Mozilla’s 2020 Internet Health Report is out.
Download the report to view our team and community members’ features on their health and unhealthy online experiences for 2020.
Special thanks to our co-founder and Global Lead, Uffa Modey, and our 2020 Community Leader, Hanna Pishchyk for being a part of the Mozilla Global Committee for publishing the Internet Health Report.
Have you ever wondered who we are, where we come from, and where are we going? We each carry with us our own culture which shapes our everyday lives and perspectives. Our paths converge on the internet: a digital space for preserving history, celebrating heritage, and learning what we share and what makes us unique. The Global Culture and Heritage Space at MozFest is a welcoming space for diverse people to bask in their heritage and share tips on how they’ve created dynamic cultural communities – both online and in-person.
MozFest 2021 tickets are live now and we would like to invite you to join us in the Global Culture and Heritage Space.
Are you looking to spice up your work and make it more accommodating and inclusive of others? MozFest has always provided a unique platform for technologies, governments, small and big tech companies, and everyday internet users to converge for electrifying activities that build trustworthy AI and shape a healthy internet. This year, it’s time to re-discover and map the paths of our culture and heritage at this collaborative festival. The Global Culture and Heritage Space will empower us to think critically about which cultures are not widely recognized and how to connect with other ways from different walks of life from our own.
This Space is open to everyone who would like to share their cultural experience as it affects their community and those who are interested in discussing solutions to problematic societal and cultural norms that influence the digital space. Bring your home culture to MozFest through the many exciting festival experiences hosted within this Space. Participants will learn more about the importance of global cultural considerations – both online and offline – while developing trustworthy AI. The Global Culture and Heritage Space will also explore digital inclusion issues faced by minority cultures, sharing important bits of their culture that require support from all of us to preserve their heritage through modern-day tech.
Digital Grassroots has been part of the Mozilla Community since 2018. This year, we are excited that co-Founder and Global Lead Uffa Modey is a Mozilla Festival Wrangler in the Global Culture and Heritage space. Our Founder and Chief Strategist, Esther Mwema is a Mozilla Festival Ambassador and is also wrangling the AI Wellness Space. We are eager to have our community join as facilitators in the first ever Virtual Mozilla Festival taking place in March 2021.
The Mozilla Festival 2021 Call for Proposals is now open. MozFest is looking for incredible, participatory, accessible, and inclusive sessions about #trustworthyAI and other topics! MozFest is co-designed with the community, welcoming sessions on a wide range of topics relevant to trustworthy AI and the internet health movement. MozFest harnesses the collective power of unexpected partnerships — from analog artists and public interest technologists to policymakers and queer activists — to creatively disrupt the status quo and reframe and reimagine our online world.
Whether your session application consists of digital storytelling, lecture series, AI workshops, community-centred think tanks, or a combination or none of these, we are looking to work with individuals and groups who are critically exploring issues around the development and implementation of AI.
Anyone can submit a session – you don’t need any particular expertise, just a great project or idea and the desire to collaborate and learn from festival participants. Since it’s online this year, we’re especially eager to see session proposals from those that haven’t been able to attend in year’s past due to travel restrictions. We have some tips on how to design your inclusive and engaging session.
If you or someone you know is interested in leading a session at MozFest next year in March 2021, you can submit your session idea here! The deadline is November 23, 2020. You are also invited to contribute to 6 Trustworthy AI Projects here. We look forward to having you be part of the #InternetHealth movement.
Digital Grassroots Ambassadors Program provides a soft landing introduction to internet governance and digital rights issues for youth from underrepresented regions. However, as digital technologies and human lives evolve daily, the program content needs to be constantly updated in order to keep up with the trends and challenges faced by our vibrant community.
The 3-day Ambassadors Program Mini-Hackathon was an open event that created a platform for everyone concerned about internet technology to review the DIGRA Internet Literacy Course content and provide insight into relevant information that should be included in the course in order to make it more impactful and relatable to underserved youth.
Special thanks to our amazing community members who joined us for this 3-days activity and shared their valuable insights and knowledge with us.
