 Felly, yn fawr yn gweithio eu chaelio am gynchau y stage Alla Sandra o Rhaffino o Gnoses, ac yn ddim eich bod ni'n gweithio, eu hunain, a'r ffaith o'r hyn yn gallu cyd-dwynt yn ei wneud i gael eich taith o technologi, i'w wneud gwych ei ddweud, a'r ffaith i'w gweld y llyffordd, ac mae'r ffaith o'r ffaith i'w gweld ymlaen i'r ffaith, mae'n gweithio i fynd i'n gweithio i fynd i'r ffaith, First Child, a ddech chi'n rhoi, mae'n bwysig i'w hollol i ni i gwerthu. Fy gyddiwch i'n meddwl i ni i dydw i'ch meddwl. Felly mae'n gofyn i'ch meddwl i Alessandra, mae'n ddweud i'r first child. Mae'n meddwl i'ch meddwl i'r first child, ond dyna'r brifyn o'r neid oedd ymddangos iawn, felly mae'n ddweud i Alessandra. Mae'n ddweud i'ch meddwl i'n dechrau. Mae'n ddweud i'n meddwl i'r newid. Thank you. I think there will be opportunity for Q&A if you don't let me speak for too long, I tend to do that, so please tell me if I start rambling too much. Thank you everyone for my society for inviting me and especially Gemma for being so helpful in the last few months as I was having a baby. And then leaving a maternity leave wasn't exactly easy to get a hold of me so they were very patient. My daughter is sitting outside so you all have a chance to meet her, she's wonderful. I'm here to talk about very depressing things but hopefully leave you with some hope for the future. I will start by giving you the depressing news which isn't exactly news, I think everyone already knows this but we are in a bit of a rough situation as democracies. Speaking as a Brazilian is living through a especially hard moment but we're not alone so at least there's other folks thinking about solutions with us. I like this framework of platform strongman as a way of defining how these new leaders that are essentially winning elections in different countries have been tackling their campaigns and then the way they govern. So essentially when we talk about platform strongman what we mean is people who run campaigns in a very new way using sort of all the tools of new power distributed campaigns that run really viral, that rely on volunteers essentially running the show with a lot of freedom and many decisions that are made horizontally but then when they actually govern they are attached to the values of old power, very authoritarian, tend to be very conservative in the case of the leaders that we have here especially Trump and Bolsonaro on the far left. These values also include being known, misogynist races and all the things that we already know. These are the guys winning elections, not just at the presidential level but as we've seen in Brazil in the last electoral cycle also at the local level. My state of Rio just elected a governor who wasn't even in the polls, he wasn't showing in the polls two weeks prior to the election. No one knew who this guy was, he wasn't making into the polls and then he just rose like a rocket and he was quite crazy. He of course is also riding on the back of a very extensive network of evangelical Christian churches in the country and the evangelical Christian churches are also making use of sort of new power tools and they are themselves based on a very distributed model of essentially anyone becoming a pastor, opening a church and then influencing a local community really strongly. And we don't know exactly how we're going to cope with the situation. What I do know and I think is relevant to the group here is that we need to beat them at their own game to some extent. And I say that I don't mean being crazy authoritarian conservatives but I do mean being really good at using technology and the tools of new power and distributing power in a way that empowers us and makes us better at what we do. And I believe there is a path for doing that in an ethical way and while withholding values that are also coherent with new power models. In order to get there, my sense is that we need to focus on fostering democratic societies not just democratic governments. And what I mean by that is that at least from the experience of Brazil for the past 30 years since essentially it became a democracy, we've been as a civil society focusing a lot on ensuring that our institutions are truly democratic. And that means essentially making sure that elections are held in a free and transparent way, that institutions are creating entry points for people to participate in policy making. All of that is necessary and really important, but I think we've become accustomed as civil society to having direct access to power through these sort of avenues that were open to us 30 years ago and influencing power directly without necessarily worrying too much about building support for democratic policies at the society level, mass support. So at some point democracy has lost the elections, that's sort of the paradox and that's where we are now. I think we need to go back and look at how our societies are organized, how normal citizens are organized and whether or not they are living democratic processes every day in their lives, not just every four years, not just when we make room for an election to take place. And well then the million dollar question is how we do it and I don't have an answer to that, but I have a few examples of strategies that I think are working and that maybe we can build upon or expend upon and then I will share with you. And I have organized these strategies in essentially two paths. One is resistance, which everyone is talking about and I do think resistance is important and not here to advocate that we focus on being proactive and forget about resistance. I think it is time to resist a little bit. But the other path is what I'm calling regeneration. I'm not sure if