Digital Civil Society Lab 2024-25 Practitioner Fellows Project Highlights

Jepchumba Cheluget

Redrawing Digital Boundaries through Indigenous Knowledge Systems

Jepchumba’s work during the DCSL Practitioner Fellowship emerged during a time of significant transition. The Fellowship itself concluded after decades of impactful research and practitioner contributions, coinciding with broader global shifts in civic institutions, digital rights, and the social role of technology. For many in the cohort, including Jepchumba, this context presented both uncertainty and urgency—a moment to reconsider what kind of contributions could be made toward a more just and imaginative digital future.

Her fellowship focused on the critical role of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as foundational frameworks for rethinking digital platform design. By centering African Indigenous epistemologies, Jepchumba explored how design could move beyond extractive, efficiency-driven models toward more ethical, relational, and culturally resonant approaches. She positioned Indigenous knowledge not as supplementary but as central to building meaningful digital experiences.

Design Practice at Origin Lab

As part of her research, Jepchumba worked closely with the Origin Research and Innovation Lab at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, Kenya. There, she developed community-oriented UX frameworks that drew from participatory Indigenous design methods. These practices included involving local elders and knowledge-holders as co-creators in the platform design process—an approach that emphasized communal memory, shared authorship, and intergenerational insight.

Her design methodology was grounded in cultural practices from her Nandi heritage, specifically the growing, treating, and decorating of calabashes, which hold ceremonial and practical significance in the Rift Valley region. These vessels became a metaphor and interface through which she translated Indigenous values such as continuity, care, and stewardship into digital design. Her work at Origin extended into the lab’s practical field programs, where she collaborated with students, artists, and rural technologists to test and refine these frameworks.

Acts of Restoration in Kakamega

As the trajectory of digital platforms increasingly reflected consolidation and exclusion, Jepchumba felt compelled to respond with an act of material and symbolic repair. She journeyed to Kakamega Forest, one of Kenya’s last remaining equatorial rainforests, where she planted over 10,000 indigenous trees and shrubs throughout the course of her Fellowship. This gesture—both ecological and epistemological—was a response to the environmental and social harms perpetuated by digital technologies in her community. It was also a call to recognize land-based, regenerative practices as part of the design process itself.

Future Work: African UI/UX and Indigenous Digital Frameworks

Building on her Fellowship experience, Jepchumba is continuing her work to advance African UI/UX design grounded in Indigenous principles. Her current focus includes:

• Developing digital toolkits and interface templates that reflect Indigenous philosophies of time, memory, and collective governance.
• Creating curricula and workshops to support African designers interested in decolonial, land-based approaches to user experience design.
• Expanding collaborations with rural communities to co-create digital platforms for cultural preservation, language revitalization, and local knowledge sharing.

Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz

From Sovereignty to Governance: Community Data Governance as a Praxis of Self-Determination

My research as a DCSL practitioner fellow focused on the critical distinction and symbiotic relationship between Indigenous Data Sovereignty (ID-Sov) as a political principle and Community Data Governance as its practical implementation. The conversation around Indigenous data often centers on the “what”—the right to sovereignty—but my work explores the “how”: the methodologies and frameworks that communities can build to exercise that sovereignty on their own terms.

Using the community telecommunications networks in my region of Oaxaca, Mexico, as a primary case study, my project documents how building autonomous technological infrastructure is a prerequisite for meaningful data governance. I demonstrate that when a community manages its own networks, it shifts from being a mere subject of data extraction to an active agent that can define its own protocols, ethics, and uses for information, aligned with its worldview and collective well-being.

Ultimately, my work argues that true digital self-determination is achieved not solely through declarations of rights, but through praxis. Community governance is the act of translating the principle of sovereignty into a tangible, local government over digital heritage, offering a replicable model for other communities seeking to forge their autonomy in the digital age.

