Pathways Through the Portal
A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest
Diana Nucera, Berhan Taye, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Micah Sifry, and Matt Stempeck, for Civic Hall. Pathways Through the Portal:
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world A Field Scan of Emerging anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. Technologies in the Public Interest 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
By Diana Nucera, Berhan Taye, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Micah Sifry, and Matt Stempeck, for Civic Hall. Suggested Citation: Diana Nucera, Berhan Taye, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Micah Sifry, and Matt Stempeck. Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest. NY, NY: Civic Hall, 2020. Available at https://emtechpathways.org.
Illustrations & Layout: by Sylver Sterling, Creative Director, Pylons Creative Agency. https://www.instagram.com/ pylonscreative. Contents Ana Velásquez, a graduate student in Media Studies at Queens College, assisted us with this research over the summer of 2020 and was instrumental in preparing the expert transcripts for publication.
Civic Hall is a non-profit center for learning, collaboration, 6 Executive Summary 101 Recommendations and technology for the public good. We envision a society that is more fair, just and democratic. Our mission is to build the power and capacity of civic-minded people and organizations. 25 Introduction 124 Annotated Bibliography At Civic Hall, entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, government staff, community organizers, philanthropists, software developers, data scientists and media makers come together to 40 Research Team 151 Appendices share knowledge and solve pressing public interest problems. 44 Goals https://civichall.org. 45 Methods 152 This report was made possible through a grant from the 48 Limitations Slide Deck of Key Findings Patrick J. McGovern Foundation. The Patrick J. McGovern 152 Resource Guide Foundation supports pioneering neuroscience research and 50 Key Findings 152 Interview Summaries explores the ways in which advances in information and & Powerful Quotes technology can improve the quality of life on Earth. 153 Interview Transcripts 52 First, Do No Harm https://www.mcgovern.org. 153 Anonymity & Data Protection 61 Context is key 154 Interviewees 68 Data is messy 162 Acknowledgements 76 Community-Led Design FTW 163 Endnotes (For The World)! 82 Sometimes, Snoozy > Sexy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- 90 Build a Stronger Community ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share of Practice and Adapt this work for any purpose, even commercially, 95 Seek Strategies for Institutional under the following terms: Attribution, ShareAlike, with No Transformation additional restrictions. Executive Summary
Executive Summary
As we write these words, the world is deep in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, a global recession or depression, and a historic uprising for Black liberation. It is a time of great crisis, a time of reckoning. Yet, as author Arundhati Roy writes, the pandemic may also be seen as a portal, a "gateway between one world and the next."1
Emerging technologies will clearly be important to our passage through this portal. Can we develop new tools that will allow us to live with a degree of safety from the virus? Can we ensure that Executive the technologies we develop do not unintentionally reinforce anti-Blackness and other forms of structural inequality? Which of Summary many potential futures do we want to build together?
1 Roy, Arundhati. 2020.
Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 7 Executive Summary Executive Summary
In an effort to develop signposts to guide us along the journey, What we found gave us cause for both caution and optimism. Civic Hall, with the generous support of the McGovern Foundation, We have synthesized our work into seven key findings and gathered a group of researchers, technologists, and community recommendations, summarized here and presented in depth organizers to explore the potential for emerging technologies to in the full report that follows. We hope that our findings serve the public interest. For the purposes of this study, we used provide insight into how and under what conditions emerging “emerging technologies” as a broad umbrella term (abbreviated technologies can help advance the public interest, so that as we as “EmTech” throughout). We paid special attention to public move together through the portal, we take only the baggage that interest uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular machine we truly want and need. learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), automated decision support systems (ADS), and bots, as well as to other tools including augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), drones, remote sensing, and satellite imagery. We focused on the types of EmTech most likely to be accessible to public interest organizations. Other emerging areas like robotics and autonomous vehicles are also likely to have immense societal ramifications, but are not yet widely available. One of our key findings is also that what counts as EmTech is highly contextual. We set out to review existing efforts to use these tools for public interest purposes, synthesize lessons learned, and mark possible pathways forward. To that end, 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.2
2 A more detailed description of our methods and the limitations of the study are available in the Methods section of the main report.
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Key Findings & Recommendations
Note: Please find more detailed recommendations, as well as Some emerging technologies offer processes, independent audits, and dedicated recommendations for project developers, funders, great potential for mitigating and stronger regulatory oversight. Public policymakers, and journalists, in the Recommendations section reducing harms. However, a vast body interest organizations have a responsibility of the full report. of scholarship, practitioner knowledge, to reflect on and, where possible, repair and lived experience demonstrates that past harms, and to actively consider powerful actors too often use EmTech possible future harms before developing to harm Black, Indigenous, People of or deploying emerging technologies. This Color, LGBTQI+, Disabled, immigrant, first principle is not resolved by a checklist working class, and other marginalized approach to technology development, but communities, whether or not those must be deeply integrated throughout harms are intended. We therefore need the field. widespread adoption of better design
1. Recommendations: First, Do No Harm • Develop a robust ecosystem to minimize harms, including red teams, vulnerability bounties, and independent audits to explore, test, and mitigate potential and actual harms of EmTech projects. “I think it’s so easy to create a machine learning • Consider adopting the Design Justice Network Principles. model. It’s completely different to make sure • Use the Consentful Technology guidelines. that it’s fair and doesn’t have harmful effects.” • Adopt a racial and gender equity framework throughout the project life cycle. —John Callery, Vice President of Technology at The Trevor Project • Develop new laws and regulatory bodies where necessary to mitigate harms, and take legal action when people’s data is used without their consent.
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An emerging technology in one place, or satellite imagery, or an augmented reality among one field or group of people, may tool. Working within local contexts runs look very different than in another; so counter to approaches that parachute a community partnerships for context and technologist into a community for a short localization are essential. What counts time, that follow a one-size-fits-all model, as “emerging” tech is highly contextual. or that push for deployment of existing There are great disparities between tools without localization. Instead, we have countries as well as between different to take time and allocate resources so that social sectors within each country in terms community based organizations can lead, of technology access, adoption, and use. participate in, and share deep contextual In some contexts, an online spreadsheet knowledge to guide EmTech in the might be considered EmTech, while in public interest. others, EmTech might mean AI analysis of 2. Context is Key
“We went back to our entirely Western group of Recommendations: developers who work on [a popular messaging • Support the leadership of community based organizations and individuals app] and we said, look, there are other parts of with deep contextual knowledge and lived experience in EmTech projects. the world. If you really designed this for them, • Follow the recommendations of the #MoreThanCode report. they’re not using it in the same way that you thought, and here are the things you might not • Provide dedicated resources for localization work. have imagined.” • Fund partnerships between community based organizations and EmTech developers. —Dragana Kaurin, Executive Director of Localization Lab
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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?” Recommendations: To better support emerging technology development and adoption in the public —Mimi Ọnụọha, Artist/Researcher interest sector, we need significant resources to support good data stewardship. • Adopt a racial and gender equity framework specifically for data infrastructure. Even as data drives many emerging What is more, we are missing much of technologies, it is always incomplete, the data that we might need to develop • Promote more transparency, consent, and accountability in how data is often misleading, and difficult to maintain technologies in the public interest. Data created, used, and shared. and protect. Data disparities lead easily sets that are crucial to concerns of racial • Develop, adopt, and implement strong data maintenance and to amplified inequalities. Many emerging and gender equity, accessibility, and social security practices. technologies rely heavily on data. In justice are often difficult, expensive, or particular, machine learning (ML) relies impossible to obtain, such as data about • Municipalities should develop comprehensive reviews of automated on large amounts of data to train models police violence, worker fatalities, or decision systems (ADS) with a racial, gender, disability, and economic that can have great predictive power. educational outcomes. Furthermore, it is justice lens. However, data is messy, uneven, and fundamentally impossible for data to ever • Support community-led data projects. often unavailable. It needs to be gathered, fully capture the infinite range and deep cleaned, and maintained. It is constantly complexities of human emotions, cultural • Develop mechanisms for public oversight of the use of EmTech at the changing, and ongoing data management significance, and experiences. municipal level. is very costly.
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Community-led design approaches Design (UCD), Human Centered Design provide pathways towards more just, (HCD), User Experience Research (UXR), equitable, and sustainable EmTech. Localization, Participatory Design, and/or These practices are moving into the Design Justice. We found many resources mainstream, but shifting the field will already available to help practitioners take sustained effort, funding, training, implement community-led design, but also and institutional commitment. There is a a need for more focused efforts towards 4. growing movement towards community- field-wide transformation. led design approaches to EmTech project Community-Led Design development, including User Centered FTW (For The World)!
"[Computer scientists] are not always in dialogue with people who are social scientists or activists Recommendations: or anthropologists or cultural theorists who are • Adopt the principle “Nothing About Us Without Us.” dealing with the actual concepts of abuse much more closely, or the people who are targeted by • Learn from Community Technology practitioners. online abuse. For example, if you're looking at • Partner with key stakeholders, issue experts, and people with lived anti-Semitism, it kind of makes sense to go and experience of the challenge when exploring EmTech for specific areas, such as climate change. speak to the Jewish community, to read that very long, well-established literature on anti- • Mainstream participatory design and community-led design methods across the field. Semitism. That doesn't always happen when computer scientists tackle these problems.” • Adopt Human-Centered Policymaking approaches.
—Bertie Vidgen, Alan Turing Institute
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It is often the tools of everyday nonprofits and civil society groups use administration that make the most AI, typically they purchase software as a impact, more than headline-catching, service to help simplify their workflows, or sexy, or cutting-edge technologies. to conduct routine tasks like transcription Many organizations need help to navigate or data entry. Very few use AI or machine through the hype. Many of the most learning to develop new predictive promising efforts to use EmTech in models or radically transform their work. the public interest come in supposedly Despite the permanent promise of radical, “snoozy” (unexciting) areas, such as futuristic applications, EmTech may semi-automation of administrative tasks, be most useful for simplifying or semi- fundraising, and content moderation. automating unexciting, everyday tasks. For example, we found that when 5. Sometimes, Snoozy > Sexy
“There's an emerging set of tools for fundraisers Recommendations: that use machine learning and algorithms to • In general, redirect support away from “innovation hubs” and “innovation help them figure out who in their database is the challenges;” instead, follow and support people and organizations who have most likely to be a donor, and then what are the demonstrated the capacity to implement tech for public interest work in ways that are grounded, community accountable, and sustainable. potential types of cultivation activities that you as the major gift officer should do. So that kind • Create and maintain a robust, regularly updated, shared resource list to help of task might take a major gift officer a week or navigate through the space. two of work, but the technology can do it in a • Don’t believe the hype! Use resources like the Nonprofit AI Readiness matter of minutes." Checklist to help evaluate your organization’s internal capacity to develop the necessary data, expertise, ethical oversight, and sustainability, before jumping on the bandwagon of the latest tool. —Beth Kanter, independent consultant, author, trainer • Consider a cooperative for buying shared access to specialized tools.
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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 Recommendations: strangely more powerful than I ever could • Rethink the entire pipeline for EmTech in the public interest. For example, have imagined.” consider the many programs listed in the Tech for Social Justice Educational Programs Spreadsheet. —Stephanie Dinkins, independent artist, Dinkins Studio • Support EmTech labs, initiatives, and organizations that are led by Black people, Indigenous people, and other People of Color. • Organize a dedicated conference for EmTech in the Public Interest. A robust community of practitioners who field of EmTech for the public interest. meet and regularly share information This lack of diversity is undermining the • Commission more art & EmTech collaborations. will have greater impact, but in order to field's potential, as projects too often • Support and learn from prototypes created by activists and harness EmTech for the public interest, reflect homogeneous experiences of team community organizers. there need to be more opportunities leadership, narrow problem framing, and for people from historically oppressed datasets and models that reproduce existing • Foster opportunities for hands-on experimentation. communities to be involved, and to be inequalities. Mechanisms like conferences, given access to resources and leadership dedicated fellowships using the cohort • Develop more dedicated fellowships using the cohort model, like positions. We found that anti-Blackness model, and ongoing virtual and physical Mozilla Fellowships. specifically, and diversity, equity, and spaces can help strengthen the growing • Encourage more pairings between technology platforms and subject matter inclusion challenges more generally, in community of people who work to bring experts, including people with lived experience. the broader tech sector also apply in the EmTech into public interest organizations.
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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 Recommendations: • Organize a dedicated Racial Justice in Tech Fund, governed and led by Black Institutional transformation will be currently allows tech companies to set people, Indigenous people, and other People of Color (BIPOC). fundamental to effective and accountable the tone for technology oversight and use of EmTech in the public interest. use. Ultimately, it is not enough to rely on • Gather and share diversity, equity, and inclusion data about Emtech This includes shifts in policies and companies to self-govern EmTech in the programs, and make public commitments to equity targets with timelines. practices within companies, nonprofits, public interest; we need deep institutional • When appropriate, adapt already existing policy frameworks to help guide universities, and other organizations, transformation, policy changes, and EmTech in the public interest. For example, consider the work of the Shadow as well as regulation at various levels expanded legal and regulatory oversight to Report on the NYC Automated Decision System Task Force and Mijente’s of government. However, the lack of address algorithmic harms specifically, and Tech Policy Toolkit. understanding of EmTech, in conjunction EmTech more broadly. with generational gaps in representation • Litigation is a necessary tool for institutional transformation. Review the AI in policy and decision-making circles, Now Litigating Algorithms report for an overview of cases in 2019.
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Additional Outputs
In addition to this report, our research team produced the following outputs:
• A Slide Deck of Key Findings • A Resource Guide • Interview Summaries & Powerful Quotes • Interview Transcripts • An Annotated Bibliography
• Dedicated Recommendations for project developers, funders, policymakers, and journalists • emtechpathways.org Introduction
24 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Introduction Introduction
Yet, as author Arundhati Roy writes, the Promising Examples pandemic may also be seen as a portal, a “gateway between one world and the next.” We found many inspiring real As she so powerfully puts it: world examples that demonstrate “We can choose to walk through it, how emerging technologies are dragging the carcasses of our prejudice already being used as tools for and hatred, our avarice, our data banks positive transformation: and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through In public health and crisis intervention, lightly, with little luggage, ready to cutting edge work is underway using EmTech imagine another world.”3 to improve the efficacy of vital services.
The Trevor Project is using machine Introduction At this moment, our planet is more digitally learning to help ensure that LGBTQI+ people connected than ever. Yet our experiences who text their crisis line get access to the are dramatically different. Those who are support they need as quickly as possible. As we write, as the first half of 2020 comes to a close, the world privileged enough to have decently paid Wadhwani.ai is building a suite of tools to is deep in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with remote jobs and access to broadband screen for low-birthweight babies in rural a historic uprising for Black liberation. Internet cling to it for connection with areas and help Indian health agencies find their friends, family, communities, and the and treat more people with tuberculosis. Radical Relay is a mobile app designed to world. At the same time, many others have help pregnant women in the South Bronx Health care systems are strained to the breaking point, lost access to a livable income, or scramble build mutual support and awareness of unemployment has surged to historic highs, and the global to survive by taking on delivery work for economy appears to be heading into a recession or depression. how to best navigate a discriminatory app-based companies that underpay them The pandemic has both exposed and exacerbated deep social maternal health ecosystem; the app uses and fail to provide the necessary personal IBM’s Watson to respond to commonly disparities, as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other already- protective equipment. Meanwhile, nation- asked questions and develop a corpus of marginalized communities everywhere face the most devastating states adopt unproven digital contract trustworthy answers. impacts of the disease itself, as well as of the extreme steps tracing and mobility checkpoint tools.4 necessary to control its spread. Tensions that have simmered for decades in the United States over the problem of police brutality against Black people and broader systemic anti-Blackness have exploded in a massive mobilization wave. If anything, the pandemic has accelerated the dysfunction, inequity, and oppression endemic in the USA, and pushed us further towards a breaking point.
3 See Roy, Arundhati. 2020. 4 See Edmond, Charlotte. 2020. & Zittrain, Jonathan. 2020.
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Will this become the new normal? These efforts left us inspired. Many of those Promising Examples Promising Examples What will happen to all of the new data we talked to shared their visions of how In anti-corruption work, Rosie the Robot that is being generated and gathered new technologies deliver us new powers. In the field of democratic deliberation and is a popular bot built by Serenata de Amor by companies and governments as we They can be deeply transformative in our civic engagement, Pol.is uses semantic that analyzes the spending patterns of strive to re-open societies in the age of personal lives, and also for communities, clustering to identify unexpected areas Brazilian politicians and flags potential COVID-19? How can we develop, guide, institutions, and societies. Emerging of consensus between people who on the 5 corruption via social media channels. In and shape new technological systems that technologies may come and go (the fax surface disagree with each other, aiding government bodies and community the Ukraine, Transparency International’s may allow us to live with a degree of safety machine, the VCR, the Segway), or they local branch built Dozorro, which uses organizations to manage complex public from the virus? How can we ensure that may redirect the trajectory of humanity machine learning to scan government deliberation challenges. CONSUL, an online the technologies we are developing now (the automobile, the internet). They can contracts for signs of corrupt procurement.6 deliberation platform, is working with will not reinforce anti-Blackness and other provide entirely new capabilities or shift the Turing Institute on an effort to apply forms of structural inequality? How will our time scales, letting us do in seconds what natural language processing to group and social and political institutions function would have taken previous generations cluster conflicting proposals submitted by under these new conditions? Which of years to complete. The developers and early community members. Loomio, an online many potential futures do we want to adopters of emerging technologies are consensus-building platform built by the build together? often driven by hope for a better world, or Enspiral worker-owned cooperative in New at least frame their intentions that way: Zealand, is another example of EmTech In an effort to help guide us through the being used by governments, membership portal, in the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020 • Virtual reality (VR) will allow us to organizations and informal groups to Civic Hall, with the generous support of the immerse ourselves in environments of improve online decision-making. McGovern Foundation, gathered a group of our own design, with rich multisensory researchers, technologists, and community experiences. Documentarians, game organizers to explore the potential for makers, and social media platforms are
5 See also Cordova, Yasodara, and Eduardo emerging technologies to truly serve the pushing the envelope of the current Vicente Gonçalves. 2019. public interest. We decided to review hardware and software tools to make 6 See Transparency International, Ukraine. 2020. existing efforts, develop lessons to share this new mode of storytelling back, and mark signposts along possible more compelling. paths forward. To that end, we conducted • Augmented reality (AR) will merge an extensive literature review, developed our daily lived experiences with the a database of 246 relevant resources power of the computing revolution. (including projects, organizations, tools, Tech companies are working to bridge conferences, fellowships, and people), the gap between awkward prototypes and conducted in-depth interviews with and lightweight devices, and to offer 24 field leaders, including data scientists friendlier user experiences that can earn and technologists, artists and activists, researchers and policy advocates, and a place in daily human interactions. others deeply involved in the space.
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Promising Examples • Within the burgeoning field ofArtificial we didn’t find any magic bullets. (If you’re Promising Examples Intelligence (AI), there are potentially In the field of political organizing looking for those, you’ve come to the wrong Journalists are also using EmTech in promising uses in nearly every area and campaigning, EmTech examples place). We are cautiously optimistic about promising ways. For example, since abound. For example, Alethea.ai, a tool of life, such as to help us improve these examples, but we warn that most 2016, the two-person team of computer for making synthetic media, has been health care, make transportation have not been systematically reviewed or programmers behind CountLove.org have used by activists to generate satirical more efficient, code video games, or externally audited either to see whether built a system for documenting the daily videos showing prominent world leaders generate creative expression. AI may they function as described, or for the ups and downs of social protest movements speaking inconvenient truths on topics help democratize access to complex unintentional harms they may produce. in the United States by using a combination like climate change.7 Outfox.ai is a tool for tasks, let us manipulate large datasets As usual, the devil is in the details. For of machine learning and human researchers US campaigns that want to maximize the without having to learn difficult new example, an auto-transcription tool may to analyze nearly 3000 news sources 10 impact of online ad targeting. CallTime.ai coding languages, or find patterns of be great for individual researchers or each day. The resulting data informs the Crowd Counting Consortium’s definitive automates the donor research process in hidden meaning and value that other small organizations that need inexpensive compendium of verifiable information on the US and provides tools to streamline methods cannot reveal. The race is on transcription, but bad for people who make to help computational systems better the many movements sweeping American the process of making and logging their living as transcribers. fundraising calls.8 respond to human needs, and to do so society in recent years (of cou rse, this kind in ways that minimize potential and There is a need to develop clear, of tool raises concerns about potentially actual harms. independent information about both harmful uses by police and intelligence the technical claims and the ethical agencies, both in the USA and abroad). • Bots and digital assistants promise implications of emerging technologies. BotCheck.me is a Twitter plug-in/browser better interfaces to vast stores extension that uses machine learning to If you worry about issues like data of human knowledge, where even score a Twitter account’s behavior and surveillance, privacy, algorithmic harms, incremental improvements to our ease help determine if it is human-run or a exploitation of people in developing of access might have ripple effects bot. Full Fact, the UK-based fact-checking countries, or the displacement of human across society. organization, and Meedan, the global cross- labor through automation, you may not language interaction platform, are both • Cheap, ubiquitous sensors, computers, want to rush to adopt many of these new using bots and machine learning to assist and cameras may allow us to automate 9 products and services. At a minimum, human fact-checking efforts.11 Forensic a range of systems and run them far EmTech projects that purport to serve Architecture, a research agency based at the 7 See Alethea AI. 2020. Year 2032. more efficiently, with finer-tuned the public interest are in need of deeper University of London, uses a mix of cutting 8 For an overview, see Company Profile: Call control. For example, digitizing our vetting, although we found that as of yet, edge technologies including 3D modeling, Time - Higher Ground Labs. 2020. energy system, from transmission there is no authoritative source for third- data mining, machine learning, pattern lines to home meters, would allow us party audits of toolmakers’ claims. analysis, and virtual reality, to conduct to make better use of the power we independent investigations into human generate and consume. rights abuses and police killings. These hopes for EmTech are admirable, but in our view, a far cry from what is currently available. In our search for 10 See Fisher, Dana R., Kenneth T. Andrews, Neal emerging technologies that serve the Caren, Erica Chenoweth, Michael T. Heaney, public interest, we gathered hundreds of 9 For example, a transcription tool like Otter.ai may Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jeremy Pressman. 2019. extremely interesting examples, resources, save an under-resourced organization time and money. But using it may also make it harder for 11 See this discussion of Meedan’s end to end fact and useful recommendations, although skilled human transcribers to make a decent living. checking process: Meedan. 2020.
