About us

What is comun.al?

comun.al is a laboratory where we meet to share experiences and build collective knowledge about human rights and technologies in Latin America. It is a proposal to decentralize knowledge and preserve the memory of movements and initiatives to promote access to justice in our region.

We develop spaces for dialogue, consultation materials, and events that promote critical approaches to technologies, focusing our reflections on the human rights amplified through their use or undermined through their abusive implementations.

We bet on the use of open source technologies and digital commons to amplify the access to knowledge and the strengthening of skills that allow us to learn, experiment (with), and create tools that help us to develop creative, sustainable, and accessible proposals; to solve our needs from the local, relying on collaborative efforts and break with the dependencies that centralize power, restricting our autonomy and dignity.

How did it come about?

Comun.al arises at the end of 2021 as an effort to join the different resistances for the defense of human rights in Latin America by promoting the use of technologies as tools for access to justice in the face of the growing waves of digital violence by the State in the different countries of the region.

This initiative brings together knowledge, experiences, and memories that have emerged from the different fronts of resistance where activists, journalists, and human rights defenders have generated routes towards processes of building justice that transform our diverse realities to preserve dignity and life.

The violence exercised through technologies is a continuation of the violence historically exercised against those who break with the hegemony established by the regime in power. With this in mind, we hope that comun.al will serve to preserve the memory and encourage encounters between social movements that use technology as a tool to resist and subvert the abuses of power that undermine our rights.

How is it sustained?

Mozilla Foundation’s Technology and Society program funded the development of comun.al, with the support of Ford Foundation. We currently repay contributors and sustain the services we share through grants, donations, and the sale of our print publications.

You can contribute by donating here:

You can purchase any publication from our print catalog here: