#MoreThanCode

#MoreThanCode Full Report

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 12:00:00 +0000

The Technology for Social Justice Project (T4SJ) is excited to release a new report, #MoreThanCode: Practioners Reimagine the landscape of technology for justice and equity. Download the Full Report.

#MoreThanCode is a participatory action research report based on interviews, focus groups, and data analysis with 188 tech practitioners from across the U.S.A. The report explores the current ecosystem and demographics; practitioner experiences; visions and values; documents stories of success and failure; and provides key recommendations for the future of the field. We hope our findings and recommendations will be useful to all those who want to use technology to make a more just and equitable world.

Key recommendations include:

Nothing About Us Without Us: Adopt Co-Design Methods and Concrete Community Accountability Mechanisms;
From Silver Bullets to Useful Tools: Change the Narrative, Lead with Values, and Recognize Multiple Frames and Terms Across the Ecosystem;
#RealDiversityNumbers: Adopt proven strategies for diversity and inclusion;
Developers, Developers, Developers? Recognize Different Roles and Expertise in Tech Work, and Support Alternative Pathways to Participation;
Coops, Collectives, and Networks, Oh My! Support Alternative Models Beyond Startups, Government Offices, and Incorporated Nonprofits.

The project is co-led by Research Action Design and the Open Technology Institute at New America, together with research partners Upturn, Media Mobilizing Project, Coworker.org, Hack the Hood, May First/People Link, Palante Technology Cooperative, Vulpine Blue, and The Engine Room.

Download the Full Report.

#MoreThanCode Executive Summary Released!

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Download the Executive Summary. Want to be notified about the Full Report? Sign up here.

The Technology for Social Justice Field Scan is a participatory action research project intended to better understand the types of work currently being done with technology for social justice (and more broadly, in the public interest), as well as the pathways people take into this work. The goal is to identify people, groups, and networks who work in this space, including those who are not ‘the usual suspects’ in the civic technology world, and to learn from them: what their paths into the work have been; what they see as their greatest constraints; where they see barriers; and what they feel is most needed to grow and diversify the field.

Practitioner Profile: Yeshimabeit Milner

Wed, 30 May 2018 17:00:00 +0000

Yeshimabeit Milner, technologist, co-founder and Executive Director of Data for Black Lives, still remembers how it felt when she was suspended from school in sixth grade. She was in a computer class at her middle school in Miami, Florida.

“I was talking out of turn because I was excited about the lesson,” she recalled. “Then out of nowhere the teacher is like, ‘You have to go to three-day suspension. That’s disrespectful.’”

So Yeshimabeit — who goes by Yeshi — missed her classes and languished in a cold room where many of the other students napped.

“We had to line up for everything: to go to the bathroom, to lunch,” she said. “I was so traumatized. I remember feeling like I was criminal, like I was really bad kid — like I had done something terribly wrong, and that there was something inherently bad about me for me to be treated like that.”

The irony was that Yeshi had always loved and excelled at school, and had a special appreciation for computers and technology. At the time of her suspension, she was in a magnet program for high achievers.

“I think that for a lot of young Black people, passion can be seen as being disruptive and can be criminalized,” Yeshi said.

Today, Yeshi realizes that her experiences were part of a trend in school disciplinary policies that civil rights activists call the “school-to-prison pipeline.” Low-income students of color are often suspended, expelled or arrested for behaviors that their white or wealthier peers are punished less harshly for. Without her mother’s constant intervention with school administrators, Yeshi noted, she would likely have been “tracked” away from the institutions that have helped her to succeed today.

“I was placed in alternative education in elementary school, a separate class that many of the poorer, first generation immigrant students in the school were placed in. Fortunately, my mother advocated on my behalf and I stayed in the advanced class,” she said. Had she remained in that program, she added, “I wouldn’t have gone on to this really good high school program; I would have never gone to Brown University.”

As it was, in spite of the magnet program that Yeshi was enrolled in at the time of her suspension, her middle school was run “like a prison.” If you forgot your ID, Yeshi said, you would be sent home. If you wore a black t-shirt underneath your uniform, you would be suspended for wearing a “gang color,” she explained.

This was the atmosphere in Miami when one day, while Yeshi was a senior in high school, some students at a neighboring high school organized a protest after an administrator put a student in a choke hold. The young people, Yeshi remembered, had congregated peacefully in the cafeteria.

“The city and the school district sent in SWAT vans with fully armed police officers ready for combat,” she said. “I remember watching young people that I went to elementary school with getting slammed against cars, hit with batons. The headliner on CNN said, ‘Riot at Miami Senior High School.’ This was not a riot. These young people should have been recognized for their courage and leadership, but instead this happened.”

Yeshi was incensed. She joined a local group, the Power U Center for Social Change, that organized youth and fought against school-to-prison pipeline practices. Yeshi and other young people at Power U strongly suspected that their schools were disproportionately punishing its students. They wanted to find the statistics to prove it.

“We would go to the school board meeting and testify in front of the school board, and we would be totally ignored,” Yeshi said. “The superintendent would turn around and ignore us. The school board members would go on their computer or talk to their assistant.”

She remembers thinking, “This is not going to work. We need to do our own data collection.”

Working with Power U, Yeshi surveyed 600 students.

“I’m going out in front of elementary, high schools, talking to young people, going to block parties, doing outreach,” Yeshi recalled. “It was powerful, because a lot of these kids… no one has ever asked them about their experiences getting suspended.”

The results of that survey were published in a comic book titled, “Telling It Like It Is: Miami Youth Speak Out on the School-to-Prison Pipeline.”

“That comic book was used in Miami to help pass restorative justice policies,” said Yeshi. “Folks all over the country have talked about how they used that comic book. It was helpful in swaying decision makers. I watched young people open the book, read it, and say, ‘I’m not a bad student because I got suspended. This is a problem that’s happening nationwide. It’s called the school-to-prison pipeline.’”