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In addition to our interviews and exploration of existing projects, organizations, and other resources, our work was also informed by reading through many recent reports, field scans, and reviews of the state of AI for good (we have provided an Annotated Bibliography below). We synthesized our findings into seven overarching conclusions about how to evaluate the pathways before us:
First, do no harm. Context is key. Sometimes, Build a stronger EmTech is too often used to An emerging technology in one snoozy > sexy. community of practice. harm Black, Indigenous, People place, or among one field or group It is often the tools of everyday A robust community of of Color, LGBTQI+, Disabled, of people, may look very different administration that make the practitioners who meet and immigrant, working class, and other than in another; so community most impact, more than headline- regularly share information marginalized communities, whether partnerships for context and catching, sexy, or cutting-edge will have greater impact, but in or not those harms are intended; localization are essential. technologies; many organizations order to harness EmTech for the we therefore need widespread need help to navigate through public interest, there need to be adoption of better design processes, the hype. more opportunities for people independent audits, and stronger from historically oppressed regulatory oversight. communities to be involved, and to be given access to resources and leadership positions.
Community-Led Design FTW (For The World)! Community-led design approaches Data is messy. provide pathways towards more just, equitable, and sustainable Even as data drives many Finally, many emphasized that we emerging technologies, it is always EmTech; these practices are need to seek strategies for incomplete, often misleading, and moving into the mainstream, institutional transformation difficult to maintain and protect; but shifting the field will take in order to fully enable the use of data disparities lead easily to sustained effort, funding, training, EmTech in the public interest. amplified inequalities. and institutional commitment.
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Most of the field leaders we spoke with roll back hard-won gains from the civil Promising Examples were cautious in their claims. They rights and women’s movements and cut Promising Examples Human rights researchers at Amnesty emphasized emerging risks, and shared millions of low income women off from In the arena of legislative advocacy, Enview International, working in partnership with thoughts about both potential and actual the support and services they need. is a tool made by CivicEagle that uses Element.ai, have used machine learning harms. People have long felt unease when Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology machine learning to help organizations to accelerate the coding and analysis of technology races beyond the limits of our reveals the “New Jim Code,” where track legislation across all fifty states detailed satellite images taken of Darfur, control. When AI is paired with cameras discriminatory design amplifies racial in the US and predict the best advocacy carefully blending the crowdsourced and sensors that are woven throughout our hierarchies. Artist Mimi Ọnụọha creates arguments to use, helping advocacy work of thousands of human volunteers organizations win policy campaigns.16 cities, as well as with drones and satellites installations and provocations to shine to develop a powerful tool for detecting that track us from above; when automated a spotlight on the ways that missing evidence of destroyed villages and other decision systems are deployed to data (for example, the number of trans* signs of human rights abuses there.12 And in Mexico, the Human Rights Data determine who gets hired and fired, access women murdered in a year, or a unified Analysis Group used machine learning and to social services, access to credit or loans, federal database of all people harmed predictive modeling to help find the graves triage decisions in the midst of a pandemic, by gun violence) reflects and reinforces of victims of human rights abuses. and even who will be incarcerated, it power inequalities. ProPublica reporter begins to feel decidedly like most of us Julia Angwin revealed how racial bias in have been kicked out of the control loop. risk assessment tools contributes to the Or perhaps, it seems increasingly likely over-incarceration of Black people;13 she 12 Read a case study at Marin, Milena, Kalaitzis, that unless we intervene, longstanding and her colleagues at The Markup are Freddie, & Price, Buffy. 2020. inequalities will be automated, to the now doing critical journalism to expose benefit of those who design and control how automated systems are producing 16 See Higher Ground Labs. 2020. these powerful new tools. This is not a flawed tenant screening reports.14 The path we want to continue on. organization AI Now has summarized the recent proliferation of lawsuits against The term “emerging technology” may AI companies based on the racist, sexist, invite magical thinking. For many people, and classist impacts of their products.15 it conjures images of talking robots, all- Organizations like Data for Black Lives, powerful AI in the cloud, or data systems Mijente, Fight for the Future, MediaJustice, that perfectly optimize our lives. The the Algorithmic Justice League, and the leaders of major tech companies and the Carceral Tech Resistance Network are all technology press constantly reinforce the breaking ground in research, organizing, ideology of tech solutionism: “there’s an and creative communication to end the app for that,” they tell us. Many have done important work to disabuse us of such magical thinking. For example, Virginia Eubanks’ book Automating Inequality teaches us how the computerization of 13 See Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner, and ProPublica. 2020. social benefits programs was used to 14 See Kirchner, Lauren, and Matthew Goldstein. 2020. 15 See Richardson, Rashida, Jason M. Schultz, and Vincent M. Southerland. 2020.
34 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 35 Introduction Introduction
harmful use of emerging technologies surveillance systems, giving police and Promising Examples Promising Examples and challenge the use of technology to other agencies that have a legacy of unjust In the realm of culture change, EmTech perpetuate racial, gender, and other forms practices access to a powerful new tool There is a rapidly growing ecosystem innovators are trying a variety of of injustice. We believe that our pathway for repression-a “perpetual line-up.”18 of organizations that work to study, experiments. AnalogFolk, a digital forward must be deeply Informed by these What is more, researchers such as Joy communicate about, and improve the consultancy, has created BigUp.ai to and other critiques of techno-solutionism. Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deborah space. For example, Data for Black Lives develop a training tool to help women Raji, and from companies, public interest is a growing community of people who develop more assertive speaking skills. The great potential of emerging are committed to using data science to organizations, and the National Institute Columbia University’s SAFELAB is exploring technologies to advance the public interest concretely improve the lives of Black of Standards in Technology (NIST), have the potential of virtual reality to teach is also clouded by the dual-use problem: people. The Algorithmic Justice League, all found that commercially available FRTs white people about racial injustice. Spot is technologies meant to be helpful can also founded by Joy Buolamwini, uses are biased by race and gender.19 As a result a chat-bot designed to help organizations be used to harm, or both at the same time. research, art, and organizing to build of this research, of organizing work by give employees safe ways to blow the What will we choose to do with these a cultural movement for equitable and groups like the ACLU, Mijente, Fight for whistle about workplace misbehavior. powerful new tools? How do we avoid a accountable AI. The AI Now Institute the Future, the Algorithmic Justice League, Perspective is an API developed by Jigsaw world where, for every AI chatbot that researches the social implications of and many others, and in the context of and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology helps people access public services, there artificial intelligence.Data & Society team in an attempt to provide tools for site the #BlackLivesMatter movement, ten gathers “researchers, policymakers, are twenty built to spam and disrupt open moderators and community members, such municipalities have passed moratoriums or technologists, journalists, entrepreneurs, communication platforms to make money, as ‘toxicity scores’ for comments. bans of FRTs. IBM has announced that they artists, and lawyers to challenge the spread disinformation, or sow division? will no longer offer general purpose FRTs,20 power and purpose of technology in Often, the question is not “is this tool good Amazon has announced a moratorium on society.” AI for the People, founded by or bad,” but rather, “who benefits, and who selling these tools to law enforcement, Mutale Nkonde, seeks to educate Black is harmed?” Microsoft has called upon governments communities about AI and social justice Take, for example, facial recognition to regulate FRTs more closely,21 and the through popular culture. The Ida B. Wells Promising Examples Just Data Lab, founded by Ruha Benjamin, technologies (FRTs). Companies that Association for Computing Machinery has aims to rethink and retool data for justice. The Our Data Bodies project, The People’s develop FRTs tout pro-social applications: released a statement calling for a pause to The Center for Critical Internet Inquiry Guide to AI, the Teaching Community Microsoft claims its tools can be used to the use of FRTs.22 The Facial Recognition at UCLA, founded by Safiya Umoja Noble Technology handbook, and the More find missing children, identify portraits and Biometric Technology Moratorium Than Code report provide much-needed and Sarah T. Roberts, aims to critically of unknown Civil War soldiers, diagnose Act of 2020 would block the use of FRTs reimagine digital technologies’ influence resources for community understanding, rare diseases, facilitate contact tracing, and ultimately control, of sociotechnical in society. The Radical AI Project is a and provide convenient verification for systems, rooted in participatory research growing community of self-identified accessing personal devices or in everyday Radical AI researchers. The Design and popular education. 18 Garvie, Clare, Alvaro Bedoya, and Jonathan Frankle. transactions, such as replacing ATM 2020. Justice Network is a growing community 17 PIN codes. However, FRTs are rapidly 19 Buolamwini,, Joy, Timnit Gebru, Helen Raynham, of practice focused on making design being deployed across cities around the Deborah Raji, and Ethan Zuckerman. 2020. processes, including technology design, world in massive, unaccountable, face “Grother, Patrick, Mei Ngan, and Kayee Hanaoka. more equitable, accountable, and just. 2020. 20 Krishna, Arvind. 2020. 21 Ibid. 17 Smith, Brad. “Facial recognition: It’s time for action”. 22 See The ACM U.S. Technology Policy Committee 2018. Microsoft On the Issues. (USTPC). 2020.
36 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 37 Introduction Introduction
23 While the pandemic, the economic crisis, and the political uprising Promising Examples throughout the federal government. Society-wide consensus about the now underway are at the front of our minds, the questions they At more prosaic operational levels, there appropriate use of emerging technologies force to the fore are not new. Emerging technologies were already are a plethora of tools to help individuals is thus always rapidly changing. changing our lives before the pandemic, before the depression, and organizations do their work more and before mass rebellion against police violence and systemic effectively. Memory.ai offers two tools, one In the days to come, we will need to anti-Blackness, in ways that were both beneficial and harmful. for time tracking and planning, the other marshall all of our knowledge to survive Our world is being transformed by these forces in ways that we for assisting in deep concentrated work. and thrive together. We are racing to are only beginning to understand, so we will need guideposts to Oral.ai offers to analyze a person’s public develop new vaccines and medications, and ensure that emerging technologies genuinely work to serve the speaking style and offer suggestions for new tools and systems for contact tracing public good. improvement. Otter.ai provides automated and rapid testing. We are trying to create note-taking during meetings, including medical surveillance systems that respect We invite you to explore our findings in the pages that follow. speech transcription and recognition privacy and consent. We need to rethink We hope that they will prove useful as we work together to of topics, people, and organizations. supply chains, routing, and last-mile design, develop, and deploy the future technologies that we will Text.io is a tool that offers “augmented delivery. We need to reimagine broadband need. Our team is inspired by many of the people, projects, and writing” suggestions that seeks to nudge internet access, digital literacies, and tools that we found. We want to help build a world where people writers in the direction of more inclusive use EmTech to advance meaningful relationships, equity, justice, language, focused on helping human transportation systems; we need to truly civic participation, and ecological sustainability, rather than to relations managers spot age bias and value, support, respect, and pay all workers gendered phrases and offering reasonable what they deserve, whether they are full- reproduce existing inequalities and the ongoing devastation of the accommodation language. Monday.com is time or in the gig economy. We may need biosphere. We hope that this report provides insight into how and a project management platform for teams to transform many essential processes under what conditions emerging technologies can help advance that makes it easy to automate recurring of civic life and self-government, like the public interest, so that as we go together through the portal processes. Boodle.ai and Gravyty are tools voting and legislating, so they can be opened by the crises, we take only the baggage that we truly want that aim to make donor fundraising more conducted without endangering people’s and need. efficient, promising to help nonprofit lives or inhibiting participation. We organizations do such things as spot need to dismantle current systems of when an existing donor is in danger of policing, reimagine community safety and not renewing their support, and offering transformative justice, and figure out how assistance with tailoring fundraising to undo the long legacy of slavery, white strategies and language to most effectively supremacy, and structural anti-Blackness. convert donors.
23 See United States Senator for Massachusetts, Edward J. Markey. 2020.
38 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 39 Introduction Introduction
Research Team
Berhan Taye (she/her) is a researcher who investigates the relationship between technology, society, and social justice. She is Senior Policy Analyst and Global Internet Shutdowns Lead at Access Now. She has led the #KeepItOn campaign, a global campaign to stop Diana Nucera (she/her), internet shutdowns with a coalition of more than 220 member AKA Mother Cyborg, organizations from across the world. Before joining Access Now, she was a researcher for the Technology for Social Justice Field is an artist, educator, and community Scan project that produced the MoreThanCode.cc report. Before organizer who explores innovative that, she was a Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow (2016-2017) with technology with communities most Research Action Design and the Open Technology Institute. impacted by digital inequalities. Berhan holds an MA in Peace studies and Public Policy from the Her specialty is developing popular University of Notre Dame and a BA in International Relations education experiences, supported by from Malmö University. dynamic documentation that empowers communities to use media and technology as visionary tools. She has been working as a media artist and technology educator for the past sixteen years.
40 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 41 Introduction Introduction
Micah Sifry (he/him) is President and Co-founder of Civic Hall, Sasha Costanza-Chock (they/them or she/her) editor-in-chief of its news-site Civicist, and the longtime curator of Personal is a researcher and designer who is known for their work Democracy Forum. He is the author or on networked social movements, transformative media editor of nine books, several of which are organizing, and design justice. Sasha is a Research Scientist focused on the intersection of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a joint and democracy, including most recently appointment in the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Urban Civic Tech in the Global South (co-edited Studies+Planning, and Senior Research Fellow at the Algorithmic with Tiago Peixoto) (World Bank, 2017); A Justice League (ajlunited.org). Sasha is the author of two books Lever and a Place to Stand: How Civic Tech and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and other research Matt Stempeck (he/him) Can Move the World (PDM Books, 2015), publications. Their new book, Design Justice: Community-Led is Senior Researcher at Civic Hall and with Jessica McKenzie; The Big Disconnect: Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, was published by the MIT curator of the Civic Tech Field Guide, a Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Press in 2020. crowdsourced global directory of nearly Politics (Yet) (OR Books, 2014); and 4,000 tech for public good projects. He Wikileaks and the Age of the Transparency holds a Masters of Science from the MIT (OR Books, 2011). Media Lab's Center for Civic Media and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Maryland College Park. You can follow along with Matt's good and bad ideas at mattstempeck.com.
42 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 43 Introduction Introduction
Goals Methods
We set out to assess: This is an exploratory field scan based primarily on interviews and desk research, as well as our own knowledge and experience as practitioners.
The current state of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, and their use and Our team of five researchers interviewed 24 people for this project. application in the public and civic technology sectors; Each interview was about one hour long; interviews took place via video chat software, and were recorded, then transcribed for analysis. We sought to intentionally include a range of voices from across several sectors, including scholars and researchers who study technology and social change, technologists who The potential for emerging technologies to advance positive work within nonprofit and social movement organizations transformational change within the public and civic (small, medium, and large), artists who explore the boundaries technology sectors; of possibility with new and emerging technologies, and some people who work at startup companies who see themselves as using emerging technology for public good. We consider all of these organizations and people to be part of a broader movement Barriers and risks to wider adoption of such towards technology in the public interest. emerging technologies.
44 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 45 Introduction Introduction
For the purposes of this study, we used the interviews, summarized key takeaways, Promising Examples Promising Examples “emerging technologies” as a broad barriers, and recommendations, and In the field of labor organizing,WorkIt In many instances, artists who experiment umbrella term (we will abbreviate it as compiled a spreadsheet of 246 resources is a mobile app built by Quadrant2 that with new technologies also offer guideposts “EmTech” as a convenient shorthand). We (tools, projects and organizations, uses IBM’s Watson AI to process natural to new possibilities. Artist Stephanie paid special attention to public interest people, conferences, fellowships, and language questions from workers about Dinkins shifts our ideas about AI and uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI), in other resources) based on interviewee their rights and then guide them, in cultural representation via her ongoing particular machine learning (ML), natural suggestions as well as our own intensive partnership with trained respondents, series of conversations with a robot that language processing (NLP), automated desk research. to the appropriate answers. The tool she is training to reflect her own identity decision support systems (ADS), and bots, “learns” over time what answers are as a Black woman, while Mimi Onouha’s We added these resources (except as well as to other tools including virtual authoritative, reducing the workload on work on missing data sets makes visible individual people) to the Civic Tech Field human respondents. reality (VR), drones, remote sensing, and the ways that data is too often a tool for Guide's Emerging Tech section, which satellite imagery. We focused on the erasing, invisibilizing, or on the other tracks tech for public good projects categories of EmTech most likely to be hand, surveilling Black people and creating that employ AI, virtual and augmented accessible to and immediately applicable compounded harms. reality, sensors, drones, blockchain, and to public interest goals. Other emerging computational cameras. areas like robotics and Autonomous Vehicles are also likely to have immense We also conducted a thorough societal ramifications, but are not yet literature review. Promising Examples sufficiently distributed. One of our key findings is also that what counts as Likewise, service organizations are EmTech is highly contextual. experimenting with a variety of bots that automatically provide users with helpful In each interview, among other questions, guidance or engage them in support of we asked participants about how they their mission. For example, AskIzzy is keep up with the development of emerging a Australian chatbot that gives mobile tech, what resources and tools they users help dealing with housing and follow, the newsletters and listservs homelessness. BotsforCharity is a project of they subscribe to, who they look up to Direct Relief and Mind Heroes that makes in this space, and fellowships, trainings, free chatbots for nonprofits. and events they would recommend to newcomers. We transcribed and analyzed
46 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 47 Introduction Introduction
A note on definitions: Core concepts Promising Examples in this field scan, such as “emerging Hardware such as sensors are also being technology” and “public interest” are not used in positive ways. Community groups tightly defined. Emerging technology like sensors.AFRICA are building and is deeply contextual: what counts as deploying their own sensors to measure Limitations 'emerging' in one community may have and advocate for local environmental long been widely adopted in another. health. Boston-area residents teamed up Technology access, adoption, and use with researchers to floatData Lanterns is structured by race, class, gender, that draw attention to pollutants in the immigration status, education, disability, Chelsea River. This is an exploratory field scan, meant to provide key insights and other axes of inequality, and is Clean Air Myanmar collectively maps from practitioners and possible areas for further research. We uneven both between countries and Yangon’s air quality with a network of did not use a random sampling process to select interviewees. between different communities within air quality sensors as a first step toward Therefore, as with any non-random sample, our findings should them. “Public interest” may mean different improving it. HeatSeek NYC partners with not be assumed to be representative of the entire field. things to different people, depending on public housing advocates to help tenants context and political ideology. We left fight for their legal right to liveable homes these concepts loose in order to allow by documenting indoor temperatures. A note on interviewee demographics: We interviewed 24 people interviewees the widest possible latitude When the Japanese government refused for this project. We specifically sought to include women, People to share their thoughts and experiences to share official radiation data in the of Color, LGBTQI+ folks, and others who are not well represented with us. aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear across the broader technology sector among our interviewees; explosion, Safecast mobilized civilian however, our interviewees are majority white. This reflects It is our hope that despite these collection of the data using sensors on cars. structural racial inequality that shows up in every field, including limitations, the report provides a valuable Public Lab brings together many of these EmTech and public interest technology. A list of interviewees, along window into the subject area, and that the communities to share technical plans and build relationships. with brief biographies, is available in the Interviewees Appendix. key insights and recommendations are of value to others in the field.
