Discover the results and impact of the collaborative work of Tactical
Tech in 2022
Across the globe, societies and democracies continue to be threatened by crackdowns on human rights. While existing social, political and environmental crises seem to worsen, the spread of misinformation intensifies social tensions and increases polarisation. Within this context, digital technologies play a key role in how people and societies get informed, form opinions, find solutions and respond to these challenging times.
In 2022, Tactical Tech partnered with over 150 trusted local actors from ore than 60 countries - civil society organisations, rights organisations, libraries, schools, museums, and community centres, as well as experts, researchers, academics, investigators, and journalists - to inform and engage their communities in conversations around the relationship between technology, democracy and crises and to provide them with the necessary tools and information to enable them to take action and make informed decisions.
Our reach in 2022
Our work is available in the following countries and languages:
Working with partners worldwide to empower communities:
Promoting critical thinking and proactive responses through digital and media literacy interventions and resources.
Our projects - The Glass Room, Data Detox Kit, What The Future Wants, the Digital Enquirer Kit and Digital You - co-developed interventions and resources that were used, adapted and further developed by partners worldwide to promote conversations around their relationship with technology and enable their communities to make informed decisions.
The Glass Room: promoting community-driven conversations about misinformation.
The Glass Room, a public educational intervention that provides interactive exhibitions and experiences, partnered with more than 130 civil society organisations, educators, schools, universities, libraries, museums, and cultural and educational centres worldwide engaging over 150,000 people in conversations about the impacts of technology on people’s lives.
In 2022, The Glass Room Misinformation Edition was used and adapted by partners to create interventions that invited people to think critically about the role of digital technologies in democracy, misinformation and crises. This unique intervention built societal resilience by enabling critical reflections on how technology influences societies and shapes opinions.
The Glass Room Highlights
Disseminating resources and organising interventions with local partners to encourage reflection and proactive actions.
were hosted worldwide together with our partners.
where exhibitions, workshops and Training of Trainers took place.
were engaged through the events and interventions.
New resources were created and translated into even more languages than before to reach new communities and increase accessibility.
The Glass Room Misinformation Edition was translated into eight additional languages in 2022: Albanian, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Georgian, Greek, Macedonian, Nepalese and Romanian.
Additional content was adapted and translated into Armenian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Mandarin, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Five new original posters were created: We All Share, We all Have Opinions, We are All connected, Google Society and Technology of Hope and Fear covering topics such as technology, crises, Big Tech and misinformation.
Easy-print and outdoor formats of The Glass Room Misinformation Edition were created in 2022 to increase the accessibility of our resources and reach communities that otherwise couldn’t be reached.
Our featured resource: The GAFAM Empire
In a context where questions about Big Tech arise, Tactical Tech researched and published the digital resource “GAFAM Empire” developed with DensityDesign Lab. GAFAM looks at the company acquisitions conducted by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, which sectors they expanded to, and what types of know-how they absorbed through these acquisitions.
Meet Cedric L., the founder of ANZlab, a remarkable organization on a mission to promote digital inclusion in Cameroon. In the summer of 2022, ANZlab joined forces with The Glass Room to host the Misinformation Edition Exhibition. In Yaoundé, the vibrant capital of Cameroon, ANZlab presented the thought-provoking experience at the International Forum on Disinformation.
But ANZlab didn't stop there. ANZlab visited local schools to share the "What the Future Wants" exhibition materials. Over 700 people, with a particular focus on young minds, participated in critical conversations about their relationship with technologies.
Meet Casa Hacker, a Brazilian organisation that empowers communities to transform their realities through digital inclusion and STEAM Education. Their dream is to make the internet and digital technologies an inclusive space for everyone in Brazil.
During the last year, Casa Hacker collaborated with Tactical Tech’s initiatives: The Glass Room and What the Future Wants to run three capacity-building events in 3 cities: Campinas, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Over 100 young people and educators actively participated in dialogues and debates on privacy, security, disinformation and digital well-being. The propositional debate and other evidence show how the resources and methodologies shared and developed by this partnership are effective in creating safe behaviours online.
