“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
—Arundhati Roy, April 2020
Research Goal
To assess the potential for EmTech (emerging technologies, such as AI, Machine Learning, new sensing tools, drones, VR, and more) to advance positive transformational change within the public and civic technology sectors.
Methods
Our team of five researchers conducted a literature review, interviewed 24 field leaders, including data scientists, technologists, artists, activists, researchers, policy advocates, and others, and developed a database of 246 relevant resources.
Key Findings & Recommendations
1.
First, Do No Harm
“I think it’s so easy to create a machine learning model. It’s completely different to make sure that it’s fair and doesn’t have harmful effects.” �
—John Callery, Vice President of Technology at
The Trevor Project
Featured Example
The Trevor Project received a $1.5 million USD Google Impact Challenge grant to develop their omnichannel crisis intervention platform for LGBTQI+ youth. They use machine learning to prioritize youth who may be at a higher risk of suicide so that they are first in the queue to reach trained counselors. They used UX research to inform development of a product that wouldn't inadvertently cause harm.
Powerful actors too often use EmTech to harm Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQI+, Disabled, immigrant, working class, and other marginalized communities, whether or not those harms are intended.
We therefore need widespread adoption of better design processes, independent audits, and stronger regulatory oversight.
Recommendations:
2.
Context is Key
“We went back to our entirely Western group of developers who work on [a popular messaging app] and we said, look, there are other parts of the world. If you really designed this for them, they’re not using it in the same way that you thought, and here are the things you might not have imagined.”
—Dragana Kaurin, Executive Director of Localization Lab
An emerging technology in one place, or among one field or group of people, may look very different than in another; so community partnerships for context and localization are essential.
Featured Example
For example, The Equitable Internet Initiative (Detroit, MI), is a great example of what it looks like to offer communities the skills they need to build their own internet infrastructure in places that commercial providers have abandoned. EII works with neighborhood leaders to ensure that more Detroit residents have the ability to leverage digital technologies for social and economic development.
Recommendations:
3.
Data is messy
“What does it mean for us to make the world into data, and what happens when we do that, and what places get missed in that process?”
—Mimi Ọnụọha, Artist/Researcher
Even as data drives many emerging technologies, it is always incomplete, often misleading, and difficult to maintain and protect. Data disparities lead easily to amplified inequalities.
Featured Example
Data for Black Lives called for states to release COVID-19 data disaggregated by race, and maintains a record of which
states have shared data on COVID-19 infections and deaths by race and which have not.
Recommendations:
To better support emerging technology development and adoption in the public interest sector, we need significant resources to support good data stewardship.
4.
Community-Led Design
FTW (For The World)!
“[Computer scientists] are not always in dialogue with people who are social scientists or activists or anthropologists or cultural theorists who are dealing with the actual concepts of abuse much more closely, or the people who are targeted by online abuse. For example, if you’re looking at anti-Semitism, it kind of makes sense to go and speak to the Jewish community, to read that very long, well-established literature on anti-Semitism. That doesn’t always happen when computer scientists tackle these problems.”
—Bertie Vidgen, Alan Turing Institute
Community-led design approaches provide pathways towards more just, equitable, and sustainable EmTech. These practices are moving into the mainstream, but shifting the field will take sustained effort, funding, training, and institutional commitment.
Featured Example
The Human Rights Data Analysis Group has worked for decades to apply statistical analysis to human rights cases. Among many other powerful projects, they were able to help activists find the graves of disappeared people in Mexico City.
Recommendations:
5.
Sometimes, Snoozy > Sexy
“There’s an emerging set of tools for fundraisers that use machine learning and algorithms to help them figure out who in their database is the most likely to be a donor, and then what are the potential types of cultivation activities that you as the major gift officer should do. So that kind of task might take a major gift officer a week or two of work, but the technology can do it in a matter of minutes.”
—Beth Kanter, independent consultant, author, trainer
It is often the tools of everyday administration that make the most impact, more than headline-catching, sexy, or cutting-edge technologies. Many organizations need help to navigate through the hype.
Featured Example
The Nonprofit AI Readiness Checklist, written by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter for the NTEN network, can help nonprofit staff consider potentially productive applications of AI and evaluate internal capacity to develop the necessary data, expertise, ethical oversight, and sustainability.
Recommendations:
6.
Build a Stronger
Community of Practice
“Many people are doing a little work in fragmented ways around the country, but when we get together, the power of knowing each other, the power of support, thinking or even challenging thinking, and the power of knowing that these folks are out there to call on, is strangely more powerful than I ever could have imagined.”
