From May 16-18, the Beacon Project participated in the annual POINT conference in Sarajevo. POINT Conference (Political Accountability and New Technologies) is a regional conference for civil society organizations from six countries of Southeast Europe, which are intensively engaged in using new technologies in their work, but also involves the participation of organizations, individuals, groups and institutions from all around the world.
Three Beacon Project partners, ZastoNe (BiH), Metamorphosis (MKD), and the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability (SRB), worked together with others to organize the event. The conference gathered fact-checkers, journalists and analysts, speakers from around the world, practitioners from the Balkan region and experts in the field of modern transparency and accountability.
Biljana Ljubic, the Beacon Project’s Regional Coordinator for the Western Balkans, moderated a panel on ‘Disinformation Operations in Europe’. The panel focused on tactics taken by different domestic and foreign actors, prevailing narratives across Europe and how individual nations and states are responding. The panel included European think-tank analysts, as well as a member of the European External Action Service Western Balkans StratCom task force.
IRI held a workshop focusing on data gathering and analysis using >versus<. IRI designed this advanced workshop in order to explain different methodologies for media monitoring using >versus<, as well as how to perform data analysis and operations using native reporting features or third party software. The workshop attendees included participants from 15 organizations and different levels of experience using >versus<. Partner organizations came from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, and Belarus.