Abya Yala Network: enabling community-owned internet infrastructure across Americas

As information and communications technology has become instrumental in societal development and transformation, a handful of big tech companies have gained surging power through platformisation, making themselves even more influential than most nation states. Modern computer systems are dominated by underlying social, organisational, and technical mechanisms driven by big tech carefully obscured to fortify structural discrimination. In places where people have no other choices than to depend on such systems, it can mean the literal difference between life and death, especially in the periphery of the U.S. empire.

The Abya Yala Network (Red Abya Yala) was born to help communities break free from big tech and gain their data sovereignty by building capacity for people to be their own (and each other's) system administrators. Formed as a coalition by group effort, The Abya Yala Network provides tooling, training, and community support for activists to use open-source, self- or community-hosted applications for their work. Primarily focused on communities doing environmental and human rights monitoring, The Abya Yala Network has also formed a free, independent media based on participatory assemblies.

Indigenous peoples, rural communities, migrants, grassroots organisations, and environmental defenders are often systematically marginalised, isolated, and blocked from meaningful access to digital spaces and communication infrastructure. Voices of these communities are frequently excluded from mainstream media, eliminated by censorship, and cut off by economic, political, and technological barriers.

The Abya Yala Network’s work is driven by an eagerness to help these peoples build community-owned infrastructure and their autonomous communication capacity with free and open-source software (FOSS) and participatory media practices. These are the communities who need the most support to have their own platform to create, manage, and share information, which can bring greater visibility to the challenges they are facing. The Abya Yala Network works directly with community members to promote digital privacy, take back control of people’s data, develop educational resources, and equip them with means to participate in decisions affecting their lives and territories.

Through email correspondence, the Abya Yala Network and their collaborator from the Co-operative Cloud shared with us the cause they are fighting for, the areas of their work, the main challenges they are facing, and their theory of change. You can take a deep dive into their work in the following excerpt. If you are inspired by the Abya Yala Network’s work and want to follow their progress, you can visit their website and follow their media Labo Popular de Medios Libres, the project they are building called Sutty (Instagram), and the open collective the Co-operative Cloud.

What first drew you to this work?

We were inspired to action by seeing the continued dismantling of the liberatory potential of the first age of the internet. We have observed the growth of surveillance capitalism, the increasing centralisation from a plurality of unique publishing platforms to a few heavily-censored oligarch-controlled apps, and the various methods of closing off access for the public to understand and customise the technology we are increasingly compelled to use to participate in the everyday life. Meanwhile, there exists wide availability of high-quality open-source software and a growing surplus of artificially-obsolete hardware.

We see the potential for grassroots resistance to build spaces characterised by interoperability, autonomy, and accessibility. This future could go beyond offering "Google but free" or "Microsoft but Latin American" to platforms that are at most aesthetic facsimiles to their corporate counterpart, leading to profoundly different political results.

What are you currently building, researching, organising, or experimenting with?

Escuela Común, our educational initiative that offers open-source tooling and training through workshops and events, recently completed its second cohort, with representatives from across Latin America gathering in Buenos Aires for the final, in-person portion of the school.

Over the past few years, we have developed and refined a growing collection of deployment “recipes” that automate the installation and management of digital platforms using FOSS. These tools can significantly lower the barriers to adopting community-owned infrastructure.

As we begin preparing for next year, our priorities are:

1. Solidifying our VPN proxy system, which helps make it easier to host applications in restrictive network conditions and in the face of state and corporate repression.
2. Selecting new open-source platforms to package as Co-op Cloud "recipes" to recommend to participants in our past and future cohorts.
3. Improving the Co-op Cloud command-line tool "abra" with bug-fixes and UI enhancements identified in the past year's teaching.
4. Further developing our pedagogical system for teaching in Latin America and beyond.
5. Growing our network of distributed data storage for backups and media.

What does a genuinely privacy-respecting or ethical technology ecosystem actually require — beyond good intentions?

What remains missing is the investment in people. Organisations and communities need opportunities to develop skills, confidence, and long-term capacity to manage their own digital infrastructure. Too often, technology projects focus on deploying platforms rather than building local knowledge.

A genuinely privacy-respecting and ethical technology ecosystem does not primarily require new technologies. In many cases, the tools already exist. FOSS has made secure communications, self-hosted services, and community-owned infrastructure more accessible and affordable than ever before. Hardware costs have decreased, and deploying digital infrastructure has become significantly easier.

Privacy, security, and digital sovereignty are not achieved simply by installing software. They require people within organisations who can manage systems, make informed decisions, and adapt technologies to local needs. The most important challenge is creating sustainable pathways for communities to become active stewards of their own infrastructure, data, and communications.

Can you name one misconception people often have about digital security, privacy, or technological ethics?

One misconception we often encounter is the belief that digital security is primarily a technical problem that can be solved by choosing the “right” tool, encryption method, or platform. While technology matters, trust, governance, and relationships are often just as important.

We frequently remind people that the key question is not only how information is protected, but also who controls the infrastructure and under what incentives. A platform may use strong encryption and excellent security practices, but ownership, governance, and business models can change over time. Communities should understand who is hosting their data, who can access it, and what interests influence those decisions.

Another common misconception is that perfect security is possible. In reality, nothing is completely secure on the internet. Security is about reducing risks, building trust, and making informed choices. For us, technological ethics begin with people, relationships, and accountability — not only with technical features.

What tensions or contradictions do you wrestle with in building and developing your work?

One of the tensions we constantly wrestle with is the desire to make digital infrastructure easier and more accessible for communities while recognising that technology is not always their most urgent need.

Much of our work focuses on developing tools, training materials, and deployment processes that help communities adopt and manage their own digital platforms. However, there is always a risk of putting the solution before the problem. Meaningful technology can only emerge from ongoing relationships with them. When we spend too much time behind a computer designing tools, we can lose sight of the realities, priorities, and challenges that communities face in their daily lives.