The outcomes of this hackathon will be updated in the next version of the DIGRA ILC and made openly accessible by the community.
Do you have ideas, comments, or questions about how we can make this activity bigger and better? Would you like to contribute to this hackathon in the future? If yes, we will love to hear from you. Please reach out to Team DIGRA via email.
Folks, it’s been a minute and we have missed you here at Digital Grassroots.
We are back with an exciting event dubbed the DIGRA Virtual Community Chill. We are eager to give you updates on what has been going on behind the scenes. You will all meet our new cool team of young community leaders who are shaping the evolution of Digital Grassroots; from Ambassador to a team member -Isn’t that cool?
This event is for you, our DIGRA community to get to know avenues through which you can actively partner with us and contribute to our initiatives in your context. We will also use this opportunity, to update you on our upcoming projects and share pathways for you to get involved in our activities going forward.
Digital Grassroots engages youth in internet governance, connects grassroots communities to institutions that enhance their autonomy in digital citizenship, and creates services that respond to the digital needs of underserved communities. We uphold the values of working and leading open and this event embodies just that. We are creating this space for us to interact better, listen to your community concerns, and have you openly meet our new team members.
Sign up to join us on 18th September 2020 from 10 am – 11.30 am UTC.
You can sign up until 1 hour before the event when we will send out the Zoom link to all who registered.
We look forward to having you at our virtual community chill. Cheers from Team DIGRA
What challenges do youth from underrepresented communities face in developing global policy for ICT and digital technology and what opportunities exist for their inclusion?
In the next 5 minutes, we will like to hear your youth voice on;
How can youth learn about core internet principles relating to openness, privacy, security, inclusion, and decentralization?
How can youth contribute to global policy development that shape our digital future?
What role do internet stakeholder organizations have to play in promoting digital literacy for internet governance among youth?
The outcomes of this survey will feed into our organizational research for young people from underrepresented communities globally to relay their concerns and aspirations on how to impactfully engage internet governance issues.
To be presented at RightsCon Online 2020.
Kindly complete by 24 JULY 2020
On October 27 of 2019, DIGRA President Esther Mwema and Vice President Uffa Modey hosted the session “I Want To Do That Too!” at 2019 MozFest. The session participants created a collectively written open letter for digital inclusion in modern age technology letter.
Read the full letter below:
“Hello Readers!
We are the attendees of “I Want To Do That Too!” session in the Digital Inclusion space of 2019 Annual Mozilla Festival. Our goal for inclusion in modern technology is yours as well and we invite you to join us in raising awareness on the challenges surrounding the use of new and emerging technology for people from minority groups.
A lack of inclusivity creates a digital divide which silences voices and prevents collective action on behalf of the under-represented group. A lack of access also contributes to limited opportunity in education or jobs. Without a collection of diverse voices, opportunities for innovation are stymied, which ultimately reduces the rate of socioeconomic development for all.
We want to be included; we don’t want our age, gender, sex, race, physical disability and social economic status to limit us from accessing digital services. This experience of inclusion in our present day can be limited in circumstances such as disability or social economic costs, any form of social discrimination online and services that are only available in certain regions and not others.
Technology must not be used to profile us, discriminate or spy on us. We want to have autonomy of technology so that we are not just consumers but also owners, inventors and creators. We want to be able to understand technologies and content so it should be in a language that we speak and understand. We want to have affordable access to devices and the Internet so that we can also benefit from being part of the digital world.
We call on all Internet stakeholders to explore avenues for promoting inclusion in digital technology. Key issues for review should include cost of internet connectivity, affordability of smart devices and equity and justice for human rights online. There should be transparency and accountability in technology design. Users should be able to trust that their interests are represented during policy development for ICT.
We hope you keep the fight going!”
Learn more about this letter here
Esther Mwema (@hadassahlouis) and Uffa Modey (@Fafa416) are passionate about engaging youth in internet problems. They founded Digital Grassroots in 2017, and now they’re adding an open leadership program to their grassroots efforts. Over the past few months, Esther and Uffa have been working to launch Community Leaders for Internet Health during Open Leaders X.
