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The Internet We Want: A newsletter by your friends at Whose Knowledge?
Issue # 4 | 14th August 2019
This month on "Action":
How do we create the Internet we want?


In this issue, we highlight the actions folks are taking to create the internet we want. Working to protect our languages, forming alliances, fighting for Openness online and ensuring women aren't erased.

 If you have any thoughts, feedback, or musings — feel free to reply to this email!

Call for Contributions: Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages!
 

We’re producing a State of The Internet’s Languages report, in partnership with the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), so that we can have a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities that support, or prevent languages and knowledges from being online. Language is a good proxy for, or way to understand, knowledge — different languages can represent different ways of knowing and learning about our worlds. Yet most online knowledge today is created and accessible only through colonial languages, mostly English.

We need you! The experiences and expertise of people who think about these issues of language online from different perspectives. We’re interested in submissions that answer questions such as:

How are you or your community using your language online?
What do you wish you could create or share in your language online that you can’t today?
What is challenging to create or share on your language online? 

Submissions can be submitted up until September 2nd — we’re eager to read yours! Read more about the Call, including submission style and honorarium on the link below. 

Find out more
Whose Knowledge? Podcast Episode 4: "Decolonizing the Internet as a Reparative Movement"
 
Back in 2001, Wikipedia was founded with the aim of providing information which could be edited and modified by anyone on a voluntary and meritocratic basis. The success of Wikipedia helped to make open knowledge something we could all interact with and contribute to. However, as it turned out, openness is not equivalent to diversity and plurality.
 

“If we are to take our mission seriously, we have to look outside of what comes naturally to us based on our demographics. We have to ask harder questions about - not just who made Wikipedia, but who didn’t. Who’s been excluded? Who’s been pushed to the margins? And how we fix that?”
 

Jake thinks one way is to make alliances between those in positions of privilege, and the ones who have been excluded on the margins but carry so much knowledge. In that sense, he understands Decolonizing the Internet as a reparative process that allows not only for alliance building, but also for healing a lot of damages that have already been replicated in the online world because of inequality and oppression.

Listen to the Podcast

Discussing Women Human Rights Defenders and Global Liberation Movements with AWID

Women Human Rights Defenders have always been the engine of global liberation movements ..and yet, they are often silenced — especially online. In June, we collaborated with Laila Malik from The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) on why we must continue to keep their stories alive.

In the article, Laila details the stories of: coal-free Batan activist Gloria Capitan; African teacher, activist and rebel Ottile Abrahams; and disability rights campaigner Lorraine Gradwell.

By telling, reading, and sharing stories about these women, we’re ensuring they won’t get erased.

Read the blog post

Breaking open Facebook’s Machine of Political Persuasion!

Our friends Nayantara Ragathan and Manuel Beltrán, who attended Decolonizing the Internet 2018, have built a tool — ad.watch, which challenges the closedness of access to political advertising information.

Nayantara and Manuel felt it was quite outrageous that Facebook’s political transparency tools are not available for all countries; so, they built ad.watch, which compiles datasets of political ads of over 150 major political actors in 34 countries. It also provides interfaces that can be used by journalists and citizens to systematically examine political advertising on the biggest social media companies.

Political advertising transparency is urgently needed in the age of social media and disinformation. Openness on the Internet is and should be expected of those tech companies who are inadvertently changing the way democracy functions.

Check out ad.watch here
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WHOSE KNOWLEDGE?

Is a global campaign working to create, collect and curate knowledge from and with marginalised communities, so that the internet we build and defend is ultimately an internet of, for and by all.
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Released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license | 2019 | Whose Knowledge?

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