Coding Rights

Coding Rights is a Rio de Janeiro-headquartered Brazilian feminist think-and-do tank that contributes to debates about the development, implementation, and regulation of technologies from what it describes in its own framing as "a collective, transfeminist, decolonial, and antiracist perspective of human rights". Founded in 2015 by Joana Varon — a Brazilian researcher and activist whose subsequent fellowships at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy have routed Coding Rights's Latin American feminist-tech research into the wider Global North digital-rights field — the organisation is one of the most distinctive civil-society anchors on AI, surveillance, and data-rights in the Latin American region and the corpus's principal queer-led, decolonial-feminist organisational anchor.

Founding and leadership

Coding Rights was founded in 2015 by Joana Varon as a women-run Brazilian NGO working — in her own framing — to redress the power imbalances built into technology and its application, particularly those that reinforce gender and North/South inequalities. Varon, who co-initiated the Human Rights Considerations working group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and was a former Mozilla Media Fellow and 2020-21 Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Carr Center, continues as Executive Directress and "Creative Chaos Catalyst". The wider staff is small — Maria Clara Delmonte as Community Manager, Laila Almeida Braga as Communications Coordinator, Max Holender as Financial Manager — and is supplemented by a wider research network including the Chile-based researcher Paz Peña on the Not My A.I. line and the designer and illustrator Clarote on the Oracle line, both named in the project sources below.

Mission and posture

Coding Rights's self-statement of mission is to "utilise creativity and hacker knowledge to stimulate imaginaries and actions that challenge power inequalities", with activities spanning research, policy advocacy, creative and visual storytelling, tech tool development, digital care and technopolitics training, and the design of methodologies and facilitation of creative processes. The organisation locates its work in the Brazilian and wider Latin American context that it describes as "particularly challenging considering the rise of far-right groups who are tech savvy and use digital environments as battlefields attacking women, LGBTQIA people, black activists, sexual and reproductive rights advocates, land defenders, activists from the favelas and other communities". This grounding in Brazilian sociopolitical conditions, rather than in imported Global North digital-rights traditions, is the substantive thread that runs through the organisation's whole programme portfolio.

The Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies

Coding Rights's best-known artefact is the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies, an interactive card-deck workshop tool produced in partnership with the Design Justice Network — concept and coordination by Joana Varon and Sasha Costanza-Chock, with design and illustration by Clarote. The Oracle began as a workshop at the Global Symposium on AI & Inclusion in Rio de Janeiro in November 2017 and was formally published on 13 September 2021. Its methodology — players draw cards from five decks (an identity reminder of who the player is; an object that will receive the technology; two guiding values; a situation to address) and collectively prototype the resulting speculative technology — draws on a speculative feminist writing workshop methodology from cooptecniques, on Human Rights Considerations methodologies that Coding Rights co-designed at the IETF, and on the Feminist Principles of the Internet. The deck's stated purpose, on the project site, is to "collectively envision and share ideas for transfeminist technologies from the future" — a deliberate counterposition to the dominant industry framings of AI and technology design in which "people who are too often excluded from or targeted by technology" do not participate. The Oracle is the corpus's clearest single anchor on the participatory-and-speculative-design methodology applied to the political question of who designs AI futures, and it has circulated as a workshop methodology across digital-rights, design-research, and feminist-tech communities.

Not My A.I.

The Not My A.I. project, launched in 2021 and run by Joana Varon and Paz Peña, is Coding Rights's principal AI-and-human-rights research-and-advocacy line. Framed as a "feminist toolkit to question A.I. systems" rather than as a technical audit programme, Not My A.I. documents and analyses how AI systems perpetuate harm in Latin American public-service deployment — with case studies from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile examining childhood-alert and social-intervention systems and reproductive-health AI deployments through a "data colonialism" frame. The project's anchor analytical piece, Oppressive A.I.: Feminist Categories to Understand its Political Effects, develops a set of feminist analytical categories — oppressive intent, oppressive effect, oppressive design — that read AI deployment as a question of political power and not solely of accuracy or fairness. Not My A.I. is the corpus's principal feminist-framed AI accountability project anchored on Global South case material, and is a structural counterpart to the algorithmic-accountability-anchored, audit-methodology-anchored AI work that the Algorithmic Justice League, AlgorithmWatch, and the DAIR Institute carry from US and European positions.