that's the best translation in English so you'll let me know. It sounds a bit spiritual I guess, but I kind of like it. Maybe it's coherent with the times. And I love dictionaries, especially when I'm trying to translate in between different languages and the exact definition of resistance or to resist is to exert force in opposition. And I think that's a very important political stance to take right now. I think in certain democracies we need to be a little bit more open about being in opposition. This is not something that most civil society organizations are used to or comfortable with. Most NGOs were born at a time where even if we were operating outside of government, we would never necessarily call ourselves the opposition because we wanted to ensure that we will last and that we weren't necessarily seen as a political force that was contingent on whomever was sitting on the seats of power. I think that time at least in Brazil has definitely changed. Most of the civil society sector now will need to be in opposition to whatever this government is already doing and will do in the next four years because these attacks are going to the very core of what a democratic society should look like. When it comes to regeneration, then I think we have a bigger responsibility because I'm talking about our own regeneration and regeneration of democracy itself. The definition that I like the best is the second definition to the transitive verb to change radically and for the better. We do need radical transformation in the way democracies operate. It's not just about ensuring that these platform strongmen are not ruining everything for us. It's also recognizing that the reason they took power is because things were not necessarily going out that well for everyone. Unless we look at these issues and solve them, we're going to keep on facing these challenges in the near future. When I talk about resistance, the first thing that comes from my mind is activism. Being in a civic tech conference, I'm especially interested in discussing with you how technology can help activists do their jobs better. When I talk about regeneration, I think about solidarity or building the commons again, building the sort of democratic tissue and muscle that we need to be vibrant democracies. I think solidarity is at the very core of that and technology can also help us think about solidarity at scale. Again, I have a few examples for you about our work and how we have been doing it. Of course, I'm sure you can think of examples of your own work and I'll be very curious in the next few days to learn more about what all of you do. I will be in and out on baby duty, but I'll definitely be around and keen to discuss. Before I give you the examples, just to give you a bit of an intro from what we are, we are a laboratory for activism and a network of small civic engagement infrastructures in different cities in Brazil. Our job, this is our team, the other day in Rio, we was very, very hot, is to create technology solidarity networks and mobilization opportunities for people, for ordinary citizens. That want to have an impact in their community, so we very much look at local communities as sort of the locus of the work that we do. And we were born in 2011 as a local organization, as a local activist organization in the city of Rio, and we sort of spun out and become this umbrella organization that has other projects embedded in it. Just really quickly, in 2015, we launched a network of local organizations that follow the model of our first project in Rio. In 2017, we started working on different causes, so we launched Mapa de Aqualimento, which is a platform for victims and survivors of sexual violence to find therapists and lawyers that want to give them free services. And Beta, our feminist chatbot, she operates on Facebook and gives a large constituency of young women opportunities for campaigning for reproductive rights in Brazil. And last year, we did a few solidarity campaigns. I brought two here that have become larger projects. Somos Cria was a massive, they're both crowdfunding campaigns. Somos Cria was a massive crowdfunding campaign to support local schools that prep black women, young black women for university, so they can actually take the entrance exams and pass, which is very hard in Brazil for public universities. And we did that campaign after a local congresswoman, Marielle Franco, was assassinated in March last year, about a year ago now. And she had herself been through one of these schools and made it to university thanks to that, so we thought it was a good way of paying tribute to her and to her path. And we just heard last week that 102 black women that went to these prep schools essentially for the year after the campaign actually made it to university just last week, so that's really great. And we also did a huge crowdfunding campaign after Bolsonaro was elected and we re-granted all the money to 10 local organizations that work with victims of hate crime. So that's sort of the kind of work that we do. We became essentially known in Brazil after we did this one campaign. There was a video about it. I'm not sure if the video is going to play, so I will just tell you what it was. We essentially in 2012 launched a campaign to save a local public school in Rio. We had just started our work and we launched this campaign to save a local public school from demolition. It was going to become a parking lot near the Maracanon Stadium in the lead-up to the World Cup. And the kids and the teachers and the parents, yeah, I know. I say this now, but it's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? I just become used to the stories. I don't get surprised