Baseline
Useful protections that should be normal for almost any digital action.
Business as usual, so to speak.
Global Digital Action Toolkit
Building Civic Capacity, Not Distributing Advice.
A Complement to CIVICUS’ Global Protest Guide, 2026
01 / Our understanding of the imperative
Our Understanding of the Imperative
CIVICUS’ indispensable work in honouring, supporting, and bolstering civil society as humankind’s contribution to life as we know it is an ever-expanding endeavour. The interdependence and strength of any one system’s people, relationship to the planet, and lived definition of community are central to WellBuilt’s understanding of what makes civil society work.
Often, an assortment of these elements are threatened by commercial, oligarchical, and classist interests. When this happens, people are reduced to labour, the planet is relegated to the role of backdrop, and community is purposefully fragmented in line with the age-old divide-and-conquer technique. CIVICUS’ Annual Plan Narrative 2026–2027 opens:
“The powerful are overreaching, and people are pushing back.”
CIVICUS · Annual Plan Narrative 2026–2027
The CIVICUS Monitor rates civic space in 198 countries and territories: respect, in policy, law and practice, for the freedoms of association, expression, and peaceful assembly. Its five ratings run from open, through narrowed and obstructed, to repressed and closed.
73%of the world’s population lives where civic space is rated repressed or closed: organising is actively obstructed, and those who do it face detention, surveillance or worse.
7.2%lives where civic space is rated open or narrowed: the conditions most guidance quietly assumes its reader is working in.
People Power Under Attack 2025. Everyone between those two figures lives under an obstructed rating.
Given the above numbers, the Digital Action Toolkit offers guidance at three levels because all three can exist in the same society but different contexts and vice versa.
Heightened exposure
Organisers, participants, information or relationships face credible additional risk.
Add context-specific precautions around exposure, data, communications, continuity, evidence, and visibility.
High-risk / specialist
The consequences of getting it wrong exceed what a fifteen-page Toolkit can responsibly advise on.
This is where fifteen pages stops being enough. Route the user to specialist support and deeper guidance.
View supporting rationale and digital-action landscape
The Global Protest Guide is therefore a welcome addition to the ecosystem, and WellBuilt Studios is pleased to present this expression of interest in researching, designing, and producing the complementary Global Digital Action Toolkit.
The existing Global Protest Guide deals with protest in a relatively legible environment: people, place, assembly, state response, and aftermath. Digital action has a more nebulous outline, encompassing people, devices, platforms, algorithms, networks, states, private companies, segmented audiences, and counter-actors. Any one of those layers can fail, censor, surveil, distort or disappear. Digital action can precede physical mobilisation; coordinate it; run alongside it; amplify it; document it; and continue long after the gathering ends. In this sense, there’s no point at which digital “starts” or “ends”. For the Global Protest Guide specifically, our job is to build the digital companion piece.
The Global Digital Action Toolkit needs to move beyond the platform-choice question of “Which platform will we use?” and help people reason around the infrastructure on which collective action depends. Excitingly, the deliberate language choice of “digital assemblies” in the Terms of Reference gives us a much larger design space:
Nine things digital action can enable, and the formats each one takes
| What digital action can enable | Illustrative formats |
|---|---|
| 1. Find people who care or need to know. | Social posts and call-outs; messaging-channel broadcasts; email campaigns; creator posts; digital flyers; landing pages; sign-up forms; referral links; searchable hashtags; quick-response-code-linked recruitment pages |
| 2. Bring those people together in ways that make it possible for them to participate. | Video or audio assemblies; livestreamed town halls; group chats; online forums; text-based discussion spaces; asynchronous message boards; captioned livestreams; multilingual digital rooms; text-message- or voice-based participation |
| 3. Share histories, stories, and lived experiences. | Digital oral histories; first-person video or audio testimony; photo essays; interactive timelines; digital story maps; podcasts; newsletters; web essays; short documentaries; testimonial threads; online exhibitions |
| 4. Enable creative expression. | Digital posters and zines; memes; illustrations; GIFs; animation; short-form video; digital collage; music and audio pieces; spoken-word recordings; filters and stickers; participant-created remixes; user-generated media |
| 5. Demand justice. | Online petitions; cross-border e-petitions; open letters hosted online; email-to-decision-maker tools; coordinated digital letter-writing; online public submissions; digital pledges; click-to-contact campaigns; campaign microsites with clear calls to action |
| 6. Pool resources. | Crowdfunding pages; digital mutual-aid funds; online legal-defence funds; mobile-money collections; digital donation drives; shared resource registries; online volunteer or skills exchanges; wish lists; digital resource-matching boards |
| 7. Create dynamic, living archives. | Searchable digital repositories; cloud-based evidence libraries; digital incident logs; timestamped photo and video archives; interactive campaign timelines; testimony databases; online oral-history collections; geotagged records; collaborative wikis; digitised document collections |
| 8. Combat mis- and disinformation. | Shareable fact-check cards; myth-versus-fact graphics; source-verification threads; rumour trackers; pre-bunking videos; rapid-response explainers; annotated screenshots; correction posts; searchable fact-check hubs; trusted-messenger broadcast packs |
| 9. Move fluidly between online and on-the-ground action, even with limited digital literacy. | text-message and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data tools; voice notes and recorded hotlines; quick-response-code-linked print materials; digital sign-ups feeding physical gatherings; livestreams extending in-person actions; text-message updates; simple mobile web pages; digital maps and meeting-point information; online follow-up spaces after physical action |
Ideally, this work also becomes useful beyond the assignment itself. CIVICUS’ 2026–2027 Digital Democracy Initiative will deliver tailored technical support to at least 200 members and operate a Civic Tech Lab supporting civic-technology innovation. A Toolkit designed as a retrievable, adaptable knowledge layer can strengthen that wider institutional ecosystem and remain useful after handover.
