Written by: Ryan Ubuntu Olson and Ron MacInnis
Congratulations to this Special Issue of Digital Culture & Education (DCE) entitled ‘Building The HIVe’ for an innovative and unique approach to global HIV and AIDS advocacy, education and research. Building The HIVe clearly demonstrates the need for digital diversity related to sex education, HIV prevention, and support. It nurtures a strategic network and provides online spaces where ideas can be shared, developed and refined into good practises among researchers, community leaders, academics and policy makers. The HIVe is a digital culture that allows for the “community” to critically and creatively engage with HIV prevention as a solution (Singh & Walsh, this issue). It utilises technology to leverage glo-cal efforts to curb HIV and AIDS infection rates, along with supporting sexual minorities and persons living with and affected by HIV to participate meaningfullly. The advocacy challenge for The HIVe is to engage advocates and activitists of varying skills, knowledge and understanding to ensure the new knowledge produced rapidly influences the policy and programming on HIV, sexuality and sex education across communities worldwide. At the same time, while we are availing digital technology to strengthen knowledge sharing and exchange, we should all be mindful of how we can support each other to model the acceptance, tolerance and diversity we wish to see in a just world. For us, this means acknowledging that for more effective HIV prevention and education strategies, we now need to educate communities through developing new and innovative platforms for communication in English/dominant and marginalised vernacular languages.