AlgoRace

AlgoRace is a Spanish state-wide civil-society project founded in 2021 to link the Spanish anti-racist and anti-colonial movement with the public debate on artificial intelligence and to make the algorithmic systems that the Spanish state and private actors deploy on racialized and migrant communities legible and contestable from outside the AI field. It is, by its own framing, "un proyecto pionero en el Estado español" — the first Spanish civil-society initiative explicitly founded for anti-algorithmic-racism work — and within the corpus it is the dedicated Spanish national anchor of the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built and deployed on-ramp at the level of racialized and migrant communities.

Founding and team

AlgoRace was established in late 2021 and publicly launched on 18 January 2022 by an interdisciplinary group brought together specifically to "vincular el movimiento antirracista y anticolonial con el debate sobre la inteligencia artificial". The current team is six members in coordination roles plus external collaborators — Youssef M. Ouled (project coordinator; journalist on Islamophobia and racial profiling, consultant for Rights International Spain), Paula Guerra Cáceres (Head of Advocacy Area; Chilean-born anti-racist organiser and former President of SOS Racismo Madrid 2018-2020), Javier Sánchez Monedero (scientific-technical advisor; AI researcher at the University of Córdoba and associated researcher at Cardiff University's Data Justice Lab), Ana Valdivia García (scientific-technical advisor; Oxford Internet Institute), Isabel Muriedas Díez (communications), and Marita Zambrana Vega (fundraising; also a former SOS Racismo Madrid president). The team self-describes as three racialized and three white members combining expertise in AI, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, and communications — a deliberate compositional choice that the organisation treats as load-bearing on the legitimacy of the work it does on behalf of racialized communities.

The project's initial development was financially supported by the Open Society Initiative for Europe (OSIFE), the Open Society Foundations' Europe regional programme, which provided the resources to take AlgoRace from concept to operating organisation.

Mission and theory of change

AlgoRace's stated mission is to bring an anti-racist perspective to Spanish public debate on AI and to make that debate accessible to migrant and racialized communities. Its theory of change, articulated in its own publications, is that artificial intelligence and automated decision-making systems "are applied under a hierarchy of power: from top to bottom, from rich to poor, from privileged to marginalized, from white to racialized subjects, from men to women or LGTBIQ+", and that the precondition for democratic accountability of these systems is that the communities most exposed to them have the conceptual vocabulary and the empirical evidence to participate in the debate on their own terms. The organisation's work programme — original research, accessible explainer publications, public-facing communications and campaigns, dialogue spaces with racialized populations, and recommendations to Spanish public institutions — is built around translating algorithmic-systems literacy into Spanish-language anti-racist civil-society capacity rather than reproducing English-language framings into Spanish.

Research and accessible explainer publications

The organisation's first major research output, Una introducción a la IA y la discriminación algorítmica para movimientos sociales (November 2022), authored by Youssef M. Ouled on behalf of AlgoRace, is a deliberately accessible explainer for social-movement and anti-racist audiences. The report introduces AI and algorithmic decision-making in lay terms; documents specific cases of racial discrimination in deployed AI systems — predictive policing, facial-recognition error rates that are systematically higher for non-white faces, discriminatory barriers in Spain's minimum vital income (Ingreso Mínimo Vital) application system, and biometric data at "smart borders" — and names the forms of civil-society resistance that have emerged in Spain and elsewhere. The report was launched at presentation events in Madrid (26 November 2022) and Barcelona (30 November 2022), and AlgoRace has since produced further sectoral materials on AI's racialized impacts.

Public-policy intervention: AESIA and SEDIA

AlgoRace's most concrete public-policy work has been a sustained intervention into the design and operation of Spanish national AI institutions. In September 2022, AlgoRace was one of six drafting organisations on an open letter to the Spanish government regarding the proposed Agencia Española de Supervisión de la Inteligencia Artificial (AESIA), eventually signed by 60 organisations including European Digital Rights (EDRi), Statewatch, Access Info Europe, the Panoptykon Foundation, Fair Trials, and Digitalcourage. The letter argued for civil-society involvement in designing AESIA, for "prudential supervision, guaranteeing the fairness of algorithmic processes", and for "a clear and defined civil society participation strategy in the processes and policy development related to artificial intelligence" — explicitly framed against the backdrop of Spain's upcoming EU Council presidency and its role as a pilot country for European AI regulation.

In March 2023, AlgoRace co-drafted (with Algorights, lafede.cat, and DigitalFems) a second open letter on the projects of the Secretaría de Estado de Digitalización e Inteligencia Artificial (SEDIA), demanding a civil-society meeting on how SEDIA would guarantee fundamental-rights protection in its collaborations, published accounts on how €5 million of a €13 million SEDIA-ADIA-Lab investment would be spent, and a signed scientific and ethical-integrity document by SEDIA and the participating research staff. The two letters together established AlgoRace as the principal Spanish civil-society interlocutor on the national AI-supervision architecture from outside the digital-rights professional field.

In September 2024, AlgoRace organised a day on digital-environment rights inside the Congreso de los Diputados — the Spanish lower house — bringing the organisation's anti-algorithmic-racism analysis directly to Spanish parliamentarians and signalling the escalation of its public-policy register from open letters into parliamentary engagement.

Coalition role: IA Ciudadana and the Spanish digital-rights ecosystem

AlgoRace sits inside a Spanish civil-society coalition on AI public policy that the corpus's wider European coverage does not yet capture. The SEDIA open letter's four-organisation drafting coalition — AlgoRace, Algorights, lafede.cat, and DigitalFems — together with Civio and Iridia constitutes the IA Ciudadana coalition, the principal Spanish civil-society formation on AI public policy. AlgoRace's distinctive contribution to that coalition is the explicit racial-justice and decolonial register: while other coalition partners anchor the algorithmic-transparency, feminist-tech, and Catalan-civil-society contributions, AlgoRace anchors the anti-racist analysis of how Spanish state AI systems disproportionately harm migrant and racialized communities. AlgoRace, Algorights, and lafede.cat also organise the Jornadas DAR (Democracia, Algoritmos y Resistencias) at the Canòdrom Ateneu d'Innovació Democràtica in Barcelona — a recurring civil-society convening on democratic resistance to algorithmic harms.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, AlgoRace is the Spanish national anchor of the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built and deployed on-ramp on the specific axis of racialized and migrant communities. Its theory of change is that empirical research on Spanish state and private-sector AI deployments — Ingreso Mínimo Vital eligibility, predictive policing, facial recognition, biometric border systems — translated into Spanish-language explainer publications and routed both into Spanish national AI-policy processes and into the everyday vocabulary of anti-racist and migrant-justice movements, equips Spanish civil-society organisations, journalists, parliamentarians, and racialized communities themselves to subject these systems to democratic accountability before national policy frameworks are settled. The organisation's distinctive contribution to the broader make-AI-good movement, as Paula Guerra Cáceres puts it, is the explicit demand that "los algoritmos sobre derechos de las personas deben publicarse y debatirse" — that algorithms which decide on human rights must be published and debated — operationalised from a Spanish, anti-racist, decolonial position that names the asymmetries between the AI industry and the racialized publics whose lives are increasingly shaped by it.