Seeking to promote a transformation in the relationship fabric that bonds the actors of the agro-ecological and tourism sectors, this project proposes strengthening community initiatives and alternative economy processes in the municipality of La Macarena-Meta, prioritizing the participation of women and the strategic use of information technologies.
To do so, the project will work on the collective design of a community communications network and its social, financial, and technological components, leveraging the Community Networks Kit developed by Colnodo. It will also implement an open-source digital platform hosted on the community network to facilitate the exchange of local products and services based on solidarity and circular economy dynamics.
This project seeks to provide continuity to the LibreRouter stack, a series of hardware, software, documentation, and audiovisual support designed to technically and socially facilitate the development, deployment, management, and expansion of community networks. LibreRouter was created with funding provided by FRIDA and was the first project to be selected in two regions (the second being Africa – FIRE). As a result of its success over the years, communities on all continents are choosing to use this technology today.
The goal of this project is to redesign LibreRouter with state-of-the-art technology, as this will allow: (i) avoiding the decreased availability of LibreRouter V1.0 components, which has a negative impact on its cost and production times; (ii) taking a qualitative leap in terms of performance and energy efficiency, so that, in the future, this can continue to be a high-performance option; and (iii) incorporating changes that have been identified over years of deployment experiences in various scenarios.
In Mexico, approximately 12 million people do not have access to mobile or fixed bandwidth, and this substantially limits their chances of being informed and participating in the global economy and society. In terms of aggregate mobile coverage (including 2G, 3G, and 4G technologies), rural areas with less than 10,000 inhabitants are the most affected.
This project seeks to develop a community mobile communication system using 4G/LTE technology, open-source software, and reused hardware. It also includes a network management system that will be integrated into the system currently used by 2G/GSM community mobile telephone networks. From a technical and social perspective, innovation is not limited to reducing the digital divide for remote communities. Instead, innovation also includes doing this in a way that will allow the community to be its own communications system provider, encouraging their active participation in the operation, management, and transformation of technology into something that truly meets their needs.
This initiative comprises the design, implementation, and maintenance of a telecommunications network using Television White Space Technology to provide connectivity services for eight public schools located in the rural areas of the municipality of Ovejas (and the communities settled in their surroundings), in the department of Sucre, Montes de María subregion, in Colombia.
This pilot project had three clearly defined functional goals:
1. To confirm the ability of the TVWS signal to coexist after installing the technology in a telecommunications base station, in the same location as the signal of five national television broadcasters, public and commercial radio services, microwave links, cell phone services, and trunking.
2. To verify the performance of the TVWS technology on site, confirming its ability to serve clients in rural, difficult-to-access areas (mountainous regions with dense foliage typical of the Colombian territory) and assess connection speed and latency.
3. To generate an impact on the education sector in the pilot project’s area of influence, assessing the functionality of the service in very difficult-to-access rural schools and evaluating the connection’s stability and quality compared to the use of collaborative tools and the consumption of audio and video content as well as video calls.
Given that the trend among companies and government institutions is to deploy online and cloud services to modernize their business models, they may be vulnerable to intrusion attempts and data leaks.
This project proposes an innovative way to protect sensitive user data for different customers (private companies, government agencies, among others) through anonymization techniques and cloud computing. This solution advances existing state-of-the-art solutions for data leak mitigation and helps companies and government agencies comply with privacy laws.
This initiative will implement a cloud-based prototype to enable higher-capacity processing without burdening the computing capacity of local devices and servers in private businesses and government institutions. The project seeks to increase security and privacy levels in existing technological solutions, to ensure the self-sovereignty of data owners, and to provide a solution for companies, government institutions, and individuals to meet the requirements of privacy laws.
The expansion of community networks, the increasingly mandatory use of digital tools, and the rapid isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have left indigenous communities vulnerable with respect to the protection of their personal and collective information.
This initiative seeks to enable the participation of indigenous peoples in digital environments, through the promotion and appropriation of digital rights, to guarantee access to information in indigenous languages in the Triqui, Mazateco, Mixe, and Zapoteco regions that are part of the cultures recognized in the Law on the Rights of the Peoples and Communities of the State of Oaxaca. This proposal provides tools to help mold digital (Internet) environments to indigenous needs and culture, by means of training workshops and a campaign in public and community media. The ultimate goal of this project is the governance of community data and the presence of linguistic diversity on the Internet, including the right of the indigenous peoples and communities of the Oaxacan entity to decide what is shared or maintained in cyberspace.
The “Health Online Indicators” project will present, in an easily readable form, five indicators that can help enable access to safe and affordable health solutions using the Internet in LAC. The information that will be part of this dataset will be taken from various national laws, executive orders, communications from national authorities, and academic research. So, while the data mostly exists already, it is neither properly organized nor accessible.
Once these indicators are compiled, they can be used to: inform policymakers on the broader situation of Latin America so then can coordinate (or compare with) the situation in their own jurisdictions; to provide data for the creation of maps, statistics, and other reference materials; and to serve as a starting point for discussions on health-related topics in Internet Governance spaces. The ultimate goal is to bring data-driven research on this matter to our region, in order to generate a productive debate.
The purpose of this initiative is to increase the visibility of online gender violence through open data, as well as to create a campaign to promote active and informed citizen engagement that will allow people to participate in the formulation of effective public policies that address prevention, education, and punishment, always within a framework of respect for international human rights standards.
The project adopts a regional perspective to unite the efforts of interested parties in the different countries and create a stronger campaign, considering common aspects of the problem. Segur@s en línea considers launching a platform to compile information resources for human rights activists, students, and anyone interested in the subject in general, as well as guidelines for reporting online gender violence in accordance with each country’s legislation and with the help of legal professionals.
Venezuela without Filters (VSF by its Spanish acronym) is a project that seeks to defend digital rights in Venezuela.
To do this, it takes advantage of existing studies and recognized research results to document and obtain critical information on the scale of cyberattacks sponsored by the Venezuelan government against dissidents, independent media, and civil society organizations and activists, trying to identify government surveillance efforts and strengthening documentation on Internet censorship and network interference.
The results of the research conducted by VSF contain real-time updates on the status of the Internet in Venezuela, including detailed technical explanations of the blocks that have occurred in the country, and are published in both English and Spanish. The findings of this work are used to issue recommendations and share best practices for protecting digital rights. They can also be used by trainers and professionals working on digital security in the civic space.
This project proposes carrying out the technical implementation phase for DNSSEC deployment for zones delegated under the .py ccTLD; promoting the use of DNSSEC in the name servers managed by Telecommunications Service Providers, Web Hosting Providers and Paraguayan Government Agencies Organizations; and setting the stage for conducting education and information campaigns related to the used and importance of DNSSEC.
The implementation plan considers the use of open-source tools and intends to adopt a design that is simple enough to be adopted to meet the requirements of other ccTLDs, for example, ccTLDs that decentralize the management of their second-level domains can leave the technical implementation for certain segments pending until a later date.