Then, when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in central Florida by George Zimmerman. Yeshi remembers watching young people like herself use technology and social media to call each other to action. She saw the story of Trayvon go viral on Facebook and traveled with Power U to the state capitol, and became part of the movement for Black lives and against police brutality. She ran a live stream of the protests, she recalled, because “there were so many people who wanted to be there with us who physically couldn’t or were not in Florida.”

Soon after, Yeshi went on to Brown University, where she completed a BA in Africana Studies.

“My focus was to get skills, especially data and analytics and in research, to bring back to Miami,” she said. During summer and winter breaks, she would return home to organize with Power U. After graduating, she took a job with the organization, working on a campaign to collect data and change policies related to the high rate of Black infant mortality rates. In the US, Black babies have two times the mortality rate of white babies, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

“This is a disparity that’s been the same for the past fifty years, even though the infant mortality rate has declined overall,” said Yeshi.

Yeshi got together with a group of young Black mothers to survey 300 mothers about their experiences in hospitals in Miami. She learned that breastfeeding was linked to infant health, and that for Black women, it was a political issue.

“One of the contributing factors to Black infant mortality was the ways in which hospitals discouraged Black women from breastfeeding,” she explained. “Black women wanted to breastfeed, but they go into the hospital and they’re given bags of infant formula. We found out through our research that there were all these kickbacks that Jackson Hospital was getting from these infant formula companies.”

Scholars at Loyola Marymount University helped Power U to crunch the numbers. Yeshi used the results to author a report titled, “A Call for Birth Justice in Miami.” She argued that breastfeeding and child health are racial justice issues, and called for policy changes to make hospitals more baby-friendly.

Miami’s public hospital, Jackson Memorial, had ignored Black women’s complaints for years, Yeshi said. But after Power U published its report and gained attention from the press, the hospital phoned the organization.

“Their reputation is their bread and butter, and they asked us, ‘Did you do this research yourselves?” Yeshi remembered. “And we’re like, ‘Yes. This is something that’s been really a pressing and urgent issue in the community.’ Literally, while I was doing this campaign, one of our member leaders passed away because of complications while giving birth.” The hospital responded by making “sweeping changes” to its maternal and child health ward, according to Yeshi.

“It fired the head OB-GYN and a ton of of her people, replaced them, totally revamped its program and even said, ‘Next time we do policy, we need to include Black and low-income mothers,’” she said. “That was like, wow, this is powerful. We couldn’t bring three hundred moms into the meeting with us to the hospital with the CEO and all his staff, but they couldn’t deny the data that we collected.”

Yeshi wondered, “How do we scale this? How do we include even more people?”

Several years later, Yeshi was living in New York City and working as a campaign manager for the racial justice organization, Color of Change. Her job was to support organizers around the country by training them to use digital tools, such as an online petition that was developed by Color of Change. At the same time, she was reading, researching and talking to others about racial bias in everyday technologies like algorithms and artificial intelligence.

One day, she doodled the phrase, “Data for Black Lives.” She stared at the words and pondered their implication. What if she could bring together scientists and activists who were thinking about data and racial justice?

“I didn’t really know how to start,” she recalled.

She reached out to an old college friend, Lucas Mason-Brown, a PhD mathematics candidate at MIT. Together, they decided to start an organization called Data for Black Lives, and launch it with a conference at the university.

“We wanted to bring together people who don’t believe that their work is very political, may even get defensive when we talk about algorithmic bias, or machine learning and how racism is baked in to some of these technologies,” Yeshi said.

Yeshi and Lucas reached out to Black youth organizations, service providers and MIT students. They received support from MIT’s president, the Black Student Union and Black Alumni Association.

“As we started talking about Data for Black Lives, we were just amazed at how those four words unleashed people’s imagination around what was possible,” Yeshi said. Black technologists, engineers and physicists — many of whom were women — “came out of the woodwork.”

“People talked about their experiences being a Black physicist, being a Black mathematician, how they’ve had to separate their Black identity from their identity as a scientist,” Yeshi said. “I was very surprised that there were this many Black people who are literally hiding in laboratories, keeping their heads down, trying to get their work done, but definitely paying attention to the protests, talking with their families over dinner about what’s going on all over the world.”

She added, “There were white mathematicians who said, ‘We have political conversations, too. Our conversations are just very biased, because it’s us talking in circles. We don’t know anybody who’s out here doing activism. We need to be connected to those people, because maybe we’ll have a better understanding and we’ll know how we can help.’”

She paused.

“People are looking for a space where they can engage in these ideas, learn, and build with people. I think that’s why we can say we’re a movement. My real goal around Data for Black Lives is creating a political home for people who don’t have one.”

The conference sold out within a week and offered over 100 scholarships scholarships. It featured panels that discussed STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education — but “not the same way that it has been talked about,” Yeshi said. “We have to talk about the school-to-prison pipeline. You can put all the coding bootcamps in all the schools, but if you’re not addressing the state violence that’s happening in schools, then there are no tech initiatives that are going to fulfill whatever gaps folks are talking about.”

Yeshi and Lucas invited and worked closely with organizers who wanted to use data to expand their work. One woman heard about the Data for Black Lives conference and traveled from a small town in Virginia. She asked for help training her community’s youth to collect data to show how murders of Black people were being ignored by police. Yeshi now talks with her on the phone weekly and is developing a toolkit for survey collection. She plans on visiting Virginia and helping to knock on doors.

The conference featured a Hackathon, where five organizing groups spoke about their work and some of the data tech challenges that they had. One of the needs expressed, Yeshi said, was for a website database that could help people — especially those who are or were formerly in prison — determine whether or not they had the right to vote.

“That’s a very simple data tool to make that can have such an important impact on shaping the outcomes of this country — but most importantly, the lives of people who need to be voting and need to have their say in the decisions that are impacting their lives,” she explained.

“That’s the kind of tone that I wanted to set for the conference,” Yeshi added. “Not just the urgency of what’s happening, the realness of the suffering that’s happening in this country, and the fact that it’s going to probably get worse — but also the resilience, hope, imagination and the possibilities that we have. Even as discrimination becomes an even more high-tech enterprise, we have the tools, data, people and collective intelligence to make real change and protect our communities.”

Practitioner Profile: Noel Hidalgo

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:50:00 +0000

When Noel Hidalgo looks at data, he sees opportunities to correct injustice. During the last five years, Noel — a largely self-taught programmer, information technologist and proponent of open data — has taken on an ambitious task.

“I set on a path to understand how the New York City government can improve its operations,” he said. “People should have access to government information to help make decisions and hold government accountable.”

Today, Noel is Executive Director of BetaNYC, a nonprofit organization that works with government agencies, neighborhood groups, technologists and planners to collect, share, analyze and apply findings from datasets on daily-life issues ranging from noise complaints to the rates of water use for trees in public spaces. In its several years of existence, the group has proposed dozens of open data recommendations — fourteen of which have since been implemented into state laws.

BetaNYC began in as a meet-up called the “Open NY Forum,” convened by a doctoral student, Hailey Cooperrider.

“It was just a bunch of friends hanging out, talking about open government, and it just gave us an excuse to meet,” Noel recalled. In early 2013, the group drafted a policy plan titled, “The People’s Roadmap to a Digital NYC.” The Roadmap was the result of several years worth of listening sessions, public forums, community events and workshops held in all five boroughs, Noel said. It was a response to three previous Digital Roadmaps authored by then-Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. Although the city boasted some forward-thinking digital accessibility and freedom-of-information laws, the People’s Roadmap found that it fell short of being truly comprehensive.

“While pioneering, we felt the government-created roadmap needed a more complete voice,” reads the People’s Roadmap. “This document is created by the people, for the people of New York City. Cesar Chavez is quoted as saying, ‘The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.’ As the people of New York, we too agree that the fight is not about the bits and bytes. The fight is for the people to connect and empower themselves.”

At the time, Noel was working as a program manager for Code for America. He helped to develop its Brigade program, which deploys volunteer technologists to come up with open-source technology solutions to address community problems. Code for America Brigades have developed apps that allow parents to locate their children’s school buses in real time, Floridians to track proposed legislation, and data visualization tools to keep Louisville judges updated on the changing number of prisoners in local jails, for example.

In 2013, New York state governor, Andrew Cuomo, launched an open data portal and initiative that was directly influenced by the People’s Roadmap authored by Noel’s meetup group. He even used the group’s name, “Open NY.” To avoid confusion, Open NY changed its name to BetaNYC.

In 2015, Noel was awarded a fellowship with the New York-based think tank, Data and Society Research Institute. As he recruited more people to build out BetaNYC, the city began hiring the group to host “data jams” — convenings of regional planners, technologists and residents to analyze open data. BetaNYC developed curriculum for its public workshops and trainings to teach people of all walks in life to learn about and use open data. BetaNYC has worked with the Parks Department and currently with New York City’s community boards — neighborhood-level decision-makers who deal with land use, zoning, licensing and budgeting issues. Much of the work is educational and design-oriented, Noel said.

“Nobody’s creating open data curriculum,” Noel explained. “Through our advocacy we’ve come up with a very clear kind of framework of what we want data to look like. We want data to be in the open data portal, and because the open data portal has a tabular interface, we want to be able to just use the data as it is in the open data portal. We also want there to be an associated curriculum around that data, so that way you can learn how to use the data with purpose — without just the data set being there… or a data dictionary, which is like the explanation of all the data values just sitting there. The data set should be super accessible.”

Noel’s interests in technology and current events were cultivated early in his life. As the son of Puerto Ricans who relocated to Dayton, Ohio, he remembers watching on television the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen massacre.

“My father was like, ‘You have to study the news,’” Noel said. “So we would sit as a family, and we would watch the nightly news together in the evening, tune into CNN and watch the last gasps of the 20th century devolve and the beginning of the 21st century evolve.”

There weren’t computer classes beyond typing in Noel’s schools, but his father was an early adopter of technology and brought home a Macintosh computer in 1984. Noel read up about BBS networks and modems.

“I got to see the inner parts of computers and understand what they were,” he said. He attended ham radio conventions held by Air Force veterans, accessing a mentorship that he characterized as “a blend between survivalism and technology.”

As a result, by the time Noel failed out of American University, he was proficient in computer networking (also from playing Doom with his friends) and managing websites.

“I called up the Internet service provider that I had been purchasing service from, and I was like, ‘I see that you’re looking for someone to do Macintosh Help Desk. I’ve taught myself that,’” he said. He landed a job with them and stayed for two years, leaving for another Mac tech support position at the RAND Corporation. He picked up additional skills in systems and network administration.

In 2003, the US invaded Iraq again.

“I said, ‘Fuck this, I need to do something political,’” Noel remembered. He volunteered for John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He said, “That’s when I started to figure out what it’s like to meld politics, policy and technology together.”

Noel’s work phone-banking at the Kerry campaign office led to a job in technical support for the Democratic National Convention, and then later at the New York state senate.

“Democrats didn’t have hardware,” Noel recalled of the his time at the state senate. “Republicans had one computer per employee. Democrats had three employees per computer. They monitored every single telephone number that you called and would charge you. It was this weird world where the government that is supposed to be addressing people’s problems was very under-resourced, not using cutting edge technology. There was no focus on capacity-building. Whether it was on the electoral side, the campaign side, or the policy side, nobody was ever focused on teaching new tools and adopting new processes.”

Noel’s post at the state senate was as “uber-technologist,” he said.

“My job was essentially to do all type of technology support,” he explained. “My responsibility was to provide frontline support for the hardware that I had to build. State senators would take campaign funds and earmark that for computer equipment. I would salvage boxes and monitors from non-profit lists in the city. Then, I would install either Ubuntu, or a cracked version of Windows, and install either OpenOffice or a cracked version of Office. Then I’d provide tech support on a parallel network that was running in the state senate’s infrastructure.”

Years later, after an extended backpacking trip around the world, Noel returned to work at the state senate. By then, he was heavily involved in the open source programming community and had founded NYC’s Drupal community. When, after two years, the senate returned to Republican hands and Noel’s job ended, other strands of Noel’s work and life began coming together.