André Ramiro

A Human Rights-Based Accountability Framework for Halting Government Hacking Abuses

André is a PhD candidate in Informational Law at Hamburg University, member of the Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology, and Society Studies (Lavits), and co-founder and former director of the Law and Technology Research Institute of Recife. A former visiting researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Weizenbaum Institute (both in Berlin), and Derechos Digitales (Chile), he has focused on surveillance, privacy, and data protection research.

André’s project aimed to deliver two interconnected initiatives: a workshop and a policy paper, both focused on litigation cases and legal theses concerning the use of spywares by public authorities. The workshop he organized happened at RightsCon 2025, in Taiwan, and dealt with “Spyware accountability in the courts: The case laws in the Americas“. It has covered civil society and other stakeholders’ actions before courts of justice and oversight authorities in the region, with a variety of panelists from the United States and Brazil. Among his outcomes, he has exposed in a public hearing before the Brazilian Supreme Court within a constitutional lawsuit aiming the regulation of secret monitoring technologies in the country; he has published a thorough paper about government hacking activities and democratic oversight of intelligence services; and delivered several interviews and op-eds about the topic for a few initiatives, such as blogs, podcasts, and newspapers (such as here, here, here, and here). Those results are direct outcomes from the fellowship at the DCSL.

A policy paper about the topic is still under development and is focused on case laws in North, Central, and South America. He will critically analyze arguments of plaintiffs, defendants, as well as court decisions, in order to elaborate a legal thesis about an accountability model for the use of spywares by public authorities. Such a proposal also aims to identify if some uses are even legal from the outset, and will also deal with the private actors that develop such technologies and the regulation of their market, necessary risk assessments that should be made by oversight authorities, and, especially, how an approach based on the protection of human rights should face the problem in order to curb authoritarian uses and abuses.

Cristina Vélez

From APIs to Community: Reimagining Digital Research in Latin America

Cristina Vélez Vieira is a Colombian digital social researcher whose work lies at the intersection of platform research, data equity, and social movements in Latin America, building the field through the design of tools and methodologies (Read full bio).

Cristina’s DCSL/CCSRE fellowship project emerged from a critical challenge: the growing data access inequality on social media platforms facing Latin American feminist movements. The feminist movement had successfully mobilized millions through strategic Twitter campaigns like the pro-choice Green Wave. However, following Twitter’s acquisition by Elon Musk and the elimination of free API access, along with similar restrictions by Facebook (CrowdTangle closure) and TikTok’s persistent opacity, these movements now face significant barriers to accessing the social media data they need to counter disinformation and strengthen digital assembly and mobilization.

Cristina’s project initially set out to address this inequality through the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which allowed European researchers to request specific information from major social media platforms to analyze systematic risks related to topics like gender-based violence and electoral discourse. Her project aimed to enable EU nonprofits to share DSA data access with Latin American feminist organizations and explore crowdsourcing and data donation schemes inspired by Lucy Bernholz’s concept of “dataraising.“

However, after several months of research and expert consultations—including virtually attending the “Data Access and Social Media Research” workshop at Berkman Klein Center (May 2024) and meetings with Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, (GFF) in Berlin and an expert interview with the Coalition for Independent Technology Research —Cristina discovered significant regulatory barriers for non-European researchers. The DSA’s crucial implementation details were only released in October 2024, well into her fellowship period. As expert Mathias Vermeulen noted in his research, while non-European researchers can file data access requests, “it’s not going to be easy” due to regulatory requirements for GDPR consultations when transferring data to non-European organizations. This creates significant bureaucratic barriers for Global South researchers.

Drawing upon Bernholz’s “dataraising” concept, Cristina developed community-centered participatory approaches that do not depend on platform APIs or European regulatory frameworks. She developed the Community Digital Research Guide within Las Escuchadoras network of more than 30 female digital researchers from 7 Latin American countries that she co-founded. The guide, launched in April 2025, explores collaborative workshops with domestic workers in Medellín, community workers in Buenos Aires, and social benefit recipients in São Paulo.

