A few months ago, within our own team, we started asking a deceptively simple question: could our spaces do more than sound alarms, point at dangerous tendencies and call out big tech? We want Digital Action to create and support spaces of opportunity, places where we talk about what’s actually being built, the communities that are building it, and how they lead the way to new narratives around Tech Justice.
That question didn’t stay internal for long. We took it to our coalition, to partners, to allies. It found its fullest shape during a circle we convened at the Global Gathering in Estoril this year, which we called “What does a win look like in our ecosystem?”
It was the last day of the Global Gathering. People were overstimulated by conversations around projects, initiatives, and strategies, so we were deeply thankful to those who came, and also to those who talked to us before and after the circle. Most participants said they were curious and wanted to leave Portugal with a sense of hope, especially after many worrying conversations. It wasn’t easy.
We started sharing a bit of the stories we had. We also explained we had been struggling with the word. We tried “achievements,” then “victories,” then “advances,” then, at our most tired, “lights at the end of the tunnel.” None of them quite scratched the itch. They either sounded too triumphant for what people were actually describing, or too small to hold what it takes to survive in this field.
We settled on “wins,” and we ended up inviting them to tell us what keeps them going. It was a different question altogether, but a useful one: what keeps you standing and working? What makes you feel like not everything is lost? What makes you feel like we’re moving forward, even by a small step? One story called the rest, and soon visions of how things have advanced and stories of what makes the space alive started hurdling across the space. Among adaptations of games, collaborations South to South, and discussions in decision-making rooms with civil society actors, we started to see some guiding threads. Three things came back to us, over and over.
Wins are complex
The first is that a win rarely arrives or stands alone. It shows up tangled with everything that’s still broken. As one person in our circle put it, we’re often forced to hold competing truths with the same hands: the win and the wound can occupy the same day, sometimes the same sentence.
We heard a version of this from a Venezuelan activist who pointed out how X/Twitter was unblocked after two years following an earthquake and sustained public pressure. The unblocking mattered. It was real. And the underlying situation was still terrible. Both were true at once, and neither canceled the other out.
We also heard it in a quieter register: people telling us that the wider digital rights movement is paying more attention than it used to — to whose expertise counts, to who gets left out of the room, to things like accessibility that used to go entirely unconsidered. We also put the question of care on the table. What it means, what comes with it, and what dilutes it. Care has been both an important (albeit difficult) conversation for what it can be and the many ways it can be approached: from hiring practices, to invisible power imbalances within international and diverse communities, to therapeutic spaces to deal with trauma (direct and vicarious), to just putting words and stories behind the emotional realities of our work.
That shift is real progress. It is also nowhere near finished.
Recognizing a win, as we’re learning, means resisting the urge to resolve that tension into something cleaner than it actually is.
A win connects to a next step
The second thing we heard, again and again, is that a win is rarely a closed event. More often, it’s a link. Something that makes something else possible, sometimes for someone who isn’t even in the room yet.
We heard about a set of shutdown-response tools and simulations built inside an organization that was starting to rise and struggling to survive after the funding crisis we all know sadly well. The initiative didn’t stay small; other groups picked it up and kept running it. We heard from a researcher who watched her own writing become a reference point inside other people’s work. Not through a formal collaboration, but through the quiet, easy-to-miss mechanism of a citation.
A footnote, she pointed out, can be a link in a chain whether or not the person who wrote it ever finds out.
We heard the same logic from someone who was told, plainly, that there was no longer a paid seat for her on the project she’d help build. She kept working anyway — unpaid, alongside it, “swimming next to the lifeboat”, in her words — and two years later she’s still trusted, still consulted, still part of the team. Her work never stopped connecting to everyone else’s and made other projects more solid. Ideal? Far from it, but still, things moved and advanced.
And we heard it from the ground up: digital security trainings that got passed on, imperfectly but widely, long after the original trainer moved on. A handful of modest workshops at a public library, mostly attended by seniors, quietly adding one more link to a chain nobody is tracking from above. All translating into learning experiences that led a community to be ready to act when the moment needs it.
When we reach for dialogue, exchange, or collaboration. When we keep a chain moving instead of letting it end with us, that’s very much a win.
Being stubborn helps
The third thing surprised us the most, mostly because of how consistently it came up. Independently, in three separate conversations, people reached for the same word: stubbornness. Not optimism. Not resilience. Stubbornness — insisting, refusing to accept what you’re told is inevitable, finding your way around an obstacle instead of through it.
One person described it exactly this way: annoyed at a world that keeps telling her what’s inevitable, while she and her community keep saying, simply, no, this isn’t how it is.
We saw that same stubbornness take concrete shape in a very specific project: a “simple” translation task — putting a digital security guide into Mapudungún in Chile — that turned into something much bigger: a full community reappropriation of the material. There wasn’t even an existing word for “password.” Building one meant rebuilding the guide’s whole logic, until it stopped being about hiding and started being about protecting yourself and the people around you.
Stubbornness came with a warning attached. One contributor gently pushed back when we spoke to her about what keeps us going, especially when I started speaking about resilience. This is how we tend to talk about people who organize and fight under pressure: as resilient, as brave. She’s tired of it. Nobody is resilient by nature: people do this because they don’t have another option, and some don’t have the same resources to be resilient. A real win, she told us, isn’t one that congratulates someone for being resilient. It’s one that humanizes them, connects them to others, and gives them back their dignity.
The question and the conversation are far from over, but we hope to make space and structure for it. What we want, going forward, is expanding the spaces we already have online devoted to this. We want to tell, point at, and expand these stories. We want to connect them with other initiatives. We want to send them out and make them visible to people who might get something out of them — people who probably wouldn’t expect to learn from others they assumed were different because they were on another continent or spoke another language.
Our work is not pointing at the challenges civil society faces, but at how people are building opportunities anyway. We’ll do it by highlighting the work of our network and our community, connecting knowledge production across initiatives, underlining what makes each one worth attention, and adjusting our own narrative and perspective — to center not only the obstacles, but the way each step forward moves others forward too, adds a new layer of understanding.
We welcome your stories, your initiatives, your reflections on what you’ve read here. We’ll make space for them in our communication channels. We will connect them to communities, ideas, and initiatives; to push for more horizontal dialogue among regions in the Global Majority, and to say, far and wide: we’re standing, and we’re together.