Global
In the COVID-19 era, community networks became increasingly important in meeting the rising demand for affordable connectivity. In Kenya, where community networks are growing in size and number, there was a positive regulatory change in 2021. Read more in this piece from KICTANet.
How did the world begin to establish the internet's basic governance rules and try to enable universal access? Carlos Afonso, director of Nupef and co-founder of APC, offers a historical look at the uneven global internet governance movement, from the 1998 International Telecommunication Union (ITU) meeting to the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and till the 2007 Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
In spite of expanding awareness on online and technology-facilitated gender-based violence, there has only been an increase in the violence online in the last decade. Feminist research points to ways to address this ongoing challenge.
New applications like ChatGPT based on AI and large language models are likely to be transformative, a step change in technology like the internet was 30 years ago, but much faster. The technology is now out of the bag and can't be uninvented, and we should move swiftly to figure out its implications, deployment and governance.
Women have historically been underrepresented in the telecommunications policy and regulation spaces, but there has been a recent push to increase diversity in these fields, as Josephine Miliza of APC member organisation KICTANet reports.
Last year saw the highest number of internet shutdowns ever recorded. Such enforced digital darkness is a slippery slope of easy authoritarianism that we see spreading globally, one that countries like India, with the world's highest number of shutdowns, are using to gain undemocratic compliance from their citizens.
Around the world, communities are building alternatives to bridge the digital divide. And their contribution has been recognised recently: in this edition, we can discover tangible examples. Welcome to the 56th monthly round-up of developments impacting your community-based initiatives.
This submission was produced in response to the call for contributions to the thematic report of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and comprises inputs collated from the experiences of APC staff and members, organised according to the guiding questions proposed in the call.
APC and Sursiendo will be hosting a workshop at this year's MozFest on 22 March, where they will invite participants to begin the process of weaving a digital quilt for feminist, just and sustainable tech futures for the Earth.
The design and development of digital language technologies, and especially the technologies relying on large language models like ChatGPT, call for a deep power analysis on who is building this technology, who will benefit from it and who will decide its future.
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2022
Unless otherwise stated, content on the APC website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)