Global Solidarity in the Digital Era: Navigating a Changing Landscape

Sydney Piggott (she/her) is a social impact leader, researcher and advocate for gender equity and social justice on a global scale. She is currently the Senior Social Impact Manager at Shopify where she champions education programs for underrepresented youth in tech and entrepreneurship with partners around the world. Before joining Shopify, she held leadership positions at Elevate and YWCA Canada. She is also a member of the Equal Futures Network Advisory Committee and the Reach Alliance Advisory Council. Sydney has been a subject matter expert in several international forums including the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, Women Deliver, Inter-Parliamentary Union Conference for Young Parliamentarians and RightsCon. She brings an intersectional feminist lens to all her work informed by her proud Afro-Caribbean heritage.

Nelson Kwaje is a South Sudanese technologist and human rights campaigner with over seven years of experience in ICT and digital rights advocacy, executing projects in Kenya, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, and Cameroon. He founded Alela Technology, A company that provides governments, enterprises, and not-for-profit organizations with technological solutions for process efficiency, human capital development, visibility, and digital storytelling. Nelson is the chairperson of #defyhatenow in South Sudan; an organization that focuses on Promoting digital rights and creating a framework for increasing trust between stakeholders and communities in Africa through mobilizing civic action against all forms of hate speech, misinformation, human rights violations, and incitement to violence. Nelson worked on the establishment of 211Check , the first fact-checking platform in South Sudan, the platform has been instrumental in combating hate speech and misinformation relating to the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Sudan. He is also credited as the co-initiator of SafeytComm, the first publicly available cyber safety hotline in South Sudan, SafetyComm provides digital safety tools, methodologies, and resources for social media users and digital natives in South Sudan. Nelson is listed among the 100 most influential young Africans for the year 2020.

General manager at eQualitie, a Canadian organization whose mission is the development of open source technologies aiming at protecting online rights, Michel Lambert is engaged in various initiatives supporting Civil Society organization’s rights to engage securely over the Internet. He has launched several projects using technologies starting from the Quebec Center for Alternative Media in 2000, Civil Society internet portals in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2002) and in the Maghreb-Mashreq (2007), and digital security schools in Montreal and Tunis. More recently he contributed to launching the LabDelta initiative. Also active on Internet governance issues, Michel was a member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Progressive Communications between 2017 and 2020, then a founding member of the Canadian Internet Governance Forum . He has contributed to multiples GISWatch issues. He’s also engaged with Isoc-Quebec.

Active on the issues of international solidarity, he was the President of the Quebec Association of International Cooperation NGOs (AQOCI) from 2017 to 2020 and was involved with various Quebec and Canadian coalitions including: Pas de démocratie sans voix, Voices/voix, the Quebec network of continental integration (RQIC), the Common Front for Energy Transition and more recently, contributed to founding the Cultiver Montréal network. Previously, he has been member of the Boards of Food Secure Canada between 2009 and 2012, Alliance Syndicats Tiers -Monde between 2015 and 2020 and the International Council of the World Social Forum. Co-founder in 1994, then Executive Director of the solidarity organization Alternatives between 2007 and 2020, Michel Lambert played an important role in planning and organizing the People’s Social Forum held in Ottawa in August 2014.

Dr. Karine Gentelet is an Associate Member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society and an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. She is the Visiting Research Chair on Artificial Intelligence and Social Justice at École Normale Supérieure-Abeonas-OBVIA.

Dr. Karine Gentelet’s research interests and publications focus on the recognition of human rights of Indigenous Peoples, uses of digital technology and artificial intelligence to improve social justice, the ethics of research in an Indigenous context, and the social responsibility of researchers.