OVOF Tech Deep-dive
The Our Voices Our Futures (OVOF) Deep-dive is an annual three-day mini-institute conducted virtually for activists, researchers, artists and other human rights practitioners from around the world to understand and critique, but also to occupy and expand digital spaces for democratic engagement. The Deep-dive was realized due to OVOF’s belief that feminists, communities and structurally silenced women and people should participate in the creation of digital technologies, make collective decisions regarding their governance, and be able to safely and securely make interventions to interrupt dominant discourse, subvert power structures, challenge private ownership and state over-regulation of public online space, and demand accountability. OVOF strives for a future in which our online lives – and the technologies which shape them – will be more inclusive and vibrant, advance human rights, and strengthen democracy everywhere.
Participants are given feminist frameworks and tools with which to critically examine their own advocacy and rights-based claims in relation to online space and digital rights, interrogate and untangle their assumptions and strategies, and unpack and recast their relationship with digital technologies.
Till I was 17, I did not have a word for who I was, or could be. I did not know I was a transgender girl. But as a 16-year-old, I discovered the internet.
– Nadika, The Smartphone Freed Me
Participants are given feminist frameworks and tools with which to critically examine their own advocacy and rights-based claims in relation to online space and digital rights, interrogate and untangle their assumptions and strategies, and unpack and recast their relationship with digital technologies.
The Deep-dive is hosted by the OVOF consortium, a global South feminist-led consortium dedicated to amplifying the voices of structurally silenced women and people in all domains of civic space, including online space. It is co-created and conducted by consortium members CREA and the Association for Progressive Communications.
The Deep-dive emphasizes linking theory to practice and aims to foreground queer theory, feminist theory and global South examples, case studies and perspectives as much as possible. This Deep-dive first began in 2021, and focused on misinformation/disinformation; in its second iteration, the Deep-dive focused on feminist digital technological infrastructures for the future. Presented by Dr. Nishant Shah, a queer feminist scholar, researcher, and technologist who studies and teaches digital cultures, the curriculum is co-created by CREA, APC and Dr Nishant Shah through rigorous context analysis, and by understanding emergent issues and needs of movements and activists, and aligning those with the goals of the consortium.
After each Deep-dive, we engage with the alumni on an ongoing basis to measure and capture the impact of the Deep-dive in their lives and work. For example, following the first Deep-dive in 2021, we interviewed participants six-eight months after to capture and reflect on long-term impact and support planning for the next Deep-dive. To create sustained and ongoing work on digital rights and digital spaces, we opened up our second Deep-dive to alumni from the first cohort as well. We plan to continue engaging with alumni to create a robust community of changemakers working on transforming digital spaces.
