Erika's blog

That old fortune teller game from our childhood put to a new use as a privacy catcher. This video shows you how to make one but more important is playing it. Ask your friends questions about why the government or police might be interested in someone’s Facebook page, or if it could be a problem that a boyfriend or girlfriend knows the passwords of their partners, and what that might mean for email or chat exchanges. Make a privacy catcher for yourself! http://takebackthetech.net/take-action/2011/12/7

Increasingly we come across intimate videos on the internet. What’s upsetting is not that people might want to film their intimacy, but that a partner can betray that trust and publish intimate, private moments for all the internet to see. This video, in Spanish, insists that the publication of private, intimate material without consent goes beyond betrayal and is a form of violence. The video was created by Carolina Grajales and Lorena Velázquez as their first-ever video experiment, part of an assignment in the recent Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) in July in Mexico City.

As part of APC WNSP´s MDG3 project Take Back the Tech! to eliminate violence against women taking place in 12 countries, a Feminist Tech Exchange on digital storytelling took place in Pakistan the second week of June with APC member Bytes for All and local partner Jehan Ara, passionate Take Back the Tech activist and president of P@SHA, the Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT and ITES.

Doing a search for women´s institutes in Mexico yields few results – even though all women´s institutes are required by law to have websites. Mexico´s 2002 transparency law was heralded as key to ending corruption, a vindication of citizens’ right to know.

Feminist practices of technology: What’s your approach?
March 8 is International Women’s Day. Tell us how you use technology as a feminist. Celebrate International Women’s Day by sharing your practice and politics on twitter. Create a buzz and add your story on how you use the internet, mobile phones and other communications technology for women’s rights and empowerment.

Tweet your story and let us know by adding the hashtags:
#feminist_tech
#iwd
#takebackthetech

Toyin Ajao-Dawodu from Nigeria is so into women blogging she helps run a technology camp for girls in Nigeria coordinated by her organisation, Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre. Together with W.Tech’s Executive Director, Oreoluwa Somolu, she co-facilitated the workshop “Blogs can move the world” at last year’s “Association for Women in Development’s Forum on Movement Building”:http://www.awid.org.

GenderIT.org approaches the problematic issue of women´s health and its interconnection with information and communication technologies (ICTs) policies.

ICTs have an enormous strategic potential to locate women at the centre of health initiatives. There are many examples of ICTs’ transformative potential on gender relations and roles, such as health clinics equipped with information technologies in low-income communities offer women information on available services.

Sylvie has just returned from September’s Highway Africa and Digital Citizen’s Indaba, where, we hope not fruitlessly, AAW members tried to put a dent in the stone wall of gender imbalance. Check out the APC Blog for news of the event.

WENT 2007 on Digital storytelling to end violence was, both Sylvie and Jenny comment, an extremely enriching experience.

It may seem like Lenka is off on maternity leave but in reality there is a lot going on in the region. Don’t miss the photos of trainings of women and girls in the Czech Republic with IBM, and for that matter, of Lenka’s new baby Adam! [flickr-photo:id=456878233,size=s]

If you’d like to find tools that fit your needs, especially from the perspective of a gender and ICT practitioner looking to apply technology strategically in your organisation, Social Source Commons is a good place to check out what other non profit ICT practitioners are using. Social Source Commons “is a place to share lists of software tools that you already use, gain knowledge and support, and discover new tools. It’s a place to meet people with similar needs and interests and answer the question: what tools do they use?” And it just won a Net Squared Innovation Award!