02 / Approach
We’ve interrogated the spine of the Protest Guide and other best in class examples to see how we can best complement the work
From the Global Protest Guide, we ascertained the spine the Digital Action Toolkit needs to support is:
| What we take from the Global Protest Guide | What that means for the Digital Action Toolkit |
|---|---|
| Follow the user journey; keep cognitive load low; make it modular. | Organise guidance around when it becomes useful, make sections independently usable, and privilege quick retrieval over exhaustive explanation. |
| Start from lived reality and design for context. | There’s no one “correct” way to act. Here, alternatives, trade-offs, and support for discernment shape the framework. |
| Distribute agency. | Design for groups with differentiated roles, knowledge, and responsibilities because it is unlikely that one heroic organiser carries the action or that knowledge and authority sit with the same person. |
| Move from knowing to doing; use realistic ambiguity. | Convert concepts into decisions, exercises, scenarios, and actions that require judgement under imperfect conditions. |
| Treat care as infrastructure. | Low bandwidth, expensive data, multilingual use, disability, cognitive accessibility, older devices, and limited digital literacy are default design conditions, not edge cases. |
| Design the whole lifecycle. | Knowledge should remain portable, documentation should survive staff turnover, measurement should be proportionate, and ownership should sit with the people who will continue the work after the consultant leaves. |
View design reasoning and working principles
The imagined user is not one heroic organiser doing everything. It is a group of people with differentiated roles, knowledge, and responsibilities. The Protest Guide takes high-stakes, politically complex material and gives it a simple operating structure without infantilising the reader.
The technology is only one layer of the system. Low bandwidth, old devices, shared phones, expensive data, language barriers, and intermittent access have to be part of the default design assumptions.
It is disingenuous to treat platforms as neutral venues. Their algorithms, moderation norms, financial incentives, and governance decisions shape what civic action can accomplish. The Global Digital Action Toolkit needs to help people organise collective action inside digital environments they do not own, cannot fully control, and may actively be used against them.
We know we are increasingly working through systems who cannot even see inside themselves, let alone have a keyhole for us to see and understand them.
From that reading, these are the design principles WellBuilt would hold the Toolkit to:
| Design principle | What it means for the Toolkit |
|---|---|
| Design for point-of-need retrieval | Organise guidance around when it becomes useful. Sections should stand alone and privilege quick retrieval over exhaustive explanation. |
| Start from lived reality | Offer alternatives, trade-offs, and support for discernment. |
| Distribute agency | Design for groups with differentiated roles, knowledge, and responsibilities. |
| Move from knowing to doing | Convert concepts into decisions, scenarios, drills, checklists, and actions that require judgement under imperfect conditions. |
| Treat care and access as infrastructure | Low bandwidth, expensive data, multilingual use, disability, older devices, limited digital literacy, and audio access belong in the default design conditions. |
| It’s okay not to walk in with all the right answers, as long as you ask the right questions. | Frame every section as a question the organiser is already asking: how can we support these people to achieve this? Requirements are written in user-story form, so a page has to earn its place against a real need: I, [role], need to be able to [do this] so that I can [achieve this]. WellBuilt never claims to have the right answers; the discipline is holding the right questions. |
| Tier every risk | Baseline, heightened exposure, or specialist. Every protective recommendation carries a tier, so one page serves a reader organising in an open context and a reader under active surveillance without either being misled. |
| Design the whole lifecycle | Knowledge, evidence, measurement, care, and ownership should survive the action where useful; temporary or risky infrastructure should be intentionally closed where it should not. |
Teach digital infrastructure literacy without requiring technical literacy by asking:
What infrastructure does our action depend on?
Who owns it?
Who can see us?
Who can remove us?
What happens if this platform disappears tomorrow?
Where is our participant information stored?
What should never be collected in the first place?
How will we communicate if the internet goes down?
How will people know which information is genuinely from us?
What happens to the community after the campaign ends?
Those are strategic questions disguised as technical ones.
Collaborating with our advisors should expose:
How does digital collective action actually happen in practice?
Where do organisers get stuck?
What do existing guides assume that isn’t true in their context?
What have they learned the hard way?
What information would they have wanted before their last action?
What do they need during an action when circumstances change quickly?
What terminology or recommendations do not travel across contexts, and why?
What would make a 15-page toolkit useful enough to keep open while organising?
WellBuilt is inseparable from how we care for whether something works, who holds power, who designed it, who gets heard, who benefits, and who retains agency once CIVICUS or a consultant leaves.
03 / Methodology
Five connected modes of work
The WellBuilt methodology consists of five connected modes of work, with extensive collaboration with the CIVICUS team, and our advisors-cum-audience of formal and informal organisers, creators, communicators, civic technologists, established civil society organisations, and people organising across open, restricted, and highly repressive environments. We will bring in specialist digital-rights validation where needed.
Evidence ↔ judgement ↔ iterationOne mode can trigger, revisit, or run alongside several others.
The methodology is connected and iterative, not a fixed left-to-right sequence.
