Digital Safe Space is designed to help you create a safe space for your digital world. News reports about foreign attackers, surveillance, and security leaks are often sensationalized and over-broad, leaving you with the impression there’s nothing you can do to keep yourself safe. And, ironically, the same digital tools that have helped social justice activists in all corners of our nation to coalesce, have also exposed them to unprecedented threats.

Our FREE Digital Safe Space workshop will help attendees to use the innate skills they make use of in their non-digital lives to safeguard their online world. Data and email theft, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ social media harassment and abuse, oppositional and state-sponsored surveillance, and targeted malware attacks are at an all-time high. It is imperative that we raise awareness within the targeted communities of mounting digital security threats and how to counter them.

We are focused on helping activists, advocates, organizations and allies in the social justice movement, to configure their technology — desktops, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, the cloud and other web-based services — in a safe and balanced way. We will give them the knowledge and tools needed to protect themselves from hacks, attacks and loss of access to their own accounts and will help build their confidence in the privacy of their devices and the data they contain.

For more information visit the Digital Safe Space website here.

Alan Klein has three decades’ experience in being a leader in strategic communications at the vanguard of political and social change. Alan, a native New Yorker, was a founding member of the AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), and he co-founded the LGBT rights organization Queer Nation. By combining innovative digital and traditional communications strategies with headline-grabbing activist savvy, Alan obtains high-profile results for his clients.

He also served as the first national communications director and spokesperson for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). He played a pivotal role in Ellen DeGeneres’ coming out, and subsequent media frenzy, by helping to orchestrate international coverage. He also brought the crisis of anti-LGBT violence to national attention by co-creating and co-producing “The Anti-Violence Campaign,” the first-ever anti-gay violence television ad campaign, chaired by celebrities including Susan Sarandon, John Waters, Harvey Fierstein and Lou Reed.

Noah Landow is a partner in Macktez, a twenty person technology consulting firm based in New York that uses language and processes familiar to the design and creative industries to develop appropriate infrastructure, encourage fiscal discipline, and integrate technology into the design process for its clients. The firm also sponsors a Summer Stipend for a creative project each summer and designs and produces their own line of paper products.

With a background in architecture from Yale and the Architectural Association of London, Noah Landow began his career working with design firms specializing in information graphics and usability on projects for large companies like Interleaf and HP. The pleasure he found in creative collaborators at Dynamic Diagrams, MetaDesign, and Two Twelve Associates inspired him to form Macktez in 1996 so those he worked closest with, his clients, could be design professionals.

In addition, he creates experimental jewelry and produces art and portrait photography under the name Ligament. He also studies and teaches Daito-Ryu Aikijujutsu Takumakai, a traditional Japanese martial art from which Aikido developed, serves on the board of the Friends of Buck’s Rock, and is the Chairperson of the Board of Directors for UnionDocs.

Jeremy Sherber sports a resume comprised of nonlinear professional assignments: graphic designer, FileMaker Developer, playwright, communications strategist, and political campaign manager. His facility for untangling complications into step-by-step actions binds his past roles together and guides his everyday problem-solving routines. As our Senior Consultant for workflow design, Jeremy is just as likely to recommend an employment policy or a good book as he is a software solution while steering clients toward their goals.