I have spent a good chunk of the last few months pondering about my essence. Or, really, to leave philosophical lingo aside: I have been thinking about what makes me the person I am.
These days, I am defined primarily by what I do and the people I am with – something I will never take for granted, since for many years it was all about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be with. But it is a year of change for me – and those two elements are not enough to guide me through this difficult but revealing process.
Long story short, I have had to devote a lot of brain power to thinking what the best way is to achieve my goals. And, in my humble experience, the most elucidating input so far has come from minding the questions that I have asked myself everyday for the last year.
The big picture
How can we direct our efforts beyond experimentation and towards creating impact?
How can we ensure that we are building and communicating long term processes towards change, and not just isolated events?
How can we move away from civic tech products, and focus on civic tech processes projects and the people who sustain them?
What does it mean in practice to look at technological opportunities with sobriety, and always with a focus on surrounding social dynamics?
The details
Tons of resources are being put into strengthening Latin American activists in the field of information security. Why are so many still using crappy passwords and insecure communication channels? What are we doing wrong?
For real: what does a feminist Internet look like? Do we primarily need more female coders and more women creating content, or is that frankly not going to give the ecosystem a stronger gender perspective?
Teenagers are doing a significant chunk of their social-emotional learning in online spaces. Does technology give us a good opportunity to give them tools to cope with this learning, or are we hijacking the role of more important factors by pretending that it does?
So much of my work comes down to community building… but, besides numbers of events or participants, I don’t have a way to compare and contrast my work to find ways to improve it. What are the best metrics to evaluate community building?
How can we make impact assessment accessible to organizations working in the overworked and underpaid scene of tech for change in Latin America?
Where are the most creative creative + disciplined + successful infoactivism campaigns in Latin America?! I want to know them all.
Some of the people I admire would feature these questions on their websites in a section called “research interests”. In my case, it may not be appropriate to call it that just yet because, as of today, I’m an activist more than I am a researcher – but we’ll see where these questions lead me.