APC

To gain insight on this process and the lessons that can be learned from it, APC spoke with Damián Loreti, Rodrigo Adriel and Valeria Betancourt, three of the people actively involved in the campaign.

APC's EcoThursday initiative is back! For the relaunching of the initiative in 2023, we will be convening once a month. Join our conversation on digital capitalism, extractivism and Indigenous communities this Thursday, 20 April.

In response to the violence they face online, women censor themselves, stepping back from conversations online and sometimes exiting online spaces entirely. At times, however, they continue to speak and exist online but alter their speech and behaviour to comply with perceived social norms.

At APC we join in the deep sorrow for the premature passing of Paulo Lima, a dear friend and ally who had a long history in connecting communities through ICTs and spent the last decade bringing internet connectivity to Indigenous and riverine populations in the Brazilian Amazon region.

This policy brief by PROTEGE QV addresses the following questions: Is this legal, regulatory and institutional framework adequate and respected in order to ensure effective management of digital waste in Cameroon? What improvements could be proposed?

With mounting global pressure to keep up with the latest technology, the scale of our digital demand is resulting in staggering amounts of environmental waste. DEF responded with an inspiring pilot project to tackle the problem of e-waste in two communities in India.

In the COVID-19 era, community networks became increasingly important in meeting the rising demand for affordable connectivity. In Kenya, where community networks are growing in size and number, there was a positive regulatory change in 2021. Read more in this piece from KICTANet.

How did the world begin to establish the internet's basic governance rules and try to enable universal access? Carlos Afonso, director of Nupef and co-founder of APC, offers a historical look at the uneven global internet governance movement, from the 1998 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) meeting to the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and till the 2007 Internet Governance Forum (IGF). 

In spite of expanding awareness on online and technology-facilitated gender-based violence, there has only been an increase in the violence online in the last decade. Feminist research points to ways to address this ongoing challenge.

The FTX project coordinator will contribute to building the capacity of feminist movements and gender non-conforming and queer people from the global South to engage with the internet and technology with care, agency, curiosity, playfulness and safety. The deadline for applications is 22 April.

India imposed 84 internet shutdowns in 2022, the highest number globally for the fifth year in a row. APC joins a global civil society coalition to urgently ask the Indian government to create meaningful safeguards for citizens' digital rights and ensure unfettered access to an open, secure and reliable internet. 

New applications like ChatGPT based on AI and large language models are likely to be transformative, a step change in technology like the internet was 30 years ago, but much faster. The technology is now out of the bag and can't be uninvented, and we should move swiftly to figure out its implications, deployment and governance.

Women have historically been underrepresented in the telecommunications policy and regulation spaces, but there has been a recent push to increase diversity in these fields, as Josephine Miliza of APC member organisation KICTANet reports.

Last year saw the highest number of internet shutdowns ever recorded. Such enforced digital darkness is a slippery slope of easy authoritarianism that we see spreading globally, one that countries like India, with the world's highest number of shutdowns, are using to gain undemocratic compliance from their citizens.

Sex workers in South Africa moved to the internet to seek clients as the offline opportunities dwindled due to the pandemic-induced lockdown. But they face previously unknown challenges with the prevalent online gender-based violence in the country.

Around the world, communities are building alternatives to bridge the digital divide. And their contribution has been recognised recently: in this edition, we can discover tangible examples. Welcome to the 56th monthly round-up of developments impacting your community-based initiatives.

On 8 January 2023, there was a shocking and violent coup attempt in Brazil that came on the heels of years of accelerating mass disinformation and fake news, reinforced through social networks and messaging apps. Our member and board director analyses this urgent test case of how a democracy can fight such information corruption and hold digital platforms accountable for moderating illegal content.

This submission was produced in response to the call for contributions to the thematic report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and comprises inputs collated from the experiences of APC staff and members, organised according to the guiding questions proposed in the call.

APC and Sursiendo will be hosting a workshop at this year's MozFest on 22 March, where they will invite participants to begin the process of weaving a digital quilt for feminist, just and sustainable tech futures for the Earth.

The design and development of digital language technologies, and especially the technologies relying on large language models like ChatGPT, call for a deep power analysis on who is building this technology, who will benefit from it and who will decide its future.