anymore. But yeah, it was one of the best public schools in the state of Rio and the local school community really organized and rallied around it. And I think our team then helped them organize on a massive scale, get other citizens involved and more notoriously, we planted a webcam in front of the school using the balcony of one of the buildings. There we talked to this really sweet elderly couple that landed their balcony for a few months and we had a webcam monitoring the school 24-7. People could watch it online and if they saw all those are coming they could press a button. And other people who had previously signed up received text messages and physically came to the school. So that happened three times during the time that we were campaigning and of course the press loved it. It just lent its health to great photo ops. Just a bunch of people sitting outside of this school and keeping the bulldozers out. And after a while it became kind of ugly for the governor and he decided to just let it be. So the school was still standing and that's how we essentially got started. That was our very first big campaign in the city of Rio. I've already told you a little bit about the projects, but just so you know how we think about them, would you think that some of our projects are more activist-oriented, so more resistance-oriented in a way and some other projects are more solidarity-oriented. And I guess the question then going back to what we were speaking about in the beginning is, is this work effective against platform strongmen? And in order to answer that question I'm going to introduce you to Brazil's first platform strongmen who is not Bolsonaro. A few years prior to Bolsonaro even being considered a viable candidate, this guy became mayor of Sao Paulo, meet João Doria, this not very handsome man actually. Anyway, João Doria was the host of the apprentice Brazil, he brings the bell right, I know. History just repeats itself very quickly now too, which is kind of weird. Anyway, so he was the host of the apprentice, he was a television personality, he got elected to be mayor of Sao Paulo, one of the biggest cities in the world, definitely the biggest city in Brazil. And he was a very social media driven mayor. He was on Facebook every day, all day long, essentially doing live streaming from 5am to 2am the following day. He made a point of making sure that people knew that he would wake up early, that was a thing. So he would always live stream something at like 5.30am showing how early he was working. I don't know what that was about, but anyway. So this is just a few examples of how he presented himself as a mayor and as a candidate. He would also do that, he would wear the uniforms of different categories of workers in the city of Sao Paulo and take pictures wearing the different uniforms. It was very Sesame Street-like, we don't know what was going on. Anyway, but that was him. Just a few more pictures, just because I love it. Look at that, the rodeo hatch, isn't it amazing? Oh, and this gesture means accelerate Sao Paulo. Because, and that's when it becomes interesting, João Daudia was elected after a previous mayor, Fiannão Duodagi from the Workers' Party, had implemented a bunch of policies to restrict cars and the velocity of cars in the city of Sao Paulo. So much of his platform was actually around sort of undoing the policies of his predecessor and saying that his predecessor had de-accelerated or slowed down the city of Sao Paulo, so he would accelerate it again. Fiannão Duodagi then went on to run for president and lost to Bolsonaro just a few months ago. But when Daudia took power, essentially his main campaign promise was to undo everything that his predecessor had done. I am by no means implying that his predecessor had only done good things. Daudia did some pretty bad things too, but the policies that he had implemented around car restrictions were actually quite successful from a scientific point of view. They had improved quality of light, they had improved actual traffic patterns, they had improved the quality of the air, and they had contributed to diminishing that in due to car crashes and other traffic-related issues. Now when Fiannão Duodagi was mayor, before Daudia was elected, we had run one campaign also around cars, as mean as Sampa through a local organization in Sao Paulo, for a policy that Daudia was not implementing on his own. It was around cars, it was around an issue that we knew that he cared about, but it was not something that he wanted to do on his own. The campaign that we had run was around opening streets for pedestrians on Sundays. It was called Paulista Bertha and it focused on Avenida Paulista, which is sort of the most important avenue in Sao Paulo, but it also included 38 other important avenues that we wanted to ensure that people had access to on Sundays, especially given that Sao Paulo has very few green spaces, very few sort of spaces for families to take their kids to during the weekends. So it was a very simple thing, but Adagio was not very keen on doing that, mostly because the commercial associations, so the neighborhoods and commercial associations around these streets were very, very powerful and all of them were opposed to precluding cars from using these streets on the weekend. The people who lived around the streets were overwhelmingly in favor of this policy, but the commercial associations were not and Adagio was already essentially fighting of a bunch of people who didn't want to pick up that fight. We ran this campaign, we won the campaign, it was a massive campaign that lasted for over a year, engaged thousands of citizens in Sao Paulo and we won it and Adagio finally