RightsCon Tunis 2019

The goal of Fat Futures is to invite folks of all identities and backgrounds into an introductory workshop on fat bodies, fat oppression, and the relationship to technology. We will help develop individual and organizational practices for humanizing, including, and cultivating accessibility around fat bodies; specifically addressing how violence shows up for fat folks and how fat oppression in physical spaces shows up within digital spaces.

In this interactive session we will gather input on how to create more and better civic spaces. We will discuss our inclusive approach for online community building in restrictive settings, including the challenges of putting this approach into practice. We will gather suggestions to improve our approach and supporting strategies. We will focus on lessons learned and best practices for creating: • Inclusive Teams: Using examples from the Libya and DRC, we will discuss the challenges of building diverse and inclusive teams. • Inclusive Content and Communities: Using examples from DRC, Burundi and Libya, we will describe our media and engagement strategies to create safe spaces where young people from different backgrounds can come together in ways often impossible in the offline space. • Inclusive Partnerships: How to engage the broadest spectrum of stakeholders? Different organisations will discuss how they use a multi-stakeholder approach to be more inclusive. • Inclusive Tech: Faster, cheaper internet is one way to make platforms more inclusive but often beyond our control. We will discuss how we optimise our platforms to make them more accessible and invite others to discuss their solutions to this issue.

Traditional hackathons have many risks: they encourage competition and not collaboration, they are oriented to expert participants in technology, they are a hotbed of ideas that are not followed up and do not arouse any critical analysis towards technology. And in addition, a very small number of women and a diverse population always participate as an indigenous, rural population, with a disability, Afro-descendant, etc. However, the challenge of developing a proposal in an intensive period is something that appeals mainly to young people. Since 2014, Sulá Batsú has developed hackathons from a feminist approach aimed at women from all over the Central American territory and from all rural, border, indigenous, afro, and other contexts. This seeks to break with all the logic behind the hackathons, but this device is used as an instance of critical analysis of technology and creation of technological proposals as a way to give voice to all women through technology. We propose it as a workshop because we want participants to design their own female hackathons in our workshop with our methodological approach.

This session will provide an interactive platform for speakers and audience participants to grapple with the inherent tensions of creating human rights apps that are intended to be universal in reach while also usable and feasible invery different local contexts, legal jurisdictions, and security considerations. The discussion will address experiences and lessons learned in taking apps to market and to scale. Responsible design and development of an app, requires us to consider how the app will be used on the ground, information flows, security considerations, and meaningful collaboration with end-users. These steps may be feasible at the pilot stage in a limited number of locations, but this session will examine how feasible it is to engage in local, end-user participation when taking an app to scale in a global market with thousands or even millions of end-users. This discussion will ask the panelists and audience: What does responsible, ethical scale up look like? What does end-user collaboration look like? What are the opportunities, challenges, and risks in creating bespoke tools that are intended to be used globally? What tech, financial and human resources are required to scale up? This session will encourage and engage participants to articulate a way forward.

The increasing risk presented to women in positions of social and political vulnerability, strongly illustrated by the public execution of Marielle Franco, exposed the urge for more supportive networks of women trainers on digital and integral security. In this intricate scenario in which individual freedom and human rights are threatened for women in a very global context, it's utterly necessary building affective networks and infrastructures - both physical and digital - towards a reimagined digital security culture based on transfeminist perspectives of collective care. Joining members from several experienced organizations and feminist infrastructures, the Feminist Digisec Network share their experiences towards building approaches for digital security training focused on sensible, nurturing and easy to understand methodologies to engage non-technical women and LGBTQIA+ human rights defenders and frontline activits on employing the current technological toolset for digital self-defense and methodologies for context analysis, holistic security, threat and risk model assessment and self-care techniques, bringing some cases and experiences from our activities. Women digital trainers from all the world are invited to join on a critical discussion over constructing narratives based on decolonial and feminist internet principles for a new culture of digital security and online self-preservation.

New technologies function as narrations of a better society. Simultaneously, they are articulations of structures of power that demonstrate how societies handle physical realities. What happens if one provokes those narrations and tries to influence futures of technologies through feminist theories? In our workshop we aim to observe, critique, and re-narrate futures of the internet. By acknowledging the power of imagination in the formulation of technologies we aim to hack and redefine those narrations. We first assess the current state of the internet and analyse where we find patriarchal, capitalist and/or social inequalities. Then, we discuss how responses to those structures of power can look like. In small groups we investigate how an alternative narration could look like in a feminist context. Outcome of each group is a feminist short story of an alternative internet that advocates for digital human rights. By using narration as a cultural practice we aim to shed new light on current debates about a feminist internet and the formulation of technologies. To imagine those futures and to write alternative stories is not only a way to discuss social structures of power, but also to actively shape those futures from a feminist standpoint.

They would expect an interactive discussion about the legal implications of Emojis and Human Rights

Session Objectives:

- Establishing that the digital economy can make the most contributions to development when we purposefully take measures to ensure for inclusion.
- Sharing research about how inclusive access and usage of the internet are today in certain regions, and where are the gaps that need to be addressed.
- Sharing research on how women and some marginalized groups experience the online world, and how this affects their Internet access and usage.
- Exploring policy recommendations that can be taken collaboratively to improve inclusion in the digital economy.