48 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 49 Key Findings
Key Findings
We synthesized key lessons from across all of our research (project scan, interviews, and literature review) into the following top-level takeaways:
1 2 3 4
First, Do No Context is Key; Data is Messy; Community-Led Harm; Design FTW!;
5 6 7 Key Findings Sometimes, Build a Stronger Seek Strategies Snoozy > Sexy; Community of for Institutional Practice; Transformation.
Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest 51 Key Findings Key Findings
Some emerging technologies offer great potential for mitigating and reducing harms. On the other hand, a vast body of scholarship, practitioner knowledge, and lived experience demonstrates that powerful actors and systems too often use technologies to harm Black, Brown, Indigenous, LGBTQI+, Disabled, immigrant, and other marginalized communities, whether or not those harms are intended. Public interest organizations and other actors have a responsibility to reflect on and, where possible, repair past harms, and to actively consider possible future harms, especially to the most marginalized communities, before developing or deploying emerging technologies. This first principle is not resolved by a checklist approach to technology development, but must be deeply integrated throughout the field. This requires shifts in organizational culture and practice, including oversight committees, intersectional AI bias and harm audits, Takeaway 1 independent third party analysis, widespread adoption of improved design processes with built-in community accountability mechanisms, and far more regulatory oversight. First, Do
No Harm i. User experience (UX) research can help development teams avoid causing harms. The more you are able to understand your users’ needs and the root of those needs, the more likely you will be able to create a solution that does not cause unintentional harm. “I think it’s so easy to create a machine learning • We interviewed John Callery, Vice President of Technology at model. It’s completely different to make sure that The Trevor Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and it’s fair and doesn’t have harmful effects.” crisis intervention organization for LGBTQI+ young people. They provide 24-hour crisis counseling services via phone, —John Callery, Vice President of Technology at The chat, and text. They also have an international peer support Trevor Project community called TrevorSpace, with similar features and functionality as Facebook. Their use of emerging tech revolves around improving the quality of care and scalability of services.
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With their multi-channel crisis intervention platform, they are “[We work with] communities of people, human in the process of using machine learning and AI to prioritize trafficking, domestic violence survivors, who youth who may be at a higher risk of suicide so that they have had by definition choice taken away from are connected to a trained crisis counselor even faster. The Trevor Project received $1.5 million from the Google AI Impact them. So the idea that the people working there Challenge, and they have taken training and seminars about AI aren’t making every choice along the way, even bias and fairness. if really machine learning is just accelerating, • Callery highlights the importance of user experience research getting the request to the right person, we so that one does not cause harm. They have been intentional have to help them be comfortable with that and about what sort of data they use, as well as the models and understand that that’s not taking their choice out the information they put out in the public. If Callery had more resources, he would use them to expand the technology that of the equation.” would enable counselors to provide real-time insights and recommendations during conversations. He identifies the —Marnie Webb, Chief Community Impact Officer need to share the journey of the project with other similar at TechSoup organizations, as the barrier for machine learning and AI can be high.
ii. Privacy/Consent/Agency. • Marnie Webb is the Chief Community Impact Officer at Ensuring privacy, consent and agency are baseline goals for any TechSoup, a US-based non-profit that builds the capacity project that wants to use emerging technology for public good. of change-makers around the world. She thinks about We need to be mindful about the potential harms of amassing emerging tech in two ways: how useful it may be to the data. We also have to make sure that community members organization’s goals, but also, how it will serve not just the are consulted and comfortable with the tools that are being organization but the population that the organization serves. 24 proposed, and wherever possible, actively involved in their In addition, she stresses the importance of making sure development and oversight. For example, the Consentful Tech the community is comfortable with the tool that’s being project has proposed that data collection from individuals used and the decision that’s being made by the tool. For needs to be re-imagined to fit the meaning of ‘consent’ that example, she described a web-based shelter support project has emerged from the movement to end sexual violence: that helps survivors of intimate partner violence find shelter, Data collection should be Freely given, Revocable, Informed, and noted that they do not have adequate data to be able 25 Enthusiastic, and Specific (FRIES). to automate the process with machine learning. For Webb, even if the shelter allocation process could be automated, it would still be important to respect the agency of those that 24 See Marnie Webb, Techsoup. come to seek their help. 25 The Consentful Tech Project–2020.
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• Crisis Text Line provides a powerful example of how well- iii. The Dual-Use Dilemma. Featured Examples: meaning EmTech projects may unintentionally cause both The same tools can be used to help The Consentful Tech project has proposed benefit and harm. Crisis Text Line is a field-leading global and harm. Technology can mitigate that data collection from individuals needs nonprofit mental health service that provides SMS crisis or create vulnerabilities. It’s critical to to be re-imagined to fit the meaning intervention. They handle a very high volume of texts, pay attention to the dual-use nature of ‘consent’ that has emerged from millions per month, and use the data to develop insights of all technologies, since no ‘benefits- the movement to end sexual violence: about how to make the service more useful and efficient. only’ technology exists. For example, data collection should be Freely given, More recently, they have begun to use machine learning (ML) when social media arrived in the mid- Revocable, Informed, Enthusiastic, and for triage, in other words, to identify those who may be most 2000s, most nonprofit technologists Specific (FRIES). at risk of harm and route them to trained human counselors saw the platforms as a boon to their as quickly as possible.26 However, while we were conducting organizations’ abilities to communicate this research, multiple reports began to surface of a toxic and build deeper relationships with workplace culture, including racism and sexual harassment constituents and potential supporters. at high levels inside the organization.27 Former staff also By the end of 2016, it had become came forward to critique Crisis Text Line’s practice of “active clear to many that the same open rescue;” somewhere between 10 and 40 times per day, the communication channels once lauded service contacts emergency services including police to for democratizing communication respond to high-risk situations, sometimes without the could also be repurposed toward anti- consent of the person in crisis.28 Given the extremely high social ends like election interference, rates of police violence against BIPOC with mental health disinformation, hate speech and others. issues, the organization’s decision to send police to people’s iv. Some technologies can help reduce homes without consent,29 failure to focus on intersectional human exposure to harm. auditing of their triage model, and failure to consider the In some cases, emerging tech can racial justice implications of their practices, provide a help address the deep ethical issues cautionary tale for well-meaning EmTech projects. of exposing humans to harm. For example, one interviewee noted that AI chatbots that seek to de-escalate hate speech online might reduce the emotional and psychological toll on human content moderators.30 Another described a tool that can auto-generate 26 See Resnick, Brian. 2018. photorealistic faces for activists to use 27 See Sifry, Micah L. 2020. 28 See Schiffer, Zoe. 2020. 29 See Ross, Becka. 2020. 30 Michał Wroczyński, Founder, and Maria Dowgiałło, Research and Language Analyst, Samurai Labs.
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for pseudonymous online profiles.31 Of course, both of these “With emerging technologies, we have an tools might also be used for harmful purposes (as in the dual- opportunity to correct a lot of the mistakes that use dilemma described above). we’ve made with previous technologies, and by v. Red-Teams, Vulnerability Bounties, and mistakes, I mean the harms they create or harms Independent Audits. that they enact on marginalized people. I think Multiple interviewees expressed that we need independent checks on “AI for good” systems.32 Mechanisms to mitigate the best way to prevent that is to make sure these potential harms of emerging technologies include: red-teams, technologies come from those communities.” where product developers spend focused time imagining the worst possible ways that a tool might fail, be hacked, —Anonymous Interviewee or otherwise harm people; vulnerability bounties, where a company offers payment to anyone who can find and document an error or bias in a tool; and independent third- information landscape. Full Fact has been in the business of party audits, where a trusted outside organization is invited fact checking since 2010 and they are one of few charities that to test a new tool against shared standards. For example, a use technology to drive their work and have technologists team of AI researchers affiliated with some of the largest on staff. Using machine learning and data tools has allowed AI companies recently released a paper that proposes ten them to be bold in the work they do. Some of the challenges mechanisms (including red teams, vulnerability bounties, and they have faced are: attracting talented technologists to work third-party audits) for improving the “safety, security, fairness, for a charity, and keeping up with the demand and urgency and privacy protection of AI systems.”33 of fact checking while misinformation spreads throughout • We interviewed Mevan Babakar, the COO at Full Fact, the the internet. The automated fact checking team has created UK’s independent fact checking charity. As well as fact many tools that have allowed their work and abilities to scale, checking, the charity focuses on building automated fact however they identify a need for a diverse field of fact checkers, checking software and tools. Their work includes monitoring policies, and language localization for this work to fully scale to the news, public parliamentary records and social media; meet the need. automatically detecting claims, and repetitions of false claims; and then checking and publishing fact checks. They also ask for corrections and make interventions to improve the
31 Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. 32 Mevan Babakar, Chief Operating Officer at Full Fact. 33 See Brundage, Miles, Shahar Avin, Jasmine Wang, Haydn Belfield, Gretchen Krueger, Gillian Hadfield, and Heidy Khlaaf et al. 2020.
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• Babakar also emphasized the need for Featured Examples: external review of the claims made The Trevor Project received a $1.5 million by organizations that apply emerging USD Google Impact Challenge grant technologies to public interest to develop their omnichannel crisis problems, putting it this way: “I think intervention platform for LGBTQI+ youth. there needs to be a wider role that They use machine learning and AI to somebody needs to play in the mis/ prioritize youth who may be at a higher disinformation landscape to make sure risk of suicide so that they are first in that tech solutions aren’t overreaching. the queue to reach trained counselors. So when people claim that their They conducted UX research to inform algorithm can fact check something to development of a product that would not 90% accuracy, that there is somebody 35 inadvertently cause harm. that says, ‘Well, that’s completely Takeaway 2 meaningless.’ There is no such thing as something that is true all the time or that could be measured in that way. 35 Interview with John Callery, Vice President of Having external datasets that could Technology, The Trevor Project. provide some sort of quality control and Context is key comparison for the work that happens in this area would be really valuable.”34 “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.” 34 Interview with Mevan Babakar, Chief Operating Officer at Full Fact. —Dragana Kaurin, Executive Director of Localization Lab
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i. Tools don’t exist in a vacuum. Featured Examples: “Anything that can be used to destabilize the Social, political, and other deep vTaiwan, e-Democracia (Brazil), and current power dynamic in technology usually structures shape and are shaped by other digital public engagement platforms involves emerging tech, and that’s something technologies and their use. Because and processes rely on large numbers of that all marginalized people need to have in their of this, no tool can ‘solve’ a hard social expert volunteers or salaried civil servants problem on its own. to connect digital civic engagement toolkit.” back to the inputs and levers of political • For example, we interviewed Yasodara institutions. The engagement that takes —Anonymous Interviewee Cordova, who until recently worked place on the digital platforms has a much as a Civic Engagement Fellow with better chance of impacting analog political the AGILE/Citizen Engagement37 institutions because of the human labor of team at the World Bank. Her team transmediating online participation into 36 What counts as “emerging” tech is highly contextual. works to enhance the development of local contexts. There are great disparities between countries as well as technological applications to support between different social sectors within each country in terms the Bank’s project through agile of technology access, adoption, and use. In some contexts, software development practices, and an online spreadsheet might be considered an emerging to increase citizen participation in technology, while in others, an emerging technology might be the Bank’s initiatives. With a software AI analysis of satellite imagery, or an augmented reality tool development background, Cordova’s that conveys timely information to users via their smartphones. focus is on assisting middle-and Contextual understanding is best leveraged by ensuring that low-income countries to integrate the development and use of emerging technologies for public technology in their governance interest projects is guided by, and ideally led by, people and infrastructure. Her work ranges from helping governments with participatory organizations with deep knowledge and lived experience budgeting, to stemming corruption of the location and the issue area. This runs counter to among civil servants, to setting up approaches that parachute a technologist into a community or budget management systems or human organization for a short time, those that follow a one-size-fits- resource management tools. She noted all imperative to scale, or those that push for local deployment that there is inequality in terms of what of existing tools without contextualization or localization. is defined as “emerging tech,” since Instead, we have to take time and allocate resources so that different countries are in very different community based organizations can lead, participate in, and places in technology adoption. For share deep contextual knowledge to guide the development and example, she pointed out that in some use of EmTech in the public interest.
37 The Agile World Bank program works to foster a more adaptive and flexible work culture within 36 Yasodara Cordova, World Bank. the institution.
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contexts, an Excel spreadsheet can be seen as an emerging ii. No silver bullets. Techno-solutionism Featured Examples: (“there’s an app for that”) is a zombie technology. Technology adoption is not only different between Equitable Internet Initiative (Detroit, MI), ideology: it’s largely been shot down, countries, it also varies within countries between sectors. is a great example of what it looks like to Cordova has worked with people in the global South to use but keeps coming back with every offer communities the skills they need to technology to focus on important problems like corruption. new wave of innovative technology. build their own internet infrastructure in She reiterates that the disparity and lack of resources in We should learn from history and places that commercial providers have languages other than English is a challenge for her work, and approach emerging technologies abandoned. EII works with neighborhood she says we need to do better in tracking failure from the past more realistically: they may be useful leaders to ensure that more Detroit decade of using open data. tools, but they won’t be silver bullets. residents have the ability to leverage digital technologies for social and economic iii. The destabilization window. development. There’s a window of time where new tech can destabilize power dynamics and our work is to help the marginalized “The range of technology implementation varies get access to it sooner, while that window is still open. Sometimes this a lot [...] there’s a huge inequality in terms of involves reverse engineering.38 For what might be emerging technologies for certain example, one interviewee described countries. [...] What would be an emerging tech? how they are involved in efforts to We all think that’s always the last thing built by reverse engineer “Smart City” initiatives and gig economy platforms to expose Silicon Valley, so you would include blockchain, discrimination. They note that Data for artificial intelligence, as you said drones. But I Black Lives, AI Now, the Algorithmic would say that emerging technology is our chat Justice League, and others are doing apps, for example, and what happens inside these great work to analyze and rethink EmTech so that it can be used to amplify chat apps. This is unknown territory emerging, the power of Black people and other used by the vast majority of the world.” structurally marginalized groups.
—Yasodara Cordova, MC/MPA Ford Foundation iv. The Revolution will be Localized. We need more mechanisms to Mason Fellow at Ash Center for Democratic support tool development, usability, Governance and Innovation, at Harvard University and localization, with people from
38 Interview with Anonymous Interviewee.
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“Social and political structures within which the along with 7,000+ partners around the Featured Examples: technology is made fundamentally shape the world. Although Localization Lab is not Rosie (Brazil), an AI anti-corruption technology, and [are] shaped by the technology.” a developer of emerging technology, Twitter bot.40 We interviewed Eduardo it is a key to emerging technologies Vicente Gonçalves (also known as being distributed and adopted around Eduardo Cuducos), a sociologist —Anonymous interviewee the world, and it is a crucial part of and computer scientist whose work the ecosystem that allows emerging throughout the years has focused on technology to take root and grow. creating tools for civic engagement and social-political agency. Along with community based organizations (CBOs) resourced to be part Kaurin feels that their biggest challenge a group of colleagues at Brazilian civic of the design team. For example, many app sign ups via text is that localization is rarely a priority. hacking project Operação Serenata de require a verification code that expires quickly, although it She also notes that there are often major Amor, he helped develop an AI Twitter takes many minutes to receive SMS in many rural places in disconnects between developers and bot named Rosie that automatically the global South. The app design therefore excludes many of community members, pointing to the checks expenses from all Congress the most vulnerable communities. This pattern is typical: local example of the plethora of “refugee apps” members in Brazil for potential signs of usability research is key, but isn’t often prioritized, and there that do not consider refugees’ data privacy, corruption. In case there is suspicious is often little to no support for technology localization beyond their context, or the issues they have to activity, Rosie tweets and asks people language translation.39 face. If she had infinite resources, Kaurin to help her corroborate the suspicion. would fund communities to create their Because this is an open Twitter account, • We interviewed Dragana Kaurin, the Executive Director own localized tech, and steer people away the politicians can jump in and try to and founder of Localization Lab, a nonprofit that works on explain themselves. The idea of Rosie from global scaled tools. She reminds localization, translation, and language preservation in digital was to create a proof of concept that us that people know what they want tools. Localization Lab conducts usability research, organizes data science can be used as a tool for and need in tech: it is paternalism and localization sprints, and does ethnographic research about public accountability. neocolonial practices that may prevent the how people adopt tools. It also conducts research to reveal creation and adoption of emerging tech unintended consequences to technology adoption. It has a in many areas of the world. Unfortunately, network of nearly 7,000 people around the world in just about localization is rarely prioritized. She notes: 40 See Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves interview. every country that work on translation and alphabet building “By having a choice of choosing something to localize technology. Developers rely on the lab to create and in my language versus English, I’m adopting provide alphabets for languages around the world. Its largest it. I’m creating a relationship with it. I’m clients are Tor and Signal, and it has open source glossaries creating a community around it.” in 221 languages online that are available for download. The lab has multiple full-time and part-time staff that do the work,
39 See Dragana Kaurin interview.
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Many emerging technologies rely heavily on data. In particular, machine learning (ML) relies on large amounts of data to train models that can have great predictive power. However, Takeaway 3 data is messy, uneven, and often unavailable. It needs to be gathered, cleaned, and maintained. It is constantly changing, and ongoing data management is very costly. What is more, we are missing much of the data that we might need to Data is messy develop technologies in the public interest. For example, developers who set out to build apps for democratic processes like elections quickly learn that there are very few reliable sources for data about who’s running for office, where voting will be held, and who currently holds power at the local level. “How data is created and how aspects of our Data from some relatively open platforms, such as Twitter, is humanity are quantified are very contentious far more readily available than data from closed platforms, processes. That's actually a level on which people such as Facebook. Data sets that are crucial to concerns of should be involved, and should have a say, and racial and gender equity, accessibility, and social justice are often difficult, expensive, or impossible to obtain, such as for that we need transparency. While it might be data about police violence, gun deaths, worker fatalities, or technically convenient to have a system interpret comparable educational outcomes across locations. Data sets gender as a male-female binary, such a decision gathered for human rights or public interest purposes can has disastrous effects on non-binary, intersex later be used for harmful or malicious purposes. Furthermore, and potentially also on trans people. So even it is fundamentally impossible for data to ever fully capture framing how a given data point is implemented in the infinite range and deep complexities of human emotions, cultural significance, and experiences. To better support a system can have huge consequences.” emerging technology development and adoption in the public interest sector, we need significant resources to support good —Daniel Leufer, Mozilla Fellow at Access Now data stewardship.
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i. Messy data. One of the biggest challenges is gathering, • We interviewed Mimi Ọnụọha, an Featured Examples: cleaning, and maintaining the relevant data. Also, data changes artist, writer, researcher, and professor Mimi Onouha’s artwork “The Library constantly, and datasets become out of date. at NYU. Her work focuses on social of Missing Datasets” is “a physical relationships and power dynamics repository of those things that have been • We interviewed Caroline Sinders, an artist and design behind data collection, specifically, excluded in a society where so much researcher who looks at how product design and UX design of how people are read, represented, is collected.” Onouha’s work teaches us systems is implicated in causing harm in society, with a lens abstracted, missed, and seen by data. that it is often in the interest of powerful on online harassment. She owns a for-profit design firm called Her artwork “The Library of Missing people and systems to avoid keeping Convocation Design and Research, and has worked at Buzzfeed, Datasets” is “a physical repository of records that demonstrate violence. For IBM Watson, Mozilla Foundation, the Harvard Kennedy Center, those things that have been excluded in example, there is no official database of and Wikipedia. She noted that one of the biggest challenge a society where so much is collected.” police officers who have killed people in areas is the politics of data maintenance, issues with data sets, She is a coder who teaches machine the United States. and disorganized maintenance of data sets. learning and algorithms at NYU, as ii. Costly data. It can be extremely expensive to acquire, clean, well as uses them in her art works. As and maintain datasets. Especially for smaller organizations, a writer, she has written about the data costs may make many emerging technologies, such as Human Rights Data Analysis Group, AI, inaccessible. Additionally, data maintenance is an ongoing who were able to help activists find process, not a one-time cost. the graves of disappeared people in Data for Black Lives has called for states Mexico City. That project taught her to release COVID-19 data disaggregated iii. Missing data. We often don’t have the datasets we need that machine learning and predictive by race, and maintains a record of which for public interest purposes. For example, Data 4 Black Lives algorithms can be used for human has been calling on each U.S. State to publicly release data states have shared data on COVID-19 rights forensics, and to strengthen infections and deaths by race and which about the impacts of COVID-19 disaggregated by race, and the accountability for historical atrocities. have not. #BlackLivesMatter movement has been demanding a national The success of this project relied database of police violence, killings, and complaints on collaboration between libraries, against officers. cultural institutions, and activists, who worked together to collect, clean, and sift through the relevant data. She uses the MI5 machine learning library, and likes to use the Runway machine “The model is only as good as the data it has seen.” learning app to explore models.
