.
Let us know what you'd like at FOCI.
10 minute talks about the Hot Topics in FOCI
If you want to stay informed about FOCI, please fill this form to join our mailing list.
