Starting Day 2 of #Buildpeace2026 which is not yet “on the Fediverse” but I am working on them for that.
Panelists from the Philippines and Colombia are talking about bridging rural-urban divides in vulnerable areas.
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Mau, from the Philippines, should have been a speaker in the Future Cities program. So much insight not just in rural-urban as polarities, but how urban and peri-urban enclaves based on migration, ethnicity or religion present very similar problems in negotiating peaceful and healthy communities.
Workshop #1 today is so, so heavy. This is all about how to build the agreements and governance about digital social spaces that play into brutal, violent conflict on the ground in global majority nations.
Makes our little Fedi-scale governance problems pretty pale. This is about how to get warring parties to a common minimum standard so that Facebook-spread propaganda stops getting people shot.
@johannab Oh, whoa.
I would love to pick your brain on this later if you've got the wherewithal. Re: project intermittently in progress.
Mmmm…. They’re feeding us well here. Build your own taco bowls for lunch.
Gonna put a “pin this” post here because afternoon workshop was SOOOOooo engaging and hands-on I couldn’t livepost it.
Finishing today with the lightning talks. First up - learning about structural violence and spatial inequality from a Civil Engineer working in Kibera, Kenya - an informal settlement. She founded the Paragon Institute of Sustainable development.
Paragon is structural support for underserved and oppressed communities to access what the wealthier, enriched cities would otherwise landfill as construction “waste”.
Niamh Henry from Univ of Edinburgh now talking about making peace processes machine readable ( or maybe not?). The data science that can support peacebuilding is her research field.
I’m not so few words, Niamh is explaining the the real work is not building the machine learning algorithm, but the curation and inclusion of sources material, and the domain expertise in interpreting the outputs.
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Next short talk is a romp through Peacebuilding through art and non-violent communication in Syria - 4 very fast profiles of different community art projects.
Now a short presentation on the city-village divide in Afghanistan. Exploring how language and choice of words and implications can shape the socio-political sphere. The point is the divide is not natural, it was created by those in, or seeking, power.
Next is FindSuri, a project founded by Syrian-Canadian Dima Aldera, which uses a technology platform to find and reunite displaced Syrians around the world. FindSuri is to address the exploitation that arose when desperate families used FB/Meta trying to locate people but were exposed to predators and exploitation who misused their information.
All FindSuri cases are reviewed by humans and information is only shared or responded to by validated and involved parties.
Audience polled as to how many of us lived, worked, grew up either “rural” or “urban” and how many had experienced conflicts in their work/study where rural and urban interests meet.
Maria (from Colombia) spoke about being from a rural past, working as a civil servant in the city, and going back to find herself no longer addressed by name. TIL: rural citizens developed a habit of addressing “city people” as “Doctor” in Colombia, as an honorific. Maria pushed back on that to bridge the divide.