Beautiful Rising: A Global Toolbox for Changemakers ActionAid Denmark & Beautiful Trouble are teaming up with activists, movements & organizations across the Global South to assemble a toolkit of creative activism that will showcase the innovative tactics & strategies of southern social movements.
Research question: What are the most "appropriate technologies" for collaboration & content delivery when working with activists and organizers in the Global South?
- To craft a knowledge platform for collecting and sharing experiences, as well as and formulating knowledge, on advocacy, campaigning and public mobilisation.
- To work collaboratively & openly, and to re-purpose existing efforts wherever possible.
- To work iteratively and to take every opportunity to put incremental work in the hands of the people who we see as potential users, seeking their direct feedback & guidance.
- For the system to be able to operate in situations with no- or low-bandwidth and country-specific constraints to Internet activity (firewalls, filtering, tracking, censorship, etc.)
- For resources to be available in, and submitted in, multiple languages. For different target audiences to be able to access, or download, different versions of the resource according to their specific needs, e.g., a “Trainers Edition.”
- To ensure that all of the tools & material created are released under a proper creative commons or open source license, and that both the code and content are easily accessible on Github.
- Where possible, to improve the existing tools available for translating content into different languages, and to ensure these tools can be improved by others.
To work toward the stated project objectives, Beautiful Rising will undertake a series of in-country workshops “listening sessions” in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Egypt Jordan.
Each of these workshops will be followed by a period of online collaboration that will endeavor to encourage, edit, and curate content developed by local activists. That content will then, in turn, be added to the knowledge platform, translated into other languages, and promoted to a wider network.
To date, the Beautiful Trouble project has relied on tools that are ubiquitous in North America and parts of Europe. Those same tools might not be well suited for working with activists in the Global South. Specifically, we will need to source the following categories of collaboration tools:
- Collaborative document editing
- Audio / video conferencing
- Project management & internal communications
- In-country session support
Some of the challenges that we’ve documented in deploying these collaboration tools in the Global South context are:
- Hardware & software limitations: it’s very likely that collaborators will not be using contemporary hardware or software and that some of the systems we’ve been using will simply not work.
- Bandwidth limitations: similarly, many of the tools we have been using require a relatively fast & stable Internet connection to work effectively. Options that can work in bandwidth-limited environments need to be researched & tested.
- Security concerns: the tools we use should be privacy respecting and enhancing, or -- failing that -- we should be able to provide clear guidance to collaborators on how to protect themselves while working with us.
We'll probably need to expand this list as we undertake the in-country sessions and that will be documented here. A good starting point on the legal situation in many countries is provided by the The Free Internet Project.
As the in-country session and post-workshop editing sprints get underway, we will shift our attention toward creating a public website and/or applications for delivering the content. We are referring to this entire ecosystem of content delivery (and the tools for sharing, remixing, translating, and otherwise improving that content) as the “knowledge platform.”
For context, here are our example use cases of how the platform might be used:
- Gay rights activist in Uganda searches for new tactics to use in her/his work, and information about activist organizations doing similar work in other countries, but struggles with slow Internet speeds.
- Free expression activist in Myanmar seeks resources for creative activism workshop and training, but Internet censorship make finding and disseminating the material difficult.
- Climate justice activist in Malawi is organising an action and seeks inspiration for creative ways to break through the media barricade, but -- with one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in the world -- doesn’t have easy access to a collection of case studies to draw from.
- Activist group Escola de Ativismo in Brazil successful uses material from the resource in their trainings, and -- after translating them into Portuguese -- seeks to contribute those resources back.
- Activists in Egypt are looking for ways to improve their creative tactics and would like input on new ideas from a network of people doing similar work.
We are developing a number of personas and updated use cases and those will be published here
Some of the preliminary categories of challenges and opportunities that we've identified are: