Case study

Primer Conversatorio sobre el Uso Responsable del Internet

Buenaventura, Colombia

Context

Buenaventura is Colombia's largest port on the Pacific coast. It handles a significant share of the country's maritime trade, but the wealth that passes through the port rarely stays in the city. It is one of the poorest urban centers in the country, with limited infrastructure, intermittent public services, and a long history of institutional neglect.

Internet access in Buenaventura is expanding — as it is everywhere — but the conversation about what that access means, what risks it carries, and how communities can protect themselves has not kept pace. Most digital literacy programs in Colombia are designed in Bogotá or Medellín, for audiences in Bogotá or Medellín. They assume reliable connectivity, baseline digital fluency, and institutional support structures that simply do not exist in Buenaventura.

The project

The Primer Conversatorio sobre el Uso Responsable del Internet was an event I organized to open a public conversation about responsible internet use — tailored specifically to the realities of Buenaventura. Not a lecture. Not a training session imported from another context. A conversatorio: a structured dialogue between community members, educators, local leaders, and technical practitioners.

The goal was not to deliver a curriculum. It was to surface the questions that mattered to the people in the room — and to take those questions seriously, even when they did not look like the questions a technology conference in Bogotá would ask.

What we covered

What made this different

Most digital literacy interventions follow a deficit model: the community lacks knowledge, and experts arrive to fill the gap. This conversatorio started from the opposite assumption — that the community understands its own risks and constraints better than any outside expert, and that the role of the organizer is to create the conditions for that understanding to surface and be taken seriously.

This is an anthropological instinct applied to technology work. Observe before intervening. Listen before prescribing. Understand the institution — formal or informal — before trying to change it.

What I learned

Three things stayed with me after the event:

The questions were better than the answers. Participants asked about problems that no existing digital literacy curriculum addresses well — like how to evaluate information when you have access to only one or two news sources, or how to protect children when the adults in their lives are themselves new to the internet.

Institutional absence is itself an institution. The lack of regulatory enforcement, digital infrastructure, and educational support in Buenaventura is not a void. It is a structure that shapes behavior. People have adapted to it. Any intervention that ignores those adaptations will fail.

Technology conversations must happen where the consequences land. The people making policy about internet safety in Colombia are not in Buenaventura. The people living with the consequences of those policies are. The distance between decision-making and impact is the problem — and it is a problem that reproduces itself in technology, governance, and institutional design everywhere.

Why this matters beyond Buenaventura

This project is a small example of a pattern I see repeatedly in my work: the gap between how technology is designed and how institutions actually function. The internet arrived in Buenaventura the same way new compliance tools arrive in a mid-size bank or a new AI policy lands in a government agency — from outside, designed for somewhere else, with assumptions about capacity and context that do not hold.

The question I keep returning to is the same one this conversatorio raised: how do you build technology that works inside the institution as it actually is, not as a deck says it should be?

I write about this question — from different angles — in my essays.