“Open data, open government, and open source; everything was converging,” he said.

A colleague had recruited Noel to be part of a “transparency working group” of the organization, Reinvent Albany. Reinvent Albany bills itself as a nonprofit “funded by individuals and foundations from across the political spectrum, interested in the power of the Internet to make our state government more responsive, open and effective.”

“The transparency working group became a coalition of good government groups that would eventually end up fighting for the city’s open data law and pass the city’s open data law,” said Noel. To Noel, “good government” is one that is responsive to people. Examples he cited of good government in action include the development of bicycle lanes in New York City that “encourage drivers to pay attention that there’s gonna be cyclists, and that they have to share the road with people,” and offering universal pre-Kindergarten that ”leverages child care centers and daycare centers that are currently providing services” and targets populations who have historically been neglected.

The success passing Albany’s open data law inspired Noel to fuse his work in technical support with political advocacy.

“There was an opportunity for shaping policy direction and making government work for more people and to address certain levels of injustice,” he said.

Noel was by then working for Code for America. Hack nights that he hosted provided the space for community conversations that would become the People’s Roadmap to a Digital New York City.

“That became the foundation of the work that I’ve been doing over the past few years,” Noel said. “Looking specifically at how to get more participation and more effective government, or how to integrate solutions into government operations that make government more responsive to people’s demands. How do you deal with the digital divide? How do you engender human-centered design practices within government, when really people are just told to keep the lights on and do the same type of service provision that you’ve been doing for the last twenty years?”

NYC community boards are a case in point, said Noel. “We’re focusing on the community board because it is an intersection of government and government agencies and government resources as well as the volunteer citizenry. It is the collision of government and the people in regards to government operations,” he explained.

BetaNYC has been working with borough president’s offices to help community boards integrate digital technology into their workings.

“Out of eight million New Yorkers, only one million have access to mobile-friendly community board websites,” he added. “Community board websites are where the rubber on the ground is, in regards to zoning, and in regards to petitions and permits. Liquor licenses, hair salons, neon signs, nail salons, sidewalk cafes. If you’re going to do any type of zoning variation, you have to go to a community board. If you want a license or a certain type of permit, you have to go to a community board. If you want to affect the city’s capital budget, you need to go to a community board. The community board starts the municipal budget process.”

“So we want to improve that system and provide 21st-century tools and opportunities,” said Noel. “This is a form of democracy that is supposed to be people-powered, and I want to ensure that.”

BetaNYC is working with community boards to livestream and archive meetings online. Fellows in BetaNYC’s Civic Innovation Lab program are building tools and curriculum for community boards. Noel and BetaNYC are also working with NYC’s non-emergency information call center, 311, to redesign its open data collection process and tools. Data collected by 311’s clearinghouse includes data on complaints, which, when archived correctly, could be able to help community boards hold agencies accountable, Noel explained.

“We have this tool that we’re launching called Board Stat, which is a dashboard that helps bring transparency to 311 calls,” he said. “Right now, 311 calls go to the agency, and community boards don’t have reports of the service requests. Now, community boards will have a dashboard where they can see in aggregate the types of 311 calls that agencies are responding to. They’ll see top 10 service conditions, top 20 descriptors. They’re gonna see location and addresses that are susceptible to 311 calls — and this cuts across a number of different ways. Where are noise complaints coming from? Where are flooded streets? Where are heat and hot water complaints coming from? We’re now trying to think through, okay, now that we’ve been advocating for this data to be useful, how do we use it?”

There are fifty-nine community boards, Noel added, and in turn, “fifty-nine different practices.” Ideally, he said, BetaNYC could dig through the workflows of community boards to identify ways that they’re already using information and data to make decisions.

“We would try to bring some type of normalization to different types of data practices and come up with curriculum or best practices of like, ‘This is the type of data that you should be looking at, here’s how you use that data to address this particular question,’” he said.

“We need to pull the curtain back, set up the process to start demystifying all of this and find resources to do this work,” Noel said. “I think that people are clearly identifying a huge literacy gap. We’re still dealing with a huge digital divide in regards to government information being produced in a structured manner. The question is: How do we bridge that divide? Some of us are fortunate enough to live in cities where there is some good, structured data. How do we really move that forward? How do we build literacy on top of that?”

Practitioner Profile: Murray Cox

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:40:00 +0000

In 2014, Murray Cox moved to the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York, and quit his tech job.

“I wanted to do something that had value,” he said. “I wasn’t satisfied working in a tech company. I don’t believe that they change the world for the better.”

Murray was trained in Computer Science and had worked a succession of programming and IT jobs, both in his home country, Australia, and the US. But for several years, he had been trying to distance himself from technology and establish a life as a social justice-oriented photojournalist instead. He traveled to Venezuela in to document participatory forms of democracy.

“I was planning to combat, at least in the US or mainstream media, the idea that Venezuela was a dictatorship,” he said. In Venezuela, Murray became interested in food justice projects. He carried that enthusiasm with him to Bed-Stuy, where he started a food justice project. He also photographed other food projects nearby in his rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood, “using food as a lens to look at the changes in the neighborhood.”

Murray connected with local, grassroots, Black-led projects. One day, while taking pictures at a community garden, Murray met one of the founders of a local organization, DIVAS (Digital Interactive Visual Arts Sciences) for Social Justice. DIVAS teaches media literacy and tech skills to young women of color. Shortly afterward, Murray began volunteering for the organization. With the youth at DIVAS, Murray created, “My Sister’s Keeper,” an app that provides affirmations and advice via video recordings and explores questions of race, gender and growing up.

“I taught them how to code, and then with the other facilitators how to video, set up lighting, and so they were actually interviewing people for the content for the app,” Murray said.

In 2014, for DIVAS’ summer camp program, Murray began devising curriculum to talk to students about gentrification using data.

