Former director of the Brussels institution for media art Yves Bernard approached me in 2018 to collaborate on a new project to develop and protect a healthy internet environment. The idea was to see if we could save the internet from corporate and authoritarian forces that threaten democracy and community interests and to see if we could also make the internet have less of a carbon footprint. We organized a workshop in the tradition of the unconference for Transmediale in 2019 entitled First Steps Toward a Digital Climate Agreement. It was a great event with amazing thinkers and activists lending their time and thoughts to the project. After a brief introductory discussion the participants divided into five groups, each focusing on a different part of the issues at hand. You can read a long report describing what happened exactly on the project's website. Unfortunately, due to internal issues at iMal the project stalled almost immediately. It would be great if another institution or organization would pick up where iMal left it. Yves Bernard has since left iMal.