—Lynn Kaack, Chair of Climate Change AI
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• Ọnụọha mentioned that her biggest Featured Examples: “What does it mean for us to make the world into challenge is getting relevant data, then data, and what happens when we do that, and A national police misconduct database has getting that data to the point of being what places get missed in that process?” long been a demand of those who advocate useful for machine learning models. If for police accountability. In response to she had infinite resources, she would those demands, the Obama Administration invest in the human power of collecting —Mimi Ọnụọha, artist/researcher launched the Police Data Initiative, which and correcting data, as well as fast worked with 21 police departments around computation power. She reminds us the country to release data. More recently, data is always messy, incomplete, as a result of nationwide uprisings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, complex, and reductive, and that outside of the parameters of models trained on normative Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris emerging technologies depend on a datasets. For example, eye tracking software that produces introduced a bill to create a mandatory huge global sociotechnical system. “trustworthiness” or “hireability” scores may flag people with national database.41 Subsequently, the autism as untrustworthy if their eye contact patterns diverge iv. Reductive data. As machine learning President signed an Executive Order (EO) too far from the norm. advances, how do we ensure cultural that, although far less comprehensive than inclusion in datasets and data practices, the proposed bill, does create a national • We also interviewed AI Artist Stephanie Dinkins, whose work police misconduct database. The EO ties without reducing the expansiveness reveals the limitations of quantifying culture. She reflects on discretionary funding to reporting, and of culture into only that which is the first time she saw a humanoid robot that was modeled after mandates that the DOJ “regularly and quantifiable? For example,shirin anlen a black woman. “Sitting down in front of this humanoid robot periodically make available to the public is a creative technologist who works and trying to have a conversation with it, realizing how far the aggregated and anonymized data from with emerging technologies such as technology has to go and also how wondrous the technology the database.”42 sensors, AR, VR, video, sound, mapping, is, but also having questions about who’s programming this web platforms, and machine learning. thing because while she looks Black, you can hear things in her In her work and in our interview, she answers that felt a bit detached from someone who had deep raised important questions about the experience in Blackness.” In reflecting on this experience, she difficulty of ensuring that the breadth 41 See https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/ talked about the cost marginalized communities face in not press/booker-announces-framework-for- of human experience is reflected in contributing to the data that will then become their digital comprehensive-police-reform-legislation. machine learning systems; for example, representation. “We’re starting to really program out the world 42 See https://www.whitehouse.gov/ she is exploring the question: “Can in algorithms. If that’s the case, and different communities presidential-actions/executive-order-safe- mental illness occur within machine policing-safe-communities. aren’t contributing to these systems, we run the risk of being learning?” Many neurodivergent left out, disregarded, hyper-surveilled at even greater rates.” people have experiences that fall
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“Social and political structures within which the • For example, we interviewed Wendy Featured Examples: technology is made fundamentally shape the Levy, Executive Director of The technology, and [are] shaped by the technology.” Alliance for Media Arts + Culture. Stephanie Dinkins’s art work Among its many cultural, creative and “Conversations with Bina48” reveals the workforce programs, The Alliance difficulty of creating an AI powered robot —Anonymous interviewee also works to connect artists and that is able to convincingly participate in underserved communities with access conversations rooted in Black American to new technologies. Through WebVR, experience. This is in part because most AI systems and conversational bots are AI, and Machine Learning, they are v. Bad models. As tools for creating, analyzing, and visualizing developed using white cultural data sets. currently developing and testing one datasets, as well as for training AI models, become easier to use In Dinkins’ quest for friendship with a Augmented Reality (AR) app and one and less expensive, it has become increasingly easy to make humanoid robot, she found “a rabbit-hole bad models. As one interviewee said, “I think it’s so easy to new AI-powered platform to meet their of questions and an examination of the create a machine learning model. It’s completely different to objectives and empower their network. codification of social, cultural and future make sure that it’s fair and doesn’t have harmful effects.”43 The AI platform is called FRED. histories at the intersection of technology, FRED will be a searchable library of race, gender and social equity.” vi. Potentially harmful data. Amnesty International developed independent media and global culture, an in-depth risk assessment model as part of its use of machine and a digital exchange and marketplace. learning to code and analyze satellite images of devastated The idea behind FRED is to help villages and human activity in Darfur. In order to minimize raise up content and stories that are harm, they developed a risk assessment model that included orphaned, overlooked, neglected or the sensitivity and graphic nature of the data; whether the intentionally excluded from traditional crowdsourced data can be shared; the need for data validation, archives. She put it this way: “We think such as whether data labelling is clear and redundant (labelled of it as a soulful new machine, and in by multiple people); and the risk of malicious misuse of data if it many ways, the new media library of falls into the wrong hands.44 the future.”
vii. More inclusive search. There is a specific need to ensure viii. Community-wide data projects. that search tools include a wider variety of datasets and In some cases, it may be possible objects. Current search often unintentionally reinforces for organizations to leverage their existing inequality, as described by Safiya Noble in her book membership, community, and/or Algorithms of Oppression.45 networks to support efforts to gather, clean, and analyze data. Amnesty International shared with us an example of mobilizing volunteers to 43 Interview with John Callery, The Trevor Project. analyze satellite imagery to produce 44 For more on the data risk assessment model used, see Marin, Milena, Kalaitzis, an estimate of civilian casualties Freddie, & Price, Buffy. 2020. in Raqqa. 45 Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018. See the Annotated Bibliography for a summary.
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It is past time to mainstream community-led design. Many of those we interviewed emphasized the need for a broad field-wide shift towards User Centered Design (UCD), Human Centered Design (HCD), User Experience (UX) Research, Localization, Participatory Design, and/or Design Justice approaches to the creation of emerging public interest technologies. Fundamentally, these approaches all share an emphasis on the need to include domain experts, including Takeaway 4 people with lived experience of challenge areas, in EmTech projects and product design processes. There are many resources already available to help practitioners implement community-led design. However, shifting the entire field Community-Led cannot be done on a piecemeal basis. It will take sustained Design FTW effort, funding, training, and institutional commitment.
(For The World)! i. Community-Led Design. Domain knowledge is key. Community based organizations, people with lived experience of the issue, and nonprofits should receive resources to work “[Computer scientists] are not always in dialogue on technology development processes. Collaboration between technologists and scientists who are domain experts is also a with people who are social scientists or activists valuable approach. or anthropologists or cultural theorists who are • Lynn Kaack is a researcher at ETH Zurich and the Energy dealing with the actual concepts of abuse much Politics Group in Switzerland as well as a chair of Climate more closely, or the people who are targeted by Change AI, an organization that works to facilitate the online abuse. So for example, if you’re looking at use of machine learning on the issues of climate change, anti-Semitism, obviously it kind of makes sense adaptation and mitigation. Climate Change AI also facilitates to go and speak to the Jewish community, to read collaborations between machine learning researchers and climate change domain experts to use machine learning that very long, well-established literature on to help mitigate the impacts of climate change. If she had anti-Semitism. That doesn’t always happen when infinite resources she would invest in understanding how computer scientists tackle these problems.” local governments can really make use of machine learning scientists to help them in designing policies. Her work —Bertie Vidgen, Alan Turing Institute shows the importance of collaboration within the scientific
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community to understand how development culture; and the high costs of Digital Democracy works in close concert Featured Examples: machine learning can best be used technology development, among with indigenous Amazon communities Climate Change AI facilitates to solve the complexity of issues that other barriers: to assist them in mapping the resources collaborations between machine learning occur when dealing with climate of their communities in intimate detail. Disconnected Development. researchers and climate change domain change. As she put it, “You need to • They have collaboratively built an experts to explore how machine learning have a good knowledge of machine There are often disconnects between offline tool called Mapeo that is based can play a role in understanding and learning in order to tackle those developers and community members. on the Open Street Map editor iD, a mitigating the impacts of climate change.46 problems relevant to climate change, Technology is not typically developed participatory mapping platform that helps but you also have to have a really good by marginalized people. For example, indigenous communities protect their knowledge about the problem itself. Jeffrey Yoo Warren, a co-founder ancestral territories from illegal mining, 46 Interview with Lynn Kaack, Chair of Experts from both sides need to come and former research director at environmental degradation, and other Climate Change AI. together, and your team also need to Public Lab, described a misalignment activities that threaten their way of life. Mapeo enables local groups to control and have people at the intersection, who in environmental sensor tool manage their own information, document have a good grasp of both things, to development away from the needs of threats, and share their stories, without develop meaningful strategies to the communities that are most harmed requiring an internet connection. address the problem.” by environmental pollution, towards the needs of professional, highly specialized ii. Focus first on organizational scientists and researchers at labs goals, not technology for funded by universities, corporations, technology’s sake. Organizations and the military.47 may tend over time to acquire new • Example: Hate Speech. To take another technology for reasons that are not example, those who are targets of hate necessarily mission-driven. Mimi speech are not usually those who are Onouha put it this way: “Don’t focus coding the solutions. We interviewed on technology, focus on the thing you Bertie Vidgen, who works at the Alan want to do.” Additionally, remember Turing Institute on a project called Hate that the organization is not always speech: measures and counter-measures. the end-user. Even if an organization Their work involves developing serves a particular community, the computational tools to detect online tools it needs internally may or may not hate speech, using those tools to serve that community. analyze online hate speech, and also iii. There are many barriers to Community-Led Design. Interviewees talked about disconnected 47 Interview with Jeffrey Warren, Co-Founder and development; a lack of resources for UX Former Research Director Public Lab. or for localization; monoculture in the tech industry; English-only technology
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developing evidence for policymakers “It is important to think about communication Featured Examples: to better understand the landscape and strategy and not only about the TxtMob was a group messaging service and challenges of how we tackle online technological parts.” that was created to help direct action hate speech. They primarily work with groups organize around police repression machine learning tools, specifically at the NYC Republican National focusing on how they can be fairer, —Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves (also known as Eduardo Convention. It provided demo design and more accessible, transparent, robust, Cuducos), sociologist and computer scientist. inspiration for the project that would later and efficient. The biggest challenge become Twitter. he sees is the gap between those who experience hate speech, and those who are coding to find it. He describes this are not typically included, resourced, or prioritized. There is a as a disconnect in language, and a divide split between how racialized communities think about new tools between how non-activists or cultural (what harms will they enable), vs how white folks tend to think The Human Rights Data Analysis Group makers approach social science. If he about new tools (what cool opportunities can be unlocked?) has worked for decades to apply statistical had infinite resources, he would apply Additionally, the tech sector is almost entirely dominated by the analysis to human rights cases. Among them towards scaling his access to more English language.49 many other powerful projects, they were data and to more computing power, able to help activists find the graves of as well as towards trying to better • High costs. In general, it is extremely expensive to develop disappeared people in Mexico City. integrate social science and computer new technologies. For example, local governments often can’t science in a really fundamental way. He afford in-house technical expertise.50 Talent is hard to find, and reminds us that we definitely need more costly, and salaries in the public interest space (government, social scientists and computer scientists nonprofit, or social movement) can’t match what the private to come together and try to actually sector will pay.51 develop theoretically informed tools.
• Monoculture. Despite a growing public conversation about the need for ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ in tech, the tech industry remains deeply unequal along lines of race, class, gender, and disability.48 In general, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color perspectives
49 Yasodara Cordova, Ash Center Fellow, Harvard University. 50 Lynn Kaack, Chair of Climate Change AI. 48 Stempeck, Matt. 2019. 51 Mevan Babakar, Chief Operating Officer, Full Fact.
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It is easy to get caught up in the fantastic potential of emerging technologies, and in sci-fi hype about the possibilities of tools like general AI, self-driving cars, or caretaking robots. However, constantly focusing on the latest “sexy” technology can distract us from simple solutions that may already be working, right under our noses. We found that many of the gains to be had in using EmTech in the public interest come Takeaway 5 in supposedly “snoozy” (unexciting) areas, such as semi- automation of administrative tasks, fundraising, and content moderation. We found that when nonprofits and civil society groups use AI, typically they use software as a service to help Sometimes, simplify their workflows, or to conduct tasks like transcription or data entry, rather than trying to use AI or machine learning Snoozy > Sexy to develop new predictive models or radically transform their work. Despite the permanent promise of radical, futuristic applications, EmTech may be most useful for simplifying or semi-automating unexciting, everyday tasks. “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 i. Tools for nonprofit administration. We interviewed Beth Kanter, an independent consultant, author, trainer, potential types of cultivation activities that you and facilitator who focuses on emerging technologies for as the major gift officer should do. So that kind social change, as well as virtual and real-life facilitation and of task might take a major gift officer a week or workplace well-being. Together with Alison Fine, Kanter wrote two of work, but the technology can do it in a a report titled Nonprofits and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide, matter of minutes. Therefore it allows the major on behalf of the Nonprofit Technology Network (sponsored by Microsoft). The report provides a useful function-by- gift officer to be out in the field spending more of function overview of how AI can be applied within nonprofit their time meeting with donors, rather than going organizations, and includes a short but useful Nonprofit through their database, trying to figure out who AI Readiness Checklist to help staff consider potentially should I talk to this week.” productive applications of AI and assess internal capacity to develop the necessary data, expertise, ethical oversight, and —Beth Kanter, independent consultant, author, trainer
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“Instead of saying ‘AI can predict XYZ,’ just saying to using these tools, because it’s hard to Featured Examples: ‘a group of research scientists can use statistical have a lot of good, clean, relevant data, The Nonprofit AI Readiness Checklist can methods to process quantified data in order unless you are a really big organization or a help nonprofit staff consider potentially platform that hosts data for a lot of smaller to achieve some results,’ that doesn’t sound as productive applications of AI and evaluate organizations. Kanter shared that the internal capacity to develop the necessary magical. I’m just always wary of the kind of veneer biggest challenges to nonprofit adoption data, expertise, ethical oversight, of magic and objectivity that the term AI washes of AI tools are: coding talent, data literacy, and sustainability. over things and then kind of hides the and organizational capacity, along with algorithmic bias and bad data pools. If she human agency.” had infinite resources, she would use them to educate nonprofits about algorithms and —Daniel Leufer, a Mozilla Fellow hosted by machine learning bias. She notes that few Access Now nonprofits have access to data scientists at all, let alone the best data scientists, which makes it hard for them to adopt data- heavy AI tools. Lastly, she shares that there sustainability.52 Fine and Kanter also wrote a recent (August are more opportunities and resources 2020) report titled AI4Giving - Unlocking Generosity With for larger nonprofits to partner with tech Artificial Intelligence: the Future of Giving for the Bill and companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Google Melinda Gates Foundation.53 This new report looks at the on AI for good projects. Mid-size and current state of how AI is being integrated into online giving smaller organizations are not currently platforms and tools, with the goal to enhance and expand supported in the same way. philanthropic giving. On the other hand, some interviewees In our interview, Kanter described how she tests a lot of different note that EmTech for semi-automation platforms to be able to make recommendations to non-profits. of routine tasks does not always provide For example, she personally uses the transcription tool Otter. an improvement over simpler methods. ai for her writing and research, as well as chat bots in Slack and For example, one anonymous interviewee Facebook for her organizing work. Kanter also writes regular is a campaign director at a labor rights roundups of links to interesting developments in new tools that organization. Most of their day to day nonprofits might be able to use. Recently, she has been looking work is done through what they call at tools that help nonprofits manage donor bases and enhance “rudimentary tech tools” like social media, fundraising efficiency. She feels that there is a high bar of entry mailing lists, petition platforms, and even spreadsheets. They shared with us that their organization tested out the use of 52 Fine, A. and Kanter, B. (2020, February 26). 53 See https://ai4giving.org, and see a summary in the Annotated Bibliography.
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“One of our goals is to reduce the emotional labor bots on Facebook, but it did not work Featured Examples: out for them: “People didn’t pick up on it. of moderators because being exposed to this Samurai Labs, a company building online Maybe people sensed there wasn’t a real kind of content every day for several hours has intervention tools meant to de-escalate person. Workplace issues are sensitive, severe psychological consequences. It may cause hate speech and toxic language online in especially with a bot with no built-up trust. clinical depression, PTSD, and can lead to serious real time. For example, they have built a And in general, workplace organizing conversational intervention bot that is is hard.”54 health issues. When you spend several hours deployed on a number of subreddits, and every day on the dark side of the world you start they have soon-to-be-published data that ii. Tools for democratic decision- to forget about the good side. Thus I think it’s not suggests it is reducing incidents of making. There are many people verbal harassment. working to develop new technologies ethical to hire people to do this every day eight that are meant to support democratic hours straight. The faster we manage to find an decision-making processes, such as automatic and reliable way to take care of the Loom.io, Pol.is, Neighborland, and more. process without humans, the better for everyone.” Most of these tools combine features like shared document development, polling, threaded discussions, visualization of —Maria Dowgiałło, Research and Language Analyst community agreement with a proposal, at Samurai Labs and other affordances. Some have seen modest adoption by small or midsized civil society organizations, municipalities, iii. Tools for content moderation. As described by and other groups. None has yet reached scholars like Sarah Roberts in her book Behind the Screen,55 mass adoption, and there are many documentary films likeThe Cleaners56 and in scholarship like challenges with these tools, including Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s recent book Ghost Work, security, trust, and a reliance on content moderation is often poorly paid, repetitive, and internet connectivity. Many of these psychologically difficult work.57 AI systems and emerging tool developers are not naive; they technologies are already being used to support human content understand that the deepest challenges moderators. At the same time, there will always be a need of democracy cannot be solved with an for human content moderators, and technology alone cannot app; that said, tools to improve shared change whether their labor is valued and respected, whether decision-making processes may certainly they are well paid, or whether they experience improvements be useful, depending on context.
55 Roberts, Sarah T. 2019. 54 Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. 56 See https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners. 57 Gray, Mary L., and Siddharth Suri. 2019.
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in working conditions and access to iv. Everyone wants the new hotness. Featured Examples: Full Fact is a charity based in London that mental health resources. Those shifts Funders and organizational leadership focuses on building automated fact checking Pol.is uses semantic clustering to identify depend on platform companies taking may be focused on the latest and software and tools. Their work includes unexpected areas of consensus between the high road, effective regulation, legal greatest emerging technology and monitoring news, the use of public funds, people who on the surface disagree action on behalf of workers where industry trends, rather than what and algorithmic accuracy accountability. with each other, aiding government necessary, an organized workforce, and is most needed or useful to the bodies and community organizations public pressure. organization and its community. to manage complex public deliberation challenges. Similarly, CONSUL, an online • For example, we interviewed Michał v. We interviewed Daniel Leufer, a Mozilla deliberation platform, is working with Wroczyński and Maria Dowgiałło at Fellow hosted by Access Now. He has the Turing Institute on an effort to apply Samurai Labs, a company working a PhD in philosophy and works as a natural language processing to group and to create online intervention tools policy analyst with a focus on topics cluster conflicting proposals submitted that can de-escalate hate speech at the intersection of technology and by community members. Loom.io is an and toxic language online in real politics. His current research focuses on online consensus-building platform built time. The company has 12 employees, how the development and deployment by the Enspiral worker-owned cooperative including a team of researchers of artificial intelligence is impacting in New Zealand, is another example of that look at the social psychology of human rights and political decision EmTech being used by governments, which types of messages are most making. He is trying to identify and membership organizations and informal effective in decreasing toxic speech combat the worst and most damaging groups to improve online decision-making. online. Wroczynski is the founder and myths and misconceptions about AI and Dowgiatto is a research and language develop resources that raise the level of analyst who works on the interventions the conversation around AI, particularly team, building tools that become aimed at civil society organizations. If monitors and first responders to hate he had infinite resources to put towards speech on social platforms. They deploy his work, he would invest in identifying chat bots on social platforms to monitor more examples of AI for good. Leufer and de-escalate hate speech by simply believes that transparency in how data reminding people that there are humans is collected, and how that collection on the other side of their words. While is framed (e.g. is gender a binary or a their work is still at an early stage, they spectrum?) is an important step in have produced measurable impacts in creating AI systems for good. He also intervening on various subreddits on the emphasizes that the ways we talk Reddit platform, for example. about emerging technologies too often obfuscate what is really going on.