View full methodology detail
| Mode | Key question | Core activities | Output | Who |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Listen, Map & Frame | What already exists, who knows what, what are we assuming, and what must success look like? | CIVICUS evidence first: Global Protest Guide, Digital Action Lab cases and knowledge products, Digital Democracy Initiative resources, existing institutional knowledge and relevant Global Resource Hub materials. Define success and scope; finalise case-selection criteria and research ethics. Practitioner conversations, purposively sampled across different civic-space, geographic, technological, and organisational contexts, with specialist digital-rights validation where needed. | Agreed evidence frame, research questions, consultation approach, case shortlist, and bounded Toolkit hypothesis. | WellBuilt leads; CIVICUS provides institutional context and source access; advisors sharpen enquiry; practitioners contribute lived evidence. |
| 2. Design Thinking | What should this become for the people who will actually use it? | Translate evidence into the fifteen-page architecture; decide what becomes prose, table, flow, checklist, case card, or audio treatment; prototype representative decision tools and information hierarchy. | Approved content architecture, page budget, prototype set and visual/audio treatment specification. | WellBuilt owns content architecture; Pumla shapes information architecture and visual specification suitable for CIVICUS or its appointed publication designer to execute. |
| 3. Test and Trial in the User Experience Lab | Where does the emerging Toolkit create ease, hesitation, confusion, exclusion or failure? | Run one focused usability round with organisers; test retrieval, comprehension, low-data use, accessibility, contextual fit, and a representative audio treatment with transcript equivalence. | Usability findings, adaptation log, and revised Toolkit architecture. | WellBuilt and Pumla run testing; practitioners use prototypes; Dylan and Tai review specialist material within their advisory windows. |
| 4. Build & Document | What must the complete Toolkit contain, and what must CIVICUS retain to adapt it later? | Draft and integrate the approximately fifteen-page manuscript; develop practical tools, cases and impact-measurement guidance; maintain source provenance, adaptation rationale, and audio-ready content notes. | Complete First Draft with visual/layout recommendations, references, source register, and audio treatment guidance. | Amukelani leads research, synthesis, and drafting; Pumla develops visual specification; advisors review bounded specialist questions. |
| 5. Finalise & Transfer | Can CIVICUS publish, adapt and continue the work without WellBuilt in the room? | Incorporate one consolidated feedback set; complete factual, editorial, accessibility, and global-applicability review; hand over source register, visual specification, adaptation logic, and rights notes. | Publication-ready final Toolkit and organised handover. | WellBuilt finalises and transfers; CIVICUS takes ownership for publication and subsequent adaptation. |
View research ethics and data-minimisation protocol
Research ethics, consent, and data minimisation
Practitioner consultation will follow a simple risk-based protocol: informed and voluntary consent; collection of only the information needed for the research question; no recording without explicit consent; no unnecessary identifiers; attribution or anonymity agreed with participants; restricted access to working files; and agreed retention, transfer or deletion at close.
No sensitive practitioner material becomes a public case study without specific permission.
04 / Toolkit structure
Proposed Toolkit Structure
The proposed structure is designed to facilitate tactile learning: organisers deliberately exercise the machinery of collective action under controlled stakes before asking it to carry something politically, financially or operationally consequential.
What do you need right now?Enter at the point of need. One route can lead to several others.
The Toolkit routes by need, not by page order. Case studies and curated resources cut across the whole system.
View full Toolkit structure detail
| Section | Core question | What it does | Illustrative tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Orient | Where am I, what am I trying to change, what role am I playing, and what do I need right now? | Read the room; map actors, dependencies, and information flows; test assumptions; diagnose strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats; route the user toward the next relevant capability. | Context Map · Assumption Check · Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats diagnostic |
| 2. Prepare & Protect | Who or what could be exposed, and what must keep working if a platform, device, account or connection fails? | Treat security as broader than accounts: wellbeing, participant data, relationships, evidence, harassment, surveillance, shutdowns, disinformation, and platform dependency. Tier guidance into baseline, heightened exposure, and specialist routing. | Exposure Check · Continuity Plan · Specialist routing |
| 3. Test & Trial | What should we learn before the stakes rise? | Start small by limiting scale, reach, workload, money, complexity, risk or permanence. Run drills that reveal single points of failure, information gaps, moderation weaknesses, and handover problems. | Trial Canvas · Recovery Drill · Narrative Distortion Drill · Handover Drill |
| 4. Act | What capability is required right now? | Route by primary problem: Meaning → Communicate; Operations → Coordinate; Production → Create; Participation → Mobilise. An action may use several; the route simply helps users find the capability they need. | Message Architecture Card · Coordination Matrix · Creation Brief · Participation Ladder |
| 5. Sustain | What should still exist once this moment is over; and what should deliberately stop existing? | Close the loop; measure and learn; consolidate knowledge; retain or close infrastructure; archive, anonymise, transfer or securely delete material; support care and recovery; transfer learning; contribute reusable lessons back to the civic ecosystem. | Outcome Review · Knowledge Transfer Prompt · Retain / Close / Delete checklist |
Illustrative outputs
Click on the tabs below to see indications of illustrative outputs.
The assumptions mapping grid: what the Test Assumptions step produces. Every assumption the action rests on, placed by the damage it does if it is wrong and how confident the group actually is. The top-left quadrant is the work list.
High risk / low certaintytest first
They're risky and unclear.
1
Platforms will keep our reach intact for the length of the campaign.
2
Participants understand what joining publicly exposes them to.
3
Our messengers are trusted by the people we most need to reach.
4
We can keep coordinating if the primary channel disappears.
High risk / high certaintyprotect
We're confident, but failure would be costly.
1
Participant information must never identify who knows whom.
2
A hostile version of our message will circulate.
3
Some participants face more exposure than others.
4
The action must work on old devices and expensive data.
Low risk / high certaintybuild on
Build on these strengths.
1
Our existing group chats already reach the core organisers.
2
People will share something that names their own experience.
3
Offline gatherings still carry the most trust.
4
We have people who can translate and localise quickly.
Low risk / low certaintyvalidate later
Low risk, but worth validating.
1
Supporters would attend an online assembly rather than only read about it.
2
A public archive would be used by people beyond our network.
3
People want progress updates between actions.
Desired user outcome: Reduce harmful exposure or harm.
The important decision was that this is broader than cybersecurity. It covers people’s wellbeing, sensitive identifier information, secure communications, participant data, visibility fear from marginalised groups, harassment, doxxing, surveillance, compromising evidence, and platform dependency amongst others.