I interviewed Esther and Uffa to learn more about Community Leaders for Internet Health and how you can contribute to the work.
Community Leaders for Internet Health will spotlight internet issues in diverse local community contexts and collaborate with local leaders to engage with tools for open campaigning towards Internet Health. Our program enables people in underrepresented regions to assess the state of the Internet in their community and share their stories on the challenges and opportunities encountered.
Community Leaders for Internet Health was started as an avenue to raise awareness on the internet principles required to maintain a healthy internet ecosystem among youth from underrepresented communities. We realised that although young people now increasingly have access to the Internet, they are not often aware or included in defining best practises that ensure that the internet remains an open, inclusive, bottom-up and safe medium.
This programs aims to identify individuals who can lead community driven projects on internet health. In this 6 weeks program, we educate the participants on key internet themes using the issues highlighted in the Internet Health Report as a reference point (openness, privacy & security, web literacy, decentralization and inclusion). The participants will also be guided on how to design and implement minor projects on internet health within their community. Through these projects, the participants can contribute to the internet health movement by documenting and sharing their experiences in fueling a healthy internet in their community.
Showcasing the Community Leaders for Internet Health program at MozFest 2019 enabled us to get relevant feedback on ways to make the program more impactful. We were able to build upon Mozilla Festival 2018 in which we showcased the Digital Rights Monopoly game to bring awareness on digital inclusion issues affecting young people we are working with. In 2020, we are putting our two MozFest experiences into practice.
Through our 6 week program, participants will collaboratively learn open leadership models necessary for raising awareness on the impact of the internet on society. The participants will also receive guidance on open campaigning for the Internet Health Report from their assigned mentors. We believe the collaboration between mentors and community leaders will keep the internet health movement active even up to the next MozFest.
Lastly, we invite everyone concerned about capacity building programs on internet health to contact us with collaboration ideas for an impactful program.
Born in 1994, about the same time Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium and a commercialized Internet started to take form, the Internet has inextricably shaped my life and career.
At 16 years old, I got my first job at an Internet café. I had taught myself to type, and that was all I needed to teach people that they couldn’t just guess a password if they had not already set up an email account. Many young people in developing nations are still grappling to learn the computer (it’s far worse for adults). This fact, however, has not stalled a social media boom. There’s a robust consumer market, but the consumers aren’t reflected in the faces of those making decisions for them in shaping the future of the Internet.
At 17 years old, after living abroad alone as a young girl, I founded the SAFIGI Outreach Foundation (Safety First for Girls) in an effort to create a world where girls are empowered, equipped, and fulfilled for the benefit of the entire world. UN Online Volunteers allowed me to collaborate with over 250 volunteers in 50 countries to use Safety Education, Research, and Advocacy in order to respond to core issues affecting safety for girls across the globe.
At 23 years old, I was named an Internet Society 2017 Youth@IGF Programme fellow, and received funding to attend my inaugural Internet Governance Forum (IGF) at the United Nations Office at Geneva in Switzerland. What would become a harrowing journey across borders without a passport, this was my first glance at the wires behind the glossy and bright screen called the Internet and the birthplace of my brainchild, Digital Grassroots.
Shape Your Digital Future! could not have been a more fitting theme for the 2017 IGF. It inspired me to create Digital Grassroots in response to what I see as a gaping digital divide. Despite being major stakeholders of the Internet, young people from marginalized communities are underrepresented in major policy developments and implementation processes that shape our digital future. Events like the IGF can often be taken for granted, and I believe it sets a dangerous precedent for the global IGF to be circulating throughout Europe, when digital rights abuses like Internet shutdowns, social media tax, and threats to journalistic freedom of speech happen predominantly outside the region. While the IGF is mainly for dialogue, for persons who live under administrations that believe “governance” in Internet Governance means government, such dialogue could make a world of difference.
