VIVA Collaborative Storytelling App

Siria Gastelum was born and raised in Culiacan, Sinaloa, epicentre of the Sinaloa Cartel and one of the most violent cities in the world. Siria started her career as a journalist, one of the riskiest professions in Mexico, to tell the stories of her community and humanize the impact of violence and corruption. She then joined the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime from 2008 to 2014, shifting her perspective on organized crime from local to international. In 2014, Siria started the Resilience Project with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime to focus on empowering community responses to organized crime around the world. Currently,  she is focused on launching a secure storytelling application, VIVA- a platform for activists, journalists and grassroots leaders to connect, explore, and coordinate solutions to organized crime with resilient communities around the globe.

Siria’s work is committed to resolving pervasive issues in communities around the world through building the capacity of civil society actors to address these issues affecting their communities themselves, whether it’s defending human rights, protecting the environment or taking a stand against crime. To achieve this mission, Siria proposes creating a secure platform called VIVA, which means to be “alive.” A user-friendly mobile app that will enable civil society actors to come together across borders, share stories without fear of reprisal, facilitate collective action and navigate deep-seated problems, such as organized crime.

VIVA could elevate humanity by creating a safe and secure space for local leaders from different regions and countries to raise issues to each other, break out into action-oriented teams, and organize projects and monitor progress toward common goals. VIVA can activate transnational multiple stakeholder cooperation through remote project monitoring and documentation.

Organized crime involves corrupting and co-opting state officials, Those seeking justice are often silenced.  While the impact of organized crime goes far beyond homicides, the rate at which life is lost is immediately measurable and profoundly devastating. In 2019, as many as 95 murders a day occurred in Mexico. Journalists and human rights activists are consistently endangered and increasingly devoid of state protection. Since 2006,  organized crime has led to more than 100000 murders in Mexico alone. Globally, the United Nations estimates that organized crime led to roughly 88,000 murders in 2017.

Civil society and non-state actors are critical in the absence of effective state response. VIVA meets this need by providing a platform for these actors to connect through reliable yet non-intrusive project coordination and monitoring between stakeholders.

VIVA will be an easy to use mobile app that provides more security with genuine support to communities and their leaders. It will allow teams to design and execute projects by setting goals, assigning responsibilities, sharing activities, monitoring progress, and publishing results. 

The app will connect and mobilize an existing network of community-led initiatives from Mexico to the Philippines that began with the #GIResilience Project in 2017. It has grown with GI-TOC’s Resilience Fund since 2019, which incubates these initiatives against organized crime. VIVA will be critical in activating the network. Through interactive video content, users will engage virtually in collaborative storytelling and problem solving, even more relevant to empowerment projects during the COVID-19 crisis. 

While the framework will be similar to popular social media frameworks, what sets VIVA apart will be its emphasis on security and support of multi-member storytelling. Users will be able to create mini-stories and episodes, generating localised content on global issues. Self-organisation will be possible through a dedicated project tab for both individual and team content creation. Activities can be sequenced and executed through a range of interactive tools such as video commenting, story composing, episode making, audience controls, team roles and project planning.

The Resilience Fund recently established a fellowship program and named 10 fellows to counteract in their communities. These fellows will be VIVA’s pilot users and crucial to the app’s improvement. 

One of the fellows is Ma Isabel Cruz from Mexico.Her son disappeared three years ago. With her quest to find him, she organized a group of mothers who’ve lost their children, excavating bodies from the cartel’s burial sites and bringing them to their families. People approach her before the local authorities. Isabel Zuleta is from Colombia, an environmental and indigenous rights activist who travels in an armoured vehicle to protect her life; over 100 leaders were killed last year. Raffy Lerma is an award-winning photographer from the Philippines who documents the extrajudicial killings, photographing funerals of the victims depicting his country’s “war on drugs.”   

The communication apps that fellows currently use can be surveilled easily. Using them endangers them and imposes limits on what they are willing to communicate to get their work done. Switching to VIVA - a more secure platform that is designed for their very needs - will allow them to communicate more freely with like-minded leaders to expose and address their communities’ most troubling concerns.

VIVA is at the intersection of all three dimensions, however we are actively working towards realising the second dimension: Elevating issues and their solutions by building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world.

Statistics define issues, their impact and success of any solution. VIVA emphasises subjectivity through first-hand experiences and highlights local perspectives, often acknowledged yet overlooked especially when it comes to influencing policies and addressing root causes.