Some key failure conditions, to be validated upon CIVICUS and stakeholder consultation, to address in this section are:
| Threat | What is actually under attack | Strategic problem it creates |
|---|---|---|
| Surveillance | Privacy, anonymity and network integrity | States, platforms or hostile actors can identify not only who is acting, but who knows whom, who coordinates whom, where people are, and how a movement operates. Exposure is the entry point to the real danger of having enough information to map and subsequently disrupt the organising network itself. |
| Internet shutdowns | Connectivity and operational continuity | Organisers can lose the infrastructure required to communicate, coordinate, document events, mobilise supporters or reach outside audiences. The question becomes: can collective action continue when the primary communications layer disappears? |
| Disinformation | Shared reality, legitimacy and trust | False or manipulated information can fracture coordination internally, confuse supporters, delegitimise a movement publicly and make authentic communications harder to distinguish from hostile ones. The true contest is over who gets believed. |
| Platform restrictions | Reach, discoverability and control over distribution | Movements organise on privately governed infrastructure whose owners can remove content, suspend accounts, throttle reach, alter algorithms or change the rules with little warning. The vulnerability is building collective power on distribution channels the movement might not control. |
The account goes beyond “Are our accounts secure?” to helping organisers interrogate:
Who or what could be exposed through this action?
What information are we collecting, and do we need it?
Who can access that information?
What does participation reveal about relationships between people?
What happens if an account, device or platform is compromised?
What channels do we depend on?
What should exist offline or elsewhere as fallback?
What exposure does public visibility create?
What evidence should be captured, protected or not retained?
When is the risk beyond what a 15-page Toolkit can responsibly advise on?
Taking the form of case studies and exercises, the most immersive section will lead with a case study and a closely tied real life exercise.
Case StudyThe model every case follows
Context
- Where, when, what kind of civic space, and what the group was trying to change. Two or three sentences, no more.
What they did
- The action in plain sequence, named by capability so it maps back to the Toolkit: what they communicated, how they coordinated, what they made, how they mobilised.
What it depended on
- The infrastructure underneath: platforms, devices, networks, money, and the people who held knowledge nobody had written down.
What broke, or nearly did
- The honest part. Cases that only report success teach nothing an organiser can use at two in the morning.
What transfers
- Which parts travel to another context, which parts were specific to this one, and what an organiser should do differently having read it.
→Read the full case
Global Digital Action ToolkitCase modelCIVICUS 2026
Test and Trial Spotlight via the User Experience Lab
A trial can be serious without being solemn. A meme competition, digital exhibition, collaborative map, tiny mutual-aid drive, 24-hour challenge, mock digital assembly or deliberately absurd petition can surface very real weaknesses in coordination, moderation, access, communications and documentation without putting participants in unnecessary danger.
Tools & Methods3.1 Test & Trial: the Trial Canvas
Before
- Pick the capability you are least sure of.
- Choose one dimension to limit: scale, reach, workload, money, complexity, risk or permanence.
- Agree what would count as a useful failure, and tell participants this is a trial.
During
- Run it at the agreed limit. Resist the urge to rescue it the moment it wobbles.
- Watch the seams: handovers, approvals, moderation, and anything that depends on one person staying reachable.
- Log every improvisation. Improvisation marks a gap the system has been hiding.
- Note what participants asked that nobody had an answer for.
After
- Debrief within two days, while people still remember how it felt.
- Name the single points of failure the trial exposed.
- Decide what changes before the stakes rise, and what you accept as a known risk.
- Keep the artefacts. This trial becomes the worked example for the next group.
→See a worked example
↓Download the canvas
Global Digital Action ToolkitTest & Trial · 3.1CIVICUS 2026
Illustrative challenges, for example:
- A 500 United States dollar crowdfunding challenge tests mobilisation, payment infrastructure, communications, trust, and fulfilment without risking the movement’s crown jewels.
- A digital artivism challenge adds creators, submissions, moderation, judging, public voting, intellectual-property questions and perhaps the first money raised as the prize. Suddenly the system has more moving parts, but the stakes are still playful enough to learn.
- An online summit tests convening, facilitation, accessibility, speakers, participation, moderation, documentation and continuity.
- A petition tests message discipline, conversion, mobilisation and whether the audience will cross the line from I agree to I will publicly attach my name to this.
- A hackathon around a real civic problem tests distributed problem-solving, teams, specialist expertise, decision rights, outputs and whether collective energy can become something usable.
- A hardware or civic-tech lab is much further up the ladder: technical interoperability, maintenance, governance, ownership, safety, procurement, long-term stewardship. At that point, the action has graduated from “can we mobilise?” to “can we build infrastructure together?”
| Capability / through-line | Viable and Valuable Test & Trial |
|---|---|
| Protect | Run a recovery or access-loss drill: assume the primary account/device/admin is suddenly unavailable. Can the team recover safely? |
| Coordinate | Run a key-person disappearance drill: the convenor or platform administrator becomes unreachable halfway through an action. Who takes over, and what information do they actually have? |
| Communicate | Run a narrative distortion drill: a misleading version of the campaign message suddenly begins travelling faster than the original. Can the team recognise, verify and respond without amplifying it? |
| Mobilise | Run a surge test: participation unexpectedly jumps 10×. Can onboarding, moderation, communication and decision-making survive the success? |
| Documentation | Run an evidence-integrity drill: receive a consequential image/video with uncertain provenance. Can the team verify, protect, contextualise and route it correctly before using it? |
| Knowledge | Run a handover-under-pressure drill: someone new has to make a live decision using only what the team has documented. What knowledge turns out to exist only in somebody’s head? |
| Wellbeing | Run an exposure-rotation drill: one moderator/documentarian hits their agreed exposure limit during a high-volume incident. Can someone else take over without losing context or compromising care? |
| Sustain | Run a shutdown drill: the campaign ends tomorrow. What gets retained, transferred, closed, deleted, funded, cared for or kept alive? |
Once confidence running complex tasks in uncertain environments builds, the Toolkit will move to ways to balance boldness with caution.
Desired user outcome: We have made something useful that advances the action.