opened a bunch of streets, 38 streets throughout the city for pedestrians. The first step of recognizing the cars don't necessarily need to own our cities. When Daria was elected with his whole Accelerate Sao Paulo business, we were very worried. We said, okay, he's going to throw this policy in the mix and undo that one too. So we ran a campaign on him right after he was elected during that period in between the election and him actually taking office. Saying, please, don't undo this. We like this. This has been a success. Just let it be. Don't go in your fur of undoing everything that Adagio has done and undo this too. This is the answer that we got from him, Joan Daria. That's his actual email address. My designer was very nice and essentially blurred the rest of it. I don't know why. I don't think you would all email him now, but he answered the way this campaign was built. It was an email pressure campaign, so essentially we had a web page where people could come in and they just left their basic name, last name email address, and we had a pre-populated message that was sent from the citizen's email address directly to Joan Daria's email address. So he got about 40,000 emails in the first eight hours, which I'm sure he noticed, and then he answered. I'm not sure if he answered all 40,000 of them, but he definitely answered a bunch, because we got a bunch of different members of Minas Sampa then emailing us and saying, hey, he answered. This is so exciting. His answer was very short, was Paulista will keep being open on Sundays. It's working well. It was adopted by the population. Then we asked for a meeting with him just to make sure that there wasn't any mixed messages that he actually mentioned what he said on the email. Sometimes politicians will do that to us. They will publicly say that they are agreeing to move a campaign, but then go back or there'll be caveats. What he told us in the meeting was quite interesting. He said, this was not an adagio policy. This was not done by my predecessor. This was done in spite of him. This was done because people pressured him, and therefore I don't need to undo it. I think this is an important insight for how we deal with platform strongmen. The insight is this. Even if we have people that we like in power, politicians that we love, politicians that are doing well or implementing good policies, if they're doing these things in a very autocratic way without any link to the population, it'll be very easy for these platform strongmen once they take power and they will in some of our countries. I don't think there's a lot we can do about that. But it will be very easy for them to undo whatever policies we like. Our best hope for a continuation of public policy is to ensure that these policies are actually backed by the population, democratic societies, not just democratic governments. We need that. Otherwise, as public sentiment swings, as governments change, we will lose the policies that we hold dear. I think technology has a very strong role to play in terms of fostering that kind of activism that leads to that popular support that will then give us hope for keeping our policies in place. That's the post that we did right after Doria said that he was going to keep the avenue open. Now, continuing on, because the story is not finished yet, Doria is now governor of Sao Paulo. He won the last elections, so he's no longer mayor of his governor. Yeah, there he is celebrating his victory with a Brazilian flag. And again, before Doria took power as governor, we had already launched the platform that I mentioned to you a few minutes ago, Mapa do Colimento, which links survivors of sexual violence with a network of volunteers that provide them with free services. We started with just mental health services because that was something that was lacking in the public health system in Brazil. Would you have some mental health services in the public health system, but not enough? It's not very well organized. And now we expanded it to legal services as well. Now it's almost 3,000 volunteers that have gone through our vetting process. We have a lot more that actually signed up, but we have a pretty strong vetting process for this. Over 2,000 women that get assistance through the platform every week because the therapy sessions are weekly. So now we're handling weekly sessions for over 2,000 women. That was something that we had already implemented about a year before Doria was elected. The week after he took office as governor, he said he actually vetoed an initiative by the local parliament to implement 24-hour police stations for women in the state of Sao Paulo. So one of the older demands of the movements that are comprised of sexual violence survivors in Brazil is that there are the be specialized police stations that are staffed by women and that are open 24 hours. So that women that are victims of violence can go to a safe place where they know they will not be dismissed as so often happens in sort of normal police stations. And this has been a demand that has been building up. Mia Sampa actually did a campaign, our organization in Sao Paulo did a campaign to open the very first police station of that kind in the city of Sao Paulo and we won. It's been open for a few years now. But then the local parliament in Sao Paulo on its own, we didn't have any campaign pressuring them. Passed a bill that would essentially ensure that there would be a number of these police stations in different zones in the state of Sao Paulo available to women 24 hours a day and Joanne Doria veto it. Those are the sort of headlines. Doria Veta project, Doria Veta means veto. Kind of easy. Right after that happened, we launched