WEASA – days four and five

Day four. Things are getting real. We are continuing to focus on information and disinformation. Margo Gontar from StopFake.org has visited our summer school, and we are conducting an exercise in which participants are designing their own disinformation campaigns. (We do, of course, follow up on those campaigns immediately, learning how we could fact-check the stories that were presented to us)

In the afternoon, we start our soft skills sessions. All participants attend four workshops that teach them social media, debating, negotiation, and entrepreneurship skills. And those workshops already seem to be bringing results, with some participants starting to disseminate the fake stories they created on social media. (Nobody was harmed through such posts, of course. The disinformation was only distributed on closed groups that acted as a sandbox for this exercise.)

Day five. Study trip time! We load ourselves into a bus and travel off to NASK – an institution that oversees much of Poland’s digital and cyber-security. We arrived, we asked lots of questions, got some fascinating answers. Unfortunately, the study visit could not last for too long – we soon needed to return to campus in order to finish the day with soft skills workshop.

And then, in a true WEASA fashion, many participants decided to depart Warsaw over the weekend to explore various Polish cities.