Tech Policy & Ethics Events in Brussels
European tech-policy and ethics events have grown into their own circuit, driven largely by the AI conversation and by the continent's unusually active relationship with tech regulation. This page covers the bigger conversations about technology rather than the hands-on building: AI governance, AI ethics, responsible-AI leadership, digital ethics, tech-in-society discussions, and the intersection of AI with education, law, and public institutions.
This page narrows the Brussels calendar to Tech Policy & Ethics events. It's a subset of Belgium's wider tech-event schedule, useful when you want something specific to go to in the city this month.
Brussels is unusually weighted toward tech-policy and open-source events because of the EU institutions concentrated in the city. FOSDEM each February is one of the largest open-source conferences in the world and draws tens of thousands. Around it, the calendar is full of AI-governance, data-protection, cybersecurity-policy, and platform-regulation events that reflect Brussels' role as the policy capital of European tech.
Upcoming Tech Policy & Ethics events in Brussels
Table Ronde · IA, énergie et souveraineté (par Bleen & Elia)
Brussels, 🇧🇪 Belgium
L’IA accélère, la demande d’électricité aussi. On fait le point sur les enjeux pour le réseau et la transition énergétique avec Elia.
Table Ronde · IA, énergie et souveraineté
L'intelligence artificielle générative s'est imposée en quelques années, à un rythme qu'aucune technologie n'avait connu avant elle. Derrière chaque requête, il y a des data centers, et derrière ces data centers, de l'électricité. Beaucoup d'électricité. Cette demande nouvelle arrive au moment où le système électrique se transforme en profondeur pour accompagner la transition énergétique et l'électrification de l'industrie, de la mobilité et du chauffage.
Comment le réseau absorbe-t-il cette croissance ? Qui raccorder, quand, et selon quels critères ? Quelle est l'empreinte réelle de l'IA, et que veut dire souveraineté quand énergie et numérique deviennent indissociables ? Trois spécialistes d'Elia, le gestionnaire du réseau de transport d'électricité belge, partagent leur lecture de ces enjeux.
Format : 1h de table ronde, suivie de 30 minutes d'échange avec le public et une session de networking.
Intervenant·es Elia : Stéphane Vanschoors (Head of IT Technology & Infrastructure), Sofie Stas (Sustainability Manager) et Jean-Philippe Deckers (Key Account Manager)
Modérateur Bleen : Olivier De Schutter (co-fondateur)
Keynote: When Censorship Becomes the Evidence
Brussels, 🇧🇪 Belgium
What a regime erases tells you what it fears
Facilitated by Viera Zuborova (CORRECTIV.Exile)
When journalism is erased, censored, or pushed out of reach, preserving it becomes an essential part of protecting press freedom.
This keynote will introduce Karakutu, a civic-tech project that uses blockchain technology to permanently preserve Turkish digital media content and make censorship visible. Inspired by the black box of an aircraft, Karakutu creates a durable public record of journalism that might otherwise be erased, while making valuable sources accessible to journalists, researchers, and citizens.
Here, digital archive can become not just a repository but a tool for investigation, accountability, and collective memory. By documenting not only what was published but also what was removed, altered, or censored, Karakutu offers a way to examine the mechanisms of information control.
Tech Fresco (by Bleen & Global Shapers Brussels)
Brussels, 🇧🇪 Belgium
A collaborative workshop to understand, examine and discuss the systemic impacts of technology from printing to generative AI.
The Tech Fresco is a collaborative, 100% low-tech workshop that questions our relationship with digital technologies.
The tech world keeps accelerating: gen AI, facial recognition, deepfakes, mass surveillance, increasingly precarious work... One question is hard to avoid. Can we still call it “progress” when innovation widens inequalities, threatens our freedoms and reshapes democracy?
After raising awareness among more than 5,000 participants through various workshops, Bleen created the Tech Fresco in 2025 with a clear goal: to build on years of hands-on experience in sustainable IT and offer a systemic workshop. One that goes beyond talking about digital tech and opens the debate on its social, democratic, health and environmental impacts.
Aware of the risk of generational amnesia, Bleen wanted to put the major milestones of information and communication technologies back into their historical context, to better understand the challenges of today and of tomorrow.
Both interactive and reflective, this workshop invites you to hit pause on the dominant techno-solutionist narrative, separate fact from hype, and imagine fairer, more sustainable technological futures together.
This event is co-organised by Bleen and the Global Shapers Brussels Hub. The evening will end with an informal get-together.