a campaign and that campaign was different about it. That we didn't launch it to our normal sort of base of activists. We actually launched it to the volunteers that were working with us in Mapa do Colimento. People that had been essentially flexing their civic muscle for a while through the solidarity network that we had built. And that solidarity network had kept them connected to this issue even as Brazil was sort of torn apart by what was a very heated election, a very polarizing election. So inside of that community, we had voted for different candidates and we certainly must have had people that voted for Doria himself but we have sort of built that community based on this idea that women need specialized assistance and we were actually providing that assistance to some extent ourselves but there are certain kinds of assistance that need to come from government and we launched this campaign to that member base and we said the governor just vetoed this. We need this to actually go through and we know that you care about this issue because we've been dedicating hours of your life every week to helping other women. We need you to get engaged in this and because these were people that were already engaged at a higher level we didn't necessarily need to ask them to send an email only. We could ask them to do more involved things, higher barrier to entry things, show up in person at his office, send physical letters to his office, all kinds of actions that are a little bit harder to take but they really show a policy show that there is popular support for something. It was a very successful campaign. It was very quick and then he went back and said, yes, I will open the 24 hour police stations. This just happened. This was just a few weeks ago because it just took off as its governor and of course he will then hug a bunch of women and take pretty pictures of them but that's fine. If that's the price we have to pay, it's okay. There you go. There he is with some of the police officers that are going to be staffing these stations and of course he made a video and he also uses that for his own platform and we know that but that's his logic and we have to play with what we have and this is how policy is being decided upon today which is not necessarily a good thing but it is what it is and if we don't do it well, if we don't play this game well enough we are going to lose. I think we already are losing but there you go. Through this work, we've been essentially growing quite rapidly we're now a bit over 1.3 million people in terms of membership. These are people that are members of our different civic engagement structures in different cities. We have trained over 150 activists in the past few years in 20 cities. More than three countries is kind of a weird phrase in four countries and raised a lot of money through crowdfunding and we have these permanent networks in 13 different cities in Brazil. We have created in 13 cities we have seven that are really active today and six that are a bit less active so we don't count them in necessarily when we do multi-city campaigns. What I want to leave you with and what I always tell my team and the volunteers and the members that work with us is that in spite of the very tough times that we're facing as activists as promoters of the resistance and the solidarity that we need to move forward we are playing the long game. I don't think we're going to see a lot of victories in the next couple of years maybe not in the next few years really with the exception of very specific policy victories that I think we can still have and I've just shown you a few examples of that of how that can happen but in spite of that I am certain I am convinced that a new generation is rising and that generation is better than us it's more connected, more open more queer, more tolerant, less cynical and more honest than what we've seen before I'm not talking about my daughter's generation that will be too far away in the future I am not that pessimistic but I'm talking about the 15 and 16 year olds of the world who are surprising as every day with their creativity and their ability to organise and our membership in the work that we do is mostly quite young 16 to 29 is our main age bracket so we deal with people like that every day and we know that they are the real deal they're doing really interesting work and they will save our democracies if we let them if we don't make our democracies so impermeable to public participation that they don't even have a chance as Nasa's and I think as a sector in general I hope that we can beat this generation's first school of democracy I hope we can beat this new authoritarian movement quickly and effectively and resist but also reinvent, rebuild, regenerate because if we don't challenge ourselves to create institutions that are truly radically different from what we've seen before platform strongmen will keep on dominating them and doing whatever they want with them and it will be a very hard world to live in in a few years from now but I don't think we're necessarily headed there because there is incredible energy in the sector that we can channel for good and I hope we do it together so thank you We've got 10 or 15 minutes for questions I guess, Alessandro, do you want to handle the questions yourself? Can we have other questions? No, no, no, over to you I've got a question whilst you're getting ready it strikes me the the role for technology is perhaps less important than the personal connections that are formed on the ground and so on so I'd be interested in the kind of the interaction between those two things and then open up to the floor So the way we see ourselves is that it's organised