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We found a clear need to build a stronger community of practice. Mechanisms like conferences, dedicated fellowships using the cohort model, and ongoing virtual and physical spaces can help strengthen the growing community of people who are working to bring emerging technologies into public interest organizations. We also found that anti-Blackness specifically, and diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges more generally, in the broader tech sector also apply in the public interest technology field. The lack of gender and racial Takeaway 6 equity in technology has prevented the cultivation of public interest technologists from marginalized communities. For example, all of the Black and Brown women technologists we talked to were self-taught out of necessity. This lack of Build a Stronger diversity is undermining the potential of EmTech in the public interest, as projects too often reflect homogeneous experiences Community of team leadership, narrow problem framing, and datasets and models that reproduce existing inequalities. In order to of Practice harness EmTech, 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. For this to happen, we need to rethink the entire pipeline for EmTech in the public interest, including education, hiring, “Many people are doing a little work in and funding focused on those that have been structurally fragmented ways around the country, but when marginalized from and by technology. we get together, the power of knowing each other, the power of support, thinking or even challenging thinking, and the power of knowing i. There are many promising experiments from that these folks are out there to call on, is artists, community based organizations, and smaller strangely more powerful than I ever could nonprofits. For example, as noted above, we interviewed have imagined.” Stephanie Dinkins, an independent full time artist who runs Dinkins Studio. She is a self-taught coder who looks at AI —Stephanie Dinkins, independent artist, through the lenses of inclusion and race, aging, gender, and what she calls ‘our future history.’ She learned AI through Dinkins Studio YouTube tutorials, and by working with GitHub repositories
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Featured Examples: alongside colleagues who are developers. seven million volunteers around the Conferences like Allied Media Conference, There is a growing ecosystem of She currently uses TensorFlow, Google world who help them monitor and NetRoots Nation, and Data for Black organizations working at the intersection Colab, and Python as her coding gather data. Lives were mentioned by interviewees as of EmTech, the public interest, platforms. Her biggest challenges have Marin has found that AI alone is not important spaces for building a community and racial and gender justice. For been learning to code, and finding as accurate as AI as a support tool for of practice around emerging technology for example, Algorithmic Justice League, enough highly technical people of color humans when detecting human rights the public interest in the United States. Data4BlackLives, Black in AI, Girls to work on her projects. If she had violations.58 To take another example, in Who Code, Black Girls Code, Lesbians infinite resources, she would create a content moderation, AI potentially allows Who Tech, The AI Now Institute, Data public artificial intelligence lab run by scale as well as real-time intervention & Society, AI for the People, The Ida BIPOC. She would want it to be highly that is otherwise impossible, but that B. Wells Just Data Lab, The Center for visible, and would make space to invite requires platform owners to integrate Critical Internet Inquiry, the Radical AI others to come and help teach there. Wendy Levy, Executive Director of Project, the Data + Feminism Lab, the these approaches. The Alliance for Media Arts + Culture, Design Justice Network, among many ii. The combination of human iii. We identified a number of barriers shared that a key goal of the Alliance others. Entries for all of the organizations capacity alongside AI allows is to convene and build capacity and to a stronger ecosystem that would that we came across are available in our organizations to comprehend opportunity for media artists, producers, enable more creative experimentation project page in the Civic Tech Field Guide. complex situations. storytellers, and communities in the For example, with emerging tech for public interest, we interviewed Milena Marin, Senior US and around the world. The Alliance and also enable institutional uptake. aggregates resources, case studies, and Advisor for Technical Research at Anti-Blackness specifically, and diversity, Amnesty International. She supports toolkits for the field on a range of subjects equity, and inclusion challenges including emerging creative technology- human rights researchers in their use more generally, in the broader tech to raise awareness, broaden access and of new technologies, and helps them sector do not magically disappear ignite collective imagination. go beyond traditional methods to scale in the public interest technology up research and use the wealth of data field; the lack of gender and racial that is now available. The technology equity has prevented the cultivation they primarily use is a combination of of public interest technologists satellite imagery along with algorithms from marginalized communities: and big data. Marin emphasizes that the combination of human capacity • Barrier: Thin and Exclusive Community alongside AI allows them to work at of Practice. There needs to be a stronger scale to comprehend complex situations, community of practice, and one that is such as estimating civilian casualties in deeply inclusive of BIPOC, LGBTQI+ folks, coalition bombings in Raqqa (Syria), or monitoring and intervening in abuse that women face online from trolls, in real time. Amnesty works with about 58 Interview with Milena Marin, a Senior Advisor for Technical Research at Amnesty International.
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“I think there should be something like an emerging tech conference, which puts together some of the thinkers and people who are really doing cutting-edge work in the same room, but also with people who I would call human rights defenders or members of marginalized groups or people who are affected by technology the most.”
—Anonymous Interviewee Takeaway 7
Disabled people, women and femmes, and others who have been historically marginalized from technology fields. Building a Seek Strategies stronger community of practice includes creating a community of lifelong learning and educational support, as well as building for Institutional the pipeline for skilled practitioners. • Barrier: Skepticism of the utility of data. One interviewee Transformation shared that In the human rights field, some practitioners are used to an emphasis on individual cases and are skeptical of data’s utility.59 • Barrier: High bar to entry. Data science is hard. It’s very “Nonprofits have to be actively involved in policy expensive and time consuming to develop new tools, to and development and contributing data, so gather, clean, and maintain good data sets; to do custom that our community members and our view of software or hardware development; to do good user research our community get factored into all of those and testing; and to do localization. Even some of the biggest sectors, like organized labor, find it a challenge to leverage new technologies … So that we don’t end up 10 years tools.60 We need to train more people in these technologies. from now with tools that are making decisions [without] the people we serve.”
—Marnie Webb, Chief Community Impact Officer 59 Ibid. at TechSoup 60 Although see WorkIt as a counter-example.
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Institutional transformation will be fundamental to effective ii. Existing policy frameworks can and accountable use of EmTech in the public interest. We need Featured Examples: help guide the development of shifts in policies and practices within companies, nonprofits, The Shadow Report on the NYC EmTech in the public interest. universities, and other organizations, as well as regulation at Automated Decision System Task Force Policymakers and regulatory bodies provides detailed recommendations for various levels of government (municipal, state, federal, and need closer ties to technical experts international). However, the lack of understanding of EmTech, “policy makers, researchers, advocates, and context experts, including people and the public about the complexities of in conjunction with generational gaps in representation with lived experience of the issue area, evaluating the true risks and opportunities in policy and decision-making circles, currently allows to better inform policymaking and of government use of ADS [automated tech companies to set the tone for technology oversight and regulatory decisions around emerging decision systems]; the limitations of use. Deep institutional transformation, policy changes, and technologies.63 We also found multiple existing bureaucratic procedures; and expanded legal and regulatory oversight are necessary to examples of existing work to synthesize the importance of engaging a variety of address algorithmic bias and harms specifically, and EmTech policy frameworks and best practices. perspectives and experiences.” more broadly. We found that there are many existing policy For example, the Berkman-Klein Center frameworks that can help guide the development of EmTech in for Internet & Society recently analyzed the public interest. For example, projects should use a racial thirty-six prominent AI principles and gender equity lens; develop “do no harm” codes of conduct documents, and from them, synthesized and follow the principles of consentful technology; produce eight foundational requirements for transparency reports; conduct risk assessment, and more. ethical AI that is in line with human rights. They found growing consensus Ultimately, it is not enough to rely on companies to self-govern around eight key thematic trends: EmTech in the public interest; we also need stronger regulatory privacy, accountability, safety and mechanisms to provide oversight and reduce harms. security, transparency and explainability, fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, professional i. We need institutional uptake to scale impact. responsibility, and promotion of 64 Promising experiments abound, but we need institutional human values. adoption to scale the use of EmTech, such as AI systems for social good.61 There needs to be robust dialogue between community and government institutions, as well as functional accountability mechanisms, to actually have EmTech projects serve the public interest.62
63 Interview with Lynn Kaack. 61 Interview with Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves, sociologist and computer scientist. 64 Fjeld, Jessica and Achten, Nele and Hilligoss, Hannah 62 Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. and Nagy, Adam and Srikumar, Madhulika, (January 15, 2020).
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“We originally set out to sort of replicate a lower new technologies, and the devastating Featured Examples: impact they have had on vulnerable cost [spectrometer], and we actually ended up Signal, the end to end encrypted people around the world. Developers of creating much more radical conceptions of what a messaging app, began as a tool for new tools and systems are increasingly activists. Its encryption protocol was tool should be or could be, and helped to implicitly thinking about mechanisms to help then adopted by WhatsApp, bringing critique the way that these technologies are prevent repeating past mistakes (like end to end encryption to over a billion developed and how they exist today.” red-teaming, vulnerability bounties, and people (although due to the details of independent audits), but this will also implementation Signal remains more require regulatory intervention. secure, this was still a significant —Jeffrey Yoo Warren, Public Lab advance towards the mainstreaming • Nathaniel Raymond is a lecturer of encryption). at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. He looks iii. EmTech projects developed to serve the public at how information communication technologies affect the vulnerability interest should have transparency reports, internal of at-risk populations, primarily in policies, risk assessment, and ‘do no harm’ codes of the context of armed conflict. He is conduct. It is not just important to investigate the technology particularly interested in ways in which and the code, but also the policies that govern how these states and non-state actors weaponize 65 technologies are developed and used. Internal organizational information technologies. He focuses policies, risk assessments, ‘do no harm’ codes of conduct, and on the laws of armed conflict, the transparency reports should be publicly available. Where governance of war, and the social possible, project level policies should be developed together digital terrain. He uses mobile phones, with the community that will be affected by the EmTech Project. AI, mapping tools, satellites, and social iv. We need stronger policy and regulatory mechanisms media to conduct this work. In addition to reduce harms. Government regulation of EmTech is to being a teacher at Yale, he is an aid lagging behind technological developments. This is partly due worker and war crimes investigator. He to the ways that many continue to understand technology advises multiple organizations, from to be a neutral force, and also to the widespread adoption of the Red Cross to various UN agencies Silicon Valley’s “disrupt at any cost” philosophy. From predictive to Save the Children, in thinking about policing to digital redlining, recent scholarship, journalism, and how technology can mitigate or create community advocacy has revealed the biases and harms of vulnerabilities. He has created many tools to support humanitarian work, including satellites and predictive machine learning to investigate mass 65 Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. graves, with the Satellite Sentinel
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Project. In his interview with us, Featured Examples: Raymond criticized the “move fast, WorkIt, an app initially built by labor break things” philosophy of Silicon organization OUR Walmart to help Valley; as he argues, the consequences organize Walmart workers (built in have been costly, especially for those partnership with Quadrant2, using at the receiving end of disruptive IBM Watson) has turned into a valuable experiments. “We thought that organizing tool and source of income for technology in itself was neutral, in that United for Respect. if we apply that in certain ways, we could have assumptions and aspirations that would be fundamentally, systemically, and intrinsically transformative.”66 Instead, Raymond The Data Justice Report by the Detroit told us, we learned that it is possible to Digital Justice Coalition and the Detroit do a great deal of unintentional harm Community Technology Project provides by applying EmTech to vulnerable clear guidelines for open data policies at communities. He feels that governance, the municipal level, guided by consent and policy, organizing, and convincing community control. stakeholders to do the right thing are the biggest challenges in using EmTech for the public interest. In particular, he feels that we need to focus on harm reduction in data collection and technology development processes.
Recommendations
66 Interview with Nathaniel Raymond.
100 Pathways Through the Portal: A Field Scan of Emerging Technologies in the Public Interest Recommendations Recommendations
1. First, do no harm
Cross-cutting Recommendations • We must work together to develop a robust ecosystem of independent auditing of EmTech, including EmTech in the public interest. Current mechanisms for external auditing are patchwork and voluntary; instead, external audits of well-meaning EmTech projects should become mainstream, expected, and robust. • Consider the Design Justice Network Principles, which provide a focus on how to design and develop technologies with community-led processes, deep user experience research, Recommendations and a focus on mitigating potential harms.67 • Use the Consentful Technology guidelines: data collection, We gathered many recommendations about how to create use, transfer, and other data related activities should be FRIES (Freely Given, Revocable, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific) and use emerging technology in the public interest. We and beyond.68 have synthesized these recommendations here in line with our seven key takeaways. In each section, we provide Recommendations for EmTech Project Developers cross-cutting recommendations as well as targeted • Adopt equity frameworks throughout the EmTech project recommendations for EmTech project developers, funders, life cycle. In particular, use the Actionable Intelligence for policymakers, and journalists. Social Policy’s excellent toolkit69 on centering racial equity
67 See https://designjustice.org. 68 See https://consentfultech.io. 69 See https://www.aisp.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/AISP- Toolkit_5.27.20.pdf.
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in data infrastructure (data planning, collection, sharing, Administration) model for Facial Recognition Technologies, analysis, reporting, and dissemination). Refer to the works of tasked with evaluating FRTs by degrees of risk and with Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and the Algorithmic Justice providing corresponding guidelines and redlines to control League on the need for intersectional audits of AI systems, as their use.73 they demonstrated in their pathbreaking gender shades70 study. Refer to the Digital Defense Playbook by the Our Data Bodies • Legal action is necessary to ensure that people have Project,71 a workbook of popular education activities focused meaningful recourse when their data is used without consent. on data, surveillance, and community safety, meant to help For example, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled unanimously advance data justice and data access for equity. that when companies collect biometric data like fingerprints or face prints without informed opt-in consent, they can be • Use red teams, vulnerability bounties, and independent sued. Users don't need to prove an injury like identity fraud or audits to explore, test, and mitigate potential and actual physical harm—just losing control of one’s biometric privacy is harms of EmTech projects. These mechanisms are becoming injury enough.74 mainstreamed in the broader tech industry, but need to also be applied to “ethical AI” or “Principled AI for Good” systems.72 Recommendations for Journalists Recommendations for Funders • Avoid hyping new “EmTech for good” projects without looking into their impacts, in particular, any potential or actual • Require grantees to adopt best practices and do no harm unintended harms. Don’t only cover launches of shiny new mechanisms, such as those described here, prior to funding products, but make sure to return to them to examine their EmTech projects in the public interest. workings and impacts once they are in the field. Recommendations for Policymakers • Ask questions like: "What potential unintended harms might this project produce? Have the project creators thought about this • New laws and new regulatory bodies may be necessary to deeply? Has this project already caused harm in the real world?" mitigate the potential and actual harms of EmTech. For example, municipalities like San Francisco and Boston have passed bills to block law enforcement use of facial recognition technology, and a federal bill is in the works. Leading facial recognition technology scientists Erik Learned-Miller, Joy Buolamwini, Vicente Ordóñez, and Jamie Morgenstern recently released a whitepaper calling for an FDA (Food and Drug
70 See http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf. 71 Lewis, T., Gangadharan, S. P., Saba, M., Petty, T. (2018). 73 See https://www.ajlunited.org/federal-office-call. 72 Recommendation from Mevan Babakar, Chief Operating Officer at Full Fact. 74 See https://courts.illinois.gov/Opinions/SupremeCourt/2019/123186.pdf.
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2. Context is key Recommendations for EmTech Project Developers • EmTech development teams must include domain experts who understand context. Researchers and tech companies that want to develop EmTech projects in the public interest must do so in accountable partnership with domain experts, Cross-cutting Recommendations including professionals who work with organizations in the relevant field or location, as well as community based • EmTech projects ideally should be led by community based organizations who are domain experts based on the lived organizations and individuals with deep contextual knowledge experience of their members. This recommendation is covered and lived experience of the project issue area. further in section 4, below, on the importance of community- • Follow the recommendations of the #MoreThanCode report. led design. It takes more than code to implement EmTech projects. Successful project teams don't just depend on technologists, Recommendations for Funders but also include researchers, community organizers, • Provide resources for localization work. We need more storytellers, and educators. Pay particular attention to the software and documentation that is translated into recommendations in section 4 of the report ("Developers, local languages, as well as local contexts. Most software Developers, Developers? Recognize Different Roles and documentation is still only in English, even in public interest Expertise in Tech Work").75 technology projects.76 Support organizations that already have experience doing translation and localization work in ways • Leverage the destabilization window. Every EmTech has a that are accountable to communities. 'destabilization window' during which it might be used to shift the balance of power. Marginalized communities, sometimes • Fund partnerships between community based organizations with the support of allies and co-conspirators, can use this and EmTech developers, over projects that are led by window to leverage new tools to survive and transform their technologists alone. own conditions.
76 Recommendation from Yasodara Cordova, Ash Center Fellow, Harvard University. 75 Sasha Costanza-Chock, Maya Wagoner, Berhan Taye, Caroline Rivas, Chris Schweidler, Georgia Bullen, & the T4SJ Project, 2018.
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Recommendations for Policymakers 3. Data is messy • Effective policies and institutional transformation require deep relationship building, not only the introduction of new policies on paper or new technological systems. To be effective, tech initiatives meant to change institutions need human champions who really understand the institutional context.
Recommendations for Journalists Cross-cutting Recommendations • When reporting on EmTech projects in the public interest, • Adopt a racial and gender equity framework specifically for where possible interview people from community based data infrastructure. Data is biased, inaccurate, and incomplete, organizations that work in the issue area or place that the especially along racial and gender lines. Adopt and learn project purports to address. Do not rely on statements from from the experiences of communities that have suffered tech companies alone. from datafication of their existence: when it suits powerful • Ask questions like: "How is this project informed by the local actors, they are highly profiled within data infrastructures; context? What connection does the project have to existing when it doesn’t, they are invisible. Use the excellent Toolkit community based organizations or domain experts?" for Centering Racial Equity Within Data Integration, recently released by Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy. • Promote more transparency, consent, and accountability in how data is created, used, and shared.77 We need more effective data sharing, but appropriate consent and accountability cannot be an afterthought. This can be facilitated by model data sharing agreements. For example, Firefox has developed a very transparent and legible privacy notice, where they describe their data usage policy.78 • Develop new models for data sharing. Data philanthropy, data stewardship, data cooperatives, data pools, data commons, and data trusts have all emerged as ways for data-rich actors to share, protect, and otherwise leverage their data for social
77 Recommendation from Daniel Leufner, Mozilla Fellow at Access Now. 78 See Firefox. 2020.
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good. For example, smaller and medium sized organizations Recommendations for Funders might invest in a shared platform to pool data about donors • Develop best-in-class internal data policies for and fundraising. Larger organizations might gather, clean, and your foundation. host data for smaller orgs. The P2P Foundation has gathered several examples of data cooperatives.79 The Data Commons • Require and support the development of clear data policies Cooperative allows cooperatives to pool their data.80 The Open from grantees. Knowledge Foundation has created toolkits for publishing • Support data maintenance. open data.81 • Support the development of currently missing essential data Recommendations for EmTech Project Developers sets that have already been identified by the field. • Develop, adopt, and implement strong data maintenance • Provide support for public oversight of the use of EmTech at practices. Many organizations need support to create and the municipal level, in particular automated decision implement policies and practices for data maintenance, and to systems (ADS). gather, clean, and maintain the data that is necessary for public interest work. Recommendations for Policymakers • Consider community participation in data projects. Enlisting • Develop open data policies, guided by consent and larger publics in data gathering and analysis is difficult, community control, as in the Data Justice Report by the but potentially very fruitful, as in Amnesty International's Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and the Detroit Community experience. To take another example, the Citizens And Technology Project. 82 Tech Lab (CATLab) works with online communities (such • Municipalities should develop comprehensive reviews of as Redditors or Wikipedians) to develop participatory automated decision systems across departments, with an experiments that help people critically understand the tech eye to ensure strong transparency, oversight, equity, and tools and platforms they use. Also see the Opening Data Zine accountability over if and when such systems are purchased 83 by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. and deployed. Be aware, though, that corporate capture of ADS reviews is possible; for example, see the work of the Shadow Report on the NYC Automated Decision System Task Force.
Recommendations for Journalists • When covering EmTech projects in the public interest, ask 79 See Data Cooperatives - P2P Foundation. 2020. questions like: "What does this project do with people's data? 80 See “Data Commons Cooperative”. 2020. How will the data be protected? How will it be maintained in 81 See Open Knowledge Foundation. 2020. the long run? Who technically owns the data?" 82 See The Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab at Cornell University. 2020. 83 See Allied Media Projects, Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, and Detroit Community Technology Project. 2020.
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Recommendations for EmTech project developers • Partner with key stakeholders and issue experts when exploring EmTech for specific areas. For example, AI can be used to support specific areas like climate change, but that should be guided by convening key stakeholders, including both scientific experts and also organizations from the most directly harmed communities. • Mainstream Participatory Design across the field. "Participatory research (PAR) and participatory design (PD) are 4. Community-Led design key approaches to developing meaningful, useful, accountable tech projects with community buy-in. PAR and PD should FTW! (For The World) be mainstreamed across the field, along with UCD and agile development methods."87
Recommendations for Funders • Prioritize projects that have been developed through community-led design. Cross-cutting Recommendations • Provide more resources for community technologists. Fund • Nothing About Us Without Us. Tech development needs to community based organizations so that they can work to create involve and be led by a more inclusive mix of people.84 EmTech their own localized tech projects where possible. projects should follow best practices in community-led design, • Support dedicated budgets for usability research in EmTech co-design, participatory design, UX research, localized product projects. Usability research is key, but is often deprioritized.88 development, and localization. The Design Justice Network provides resources and a growing community of practice for • Provide resources for educators to teach co-design methods these approaches.85 to more practitioners. There are many existing efforts in this space, such as those listed in the Tech for Social Justice • Learn from Community Technology practitioners. The Educational Programs Spreadsheet.89 Teaching Community Technology handbook is a great place to start.86 • Gather and share Diversity and Inclusion data about Emtech programs, including fellowships and grants.