Our team of 2017 Youth@IGF fellows, all under 25 years old and living in 11 different nations across the globe, are passionate about the core values of the Internet. Together we are striving towards ensuring openness, security, privacy, web literacy, and decentralization of the Internet. Starting at the grassroots level, Digital Grassroots created an Internet literacy course to address the existing lack of awareness of basic Internet literacy knowledge in local communities in the developing world. Our Cohort 1 Outcome Report highlights the impact we’ve had. After three cohorts, the final one being in French, we have released a Communiqué on Youth Resolutions in Internet Governance. Mozilla Open Leaders gave our team the tools we needed to work and lead Open, helping us to empower and collaborate within inclusive communities. In 2018, we trained at least 300 young people in digital literacy and mentored over 100 in youth participation in Internet Governance.
Now at 24 years old, I recognize that representation matters if we want to see transformative change online and off. And this is why Digital Grassroots is so important. If we do not create these spaces for ourselves to participate and to be heard, no one will.
Young people seem to have to do more to get a seat at the table, especially young people from underrepresented regions. For most of our team it has meant sleepless nights, working long hours, and sacrificing our own resources to create a relatable Internet literacy course, build a Digital Rights Monopoly game, mentor youth in Internet Governance, travel to meetings, and organize youth IGFs and national IGFs. Digital Grassroots has also recently raised a petition asking local and international Internet Governance bodies to include youth at the table and we invite everyone to sign it.
It’s our future
The journey may start at the IGF but it does not end there. In 2019, I will be curating the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF) as the Next Net IFF Community Development fellow. Next Net focuses on the future of the Internet, opportunities, and risks. The Internet we want.
The Web may not have been invented for a person like me, who did not start out life as a digital native regardless of the era. Policymakers may brush someone like me aside because I don’t fit the market group and seem to have little influence. This is an oversight.
Youth have the power and skill to reinvent and shape an open and healthy Internet, if given the opportunity.
Regardless of attitudes towards young people, girls, and the underrepresented when it comes to participating in Internet issues, it will remain that the Internet is on our side; a neutral platform that embraces all equally.
We are inventing the Internet we want because our future depends on it.
We need your help! Are you a young person who wants to be a part of the making the Internet for everyone? Here’s where you can get started.
Like many people around the world, the Internet has contributed largely to the person I am today – building my knowledge base through access to a wealth of information. Without the Internet, a lot of things would not be as easy as they are right now.
As a recent graduate, I can relate to the fact that the Internet has been extremely helpful in aiding and improving student learning and research, as I can cite academic resources online and watch lectures from world class tutors from the comfort of my room. I am a strong advocate for open access in research, education, and data, and the Internet has been a powerful enabler in bridging knowledge gaps between privileged and underprivileged communities. The ability of the Internet to serve as a platform for disseminating information to all and sundry, regardless of race, gender, or nationality is what makes the Internet a global tool trusted by billions of people around the world.
In 2016, I founded Open Switch Africa, where I advocate for an accessible and inclusive Internet where information is not hindered by paywalls, regulation, or lack of connectivity.
Without connectivity we cannot have the vast interconnection that the Internet creates between billions of computers and devices, thereby forming an interconnection between people and information. Information brings knowledge, and knowledge, as they say, is power.
It has become increasingly clear that the Internet is at the core of almost all that we do. With automation and machine learning at the forefront of transforming the scope of future jobs, open education and open data driving the scope of education and research, and social media plus blogs disrupting the status quo in communication, very soon a much larger percentage of the world population will depend on the Internet for their livelihood. This is why it is extremely important, in preparation for the future, that we ensure all voices are heard when it comes to critical decisions regarding the future of the Internet.
The Internet is diversity by its very nature, and youth involvement is crucial to shaping the Internet of tomorrow. Young people are already shaping the online culture in so many ways. They are building their dream Internet. And yet when it comes to policy discussions, they are not at the table.
We need policies that protect us and prepare us for the future of the Internet, while ensuring that no one is left behind.
Visit #CountMyVoice and help build an Internet that’s for everyone!
