access to knowledge

Judith Owigar speaks about her journey entering into tech spaces, and also about their work with Akirachix in Kenya helping other women along the same journey marked by trials, exclusions and success. While speaking about the barriers of education in science and technology (STEM), she says that what inspires her work in many forums around women in tech in Africa, is that eventually a woman should…

The Distributed Denial of Women strike borrows the metaphor of the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack as a radical and subversive tool by activists, but currently DDOS attacks powered by zombie-bots are part of the anarcho-capitalist economies of the internet. Ganesh in their article unpacks the many levels at which gendered labour is extracted, and while positing feminist autonomous…

Even in 2015 the contribution by women to Wikipedia, one of the largest repositories online of organised knowledge about the world, had not reached 25% of the total. Most of the content online comes from the global North, specifically from white male contributors in North America. What needs to be done to ensure diversity, localisation and gender parity in content online? APCNews speaks to…

My daughter is 8 years old. She likes to make pretend fairy houses with tiny little signs that have small fairy tales written on them. Every other week her dream to be ‘someone’ changes – sometimes she wants to be a chef, other times a paleontologist when she grows up. ‘When she grows up’ is a phrase that holds the promise of tomorrow for her.

It's day two of the 'Informal' Asia Europe Foundation meeting on human rights and ICTs, and we're split up into workshops to discuss recommendations that will go to the Foundation's ministerial meeting in November: I'm in the workshop on digital divide. While a lot of interesting ideas came up during the course of the day, the one which causes me most concern is the problem of knowledge that is…

The challenge of doing sexual health outreach work in East London has been transformed by police action in the run up to the Olympics. APC member GreenNet answered Open Doors Sexual Health Clinic’s request for a new website that could speak clearly to east London sexworkers with advice and resources.

South Africa's constitution guarantees freedom of expression, and has been interpreted to include the right to community media and to creative journalistic content. However, these progressive interpretations come in the light of broadcasting, rather than the internet. Online media and its regulation in South Africa fall short of the human rights standards that South Africa has recognised under…

In 2001, while working at Agenda, a South African feminist academic journal, we produced an edition titled ‘Globalisation: challenging dominant discourses’. The journal problematised the realpolitik of a global neo-liberal economic system that was marked by developing countries’ indebtedness, the rise of the market and the devastating consequences of structural adjustment policies for women of…

When I saw this quote on Mozilla's new Collusion website: "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold - Andrew Lewis." I felt it summed up the economics tool box session on Commodification of Knowledge that APC led at the 2012 AWID Forum quite nicely. The session, organised by APC, brought together speakers to spark debate and reflection, but the…

The work of the APC WNSP with organisations in Congo provides invaluable real life experiences that can be useful in discussions at international forums like the upcoming fifty-fifth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) whose theme this year is women, technology and education, according to Selina L Mudavanhu. She examines projects under the MDG3 Take Back the Tech! small grants…