Language: English (mozilla)
In this session we will talk about “Circulo”, a digital safe communication channel for female journalists and HRDs. Circulo was developed based on the feedback from female journalists and HRDs from Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, professions that are very dangerous in those countries, especially for females who face physical and digital gender violence on a daily basis.
We want to share the logic and challenges behind its development. First, the social, participatory and human rights approach when talking about gender violence against women journalists and; and then, we would like to share how turned the results of the above into the construction of a technology tool designed from and for the social subject that seeks to help.
With hte participants would like to explore the problems that arose from the contexts where the app is currently implemented, the main thread and technological limitations we identified during the research process, and the features we incorporated in the app as a result of the research and the feedback provided by our partners.
Come up with alternative solutions to those challenges
Think of vulnerable groups facing gender violence or inequality in their regions and how Circulo could be incorporated into their safety protocols.
- We share the lessons we learned developing an app for female journalists in Latin America facing physical and digital threats because of their job, show the audience the threats we identified, and the features we created to help mitigate them, and then ask them to help us come up with alternative solutions, but also help us identify possible weaknesses in the current design that should be addressed.
- We want to learn about other vulnerable groups that could benefit from the app and the challenges they face, the protocols they have in place and how could the app be incorporated to this existing safety protocols.
The inequality females in general have to deal with in most of the Latin American countries becomes even more evident when it comes to journalism where powerful public figures are involved and female journalists face threats not only to their professional careers but also to their reputation, physical safety, and even their families. To make matters worse, government institutions and law enforcement agencies are often corrupted and on the side of the perpetrators, so victims can only trust a small group of family, coworkers, and friends to provide help in case of an emergency. This puts them at a big disadvantage against the people attacking them, and our goal is to help them maximize and optimize the resources and protocols they have by using digital technologies they have already available.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session? What if 30 participants attend? What if there are 3?:If the number of participants is small we will see that as an opportunity to have a conversation at a more personal level in which we hope every participant will get enough time to share their opinion and personal experiences when it comes to digital safety apps and the threats, technological capabilities they have experienced.
If we have a large number of participants we will structure our talk in a way that will allow us to maximize the time given to us in which we will use the first quarter to talk about all the research and background behind the development of the app, the second quarter to present Circulo and all its features and the last half of the time to interact with the participants with a defined set of questions designed to maintain the focus of the session
We would love for Circulo to be adopted in other regions as part of their safety protocols, and like any other of the apps developed by Guardian Project, we do our best to provide timely, free, and accurate technical support to all our users.
This session will also help us improve the app, but also it will help us visualize what the localization of Circulo would be like for future developments.
At the end of the session, we will provide our contact information and we will commit to taking into consideration any requests or suggestions that might come after from the participants.
English, Spanish