This is where the Toolkit makes the point that civic action can do more than oppose, persuade or demand. It can produce alternative ways of thinking, organising, and being. Examples span the full gamut and include:
a zine · an archive · a map · a song · a database · a prototype · a community ritual · a piece of software · a hardware device
Key quality assurance questions include:
| Component | Core question |
|---|---|
| Purpose | What job does this thing need to do? |
| User / community | Who is it for, and who should participate in making it? |
| Minimum useful form | What is the smallest thing we can make that genuinely performs the job? |
| Form | Does this need to be text, visual, data, media, software, hardware, physical or hybrid? |
| Access | Who might be excluded by the chosen format, platform or technology? |
| Contribution | Can others add to, adapt or localise it? |
| Ownership | Who owns, governs or controls what is created? |
| Information / evidence | Does creating it introduce privacy, provenance or security obligations? |
| Maintenance | Does it need to keep working after launch? If so, who maintains it? |
| Exit | What happens if it should no longer exist? |
Relationships, trust, evidence, knowledge, infrastructure and commitments may need to continue; temporary systems, unnecessary data and high-exposure channels may need to disappear.
| Component | Core question | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Close the loop | What did we promise, and who needs to hear what happened? | Communicate outcomes; follow through on commitments; close unanswered asks; return to participants, partners, supporters, and affected communities. |
| Measure & learn | What changed, what worked, what did not, and what can we reasonably attribute to the action? | Proportionate impact measurement; participation/conversion signals; intended versus unintended outcomes; failures; surprises; contextual changes. |
| Knowledge Management | What have we learned, who needs to know it, and what should change because of it? | Consolidate decisions, lessons, adaptations, relationships, and tacit knowledge into something retrievable and reusable. |
| Retain or close | What should remain active, and what should deliberately stop existing? | Channels, coalitions, repositories, mailing lists, protocols, tools, funding mechanisms and infrastructure worth retaining versus temporary credentials, insecure group chats, crisis channels, unnecessary databases and sensitive participant information that should be closed or deleted. |
| Document & archive | What has enduring operational, evidentiary, legal or learning value? | Archive, anonymise, transfer or securely delete material according to its future value and continued risk. Our earlier document-management work already distinguishes preservation from deletion as part of the information lifecycle. |
| Care & recovery | What do the people carrying the action need after the peak moment? | Debriefing; workload/exposure rotation; decompression; peer support; follow-up after harassment or distress; appropriate escalation/referral pathways. |
| Learn & Transfer | What did you learn that the next organiser should know? | Convert lived experience into reusable knowledge and make it available beyond the people who happened to participate this time. |
| Contribute | Is there something worth adding back to the wider civic ecosystem? | Route tested practices, cases, regional adaptations, translations, emerging tools, corrected/broken resources and lessons back into a living CIVICUS resource ecosystem. |
Hive Mind models the Contribute step well. Its content-collection form captures language, cost, currency, creator credibility, format, topic, audience and consent for every resource submitted, which is the mechanism that keeps a resource ecosystem dynamic.
Illustrative layouts. Content is drawn from the proposed Toolkit architecture and would be validated at inception and in user testing.
View cross-cutting throughlines and curated resource layer
Three throughlines apply across the board
Documentation
Manage the artefacts and records of the action.
Capture → Classify → Control → Store → Update → Preserve / Delete
What needs to be recorded, protected, versioned, retained or deliberately removed?Useful for legal aftermath, withdrawal of consent for people’s likeness or words to be accessible and distributable, and posterity.
Knowledge Management
Manage the meaning and reusable learning generated through the action.
Retrieve → Interpret → Capture → Validate → Transfer → Apply → Consolidate → Reuse
What do we already know, what are we learning, who needs to know it, and what should survive this action?This is when documentation becomes institutional wisdom and informs the next waves of organising. Specialist depth remains visible through trusted CIVICUS and external resources across manuals, tools, tutorials, cases, courses, video, and audio. Assuming sustained screen-reading is not feasible for all, the Digital Action Toolkit will learn from the Global Protest Guide’s multimodal publication approach, including its audio guide, so essential knowledge can travel across text, visual, and audio forms.
Wellbeing
Protect the people carrying the action as part of operational resilience.
Exposure → capacity → rotation → recovery → referral / escalation → return
What does this action ask people to carry, and what needs to happen before, during, and after exposure?
Curated resource layer
We can include a curated resource layer containing different levels and modalities: manuals, guidelines, digital tools, tutorials, articles, case studies, and courses to start.
| Bucket | Illustrative resources |
|---|---|
| Guides & Manuals | Security in-a-Box (Front Line Defenders + Tactical Tech); Digital First Aid Kit (CiviCERT). |
| Toolkits & Templates | Campaign Accelerator Resources (Mobilisation Lab); Exposing the Invisible: The Kit (Tactical Tech). |
| Evidence & Documentation | Video as Evidence Field Guide (WITNESS). |
| Digital Platforms & Infrastructure | New/Mode (advocacy and civic-engagement platform for supporter mobilisation, decision-maker outreach, and fundraising). |
| Courses & Learning | Advocacy Assembly (multilingual, self-paced training for activists, campaigners, and journalists, including digital security, internet shutdowns, advocacy, and digital rights). |
05 / Workplan
Workplan & Timeline
The workplan protects the three formal delivery gates while making CIVICUS’ review burden explicit. Week 7 is a protected internal review window; the schedule assumes one consolidated CIVICUS feedback set before final revision.
