Fundación Karisma

Fundación Karisma is a Bogotá-headquartered Colombian civil-society organisation whose mandate is to ensure that digital technologies protect and advance fundamental human rights in Colombia and across Latin America. Founded in 2003, Karisma is one of the longest-standing dedicated digital-rights organisations in the Andean region and the principal Colombian civil-society anchor inside the wider Latin American digital-rights field. Its work combines original research, public-policy advocacy, strategic and technological activism, and direct digital-security support for journalists, human-rights defenders, and activists; its distinctive registers inside the make-AI-good movement are an algorithmic-transparency-and-citizen-participation line on Colombian AI public policy, an electoral-software audit collaboration with the Misión de Observación Electoral (MOE), and the country's first civil-society digital-security laboratory.

Founding and leadership

Karisma was founded in 2003 as a small Bogotá civil-society organisation working at the intersection of human rights and technology — initially with a strong access-to-knowledge and open-culture register that has since broadened into surveillance, privacy, freedom of expression, digital security, and algorithmic-rights work. From the early 2010s the organisation was led by Carolina Botero Cabrera, a Colombian lawyer with international-law graduate degrees, who served as Executive Director for more than a decade and under whose leadership Karisma became, in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's framing on awarding her its 2024 EFF Award, "an outspoken voice fostering freedom of expression, privacy, access to knowledge, justice, and self-determination" in the digital realm across Latin America.

On 1 February 2024 Botero voluntarily stepped down and the organisation transitioned to a co-directorship: María Catalina Moreno, who had led the Social Inclusion line for the previous two and a half years on technology protections for vulnerable groups, and Juan Diego Castañeda, who had managed the foundation since September 2023 and previously coordinated the Autonomy and Dignity line on identification systems, communications surveillance, and Internet regulation. Botero remained with the organisation as an advisor to the new leadership and as coordinator of the K+LAB digital-security and privacy laboratory.

Programme areas

Karisma organises its work across four programme lines — Civic Participation, Autonomy and Dignity, Social Inclusion, and the Democratization of Knowledge and Culture — each combining empirical research with public-policy advocacy, strategic and technological activism in coalition with local and international partners, and public-facing communications. The Civic Participation line carries the organisation's algorithmic-transparency, open-government, and electoral-integrity work; Autonomy and Dignity carries surveillance, identification systems, communications interception, and platform-governance work; Social Inclusion focuses on the deployment of technology against vulnerable communities (gender-based violence online, child rights, migrants); and the Democratization of Knowledge and Culture continues the foundational copyright, open-access, and access-to-knowledge thread on which the organisation was originally built.

The corpus's wider Latin American coverage reaches Colombia through regional bodies (Al Sur, IACHR submissions); Karisma is the dedicated Colombian national-level anchor that those regional efforts coordinate with on Colombia-specific casework, evidence, and advocacy.

AI public-policy and algorithmic-transparency work

Karisma's principal current AI-and-human-rights register is a sustained intervention into Colombian state AI public policy. The organisation's Autonomy and Dignity line published a 10 August 2023 report titled "Inteligencia artificial y su 'regulación' en Colombia — ¿Y qué hay de la participación ciudadana?", arguing that despite Colombia's international recognition (including in Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Index) for its role in designing public policies on AI, the documents that compose the Colombian AI public-policy framework have been drafted with limited mechanisms for citizen participation. The report names that as a structural problem — "the absence of mechanisms for citizen participation in the development of these documents is a problem" — and calls on Colombian public entities to identify the obstacles blocking participation, on the National Planning Department to model effective consultation facilitation, and on the broader policy field to transform public consultation from a bureaucratic requirement into genuine collective problem-solving on how AI is deployed by the Colombian state. The framing is the corpus's clearest documented Colombian civil-society application of the working principle are people outside AI being engaged in shaping AI? to a Latin American national AI-policy process.

