The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is an international network of organizations that was founded in 1990 to provide communication infrastructure, including Internet-based applications, to groups and individuals who work for peace, human rights, protection of the environment, and sustainability. Pioneering the use of ICTs for civil society, especially in developing countries, APC were often the first providers of Internet in their member countries.
Africa Source was a set of events, held in 2004 and 2006 in Namibia and Uganda respectively, to promote the use of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) among non-profit and non-governmental organisations. Africa Source was part of the wider "Source Camps" organised by Tactical Technology Collective (Tacticaltech.org) and its partners, and was also linked to the Asia Source and other parallel events held elsewhere.
Windows CardSpace is a discontinued identity selector app by Microsoft. It stores references to digital identities of the users, presenting them as visual information cards. CardSpace provides a consistent UI designed to help people to easily and securely use these identities in applications and web sites where they are accepted. Resistance to phishing attacks and adherence to Kim Cameron's "7 Laws of Identity" were goals in its design.
mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that the code could be – and soon was – redeployed in other countries.
European Digital Rights (EDRi) is an international advocacy group headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. EDRi is a network collective of NGOs, experts, advocates and academics working to defend and advance digital rights across the continent. For almost two decades, it has served as the backbone of the digital rights movement in Europe. In March 2021, EDRi is made of 44 NGOs, as well as experts, advocates and academics from all across Europe.
The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. It also hosts and promotes the collaborative development of open source software projects.
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It uses multiple other PHP frameworks such as Laminas and Symfony. Magento source code is distributed under Open Software License (OSL) v3.0. Magento was acquired by Adobe Inc in May 2018 for $1.68 Billion USD.
An information activist is someone who works to make information available to the general population. According to Anthony Molaro, "An information activist is a vigorous advocate of knowledge gained through study, communication, research or instruction".
A smart TV, also known as a connected TV (CTV), is a traditional television set with integrated Internet and interactive Web 2.0 features, which allows users to stream music and videos, browse the internet, and view photos. Smart TVs are a technological convergence of computers, televisions, and digital media players. Besides the traditional functions of television sets provided through traditional broadcasting media, these devices can provide access to over-the-top media services such as streaming television and internet radio, along with home networking access.
FreedomBox is a free software home server operating system based on Debian, backed by the FreedomBox Foundation.
Jigsaw LLC is a technology incubator created by Google. As of February 2020, it is under Google management and used to operate as an independent subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Based in New York City, Jigsaw is dedicated to understanding global challenges and applying technological solutions, from "countering extremism", online censorship and cyber-attacks, to protecting access to information. Jared Cohen, formerly with the Policy Planning Committee at the US State Department, is the CEO of Jigsaw, and was formerly co-founder and director of Google Ideas.
The Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) is an open source software project managed by the Linux Foundation. It provides a set of data plane libraries and network interface controller polling-mode drivers for offloading TCP packet processing from the operating system kernel to processes running in user space. This offloading achieves higher computing efficiency and higher packet throughput than is possible using the interrupt-driven processing provided in the kernel.
DigitalOcean, Inc. is an American cloud infrastructure provider headquartered in New York City with data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. DigitalOcean also runs Hacktoberfest which is a month-long celebration of open source software run in partnership with GitHub and Twilio.
Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) is an Android smartphone geospatial infrastructure and military situation awareness app. It allows for precision targeting, surrounding land formation intelligence, situational awareness, navigation, and data sharing. This Android app is a part of the larger TAK family of products. ATAK has a plugin architecture which allows developers to add functionality. This extensible plugin architecture that allows enhanced capabilities for specific mission sets.
Civic technology, or civic tech, enhances the relationship between the people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government.
Data activism is a social practice that uses technology and data. It emerged from existing activism sub-cultures such as hacker an open-source movements. Data activism is a specific type of activism which is enabled and constrained by the data infrastructure. It can use the production and collection of digital, volunteered, open data to challenge existing power relations. It is a form of media activism; however, this is not to be confused with slacktivism. It uses digital technology and data politically and proactively to foster social change. Forms of data activism can include digital humanitarianism and engaging in hackathons. Data activism is a social practice that is becoming more well-known with the expansion of technology, open-sourced software and the ability to communicate beyond an individual's immediate community. The culture of data activism emerged from previous forms of media activism, such as hacker movements. A defining characteristic of data activism is that ordinary citizens can participate, in comparison to previous forms of media activism where elite skill sets were required to participate. By increasingly involving average users, they are a signal of a change in perspective and attitude towards massive data collection emerging within the civil society realm.
Jennifer Radloff is a South African feminist activist and a pioneer on Information and communications technology (ICT) for social justice. She works for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in the Women’s Rights Programme and is a board member of Women’s Net.
ODK is open-source software for collecting, managing, and using data in resource-constrained environments. It allows for offline data collection with mobile devices in remote areas. The submission of the data to a server can be performed, when Internet connectivity is available. It allows communities to aggregate data with full control over the collected data and the servers where this data is stored.
CivicActions, Inc. is a services firm that provides technological support with a focus on free and open-source software to agencies.
