Tech for narrative power

At Komons, one of our core passions is making technology more accessible to communities. In our projects, we serve as technological mediators, with a focus on designing technology that addresses social needs. For instance, at the Kenya Comms Hub, we have created a device that employs AI to generate messages, integrating technical knowledge in a way that is user-friendly for professionals. Additionally, we have developed a digital product for a community that is researching the anti-gender movement in Latin America. We are also actively supporting a women's research group in Latin America, as well as a research group in Kenya. This area of work is currently ongoing and evolving.

Objective

Develop technology that provides insights to communities.

Challenges

• Adverse digital landscape: The digital environment is heavily contaminated with disinformation and manipulation tactics employed by authoritarian actors, a situation further exacerbated by Big Tech business models that amplify these dynamics. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) poses an additional threat, with potential misuse by bad actors likely to further intensify these challenges.
• Lack of access to technology: Pro-rights actors are grappling with limited resources and time, underscored by the need for well-being and collaboration to forge effective alliances. They are also confronted with the vast and intricate domain of strategic communication and narrative change, necessitating learning experiences and the integration of diverse fields of expertise. Practitioners urge to gain narrative and digital competencies thought practice and feasible learning experiences. The digital tools available on the market do not meet these needs.

Our Approach

• Unique intersection of expertise: We possess a distinctive blend of expertise in technology comprehension, narrative practice, digital research, and collective processes. We bring this wealth of knowledge to our approach in designing technologies that are accessible and yield truly significant outcomes for the objectives of practitioners.
• Technology at the service of narrative communities: We engage with communities to understand their needs and challenges, offering customized technological solutions. We share our vision on technology to move towards innovative solutions that provoke deep reflection.
• Scalable strategy: We focused on developing applications that address specific needs from the first year, ensuring their applicability across different contexts and goals. This involved progressively integrating successful applications to form more complex and cohesive solutions over time, allowing the technological infrastructure to be flexible, grow and evolve based on the successes of developed devices.

Outcomes and Learnings

• Enhanced digital intelligence accessibility: We explored technologies to capture and analyze data from a narrative change and strategic communications perspective, developing applications that enable various expertise levels to access to information and make digital analysis accessible to diverse narrative actors.
• Empowering collaboration through digital research: Digital research has facilitated the gathering of diverse stakeholders, prompting reflection on their challenges and providing a strategic overview and control over their context. Gaining a comprehensive understanding of their issues and specific narrative insights has enabled the formulation of insightful campaigns and fostered collaboration.
• Decoding narrative complexity: We have advanced by employing sophisticated narrative change theory perspectives and AI data analysis. While these methods are continuously being refined, we have succeeded in conducting analyses that were previously unfeasible, yielding crucial reflections on the narratives circulating within the digital realm.

Contributors:

Supported by Bridges-Puentes