ForSet, a creative enterprise based in Tbilisi, empowers change-makers through data, design, and technology. They translated The Glass Room: Misinformation Edition and What the Future Wants into Georgian, showcasing the Misinformation Edition at DataFest Tbilisi 2022 with over 600 attendees.
Using these translated resources, ForSet organized an event at the National Parliamentary Library of Georgia. It brought together university students, journalists, employees from private companies, artists, civil servants, and digital literacy stakeholders, including NGO representatives and the EU Delegation to Georgia. The event raised awareness of the power of arts, visualization, and self-reflection in education. ForSet integrated the exhibition contents and the Data Detox Kit into their educational programs, benefiting 100 to 200 young individuals annually.
Everything Will Be Fine: Raising awareness around technology's impact on human responses to crises.
"Everything Will Be Fine" (EWBF) is a large-scale public intervention that, through the lens of technology, looks at how people understand and respond to global crises like climate change, pandemics and political polarisation. This hybrid exhibition covers the topics of Digital Panic, Care, Doubt and Hope and includes both an outdoor exhibition and a digital version. Users are invited to navigate through the works of over 60 artists, researchers and technologists. Pieces from each artist are displayed on both the outer and inner rings of the exhibition as a means of engaging people inside and encouraging critical thinking, debate and self-reflection on the aforementioned topics.
The outdoor version of the exhibition was co-produced with HAU Hebbel am Ufer and hosted in front of the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin between the 14th of September and the 4th of October. The digital version is still accessible for interested audiences.
Highlights
Over 4,200 visitors were taken on a journey of critical self-reflection.
More than 8,751 people visited the virtual experience.
1/6
"The pieces included in the exhibition show different
perspectives and debating positions. It made me rethink the impact of
technology on our lives.”, visitor of the exhibition. Picture by Andrea
Rossetti.
2/6
"What impacted me the most was the diversity and complexity of
the subjects in the exhibit, the creativity of the artists, the
disciplinary range of technologies that have a profound impact and the
questions that we need to think more about.", visitor of the exhibition.
Picture by Andrea Rossetti.
3/6
"The exhibition makes the invisible visible, which is very
important in understanding how things work to change them. There are a
wide range of perspectives and topics.", visitor of the exhibition.
Picture by Andrea Rossetti.
4/6
We asked people if it was fair for governments to use their
personal data in a crises. Most of the visitors disagree.
5/6
We asked people if AI was better than people at solving our
problems. Most of the visitors disagree.
6/6
Posters of the Everything Will Be Fine exhibition
What The Future Wants: putting young people in the driver’s seat of their digital futures through education, co-creation and capacity building.
What The Future Wants engages young people, parents and educators in thinking critically about their current and future digital environment through an interactive exhibition. This intervention, co-developed with youth, for youth, provides creative and interactive media literacy resources and assets to educators.
Teachers, librarians and organisations working with youth worldwide used, adapted and outreached these resources to host interventions that engaged around 12.000 young people in conversations about the digital environment they live in and the ways they can re-imagine it.
What the Future Wants Highlights
The What the Future Wants project and its interactive exhibition fulfilled educators’ needs for engaging and creative media literacy resources.
were hosted worldwide together with our partners.
where the events and interventions took place.
were engaged in critical conversations.
What the Future Wants co-developed and translated resources facilitating accessibility and scalability.
The physical and online versions of the exhibition include a set of collaborative and interactive posters, activities and resources about facial recognition technologies and their implications, privacy concerns about data collected and owned by big tech, and the environmental impact of digital technology.
To facilitate the scalability process, the project createda manual to support educatorsin setting up, and hosting the exhibition.
