CovidCon

In March 2020, as the world went into lockdown, the Human Rights Foundation saw a story nobody was telling. The pandemic wasn't inevitable. Censorship, lies and cover-ups helped it spread.

Authoritarian governments were also exploiting the crisis to grab power and crush dissent, while everyone's attention was on the virus. HRF wanted to expose both, fast, to a world stuck at home.

HRF's Oslo Freedom Forum usually brings dissidents together in person. That wasn't possible in the spring of 2020, so the conversation had to move online, in weeks rather than months.

COVIDCon: a virtual Oslo Freedom Forum built for lockdown. Two days, April 13 and 14, streamed free to anyone, with the boldest journalists, dissidents and experts from the front lines of the pandemic.

We concepted the event with HRF, then gave it a face. The key visual put the coronavirus where a general's face should be, so tyranny and the virus read as one image.

Two lines framed the conference and the site: tyranny sparked the pandemic, and tyranny exploits the pandemic. Hot magenta and electric blue made sure nobody scrolled past. The general repeats in rows and switches color, so one image could stretch across the site and every social post.

Our proposal went to HRF on March 23, 2020, and the conference went live on April 13. In between we made the logo and brand, the key visuals, a promo film and covidcon.org.

The promo opened on a story not being told, then named it: censorship, lies, cover-ups. Tyranny sparked the pandemic, and now it's exploiting it. It closed on the dates and one ask, register at covidcon.org.

The site held the agenda, the speakers and the free stream. It carried twelve sessions, from Censorship in China: The Pandemic Spark to Pandemic Power Grab: State Abuse of Emergency Laws.

Over two days, COVIDCon ran 28 speakers across 12 sessions. They included Ai Weiwei, the Chinese dissident artist; Garry Kasparov, the Russian democracy advocate and former world chess champion; Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum; Joshua Wong; and Masih Alinejad.

Our promo script had planned for 1,000 attendees. More than 6,000 people came, far beyond what the Human Rights Foundation expected. Every one of them watched for free, on a stream anyone could join from home.

All of it came together in three weeks, in the first weeks of lockdown. In late March, COVIDCon was an idea in a proposal. By April 14, thousands of people had heard dissidents name the regimes behind the crisis.