Hi everyone!
I’m Allegra and I recently came across the Edgeryders community.
I always find it difficult describing myself since I am working simultaneously in different fields, but I see myself as a digital activist thinking about how to foster social change through technology 
In the last years I have been thinking about how to counteract misinformation and how to enable good quality information in a healthy online environment. Big tech monopolies are creating an extremely toxic environment and I feel the urge to counteract. I believe that opening up knowledge is part of the solution we currently need. We need decentralized technologies that empower users to use their data for their own benefits!
I work at the intersection between tech and civil society as a connector between those worlds.
I first co-founded a project called TraceMap, where we developed an open source tool that displays maps of how information spreads on Twitter. These maps, together with a bunch of metrics and analytic tools, were specifically designed to help Twitter users and journalists make sense of the news they’re reading.
Now TraceMap is associated to Worldbrain, the creators of Memex. Memex is a privacy-focused, open-source & offline-first browser extension for web-research collaborative organisation. We want to empower independent journalists, content creators, researchers and fact-checkers in all steps necessary for the creation of good-quality information.
We are soon starting to develop collaboration features - and, in this process, to involve non-tech actors into the development steps.
This brings me to one of my topics of interest for the fellowship: How can we bring the tech community and civil society actors closer together? How can we foster collaboration between these worlds? Different communities speak different languages, use different platforms and have different understandings, a real challenge to be tackled. How can we decrease literacy barriers for people to access certain communities? How can we increase interoperability between platforms? Should we design platforms differently? Do we need more mediators between the different communities?
There are broader questions related to democratization of knowledge and linking back to the misinformation problem: How can we decouple knowledge from economic interest? How can we find sustainable models? How to design micropayment systems without falling back into old, toxic models?
I’m looking forward to meet likeminded people in here, exchange thoughts and collaborate!