Chupadados (data-suckers)

The Chupadados project — Portuguese for "data-suckers" — is Coding Rights's investigative-journalism collaboration documenting massive data collection across Latin American everyday life. Trilingual (Portuguese, English, Spanish) and structured around four sub-areas (urban space, home, body, finances), the project commissions Latin American journalists and academics to investigate concrete sites of data harvesting and analytical processing. Its published story portfolio spans the Rio de Janeiro transit card data concentration, surveillance equipment at Olympic venues, dating-app location tracking without consent, period-tracking apps monetising menstrual data, gender-targeted advertising, and credit-scoring through behavioural surveillance. Phase 1 of the project was supported by the Open Society Foundations; Phase 2 by Derechos Digitales, the corpus's other Latin American organisational anchor and Coding Rights's fellow Al Sur consortium member.

Other named programmes

Beyond the three anchor projects above, Coding Rights's active project portfolio includes research on facial-recognition harms to transgender and non-binary identities, the #SaiDaMinhaCara ("get out of my face") policy-advocacy campaign mobilising Brazilian legislators across regions to introduce bills banning facial-recognition technology in public spaces, the Map of Internet Territories project on the physical infrastructure and power dynamics of internet access across Latin America, the WhatsApp Pay analysis of payment-platform data-monopoly concerns, and the speculative-feminist-science-fiction Spanish-language anthology Una Bolsa de Semillas: Ciencia Ficción Feminista en Abya Yala. Across the portfolio, the organisation's recurring move is to pair technical analysis with creative and storytelling artefacts that route the analysis to non-technical publics — including legislators, journalists, and movement organisers — in the languages and idioms of the regions whose lives the technologies most directly shape.

Coalition role: Al Sur and the Latin American digital-rights field

Coding Rights is a member of the Al Sur consortium — the consortium of eleven Latin American and Caribbean civil-society organisations and academic centres (ADC, CELE, Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, Karisma, Hiperderecho, IDEC, IPANDETEC, InternetLab, R3D, and TEDIC) whose six thematic areas explicitly include artificial intelligence alongside access, surveillance, personal data, cybersecurity, and intermediary liability. Within Al Sur, Coding Rights is the Brazilian / Portuguese-language anchor and the consortium's principal feminist-tech / transfeminist methodological pole, complementary to Derechos Digitales's Chilean / Spanish-language regional-advocacy anchor and to the other national-level Al Sur members in Argentina (ADC, CELE), Mexico (R3D), Colombia (Karisma), Peru (Hiperderecho), and Paraguay (TEDIC). Beyond Al Sur, Joana Varon's personal participation in DeepLab, OONI, and the Privacy International Network situates Coding Rights inside a broader transnational feminist-tech and digital-rights infrastructure.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, Coding Rights occupies a distinctive position — the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built on-ramp at the Brazilian and wider Latin American scale, but routed through an explicitly transfeminist, decolonial, and queer-led methodological frame that none of the corpus's other organisations carries as a primary identity. Its theory of change runs in two directions at once: outward into Latin American policy processes through Al Sur advocacy and the Not My A.I. case-material base; and inward into the design and methodology of AI and technology projects themselves, through the Oracle for Transfeminist Technologies and the wider participatory-and-speculative-design methodology Joana Varon, Sasha Costanza-Chock, and Clarote have developed. The organisation's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is that it treats methodology and creative form as themselves political — refusing the separation between AI policy advocacy and the imaginative work of figuring out what better technologies might actually look like, and routing that refusal through Latin American feminist, queer, and decolonial traditions rather than through Global North digital-rights vocabularies. In the corpus's regional shape, it pairs with Derechos Digitales as the two anchoring Latin American organisational poles: empirical-research-and-multilateral-advocacy on the Chilean side, feminist-creative-methodology-and-Brazilian-policy-engagement on the Brazilian side.