"I imagine a future in which the digital ecosystem is framed by human rights and centred on our younger generations", says Soledad Magnone, director of JAAKLAC, an organisation that advocates for a quality education tuned with the challenges and opportunities of the digital age.
JAAKLAC collaborated with Tactical Tech to implement social media campaigns and ideate plans for community exhibitions in Latin America with and for youth. Through their work, they raised awareness and facilitated educational resources on various pressing issues in the region stemming from the intersections between human rights and digital technologies. Their projects also enabled a platform for Latin American digital rights organisations to co-create with schools.
Voices of WTFW in India is a project by digital literacy educator Ashkumar G. in partnership with the Free Libraries Network, Community Library Project and Next Page Foundation. The initiative translated the What the Future Wants exhibition and its supporting materials into Hindi to make them more accessible to young people from Hindi-speaking communities in India.
The project hosted 12 rounds of facilitated What the Future Wants exhibitions in English and Hindi that engaged more than 100 young people in Mumbai, New Dehli and Gurugram. “Now, the network of libraries is organizing more digital literacy programs. There is more openness and seriousness to the need for digital literacy as a topic and tailoring it based on the needs of the libraries,” says Gopalani.
Goethe-Institut Skopje partnered with What the Future Wants to promote critical digital literacy in young people across Goethe-Instituts in Southeast Europe. They organized co-development workshops, translated the exhibition into multiple languages, and collaborated with schools and civil society organizations to host exhibitions throughout the region. This initiative created safe spaces for learning and critical thinking about the impact of digital technologies on youth and their communities.
A notable highlight was the exhibition hosted in Skopje, North Macedonia, as part of the "Der gläserne Mensch" project, a collaboration between regional Goethe-Instituts. The exhibition attracted young people, educators, civil society organizations, and decision-makers. It was accompanied by an extensive outreach campaign on social media and in local media outlets.
Data Detox Kit: Educational resources to strengthen people’s agency.
We worked with partners worldwide who translated and adapted our Data Detox Kit (DDK) educational and awareness-raising materials. Our partners shared the materials with their audiences, building agency to reshape their relationships with the technologies they use.
In 2022, the project focused on making the materials available in over 40 languages to new audiences, diversifying and extending the topics covered and creating new strategies to build the capacity of civil society organisations and individuals.
Data Detox Kit Highlights
the Data Detox Kit is available in.
accessed the Data Detox Kit resources online.
To empower people through the sharing of information and knowledge, we further developed and translated resources and materials that promoted new conversations on relevant topics.
The Kit was translated into seven new languages: Albanian, Georgian, Khmer, Kurdish, Macedonian, Romanian and Swahili.
Additional content was adapted and translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian and Portuguese.
Dissemination of our collaborative work practices with partners:
We hosted a Partnerships Showcase to share success stories inspiring other organisations to engage their audiences through the use of our resources.
The “Workshops” section was expanded to provide tools and resources to educators and facilitators, which enabled them to engage more effectively with their audiences on topics like digital privacy, security, wellbeing and misinformation.
data_labe is a media and research organization based in Maré Favela in Rio de Janeiro. Their work intersects human rights, race, gender, urbanism, data and technology. Driven by their creative approach, they adapted the Data Detox Kit into several posters that were shown at their annual festival, Criptofunk.
The festival brought together activists, favela dwellers, and individuals interested in digital care. The theme was "deceleration," a call to pause, reflect, and reconnect with our collective past. Amidst this gallery, a character emerged: Sankofa, a majestic bird drawn from the depths of African and Afro-Brazilian philosophy. Sankofa symbolized the act of returning to the past to reinterpret the present and forge a path towards a brighter future.
Prepare to be inspired by the incredible work of Ubunteam, a dynamic organization based in the Ivory Coast. Their mission? To champion open-source software, foster digital inclusion, and defend digital rights. Ubunteam takes pride in training journalists, activists, and students on the intricacies of open-source software, digital privacy, and digital security.