—Stephanie Dinkins, independent artist, Dinkins Studio
A robust community of practitioners who meet and regularly share information will have greater impact, but in order to harness EmTech for the public interest, there need to be more opportunities for people from historically oppressed communities to be involved, and to be given access to resources and �leadership positions.
Featured Examples
There is a growing ecosystem of organizations working at the intersection of EmTech, the public interest, and racial and gender justice. For example, Algorithmic Justice League, Data4BlackLives, Black in AI, Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, Lesbians Who Tech, The AI Now Institute, Data & Society, AI for the People, The Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, The Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, the Radical AI Project, the Data + Feminism Lab, the Design Justice Network, among many others listed in the Civic Tech Field Guide.
Recommendations:
7.
Seek Strategies for
Institutional Transformation
“Nonprofits have to be actively involved in policy and development and contributing data, so that our community members and our view of our community get factored into all of those technologies [… ] so that we don’t end up 10 years from now with tools that are making decisions [without] the people we serve.”
—Marnie Webb, Chief Community Impact Officer at TechSoup
Institutional transformation will be fundamental to effective and accountable use of EmTech in the public interest. This includes shifts in policies and practices within companies, nonprofits, universities, and other organizations, as well as regulation at various levels
of government.
Featured Example
The Shadow Report on the NYC Automated Decision System Task Force provides detailed recommendations for “policy makers, researchers, advocates, and the public about the complexities of evaluating the true risks and opportunities of government use of ADS [automated decision systems]; the limitations of existing bureaucratic procedures; and the importance of engaging a variety of perspectives and experiences.”
Recommendations:
Explore Our Resources
Interviewees
Learn more at emtechpathways.org
Q&A
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Please post your questions in the Chat!
THANK YOU!
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INTERVIEWEES
Beth Kanter
Beth Kanter is an independent consultant, author, trainer, and facilitator who focuses on emerging technologies for social change, as well as virtual facilitation, real-life facilitation, and well-being in the workplace.
Read Beth's interview at http://www.emtechpathways.org/interviews/interviews.html#Beth_Kanter
Bertie Vidgen
Bertie Vidgen is a Research Fellow in Online Harms at The Alan Turing Institute. He researches online harms, including hate, extremism, and misinformation, and works primarily on the project ‘Hate speech: measures and counter-measures.’ His work involves developing computational tools to detect online hate speech, using those tools to analyze online hate speech, and developing evidence for policymakers to better understand the landscape and challenges of how we tackle online hate speech.
#EmTechPathways
Caroline Sinders
Caroline Sinders is an artist and design researcher who looks at how product design and UX design of systems is implicated in causing harm in society, with a lens on online harassment. She owns a for-profit design firm called Convocation Design and Research and has been a research resident at BuzzFeed, IBM Watson, Mozilla Foundation, and the Harvard Kennedy Center.
#EmTechPathways
Daniel Leufer
Daniel Leufer is a Mozilla Fellow hosted by Access Now. He has a PhD in philosophy and works as a policy analyst with a focus on topics at the intersection of technology and politics. His current research focuses on how the development and deployment of artificial intelligence is impacting human rights and political decision making. He is trying to identify and combat the worst and most damaging myths and misconceptions about AI and develop resources that raise the level of the conversation around AI, particularly aimed at civil society organizations.
#EmTechPathways
Dragana Kaurin
Dragana Kaurin is the Executive Director and founder of a non-profit called Localization Lab, which works on translation and language preservation in digital tools. Localization Lab also does usability research, as well as ethnographic research about how people adopt tools. They also conduct research to reveal unintended consequences to technology adoption.
#EmTechPathways
Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves
(also known as Eduardo Cuducos)
Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves (also known as Eduardo Cuducos) is a sociologist and computer scientist whose work throughout the years has focused on creating tools for civic engagement and social-political agency. Along with a group of colleagues at Brazilian civic hacking project Operação Serenata de Amor, he helped create an AI Twitter bot named Rosie that automatically checks public records of expenses from all Congresspeople in Brazil. In case that there is a suspicion of corruption, Rosie tweets and asks people to help her to corroborate the suspicion.
#EmTechPathways
Jeffrey Yoo Warren
Jeffrey Yoo Warren is a co-founder and former Research Director of Public Lab, a nonprofit organization that partners with community groups who are facing environmental injustice to co-create methods to collect evidence, document harms, and create accountability. He helped develop many interesting open source technologies for community science during the last 10 years at Public Lab.
