A map for Internet freedom

DC/DICYT The Internet has become a commercialized and centralized space, which is controlled by a small number of international companies. Corporations such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon extract personal information from the multitude of Internet users who visit their online services. They also decide the advertisements that are published and the place where the relevant information appears within their pages and search engines.

Given this context, the University of Valladolid’s researchers Dafne Calvo and Eva Campos Domínguez have designed a map to identify the groups that promote free culture and free technologies. With this, they intend to collect the initiatives that contribute to investing these unequal power relations that occur in the cyberspace.

The project is called Digital resistances (Resistencias Digitales). It currently locates 304 initiatives that program with free software, participate in blockchain technologies, build mesh networks, study the protection of privacy or coordinate hacktivism actions.

Among these groups, it is possible to find projects of the free encyclopedia such as Wikimedia Spain, Amical Wikimedia, Cuarto Propio in Wikipedia or Wikiesfera. The map includes also Mozilla or Trisquel, which is a Galician free operating system recognized by the Free Software Foundation. Furthermore, it is possible to visit the neutral network Guifi.net or the groups dedicated to the manufacture of free hardware prostheses Autofabricantes and EXando una mano.

The cartography is deployed in the free software platform Ushahidi. It is open to the responses of new groups that promote culture and free technologies. To do this, they must access the questionnaire available on the homepage.