Digital Action

Tribal Digital Sovereignty: How Native Communities Are Powering Their Own Tech Future - Ford Foundation Learn how Tribal Digital Sovereignty empowers Native Nations to gain self-determination over their data and tech infrastructure to shape a just digital future

And Ford Foundation’s Chancellar Williams’ reflections on Tribal Digital Sovereignty.
These offer concrete paths toward people-centred tech futures.
www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-sto...

Communal internet infrastructure Executive summaryThis paper explores the concept of communal internet infrastructure – an alternative, self-managed approach to digital spaces built upon values of community, autonomy and…

APC’s work on communal internet infrastructure
www.apc.org/en/pubs/comm...

The Case for Community Tech — Promising Trouble Community tech - technology that gives power and generates benefit for communities – is a vital part of the modern technology ecosystem.

📚 To explore further:
Promising Trouble’s The case for community tech:
www.promisingtrouble.net/blog/blog-po...

✨ What makes this approach powerful is agency.
Meaningful innovation happens when technology serves people, not the other way around—and when communities can shape, govern, and sustain what they build.

🛠️ Community tech works differently.
It connects existing technical possibilities with unmet needs, creating tools that actually work for the people who use them—not for distant markets or extractive models.

🎭 One metaphor kept returning: a local circus.
Different skills, shared trust, constant movement. The work is never “finished”—it evolves. Technology, after all, is built by people, shaped by their needs, values, and choices.

🌱 What we saw is that community tech opens space for governance beyond corporate interests.
It allows communities to reflect their own values, understand technology’s climate impact, and make collective decisions about the tools they rely on.

🎪 #ExplorationDays: Community tech works at a much smaller scale than Big Tech, and that’s precisely its strength.
By focusing on local needs, communities create digital commons they can access, adapt, and sustain together. This is where digital sovereignty becomes tangible.

📣 👩🏽‍💻 👉🏾This #webinar is tomorrow!

Where Cloud Meets Cement

…And The Maybe’s Where the cloud meets cement.
They help make visible what digital infrastructures try to hide.
www.themaybe.org/research/dat...

Não somos quintal de data centers Onde vão parar seus dados quando você salva algo na nuvem? Este estudo revela o lado oculto dos data centers na América Latina, mostrando como gigantes da tecnologia como Google e Microsoft escolhem e...

📚 For deeper dives, these references guided our thinking:
IDEC’s We’re not the backyard of data centers (PT)
idec.org.br/publicacao/n...

🌱 When we talk about digital futures, we rarely ask:
Resources for whom?
Development for whom?
Growth for whom?
And ultimately: who bears the costs of digital progress?

☁️ As we explored rights, decentralization, and free expression, a question kept returning during our #ExplorationDays: what does all this technology look like on the ground?
What are the real costs of connection—and who pays them?

📣 This Thursday 👇🏽

🧠 Kai-Hsin Hung’s Beyond Big Tech Geopolitics pushes the conversation further: toward AI shaped by local realities, people-centred design, and values beyond extraction.
A useful compass for what comes next.
www.tni.org/en/article/b...

The Global Index on Responsible AI Igniting global action on responsible AI, with local evidence. The Global Index on Responsible AI, a multidimensional tool measuring progress towards responsible AI in 138 countries.

📊 The Global AI Index shows where capacity, investment, and influence concentrate, and how uneven AI development still is globally.

www.global-index.ai

📘 CIPESA’s State of Internet Freedom in Africa 2025 helps situate AI governance within broader struggles over rights, power, and accountability across the continent.

A crucial reference for understanding what’s at stake.
cipesa.org/download/rep...

⚖️ A key tension keeps surfacing:
Should AI develop organically, adapting as we go?
Or should strong regulation come first?
Across these debates, one idea is gaining ground: local-first AI, rooted in community consent, collective rights, and protection of the most vulnerable.

📄 Looking at the African Continental AI Strategy, the contrast is clear: strong statements, limited operational guidance.

Countries face a real challenge—how to move from principles to frameworks that can actually guide implementation on the ground.

🌍 Africa’s AI journey mirrors a wider Global Majority pattern: copying foreign laws, repeating big declarations, and struggling to make them locally meaningful.
During our #ExplorationDays we looked at both the gap between ambition and practice, and the cost of regulation without context.

👩🏽‍💻 We're excited to invite you to join us to the webinar on Information Integrity in the SWANA Region: Challenges, Gaps, and Tech-Driven Responses

In collaboration with Arabi Facts Hub, Al-Fanar Media and Witness:

Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

📌 Arabi Facts Hub, in collaboration with Al-Fanar Media, Digital Action, and Witness, invites you to join a webinar on:

Information Integrity in the SWANA Region: Challenges, Gaps, and Tech-Driven Responses

@digitalaction.bsky.social @witnessorg.bsky.social

Directions for Future Work: From #TechWontBuildIt to #DesignJustice

🛠️ Sasha Costanza-Chock’s work on #DesignJustice pushed us to ask: who designs, who decides, and who benefits?
From #TechWontBuildIt to design justice, it offers tools to build technology aligned with community needs and shared power.
designjustice.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ev26fjji...

🔄 We Rise’s Cycles of Movement Building reminded us that movements are not linear.
They grow, pause, fracture, regenerate. Understanding these cycles helps us value care, timing, and relationships as much as momentum.
werise-toolkit.org/en/cycles-mo...

Practicing New Worlds by Andrea J. Ritchie Andrea Ritchie draws from Black feminist abolitionist politics, emergent strategies, and speculative fiction to light up a path for surviving racial capitalism, growing fascism, and the climate crisis

📖 Andrea J. Ritchie’s Practicing New Worlds helped us think about collective work beyond reaction.
Drawing from Black feminist abolitionist politics and speculative thinking, it invites us to imagine how we survive, resist, and build something big. Together.
aworkinglibrary.com/reading/prac...

That raised harder questions for us:
How do we grow without losing our core?
How do we stay humble while standing firm?
How do we expand reach while remaining resilient?
These tensions shape collective work over time.

Like ants, we each arrive with what we have: different resources, limits, and needs.
When shared, these differences can turn trauma into solidarity—and uncertainty into a companion, not an obstacle.

🐜 🐜 🐜

🌱 During our #ExplorationDays, we noticed something simple: we often search for disruptive answers far away, when much of what we need is already around us.
Nature shows us this clearly. Collective work thrives through collaboration, not competition.

We’ll also be sharing the ideas and resources we found during our Exploration Days both in our socials and in our newsletter (Sign up!)

digitalaction.co (Scroll to the bottom)

🕳️ What happens when you get lost in an idea… on purpose?

We share notes from behind the curtain of our ‘Exploration Days’. A time we put aside to fall down rabbit holes together without rushing to come up with shiny outputs.

We think you should try it too: digitalaction.co/how-to-fall-...