it's not digital activists, it's organised people and that may be through a campaign that may be for a solidarity effort it may be for different things and I think what technology does is it makes organising cheaper and more accessible at a scale that is relevant to a city like Sao Paolo a city of 12, 13 million people so I think technology is actually quite vital we wouldn't be able to do the work that we do without good technology simply because we wouldn't have the resources to operate at a scale without technology however, we don't see it as a lens in itself we do see it as a means for effective organising and effective organising is your right based on building personal connections that last, building identification to a cause and to a community people will work together in spite of their political differences if they trust each other on some level so what we've found is that making sure that people see the humanity in each other and they have a common cause a common ground is actually quite powerful if you do it over time in spite of other differences that may arise and I think technology if used badly can actually go in the opposite direction of that it can actually make people blind to what is common in them and to what unites them because it creates this veil very easily you could do that but it can also actually do the opposite thing help you find your peers help you find your civic soulmates in this sea of craziness and there's a question over there and another one there Hi, Luke from Grassroots a question particularly, I really like the thank you very much for the framing of beating platform Strongman on their own ground and a very tactical question on that one of the things that's been reported on quite a bit from the Brazilian election is something very innovative and very aggressive use of technology was the Bolsonaro campaign use of WhatsApp groups at scale it's been particularly reported in terms of sort of fake news but actually it looks like from the outside it was really important in terms of organising and getting people to act can you describe a bit more about learning from the enemy how they actually did that in terms of getting people to actually act and what we can learn from what they did there yeah, so a few things we did quite a lot of thinking around this and some research and some espionage as well so I can share what I know my first thought is we don't know enough we need more research on this and it's hard to have research on what happens on WhatsApp because it's encrypted because it's not sort of a public timeline like what we see on Facebook but what we do know is that most of the WhatsApp groups that were activated by the Bolsonaro campaign were actually not created as Bolsonaro campaign WhatsApp groups they were created as neighbourhood groups they were created during the truck driver strike that happened earlier in the year they were created for other uses and then Bolsonaro campaigners sort of took over in a way and then they became very active during the campaign I think that's an important insight and it goes back to what I was saying about personal connection it's once you've built a group that is already connecting about something that is of common interest to everyone and that group has been effective over time it is a lot easier for the organisers of that group or the more prominent, the facto leaders of the group to then introduce a new mission and the mission may be alex Bolsonaro and that be well received by the other members of the group so that's one thought the second thought is that the kind of messaging that Bolsonaro was using just travels well on WhatsApp and I think that's an unfortunate side effect of the architecture of our social networks is that they do favour sort of very superficial fake information, very sensationalist and I don't think we can necessarily beat them at this game because that would be unethical but we can work on language when we talk about issues so they don't seem so lofty and sort of far away from people so very basic insight but I think very important and then I think the third thing which requires a larger conversation with Facebook essentially is that the same things that make WhatsApp amazing for some types of activist work encryption, the fact that it can do so much in a private way is also allowing crimes to be committed in a way in electoral crimes included in a way that goes unchecked and we just don't have a good enough answer for that yet but we need one I don't think the answer is getting rid of these things we do work with WhatsApp in Rio as well around police violence we do collaborative reporting of police violence through WhatsApp and the reason we do it through WhatsApp it's because of encryption and the fact that everyone has WhatsApp so I don't think we should lose it I think WhatsApp is actually an amazing technology very valuable to activists in many ways but the impact on the elections was terrible and that's something that we need to look at but not necessarily just a civil society also as the larger sector and one over here I'll go there and I'll go back to you I won't forget you Hi, Miche Sifri from Civic Hall thank you for that wonderful presentation I have to say coming to this conference now for many years it's really striking to hear a keynote that is so activist or as opposed to neutral in the way that Civic Tech works so question, joke are you sure your last name is in Cortez because you sure remind me of AOC a very interesting new political actor in the United States and so that gets to my question which is number one do you think personally that you might enter politics do you think being in politics may be the best vehicle