“I was teaching them maps and statistics,” he said. “On my mind were things like the rising costs of housing as a root cause of displacement. I noticed that a couple of journalists, one in San Francisco and one in New York, were using Airbnb data to talk about how Airbnb was being used in those cities. I had questions like, ‘How was Airbnb being used in my neighborhood?’ So I decided that I would see if I could get the data from my own neighborhood.”

Housing activists have long accused Airbnb of taking long-term housing off the market and driving up rental prices. In New York, it is illegal to list an entire apartment for rent for less than 30 days, unless a permanent resident is present. The law is meant to prevent commercial landlords from running illegal hotels.

Murray wrote code to scrape Airbnb’s online data and mapped the results, using open source software tools to create an interactive web-based interface. His maps showed that the majority of listings on Airbnb in his Bed-Stuy neighborhood were for entire homes, violating New York’s law.

“I also found quite a lot of hosts that had multiple Airbnbs,” he said. “I decided to collect data for the whole city.”

In February 2016, Inside Airbnb in New York City was released, with tools to navigate through what Murray thought were the key metrics of the story. A user could sort data in various neighborhoods, and also download the data for free.

Murray became acquainted with Tom Slee, a Canadian software engineer and critic of so-called “sharing economy” ventures. Slee had been tracking Airbnb data since 2013. At the end of 2015, both men noticed that right before Airbnb released a “data snapshot” of its New York City listings, claiming that it was “the first time Airbnb has voluntarily shared city data on a wide scale on how its hosts use the online platform,” the company had deleted 1,500 of its “entire home” listings in the area.

In a report that Murray and Tom wrote to expose the company’s actions, they stated: “Airbnb used the data snapshot to paint a misleading picture of its business: Airbnb’s message was that only 10 percent of Entire Homes listings belonged to hosts with multiple listings. Multiple-lister hosts earned 41 percent of the complete Entire Home revenue during the 2014-2015 year. This number is in line with what critics have been claiming for the last two years: a disproportionate amount of Airbnb’s revenue is gained from commercial operators offering listings that are more likely to disrupt neighbors and displace long-term residents, and many of which are illegal under New York State law.”

Initially, Murray said, he imagined publishing his findings as part of a more seemingly “objective” data journalism piece. But he changed his mind.

“I started to think about these polarized issues that we have in the world — and Airbnb happens to be one of them — where journalists take a neutral approach and then give equal weight to both sides, even when one side is putting marketing spin on things, not supplying information and misdirecting facts,” he remembered thinking.

“I felt Airbnb was doing this in the way that they dismissed any type of data talking about the issue; they talked about home sharing and how people were just renting out spare rooms. I didn’t want to give them equal weight, because at that point they’d raised a few billion dollars and were using it to control the conversation… like there’d be marketing campaigns in New York City subways, for example.

So I thought that it would be a better approach to take a contrary position, because people were going to come to my site, I hoped, and I wanted them to go away not thinking, ‘Oh, is it good? Is it bad?’ but actually coming away with an opinion. I was trying to be responsible. I was trying to base it on data, but I was also layering on my activism and opinion that I thought it was bad for housing, and I thought it was affecting our residential neighborhoods.”

Airbnb initially denied removing the listings for its 2015 data snapshot, but within weeks a company representative admitted in a letter to the New York State Assembly and Senate, “we removed approximately 1,500 listings from our platform in New York City that were controlled by commercial operators and did not reflect Airbnb’s vision for our community.”

When Inside Airbnb first published, Murray was not very connected to housing rights activists in New York City. He worked as a volunteer on the project and recruited a friend who he had worked with previously and was a designer. Murray supported himself with part-time consulting work. He didn’t expect to fund the project externally. Murray was wary of grant funding, he said, since Inside Airbnb “didn’t really align with nonprofit priorities and is a slightly political project.”

He explained, “It’s anti-corporate, and some people still think Airbnb is cool and a good thing. So I just perceive that getting foundation funding wouldn’t be available, and I didn’t really want to open myself up to corporate funding via hotel interests groups, for example.”

To his surprise, within months after the site went live, Murray began receiving requests from hospitality researchers willing to pay for data.

“They were asking me, ‘Can you add this city? Can you provide data on the whole country?’” Murray recalled. “So I started to make data sales, and that started to help sustain the project. We decided that we would split the money according to how much time we were putting into the project, like a cooperative model.”

He added, “But I tried not to think about the commercial aspects, because otherwise you start thinking about changing the project to get more data sales.”

Today, Inside Airbnb tracks data from 80 different cities worldwide. Inside Airbnb continues to track data on hosts with multiple listings, and it provides that information to city officials in New York and San Francisco for enforcement purposes, Murray said. As Inside Airbnb established itself, Murray joined the Coalition Against Illegal Hotels in New York City, which comprised of members from 40 different affordable housing and tenants’ rights groups. In March 2017, Inside Airbnb published its latest report, The Face of Airbnb, New York City - Airbnb as a Racial Gentrification Tool, which was endorsed by the Brooklyn-based Crown Heights Tenants Union.

The report found that “Black neighborhoods with the most Airbnb use are racially gentrifying, and the (often illegal) economic benefits of Airbnb accrue disproportionately to new, white residents and white speculators; while the majority Black residents in those communities suffer the most from the loss of housing, tenant harassment and the disruption of their communities. Across all 72 predominantly Black New York City neighborhoods, Airbnb hosts are five times more likely to be white. In those neighborhoods, the Airbnb host population is 74 percent white, while the white resident population is only 13.9 percent.”

Currently, Murray works with activists in Los Angeles, California, where tenants rights groups are pushing for an ordinance that would restrict Airbnb hosts to rent out their homes for half the year. Inside Airbnb’s latest report, Airbnb vs Rent, was inspired by conversations about that controversial 180-day rental cap.

“I came up with this comparison of using census data, ‘How much could you rent a typical house in that neighborhood?’ versus renting it out on Airbnb for 30, 60, 90, 120, 180 nights, and seeing at what point would you break even and therefore have an incentive to rent on Airbnb versus renting for a whole year to a tenant,” Murray said. “That was a device to discuss whether caps would be good for the city, and also what the cap should be.”

