Overview

The workshop titled "Towards a Safer Web for Women: Second International Workshop on Protecting Women Online" is part of The Web Science Conference 2026, hosted in Braunschweig, Germany. The in-person workshop will take place on 26 May 2026.

We invite researchers, developers, activists, and anyone passionate about making a difference to join us. Whether you’re presenting your work, sparking innovative discussions, or simply curious about creating safer online spaces, every idea is welcome. Come engage, collaborate, and contribute to a more inclusive digital future!

Important Dates

Abstract Submission Deadline: ~~17 March~~ 27 March, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: ~~31 March~~ 3 April, 2026
Workshop Date: 26 May, 2026

Check our Call for Abstracts for submission details.

Schedule

The workshop will be a half-day event featuring presentations of new ideas and research alongside interactive discussion. This year’s edition will place particular emphasis on preventive approaches to online safety, aiming to identify emerging risks, anticipate harms, and surface early warning signals rather than responding only after harms occur. The programme will include short paper presentations, followed by a panel-style Q&A with the authors to support collective discussion of the accepted work. It will also feature a keynote session and two group activities designed to identify gaps, emerging threats, and future research directions through collaborative reflection. The workshop will close with a short synthesis of the main insights and next steps emerging from the discussions. For further details, please visit our Schedule page.

Invited Speaker

Claudia Wagner, Professor for Applied Computational Social Sciences at RWTH Aachen University and Scientiﬁc Director of the department Computational Social Science at GESIS
For further details about our keynote speaker, please visit our Keynote Speaker page.

Organisers

Ángel Pavón Pérez, The Open University
Miriam Fernandez, The Open University
Christine de Kock, University of Melbourne
Alba Morales, The Open University
Arianna Muti, Bocconi University

Contact

For any inquiries, please contact us at angel.pavon-perez@open.ac.uk.