The APC has been refining its Gender Evaluation Metholodolgy (GEM) since it was first elaborated in 2001. GEM can help you determine whether your project or initiative is really improving the lives of women and promoting positive change in the community you are working in.

The first winner of the Connect Your Rights: Make the Connection contest is Charlie Parra del Riego for his hilarious SOPA Guitar Solo. To learn how you can submit your own content, check out our call for submissions.

In partnership with the University of Manchester, APC co-hosted a workshop from January 22 – 24 in Johannesburg to discuss findings, challenges and key actions going forward on how ICTs can help mitigate climate change and help communities better adapt to the increasing changes in their local environments.

On January 18th, APC joined dozens of sites and organisations in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) by blacking out. These two bills, if passed, represent an unprecedented threat to the open internet as we know it, with impacts felt far beyond the borders of the United States.

APC welcomes the proposal, while noting that it does not go far enough in supporting developing country applicants. To be truly successful, the proposal must include provisions for greater capacity building, increased transparency and a more representative review panel which would include experts from developing countries.

APC’s “open spectrum” initiative aims to provide an understanding of spectrum regulation by examining the situation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this synthesis, the project’s consultant Carlos Afonso brings together the most important aspects of the studies in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.

The Take Back The Tech! campaign, run by APC WNSP, launched an interactive mapping platform which collected more than one hundred stories about gender violence online or through mobile phones. In this article by GenderIT.org, Sonia Randhawa outlines some of the tendencies that stand out when analizing the collected information.

In Colombia, several government initiatives aim at broadening telecommunications access for the whole population through spectrum. Colombian civil society should make the most of recent opportunities to lobby for the design of a management model that is more efficient and that emphasises the social value of the spectrum say Lilian Chamorro and Ariel Barbosa, authors of a new study for APC.

“There were very strong human rights themes across the main sessions, particularly around freedom of expression and freedom of association. However it is time for human rights to be the principal theme of the Seventh IGF,” says APC as the world’s oldest progressive network reflects on the progress of the UN conference on how the internet is run.