Representatives from the APC membership, team and partners were among groups from around the world attending this year's Team CommUNITY Global Gathering to meaningfully explore the intersection of human rights and technology. The annual event took place once again in Estoril, Portugal, from 4 to 6 September 2026, offering participants opportunities to connect, network and mobilise within a self-organised, community-driven format.
Throughout the event, regional villages and spaces dedicated to specific topics related to digital rights ran alongside booths showcasing projects, demonstrations and skill-sharing sessions. APC hosted a booth across all three days, and our community used the Global Gathering as an opportunity to reflect on what we can build, strengthen and reimagine together – from FLOSS to community-centred connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI) to digital care and collective resistance, and much more. Here we have brought together a collection of insights and takeaways from the gathering.
Resisting together
The APC network was well represented at the Global Gathering, with participation from Derechos Digitales, TEDIC, Progressive Technology Project, Colnodo, Point of View, LaLibreNet, 7amleh, Código Sur, EngageMedia, Media Matters for Democracy, Myanmar Internet Project, Nupef, VOICE, SFLC.in, Open Culture Foundation (OCF) and more on the ground. The insights shared and knowledge gained in this reflective space helped us to connect and reaffirm our commitment to advocating for people-centred technology.
“Something we have seen at this Global Gathering is the question of how we can sustain our groups when they move away from Big Tech,” said Jes Ciacci from May First Movement Technology, who is also part of the new Rise Against Big Tech (RABT) coalition alongside Progressive Technology Project. “Many groups and circles have been discussing it, and I think it is important because this conversation had not previously been framed in this way.”
Adding to this, Ahmed Qadi from 7amleh reminded us of the importance of collaborating in our collective struggles:
“We do not have the luxury of duplicating our work; we truly need to coordinate and change how this ecosystem operates. We need to shift towards complementing one another rather than competing.”
Riddhima Sharma from Point of View also noted that confronting Big Tech is not a binary argument. “It is not as straightforward as either completely rejecting AI or completely embracing it. There is always some tension in how CSOs navigate that space and develop their own policies and safeguards.”
Solidarity and collective action
A message that repeatedly echoed across the APC network is the need for solidarity and collaboration. Whether regional or thematic, coming together is integral to strengthening our efforts, whether through sharing experiences and resources, partnering on projects or bringing our many voices into important policy discussions.
“One issue I brought to this Global Gathering is regional solidarity around Facebook and broader platform accountability,” reflected Musharrat Mahera from VOICE Bangladesh. “If we work together, there is some hope of securing accountability from the big platforms.”
Concretely put, according to Ashraful Haque from EngageMedia, this could mean creating a space of solidarity to pool our resources. “We need to build some kind of platform for collective action. It should bring us together as a collective movement in response to these new policies and laws.”
Mohsin Saleem from Media Matters for Democracy cautioned on the obstacles faced by digital rights activists. Depending on context, challenges could come from different sources and impact our work in both open and covert ways. As he noted, “The government imposes many so-called security checks. These are not really security checks; they are used to prevent work related to freedom of speech and expression, whether in journalism, media development or other areas.”
The potential for fragmentation is considerable when we assess risks and precarity alongside increasingly shrinking spaces for open discussion. “The most urgent threats today are censorship and the splintering of networks caused by many nation states,” observed Jeremy from eQualitie. Encouragingly, “the community is responding with several different types of solutions.”
Building community-centred connectivity
Digital inclusion is one strategic priority at the heart of our work, and the need for meaningful community-centred connectivity resonated across reflections at the Global Gathering. “One highlight was learning more about innovative community-centred connectivity initiatives in Myanmar – including fibre networks serving thousands of users and locally developed services,” noted Mike Jensen from APC's Local Access Programme, who hosted a booth on community-centred connectivity.
At the circle entitled “Tooling up: A collaborative approach to build meaningful software and equipment stacks for local services and community-centred connectivity” organised by APC, it was observed that “we had an extremely rich set of inputs around local services that community-centred connectivity initiatives could implement on their networks, with participants contributing ideas throughout the three sessions.” Some of these produced innovative ideas and concrete suggestions for implementation. “Many new ideas for local services emerged – including offline payment applications, community radio and podcast streaming, and local AI tools that could provide agricultural advice.”
The mindful setup of the Global Gathering was integral in creating spaces for discussion, and the APC booth was a vital point of connection for the APC network to also forge new relationships with like-minded digital rights activists. Thiane Neves Barros is a researcher on communication in the Amazon and an activist in Black and feminist movements, and remarked that “visiting the APC booth at the Global Gathering 2026 made me realise that the work LocNet is doing with communities is incredibly important for ensuring that these communities are fully integrated into the field of digital rights and participate with an active voice – suggesting, creating, critiquing and building digital tools, technologies and policies that make sense for each context.”
These kinds of reflections were encouraging affirmations of the importance of connecting our work with broader communities of practice, reinforcing the importance of collaboratively building our tools for advocacy.
Feminist technologies
As a feminist organisation, APC’s commitment to empowering women and gender-diverse people cross-cut our engagement at the Global Gathering. This was brought to the forefront across numerous circles and booths, and exemplified through vibrant discussions. As Nikole Yañez from Código Sur reflected on the last day of the event, “We discussed feminist, holistic perspectives and the protection strategies that women human rights defenders in Mesoamerica are developing in response to digital violence. We are actively working on this issue and trying to make a greater effort to share information about it.”
Smita from APC’s Women’s Rights Programme shared a poignant call to action for how we can advance our work:
“People in power are paying attention to online spaces because these spaces are powerful. Since they have recognised this, it is important that we also recognise it in a practical and intentional way and work to safeguard these spaces.”
As our work is deeply rooted in principles of care, we also discussed how this manifests concretely in our engagement. At the APC-organised circle “Operations as care infrastructure”, we asked, “What do we need to care for people, and ourselves, as we continue to do this work? What could we build collectively that individual organisations cannot and should not have to build alone?”
How to make FLOSS more inclusive?
A highlight from this year’s Global Gathering was the launch of a new special edition of Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch), celebrating ground-breaking research on how free, libre and open source software (FLOSS) can be more inclusive. With six authors in attendance, the launch was both a meaningful discussion of challenges to bridging the North/South power divide and a coming-together around strategies and best practices for amplifying our advocacy.
What arose across all discussions is the importance of not considering FLOSS development in a vacuum in order to better understand its impact and its potential as a liberatory practice. This means centring people at the heart of the discussion around these technologies. “We need to do more community building in general," summarised Ragheb Ghandour from SMEX.
For Elisa Lindinger of SUPERRR Lab, who co-wrote a chapter with Zara Rahman, one of the concrete ways we can do this is through transparency and accessibility. “If we acknowledge the labour that is being contributed to FLOSS, it would actually be more inviting for others to join and contribute,” she reflected.
Across the themes discussed throughout the tightly packed schedule of the Global Gathering, these calls for solidarity and collective action were repeatedly echoed by participants. For many of us who rely on technology to do our work while at the same time finding ourselves siloed behind our terminals, the Global Gathering was a powerful reminder of the very real and immediate need for community in order to not only push ahead with our work, but to continue building the strength and resilience of our movement.