As a techie in social justice spaces, and an activist in techie spaces, Murray has found that he often bridges two very different worlds. Back when Inside Airbnb was just emerging, Murray would share some of his efforts with coworkers at a tech company.

“They all thought it was a little bit strange,” he recalled. “They were trying to make suggestions of how I could make money from it, and they didn’t really quite understand. I do keep in touch with some of those people, and some of those people I’ve been trying to kind of convert into supporters of activism. I don’t find that tech companies are good breeders for activists or even just people that are socially aware.”

Slowly, Murray is building a network of people with tech backgrounds who are interested in social justice. He is collaborating on a project to create jobs outside the tourist economy in Venice, Italy, and assembling a collective of techies in New York City.

“Most tech people are not very good at organizing,” Murray said. “They’re not even really connected with community groups either. That’s something that I work hard at: connecting with community groups. So I’m trying to find the opportunities to connect not just the community groups for my own projects, but also other people that don’t know how to plug themselves in.”

Practitioner Profile: Kenyatta Forbes

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:30:00 +0000

Educator and Chicago native, Kenyatta Forbes, is in the business of encouraging people to think. She’s taught coding fundamentals to fourth graders via programmable robots, used iPads to customize Special Ed instruction in a public school classroom, and created a card game that forces players to talk about race and Blackness. She has long found creative ways to use technological tools for teaching and community organizing.

Kenyatta came into education “by happenstance,” she said. After studying video and animation in college, Kenyatta taught a clay animation class for kids.

“I was like, ‘Whoa. I kind of like working with younger students.’ Didn’t expect that,” she recalled.

Kenyatta earned a Master’s degree in Education and began working in Chicago’s public schools, teaching third grade, eighth grade, then Special Education.

“Then the iPads came and changed everything,” Kenyatta said.

The iPads were part of a State Board of Education grant awarded to two teachers at Kenyatta’s school. The recipients had proposed a short-term project for which the iPads would be used. The project, Kenyatta recalled, was “not as interactive or as engaging as one would have hoped it would be.” Then, it ended.

“No other teachers wanted to use the iPads,” Kenyatta remembered. “They were like, ‘I’m good on that. I already have enough to do here.’ And I was like, ‘Let me have them!’”

Kenyatta immediately found ways to use the iPads. She distributed them out to her students, uploaded with individualized questions and worksheets tailored for each one. After reading a lesson together as a class, each student could work on the skills specific to their needs.

“I think that one of the biggest challenges for a Special Ed, or a diverse learner, teacher, is that you can’t clone yourself,” she said. “A lot of the kids are at different levels, which requires you to have different content ready for them. So, it was just a really great way for me to be able to clone myself, and have individual content set up on an iPad for students. They can go work independently at their level while I’m working with other kids.”

Soon, Kenyatta was working as Technology Coordinator and Digital Media Teacher at the school. Her duties shifted.

“It became trying to help other teachers along their iPad journey,” she said. “You have a certain sect of teachers who are like, ‘I’ve been doing it this way since before Moses,’ and I get that. But it’s also really dangerous to say, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it’ — especially when you’re competing with a digital native. I look at my niece who’s three, and she can operate a smartphone and an iPad with ease.

You have to shift along with what’s happening currently. When I was talking to teachers about this, I was saying, ‘Think about Disney movies. Mickey Mouse back in the 1960s, black-and-white, and then you fast-forward to now. Disney had to shift, and as educators, we also have to shift. It’s not that what you’re doing is wrong or not as good, it’s just taking that content and bringing it to what students are used to engaging with now.’”

As technologies continued to change, Kenyatta and her colleagues faced new challenges. One day, the state of Illinois announced that going forward, a test that had formerly been on paper would be administered online instead. Suddenly, Kenyatta remembered, kindergarteners had to master the motor skill of clicking a mouse — and it was her job to teach them. Another time, students who couldn’t yet read had to learn what email was.

“Oh, this is going to be an interesting challenge,” Kenyatta remembered thinking. “It’s an abstract concept. Think about it: an email to them flies through the air.”

Kenyatta did some research and found an app that she installed on all of the iPads in the classroom.

“The kids drew pictures and emailed themselves, so they could understand that an email is kind of an electronic thing that goes from one point to the other point,” she said. “So, we have a little picture. And if they wanted to send it to Adam, they would click Adam’s face.”

The tech curriculum that Kenyatta developed was “very grade by grade,” she said. For the fourth and fifth graders, Kenyatta devised ways to “sneak in 21st century skills” by bringing in Sphero balls — robotic balls controlled by simple codes written in an app.

Sometimes, Kenyatta and her students would learn together.

“I have no problem fumbling through something with a kid,” Kenyatta said. “I’m always like, ‘Oh, how did you do that? Can you show me?’ That’s not a comfortable place for some educators; they want to be the authoritative person in the space. I’m just like, ‘We’re all learning. I want to be a life-long learner, so let’s figure this out together.’ It’s very different.”

These days, Kenyatta is Community Manager for Hive Chicago, a youth educational organization under the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. It creates and supports programming and professional development opportunities for youth, often outside of schools. Kenyatta connects Hive Chicago’s eighty member organizations with techies, parents, educators and other Chicago residents to identify and address common problems that youth face.

One of Hive Chicago’s most well-known innovations is an app, Ride W/Me, that allows young people riding public transit in the city to find and accompany each other. The app was developed in a partnership between students, teachers, developers and designers affiliated with Hive Chicago.

Hive Chicago convenes community-wide meetings, trainings for educators, Hackathons and other events. Recently, Kenyatta said, Hive Chicago has been talking about the impact of the repeal of DACA on young people in the city, and net neutrality.

At Hive Chicago, Kenyatta is often the person who introduces people and ideas.

