DUNIA

Dunia is a platform of free digital tools and networked communication, created in 2012 around the Earth Summit (Peoples Summit Rio+20) in Brazil. At that moment, it became more evident that the world was heading to a more intense confrontation in terms of political, economic, and technological rivalries. Alongside the effect of digitalization, the global economy showed also at that time that it was more and more embedded into a large process of hyper-industrialization, bringing a new kind of inequities, social polarization and concentration.

Since the 90’s, the same wave of growing digitalization has also changed the way civil society is acting. Information has become an unseen leverage to struggle and pressure political actors, at the same time it has become a strategic issue for many organizations. The economy of innovation and monopolistic competition is now reinforcing the strategic dimension of information.

The new networked economy is currently driving territories and social communities to a new configuration: more global competitive, capitalistic, conflicting, individual-centric, and relational. This gives a new role to social and solidarity economy.

In this context, Dunia started to provide online tools and services to foster networked communication to organizations involved in the large field sustainability and altermundialism (digital infrastructure, servers, clouds, websites, streaming, etc.). It established partnerships with around 60 worldwide networks and institutions.

On the way, the platform has been structured by three specific operational lines: 1. Develop an offer based on open and interoperable digital tools for networking, rooted in the community of free software and activism. 2. Deepen the methodological experimentations undertaken by organizations in terms of collective intelligence, coordination and global outreach. 3. Contribute to generate new conceptual frameworks to address the new networked economy and power relations through information.

The core team of Dunia is currently composed of 5 persons based in Argentina, with a double juridical status of association (France, law 1901) and entrepreneur (Argentina). The digital infrastructure is mainly hosted in OVH (France), with dependencies in Germany (Hetzner) and Finland (Hetzner). The FPH is mainly supporting the project, while other organizations are contributing according to their financial possibilities.

Dunia was involved in the World Social Forum of Transformative Economies (2020), and the World Social Forum. It’s now working with the Global Social Economy Forum (GSEF) and the Iconomie Institute (France).