In 2022, Ubunteam ran five interactive and engaging Digital Detox Days, reaching and empowering 330 participants, mainly young people, with the tools to navigate the digital landscape confidently and safely.
The Fabulous Woman Network, based in Ghana, supports the growth of women-led businesses providing them with entrepreneurial skills through activities and training programs. They have been partners with the Data Detox Kit since 2019, running multiple programs, including developing videos.
In the frame of the Digital You initiative 2021-2022, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, The Fabulous Woman Network created a unique series of creative and engaging videos about young women and safety and personal data that hundreds of viewers have watched. Each video ends with a call to action for viewers to learn more through the Data Detox Kit.
Digital You: Working with young leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa to promote digital and media literacy.
The Digital You initiativeis a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Kinshasa and Tactical Tech. The initiative brought together Goethe-Institutes’ country offices and 12 partners in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries to create campaigns and training activities on digital and media literacy.
Digital Enquirer Kit: An educational tool to prevent the spread of misinformation.
“The Digital Enquirer Kit”, an e-learning course created in collaboration with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH - GIZ available in 13 languages and dialects - Arabic, French, Swahili, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Hausa, East African English, West African English and Hindi - built the capacity of journalists, educators and activists to prevent the spread of misinformation in their corresponding contexts.
The initiative included a Summer Training Series that reached 340 participants who gained skills on the topics of gender-based online violence, online scams and risk assessments, among others.
Building skills of organisations and experts to promote access to reliable and trustworthy information.
Our projects Exposing the Invisible and The Influence Industryadvance knowledge and methodologies that build the skills of civil society organisations, media organisations, experts, researchers, academics, investigators and journalists, with whom we co-develop new resources and materials.
The Influence Industry Project: advancing knowledge on digital political campaigning.
The Influence Industry Project pioneered research and developed resources, tools, training and methodologies to advance knowledge on how political groups use digital technologies and personal data to influence citizens’ opinions and decisions in campaigns and elections. Civil society organisations, decision-makers, journalists, researchers, election monitors,
academics, investigators and other actors working in the field used, accessed and contributed to these resources that expanded their skill sets, enabling them to research their own contexts. In 2022, the project co-developed field-building resources like the Influence Industry Explorer a Learning Hub for professionals, a series of interviews and research case studies.
The Influence Industry Project Highlights
working in political influence were included in The Influence
Industry Explorer.
accessed the Influence Industry resources online.
Highlights
68 key experts from all across the world gained and built new skills by participating in the “Investigating the Influence Industry: Summer School 2022”.
14 partners worldwide used the Voter’s Guide, a media literacy resource for voters to develop their own adaptations that respond to the local needs of their communities.
Changing the conversation around data-driven politics and the role of the Influence Industry.
In 2022, we launched The Influence Industry Project website where organisations and individuals can learn about, explore research and discover resources on the industry using our personal data to influence citizens in political campaigns.
A Learning Hub for professionals, including three modules on data and political influence and a module on "Research Methods for Investigating the Influence Industry", which guides users through the steps necessary to investigate how political actors use personal data in political campaigns.
Eight interviews with experts, researchers, digital activists, leaders in the field and decision-makers from all across the world were published and disseminated.
Our featured resource: The Influence Industry Explorer
An open-source tool that provides detailed information on more than 500 companies that play a role in election campaigning was launched in 2022. The Explorer is a first-of-its-kind resource for everyone working on election monitoring and investigating political influence. The methodology and the findings are openly accessible.
MediaNet Works, an organisation based in Kenya, empowers communities, especially young generations, to reap the benefits of the Internet and the general ICTs available. "Information is power, and when people have it, they can take control of their lives.", says Clement Njoroge, Founder and Director of MediaNet Works.
