Susannah Vila

finding and sharing effective uses of technology for social impact

Liberationtech: How the Next Generation Diaspora* Should Be Built to Help High-Risk Activists

After leaving Diaspora*, Liberation Technology’s Yosem Companys discusses what would be necessary to create an alternative social network for human rights defenders, issue advocates and other who must be concerned with security. The huge challenge that any new online space has to overcome, of course, is competing with Facebook’s network effect. Here’s liberationtech:

An online privacy activist recently asked me: Suppose you were to build the next-generation Diaspora* — i.e., a secure, private, and decentralized social network — how would you go about it?

The question is an important one, especially considering that many projects preceded Diaspora*…

Source liberationtech

Reblogged from Liberationtech

Too Many Messages and Only One Facebook Page: April 6th Movement in Post-Mubarak Egypt

This post draws from over 30 in-depth, semi structured interviews conducted with coordinators of and participants in the Egyptian revolution between March and August 2011 that I did in collaboration with the engine room. It was originally published on Technosociology.org

By late July, Egyptian protesters in Cairo had been camped out in Tahrir Square for nearly 3 weeks. Though the mood was jovial, it was clear that residents of the square were considering an approaching end game. During this wind-down of the 3 week sit-in, I met Ahmed Maher from the April 6th Youth Movement a few blocks from Tahrir at a coffee shop. April 6 (hereafter A6Y) is perhaps the most well-known network of young people coordinating actions during the years before January 25^th. In recent months a spate of new, wired revolutionary youth movements, many of which were formed by Egyptians that were politically activated by the winter’s uprising, have also emerged. Maher still has a day job, and does all of his April 6 related work after sunset. It was nearly midnight when we got together. He said a few hellos – nearly half of the customers seemed to know him –sat down, and rushed into an account of A6Y’s recent growth. “There is no split,” he assured me, referring to accounts in the Egyptian and international press of infighting and divisions among A6Y members. This affirmation was partly true. A6Y did indeed turn out to be much more intact than I had expected. It still, however, struggled to communicate its goals and messages to the more tech-savvy revolutionaries that were sitting in mere blocks away. The fact that it wasn’t hard to find someone in Tahrir who would express disillusionment with A6Y is indicative of the larger challenge that he and colleagues face today: after the political sphere is broken open by uprising, how do you maintain and build upon support among the highly-wired crowd while simultaneously recruiting offline Egyptians? A6Y’s struggle to address this question has left it, as FP’s Marc Lynch put it last week, one of many wired revolutionary movements currently “floundering” and unable to connect either with one another or with the general public. But, as my discussions with Maher and others would make clear, this is not for lack of trying.

Training South Asia’s Youngest Civil Society Members

A version of this was also published at The Huffington Post

This summer, frustration towards pervasive corruption in India reached a tipping point when hunger striker Anna Hazare mobilized thousands. While an awakening of the world’s largest pluralistic democracy should perhaps not come as a huge surprise, is something also brewing in neighboring Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the rest of South Asia?

That’s what a new generation of committed youth activists in the region would tell you. Last week, I co-led workshops on online strategy at a training event in Sri Lanka - where activists conceived of and refined ideas for new, regional NGOs and campaigns.

To my surprise, it was not the examples of online activism from North Africa and the Middle East that provoked the most excitement - instead it was news from the Indian anti-corruption movement.

Here’re the presentations from the workshop I gave at the event - which was a partnership between the U.S. State Department and the Sri Lankan NGO, WCIPER. The goal was to offer a more strategic framework for these young leaders to plan their campaigns within, and then to go deeper into how new technologies can be embedded into this strategy.

Strategy, New Media and Winning Campaigns from susannah vila on Vimeo.

In the coming months, the projects that these youth leaders envisioned over the course of the week long conference will be implemented. The campaign that we (trainers and judges) gave first prize to will receive support from WCIPER, the US Embassy, and other supporters.

Technology and Human Rights

Here’s a good write-up of my panel at the Personal Democracy Forum this June, written by The Reboot’s Emma Gardner, who was in the audience (thanks for joining Emma, although why anyone went to our panel over Cory Doctorow’s is a mystery ;). She writes:

In a globalized world, technology originally designed to solve a particular problem for a subset of people in the US (say, allowing college students to stay in touch and flirt through wall posts, photos, and pokes) very well could spread to another part of the world and be used for a completely different purpose (say, organizing protests, demonstrations, and movements in the Middle East). Given this, how can software developers, technology enthusiasts, and designers better anticipate and design for unexpected use-cases? How can we come together to evaluate the impact of our decisions on the lives of people throughout the world?

How human rights organizers can and should use new social platforms is a important question, and one that I hope to be closer to answering after spending some time this summer working with activists in the Middle East and North Africa as well as Southeast Asia.