Cristina also implemented participatory research strategies in the “Democratic Futures in Latin America” project involving 34 activists across eight countries, using crowdsourcing methods to break algorithmic bubbles. She documented this work in her Lupas Digitales newsletter series at Substack, reaching over 1,500 civil society practitioners.

To amplify this work globally, Cristina joined two transnational digital listening efforts starting in summer 2025: a Generation Z and Democracy project involving researchers in Brazil, Kenya and Spain led by the CommsHub, and :GAIN (Generative AI Network), analyzing AI narratives from South-South perspectives. While the European DSA opened possibilities for transparency standards, its barriers beyond Europe make it essential to continue innovating through community-based research like Cristina developed, centering the voices of those most affected by technological systems and applying a gender lens.

Learn more about Cristina’s work through her LinkedIn profile, the Las Escuchadoras network at escuchadoras.org, and the Lupas Digitales newsletter. 

Selene Yang

Queer Care: Mapping Collective Queer Care Systems

An Exploratory approach to care, community, and queerness

The “Mapping Cuir Collective Care Systems” project, spanning four Latin American countries (Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia), was designed as an exploratory research study into existing public care policies and the extent to which they are crafted around women, rather than the full spectrum of gender identities. This research also examines how this affects the queer community, both directly and indirectly, given the need to develop their own community-created care strategies.

The assumption that care work is inherently feminine has led many states to design social policies that overlook the myriad of minoritized gender identities performing caregiving tasks within their families and communities. This model, which frames care as a domestic and internal action, reflects the gendering of space, in which the private, familial sphere is assigned to women and the public, productive sphere to men. Time‐use surveys consistently show that women spend far more hours on caregiving tasks than men^[1]. This raised critical questions for this research: What happens to all those caregivers whom governments do not recognize? Who cares for these caregivers? And what alternative, community-based care models emerge outside institutional frameworks and laws?

Over the course of one year, I analyzed national and subnational care policies in Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico, comparing their differences and commonalities. A recurrent finding was that care policies often lack nationwide scope, instead being administered at the provincial, state, or departmental level. This fragmentation complicates efforts to standardize care processes, guarantee rights, and recognize care activities as legitimate work.

To capture the lived experiences of the people affected by the lack of inclusive care policies, I employed the Relief Maps methodology, developed by María Rodó-Zárate, a tool for examining social inequalities through an intersectional lens. Relief Maps enabled me to gather people’s feelings and emotions based on identity indicators—gender, disability, sexual orientation, and more. Responses varied widely: some participants reported discomfort or even hostility in public spaces, while others experienced violence within their own homes. By “mapping” these affective experiences across different territories and identity axes, I could pinpoint where participants felt cared for and where, as caregivers, they felt exposed or unsupported. As Ares and Risler (2013) note, such spatialization of affects “becomes part of a network of experiences embedded in diverse territories, collaborating to deploy joint action and thought oriented towards resistance and mutual care” (p. 58).

Community Voices: A Case from Yucatán, Mexico

I also conducted interviews with activists in Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Colombia to explore how their queer identities inform their approaches to community, familial, and personal care. Here’s a fragment of one of those interviews with a queer activist from Mexico.

Aede’s Story
In Yucatán, Aede has woven her networks of care through self-management. She maintains a personal emergency protocol, utilizes digital tools to share her location and track her routes, and participates in barter networks, solidarity economy initiatives, free psychological support spaces, and mutual aid groups. For Aede, care is not just an act of compassion but a vital strategy for survival.

“I’ve placed a lot of emphasis on having a personal protocol… reaction time is crucial in case something happens.”

Conclusion

Through combining policy analysis, intersectional mapping, and firsthand narratives, the Mapping Cuir Collective Care Systems project demonstrates how collective, community-based systems of care emerge to fill the gaps left by institutional policies and how these systems resist and reimagine care beyond traditional gender norms.