Community Needs

The Internet Freedom Community faces different challenges that evolve with the fight against censorship and surveillance. We take advantage of the IFF virtual gatherings so we can listen to different digital right defenders from a diverse number of regions and backgrounds, and define their needs and potential solutions.

Future Skills for Current Challenges (Entire Community)

We dedicated this Glitter Meetup, on September 3, to explore the needs that we have as a community with a futuristic exercise: It's 2030, you are remembering the last decade. What do you wish you knew how to do in 2020. What skills or knowledge do you have now, that you wish you had in 2020. These are the needs listed:

Trends:

• AI
• Storytelling
• Project Management
• Need for mentorship or niche expertise knowledge.
• Debate and meditation skills.

Needs listed during the brainstorming:

• How to hack AI systems
• Better understanding internet architecture
• Ability to break people's programming mentally, so they don't believe disinformation.
• An ability to shield myself from hateful talk/speech during elections.
• An ability to give money support to IF projects without exposing their identity
• An ability to shield myself from hateful talk/speech during elections.
• A way to physically deliver glitter to friends in different countries.
• Localization engineering / development skills to better support project owners.
• Strong constructive discourse skills. The ability to more calmly and thoughtfully debate.
• Corporate style project management skills.
• Better ability to delegate and encourage volunteers to take on more community management and outreach responsibilities
• How to better storytell about our space.
• How to better coordinate between different groups, despite capacity issues. outreach responsibilities.
• Better documented and collective experience with OSINT
• Better writing skills / more confidence in my writing skills.
• Background in research methods.
• M&E experience.
• No php/mysql based website anymore, just plain html using jamstack or other new technologies
• Better understand of machine learning and AI for "good" causes
• Improve my negotiating skills
• Be more confident about myself
• Organise my time better to read and experience all the stuff from different fields that I'd like to!!!
• Learn how to take a break from work
• Better tools for supporting and bringing the funding spotlight to grassroots and local organizations.
• To know more tools to work the ground and grow my own food but along with rural communities without hurting their income/ways to hack right far mentalities.

Latin America Community

Main needs:

• Contact with other organizations and projects that would complement their work. This is a good example of the need of networking not just with the folks that do similar work.
• Resources for Digital Trainings with Rural Communities
• Funding
• Algunos materiales para hacer capacitaciones en línea u otros materiales relacionados a tecnología (pueden ser 3 slides u otros materiales básicos), generalmente son subestimadas. Algo como guías básicas para conectarse a herramientas específicas. Proponemos hacer un repositorio o similar?
• Se han sistematizado algunos recursos compartidos en IFF en general, hay un gap importante en cuanto a niños, niñás y adolescentes, por lo que se quisiera incluir este tipo de información dentro de iniciativas más generales.
• Hay algunos obstáculos para verificar palabras indígenas y hacer traducciones en lenguas indígenas, cualquier contacto es bienvenido. Otros participantes trabajan con Lenguas Indígenas en Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia y Perú. Se trabajan temas de contenidos, visuales (cine, cortos)

Asian Community

• Funding (not be discused this time)
• Grant writing and project management (not be discused this time)
• How to improve young people's awarness in cybersecurity and digital activities (main conversation)
• No matter in Hong Kong or Thailand, we can see more and more high school students join the movements and become the game changer. However, those young protesters may not be able to easily access or understand the materials and guidelines which were created for adult activists or NGO workers, and there were ideas generated:
  • basic security, security 101 those simple guideline may be helpful.
  • Students use social media for movements and personal life a lot, they should be cafeful if they provide too much information all together. It may be an important topic to develop the guidline.
  • Many schools around the world experineces remote teaching this year. Hence, more and more security kit for kids may be generated already.
  • In several researches, there was a lot of feedback indicating that young people especially aren’t practising digital security, it’s definitely a cross-cutting challenge.
  • Tibetan groups has some funny videos to demostrate the important of cybersecurity: https://tibetaction.net/digitalsecurity/ ; https://tibetaction.net/