#EmTechPathways
John Callery
John Callery is the Vice President of Technology at The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQI+ young people. They provide 24-hour crisis counseling services via phone, chat, and text. He is the founding member of the organization’s technology department, and now oversees 15 talented professionals across product, engineering, artificial intelligence research and development, and technology operations. He also oversees TrevorSpace, the world’s largest safe-space social networking site for LGBTQI+ youth.
#EmTechPathways
Lynn Kaack
Lynn Kaack is a researcher at ETH Zurich and the Energy Politics Group in Switzerland as well as a chair at Climate Change AI, an organization that uses machine learning for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Climate Change AI also facilitates collaborations between machine learning researchers and climate change domain experts to explore how machine learning can play a role in solving climate change.
#EmTechPathways
Maria Dowgiałło
Maria Dowgiałło is a research and language analyst at Samurai Labs, focused on strategies of online violence prevention and alleviation. She is also a graduate student of clinical psychology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities SWPS.
#EmTechPathways
Marnie Webb
Marnie Webb is the Chief Community Impact Officer for TechSoup and leads Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup. In her role, she works with communities around the world to describe desired impact and to develop technology solutions that help them move towards that impact. Her work is influenced by human centered design principles, as well as methodologies from social work and international development, such as Participatory Action Research. She has been working with civil society, governments, academia, and corporations for more than 30 years to put together teams and solutions that can accomplish big goals, with and for communities.
#EmTechPathways
Mevan Babakar
Mevan Babakar is the Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO at the UK’s leading fact checking charity, Full Fact. Previously, Mevan was the founding head of Full Fact’s automated fact checking team, which won the Google AI Impact Challenge. In 2016 she co-authored The State of Automated Fact Checking, and regularly speaks in the UK and internationally about misinformation, fact checking, and civic technology. Mevan has been a digital adviser to the Big Lottery Foundation, is a board member of the civic engagement non-profit Democracy Club, and is a founding organiser of Citizen Beta, a community of 600+ civic technologists in the UK.
#EmTechPathways
Michał Wroczyński
Michał Wroczyński is a serial entrepreneur who has worked for 22 years in artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems. He is the Founder of Samurai Labs, a third-wave A.I. company that combines deep expertise on neural networks together with reasoning to detect and prevent violence online.
#EmTechPathways
Milena Marin
Milena Marin is a senior adviser for tactical research at Amnesty International and was the project lead for Amnesty International’s Troll Patrol project, as well as the Amnesty Decoders project.
#EmTechPathways
Mimi Ọnụọha
Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Her multimedia practice uses print, code, installation and video to call attention to the ways in which those in the margins are differently abstracted, represented, and missed by sociotechnical systems. Ọnụọha has been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia University, and the Royal College of Art.
#EmTechPathways
Nathaniel Raymond
Nathaniel Raymond is a lecturer at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. He looks at how information communication technologies affect the vulnerability of at-risk populations, primarily in the context of armed conflict. He is particularly interested in ways in which states and non-state actors weaponize information technologies. He looks very closely at questions of the laws of armed conflict, the governance of war, and the social digital terrain.
#EmTechPathways
shirin anlen
shirin anlen is a creative technologist who works with emerging technologies including but not limited to sensors, AR, VR, web platforms, and machine learning. She is motivated about creating emotional, meaningful, and outstanding immersive experiences that are rooted in real-life stories and have the potential to empower and engage communities. She holds an MFA in cinema and television, was a research fellow at MIT Open Documentary Lab, a co-founder of Raycaster, an experience design studio, and the founder-director of Steamer Salon, the first VR and interactive storytelling festival and lab in Israel.
#EmTechPathways
Stephanie Dinkins
Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is particularly driven to work with communities of color to co-create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent ecosystems. Dinkins exhibits and publicly advocates for equitable AI internationally. Her work has been generously supported by fellowships grants, and residencies from Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Berggruen Institute, Lucas Artists, Creative Capital, Data and Society Research Institute, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC and The Laundromat Project.
#EmTechPathways
Wendy Levy
Wendy Levy is the Executive Director of The Alliance for Media Arts + Culture. Among its many cultural, creative, and workforce programs, The Alliance also works to connect artists and underserved communities with access to new technologies. Through WebVR, AI, and Machine Learning, they are currently developing and testing one A/R app and one new AI-powered platform to meet their objectives and empower their network.
#EmTechPathways
Yasodara Cordova
Yasodara Cordova works at the World Bank’s governance sector as a Citizen Engagement and Agile Fellow. With a developer background, she assists middle and low-income countries to integrate technology into their governance infrastructure. Her work ranges from helping governments with participatory budgeting to stemming corruption among civil servants to setting up budget management systems or human resource management tools.
#EmTechPathways