84 See Civic User Testing Groups. 85 See designjustice.org. 87 See Costanza-Chock, Sasha, Maya Wagoner, Berhan Taye, Caroline Rivas, Chris 86 See Detroit Community Technology Project “Teaching Community Technology Schweidler, Georgia Bullen, & the T4SJ Project. 2018. Handbook”. 2020. 88 Recommendation from Dragana Kaurin, Localization Lab. 89 See Technology for Social Justice Project (T4SJ). 2018.
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Recommendations for Policymakers • Consider Human-Centered policymaking approaches, for example the human-centered policymaking and design framework developed by MIT Center for Civic Media researchers Anna Chung, Dennis Jen, Jasmine McNealy, and Stephanie Nguyen.90 Recommendations for Journalists 5. Sometimes, • When covering EmTech projects in the public interest, seek out and amplify projects that are led by communities directly snoozy > sexy impacted by the issue area. • Ask questions like: "Who from the community most harmed by the issue area I'm covering is working on an EmTech project? Does this project have leadership from people who are most affected? What specific steps has this project taken to follow the principle of 'Nothing About Us WIthout Us?'" Cross-cutting Recommendations • Follow and support people and organizations who have established reputations for critically evaluating tech for public interest work. The Civic Tech Field Guide provides regularly updated information about tech tools, and now has an EmTech section.91 If you work at a nonprofit organization, follow Beth Kanter's Blog for a steady stream of reviews of EmTech tools. Other good places to learn about tools include Netroots Nation, the Allied Media Conference, and the Nonprofit Technology Conference.92 • Create a robust, regularly updated resource list. Catalog and provide examples of currently useful tools. We have provided a seed for this in the EmTech section of the Civic Tech Field Guide, but it requires ongoing curation and updates.
91 See Civic Tech Guide. 2020. 92 See Kanter, Beth. 2020. 90 Chung, Anna, Dennis Jen, Jasmine McNealy, and Stephanie Nguyen. 2020.
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Recommendations for EmTech Project Developers Recommendations for Policymakers • Don't believe the hype! Consider simpler solutions before • Consider redirecting support away from “innovation hubs” complex expensive solutions. Consider time tested approaches. and “innovation challenges,” and away from promoting Consider that your organization may not need an EmTech hackathons and other flashy events that exploit start-ups and solution, especially if what you're already doing works well. Use privilege founders with access to capital, and instead prioritize the Nonprofit AI Readiness Checklist to help decide about how, deeper and ongoing technology training and support for whether, and what kinds of AI tools to use. nonprofit organizations and community-based users. • Consider a cooperative for buying access to specialized tools. • Pay more attention to underlying digital equity problems, like Smaller organizations can sometimes pool resources or work access to free or cheap high-speed broadband for all. with fiscal sponsors to access new tools, such as fundraising • Support, rather than supplant, existing efforts. In many cases software support. Nonprofits can use AI to help fundraise by there are already people and organizations working to integrate semi-automating various time-consuming aspects of fundraising EmTech in the public sector across a range of issue areas. work.93 However, these tools are often too expensive for smaller nonprofits, so it may be useful to pool resources or work with Recommendations for Journalists fiscal sponsors to negotiate shared access. • Avoid overhyping EmTech projects in general, and “AI for Good” Recommendations for Funders projects specifically, without proper vetting. • Support grantees to adopt tried and true technologies, and to • Try to find ways to pitch “slow tech” stories, for example, build more robust infrastructure, not only flashy new by covering how organizations and communities make use demo projects. of existing technologies in innovative ways. Necessity is the mother of invention, and there are endless stories there! • Support shared or cooperative access to expensive new tools, after carefully vetting to see if they will be useful to the field. • Ask questions like: "Is this project solving a real need? Whose need? Who is involved? Who benefits? Who is harmed?"
93 For a brief summary, see Hoang, France. 2019. “How AI Can Improve Your Funraising Channels”. Nonprofit PRO. https://www.nonprofitpro.com/post/how- artificial-intelligence-can-improve-your-nonprofit-fundraising-channels/.
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6. Build a Stronger • Commission more art & EmTech collaborations, because artists can help all of us explore complexity and imagine new Community of Practice possibilities. Provide support for leisure time, exploration, and creative uses.
Recommendations for EmTech Project Developers • Support and learn from prototypes created by activists and community organizers, because they often find creative hacks in conditions of scarce resources. Cross-cutting Recommendations • Foster hands-on experimentation, to constantly demystify • Rethink the entire pipeline for EmTech in the public interest, emerging technologies and help people from a wide range of including education, hiring, and funding focused on those who backgrounds explore and imagine how they might use have been structurally marginalized from and by technology. these tools. • Support EmTech Labs, initiatives, and organizations run • Encourage more pairings between technology platforms and by Black people, Indigenous people, and other People subject matter experts. For example, YouTube began to work of Color. Even in supposedly values-aligned sectors such with WITNESS after key people in each organization met in a as nonprofits, academic research groups, and civic tech, parking lot during a fire alarm, when they began to chat about persistent institutional racism tends to allocate the most the need for face blurring as a feature in video platforms. resources to white individuals and white-led organizations. It is high time for resources to flow to organizations led by Recommendations for Funders BIPOC. We recommend that all those with access to resources • Organize a focused EmTech funder network. Funders in the (funders, existing organizations, individuals) make significant space can work together to learn more about the issues in the commitments to support EmTech and AI labs, organizations, field, fund jointly where appropriate, and develop and share and initiatives with BIPOC leadership. best practices. • Organize a dedicated conference for EmTech in the Public • Fund Mozilla EmTech and AI Fellows to support existing Interest. Conferences and convenings provide important community based organizations and advocacy organizations learning opportunities. More than one interviewee suggested that work in specific domains. the need for a Public Interest EmTech conference where advocates for marginalized communities and makers of • Fund Public Interest EmTech Fellows who can support smaller cutting-edge tech can better share knowledge and resources nonprofits and build or customize relatively small tools like across fields like computer science, social science, the arts, and bots, APIs, and CRMs. community organizing.
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Recommendations for Policymakers • Create a Public Interest EmTech policy network. As policymakers at different levels (municipal, state, federal, international) develop concrete policies to guide and control the use of EmTech, such as AI, Automated Decision Systems, and Facial Recognition Technologies, there is a need to build a stronger network of EmTech policymakers to share knowledge, 7. Seek Strategies ideas, model bills, and best practices for oversight and accountability. for Institutional Recommendations for Journalists Transformation • Attend conferences and convenings (like Netroots Nation, Nonprofit Technology Conference, Internet Freedom Festival, Mozilla Festival, and the Allied Media Conference) where technology developers and advocacy organizations gather together to share knowledge and develop new tools. • Ask questions like: "Who, outside of the usual suspects, is Cross-cutting Recommendations creating innovative new tools for the public interest? Who are • Case Studies. We need to document and share what works key people and organizations from marginalized communities and what doesn't. We need more case studies about AI for who have been putting work into this space for a long time?" good that go beyond marketing hype.94 Better-resourced organizations should produce these. Review private sector business intelligence about where on the adoption curve we are, to help understand whether we should adopt. Document and share project journeys so that the whole field can learn and grow. We also need to keep better track of failure, and learn the appropriate lessons.95
94 Recommendation from Daniel Leufner, Mozilla Fellow at Access Now. 95 Recommendation from Yasodara Cordova, Ash Center Fellow, Harvard University.
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Recommendations for EmTech project developers Recommendations for Policymakers • Adopt community-led innovations and implement them at • Use already existing policy frameworks to help guide EmTech scale in larger platforms, when appropriate. For example, Signal, in the public interest. For example, the Berkman-Klein Center the end to end encrypted messaging app, began as a tool for for Internet & Society recently analyzed thirty-six prominent activists; its encryption protocol was then adopted by WhatsApp, AI principles documents, and from them, synthesized eight bringing end to end encryption to over a billion people (although foundational requirements for ethical AI that are in line with Signal is more secure, this was still a significant mainstreaming human rights.96 of encryption). • Locally adapt the recommendations of the Shadow Report on the • Normalize risk assessment, internal and external bias and NYC Automated Decision System Task Force. harms audits, and ‘do no harm’ codes of conduct. Project • Use the Take Back Tech policy toolkit by Mijente to push back developers can encourage companies and institutions that against the rollout of surveillance technology at the develop EmTech projects to have clear and transparent policies municipal level. and budgets for risk assessment, internal and external bias and harms audits, and ‘do no harm’ codes of conduct. Where • Implement the open data recommendations from the Data possible, project-level policies should be developed together Justice Report by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and the with communities that will be most affected by the Detroit Community Technology Project. EmTech Project. Recommendations for Journalists Recommendations for Funders • Ask questions like: "What are the policy processes that shape • Organize a dedicated Racial Justice in Tech Fund, governed the development and use of this EmTech that claims to be in and led by Black people, Indigenous people, and other People the public interest? Is this governed by relevant local, state, or of Color (BIPOC). federal law? Who is getting the contracts to build and deploy these systems? When powerful actors say that a particular • Transform funding practices in the space. Shift EmTech EmTech will benefit communities, what are community based resources to people, organizations, and projects that are organizations saying?" led by BIPOC and historically marginalized communities. As new knowledge and practices emerge, create a channel for circulating specific EmTech recommendations, briefings, and trainings for funders in the space. For example, see the funder recommendations from the More Than Code project. • Gather and share Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion data about Emtech projects, programs, funding, fellowships, and grants; publicly commit to meeting clear inclusion targets at every level.
96 Fjeld, Jessica and Achten, Nele and Hilligoss, Hannah and Nagy, Adam and Srikumar, Madhulika. 2020.
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Annotated Bibliography
Recent years have seen a great deal of writing about emerging technology as a tool for the public interest, both in scholarly literature, the popular press, and in industry and philanthropic Annotated spaces. This literature is vast, and it is beyond the scope of this study to provide a comprehensive summary. In this annotated bibliography, we provide brief descriptions of some of the Bibliography recent works that we believe are influential in the field.
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Recent Overviews Costanza-Chock, Sasha, Maya Wagoner, Berhan Taye, Caroline Rivas, Chris Schweidler, Georgia Bullen, & the Of The Field T4SJ Project. #MoreThanCode: Practitioners reimagine the landscape of technology for justice and equity. Research Action Design & Open Technology Institute, 2018. Retrieved from https://morethancode.cc. Civic Hall. The Civic Tech Field Guide. Ongoing. Retrieved from https://civictech.guide. A participatory action research project published in 2018 [disclaimer: two of the authors of Pathways Through the Portal are The Civic Tech Field Guide, an official project of Civic Hall, is a co-authors of #MoreThanCode], #MoreThanCode is intended to crowdsourced, global directory of several thousand civic tech better understand the types of work currently being done with tools and projects built and maintained by Matt Stempeck and technology for social justice (and more broadly, in the public Micah Sifry [disclaimer: two of the co-authors of this report]. interest), as well as the pathways people take into this work. The Most relevant to this report, the Field Guide includes a section report identifies people, groups, and networks in this space, dedicated to the use of emerging technologies for public good, including those who are not ‘the usual suspects’ in the civic including AI, bots, Virtual Reality, drones, satellites, sensors, and technology world, and explores: what their paths into the work the blockchain. The collection also includes additional resources have been; what they see as their greatest constraints; where around ethical tech, digital security and privacy, among others. As they see barriers; and what they feel is most needed to grow and a collection, the Field Guide is generally designed to help users diversify the field. The report synthesizes recommendations from discover existing resources. Its categorization of the space is over 100 practitioner interviews and focus groups around the extensive, but it doesn't include as much original content as the country. The authors recommend: resources it points to. i. Tech project design must involve people from the communities
The Consentful Tech Project. Consentful Tech Guide. the project is meant to serve, early on and throughout the Ongoing. Retrieved from https://www.consentfultech.io/. design process; While not technically a field overview, this project provides tools ii. The ecosystem of people, organizations, and networks who useful across all emerging technologies. It translates the notion work at the intersection of technology and social justice, social of personal consent into our lives as technology users. It adapts good, and/or the public interest is complex and constantly Planned Parenthood's FRIES framework to advocate for tech changing (study participants identified over 252 terms to that respects its users, by honoring consent that is Freely given, describe the work they do); Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific. iii. Despite recent attention to race and gender disparity in the broader tech sector, this field lacks demographic data, and many practitioners experience barriers of race, gender, class, language, and disability;
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iv. Technology roles within organizations are diverse, and tech Costanza-Chock, Sasha. work is not performed only, or even primarily, by software Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the developers, but the different kinds of roles that are necessary Worlds We Need. to effectively use tech for social justice need to be made much Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. Retrieved from more visible; https://design-justice.pubpub.org. v. Some of the most sustainable, respected, and interesting This recent book [disclaimer: authored by one of the authors tech work is being done by groups that do not fall into the of this report] is described by the MIT Press website as standard models of for-profit startups, government offices follows: "'Design justice' is an approach to design that is led by or agencies, or incorporated nonprofit organizations, such marginalized communities and that aims explicitly to challenge, as tech cooperatives and collectives, informal networks, and rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged membership-based organizations. from a growing community of designers in various fields who This report also documents shifts in the language used to describe work closely with social movements and community based the overall field. If the early 2010s were the heyday of "civic tech," organizations around the world. This book explores the theory the mid to late 20-teens saw a shift towards "public interest and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist technology," in large part due to field framing efforts by the Ford design principles and practices erase certain groups of people— Foundation. During the same time, "big data" morphed into "A.I." specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged in much of the discourse. In parallel, alternative frameworks or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white rooted in community organizing, such as community technology, supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler maintained their course. All of these findings are relevant to the colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world questions central to this report. Whatever one calls the overall where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and field of work, its contours continue to evolve. We continue to lack ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a detailed empirical data on who makes up the field, but can affirm multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each that many practitioners from marginalized communities continue grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes to experience a range of barriers and harms. Not all of the roles beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and necessary for the effective use of tech for social justice are as employment diversity in the technology and design professions; visible as they should be. Often, the most promising work is being it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and done on the margins by groups that do not fit standard models. ecological survival."
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Fine, Alison, and Beth Kanter. repetitive tasks, it should free up staff time for other activities,” Nonprofits and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide. they suggest. They also note that many organizations attempting NTEN, February 2020. Retrieved from https://www.nten.org/ to use AI to enhance their operations may not have the capability wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Nonprofits-and-Artificial- to understand their appropriate use, lack clean or usable data, Intelligence_-February-2020.pdf. and should be cautious about dependence on large commercial platforms. The report includes a short but useful Nonprofit This report, which was written on behalf of the Nonprofit AI Readiness Checklist that helps staff consider productive Technology Network (NTEN), and sponsored by Microsoft, applications of AI and internal capacity to develop the necessary situates AI for Good “at the intersection of big tech companies, data, expertise, ethical oversight, and sustainability. AI university research labs, social change organizations, and the world‘s biggest problems. The technology companies or Hopkins, Anna, Jonathan Breckon, and research labs provide expertise, toolkits, and resources to James Lawrence. The Experimenter's Inventory: work with nonprofits to integrate different types of AI... Social A catalogue of experiments for decision-makers change organizations bring context and sector expertise to the and professionals. problem. These partnerships are aimed at addressing issues London: NESTA, Alliance for Useful Evidence, 2020. Retrieved that require massive amounts of data to understand, much from https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Experimenters_ less solve. AI4Good covers areas such as healthcare, education, Inventory.pdf. workforce development, humanitarian aid, climate change and other scientific disciplines, and others.” Within that frame, Fine Nesta, a UK charity and research organization, examines the and Kanter point to several interesting examples of non-profits role of experimentation in "public problem-solving." This report attempting to innovate inside the containers offered by Big Tech includes a measurable prototyping process for experimentation platforms. A number of organizations have built interactive chat- with novel solutions. The library of experiment designs (for bots that run on the Facebook Messenger platform, such as the example, Randomized Controlled Trials) covers their causal power Climate Reality Bot, which is designed to educate supporters and their limitations. This is a helpful resource for social policy and build an organizational email list for action alerts. They also organizations and governments interested in employing emerging point to Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid organization, which technologies and understanding what, if any, effects they have. turned to Facebook Messenger bot when the organization’s 1.5 The timeline shows growing adoption of experimentation by civic person social media team could not keep up with requests for tech organizations since 2003. aid during Hurricane Harvey two years ago. The bot replies to frequently asked questions about the organization’s emergency response programs, how to apply for aid, and ways to volunteer and donate. "It would have been impossible for staff to reply manually in a reasonable time,” they write. The authors argue that AI for good may enable nonprofit organizations to become more human-centered. “When AI-powered systems take over rote,
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Kanter, Beth and Allison Fine. Mozilla Foundation. AI4Giving - Unlocking Generosity With Artificial Mozilla: With Great Tech Comes Great Responsibility. Intelligence: the Future of Giving. Mozilla, 2020. Retrieved from https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/ Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, August 2020. initiatives/great-tech-great-responsibility/. Retrieved from https://ai4giving.org. The Mozilla Foundation is the non-profit owner of Mozilla This report looks at the current state of how AI is being Corporation, makers of the Firefox web browser. The foundation integrated into online giving platforms and tools, with the goal advocates for an open and trustworthy internet. With this to enhance and expand philanthropic giving by all types of resource, Mozilla Foundation is directly addressing the tech donors. It is based on in-depth interviews with more than 40 industry's future workers: current students. The guide provides representatives of online fundraising platforms, data scientists, a timeline of ethically-driven practitioners within the computing fundraisers, thought leaders, futurists, and others. The report industry beginning in 1969. It also offers a helpful overview highlights a variety of fundraising efficiencies obtainable through of worker organizing strategies within the tech industry, as the use of AI, for example, to facilitate connections with donors, demonstrated in the decentralized #TechWontBuildIt campaign, guide donors toward projects that best match their interests, help and corporate efforts to limit that movement. It's an invaluable institutional fundraisers target donors more efficiently, auto- resource for any tech worker, and especially those just beginning generate and scale personalized communications, and automate their careers. internal reporting and other administrative tasks. The authors Sifry, Micah, and Matt Stempeck. "A Timeline Of Civic Tech also suggest that some philanthropies may avail themselves of Tells A Data-driven Story Of The Field." philanthropic advising tools-called “philgorithms” by Rhodri NY: Civicist, 2019. Retrieved from https://civictech.guide/timeline. Davis at the Charities Aid Foundation-to guide their investment or strategic choices about how to achieve the greatest impact The first generations of public interest tech focused on leveraging (a prospective use of predictive analysis that strikes us as highly information & communication technologies (ICTs) like the suspect). The authors are enthusiastic about these potential internet, websites, social media, and SMS to do good. These benefits, but also point out that the current array of AI4Giving efforts were relatively straightforward. For example, ensuring tools do not alter the standard model of transactional fundraising, that public law is available for free online is a clear necessity for which they say is in crisis, leading to a decline in donor retention. a society ruled by that law. The Timeline of Civic Tech research They also point out the challenge most nonprofits have in study [disclaimer: authored by two of the co-authors of this building and maintaining useful data-sets, the risk that only large report] found that the field focused on building websites and apps nonprofits will benefit from these tools (increasing inequality in for democracy for much of the 90's and 2000's, began to diversify the sector), the lack of transparency from for-profit vendors that into more social uses of tech in the late 2010s, and more recently offer these tools about their internal algorithms, and the ways has begun to venture into the use of emerging technologies. that “the technology is racing ahead of ethical concerns about data privacy.”
