Sovereignty Cannot Be Downloaded: Why the Future of Communication Is Local, Community-Led and Diverse
By Gabriela Herrera Gómez
Digitalisation in Latin America is becoming a process of technological sovereignty and co-creation rooted in local territories. The organisations featured in DemocráTICa’s Impact Portfolio show both the challenges and the lessons that emerge when technology is placed at the service of collective processes.
Reaching the most remote communities of the Puna, in the province of Jujuy in Argentina’s far north, requires a five- to six-hour journey at more than 3,000 metres above sea level. This is the journey undertaken by the Wikimedistas de Jujuy team with one goal: to train community editors who can expand the spaces where global knowledge is created and shared.
Their interest emerged from seeing how their communities’ stories were often written from external perspectives or locked behind platform paywalls. They found a mechanism that not only opened up access to knowledge, but also enabled communities to become sovereign over their own digital identities.
“Our most important role is to make our local communities visible, because we have historically been underrepresented in a country where narratives centred on a Eurocentric identity have predominated. We want to show other Argentine realities and build a network with neighbouring provinces such as Salta and Tucumán, with which we share a great deal of culture”, explains Luis Fernando Flores, coordinator of the Wikimedistas de Jujuy project.
Their work is a response to this invisibility:
“Sometimes you would search for information about a small settlement or town in Jujuy and it simply wasn’t there, it was out of date, or what it said was completely wrong. Our work is about correcting incorrect information — a population figure, for example, or a road located in the wrong place.”
This shift in approach, supported by the regional DemocráTICa initiative through technical assistance and resources for locally rooted projects, is not an isolated phenomenon in the highlands. It is spreading across the continent as an infrastructure of resistance, adapting technology to the languages and needs of each geography.
In Peru, for example, Asociación Apu Catequil is migrating environmental monitoring records to AI-powered infrastructure, enabling Indigenous communities to build data-based counter-narratives in the face of mining activities. In Ecuador, Fundación ADHA uses the MANKA infrastructure through WhatsApp so that rural women can manage information about their own territorial needs.
A similar approach can be found in the community of El Culebrón Timbal. Forty kilometres from Argentina’s capital, in the semi-rural neighbourhood of Cuartel Quinto in Moreno, the cultural production organisation and school has spent 20 years addressing inequality through the community-based living culture movement.
Through workshops, a socially managed primary school and an educational farm, its approach places digitalisation firmly within territorial action. Transforming global infrastructures from within is one possible route, but building digital communities from the suburbs brings its own political challenges.
Diana Mello, project monitoring coordinator, explains that digitalisation only recently became an organisational priority due to difficulties in accessing resources and funding.
With support from DemocráTICa, young people from the community produced three podcasts focused on digital democracy as part of a ten-episode series entitled El pulso y la trama. The series explored topics including popular education, territorial art, youth and cultural production in the suburbs.
The project became a technical tool for strengthening what the organisation calls “street democracy” — a travelling initiative that takes workshops and performances to neighbourhood squares using an old bus — by bringing physical expressions of community life into the digital ecosystem.
However, challenging dominant public narratives and documenting complex realities can expose communities to very real surveillance risks.
Tella, an open-source application developed by the organisation Horizontal, was created to reduce this vulnerability. Tella works as an encrypted vault that protects the identities, contacts and evidence collected by activists, journalists and human rights defenders working in repressive environments — from election monitoring in Nigeria and Belarus to documenting environmental crimes in Brazil.
“What it does is hide information on people’s phones and encrypt it, so that if you are crossing a border, or documenting police violence and someone confiscates your phone, they cannot access the evidence to delete it or use it against you”, explains Carolina Hadad, coordinating member of Horizontal.
The tool’s resilience lies in its context-sensitive design: it does not require an internet connection to protect data and is designed to work even for communities facing high levels of vulnerability, including LGBT groups in countries where their identities are criminalised.
In this way, technology stops being a vector of surveillance and becomes an infrastructure for self-defence and collective care.
“An international organisation working in an African country contacted us. They wanted to train the journalists who would be collecting data. They were going to connect to an Open Data Kit server, which is one of the servers we work with, and we helped them think through what would make sense for their context, their risk scenario and the risks those people were experiencing.”
Other examples of adapting digital platforms to local realities can be found across the region.
In Colombia, organisations such as Fundación Tierra Montemariana co-design digital systems with young people that are optimised for low-connectivity environments. They have developed a Digital Citizens’ Manifesto to share advocacy mechanisms that strengthen the participation of rural women and young people in Bolívar.
Meanwhile, in Cali, Halcón Mirón uses artificial intelligence through WhatsApp to translate technical government information into audio and plain language, enabling communities in underserved neighbourhoods to meaningfully exercise public oversight.
The challenges of structural precarity
Deploying these processes in Latin America means recognising the material realities of the region.
According to DemocráTICa’s baseline data, 45% of these collectives face gaps in technical knowledge, while 55% operate with limited annual budgets of less than USD 50,000.
Working under these conditions means that technological achievements are often threatened by basic shortcomings in hardware, limited digital literacy and intermittent connectivity.
For El Culebrón Timbal, these structural limitations shaped the project from the outset.
“We didn’t even have enough computers for everyone; the organisation’s level of digitalisation was very low", explains Diana Mello.
This meant that one of the main challenges was recognising that, even if young people are considered “digital natives”, pre-existing inequalities can create significant digital gaps that affect their ability to adapt to content production.