“A lot of my work is behind the scenes, and it’s about elevating other people’s work,” Kenyatta said. “I often get that email like, ‘Hey, I’m trying to learn about the little Chromebooks.’ Or, ‘Do you know anybody who’s doing a fashion program?’ A lot of my job is knowing what organizations are up to, and then also knowing what organizations need. So, I will periodically do a needs assessment within the network, and that also helps figuring out what kind of professional development we want to run, as well.”

Using and understanding technology has been central in much of Kenyatta’s work. But, she noted, technology “is only a medium.”

“Technology is the vehicle to empowerment,” Kenyatta said. “It’s access to information. What I do doesn’t center around technology. I would consider myself more of a community organizer than a technologist.”

Early in 2017, Kenyatta launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Trading Races, a “party game for Black culture.”

“The objective of the game is that people out-Black each other,” she explained. “If you were to put down Nelson Mandela, I’d look at my hand and try to out-Black you. I may put down Malcolm X. And then, we have to have a conversation about who we think is Blackest, and why. It’s a way to talk about the construct of race, and how people identify it, or what kind of biases or construct they’ve come up with, in a non-confrontational way.”

Trading Races has been featured on VICE News, NPR and used to teach university-level Sociology classes. Part of the inspiration for the game, Kenyatta said, was an trip she took at age twenty-four to Germany.

“I remember being floored at how successfully they’ve dealt with the Holocaust, and thinking in my head, ‘How different would America be if they had dealt with slavery in the same way?’” she recalled.

“It was the first time that I didn’t feel the color of my skin was at the forefront of my interactions with people. I was there for about six months, and it was interesting being there for the first month, because I had to unlearn institutional racism. I would go into a store — and in the States, when I’m going into the store, I’m going to be followed. There, I would walk in. They would be like, ‘Hello,’ and they would go into the back room. And I was like, ‘Wait, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, which is watching me so I can shop.’ Now I feel uncomfortable. Do I leave? If I leave right now, will she think I stole something? It’s too much. And then it’s like, ‘Ken, just buy the shirt.’ So, it was great having to unlearn that, but then devastating having to fly back and relearn it all over again.”

Practitioner Profile: Josh Breitbart

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:20:00 +0000

Josh Breitbart’s plans for the future are both humble and huge: From his post as the first-ever senior broadband advisor at Mayor de Blasio’s office in New York City, he quietly sets up meetings between government planners and community organizers to wrest ever-evolving technologies of communication (high-speed wireless Internet, for example) away from pure private market control and secure them firmly in the hands of residents in working-class areas such as Red Hook, Mott Haven and Queensbridge.

Among the projects that Breitbart has initiated or supported is the city’s plan to spend $10 million to connect 16,000 residents at five public housing sites with free broadband service. But that’s not all: Residents also learn technical skills so that they can participate in operating and repairing their community’s networks.

“I don’t think of myself as someone who works in the tech sector, and I certainly don’t refer to myself as a technologist,” said Breitbart. “Instead of pursuing coding there was another space where I could contribute: the democratic governance of technology. The Internet is a real, physical thing, and that seems to be left out somewhere between law and code. There are actual materials and electromagnetic signals. We need democratic processes determining where we put those things and how we run them day-to-day, or how we oversee the institutions or corporations that run them day-to-day.”

Breitbart grew up in Park Slope, now one of Brooklyn’s most upscale neighborhoods. He was raised by an independent filmmaker father and reproductive justice activist mother.

“I think that for a variety of reasons, both through my the network of people, historical timing, partners and friends, as well as my personal race, gender, and education privilege, I have been able to form a career engaged in this effort, which I just think is incredible,” he said.

Breitbart’s interest in the politics of communications as a platform for social change date back to his media activist days during the late 1990s. Back in his twenties, Breitbart co-founded Rooftop Films, a local film festival in New York City, and he contributed to Clamor, an alternative culture, left-wing magazine. In the early 2000s the global social justice movement dovetailed with the rise of the Internet as a platform for independent media distribution. Breitbart helped build Indymedia, a network established by independent and alternative media organizations and activists in Seattle, Washington, in 1999 to provide grassroots coverage of counter-globalization protests and movements. In 2004, Breitbart was part of the team that organized New York City’s Indymedia Center during the Republican National Convention protests.

“It became clear,” said Breitbart, “that in the movements for media democracy and mass participation in media creation there were things that needed to evolve: issues of racial and economic justice, and sexism in technology and access. And although there was this incredible explosion of content creation and using the Internet as a distribution platform, without the ability to democratically control that infrastructure it was incredibly limiting.”

Since then, Breitbart has fought for community control of communications infrastructure — explicitly focusing on policy and the racial and economic justice implications of access and ownership of such technologies. As the Policy Director for the now-defunct People’s Production House — which trained low-wage workers, immigrants, and young people in journalism and media literacy in New York and Washington, DC — he focused on securing equitable Internet access and testified before city and state officials and federal agencies on mobile broadband, net neutrality, the digital television transition, and government transparency. He worked to expand access to broadband in Philadelphia and conducted an investigation into the failure of the city’s Wireless Philadelphia initiative. From 2010 to 2015, Breitbart worked in Washington, DC, with New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, where he coordinated researchers, organizers and technologists to work with community members and create public computer centers, broadband adoption programs, and wireless network deployments — often conducted in partnership with government agencies, research institutions, educators and entrepreneurs.

Taking on Internet policy, Breitbart said, is the “logical extension” of “being the media,” Indymedia’s famous motto.

“At the time there were no prohibitions, there were just these powerful gatekeepers,” he said of the Internet during those years. “Since then, there has been a long fight to achieve net neutrality, which is a key element of democratic control. It’s only partial, but it’s still tremendous that we did any of that.”

When, in 2013, it became apparent that Bill de Blasio, a progressive, would become the first Democratic mayor of New York City in 20 years, Breitbart was thrilled. Breitbart talked to everyone he knew who had worked in the city government and “started putting it out to the universe” that he was interested in a job on broadband policy at the Mayor’s office. Around the same time, civil rights attorney, Maya Wiley, published a story in The Nation that promoted a WiFi project in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that Breitbart, working with OTI, had helped with. After Wiley was appointed counsel to the Mayor and she was assigned the task of leading the city’s broadband strategy, Wiley looked to hire Breitbart.

