Appropriate Technologies for Community-Owned Information: Civic Innovation and Territorial Defence in Latin America
By Marcela Basch
Faced with material inequalities and surveillance, organisations across the region are building the tools they need to produce and protect their own data. From Colombia to Chile, DemocráTICa’s Impact Portfolio brings together experiences of communities weaving digital sovereignty through networks.
An environmental monitor in the Peruvian Andes takes a water sample. They record the values, take a photograph with their mobile phone and upload it to a platform. If the pH reading is scientifically inconsistent, the system rejects it and recommends checking the source; if it is correct, it is added to a database built from community reports.
In southern Bolívar, Colombia, a group of young people travels along rural tracks to document the impact of mining on the region’s wetlands, which are becoming increasingly dry. They then upload their findings to an online citizen platform, creating a repository that can challenge official environmental narratives with evidence.
In Latin America, technology is neither an accessory nor a luxury. It has become basic infrastructure — for businesses and governments, but also for communities that are often overwhelmed by extractive industries.
Yet there are enormous material and operational gaps between the technological resources available to large corporations and those accessible to civil society organisations.
According to data from DemocráTICa — the programme promoted by the Digital Democracy Initiative (DDI), CIVICUS and Wingu to advance inclusive digital democracy across Latin America and the Caribbean — 55% of civil society organisations in the region operate with annual budgets below USD 50,000, while almost half report gaps in specific technical knowledge.
In this context, advancing digital sovereignty becomes an imperative: communities need to be able to produce, store and analyse their own information in order to protect their rights without depending on platforms that can, in many cases, also function as tools of surveillance.
Documenting pollution: Apu Catequil and community water monitoring
This need is particularly evident in the Peruvian regions of La Libertad and Cajamarca, where open-pit mining has been reshaping both the landscape and the lives of local communities since the 1990s.
Communities began to notice changes in water quality through unmistakable signs:
“They see that the water changes colour and taste, and that livestock have swollen stomachs, fail to gain weight or develop health problems.”
explains Guillermo Martínez de Pinillos, coordinator of Apu Catequil / Red Catequil, an association focused on territorial studies and social and environmental development in northern Peru.
But even when the consequences of pollution were evident, mining companies denied that their activities were having a negative impact, while public authorities failed to intervene.
In response, communities organised environmental monitoring committees that recorded pollution indicators at key locations. But these records had one significant weakness: they were written down in notebooks, leaving the information fragile and scattered.
“A lot of that data has been lost. It was kept on sheets of paper; leadership changed within the organisations and the information disappeared”, Martínez de Pinillos explains.
The information imbalance therefore continued to grow: the State and companies had laboratories; communities had damp scraps of paper.
Apu Catequil takes its name from an Andean deity associated with the anger of water and the climate, and therefore with environmental change.
The organisation created a Community Digital Water Monitor, a digital repository designed to bring all these records together.
The platform includes a form of information quality control: if someone accidentally enters an inconsistent value, the system blocks it until it can be checked against the original handwritten record.
Once validated, the information can be incorporated into digitised, officially headed documents, enabling communities to present a scientific counter-narrative before different branches of the State, the media and the wider public.
With support from DemocráTICa’s Fund mechanism, Apu Catequil is training members of territorial environmental monitoring committees to become multipliers who can teach others how to use the platform.
They are also organising a digital marathon to upload historical records before they disappear.
In this way, if livestock become ill or crops deteriorate, communities will be able to draw on georeferenced data to demand effective oversight from public authorities.
No wetlands, no life: Trochas y Ríos in Simití
A similar situation can be found in the Simití region, a kind of “metaphorical island” located between the Magdalena River and the Serranía de San Lucas in Colombia’s Central Andes, where life revolves around water.
According to Richard Payares Correa, Director of Territorial Studies at the Colectivo Rural Trochas y Ríos para la Paz, the expansion of large-scale mining after the pandemic is causing sedimentation in 25 wetlands that are vital to the local fishing economy.
“When mining waste, minerals, mud and rocks start blocking the channels — the tributaries — water can no longer reach the wetlands, so they stop being oxygenated”, he explains. “Without oxygen, the water stagnates; it becomes dead water, it turns green, and fish can no longer complete their natural reproductive cycle. Here in Simití, fishing is absolutely central to the economy, so there is sedimentation in environmental terms and economic loss in social terms.”
In the past, citizen complaints were little more than a scattered “cry” that authorities systematically ignored, Payares says.
“You need to demonstrate organisational strength, and the first step is to collect data, systematise it and build a solid evidence base from which action can be taken.”
With support from DemocráTICa, the collective therefore created a digital reporting platform and trains young people to collect evidence of pollution and upload it.
The goal is to build citizen knowledge about the environmental and social consequences of mining.
There is another dimension to this environmental activism: documenting the biological death of a body of water can also be a careful way of exposing territorial dispossession without placing young people at direct risk.
The Simití area was one of those most deeply affected by the armed conflicts that devastated Colombia. Since the signing of the peace agreements in 2016, these conflicts have been reconfigured in mining territories, where multinational companies often establish economic relationships with armed groups that remain active despite the agreements.
Technology therefore makes it possible to systematise complaints about water pollution and transform them, carefully and strategically, into effective legal advocacy.
The right to understand: Precisar and functional literacy
Making good decisions requires access to good information.