We need to work directly with communities to understand their current challenges, identify which tools are most useful in their contexts, and co-develop new deployment recipes that respond to real needs rather than assumptions.

Equally important is training people to use, adapt, and maintain these tools themselves. Building local capacity is essential for long-term sustainability. Dialogues, in-person gatherings, and long-term community engagements help ensure communities remain active participants in shaping the tools they use. By expanding training and community engagement, we can strengthen the international network of users that already exists and create stronger pathways for knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and digital autonomy.

What keeps you motivated despite the challenges of this work?

People we meet along the way keeps us motivated. Through this work, we have the opportunity to collaborate with remarkable communities, organisers, technologists, educators, and environmental defenders who continue to create alternatives despite significant challenges. These relationships remind us that technology is ultimately about people, not platforms.

We are also motivated by the success stories that emerge over time. Seeing a community deploy and manage its own infrastructure, an organisation gain greater control over its communications, or participants go on to train others demonstrates that meaningful change is possible. Some of the most rewarding moments happen years after an initial training or collaboration, when people share how they adapted a tool, solved a problem independently, or supported another community.

These experiences reinforce our belief that investing in people, knowledge-sharing, and collective autonomy creates impacts that extend far beyond any individual project.

What is something people rarely see or understand about the labour behind this kind of work?

One thing people rarely understand is the emotional labour behind technology development. Developers are often seen as highly skilled individuals who simply write code and produce solutions, but the reality is much messier. Much of the work involves research, experimentation, troubleshooting, and long cycles of trial and error. Progress is often slow, and solutions that appear simple from the outside can take weeks to develop.

There are many moments of frustration. Technologies change, systems fail, and ideas that seemed promising do not always work as expected. The work requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to continuously learn.

As a result, the emotional and intellectual effort behind the work is rarely part of the equation when people assess a platform or interact with its developers. Technology is created by people, often working with limited resources and support. Building healthier relationships between developers and communities requires recognising the human labour, care, and persistence that make these tools possible.

What is one digital habit or practice you think more people could benefit from when adopted?

It would be community hosting. Rather than relying exclusively on large commercial platforms or requiring every individual person or group to do their own system administration, communities and organisations can host their digital services through trusted local networks, cooperatives, or community-led infrastructure. This approach not only improves transparency and data sovereignty, but also strengthens the relationships, skills, and mutual support systems that make digital autonomy possible.

What gives you hope about the future of technology, digital security, and/or privacy?

We are optimistic to see the growing wave of popular resistance to extractive and polluting data centre expansion, to the trend of imposing generative "AI" systems into people's lives, and to increased camera surveillance.

We are also heartened by the increasing popularity of practices, software, and devices dedicated to healthy, consensual boundaries with technology. The rise of the permacomputing and decentralised web movements, for example, represent to us an increasing renegotiation of the forcibly-established norms set by the monopolistic and exploitative tech giants.

What advice would you give to someone newly entering this field?

It was hard to know at the time whether it was worth focussing on governance structure and international network-building, but we would say that both choices were very worthwhile. So, we would encourage anyone helping start or re-start a project to consider governance and build links with other allied groups as early as possible. Having a broader community has helped identify accessibility issues, led organically to the involvement of new committed volunteers, and directly and indirectly contributed to financial sustainability. Likewise, decentralising power and implementing democratic decision-making early on has been exceptionally useful in reaching and building trust with our intended public and practical in broadening our pool of contributors.

About the team

Chasqui is a member of the Laboratorio Popular de Medios Libres (LPML). He works on communication processes, free technologies, and community-based digital infrastructures, supporting organizations and communities in building technological autonomy, digital care, and data sovereignty.

fauno’s work is focused on investigating, adapting and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, specially autonomous, collectively managed infrastructure. In the last eight years fauno has been working almost exclusively on resilient web sites using Jekyll and developing Sutty, a platform for updating and hosting these sites.

Calix is an activist technologist, working towards digital liberation through developing and promoting open source software and building up the solidarity economy in the computing sector. Calix co-founded three worker-owned technology co-operatives and co-initiated the Co-operative Cloud (Co-op Cloud). They are an operational member of the platform co-operatives Social.coop and Meet.coop.

Glossary

Platformisation: When more and more everyday activities (shopping, dating, working, socializing) get funneled through big tech platforms like Amazon, Uber, or Facebook, instead of happening directly between people or businesses. The platform becomes the middleman for almost everything. Data Sovereignty: The idea that people, communities, or countries should have control over their own data (where it’s stored, who can access it, and how it’s used) rather than it being controlled by governments or foreign entities.

Participatory Assemblies / Citizen Assemblies: Groups of everyday people (not politicians or experts) brought together to discuss an issue and help make relevant decisions. Think of it like jury duty, but for public policy, regular citizens getting a real say in decisions that affect them.

Interoperability: The ability for different apps, devices, or platforms to work together and share information smoothly. For example, being able to take your contacts from one messaging app to another, instead of being locked into just one company’s system, unable to easily move between different platforms/apps/devices with ease.

Permacomputing: An approach to technology inspired by “permaculture” (sustainable farming). Designing and using computers and software in ways that are durable, repairable, and use minimal resources, instead of constantly buying new devices and throwing old ones away.

Surveillance Capital: Wealth and power being amassed by companies collecting massive amounts of personal data about people (what you click, where you go, what you buy) and using or selling that information, often without people fully realizing it.

Artificially Obsolete: When products are deliberately designed to stop working, become outdated, or feel “old” after a short time — not because they are actually broken, but so companies can sell you a replacement where profit is the primary goal over quality (a practice usually called “planned obsolescence”).