| Week | Focus | Key activities | Output / milestone |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 114–18 September | Listen, Map & Frame | Kick-off; review Global Protest Guide, Digital Action Lab knowledge products and existing CIVICUS sources; confirm success criteria, research ethics, case criteria, and consultation approach; begin targeted research. | Evidence frame; interview guide; source map; case criteria; assumptions register. |
| Week 221–25 September | Evidence → Inception | Conduct first practitioner conversations; continue comparative research; synthesise gaps and contextual variation; refine the fifteen-page page budget and architecture. | Deliverable 1: Inception Concept Note + Toolkit Outline, 25 September. |
| Week 328 September–2 October | Co-Design & Architecture | Incorporate inception feedback; complete priority conversations; map evidence into Orient → Prepare & Protect → Test & Trial → Act → Sustain; select specialist routes; map text, visual and audio treatments; prototype decision tools. | Approved content architecture; case shortlist; prototype set; visual/audio treatment specification. |
| Week 45–9 October | Prototype & Test | Run one focused usability round with organisers; test retrieval, comprehension, low-data use, accessibility, contextual fit, decision aids, and a representative audio treatment with transcript equivalence; iterate. | Usability findings; adaptation log; revised information architecture. |
| Week 512–16 October | Build & Document I | Draft and design the first substantive content set; develop tools and case cards; verify sources; build specialist routes; document provenance and design rationale; prepare audio-ready adaptation notes. | First major manuscript components; practical tools; case cards; source register; initial visual treatments. |
| Week 619–23 October | Build & Integrate → First Draft | Complete remaining content; integrate the approximately fifteen-page manuscript; complete impact-measurement guidance; harmonise terminology; review accessibility, factual accuracy, references and complementarity with the Global Protest Guide. | Deliverable 2: Complete First Draft, 23 October, with visual/layout recommendations, references and audio treatment guidance. |
| Week 726–30 October | CIVICUS Review & Sensemaking | Protected CIVICUS review period; internal review; one structured feedback session; consolidate comments; distinguish substantive issues from preference edits; resolve conflicting inputs and agree revision priorities. | One consolidated CIVICUS feedback set + agreed revision priorities. |
| Week 82–6 November | Revise, Verify & Strengthen | Incorporate substantive feedback; verify cases and sources; run accessibility, global-applicability and text/audio-equivalence review; finalise visual specification and rights/provenance notes. | Near-final publication-ready manuscript + final visual/audio specification. |
| Week 99–13 November | Liftoff & Step Out | Final editorial and factual quality assurance; resolve limited final comments; organise source register, adaptation logic, and handover materials, including audio treatment guidance for future adaptation and production; confirm ownership and future-use arrangements. | Deliverable 3: Final Toolkit, 13 November; publication-ready manuscript of approximately fifteen pages. |
Delivery gates: 25 September, Inception Concept Note + Toolkit Outline · 23 October, Complete First Draft · 13 November, Final Toolkit.
We ask that CIVICUS reserves this week for concentrated review.
Comments arriving in separate tranches after the protected window compress revision and verification into the same week, and quality follows the squeeze.
Comments arriving in separate tranches after the protected window compress revision and verification into the same week, and quality follows the squeeze.
06 / Team
Why We’re The Right Team
Amukelani Muyanga Lead Partner & Managing Director
Amukelani is a strategist, product designer, and programme leader working at the intersection of technology, public-interest systems and institutional change. As Managing Director of WellBuilt Studios, she leads work that helps organisations diagnose complex problems, determine the smallest useful intervention, and coordinate the people, systems and technology required to make that intervention work in practice. Her career spans government, philanthropy, civil society and technology, with a consistent focus on building a tech-enabled, pro-poor and climate-smart future.
Her digital and technology work ranges from policy to product. At Dalberg Advisors, Amukelani shaped the development of principles for good digital identity in Africa with the African Union and Meta, worked with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Innovation and Technology and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa on digitisation of civil registries and the national identity programme, and co-authored work on data policy balancing innovation with privacy, security, and citizen protection. She also designed and facilitated digitisation-for-development engagements for African government delegations, foundations, and technologists, with facilitation protocols, facilitator training, participant learning tools, and public-facing communications. Today, through the International Business Machines Equity Equivalent Investment Programme, she works directly with ventures building with artificial intelligence, large language models, cloud, and hybrid computing, taking them from business-case assessment and design thinking through user experience, product development, and minimum viable product launch with engineers.
Amukelani’s work is equally rooted in institutional and social systems. She led the development of a five-year, 60 million United States dollar strategy for the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business’ Bertha Centre, co-designing the strategy with the leadership responsible for implementing it after handover. For the Rockefeller Foundation’s Uncommon Collaborations Initiative, she designed and managed a 1 million United States dollar programme supporting six cross-sector collaborations tackling issues ranging from poverty-targeting technologies and social protection to climate action, forced labour, and smallholder farming. Earlier in her career, she spent four years with the Community Empowerment Fund, where she managed civic-engagement and volunteer programmes and helped increase annual advocate retention from 45% to 95%, while also working directly with low-income individuals and families on financial independence and emergency housing support.
Her approach combines systems thinking with a strong bias toward implementation and institutional ownership: the people expected to carry a strategy, programme or technology after handover should help shape it from the beginning. Alongside WellBuilt, Amukelani is the Founder and Director of The Wellth Well, a mental-health and holistic-wellness ecosystem; a Co-Founder and Advisor to African Life-Centric Design; and an active member of the Post Growth Institute. Her wider client experience includes governments across Africa, Europe and the United States; the Gates, Rockefeller, Bertha and Yellowwoods Foundations; Meta, Microsoft and Mozilla; and the African Union.
For the Global Digital Action Toolkit, Amukelani brings a rare combination of digital-policy experience, contemporary artificial intelligence and product practice, participatory programme design, civic-sector experience, and complex stakeholder orchestration. She is particularly skilled in translating technical and institutional complexity into practical systems that people can understand, use, and ultimately own.
Dylan A. Sparks Lead Advisor
Dylan is a technology policy and democracy specialist working at the intersection of civil society, public policy, philanthropy and digital power. He is currently United Kingdom Director at Reset Tech, where his work focuses on the governance of technology and the systemic effects that digital platforms, algorithms and emerging technologies can have on democratic institutions and public life. In June 2026, Dylan gave evidence to the United Kingdom Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee as part of its British Broadcasting Corporation Royal Charter Review, contributing to its examination of how public-service institutions should operate in an increasingly algorithmic and technology-mediated information environment.
