Behind the Mask Online Meetup:

Collective Care: Community Responses to COVID-19

BtM Meetup 2 - Collective Care.jpg

Wednesday 10 March 2021, 19:00 – 20:30 CET Online Meetup

Part of the DNL Activation programme https://www.disruptionlab.org/meet-ups
Cost: free admission · Language: English

Registration: The number of participants is limited to 30. Booking is essential.
Please reserve your spot via: https://pretix.eu/disruptionlab/collectivecare

Ahead of our 23rd conference BEHIND THE MASK: Whistleblowing During The Pandemic (18-20 March 2021, Streaming online), we invite you for an evening on community responses in the fight against COVID-19, with speakers from the Coronavirus Tech Handbook, the Pirate Care network and the COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP). These initiatives, though different in their focus, have each worked on collecting and documenting resources for community actions addressing the coronavirus pandemic. We will speak together about how to organise such collections, how to involve different communities, and what the learnings have been so far.

The Coronavirus Tech Handbook is a crowdsourced collection of tools, services and resources relating to COVID-19 response. It was the largest online library of tools in the early days of the crisis. Their community gathered thousands of resources and created communities of doctors, data scientists and PPE manufacturers, with over 100 news articles mentioning them. Nathan Young will talk about making projects easy to join, trusting the public and the mistakes he made.

The COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project (CTAP) was launched in the wake of COVID-19 to track public expenditure and government’s response and accountability measures in African countries. CTAP works on promoting accountability and transparency through the tracking of COVID-19 intervention funds across 7 African countries. Jorge Florez of Global Integrity, the project’s learning partner, will join us to share more on their current work within CTAP.

The Pirate Care research project and network wishes to map and connect collective practices that are emerging in response to the neoliberal "crisis of care". Such pirate care practices for example provide pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offer health support where institutions fail, self-organise childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone, liberate knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders, and politicise that disobedience to contest the institutional status quo. To foster collective learning processes from these pirate care practices, they have been working on a collaboratively-written Pirate Care Syllabus and in the early period of the pandemic on a set of notes documenting organising of care titled "Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care".

Program - starting from 19:00:

  • Introduction to the conference Behind the Mask: Whistleblowing During the Pandemic

  • Input presentations by:

    • Nathan Young (Coronavirus Tech Handbook)

    • Jorge Florez (COVID-19 Transparency and Accountability Project - CTAP)

    • Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care)

  • Q&A

Speakers

Nathan Young is a political technologist. He runs civic projects, most recently The Coronavirus Tech Handbook. Nathan wants to understand what's holding back UK institutions. His other interests are forecasting, storytelling and writing self-aware bios.

Jorge Florez leads work at Global Integrity on open fiscal governance, with a focus on the use of data for accountability and anti-corruption. He currently lead projects focused on generating evidence and lessons about how to more effectively use data to fight corruption, improve accountability, and contribute to better development results. He is most interested in finding ways to support partners in their efforts to solve local problems through the use of data, evidence, and innovation.

Marcell Mars is a research fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University and one of the founders of Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb. His research Ruling Class Studies, started at the Jan van Eyck Academy (2011), examines state-of-the-art digital innovation, adaptation, and intelligence created by corporations such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay. Together with Tomislav Medak he founded Memory of the World/Public Library, for which he develops and maintains software infrastructure.

Tomislav Medak is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World/Public Library project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual property and unevenness of technoscience.

Registration

  • The event is free of admission but the number of participants is limited. Booking is essential. Please register via https://pretix.eu/disruptionlab/collectivecare and we will send you the link and instructions to join the online call.


Funded by: Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (Senate Department for Culture and Europa, Berlin), Bundeszentrale Für Politische Bildung, the Reva and David Logan Foundation (Grant Provided by NEO Philanthropy). Supported [in Part] by a Grant From the Foundation Open Society Institute in Cooperation with the OSIFE of the Open Society Foundations. Part of Re-Imagine Europe co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.