The 2025 Team CommUNITY Global Gathering, set to take place in Estoril, Portugal, from 8 to 10 September, is a dynamic meeting of digital rights defenders from more than 144 countries and over 1,000 organisations. It covers three days of immersive collaboration and reflection on urgent challenges for civil society working at the intersection of technology and human rights. By bringing together diverse voices, the gathering helps strengthen the global ecosystem of digital rights defenders.
This year, the Global Gathering returns to a self-organised model that allows participants to drive the agenda in response to their own needs. Activities will take place in the form of meetups and circles, booths, and villages and private events. Rather than imposing top-down programming, this format encourages attendees to convene gatherings for peer-led exchange on themes such as grassroots responses to tech challenges, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and misinformation and disinformation.
The Global Gathering is a significant space for the APC community to nurture solidarity and build networks. It is also a vital venue for cross-disciplinary exchange.
APC will once again play an active role throughout the event by participating in various meet-ups and hosting a village, located at Booth 7. Villages are spaces where participants can host public and private events as well as showcase their work, run demos and facilitate skillsharing sessions.
The APC Village... offers a space to explore feminist, human rights–based approaches to technology. Visit to learn about APC’s global initiatives, connect with network members, and share strategies for digital justice.
With our network’s diversity of voices, we see the village as a space for nurturing our vision of the future, practicing hope and channelling the power of communities. The activities are being shaped as a critical response to the overwhelmingly aggressive efforts by big tech operations driven by accumulation, exploitation and expropriation. APC has established the following goals and priorities for the village:
- Collective sensemaking for building across differences.
- Sharing learnings and tactics around countering digital mis/disinformation.
- Looking for synergies and resources from a feminist intersectional positioning to support and expand individual and collective responses to technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV).
- Preparing, practicing and engaging in models and ways of digital infrastructures to not just respond and counter big tech violence and monopoly of public spaces and voices, but to give life to spaces built on care and sustainability.
- Re-thinking “risk”, centring it in people’s localised knowledge.
Participants can check the official Global Gathering agenda to find where the APC network will be participating. We invite everyone to browse the schedule below for more information on specific gatherings taking place across our network (please note that the information will continue to be updated on an ongoing basis). Next, we also share recommended resources as a warm-up for topics that will be in focus.
Day 1 - 8 September
APC Village
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 7
ARTICLE 19
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 8
Access Now - Digital Safety Clinic
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 15
Sursiendo - Digital Rights X Climate Justice: Meet Up!
15:00 - 16:00 local time | Circle 1
Day 2 - 9 September
APC Village
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 7
ARTICLE 19
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 8
Pangea - Software for digitalised communities, citizens, digital devices
IdHub for decentralised identity and verifiable credentials, Workbench and DeviceHub for inventory and passports for second-hand computers (ereuse.org)
13:00 - 15:00 local time | Booth 16
Digital Empowerment Foundation - The ARISE Accountability Arcade: Feminist and Global South-Led Campaigns for Platform Accountability
13:00 - 15:00 local time | Booth 80
REDES A.C. - Capacity Building in Community Contexts: Needs, Pedagogies, and Emerging Challenges
13:30 – 14:30 local time | Regional Topics A (Booth 21)
Infrared (Coalition including APC, May First and other APC members) - Rise Against Big Tech
15:30 - 17:30 | Booth 80
Day 3 - 10 September
APC Village
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 7
ARTICLE 19
13:00 - 15:00 & 15:30 - 17:30 local time | Booth 8
EngageMedia - Regional Conversations B
13:00 - 15:00 local time | Booth 22
Point of View - Social Media Platforms From The Margins: Reimagination
13:00 - 15:00 local time | Booth 80
Sursiendo - Building Environmental Justice with Community Tech: From Research to Collective Action
15:00 - 16:00 local time | Circle 4
Featured resources:
- "Building a Free Internet of the Future": This monthly interview series highlights the experiences and perspectives of individuals and communities supported by NGI Zero (NGI0) grants. It amplifies voices often absent from dominant tech narratives, sharing real-life stories that expose the challenges of digital exclusion and the innovations created to address them.
- Stepping outside the algorithm: This article gathers APC members perspectives on how the governance changes at social media companies have affected their work – and, importantly, what they think civil society organisations should do about it.
- Routing for Communities: In this podcast, we invite you on a journey to discover community-led experiences of people who have come up with alternatives to overcome the challenges of digital inclusion in remote, rural and urban areas across the globe.
- A feminist perspective on researching technology-facilitated gender-based violence: This new GenderIT.org edition is a collection of reflections and analytical essays by the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN) and FIRN’s research partners. It reflects on what it means to do research at this critical juncture.
- #FeministTechJoy: Initiatives rekindling expression and creativity on the internet and beyond. #FeministTechJoy is a series of annual small grants designed to spark the exploration of alternative infrastructures and strategies. Here you can find a summary of the wonderful initiatives supported by APC in the latest cycle, celebrating feminist expression.
- Reduce, reuse, recycle: A guide to circular economies of digital devices. This guide aim to contribute to the goal of mobilising collective action for environmental justice and sustainability that APC and its partners promote.
- Ethical selection of our internet access provider: This guide emphasises that there are other dimensions to consider if we are concerned with more than just prices and speed, such as the effect our decision has on local supply and the market, and environmental impact considerations.
- The (internet) shutdown game: An engaging and informative training activity that sheds light on the various methods of internet shutdowns and ways to counteract them.
- Global aid in crisis: Can we find sustainability in a precarious funding climate? This article reflects on how to assess and respond to emerging challenges, precisely at a moment when we need more – and not less – international solidarity and joint action.