About the DeSIC project.

1. Through this project we will work with initiatives of migrant women, which promote empowerment and active citizenship with a particular focus on gender-based violence. Our team consists of two migrant women communities, Angelou Centre (UK) and UWAH (GR), the University of Newcastle and a team of developers and researchers from Sociality (GR).

2. The first two communities work with and are mostly migrant women, as far as beneficiaries and staff is concerned, and will be the basis for our comparative research project. University of Newcastle has years of experience in designing technological infrastructures for and with communities with intricate needs. Sociality, a cooperative from Athens Greece, has research experience and has co-developed and co-designed software with various grassroots initiatives.

3. All these groups will work closely in order to develop and prototype activities that unpick the sensitivities of technology use and data management in such complex contexts.

4. More specifically we want to explore and provoke activities that revolve around:

• notions of positive digital security, i.e freedom to act while being secure,
• security as socio-technical process, i.e. how people relate to security and not only how security is enforced upon them by designers and practitioners,
• delegation of access i.e through sharing resources and
• the use of disruptive technologies, such as blockchain.

5. We seek to experiment and combine methodological tools and design approaches in order to develop an empathetic understanding of participants, their constraints, problem-solving perspectives, interrelations and practices. We are also informed by feminist and intersectional approaches to data management that provide a proper lens through which we will be enabled to zoom out and incorporate aspects of participant’s everyday activities that are otherwise ignored or miss-treated.

6. The project team will work towards the development of an open-source application that will encompass the aforementioned principles providing an infrastructure in order to foster tasks of these communities which can be held online. It will also fend for the expansion of their work to communities beyond their physical reach and make use of resources for educational and communication reasons that are to some degree left latent.

7. Departing from our work with specific groups, we aim at (open source) transferability and scalability to broader contexts so as to ensure viability beyond the scope of this funding. This project is a continuation of our work in infrastructuring for communities and a step towards further research on the implications of technological design for sensitive data.