for the type of work that you're describing and then the second question is do you worry about your own safety oh boy, okay so first question I've already entered politics but not in an electoral way I know what you mean do I think about running for office yes, not now if I say no I think that would be a lie I love politics and I love policy and I think there is a scale to whatever the state does that is just amazing so I would love to be a part of that at some point in my life but the way that the political system is organized in Brazil right now would make it very hard for someone like me to have any impact and I think I've been working with this for long enough now to know that it is often an illusion just how much impact you can have from the within I'm not disagreeing that big change also needs to happen from within but I think we often times assign way too much power to whomever is holding the pen when in reality that person is subject to so many types of pressure from everywhere party pressure, constituency pressure funder pressure etc that I think for now at least for me a more effective way of having that kind of impact is actually organizing a new kind of pressure so that everyone who is already in politics is also subject to citizen pressure otherwise they are just responding to interests that are well better organized than we are and I think we have a potential for having more power than we exert as citizens it's just a matter of sort of organizing yourself better so that's for the first one on safety yes I do we faced some pretty serious threats about a year and a half ago we faced sort of trolls and hate all the time every day but I don't really count that in I think that's sort of like a dog that barks but doesn't necessarily bite but we did face some serious threats about a year and a half ago because of the work that we do on police violence and we realized that that piece of work was actually making to create security protocols around it that would then have to sort of be applied to the entire organization so we are actually trying to spin that piece of work out precisely because of that because it wasn't just me I was definitely more in the spotlight but my entire staff was very scared and we work with a pretty diverse staff so people that come from different walks of life some people that live in favelas in Rio that are subject to all kinds of different political rule and I think even though the threats that were made to me were more public I think that the threats that are made to them are much more serious so I do worry about my safety I worry about the safety of my team a lot more than I worry about my own because I'm not AOC I love her but I'm not her and I come from a at least on my mother's side a wealthy background which in a country in a very very unequal country like Brazil some level of protection I don't kid myself into thinking that that will make me invincible but it is different from being say a black woman in Islam in Rio and I do have black women who lives in two that live in slums in Rio or whose families do in my staff so that's what I'm mostly worried about now and that's why when both are not a one the crowdfunding campaign that we ran was to support very small organizations that work directly on victims of hate crime it wasn't necessarily to support us but then again yes it's a weird situation in Brazil so some level of scared I think it's prudent but I tell myself this will sound very strange in English but I'll say it anyways that we will not die until they kill us so I will not let fear keep me or anyone that I work with from speaking up and actually doing this work because I think that fear is both on out and other platforms they play very well with the resemblance of the democratic normalcy so they will say and claim because they were elected that all is well of our democracy there's nothing wrong they're not doing anything that should be considered reason for being alarmed so the flip side of that is that if we are so fearful that we shut up that won't necessarily be seen as a direct result of their work that would just be seen as us being cowards there's just nothing tangible enough that would necessarily make us shut up with that said I was friends close friends with Mariali so we've had our share of loss and violence in Brazil in the past year so we need to keep an eye out there was a question here that I don't want to forget and then I think we're going to run out of time but I'll be around I'm not going to be around immediately I'm going to be around for like the few minutes after this and then I'm going to have to leave view of my baby a little bit but I'll be back later and then tomorrow so we want to talk more I'm here, yes Thank you Alessandra this was a very inspiring and useful frame the resist and regenerate and a great flow from the presentation because just before you went into that historical perspective I wanted immediately to ask you how did all your work since 2011 play into this kind of politics rising why did that happen despite so many groups doing this work so it's fantastic like the way you put it there my question is if you can say a bit more about what notion you think we need to give to solidarity in that context and you spoke about solidarity at scale and you know I can see this in a platform about women that have been through violence but that solidarity between people that dehumanise other members in the community and the people who are dehumanised black women, migrants in Brazil or in other context how do when we don't have the personal connection as in like people working in the neighbourhood and I know that's a very hard question just your thinking on like how