Announcing tbd/con
A virtual conference for people who have more questions than answers about AI. September 23-24, 2026, on gather.town. Free.
What it is
tbd/con is a two-day virtual conference Madison Karas, Patrick Boehler, Matthew Gore-Kormanik, and David Kuszmar are organizing for September 2026. It runs entirely on gather.town, with no admission cost.
The premise is that AI isn't arriving cleanly, and the conversation about it shouldn't be either. Researchers are probing model behavior. Security practitioners are breaking systems. Journalists are trying to explain what's happening, or figure out how to survive it as competition. Policymakers are being asked to act on incomplete understanding. Developers are shipping anyway. These groups rarely end up in the same room. tbd/con is an attempt to change that.
The program is organized into five circles:
- thought,
- information,
- security,
- practice,
- and the garage.
Sessions include talks that end with open questions, demos of raw prototypes, workshops where you build something and fail, panels with civil disagreement, office hours for cross-domain critique, and a midway for random encounters. No keynotes from on high. No illusion of consensus.
Why it sits with Gazzetta's work
Gazzetta studies how people access information in distorted environments. Service Desk works with newsrooms that need to move from good intentions to actionable strategy for the people they actually serve. Both lines of work keep running into AI as a force that reshapes the terrain: it changes what audiences can find, what producers can make, what adversaries can deploy, and what assumptions funders carry into the room.
We have not found a venue that holds those threads together. The AI events we attend are usually sorted by audience: a research conference, a security conference, a journalism conference, a policy convening. Each one is competent on its own terms and partial by design. The connections that matter to our work, between a circumvention tool's threat model and a newsroom's distribution strategy, between an audit method and an editorial standard, between a prototype in someone's garage and a community's information needs, tend to get made informally or not at all.
We want to make those connections legible. That is why we are involved in organizing it, and why we think it is worth a couple of days of your time if you work anywhere near these questions.
How to get involved
Three ways, depending on what you have to offer and what you need:
Attend. Registration of interest is open at ask.gazzetta.xyz/tbdcon26. The conference is free and virtual. Bring questions, not credentials.
Propose a session. We are looking for talks that end with open questions, demos of work in progress, and workshops where the failure mode is part of the lesson. Technical depth, social critique, and weird prototypes are all welcome. Same registration link, with a session option.
Join the review crew. We are recruiting five reviewers, one per circle, to help shape the program. Reviewers work from shared criteria during a July-August window, join a short team sync on June 17, and get credit on the final program. We are especially interested in practitioners, independent researchers, developers, community journalists, and people who have watched AI develop up close. Apply by May 31, 2026.
If you are unsure which path fits, write to us: tbdcon@gazzetta.xyz.