But this is more complex than it might seem. Information not only needs to be reliable; people also need to be able to understand it. It must be relevant, useful and manageable rather than overwhelming.
“Not noise — and there is so much of that at the moment.”
says Male Hoffman, Executive Director of Fundación Precisar, in Chile.
Precisar emerged after Chile’s constitutional processes, when the team realised that many citizens did not understand what was actually being discussed.
“It partly started as a joke,” Male recalls.
“Andrea — Raglianti, our Project Coordinator — and I would read the headlines and need to work with a lawyer because we couldn’t understand any of it. I simply couldn’t make sense of it. I remember thinking, ‘Well, from where I am standing, I don’t understand this.’”
This led them to think more deeply about how information reaches different groups across Chile.
“The right to understand goes beyond plain language; it means that information is complete, that people can actually find it and that it is useful for something”, Andrea adds.
“It needs to respond to the needs of a very broad range of people — not only those who read regularly, those who already know, or those who are formally educated”, Male explains. “It should mean that ‘Señora Juanita’, for example, can find new embroidery styles for the aprons she sells at the market, and that the information circulating is useful to her.”
To explore how much citizens understood and how satisfied they were with their relationship to information, the team developed a consultation with support from DemocráTICa entitled “How do you get your information today?
Preliminary findings showed that 71.5% of respondents needed some form of adaptation in order to understand the news.
In many cases, news content created more confusion than clarity.
To address this gap, they designed a WhatsApp bot that helps people understand how the State works.
As part of DemocráTICa’s POLIS mechanism, they also developed an educational module entitled “Disinformation without panic: how to respond without amplifying”, designed to strengthen civil society teams’ capacity to respond to media noise.
The module forms part of the Innovation and Digital Governance course within the DemocráTICa School.
Bringing regional debates down to earth: Linterna Verde
Given the enormous diversity of challenges affecting Latin American citizens in digital environments, how can societies exercise full digital citizenship and sovereignty based on their own needs, rather than importing models designed elsewhere?
Through DemocráTICa’s Network mechanism, many organisations work to strengthen ties between different initiatives.
One of them is Linterna Verde, an organisation created in Colombia with a regional reach that acts as a connecting node.
Its mission is to empower civil society organisations in Latin America’s digital public debate. Its role is to bring global discussions on internet governance and artificial intelligence regulation down to the realities of Latin America.
Its Executive Director, Daniela Flórez, defines digital sovereignty as:
“The capacity of each country to determine its own rules in the digital environment, guaranteeing everyone’s rights and responding to local contexts based on their own realities.”
For years, Linterna Verde has worked on capacity building and creating bridges across civil society.
It also plays a strategic role: the organisation engages with major platforms such as Meta to escalate cases involving unjust account closures or moderation problems, while also collaborating with organisations carrying out direct activism on the ground.
Within DemocráTICa’s Network mechanism, Linterna Verde recently produced “Diálogos Cruzados”, a series in which activists and experts from across the region share different perspectives on digital sovereignty, hate speech, technology-facilitated gender-based violence and other issues.
In partnership with the digital media outlet La Silla Vacía, these dialogues were published as part of the Democracy and Technology Network, expanding the range of perspectives and voices contributing to the constantly evolving space of online human rights.
“What we created was a dissemination platform where we could bring together conversations from many parts of Latin America about what was happening with regulation in each country, as well as experiences and lessons learned”, Daniela explains.
These resources deepen the debate, encourage reflection and support the work of organisations engaged in activism and advocacy.
In the face of precarity and single narratives: more diversity and technological sovereignty
As civil society organisations working to protect and expand community, territorial and digital rights across Latin America become increasingly interconnected, complex processes of shared learning emerge.
Each actor benefits from the experience of others and learns from the region’s diversity.
This is why DemocráTICa places particular emphasis on catalysing these exchanges through a regional network that enables organisations to strengthen one another.
Initiatives such as the Weaving Digital Sovereignty sessions seek to collectively shape a regional rights agenda.
The organisations connected through the programme extend far beyond those mentioned here, and their work is highly diverse.
Some initiatives focus on ensuring bilingual access to justice for young people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Others, based in Argentina, work to strengthen rights frameworks for babies and school-age children. Others focus on protecting women or LGBTQ+ communities.
From Mexico to Patagonia, activist teams across the region demonstrate that the struggles are many and urgent — and that technology must always be an ally, not a spy and not a burden.
True civic innovation in Latin America does not lie in developing the most sophisticated application.
It lies in finding appropriate technologies, in both senses of the term: technologies that are appropriate to the problems they need to solve and the contexts in which they operate, and technologies that communities can truly make their own.
For this reason, every process begins locally and uses dialogue to identify the most suitable ways to overcome connectivity limitations and security risks while achieving the greatest possible impact.
Ultimately, the challenge itself is not new: it is about managing and optimising knowledge so that it can help people live better lives.
About the authorMarcela Basch is a journalist, literature graduate, university lecturer, communications specialist and nexialist. She founded El Plan C, a news platform focused on collaborative economies and free culture, and co-founded and co-curated the Encuentro Internacional Comunes. She is a member of the Open Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the global Creative Commons community. She has worked as an editor at Noticias magazine, Libre newspaper, Grupo de Revistas La Nación and Lamujerdemivida magazine. She also wrote the experimental newsletter diezpalabras and is currently part of the editorial team at Perfil.com.. |