do we do solidarity at scale when we have this polarising situations and maybe just to put this into context like I co-lead the Global Strategy Programme for Amnesty International and I'd love to talk to everybody about this but we're at some point in the next month like launching this bigger consultation on like how does Amnesty need to transform the way we do solidarity being that it's a big organisation built on like the concept of international solidarity but now we're at another moment in time and we're going to use tech to do that etc etc and it's great if we can start collectively thinking about these questions Okay Hard questions to answer quickly but I'll give you just a few thoughts from a tactical perspective I think that again you cannot stand in solidarity with someone that you don't see as an equal as a human being that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to know them personally that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to agree with them on every issue but it does mean that you have to see the humanity in them and I think what makes us sensible to the humanity in others is different for everyone but it's definitely not necessarily the demographic data that most political organisers historically work with so it's not necessarily age it's not necessarily social class the traditional categories for targeting political messaging are already blurred and I think the platform strongmen were actually the first ones to notice that that's why they moved into working with psychological analysis targeting their messaging not necessarily through the traditional demographic categories but ways of thinking so some people are more easily convinced by numbers so I'm going to give them numbers some people are more easily convinced by emotional stories so I'm going to give them that they're doing that too better than we are but when it comes to solidarity the things that makes us sensible to the humanity in others are different but there are a few common traits and I think we can amnesty has a large community of members I'm sure you could get data on this if you applied some data science to it what we've done with our database is try to identify these traits and it's not we started our biggest solidarity platform with survivors of sexual violence not just because it is a huge issue in Brazil because it was a real need those are of course big factors into making that decision but also because we realized that after the very young people our biggest membership was actually amongst 35 to 55 year old women with children so it's essentially youngish I guess sorry mums that we see the most action and we realized that knowing that someone was also struggling to raise their children we're facing some of the same issues that he wore as a mother actually made you a lot more sensible to their struggle in spite of differences in class race etc etc so I think we can find bridges like that of course in an ideal world I'm a humanist I would love for people to see the humanity in everyone just because they're human beings but that's just not necessarily how people operate and again I think that part of our struggle with platform strongmen far right populist in general is that we often times don't want to work with the realities of how people get engaged politically because we like those realities to be different so we sort of already operate on the assumption that they are but they're not people want to be on whatsapp they want the gossipy aspect of politics to be served to them and they will stand in solidarity a lot easier if you give them something to identify with and if you do that over time I think that's also key especially for international organizations that often not say it's the case with MNC I don't know if they work well enough but that often sort of come in in moments of crisis and just run one campaign and then go out what we've learned is that in order to build trust in a community the community and the team and the team with the community and the community and amongst itself you need time Milhiyu for instance we took a poll after Bolsonaro was elected 20% of our members voted for him about 30% of them self-identified evangelical Christians and they're not leaving the community even though we took a very strong stance against most of what he was saying but we never said that he was equal to his followers I think that's one thing people vote for candidates in spite of disagreeing with them on some issues we all do that I know it's harder for us to accept that people would do that when the issues are to men you shouldn't vote for someone who thinks that or who says publicly I would rather have a dad son than a gay son but the reality is that some people voted for him for other reasons in spite of that and just equating his hideousness to meaning that everyone who voted for him is also hideous will not help us ask them to stand in solidarity with people that are being targeted by these policies so we realize that we have enough people in our community that like him to some extent enough to vote for him they still participate in our campaigns because we've been around for seven years now so we've done so many things in Rio that people know that they can trust us that we are on their side in spite of whomever is sitting in power we don't change our stances we're always working for policies that better the lives of people in cities even as governments change and the fact that we have survived these swings also makes it easier for people to be standing in solidarity with us and with each other within the communities that we have created I think this is it thank you so much for having me and I'll talk to you very soon