FTX: Safety Reboot

The FTX: Safety Reboot is a training curriculum made up of several modules for trainers who work with women’s rights and sexual rights activists to use the internet safely, creatively and strategically.

It is a feminist contribution to the global response to digital security capacity building and enables trainers to work with communities to engage technology with pleasure, creativity and curiosity.

Who is it for?

The FTX: Safety Reboot is for trainers working with women’s rights and sexual rights activists on digital safety. Trainers should be familiar with the obstacles and challenges faced where misogyny, censorship and surveillance are restricting activists’ freedom of expression and ability to share information, create alternative economies, build communities of solidarity and express desires.

Why the FTX: Safety Reboot?

The FTX: Safety Reboot explores how we occupy online spaces, how women are represented, how we can counter discourses and norms that contribute to discrimination and violence. It is about strategies of representation and expression and enabling more women’s rights and sexual rights activists to engage technology with pleasure, creativity and curiosity. It is a feminist contribution to the global response to digital security capacity building, bringing the APC Women’s Rights Programme’s unique methodology and approach, which we call Feminist Tech eXchanges (FTX).

The APC Women’s Rights Programme (APC WRP) has developed the FTX: Safety Reboot as a contribution to existing training guides on digital security but rooted in a feminist approach to technology. The FTX: Safety Reboot is a work in progress to assist trainers to enable activists to use the internet as a transformative public and political space, to claim, construct, and express ourselves more safely.

Our political framing and tool for analysis are the Feminist Principles of the Internet (http://feministinternet.org), which shape and inform our work. The FPIs build our case for a safe, open, diverse and gender-just internet.

What does it do?

FTX creates safe spaces of exchange and experience where the politics and practice of technology are informed by local, concrete and contextual realities of women. These spaces aim to build collective knowledge and ownership. We are conscious of power relations which can be easily set up, particularly around technology, an area where women are historically excluded and their contributions invisibilised. We advocate for change through working towards consciously deconstructing these power relations.

APC WRP capacity-building work bridges the gap between feminist movements and internet rights movements and looks at intersections and strategic opportunities to work together as allies and partners. APC WRP prioritises inter-movement building in order to bridge gaps and grow understanding and solidarity between movements.

What are the FTX core values?

FTX core values are: embedding a politics and practice of self and collective care, participatory and inclusive, secure, fun, grounded in women’s realities, transparent and open, creative and strategic. FTX emphasises the role of women in technology, prioritises appropriate and sustainable technologies, and is framed by the Feminist Principles of the Internet. FTX explores feminist practices and politics of technology and raises awareness on the critical role of communication rights in the struggle to advance women’s rights worldwide. Recognising the historical and current contributions of women in shaping technology, FTX grounds technology in women’s realities and lives. We emphasise local ownership of FTX and have seen the uptake of FTX by our members and partners over the years.