Bot Populi

A critical strategic intervention we made in the year 2018-19 was the establishment of an alternative media platform, Bot Populi. This space is dedicated to looking at all things digital from a social justice and global South perspective. In partnership with the Just Net Coalition and five other organizations invested in a progressive politics of social and economic justice, Bot Populi has been conceptualized as a media space to foreground the missing global South perspective in the digital and data rights sphere.

In 2018, we explored raising resources for the initiative and were able to bring together some funding to kick-start the project and assemble a part-time team at IT for Change to work on this. By January-February 2019, the project team developed a mock-up for the media space, outlining initial design and content elements, which was presented to the collaborating organizations and advisers at a side-meeting within the Just Net Coalition workshop program in March 2019. IT for Change will be working to formally launch Bot Populi in June 2019 in Tunis at the RightsCon summit.

Writing and publications

Through academic research, writing and other inputs, IT for Change continued to make critical interventions in the areas of digital rights, democracy and communication for social change – deepening our connections with leading media and communication scholars in London School of Economics, University of Sydney and University of Cambridge. We were invited by Loughborough University to join a global network of scholar-activists working on the public sphere to propose new ways to think about emerging publics.

We introduced the idea of “institutional listening” as a way of conceptualizing the new regimes of citizen rights needed to translate voice into the right to be heard in datafied democracy. The unique Southern perspective that IT for Change brings to the debate on digital rights has garnered much appreciation. In April 2018, Anita Gurumurthy was invited to speak at a public event organized by the University of Sydney, where she made a presentation on interrogating the digital rights debate from a Southern standpoint.  Anita Gurumurthy was also invited to deliver a keynote at the Conference on Data justice organized by the Data Justice Lab, Cardiff University in May 2018, centred on the theme of exploring social justice in the age of datafication.

We also made a lot of headway in terms of writing for peer reviewed journals and contributing to edited volumes. We  authored a paper on Democracy and the Algorithmic Turn- Issues, Challenges and the Way Forward for the July 2018 edition of the Sur International Journal of Human Rights, which outlined the ways in which democracy is being remade through datafication. This essay was translated into Spanish and Portugese as well.

We also contributed a commentary on the political practice of empowerment in digital times from the Southern perspective, to a Routledge publication on Power, Empowerment and Social Change that is scheduled for release in late 2019. Additionally, we were selected to contribute to a forthcoming edited book by the University of Minnesota Press on the Global Debates in the Digital Humanities where  we are constructing theory ground-up, bringing in insights from the work of our field centre in Mysuru with adolescent girls on intergenerational leadership and grassroots citizenship.

Events (National)

We have been invited to participate in key academic and research conferences at the national level by civil society think tanks and mainstream institutions.

• In October 2018, Anita Gurumurthy participated in the expert round table on Artificial Intelligence, organized by the Tandem Research Collective in Goa.
  

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  In January 2019, Meenakshi Yadav made a presentation at the Communication Quotient, an annual conference on Contemporary Media and Communication Ecology: Discourses and Dynamics, organized by Symbiosis School of Media and Communication in Bengaluru.
• In March 2019, Deepti Bharthur provided an input on potential themes for future research into the digitally-mediated public sphere at a round table on Social Media and Democracy in Bengaluru. This event was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with Social Science One, and the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age.

Impact

Our work has had impacts both on the ground and in the discursive space of policy change. The Spoorthi project has produced a cadre of grassroots leaders – information and data stewards – equipped with a critical understanding of citizenship rights and local democracy and equipped with the skills to work towards inclusive local governance in their communities. Our writings and advocacy at global and national levels have continually brought in a cutting-edge ‘South-centred’ understanding to the mainstream debates on digital rights.

Plans for 2019-20

We will continue our efforts under the Spoorthi project to build the capacities of data stewards and roll out the community-based spatial data system. We will also seek to engineer critical linkages with local city based agencies such as the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board for the platform to have greater impact. In the coming year, we will also focus on building up Bot Populi as a go to space for critical technology justice debates and issues – crystallizing our dissemination and outreach strategies for various constituencies and influencers in the space and furthering our cross-media engagement. We have already identified and initiated conversations with a pool of contributors – cutting-edge thinkers on the digital economy, data justice, labour rights, platform governance, social justice movements, surveillance capitalism and a host of other themes – in order to ensure a steady stream of articles to attract and retain a dedicated audience. We will continue to contribute to field-building in digital rights, striving to understand changes from the standpoint of the global South.