The team required the ongoing support of two facilitators, as well as an additional donation of computers from Fundación Banco Hipotecario de Argentina.
Mello notes that grassroots cultural organisations generally operate under unequal conditions when it comes to marketing, design and positioning skills, making it harder to meet the demands of the digital world.
Wikimedistas de Jujuy, meanwhile, faces geographical and literacy barriers that slow down its educational processes.
Working in remote territories alongside Fundación Puna, the team must contend with recurring power cuts, poor mobile signal and participants for whom digital tools are completely unfamiliar.
This forces them to design long, multi-stage in-person workshops: an initial session discussing what the internet says about their communities; a two-week interval before a second meeting dedicated to uploading images to Wikimedia Commons; and a third session focused entirely on writing and editing Wikipedia articles.
These barriers are compounded by the challenges of designing software for contexts where devices may be outdated, or of relying on free solutions that can leave field teams exposed.
Carolina Hadad explains that one of Tella’s greatest challenges is developing infrastructure that can run efficiently on older mobile phones while remaining intuitive for people without technical training — guaranteeing security without creating additional friction.
She also warns against rapidly adopting AI-generated solutions without external audits:
“In spaces where privacy is critical, I see a risk in the trend of quickly creating an application and sharing it with activists who, for example, may be working under a dictatorship. Established tools such as Tella or Signal undergo external security audits and code reviews. A new technology may have vulnerabilities and put people at risk.”
Context-sensitive innovation and the decolonisation of data
Despite these structural challenges, organisations have understood that the path towards digitalisation is not about adapting themselves to technology, but rather about shaping and situating technology around collective processes.
“It is not about how technology changes community-based living culture, but the other way around. I believe community-based living culture reminds us that actions should not exist only within the digital sphere. They need to be complemented by physical, embodied actions in the territory, through encounters with others, because the digital universe is biased”, says Mello from El Culebrón Timbal.
In other words, when tools are adapted to local realities, they stop functioning as instruments of information extraction and can instead become platforms for legitimate resistance.
For Wikimedistas de Jujuy, making local knowledge visible also means applying ethical criteria defined by the communities themselves:
“We emphasise very strongly that not all knowledge should be made public; not everything belongs on Wikipedia. For example, we are very careful with knowledge linked to ancestral medicine because we do not want to reproduce extractive practices around ancestral knowledge. We have mainly released photographs of flora and fauna, but without extensive descriptions of their uses precisely to prevent this”, explains Flores, the project coordinator.
This understanding of data sovereignty also includes decisions as specific and important as deliberately removing geolocation metadata.
During workshops, participants are taught to delete geographical coordinates from images before uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. The reason is directly linked to territorial conservation:
“If we uploaded a geolocated photograph of one of the cactus species that is endangered here, we could actually encourage someone to go there and steal the plant.”
The decision about what should be digitalised — and what should not — therefore remains under community control.
Sustainability and continuity: beyond funding
The real impact of these initiatives can be measured by their ability to take root and remain within communities after funding ends.
To achieve this, organisations develop holistic strategies that go beyond simply creating a product. Instead, they focus on strengthening autonomous capacities and ensuring that communities develop a political sense of ownership over the tools they use.
From Horizontal’s perspective, Tella’s sustainability is not limited to distributing the app through conventional commercial stores.
Registering through the Google Play Store or Apple App Store may be dangerous or inaccessible in some regions. For this reason, the organisation distributes the tool through alternative channels such as Telegram, Trello and F-Droid — a private repository that does not require Google accounts or retain download records.
The app currently has more than 20,000 traceable active users, although its actual reach is higher because it is also shared directly through activist networks.
To support long-term adoption, Tella works with local trainers who adapt in-person workshops to the specific risks of their contexts.
The ecosystem is also complemented by Shira, an application designed to train organisations to recognise social engineering and phishing attacks, helping protect sensitive information within civic networks in an ongoing and practical way.
Community processes, meanwhile, demonstrate that technological tools can develop a life of their own once territories take ownership of them.
After completing the initial podcast series, the young people involved with El Culebrón Timbal decided to continue producing content independently.
They now manage their own channels, go into the streets to interview other organisations and choose the issues they want to prioritise themselves, while actively looking for new sources of funding to sustain a permanent communication role.
In Jujuy, Wikimedistas have built continuity into their work by presenting a public account of their activities at the end of each implementation cycle.
Although they recognise that virtual participation can be exclusionary because of distances and transport costs in northern Argentina, the team has added a person responsible for remote support to provide ongoing follow-up to new editors.
In this way, the community is ensuring that auditing, correcting and updating the encyclopaedia becomes a regular and autonomous practice.
As Carolina Hadad from Tella concludes:
“In today’s world, we invite people to understand themselves as subjects, not simply as recipients. Technology should not be understood as something fixed, singular or neutral, because it is not. The tools we use respond to interests that are not necessarily aligned with our individual interests — and we have agency.”
About the authorGabriela Herrera Gómez is a colombian writer, historian, social media manager and journalist specialising in culture and human rights. She has published in several Colombian media outlets, including Revista BOCAS, El TIEMPO, Cerosetenta, Círculo de Mujeres – Revista SEMANA and Revista Gaceta. She has worked at Colombia’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Knowledge, Universidad de los Andes and FOTOMuseo – Colombia’s National Museum of Photography. She was awarded an academic excellence scholarship for the Master’s in Journalism at Universidad de los Andes. |