Before joining Reset, Dylan worked with Luminate and Omidyar Network, researching digital threats to democracy with a particular focus on elections, disinformation and data-privacy legislation. His work also included due diligence for grants and investments, giving him experience assessing organisations and interventions across research, technology development, civic engagement and policy advocacy. At Reset, this evolved into research, strategic planning and relationship-building with civil-society organisations and policymakers working to address digital threats through law, policy and institutional reform.
Dylan’s engagement with civic participation and collective action predates his technology-policy career. A South African who grew up across several countries, he attended United World College of South East Asia before studying Global and International Studies at Bard College, with a focus on international relations and economics. While at United World College, he helped organise and facilitate an Initiative for Peace conference in Sri Lanka that brought together young people from Tamil, Sinhalese and Muslim communities for dialogue and conflict-resolution work.
For the Global Digital Action Toolkit, Dylan brings particular depth in digital democracy, platform governance, disinformation, privacy, civic space and the relationship between technological systems and democratic power.
Tai Huynh Lead Advisor
Tai is a civic-technology entrepreneur and former elected public official whose work centres on making public institutions more accessible, responsive and accountable to the communities they serve. He is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Acta Solutions, a government-technology company that builds digital infrastructure for local governments, helping public agencies reduce administrative friction, centralise institutional knowledge and respond more effectively to residents navigating services including permits, inspections and licences. Acta is now used by 55 local governments across 15 United States states.
At 22, Tai was elected to the Chapel Hill Town Council in North Carolina, becoming the first Vietnamese-American elected to public office in the state. He served from 2019 to 2023, bringing a technology and community-engagement perspective to questions including affordable housing, economic opportunity, public-private collaboration, and residents’ relationships with local government. His public-service experience gives him direct insight into designing institutions and technology around community needs.
Tai has continued to work across public institutions beyond elected office. He currently serves as a Director-at-Large of the North Carolina State Board of Community Colleges, and his public-sector affiliations have included the Durham Planning Commission and Durham Tech Foundation. He holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with minors in Business Administration, and Anthropology, where he studied as a Morehead-Cain Scholar and first-generation university student.
For the Global Digital Action Toolkit, Tai brings an unusually practical combination of democratic participation, civic technology, digital public-service design, and firsthand experience of the relationship between communities and the institutions intended to serve them. His career spans both sides of that relationship: as an elected representative accountable to residents and as a technology founder building systems through which residents interact with government.
Pumla Maswanganyi Creative Director
Pumla is a design strategist, researcher and creative director working across cultural design, futures thinking, social systems and African-centred knowledge systems. She is Co-Founder of With Another, an art, design and research-led practice working across strategy, futures and systems-led design, and the primary author of African Life-Centric Design, a framework that centres contextual intelligence, cultural heritage, communal interdependence, and adaptive resilience in the act of creation. Her work has included collaborations with organisations such as Mozilla, the African Union, British Council, Samsung, and other cultural, technology and public-interest institutions.
Central to Pumla’s practice is a discipline she and With Another describe as a “Taxonomy of Essentials”: deliberately identifying and prioritising only what is genuinely useful, creating room for modularity, and ensuring that every element of a design serves a distinct purpose. The methodology sits within a wider commitment to joint wisdom and custodianship. This recognises that expertise is distributed among designers, communities, and institutions, and designs outputs that others can continue to shape after the designers step away.
For the Global Digital Action Toolkit, Pumla will lead creative and information architecture from the beginning of the design process. Working alongside the substantive research and toolkit architecture from Week 2, she will help determine what information earns scarce page space and the form in which it will be most useful: what should be prose, what becomes a table, what needs a diagram or flow, what works as a checklist or worksheet, and what should be removed altogether. This role will keep cultural, linguistic, and technological context explicit in the design. This is consistent with African Life-Centric Design’s emphasis on locally grounded, adaptable design.
Selected experience Five integrated capabilities
| Capability | Selected evidence | Strategic relevance to CIVICUS |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Advocacy, policy influence & institutional change | African Union + Meta: shaped the drafting of principles for good digital identity in Africa as part of a continental digital-economy strategy. Ethiopian Ministry of Innovation & Technology + United Nations Economic Commission for Africa: assessed opportunities and gaps in Ethiopia’s emerging digitisation strategy for civil registries and the national identity programme. Dalberg Advisors: co-authored a White Paper examining how data policy could unlock innovation and economic growth while protecting privacy, security, and citizens. South African Department of Justice and Constitutional Development: co-developed a practical Partnership Playbook for selecting appropriate partnership models, identifying and prioritising private-foundation and corporate partners, and structuring collaborations as development-assistance architecture changed. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: co-developed the Foundation’s 2020 Africa Strategy as one of two team members. | WellBuilt brings experience operating where public policy, institutional power, technology, private actors, and citizen interests collide. For CIVICUS, this enables a Toolkit that treats digital action as a question of power and governance: who establishes the rules, who owns critical infrastructure, what leverage civic actors retain, and how collective action builds leverage and influences institutions. |
