Social, economic, racial and gender inequalities are concrete barriers to democracy being a value lived in everyday life — and peripheral youth, who feel these barriers the most, are the ones who least occupy the spaces where decisions are made.
The same goes for technology. Whoever writes the rules of the internet, sets the price of access, decides how an artificial intelligence may be used or what a platform must moderate almost never lives where those decisions hurt first. The periphery enters these conversations as a statistic, rarely as a voice.
Our answer took shape in complementary, evolving initiatives: the Youth Council (2021–2023, with the FEAC Foundation) held 22 meetings of training, active listening and advocacy; from it was born the Youth Forum, a broader, autonomous movement created and led by the young people of Campinas themselves — with 10 young fellows on the Leadership Committee, 5 territorial forums in peripheral regions, an initiative-mapping effort and the podcast “Juventude na Voz!”.
digital rights are human rights.
Casa Hacker is one of the organizations that make up the Coalizão Direitos na Rede (CDR — Rights in the Network Coalition) — a network created in 2016 and formed today by more than 40 civil society entities, university labs, activists and researchers. Our signature is on the coalition’s official list of member entities, alongside names such as Idec, Artigo 19, InternetLab, Coding Rights, Instituto Alana, Data Privacy Brasil, Aqualtune Lab, Creative Commons Brasil and Wikimedia Brasil.
We share, without reservation, the commitment the coalition makes in writing: the defense of digital rights — among them the right to access, freedom of information and expression, security and respect for privacy and personal data, and the establishment and preservation of democratic, multi-participatory governance mechanisms, including the formulation of public policy. It is the same sentence that sustains ours: defending digital rights is strengthening human rights and democracy.
In practice, this means embracing an agenda that goes far beyond what one organization could do alone — access, personal data, elections, artificial intelligence, freedom of expression, platform regulation, digital health and surveillance. And it means a choice of method: in advocacy, a peripheral organization that signs together with more than 40 others doesn’t speak louder — it speaks with institutional weight. That is why the CDR is not, for us, a network of logos, but the way we bring the periphery’s agenda to tables where, alone, we would have no seat.
what we have signed together
- August 2020 · #CriptoAgosto. A CDR campaign on the importance of encryption in communications. Casa Hacker took the topic out of the technical circle with the talk “Everything you wanted to know about encryption” and the live stream “Encryption in real life” — what it is, why it matters and how it reaches us.
- February 2022 · Open letter on the regulation of Artificial Intelligence. Alongside dozens of organizations, we asked that the committee of jurists in charge of the AI legal framework be expanded with gender parity and racial, ethnic and regional diversity, and that the debate leave the exclusively legal field for public hearings with those affected. Regulating AI is a cross-cutting decision, not a specialists’ topic.
- December 2023 · Statement on the public consultation for the National Digital Government Strategy. The consultation opened for 10 business days, right over the year-end holidays. We asked for an extension until January 31, 2024: social participation is not a deadline stamp.
- December 2023 · No to article 3 of Bill PL 3696/2023. The provision gave Ancine the power to suspend and terminate the use of works without going through the courts, with no safeguards for users’ rights. We signed against it: freedom of expression and access to culture are not to be withdrawn by administrative fiat.
- July 2024 · Official letter to the Attorney General’s Office on the migration of telephone concessions. The Federal Court of Accounts estimated the reversible assets of fixed telephony at R$ 121 billion (BRL); the agreements approved with Oi and Vivo added up to R$ 10.4 billion, with acknowledged flaws in the valuation of 49.18% of the assets — more than a million of them valued at ZERO. A digital education organization signs a telecommunications document for one direct reason: every real discounted there is high-capacity network that stops reaching the periphery.
- November 2025 · Akoben Anti-Racist Commitment. Together with the CDR, we signed on to the Aqualtune Lab commitment and took on objective goals for our own events — starting with guaranteeing at least one Black person in the program of every event with three or more speakers. There is no digital justice without racial justice.
from the bill’s text to the vote.
Advocacy, for us, doesn’t end at the signature. The Coalition for Feminine Genius — built from Casa Hacker and supported by Rise Up, the international leadership accelerator whose network of 800 leaders has helped pass more than 185 laws and policies worldwide — was born to give visibility to the women who generate knowledge in every corner of Brazil: riverside women of the Amazon, women of the sertão, caiçaras, girls from the favelas, the quebradas and the urban territories. And to monitor the public policies that reach those on the front line of basic education: public school teachers and principals.
The method is the same in any legislature: identify the bill, follow its progress, press lawmakers, propose changes to the wording and make the thing move.
This work did not start now, and the notes are dated. Since 2018 we have followed PLS 398/2018, now Bill PL 840/2021, with the Coalition for Feminine Genius, proposing amendments to the text. With the Coalizão Direitos na Rede we signed, among others, the February 2022 open letter on the regulation of artificial intelligence, the December 2023 note against article 3 of Bill PL 3696/2023 and the July 2024 letter to the Attorney General’s Office on the telephony concessions. What changed in 2026 was opening this monitoring to the public, in a systematic way, with Legisla STEAM, our legislative radar. It follows, in the Chamber of Deputies, the Federal Senate and ALESP, the bills that affect science and technology education in public schools and the access of girls, women and peripheral and Black people to STEAM education. From everything introduced in the three houses we get to the agenda that matters — and every bill on it has a signed position paper, with what the text says, what the substitute changed, our position and what we ask, published on the site and forwarded to committees and legislators.
The case that best shows the result is Bill PL 840/2021 (previously PLS 398/2018), which amends the National Education Guidelines Law and the Innovation Law to encourage women’s participation in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics and information technology, mitigate the barriers imposed on women in these fields, and extend the deadline for completing higher education in cases of maternity and adoption. The bill’s text was changed based on suggestions submitted by the coalition — there were working meetings with the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Women and the industry ministry, and the agenda reached UN events, LatinoWare and Favela.Lab.
The bill had its rapporteur’s report approved by the Chamber’s Education Committee in October 2025 and has been at the Constitution and Justice Committee since then, with three other bills attached, awaiting the appointment of a rapporteur. We keep monitoring, and our position paper on Bill PL 840/2021 is published on Legisla STEAM — because that is how advocacy is measured: by the progress, not the event.
And at the institutional level the advocacy stays alive: we monitor education, science and technology committees, build coalitions and defend more public investment — Brazil still invests less in education and S&T than all 15 comparable countries.