MediaNet Works, and 13 other organisations, partnered with Tactical Tech to adapt and localise the Voter's guide. This collaborative effort paved the way for developing training programs for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) practitioners who gained tools and skills, enabling them to share the acquired knowledge with their communities. This has unleashed multiplying effect. Their dedicated research efforts have also made significant strides in advancing knowledge of Kenya's digital rights and privacy landscape.
"I want citizens to be aware of technology's role to be able to ask questions about how the different political forces treat their data and what they will do with it", says Tetyana Bohdanova, a researcher from Ukraine, focused on election monitoring, digital security and voter engagement.
Tetyana Bohdanova is one of the researchers and journalists who gained knowledge and skills to research how data was used in the Ukrainian context. She used this experience to create new materials for other researchers and authored the module "Research Methods for Investigating the Influence Industry", included in the Learning Hub of the Influence Industry Project website.
Exposing the Invisible: building skills and creating knowledge sharing spaces for the investigative community.
Media and other civil society actors - journalists, researchers, activists and investigators -accessed, contributed to and adopted Exposing the Invisible resources to develop their investigation and strengthen their reporting skill sets on effective and responsible investigation methods and techniques.
Besides producing resources and organising events to provide the community with tools and best practices, Exposing the Invisible focused on building the skills of trainers and facilitators who can bring the resources and information to new audiences. To do so, a series of 17 workshop curricula outlines on investigative methods were created and translated into 10 languages to be used by investigators and facilitators running their own workshops on investigative approaches and techniques.
Exposing The Invisible Highlights
advanced their skillsets through the project.
accessed the Exposing the Invisible online resources.
32 journalism professionals from Eastern Europe participated in a training-of-trainers program providing them with methods, tools and resources to host their own investigation workshops and training sessions.
“Exposing the Invisible is a treasure trove of valuable resources for
anyone who wants to understand the power of investigations and to learn
from the best in the field. It’s free, accessible and educational.”,
Diana Lungu, Free Press Unlimited
1/6
"Exposing the Invisible is my go-to resource for getting inspired,
learning new skills and solving investigation conundrums... It's just
awesome! Special kudos to the podcast, my all-time favourite."
Léopold Salzenstein, journalist
2/6
"The best thing about Exposing the Invisible resources is how accessible
and varied they are. It gives citizen investigators the guide how to
move from the hunch to the full story. It is really useful for the
trainers, too.", Sanita Jemberga, CEO of the Baltic Center for
Investigative Journalism
3/6
"Exposing the Invisible provides valuable resources for journalists and
researchers who work towards bringing the truth to light and exposing
reality where it falters. We encourage everyone to visit, explore, read,
and listen to ETI resources!", Iliana Papangeli, Solomon
4/6
“The Kit covers many interesting issues with in-depth explanations that
don’t take anything for granted, so they speak both to the beginner and
to the intermediate investigative journalist.”, Federico Caruso,
researcher and journalist, OBC Transeuropa
5/6
“What I really like from the Exposing the Invisible website is the
straightforward way the authors connect with the reader and the
matter-fact style in the approach of very important topics that can be
difficult to explain.”, Jacinto Pariente, translator
6/6
New resources were produced to advance and share knowledge on investigation methods and reach a wider audience.
A series of nine online talks on investigation tools, methods and stories was produced. The topics range from risk management and digital safety, open source investigation tools and methods to fact checking, tackling conflict-related disinformation and investigating issues concerning migration and refugees.
A series of eight video interviews focused on ‘Journalists Handling Crises" with seven journalists and investigators from the CIJI network was produced.
A series of five video explainers that highlight an accessible and straightforward way, investigation methods, tools and best practices.
Our featured resource: Workshop curricula on investigation methods and techniques
The workshops section of Exposing the Invisible offers curricula for researchers, investigators, journalists or ultimately anyone interested in running their own investigative workshops or training sessions. We offer a structure, techniques, tips and recommended tools that can be used to train on topics such as open-source intelligence (OSINT), risk assessment, climate change, disinformation, crowd-sourcing, evaluating evidence, storytelling and more.
