In Ukraine, information noise has become ubiquitous. Disinformation, coordinated narratives, and manipulated signals flow through news feeds and social media every minute. For civic organizations working on the frontlines of accountability, human rights monitoring, and community resilience, that noise has consequences in the real world, continuously impacting people’s lives.
Daily Humanity is an organization that trains journalists, humanitarian workers, and civil society actors to operate safely in hostile environments. It has spent years building this resilience. Its work started with physical risk, but the organization’s founders came to understand that the hostile environment had expanded. The threat was no longer only kinetic. It was cognitive.
“We kept hearing from the organizations we trained that they were overwhelmed,” says Katerina Sergatskova, the Executive Director of Daily Humanity. “Even though many had physical safety skills, they were drowning in information overload and multi-dimensional threats like hate campaigns, work stress, and secondary trauma, which made them vulnerable in a completely different way.”
That recognition led to a new project and a new partnership.
Bridging distant worlds
Daily Humanity sits at an unusual crossroads. It trains media professionals with the methodologies of hostile environment preparation, advises humanitarian organizations on duty of care, and works with defence institutions to sharpen threat assessment and get direct updates about new technologies.
Through its tech arm, an AI and decision intelligence platform called MAIRA, it has developed tools originally piloted with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence and other defence industry partners in Europe.
Civil society, media, defence, and technology rarely share vocabulary, let alone tools. Daily Humanity believes they should.
The Civic Signals Lab, launched this year with support from CIVICUS as part of the DDI Digital Spark initiative, is the practical expression of that belief. The program brings together civic organizations from across Ukraine for a five-month intensive and hands-on training in AI-assisted monitoring, AI-focused digital security, narrative threat mapping, and evidence-based advocacy production. The core tool they are learning to use is MAIRA.
What does MAIRA actually do?
MAIRA is a cognitive risk and decision intelligence platform built to scan, classify, and surface patterns across information environments that a human analyst would take days or weeks to process manually.
The platform can monitor signals across 122 languages, identify coordinated inauthentic behavior, track the lifecycle of narratives, and model how information threats are likely to evolve. It was built for environments where the cost of a missed signal is measured in operational outcomes, financial, and physical losses.
For civic organizations in Ukraine, monitoring forced deportations, documenting the destruction of cultural heritage, tracking events in temporarily occupied territories, or monitoring hate speech, that capability is directly applicable to their work and can change the level of impact and improve their safety.
“Technology is like a car in the age of horses. Many people are afraid of those new things and push back,” says Roman Stepanovych, the Development and Tech Lead at Daily Humanity.
“But once people started using cars, they couldn’t live without them. It means that civil society cannot ignore [AI]: they must adapt and make the best use of it. With AI, we create tools that can help human rights advocates achieve important goals more effectively and faster than perpetrators cause damage.”
The Civic Signals Lab is focused on providing organizations with the right tools and skills to use them effectively. In workshops combining methodology training with direct platform access, organizations learn to build monitoring queries, identify narrative clusters, and translate raw signal data into advocacy materials that lead to successful results.
The glue nobody thought to apply
There is a recurring problem in the Ukrainian civil society ecosystem that practitioners describe in similar terms regardless of their sector. The organizations doing the most important work on the ground are often the least connected to the tools and networks that could amplify it.
Tech companies build platforms that presuppose stable infrastructure, English-language interfaces, and users with time to learn. Defense-adjacent research produces intelligence that never reaches the communities it describes. Media organizations train journalists but rarely share methodology with the NGOs documenting the same events from a different angle.
Daily Humanity’s role is to be the connecting layer between these worlds. The organization brings the operational discipline of hostile environment training into the civic space. It brings the analytical capacity of a defense-grade AI platform into the hands of human rights monitors.
It creates a structured community of practice where a youth media organization in Dnipro and a legal aid group in Zaporizhzhia can share what they are seeing and build collective situational awareness.
That community infrastructure is hosted on a dedicated knowledge platform and supported by peer mentorship across the cohort, which, in some ways, is the program’s most important product. The skills transfer matters, and the network itself is the multiplier.
Outcomes that are still being written
The Civic Signals Lab is still a work in progress. The 10 organizations, represented by 25 people, in the first cohort are still developing their monitoring projects, learning the platform, and building the advocacy outputs that will demonstrate what Ukrainian civil society can produce when it is given the right tools.
What is already visible is the demand. Organizations that began the program skeptical of AI as a concept relevant to their work have, within weeks, identified specific use cases.
These include tracking the spread of a disinformation narrative about a documented atrocity, mapping the information environment around a community under constant kinetic threat, and building an evidence base for a legal submission that needed to show not just what happened but how it was systematically processed.
The hostile environment is a space you can learn to navigate. It requires skills, rehearsal, and a risk-aware mindset. The Civic Signals Lab is a proof of concept of applying these things to the information environment that shapes how conflicts are understood, recorded, and eventually judged.
Daily Humanity is an organization delivering safety training, risk-focused strategies, and AI-assisted risk tools for journalists, humanitarian workers, civil society organizations, and businesses operating in high-risk settings. The Civic Signals Lab is supported by CIVICUS as part of the DDI Digital Spark initiative.