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Tiago Peixoto & Tom Steinberg. Emerging Digital Artificial Intelligence Technologies & Citizen Participation: Eleven Predictions on the Influence of Emerging Technologies. The World Bank Group. Retrieved from: https://www.citizentech.org. Berryhill, J., Kok, HK., Clogher, R., & McBride, K. (2019, November 28). Hello, World: Artificial Intelligence and In this report for the World Bank, the authors interviewed about its Use in the Public Sector. 30 field experts and reviewed literature in order to address the research question "Will digital technologies, both those that Retrieved from https://oecd-opsi.org/ai-primer-blog/. are already widespread and those that are still emerging, have "This primer is focused specifically on the use and implications substantial impacts on the way citizens engage and the ways of AI in government." Its three goals are to 1) provide background through which power is sought, used, or contested?" They provide and explain technical aspects, 2) show the public sector AI 11 predictions and 6 recommendations. The predictions are: The landscape, and 3) offer governments guidance on the technology's “fake news” arms race will grow further, shifting the focus of public implications." It does this through dozens of real-world examples debates; “Social scores” will influence political and governmental and seven in-depth case studies. The primer accompanies a responsiveness; ID technologies will increase citizens’ pressure report called AI Strategies & Public Sector Components, which on decision makers; More political parties will develop policy offers a global perspective of the national AI strategies of 50 and choose candidates using digital platforms; Different national nations and international bodies (like the European Union). This regulation of social media will lead to increasingly different spaces research will become the AI Policy Observatory (AIPO), "an open for public debate; Activists and tech companies will fight over who and comprehensive database of AI policy initiatives," in 2020. gets to speak to citizens; “Free internet” will influence civic and political conversations; Augmented reality may become a driver Chan, J., Rea, T., Gollakota, S. & Sunshine, J. (2019, June 19). of increased citizen awareness; Automation will reduce certain Contactless cardiac arrest detection using smart devices. kinds of citizen feedback; Bots will be used to acquire, mobilize, Retrieved from and coordinate activists; and Many will try to use ‘blockchain’ to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-019-0128-7. raise trust in participative exercises. Based on these predictions, the authors propose 6 measures: Governments should adopt user- This paper is an example of a social-good application of AI: people centered digital practices; Set boundaries for the use of social experiencing cardiac arrest often exhibit breathing patterns that scoring; Make use of citizens assemblies to set digital policies; can be detected by a listening machine. Researchers trained off- When regulating tech companies, don’t forget to consider citizen the-shelf smartphone devices to listen to real-world audio from engagement; Telecoms regulators need to consider citizen calls to emergency hotlines. The devices' ability to rapidly detect engagement; Design civic technologies for inclusiveness. and diagnose the hypothetical person's breathing pattern could rapidly accelerate treatment, saving lives.
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Elliott, Hessy. The AI Powered State: What can we learn from While the dataset was subjectively selected, and differences China's approach to public sector innovation? remain, the most recently published documents surveyed appear London: NESTA, 2020. Retrieved from https://media.nesta.org. to converge around these eight principles, suggesting an emerging uk/documents/Nesta_TheAIPoweredState_2020.pdf. consensus amongst those interested in the governance of AI. Over half of the documents reference human rights frameworks. This essay collection from Nesta considers China's groundbreaking use of AI toward public sector goals like Fortuna, P., & Lunes, S. (n.d.). A Survey on Automatic education, healthcare, traffic management, and, of course, Detection of Hate Speech in Text. social credit with an eye on what can be taken back to Western Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3232676. democracies. China is investing in and actively deploying state- run AI far more aggressively than other governments. Nesta's This paper surveys a positive application of AI: its use takeaways provide further evidence of the benefits of local R&D to detect hate speech in texts, such as social media. It innovation ecosystems and innovation test-beds that temporarily covers the technical approaches and methodologies protect nascent tech from regulatory oversight. They also found used, and the applications limits related to the complexity that China's emphasis on rapid deployment and scaling of existing of deeply contextual human communication. AI tech has been even more valuable than cutting-edge original technology discoveries themselves. Critically, the report finds that Google. (2019). Accelerating social good with artificial ed-tech gains disproportionately benefit the wealthy who can intelligence: Insights from the Google AI Impact Challenge. afford private sector solutions, and that some of the authoritarian Retrieved from https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ state's AI applications are indeed "profoundly alarming" in their accelerating_social_good_with_artificial_intelligence_google_ violation of civil liberties. ai_impact_challenge.pdf.
Field, J., & Nagy, A. (2020, January 15). Another important recent touchstone is this paper by Google.org, Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Consensus in based on a review of the 2,602 funding proposals the company Ethical and Rights-based approaches to Principles for AI. received from 119 countries in its AI for Impact Challenge. The report offers several relevant findings. Recurring "public sector" Retrieved from https://cyber.harvard.edu/publication/2020/ themes in the applicant pool included: improving the "customer principled-ai. service" layer between citizens and governments; monitoring There may now be an emerging consensus amongst those public procurement processes for corruption; and evaluating interested in AI governance to ground principles in human land use. Only 45% of not-for-profit applicants and 60% of rights. This recent study by Fjeld, et al for Harvard’s Berkman- for-profit applicants reported any prior experience with AI. To Klein Center helpfully synthesizes 36 different sets of "ethical describe AI technology more accurately, the authors of this report AI principles" and identifies eight recurring trends: "privacy, suggest that we use the following more specific subcategories: accountability, safety and security, transparency and explainability, Rules-based solutions, Machine learning, Deep learning, Audio fairness and non-discrimination, human control of technology, processing, Speech recognition, Machine vision, Machine learning professional responsibility, and promotion of human values." analytics, and Natural Language Processing.
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Hicks, M., Narayanan, A., Turkle, S., & Medina, E. (2019, cases profiled actually employ AI, and many of these are small November 18). Promises and Perils of AI. trials (the remaining cases concern analytics). The company did not make its use case library available for outside analysis; only six Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/document/ cases are discussed in detail. Interviews with 18 AI experts found d/1s_AgoeL2y_4iuedGuQNH6Fl1744twhe8Kj2qSfTqyHg/ that checks on the potential of AI for social good include access edit#heading=h.hhdbvb5k7wjr. to quality data, expert talent, and potential regulation. In our This document provides notes from an event at MIT on November research, the actual examples of AI or EmTech for Good that we 18, 2019 titled "The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence," found only number in the dozens, not hundreds. with speakers Mar Hicks, Arvind Narayan, and Sherry Turkle; moderated by Eden Medina. The event focused on the ethics of Ọnụọha, Mimi, and Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera). AI. This document provides an easily digested understanding of A People’s Guide to AI. some of the major issues ethicists are grappling with, such as how Detroit: Allied Media Projects. 2018. Retrieved from to shape a rapidly advancing technology or what to do about the https://www.alliedmedia.org/peoples-ai. proliferation of 'snake oil' promises around AI technology. Written in 2018 by Mimi Ọnụọha and Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera) [disclaimer: one of the co-authors of this report], A McKinsey Global Institute by Chui, M., Harryson, M., People’s Guide to AI is a comprehensive beginner's guide to Manyika, J., Roberts, R., Chung, R., Nel, P., understanding AI and other data-driven tech. The guide uses & Heteran A. (2018, November). Applying artificial a popular education approach to explore and explain AI-based intelligence for social good. technologies so that everyone—from youth to seniors, and from Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/ non-techies to experts—has the chance to think critically about artificial-intelligence/applying-artificial-intelligence-for- the kinds of futures automated technologies can bring. The social-good. mission of A People’s Guide to AI is to open up conversation around AI by demystifying, situating, and shifting the narrative The challenges inherent in compiling a truly relevant scan of the about what types of use cases AI can have for everyday people. field’s potential has not stopped the usual boosters of technology’s potential from pushing rosy scenarios. Perhaps the best example of that work was this November 2018 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, called “Applying artificial intelligence for social good.” McKinsey's analysis reviews the domains of social good where AI might best be applied, which types of AI might prove most useful in them, and potential risks. The discussion paper defines the potential for impact as an estimate of the frequency with which a hypothetical AI model might be consulted in a year, which is a questionable proxy for quantitative data. Despite the enticing title, the report and the database it references are light on compelling examples; only one quarter of the roughly 160
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Pahlka, Jen. (2019, October 8). AI Deserts. Retrieved from https://medium.com/code-for-america/ai- deserts-fc210fc2fd41. AI and machine learning require lots of data, which the private (tech) sector has in droves. Code for America's founder argues that the public and social sectors are being left behind due to a lack of data and poor connectivity between their systems that do contain data. Challenges like machine readability, standards, backwards Critical Lenses compatibility, and legal and bureaucratic access to the data stymy efforts to apply AI to public challenges. Even if we were to overcome these challenges for a moment in time, Pahlka argues, AI depends on "organizational competence at digital that’s rooted in enduring structures and cultures," which public and social sectors often lack. Governments' inability to use AI well won't The easy techno-optimism of the late 1990s and early 2000s prevent them from using AI, which can produce disastrous results has long since been moderated by growing critical analysis of for those affected by such systems. If the private sector enjoys an the ways that emerging technology too frequently reproduces insurmountable advantage over the public and social sectors, the old patterns of inequality (we mentioned many of these works latter may never catch up, and could become beholden to choices in the introduction and will not focus on them again here). made by the private sector, she warns. By now, we are beyond the early years of perhaps naively applying emerging tech to society's problems, even as we hope Partnership On AI. (n.d.). Human-AI Collaboration that technology may play a productive role. Tech's deeper Framework & Case Studies. penetration into all areas of society forces us to adopt a Retrieved from https://www.partnershiponai.org/wp-content/ precautionary principle. Our work today isn't just to apply uploads/2019/09/CPAIS-Framework-and-Case-Studies-9-23. emerging technologies to existing societal challenges; we must pdf. also work to prevent emerging technologies from producing This framework and seven case studies addresses the collaborative their own distinct harms. Much of the recent literature reflects space between humans and machines. If the near future of AI is this emphasis, and many of those we interviewed led the meant to be productive collaborations between people and AI conversation in this direction. This literature is vast, and we systems, as many experts have suggested, this report's guidance cannot do it justice-here we note a few recent key works and around "responsible product/tool design, policy development, links for further reading. [and] research processes," and their social impacts, will be of use.
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Benjamin, Ruha. Resources. 2020. Broussard, Meredith. (2018, April 20). Artificial Retrieved from: https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/resources. Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Scholar of race and technology Ruha Benjamin has organized this go-to list of key texts, organizations, and research centers that Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/artificial- apply a critical lens to race, gender, class, justice, and technology. unintelligence. In this book, Broussard, who has a background in software Benjamin, Ruha. (2019, June 10). development and journalism, uses a series of compelling Race After Technology. worked examples to demonstrate how computing systems Retrieved from https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/race-after- are often poorly designed, fail to perform their intended task, technology. and reproduce historical bias-and yet, due to what she calls technochauvinism (the belief that technology is always the An important recent book that shows how the same emerging solution), we often deploy them anyway. Examples include technologies delivered wrapped in the rhetoric of liberation driverless cars, standardized tests, risk prediction, and campaign instead end up reinforcing society's pernicious racial hierarchies. finance reform. In one particularly compelling passage, she Technologies like AI, in particular, threaten to obscure and demonstrates how a model trained to predict who would survive entrench the automation of racist outcomes, while offering the Titanic can never get it perfectly right, because the data set a misleading sheen of impartial neutrality and technological doesn't include particular but important quirks of human nature superiority. Most relevant to the purposes of this report, the (such as two passengers of similar demographic classes, one of chapter on unintended harms of tech solutionist approaches is whom survived because he jumped as far as he could, the other of particularly compelling as well-meaning technologists race to roll whom died because he hung over the railing and slid down into out unproven emerging technologies. the water). Additionally, she points out that even if the model is Buolamwini, Joy, and Timnit Gebru. nearly correct (97% of the time), it could then easily be used to "Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in systematically erases the socioeconomic disparities that underlie commercial gender classification." patterns in the data, then make those disparities worse (for In Conference on fairness, accountability and transparency,pp. example, by charging lower income boat passengers more for life 77-91. 2018.Retrieved from https://gendershades.org. insurance, since the historical data shows they are more likely to die). This landmark study demonstrates that commercial gender classification systems perform best on white men and worst on Black women. The innovative methodology required the authors to assemble their own benchmark dataset of faces from public officials around the world, since existing benchmarks were majority white men. The work launched a heated debate in the field and has become a powerful tool in reigning in facial recognition technologies (FRTs) at municipal, state, and potentially federal levels.
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Crawford, Kate, Roel Dobbe, Theodora Dryer, Genevieve Lum, K., Boudin, C., & Price, M. (2020, January). Fried, Ben Green, Elizabeth Kaziunas, Amba Kak, Varoon Human Rights Data Analysis Group: The impact of Mathur, Erin McElroy, Andrea Nill Sánchez, Deborah Raji, overbooking on a pre-trial risk assessment tool Pages (pp. Joy Lisi Rankin, Rashida Richardson, Jason Schultz, Sarah 482–491). Myers West, and Meredith Whittaker. AI Now 2019 Report. Retrieved from https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3351095.3372846. New York: AI Now Institute, 2019, This recent (2020) study demonstrates that pre-trial risk Retrieved from https://ainowinstitute.org/AI_Now_2019_ assessment tools (RATs), which are frequently used in court Report.html. proceedings to help determine whether someone will be The AI Now Institute's annual report focuses on the downsides incarcerated prior to trial, are influenced by non-conviction of these emerging technologies. It documents a wide range of booking charges. The authors found that one popular RAT (The problems, like machines controlling workers, insecure systems, Arnold Public Safety Asessment) recommended a heightened unexplainable tech, biased decision-making, surveillance states, level of pre-trial supervision for defendants when they had non- and privatization of public responsibilities. The report also covers conviction booking charges (charges that were dropped or ended the organizing work being done to confront these technologies as in acquittal) in nearly a third of cases. they encroach further and further into social realms. The report Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: focuses on risk in the continued advance of AI technologies, and How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. celebrates the work being done to prevent them from securing an NYU Press, 2018. inevitable place in our lives. Retrieved from https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/ Eubanks, Virginia. (2018, January 23). Automating Inequality: algorithms-of-oppression/. How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. Safiya Umoja Noble's must-read book demonstrates how search Retrieved from https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250074317. algorithms reproduce racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality. The book begins with Noble's experience searching A key work in the growing field investigating the ethics of for “black girls” on Google and seeing sexually explicit content automated technologies. In the context of this report, most presented at the top of the results, in contrast to “white crucially, Eubanks demonstrates that despite promises of girls,” where the results present far more varied content. This efficiency for state programs as a rationale for using these experience led Noble to deep dive into the ways that search technologies, their real impact often is to deprive people of algorithms function, to learn about data discrimination, and to benefits that they need to survive, and to reduce the range of uncover the ways that the political economy of search prioritizes options for recourse. Automation of decisionmaking about access whiteness and reproduces racism, sexism, and other inequalities. to public benefits tends to harm already disadvantaged people The book ends with a call for the development of different kinds of the most. search engines.
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Obmeyer, Z., Powers, B., Vogeli, C., & Mullainathan, S. (2019, Satellites & Sensors October 25). Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. Retrieved from https://science.sciencemag.org/ content/366/6464/447. Clooney, George, and John Prendergast. This paper provides an example of serious issues in applying Satellite Sentinel Project. 2015. emerging technologies like AI to societal use cases. The Retrieved from http://www.satsentinel.org/. researchers discovered that US healthcare providers have been This project, funded by actor George Clooney, sought to prevent using a racially biased algorithm to predict which patients warrant large scale human rights violations by literally pointing satellites additional care. By using healthcare costs as a proxy for met at them in real-time, capturing the imagery, and presenting it healthcare needs, the algorithm effectively prevents additional, to world leaders to demand intervention. The team's key finding medically warranted care to black people, who suffer from higher has been that these elite actors move because of the political and healthcare costs. social pressures they face, not the existence of real-time evidence Social Media Collective. Critical Algorithm of human rights violations. This finding is an important learning for any EmTech effort whose theory of change is predicated Studies: A Reading List. on a novel technology or making information newly available. Microsoft Research New England, 2016. https:// Availability of information is a prerequisite for action, but far socialmediacollective.org/reading-lists/critical-algorithm- from sufficient on its own. EmTech projects must also consider studies. engagement and, ideally, movement organizing. For further reading see this excellent overview by the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. Although last Lu, Jacqueline. (2019, April 19). Digital Transparency in the updated in 2016, it provides core texts arranged by key top Public Realm: How can we bring transparency to urban tech? level insights. These icons are a first step. Retrieved from https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/how-can- we-make-urban-tech-transparent-these-icons-are-a-first-step- f03f237f8ff0. Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has been criticized by civil society groups for their Quayside project on the Toronto Waterfront, which it withdrew from in May 2020. To help bring transparency to public conversations about the use of digital
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Augmented and
tracking technologies in public space, many of which are already Virtual Reality in place throughout the world, Jacqueline Lu prototyped a design language to communicate which technologies are in use in a given area. An explanatory blog post provides more context.
Satellites in Global Development. (n.d.). _docubase. MIT Open Documentary Lab. (2014). Retrieved from https://landscape.satsummit.io. Retrieved from https://docubase.mit.edu. Satellite systems continue to improve in image and temporal Docubase is "an interactive curated database of the people, resolution. There are numerous social good applications of these projects, and technologies transforming documentary in the technologies and the data they produce. This microsite report digital age." The database includes 366 documentary projects explains the state of the underlying technologies and covers that stretch our understanding of the genre, plus case studies, a four social good applications: transportation networks, forest selection of useful storytelling tools, and the ability to curate your and agriculture, disaster reduction and response, and crop own playlists. classification in challenging geographies. Immerse. (n.d.). Immerse: Creative Discussion of Emerging See also the World Bank summary of innovations in satellite Nonfiction Storytelling. measurements for development: Retrieved from https://immerse.news/. https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/innovations-satellite- Immerse is a key web-based magazine about the creative use measurements-development. of emerging non-fiction media for storytelling: journalism, documentary, social movements, and other public-good missions. Their definition of non-fiction includes "speculative fiction based on real-world events." Immerse expects these still-emerging technologies to eventually change how "billions of people learn, communicate, and understand themselves and the world."
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Sinclair, Kamal. (2017, December 26). Making a New Reality. Challenging the Innovator Stereotype…and other concerns of bias in emerging media. Retrieved from https://makinganewreality.org/challenging-the- innovator-stereotype-3e3ef41857c. As part of a broader series on storytelling with emerging media, Sinclair recalls a starkly homogenous evening at the Oculus (Virtual Reality) developers conference. The vast majority of attendees were white or Asian men, and when confronted about this, company executives expressed no interest in considering diversity in their hiring, community engagement or marketing practices. Sinclair contrasts this experience with a long list of under-celebrated and sometimes even forgotten innovators who broke that mold, despite serious obstacles. She argues that we must move beyond our outdated, biased stereotypes of what makes an innovator, that marginalized people have always been innovators in new modes of storytelling, and we should recognize that with the emerging modes we see today.
Appendices
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Appendices Interview Transcripts
Over the coming months, Civic Hall will work with interviewees to review, edit, and then release full transcripts of the interviews Slide Deck of Key Findings that we conducted for the project. These will be available via the We produced a slide deck of key findings and powerful quotes for project website, at: use in presentations and for online circulation. https://emtechpathways.org/interviews/interviews.html https://emtechpathways.org/append/slides.html Anonymity & Data Protection Resource Guide To protect research participant privacy and confidentiality, we We are pleased to share a database of information about more established processes to manage and store participant data. This than 4,000 organizations and projects, including those from included written informed consent, tightly controlled permissions the hundreds of resources that we identified during our work for access to recordings and transcripts, and anonymization of together, available via a dedicated section in the Civic Tech transcripts when requested. We provided all interviewees with Field Guide: http://civictech.guide/emtech. an Informed Consent Agreement outlining the project purpose, risks and benefits of participating, confidentiality parameters, and Interview Summaries & Powerful Quotes voluntary nature of participation. We gathered recorded verbal We wrote short summaries of key takeaways from all interviews. consent at the start of each interview, and gave interviewees the These are available in this document: option of being named & credited, or remaining anonymous. Most https://bit.ly/emtechpathways-interviews-quotes-final interviewees chose to be named. We limited access to all research documents to our research team.
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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.
Caroline Sinders Interviewees 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. We interviewed 24 people for this project. She owns a for-profit design firm called Convocation Design Four are anonymous. and Research and has been a research resident at BuzzFeed, IBM Watson, Mozilla Foundation, and the Harvard Kennedy Center.
Bertie Vidgen Bertie Vidgen is a Research Fellow in Online Harms at The Daniel Leufer Alan Turing Institute. He researches online harms, including Daniel Leufer is a Mozilla Fellow hosted by Access Now. He hate, extremism, and misinformation, and works primarily on has a PhD in philosophy and works as a policy analyst with a the project ‘Hate speech: measures and counter-measures.’ His focus on topics at the intersection of technology and politics. work involves developing computational tools to detect online His current research focuses on how the development and hate speech, using those tools to analyze online hate speech, deployment of artificial intelligence is impacting human and developing evidence for policymakers to better understand rights and political decision making. He is trying to identify the landscape and challenges of how we tackle online and combat the worst and most damaging myths and hate speech. misconceptions about AI and develop resources that raise the level of the conversation around AI, particularly aimed at civil society organizations.
