This was presented by Maya Indira Ganesh from the Tactical Technology Collective at the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC2016) in Barcelona on 27th April. You can find out more information about the conference here: https://www.mysociety.org/research/tictec-2016/

2. FROM “DIRTY TOILETS” TO THEMBELIHLE
Factors affecting the use of tech tools amongst housing and
urban development rights activists in Johannesburg & Cape
Town
MAYA GANESH
TACTICAL TECHNOLOGY COLLECTIVE
WITH JENNIFER SCHULTE AND JEFF DEUTCH

3. Starting Points

4. ● The 'usual suspects'
● A tension between visibility & anonymity.
● What are the risks and barriers to using tech
tools?
● The South African context of visibility,
transparency and exposure through technology.

5. How does technology fit within the context of the
lives of South African housing rights and urban
development activists and in the political context of
rights in South Africa, and what implications does
this have for their engagement with T4TA
activities?

6. On the ground

7. ● Local research assistance and SERI
● 10 Formative interviews
● Sampling determination exercise
● 17 semi-structured interviews in Johannesburg:
10 women, 7 men; across racial groups
● Review of findings by 15 stakeholders in
Johannesburg

8. Results

9. Landscapes of movements
● Activist and NGO typologies
● Identifying communities of practice, their
locations, engagement – what this means for
how they approach tech projects.
● “Intermediaries” in tech

10. The Case of the Housing List
● “...the list isn't everything”
● “Data is rational but people are messy”
● “After access comes legibility”:

11. Tech use
● Mobiles + WhatsApp > Computers, tablets,
email, Facebook, Twitter
● Social media use associated with access/tariffs.
● Facebook = known networks = too public.
● WhatsApp: “virtual newsroom” ; “to transcribe
discussions and share immediately; “to show as
evidence”; for organising, decision-making in
groups
● Twitter: not to 'have a voice' but to publicise
service outages. Not popular in settlements

12. Barriers to using tech
● Tariffs in South Africa are high: “"people would
rather have airtime to contact you in an
emergency than use it to report corruption."
● Language
● Digital literacy
● Differential access across gender, class, race,
age - Black women in settlements least likely to
have access to mobiles.

13. A lack of trust
● The legacy of Apartheid-era tensions with
activists – informants, surveillance, lack of trust
● Thembelihle
● Lateral surveillance and violence within
movements and communities

14. On transparency
“Complete transparency is a nice idea for white
men in the suburbs... whiteness protects people in
South Africa and it is a white lens through which
this idea of transparency is seen. It is also a
gendered lens..I need to speak anonymously
sometimes.”

15. Maya Indira Ganesh
@mayameme