The network began with the Resilience Dialogues, a series of conversations carried out between 2017 and 2019 by civil society actors including journalists, indigenous youth groups, artists, gang violence interrupters, mothers of missing people in Mexico, Guatemala, the Philippines and South Africa. Local actors fighting criminal governance in their communities gathered to meet one another and identify common goals. They connected with each other through workshops, talks and arts festivals during the dialogues. Many met for the first time. These powerful exchanges transformed into new local initiatives and multi stakeholder projects that would not exist without a space meant for such interactions.    

VIVA is a realisation of the Resilience Dialogues in a virtual space to facilitate and sustain such networks organically. It’s a definite milestone, necessary for sustained impact. Therefore, I began working on it alongside the Resilience Fund. Activating the network is critical to enriching individual and community-level efforts and bringing them to a wider community.

I am passionate about my project because being raised in a region plagued by violence, organized crime and drug trafficking has deeply impacted my life. I witnessed the destruction of numerous families and homes with overwhelming helplessness in the face of what seemed like solvable problems. But people are not always willing to talk about the problems out of fear for their safety,limiting their capacity to come together and resolve them.Today's technologies enable people to organize virtually and discreetly from safe spaces.I want to harness this capacity by connecting via smartphones a vast network of civil society actors who are already making profound changes in their communities.These connections will be able to bring their initiatives to the next level by shedding light on issues, sharing means to overcome them, creating the resilience necessary to persevere through setbacks, and generating accountability through the power of broader awareness. 

In 2017, I worked on a report that focused on community resilience that highlighted various heroes in Sinaloa, Mexico, from mothers of missing people to community art interventions and journalists.This resilience must be amplified to find genuinely sustainable solutions for broad social phenomena. I hope that Elevate 2020 will help me realize this vision.

Since I started the #GIResilience Project, the number of initiatives, partnerships and stakeholders involved has exponentially increased. We are at the tipping point with the VIVA prototype ready to be piloted on the ten Fellows in a month. The group is multilingual with various levels of digital skills. Their feedback and overall participation will help VIVA scale and evolve effectively.      

I’ve worked on tech-solutions with the UN, leading teams with diverse skill sets, backgrounds and locations. One of my projects, the UN.GIFT.HUB. received the UN 21 Award by then Secretary, Ban Ki Moon. It is a digital knowledge management platform that streamlined human trafficking data across stakeholders and countries,used by UN agencies. I realized the power of inclusive storytelling and media to elevate grassroots advocacy as a print and broadcast journalist in Mexico, the US and Canada. In 2007, I received an Emmy Award for my series “Pulque: the drink of the Gods.” I've also trained local journalists to cover human trafficking and organized crime in Africa and the Middle East.  

I have been working with GI-TOC on building community resilience for five years, and on countering organized crime at the international level for over twelve years. I grew up in the environment that I want to change. My personal and professional experiences were cultivated through a myriad of roles and networks. We’ve been working on VIVA for over a year with limited resources, big vision and a growing team equally passionate about enabling security with advocacy. 

When I started working on the Resilience Project, I met Javier Valdez, a renowned Mexican journalist documenting the lives of ordinary people in Mexico’s war on drugs. He was an ardent investigative journalist who reported on organised crime beyond the gore and violence. Javier connected me to community-led initiatives in Sinaloa that inspired the Resilience Project at the GI-TOC. He was slated to participate in the Resilience Dialogues and host a media panel discussion. Two months prior, Javier was shot dead in broad daylight just outside his office in Culiacan- one of 159 journalists killed in Mexico since 2000.

“Resilience” felt hollow against the bullets that killed Javier, but the community protested and that was a ray of light. In August 2017, we held the Resilience dialogues in Sinaloa with 21 organisations. They were extended to Guatemala, Colombia and South Africa. Thanks to additional international support the project became the Resilience Fund that elevates over 30 initiatives and leaders in four continents, including Javier’s wife in her work to protect journalists. At the center of my work are people dealing with death threats and harassments daily. I have to channel resources through a secure network that enables and protects them.

There was no student newspaper in my university when I joined. In fact, student-run college newspapers were not common at all. Mexico was still grappling with freedom of expression at the time; censorship was everywhere. I knew we needed a student newspaper, so my friends and I got to the task. Initially, the school authorities vehemently opposed our little publication, which met with several obstacles receiving minimal to no institutional support. We launched the first student newspaper anyway with the little money that we had. Soon, universities in Mexico and in the US took notice of our resistance to censorship. I was its first editor in chief until I graduated a year later, but the newspaper continued to thrive with future journalists steering it ahead. This was a core experience in my life. From the first student newspaper in my university to the first global platform on human trafficking and now the Resilience Project, the ability to collaborate and learn from others, in my opinion, is the key to progress. As the Director of Resilience in the GITOC, I am keen on starting VIVA with my colleagues and bringing tech-mediated solutions to the communities under threat and harassment.