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Dragana Kaurin John Callery Dragana Kaurin is the Executive Director and founder of a John Callery is the Vice President of Technology at The Trevor non-profit called Localization Lab, which works on translation Project, the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis and language preservation in digital tools. Localization Lab intervention organization for LGBTQI+ young people. They also does usability research, as well as ethnographic research provide 24-hour crisis counseling services via phone, chat, about how people adopt tools. They also conduct research to and text. He is the founding member of the organization’s reveal unintended consequences to technology adoption. 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 Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves networking site for LGBTQI+ youth. (also known as Eduardo Cuducos) Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves (also known as Eduardo Cuducos) is a sociologist and computer scientist whose work throughout Lynn Kaack the years has focused on creating tools for civic engagement Lynn Kaack is a researcher at ETH Zurich and the Energy and social-political agency. Along with a group of colleagues at Politics Group in Switzerland as well as a chair at Climate Brazilian civic hacking project Operação Serenata de Amor, he Change AI, an organization that uses machine learning for helped create an AI Twitter bot named Rosie that automatically climate change adaptation and mitigation. Climate Change checks public records of expenses from all Congresspeople in AI also facilitates collaborations between machine learning Brazil. In case that there is a suspicion of corruption, Rosie researchers and climate change domain experts to explore how tweets and asks people to help her to corroborate the suspicion. machine learning can play a role in solving climate change.
Jeffrey Yoo Warren Maria Dowgiałło Jeffrey Yoo Warren is a co-founder and former Research Maria Dowgiałło is a researcher and language analyst at Director of Public Lab, a nonprofit organization that partners Samurai Labs who is focused on strategies of online violence with community groups who are facing environmental prevention and alleviation. She has a degree in clinical injustice to co-create methods to collect evidence, document psychology from the University of Social Sciences and harms, and create accountability. He helped develop many Humanities SWPS. interesting open source technologies for community science during the last 10 years at Public Lab.
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Marnie Webb Milena Marin Marnie Webb is the Chief Community Impact Officer for Milena Marin is a senior adviser for tactical research at TechSoup and leads Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup. Amnesty International and was the project lead for Amnesty In her role, she works with communities around the world to International’s Troll Patrol project, as well as the Amnesty describe desired impact and to develop technology solutions that Decoders project. 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 Mimi Ọnụọha accomplish big goals, with and for communities. Mimi Ọnụọha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work highlights the social relationships and power dynamics behind data collection. Her multimedia practice Mevan Babakar uses print, code, installation and video to call attention to the Mevan Babakar is the Chief Operating Officer and Deputy CEO ways in which those in the margins are differently abstracted, at the UK’s leading fact checking charity, Full Fact. Previously, represented, and missed by sociotechnical systems. Ọnụọha Mevan was the founding head of Full Fact’s automated fact has been in residence at Eyebeam Center for Art & Technology, checking team, which won the Google AI Impact Challenge. In Studio XX, Data & Society Research Institute, Columbia 2016 she co-authored The State of Automated Fact Checking, University, and the Royal College of Art. 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, Nathaniel Raymond and is a founding organiser of Citizen Beta, a community of Nathaniel Raymond is a lecturer at the Jackson Institute for 600+ civic technologists in the UK. 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 Michał Wroczyński is particularly interested in ways in which states and non- Michał Wroczyński is a serial entrepreneur who has worked state actors weaponize information technologies. He looks for 22 years in artificial intelligence (A.I.) systems. He is the very closely at questions of the laws of armed conflict, the Founder of Samurai Labs, a third-wave A.I. company that governance of war, and the social digital terrain. combines deep expertise on neural networks together with reasoning to detect and prevent violence online.
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shirin anlen Wendy Levy
shirin anlen is a creative technologist who works with Wendy Levy is the Executive Director of The Alliance for emerging technologies including but not limited to sensors, Media Arts + Culture. Among its many cultural, creative, and AR, VR, web platforms, and machine learning. She is motivated workforce programs, The Alliance also works to connect artists about creating emotional, meaningful, and outstanding and underserved communities with access to new technologies. immersive experiences that are rooted in real-life stories and Through WebVR, AI, and Machine Learning, they are currently have the potential to empower and engage communities. She developing and testing one A/R app and one new AI-powered holds an MFA in cinema and television, was a research fellow platform to meet their objectives and empower their network. 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.
Yasodara Cordova Stephanie Dinkins Yasodara Cordova is a MC/MPA Ford Foundation Mason Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist who creates Fellow at Ash Center for Democratic Governance and platforms for dialog about artificial intelligence (AI) as it Innovation, at Harvard University. She worked at the World intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. She is Bank’s governance sector as a citizen engagement and agile particularly driven to work with communities of color to co- fellow. With a developer background, she assisted middle create more equitable, values grounded artificial intelligent and low-income countries to integrate technology into their ecosystems. Dinkins exhibits and publicly advocates for governance infrastructure. Her work ranges from helping equitable AI internationally. Her work has been generously governments with participatory budgeting to stemming supported by fellowships, grants, and residencies from corruption among civil servants to setting up budget Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, management systems or human resource management tools. Berggruen Institute, Lucas Artists, Creative Capital, Data and She is a former Senior Fellow of the Digital Kennedy School, Society Research Institute, Sundance New Frontiers Story Lab, and a former fellow of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, MacArthur and Society, both at Harvard University. Foundation, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works Tech Lab, NEW INC and The Laundromat Project.
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Endnotes Acknowledgements 1. See Roy, Arundhati. 2020. “Arundhati Roy: ‘The Pandemic Is A Por- tal’ | Free To Read”. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/10d- 8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca. This project was a true team effort. First and foremost, we'd like 3. See Roy, Arundhati. 2020. “Arundhati Roy: ‘The Pandemic Is A Portal’ | Free To to thank our interviewees. Practitioners and researchers at the Read”. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe- cutting edge of emerging technologies, in the midst of rapidly fcd274e920ca. shifting battles for the public interest, are busy people. They 4. See Edmond, Charlotte. 2020. “COVID-19: What Are Immunity Passports And receive many requests for their time, including interviews like How Would They Work?”. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/ ours. This report was only possible because they took extra time agenda/2020/06/immunity-passport-quarantine-work-covid-19/. & Zittrain, to share their work, perspectives, and learnings with us. We hope Jonathan. 2020. this report does their work justice by introducing it to larger and 5. See also Cordova, Yasodara, and Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves. 2019. “Rosie The more diverse audiences. Robot: Social Accountability One Tweet At A Time – Part 2.” Available at https:// blogs.worldbank.org/governance/rosie-robot-social-accountability-one-tweet- Our graphic designer, Sylver Sterling, guided us through the time-part-2. process and helped us make our findings beautiful and compelling. 6. See Transparency International, Ukraine. 2020. “DOZORRO Artificial Intelligence To Find Violations In Prozorro: How It Works | Transparency International Transcription services were provided by QualTranscribe. Ukraine”. Трансперенсі Інтернешнл Україна. https://ti-ukraine.org/en/news/ dozorro-artificial-intelligence-to-find-violations-in-prozorro-how-it-works/. Finally, this report would not have been possible without 7. See Alethea AI. 2020. Year 2032: World Leaders Apologize | Climate Change | the generous support of our funder, the Patrick J. McGovern Satirical Synthetic Video. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpeEY5_ Foundation, whose mission is to support pioneering neuroscience Zvkg. for examples. research and explore the ways in which advances in information 8. For an overview, see Company Profile: Call Time - Higher Ground Labs. 2020. and technology can improve the quality of life on Earth. “Company Profile: Call Time - Higher Ground Labs”. Higher Ground Labs. https://highergroundlabs.com/company-profile-call-time.
9. For example, a transcription tool like Otter.ai may save an under-resourced organization time and money. But using it may also make it harder for skilled human transcribers to make a decent living.
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10. On a nightly basis, Count Love’s web crawler programmatically visits a list of nearly 3000 URLs for local news sources, and downloads a copy of the article 18. Garvie, Clare, Alvaro Bedoya, and Jonathan Frankle. 2020. “The Perpetual Line- text for any link that contains the words “march,” “protest,” “demonstration,” or Up”. Perpetual Line Up. https://www.perpetuallineup.org/. “rally.” Count Love then “uses custom natural language-processing tools to flag 19. Buolamwini,, Joy, Timnit Gebru, Helen Raynham, Deborah Raji, and Ethan irrelevant articles; group similar articles together; identify duplicate syndicated Zuckerman. 2020. “Gender Shades”. Gendershades.Org. http://gendershades. articles; annotate text that may describe a date, location, attendee count, or org/overview.html.; Grother, Patrick, Mei Ngan, and Kayee Hanaoka. 2020. “Face reason for protest; and populate those details with best guesses for human Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 2: Identification”.NIST . https://www.nist. review. The natural language-processing and machine-learning-annotation- gov/publications/face-recognition-vendor-test-frvt-part-2-identification. US and-prediction tools used to automate components of the review process Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology, 2019; are based on similarity hashing, word vectors trained on a global corpus, and and see The Algorithmic Justice League. 2020. “Facial Recognition Technologies long short-term memory recurrent neural networks…. After the machine- In The WILD”. Ajlunited.Org. https://www.ajlunited.org/federal-office-call. annotation-and-prediction processes are completed, a researcher hand-reviews the final results, refining annotations as necessary and coding actual protest 20. Krishna, Arvind. 2020. “IBM CEO’s Letter To Congress On Racial Justice Reform”. events.” See Fisher, Dana R., Kenneth T. Andrews, Neal Caren, Erica Chenoweth, Thinkpolicy Blog. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/facial-recognition-sunset- Michael T. Heaney, Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jeremy Pressman. racial-justice-reforms/. 2019. “The Science Of Contemporary Street Protest: New Efforts In The United States”. Science Advances 5 (10): eaaw5461. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw5461. https:// 21. Ibid. advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/10/eaaw5461.full. 22. See The ACM U.S. Technology Policy Committee (USTPC). 2020. “Statement 11. See this discussion of Meedan’s end to end fact checking process: Meedan. 2020. On Principles And Prerequisites For The Development, Evaluation And Use “Results From Global Fact-Checking Effort On Whatsapp Business API Released”. Ofunbiased Facial Recognition Technologies”. https://www.acm.org/binaries/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Lhs6WZtyJgIUiOsOenrucqBZLWVfZYAOyn content/assets/public-policy/ustpc-facial-recognition-tech-statement.pdf. ughCwmI9M/edit. 23. See United States Senator for Massachusetts, Edward J. Markey. 2020. “Senators 12. Read a case study at Marin, Milena, Kalaitzis, Freddie, & Price, Buffy. 2020. Markey And Merkley, And Reps. Jayapal, Pressley To Introduce Legislation To Ban “Using Artificial Intelligence To Scale Up Human Rights Research: A Case Government Use Of Facial Recognition, Other Biometric Technology”. https:// Study On Darfur”. Amnesty International - Citizen Evidence Lab. https:// www.markey.senate.gov/news/press-releases/senators-markey-and-merkley- citizenevidence.org/2020/07/06/using-artificial-intelligence-to-scale-up-human- and-reps-jayapal-pressley-to-introduce-legislation-to-ban-government-use-of- rights-research-a-case-study-on-darfur. facial-recognition-other-biometric-technology#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20 Facial%20Recognition%20and%20Biometric,Sarkesian%2C%20Senior%20Policy%20 13. See Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, Lauren Kirchner, and ProPublica. Counsel%2C%20New. 2020. “Machine Bias”. Propublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/machine- bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing. 24. Interview with Marnie Webb.
14. See Kirchner, Lauren, and Matthew Goldstein. 2020. “Access Denied: Faulty 25. See “The Consentful Tech Project – The Consentful Tech Project Raises Automated Background Checks Freeze Out Renters – The Markup”. Themarkup. Awareness, Develops Strategies, And Shares Skills To Help People Build And Use Org. https://themarkup.org/locked-out/2020/05/28/access-denied-faulty- Technology Consentfully.” 2020. http://consentfultech.io automated-background-checks-freeze-out-renters. 26. See Resnick, Brian. 2018. “How Data Scientists Are Using AI For Suicide 15. See Richardson, Rashida, Jason M. Schultz, and Vincent M. Southerland. Prevention”. Vox. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/8/17441452/ 2020. “LITIGATING ALGORITHMS 2019 US REPORT: New Challenges To suicide-prevention-anthony-bourdain-crisis-text-line-data-science. Government Use Of Algorithmic Decision Systems”. https://ainowinstitute.org/ litigatingalgorithms-2019-us.pdf. 27. See Sifry, Micah L. 2020. “ The Uprising At Crisis Text Line: Staff revolts against Nancy Lublin; anti-racism and Political Data World; Change.org promises shifts; 16. See-Higher Ground Labs. 2020. “Company Profile: Meet Civic Eagle - Higher and much much more.”. Civic Hall. https://civichall.org/civicist/the-uprising-at- Ground Labs”. Higher Ground Labs. https://highergroundlabs.com/company- crisis-text-line. profile-meet-civic-eagle/. 28. See Schiffer, Zoe. 2020. “How A Twitter Campaign Brought Down The CEO 17. Smith, Brad. “Facial recognition: It’s time for action”. 2018. Microsoft On Of A Prominent Mental Health Startup”. The Verge. https://www.theverge. the Issues. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial- com/21293176/crisis-text-line-ceo-racism-insensitivity-police-nancy-lublin- recognition-its-time-for-action. mental-health.
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29. Ross, Becka. 2020. “The TL;DR On Suicide Prevention And Active Rescues At 48. Stempeck, Matt. “See Big Tech’s terrible diversity record, visualized using its Crisis Text Line - Crisis Text Line”. Crisis Text Line. https://www.crisistextline. logos”. Fast Company, 2019: https://www.fastcompany.com/90428465/see-big- org/mental-health/the-tldr-on-suicide-prevention-and-active-rescues-at-crisis- techs-terrible-diversity-record-visualized-using-its-logos. text-line/. 49. Interview with Yasodara Cordova. 30. Michał Wroczyński, Founder, and Maria Dowgiałło, Research and Language Analyst, Samurai Labs. 50. Interview with Lynn Kaack.
31. Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. 51. Interview with Mevan Babakar.
32. Interview with Mevan Babakar. 52. Fine, A. and Kanter, B. (2020, February 26). Nonprofits and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide. Retrieved from https://www.nten.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/. 33. See Brundage, Miles, Shahar Avin, Jasmine Wang, Haydn Belfield, Gretchen Krueger, Gillian Hadfield, and Heidy Khlaaf et al. 2020. “Toward Trustworthy AI 53. See https://ai4giving.org, and see a summary in the Annotated Bibliography. Development: Mechanisms For Supporting Verifiable Claims”.Arxiv.Org. https:// 54. Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. arxiv.org/abs/2004.07213. 55. Roberts, Sarah T. Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows 34. Interview with Mevan Babakar, Chief Operating Officer at Full Fact. of social media. Yale University Press, 2019. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/ 35. Interview with John Callery, Vice President of Technology, The book/9780300235883/behind-screen. Trevor Project. 56. See https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners.
36. Interview with Yasodara Cordova. 57. Gray, Mary L., and Siddharth Suri. Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from 37. “The Agile World Bank program is a program trying to foster a more adaptive Building a New Global Underclass. Eamon Dolan Books, 2019 https://www. and flexible work culture within the institution.” amazon.com/Ghost-Work-Silicon-Building-Underclass-ebook/dp/B07FKB6CZK.
38. Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. 58. Interview with Milena Marin.
39. Interview with Dragana Kaurin. 59. Ibid.
40. Interview with Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves. 60. Although see WorkIt as a counter-example.
41. See https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-announces-framework- 61. Interview with Eduardo Vicente Gonçalves. for-comprehensive-police-reform-legislation. 62. Interview with Anonymous Interviewee.
42. See https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-safe- 63. Interview with Lynn Kaack. policing-safe-communities. 64. Fjeld, Jessica and Achten, Nele and Hilligoss, Hannah and Nagy, Adam and 43. Interview with John Callery. Srikumar, Madhulika, Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Consensus in 44. For more on the data risk assessment model used by Marin, Milena, Kalaitzis, Ethical and Rights-Based Approaches to Principles for AI (January 15, 2020). Freddie, & Price, Buffy. 2020. “Using Artificial Intelligence To Scale Up Human Berkman Klein Center Research Publication No. 2020-1. Available at SSRN: Rights Research: A Case Study On Darfur”. Amnesty International - Citizen https://ssrn.com/abstract=3518482. Evidence Lab. https://citizenevidence.org/2020/07/06/using-artificial- 65. Interview with Anonymous Interviewee. intelligence-to-scale-up-human-rights-research-a-case-study-on-darfur. 66. Interview with Nathaniel Raymond. 45. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018. See the Annotated Bibliography for a summary. 67. See https://designjustice.org.
46. Interview with Lynn Kaack. 68. See https://consentfultech.io.
47. Interview with Jeffrey Yoo Warren. 69. See https://www.aisp.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/AISP- Toolkit_5.27.20.pdf.
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87. See Costanza-Chock, Sasha, Maya Wagoner, Berhan Taye, Caroline Rivas, Chris 70. See http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf. Schweidler, Georgia Bullen, & the T4SJ Project. #MoreThanCode: Practitioners reimagine the landscape of technology for justice and equity. Research Action 71. Lewis, T., Gangadharan, S. P., Saba, M., Petty, T. (2018). Digital defense playbook: Design & Open Technology Institute, 2018. Retrieved from https://morethancode.cc. Community power tools for reclaiming data. Detroit: Our Data Bodies. Available at https://www.odbproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ODB_DDP_ 88. Recommendation from Dragana Kaurin, Localization Lab. HighRes_Spreads.pdf. 89. SeeTechnology for Social Justice Project (T4SJ). 2018. “Educational Programs For 72. Recommendation from Mevan Babakar, Chief Operating Officer at Technology And Social Justice/Social Good/Public Interest/Civics/Etc.”. Google Full Fact. Docs. http://bit.ly/t4sj-programs.
73. See https://www.ajlunited.org/federal-office-call. 90. Chung, Anna, Dennis Jen, Jasmine McNealy, and Stephanie Nguyen. 2020. “From Legislation To Implementation: Exploring How To Prototype Privacy Bills 74. See https://courts.illinois.gov/Opinions/SupremeCourt/2019/123186.pdf. Through Human-Centered Policymaking + Design – MIT Media Lab”. MIT Media Lab. https://www.media.mit.edu/posts/from-legislation-to-implementation- 75. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Maya Wagoner, Berhan Taye, Caroline Rivas, Chris exploring-how-to-prototype-privacy-bills-through-human-centered-policymaking- Schweidler, Georgia Bullen, & the T4SJ Project, 2018. #MoreThanCode: design/. Practitioners reimagine the landscape of technology for justice and equity. Research Action Design & Open Technology Institute. Available online at http:// 91. See Civic Tech. 2020. “Emerging Tech”. Civic Tech Field Guide. https://civictech. morethancode.cc. guide/emtech.
76. Interview with Yasodara Cordova. 92. See Kanter, Beth. 2020. Beth’s Blog. http://www.bethkanter.org.
77. Recommendation from Daniel Leufner, Mozilla Fellow at Access Now. 93. For a brief summary, see Hoang, France. 2019. “How AI Can Improve Your Funraising Channels”. Nonprofit PRO. https://www.nonprofitpro.com/post/how- 78. See Firefox. 2020. “Firefox Privacy Notice”. Mozilla. https://www.mozilla.org/en- artificial-intelligence-can-improve-your-nonprofit-fundraising-channels/. US/privacy/firefox/. 94. Recommendation from Daniel Leufner, Mozilla Fellow at Access Now. 79. See “Data Cooperatives - P2P Foundation”. 2020. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/ Data_Cooperatives. 95. Interview with Yasodara Cordova.
80. See “Data Commons Cooperative”. 2020. Datacommons.Coop. 96. Fjeld, Jessica and Achten, Nele and Hilligoss, Hannah and Nagy, Adam and https://datacommons.coop. Srikumar, Madhulika. 2020. “Principled Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Consensus in Ethical and Rights-Based Approaches to Principles for AI” Berkman 81. See Open Knowledge Foundation. 2020. “Creating An Open Data Publication Klein Center Research Publication No. 2020-1. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn. Toolkit An Open Data Institute Case Study”. Okfn.Org. https://okfn.org/what-we- com/abstract=3518482. do/case-studies/creating-an-open-data-publication-toolkit.
82. See The Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab at Cornell University. 2020 “Research - Citizens And Technology Lab”. Citizens And Technology Lab. https://citizensandtech.org/research.
83. See Allied Media Projects, Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, and Detroit Community Technology Project. 2020. “Opening Data Zine”. Alliedmedia.Org. https://www.alliedmedia.org/files/ddjc_zine-final-rgb.pdf.
84. See Civic User Testing Groups, where target users are supported to share their experiences interacting with technology under development.
85. See designjustice.org.
86. See Detroit Community Technology Project “Teaching Community Technology Handbook”. 2020. Detroitcommunitytech.Org. https://detroitcommunitytech.org/ sites/default/files/librarypdfs/TeachingCommunityTech.pdf.
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