Electoral integrity and algorithmic accountability

The Civic Participation line carries Karisma's longest-running algorithmic-accountability collaboration: a multi-year electoral-technology partnership with Misión de Observación Electoral (MOE), Colombia's main civil-society electoral-observation organisation. In response to recurring concerns about the integrity of Colombian electoral counting and consolidation software — and to a Consejo de Estado ruling annulling three congressional seats over electoral-software disputes — MOE commissioned Karisma to develop an audit protocol for the counting-and-consolidation software used in Colombian elections. Karisma's technical conclusion — that the software is vulnerable, has not been designed to be auditable or controllable, and that no independent audit of the scrutiny system has ever been conducted — anchors a programme line that has since produced repeated rounds of technical electoral observation for the 2018, 2022, and 2023 election cycles, including the 2022 presidential first-round and the 2023 regional elections. The work is the corpus's clearest Colombian civil-society documentation of the algorithmic-accountability problem in state-deployed software whose outputs are democratically load-bearing.

K+LAB: civil-society digital security

Karisma's K+LAB — the Digital Security and Privacy Laboratory — was established in 2017 as the first civil-society digital-security laboratory in Colombia. The lab supports Colombian civil-society organisations, journalists, human-rights defenders, and activists on digital-risk identification, vulnerability disclosure, audit protocol design, and public-interest-technology policy recommendations, on the principle of co-responsibility that the Colombian Digital Security Conpes (national policy framework) introduced in 2016. The OECD has recognised K+LAB in its policy work on coordinated vulnerability disclosure. Post-2024, Carolina Botero coordinates K+LAB in her advisor role; the lab continues to host much of Karisma's hands-on technical work on platform, application, and infrastructure security in support of at-risk Colombian users.

Coalition role: Al Sur, GNI, KeepItOn, and the Privacy International partnership

Karisma sits inside three pieces of regional and international civil-society infrastructure that the corpus's wider Latin American coverage already maps. It is a member of the Al Sur consortium — the eleven-organisation Latin American and Caribbean digital-rights consortium (ADC, CELE, Coding Rights, Derechos Digitales, Karisma, Hiperderecho, IDEC, IPANDETEC, InternetLab, R3D, and TEDIC) whose six thematic areas explicitly include artificial intelligence. Within Al Sur, Karisma is the Colombian national anchor — complementary to Derechos Digitales's Chilean / regional-advocacy anchor, R3D's Mexican national anchor, and Coding Rights's Brazilian feminist-tech anchor.

Karisma is also a member of the Global Network Initiative — the multistakeholder coalition of companies, civil-society organisations, and academic institutions on ICT-sector freedom of expression and privacy — which it joined in 2017, and is a named partner organisation of Privacy International on Colombian surveillance, identification-systems, and digital-rights research. Karisma is also a participant in the international KeepItOn coalition through its parallel Observatorio de Bloqueos de Internet (OBI) project documenting Colombian internet censorship and disruption.

Posture in the movement

Within the corpus's frame, Karisma is the Colombian national anchor of the non-AI publics engaging with how AI is built and deployed on-ramp at the Andean scale. Its theory of change is that empirical research on Colombian state and corporate AI deployments — electoral software, public-administration algorithmic decision-making, national AI-policy framework documents, biometric and identification systems, communications surveillance — translated into Spanish-language strategic and technological activism and routed both into Colombian public-policy processes and the Inter-American human-rights system, equips Colombian civil-society organisations, journalists, human-rights defenders, and parliamentarians to subject these AI-and-surveillance systems to democratic accountability before national policy frameworks are settled. The organisation's distinctive contribution to the make-AI-good movement is that it does this from a Colombian grassroots position — explicit about the asymmetries between the state and platform-side technology supply chain and the affected publics whose rights are shaped by it — and that the citizen-participation framing it has carried into Colombian AI-policy debate is a concrete operationalisation of the corpus's working principle that people outside AI must be engaged in shaping how AI is built and used.