| 2. Technology & applied experimentation | Uncommon Collaborations Initiative: led programme design, work planning and delivery for a 1 million United States dollar portfolio of six experimental collaborations that put technology and data to work against radically different public-interest problems. The portfolio included Operation Outbreak, an experiential model using pandemic dynamics to expose marginalised students to science, technology, engineering and mathematics; a Forced Labour Risk Estimation Tool, built around closing data-availability and data-bottleneck gaps so institutional investors could identify and mitigate forced labour in supply chains; University of California Berkeley Data-Intensive Development Lab + GiveDirectly poverty-targeting technology for country-level social-protection delivery, including coronavirus disease 2019 cash transfers; and CARE + myAgro, which combined platforms, technology like drone mapping, models, and audiences across smallholder-farmer pilots in Tanzania, Burundi, and Nigeria. Dalberg Advisors: assessed, through three impact-evaluation case studies, digital platforms designed to connect East African smallholder farmers to affordable agricultural inputs, best-practice knowledge and markets. International Business Machines Equity Equivalent Investment Programme: interrogates the business cases of ventures built on artificial intelligence, large language models, cloud computing, and hybrid computing across insurance, law, job creation, and manufacturing, then develops viable products from strategy through design thinking, user experience, interface design and minimum viable product launch with engineers. | CIVICUS is designing for a broad and shifting definition of digital action. WellBuilt has reasoned across experiential technology, labour-rights analytics, poverty-targeting systems, social-protection infrastructure, drone-enabled agriculture, digital farmer platforms, artificial intelligence, large language models, cloud systems and digital identity. The discipline is consistent: identify what the technology is being asked to accomplish; interrogate the data, infrastructure, and actors it depends on; surface where it can fail or transfer risk; and determine whether technology is actually the right intervention. |
| 3. Narrative, communications & knowledge translation | Digital Impact Alliance: designed the communications and participation architecture for digitisation-for-development workshops involving African government delegations, private foundations and technologists across Johannesburg, Kigali and New York. Outputs included facilitation protocols, supporting documents, facilitator training, interactive participant notebooks and public-facing communications, translating subject matter that included data-science applications into forms different constituencies could use. Digital identity and data-policy work: co-authored the substantive policy product and co-designed its public-facing form, treating technical rigour and public intelligibility as separate design problems; the finished White Paper became sufficiently useful that the chief executive placed it in his email signature. Uncommon Collaborations Initiative: wrote case studies across the portfolio, converting experimental collaborations into transferable learning that travels beyond the project teams. Global Africana Review: Founding Associate Editor, bringing editorial judgement and public-interest knowledge production into the broader communications practice. | A fifteen-page global Toolkit has to make technical rigour immediately usable. WellBuilt designs how complex ideas travel between technical, institutional, participant and public audiences. For CIVICUS, that means converting specialist knowledge about platforms, power, risk, mobilisation, and infrastructure into language, diagrams, decision aids, scenarios, and exercises that remain rigorous while becoming immediately usable. |
| 4. Community, participation & network infrastructure | Community Empowerment Fund: project-managed civic-engagement, volunteer recruitment, selection, and retention teams inside a community organisation; designed recruitment and engagement policies around diversity, skill, and socioeconomic representation; coordinated training and monthly skills upkeep; and redesigned the advocate programme, increasing annual volunteer retention from 45 per cent to 95 per cent. The role also included direct financial-independence work with low-income individuals and families, spanning tax support, emergency housing, and financial coaching. University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship: led a five-year, 60 million United States dollar strategy, built through participation with the people expected to carry the institution’s work forward, around making social entrepreneurship something students could see, test and sustain rather than treating commercial entrepreneurship as the only legitimate model. Initiative for Peace, Sri Lanka: designed and facilitated a five-day programme in communication, negotiation, networking, public speaking, active listening, and goal-setting. | CIVICUS is an alliance. WellBuilt therefore approaches participation as infrastructure: who holds knowledge, who holds authority, how roles are distributed, what keeps people engaged, where single-person dependencies create fragility, how disagreement is navigated, and what allows a network to continue functioning after the initial moment of mobilisation. The recurring capability is orchestration — aligning actors with different incentives, expertise, and power around a shared problem. |
| 5. Digital design for good | SweepSouth: first Product Manager. Translated the needs of a two-sided digital marketplace, particularly a historically underserved, predominantly female-identifying domestic-worker base, into digital product strategy and then into priorities an engineering team could build. Owned product and customer requirements, objectives, and key results, short- and long-term roadmaps, engineering sprint plans and cross-functional execution across executives, engineering, customer success, growth, business development, operations, legal, marketing and finance. Crucially, product decisions travelled back into the physical operating system: interventions were tested against whether they improved on-the-ground operations and worker experience, left them unchanged, or introduced new harm. During the coronavirus disease 2019 crisis, this included an essential-services electronic-commerce pivot; contribution functionality designed to increase service-provider earning potential without simply pricing customers out of the marketplace; functionality supporting workers unable to work during lockdown; and a machine-learning customer-lifetime-value predictor and retention tool. This product role followed direct experience as Worker Engagement Coordinator, where the mandate included domestic-worker satisfaction, performance, retention, communication, employment barriers, and upward mobility. | This is WellBuilt’s clearest demonstration of digital design for good as a closed loop: lived need → product requirement → digital strategy → engineering implementation → operational consequence. For CIVICUS, the implication is fundamental: the Toolkit should equip members to ask whether an intervention actually expands people’s capacity and agency, changes nothing meaningful, or quietly transfers new cost, dependency, exposure or harm onto the people it was meant to serve. |
07 / Budget and boundaries
Scope Boundaries & Optional Extensions
9,000 United States dollars, inclusive of professional fees, applicable supplier taxes, and associated costs within scope. Corporate income tax is borne by the supplier on taxable income and absorbed within the proposed rates.
| Line | Rate | Units | United States dollars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amukelani MuyangaLead Consultant and Project Director | 300 / day | 20 days | 6,000 |
| Pumla MaswanganyiCreative Director, information design | 300 / day | 3 days | 900 |
| Dylan A. SparksOnline policy and misinformation | 50 / hour | 18 hours | 900 |
| Tai HuynhCivic technology and government innovation | 50 / hour | 18 hours | 900 |
| Ground transportSelected in-person interviews, South Africa | 60 / trip | 5 | 300 |
| Total request from CIVICUS | 9,000 | ||
The submission formats demonstrate information portability. Any interactive version of the Toolkit would be separately scoped after the manuscript ships.
Scope boundaries
Included in the base scope
Research and synthesis; practitioner conversations; one usability round with organisers; the publication-ready manuscript; case studies and practical tools; impact-measurement guidance; source register; visual and layout specification.
Separately scoped
Full graphic-production services beyond the visual specification; studio audio recording, voice talent, and mastering; website or interactive Toolkit development; international travel; additional research rounds; open-ended specialist review.
Optional translation and localisation
Available as an additional service above the base budget once target languages, volume, accessibility requirements, and localisation scope are confirmed.