This is the report of Day 3 of the IPTC Autumn 2018 Meeting in Toronto. See the report from Day 1 and the report from Day 2. All the presentations are available to IPTC members in the IPTC Members Only Zone.

Day 3 of IPTC Autumn Meetings always includes the Annual General Meeting, where all Voting Members can have their say in the future of the organisation. This time new Managing Director Brendan Quinn gave his first MD’s report, alongside Stuart Myles’ Chairman’s Report (which will be posted to the IPTC blog soon). Materials from the AGM are available to members in the IPTC Members Only Zone.

Rounding out the discussions for the three days, we had some broad-ranging and future-facing conversations regarding News Credibility projects, where Stuart Myles took us on a tour of the wide range of projects and initiatives around misinformation, the credibility of news and news sources, and the perceived problems of “fake news.” IPTC or IPTC members are helping out several organisations in their efforts in this area such as the w3C Credible Web community group and the Journalism Trust Initiative.

We also had a discussion on funding opportunities and potential IPTC projects, which is an internal discussion involving members only.

Lastly, speaking about the future, we had Michael Young from Civil Media speak to us about their plans to use blockchain technologies to power small newsrooms and fulfil their broad goal to “power sustainable journalism throughout the world.” A lot of focus has been on Civil’s Initial Coin Offering, which closed underfunded and will be returning investors’ money, but they have many other activities, including a suite of WordPress-based plugins allowing news providers to join the Civil ecosystem and pledge openness, fairness and transparency according to the Civil Foundation’s constitution. Mike explained how blockchain based voting and decisions mean that members can be rewarded for pointing out breaches of the constitution, and bad actors can be punished or even removed from the network entirely.

The event ended with a few of us attending the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s event with journalism pundits Vivian Schiller, Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and Matthew Ingram, talking about misinformation and misuse of social media (video recording available via the above link), and ten of us went on a networking and team bonding trip to Niagara Falls and to a local winery on the Thursday.

Overall it was a great Autumn Meeting which set the scene and built the foundation for many more great IPTC meetings to come!