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This post was authored by Laurence Meyer and Sarah Chander. Graphic recordings by Blanche Ellis and Temujen Gunawardena.

The Decolonising Digital Rights project is a collaborative design process to build a decolonising programme for the European digital rights field.

Together, 30 participants are working to envision and build toward a decolonised field. This blog post charts the progress, learnings and challenges of the process so far. 

In 2020, a group of people from DFF and European Digital Rights (EDRi) recognised that the digital rights field wasn’t currently equipped enough to holistically address technological harms as a product of multiple and intersecting types of oppressions.

This recognition was informed by the acknowledgment of missed opportunities and the harms the current siloed approach led to, but also by the hope, desire and visions of another digital reality. 

In Phase II, we are facing challenges to keep hope and desire afloat while staying true to a decolonial ethos

In Phase II, we are facing challenges to keep hope and desire afloat while staying true to a decolonial ethos.

From vision to process

Collective dreaming and radical reimaginings are crucial to processes that seek to challenge the status quo. The next challenge now is to move from vision to practice. This is, of course, much harder. 

Not only do we face the difficult task of understanding what concrete steps we and the field will need to take to achieve our visions, we must also build a process that reflects and implements these ideals. More than simply theory or outcomes, decolonising is fundamentally about that process, the journey that will get us there.

Our major challenge has been to build a collective design process that is genuinely decolonial; that does more than adopt the term but applies and embodies it. While we have been encouraged by the depth of the experiences, knowledges and backgrounds our group represents, we have also struggled in many ways. 

Our major challenge has been to build a collective design process that is genuinely decolonial

“Moving at the pace of trust” during a pandemic

In the film Privilege from Yvonne Rainer, the words “Utopia, the more impossible it seems, the more necessary it becomes” appear on a (now very much vintage looking) computer screen.

We are not living in hopeful times. Dreaming these days doesn’t come easy. We’re living through a global pandemic, which has heightened inequalities and drastically weakened our personal and collective systems of care. It has hit marginalised communities the harshest and boosted existing power imbalances between the global North and the global South. It made a lot of things that had previously brought us comfort and support inaccessible or dangerous.

The political response to the pandemic reinforced digital divides and exclusion, putting pressure on organisations to respond to many urgent matters while still under-resourced – all within a European political environment in which surveillance measures and attack on human rights have multiplied. Many of us find ourselves exhausted, if not entirely depleted. 

A decolonising process must rely on trust. Many of our core participants have underlined this as an essential first step to do the work

A decolonising process must rely on trust. Many of our core participants have underlined this as an essential first step to do the work. Since the project’s inception, we’ve been meeting online. That has been a barrier to building trust.

There is also the question of continuity. Many of the current participants in Phase II weren’t part of the envisioning meeting. Because one of the process’s objectives is to break down the silo between racial, social and economic justice organisations and the current digital rights field, many of the people involved don’t know each other, come from different organisational traditions, don’t speak the same mother tongues, and have potentially different understanding of what decolonising means.

Building trust among each other, creating a sense of community between everyone involved in a journey that requires us to be hopeful in a very difficult time, in Zoom and Big Blue Button rooms, is a very hard task.

Failing as a way of learning: assuming iteration and fumbling

During the first period of Phase II, which ran from June to the end of September 2021, each of our working groups worked on a theory of change concerning their thematic focus area (programmatic, funding, organisational, collaboration, and public engagement).

They worked to identify the long-term goal in their thematic area, what the current needs and problems are, pinpointed the pertinent stakeholders, where resistance might lie, etc.

During this first period, we also welcomed an artist, Ahmed Isam Aldin, who will be documenting our process via an art piece.

But the central challenge has been to turn our group into a community, in particular one that centres care over outcomes, refusing the capitalist and extractive dynamics so often present in joint projects, even in the NGO space. 

But the central challenge has been to turn our group into a community, in particular one that centres care over outcomes

On 11 and 12 October 2021 we met for our second plenary. It began with each working group receiving feedback on the theory of change they drafted for their thematic focus area. The second part of the plenary was a moment rich with conversations, during which many of our group shared their views on how the process could be improved.

This meant that although some space in the planned agenda was already dedicated to reflection and feedback on the process, we then actually agreed as a group to  a much more drastic change to the agenda to respond to the group’s expressed need for a wider and longer discussion about the process.

Many core participants felt rushed into delivering a theory of change, feeling that they were asked to “produce”

Many core participants felt rushed into delivering a theory of change, feeling that they were asked to “produce” at an inadapted pace. One of the core participants stated that “we need to move at the pace of trust”. This pace might be different for each working group.

Some participants also shared their feeling that the current process lacked the energy felt during the first envisioning meeting. Others told the group that they felt both excited and overwhelmed by the task at hand. The task itself felt too big. The process seemed too complex. To deal with these concerns the group arranged a self-governed break-out room session around how to create ownership over the process.

We realised that … in our efforts to “get things done” and “show impact” to our funders and others, we run the risk of prioritising timelines, deadlines and outcomes over relationships.

As process facilitators (EDRi and DFF), we realised that, as we are ourselves ignoring our own needs for more spaciousness and meaningful connections, especially during these times, in our efforts to “get things done” and “show impact” to our funders and others, we run the risk of prioritising timelines, deadlines and outcomes over relationships.

Creating care and assessing our own limitations

Collaboration is not an invocation, it is a set of practices.

How do we divest from artificial feelings of urgency, how do we centre connectedness and creativity in the process? How do we make this journey a nourishing space instead of an extractive one, which fuels utopia in a time that desperately needs it? How do we build in the process the emotional dimension of decolonising and the need for centring mental health and wellness? 

Following the plenary in October, we held two drop-in sessions during which we discussed how to concretely implement these wished improvements.  

There, the participants attending confirmed a desire expressed during the plenary by others to have an in-person meeting, stating that “there is just something about these Zoom rooms, the online format, the fact that you can put your camera off and disconnect. It has become too much and it is something we are not used to”.

All present also agreed that in-person meetings have potential exclusionary risks, connected to colonial dynamics, notably when thinking of vaccine borders, visa rights etc. 

All present also agreed that in-person meetings have potential exclusionary risks, connected to colonial dynamics, notably when thinking of vaccine borders, visa rights etc. 

If the need to build trust was clearly stated, some also warned about the risk of disengagement if we were to spend too much time reflecting on the process instead of trying models long enough to test their sustainability. 

We will therefore have one-on-one conversations with each participant in January as a way to consult on a modified format of the process, as well as on the possibility of an in-person meeting.

We have also been continuing our consultations with experts on collective care who advised us not to neglect our own need for community care as process facilitators.

Paradoxically, even if the current situation feels turbulent and uncertain, it confirms more than ever the need to decolonise our ways of working together

Paradoxically, even if the current situation feels turbulent and uncertain, it confirms more than ever the need to decolonise our ways of working together, as well as our goal setting, within the digital rights field and beyond. It takes time to change the mindset of a lifetime, of having to be productive and to prove one’s worth and value. This is especially true as women of colour, of whom not much is expected except failure and invisibilised care. Will we be allowed to fail up? 

It is challenging, demands patience, generosity for mistakes and failure…. and a lot of introspection. There are many things not usually seen as good measures for success when evaluating projects in and outside of the non-profit sector, none of them quantifiable and transformable in easy-to-read data without completely losing their core value.

As we enter a period of transition on many fronts and say goodbye for now to Nani Jansen-Reventlow, a person who fought tirelessly for this process to come to light, we wish everyone a restful and sweet entry in the new year, hoping for 2022 to allow us to design the necessary utopias for these impossible times.