“Maya said that basically she knew who I was and knew my involvement — along with others — in the Red Hook WiFi project,” Breitbart recalled. “I understood how that project worked, how cities could scale it up, and I also happened to be a native New Yorker who graduated with an Ivy League degree from New York and went to New York public schools. I had moved into a job at a think tank through connections I had made at Indymedia. I had lots of different kinds of privilege.”

He paused.

“In the end, I feel like it comes back to having exemplary, visionary projects in the places where you want to achieve an impact,” referring to the Red Hook Wi-Fi example.

There is tremendous potential to create more equitable, universal and low-cost broadband systems right now, Breitbart added. There is also potential for epically-proportioned failures that could spiral out for decades to come.

“If you look at the history of the way that transportation infrastructure is built — highways in particular — there are a lot of negative examples,” said Breitbart. “We can learn from those mistakes.”

So far, in the US the “open wireless” movement that has set up community Wi-Fi in areas of some cities has largely been a “top-down” approach, dominated by “people with technological privilege who decide that they want to use that technological know-how and privilege to set up wireless access points for their neighbors,” according to Breitbart. “That dynamic is really challenging. That tends to be the kind of dynamic that drives gentrification or displacement, where you have young people with forms of privilege moving into communities that have inadequate infrastructure and low incomes.”

Projects like Red Hook Wi-Fi turn that approach on its head by supporting long-standing community organizations to take ownership and control of wireless networks. Red Hook Initiative, which led the Wi-Fi project that Breitbart worked on while with OTI, runs a job skills training program that pays young people to become “digital stewards” who install, maintain and promote the Wi-Fi network, which is free of charge to locals. The challenge for Breitbart is to figure out how to do that at city scale.

Ultimately, the goal is “not broadband for its own sake but part of a broader agenda of addressing some of the fundamental economic inequities in the city,” Breitbart said. “Just because you’ve gone out and purchased broadband access for somebody or a community it doesn’t mean you are going to achieve the political or social or economic transformation that broadband access can achieve. There’s got to be true participation from community members at various levels in that process. And we’re not talking about systems that were designed with that in mind — even before you get into the digital and Internet components of it.”

Breitbart perks up when he talks about working with community organizers and social justice activists to plot the future of the Internet. With a smile, he recounts his pitch at a typical encounter:

“I’m not here to try and tell you that the most important thing you’re going to work on this week is getting people access to Internet — but for ten minutes I need you to take all the brilliance that you have about community organizing, all the knowledge that you have about your community and the issues they face, and some awareness of the types of relationships that you’ve developed around all of that, and just put that brilliance to bear on what kind of processes we can use to connect all that to the infrastructure and tools and technologies that are going to be the underpinnings of the next 100 years of the cities that you’re living in.”

In recent years there have been a number of successful collaborations between city and federal governments and community media activists, Breitbart said. In Philadelphia, a network of community organizers and residents successfully pushed for a deal between their city and telecommunications giant, Comcast, to provide affordable and heavily discounted internet and cable to potentially hundreds of thousands of low-income people, raise pay for workers, contractors and subcontractors, and to invest far more heavily in educational and job opportunities for Philadelphia public school students and graduates. The “digital stewards” model being adapted at New York’s broadband sites, Breitbart said, was developed initially by Allied Media Project as part of the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Project (BTOP), to help bridge the technological divide and create jobs. The resulting Detroit Community Technology Project is responsible for scaling this work in both Detroit and New York.

The first thing funders can do, he said, is strengthen those networks of community groups and help them “gain political force” by funding political movements. Then, second, connect them with policy advocates like himself to engage community on technology issues.

“These types of citywide coalitions of organizations maintain a set of relationships among community-based or social justice organizations and provide a shared connection to the world of technology and telecommunications,” Breitbart said. “You increasingly see levels of government acknowledging the success and the importance of this approach to building technology and infrastructure as strategies for economic and community development.”

Practitioner Profile: Jess Kutch

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:10:00 +0000

What if there was an online platform that could connect low-wage workers, separated by distance, but who toil for the same global corporations?

The idea struck Jess Kutch back in 2011. It was November, and Jess was the Organizing Director of Change.org. A Target employee in Omaha, Nebraska, Anthony Hardwick, was making national headlines after he launched a petition on Change.org to protest his workplace’s decision to schedule shifts late on Thanksgiving Day. Anthony’s complaint touched a nerve for many. Within two weeks, nearly 200,000 of his fellow workers, Target shoppers and others had signed his online petition imploring Target to “save Thanksgiving.” Change.org helped Anthony to manage press inquiries and publicize his campaign. Some 150 people were inspired by him to circulate their own petitions lobbying similar retail giants to let employees rest on the federal holiday.

“I saw the potential,” Jess remembers. The organization was young and had recently introduced its now-iconic online petitions. “I was part of the team of folks brought in early that figured out how people can leverage popular technology to influence major corporations or other targets, like elected leaders,” she recalled.

But Jess, whose background includes labor organizing at SEIU and digital campaigning at Public Citizen, also saw the limitations of a general-use platform like Change.org in responding to the specific needs of workplace organizing that emerging leaders like Anthony faced. Indeed, despite coverage by New York Times, Reuters and other news outlets favorable toward Anthony’s efforts, Target did not capitulate to his demands in 2011, and it has continued to stay open on Thanksgiving night in the years since. Jess doesn’t know where Anthony is today, and the brief and powerful worker outcry following his Change.org petition was a missed opportunity, in her opinion.

“Anthony recruited tens of thousands of Target employees,” Jess lamented. “Those folks were never communicated to again as Target employees. They’re not going to be able to find each other again through Change.org.”

What if, Jess wondered, there was a platform similar to Change.org, except that it was committed to helping workers like Anthony grow as labor organizers and support each other after they speak out?

“I thought, ‘We need to do this now, because workers are losing,’” she said.

Jess and fellow labor activist, Michelle Miller, launched Coworker in 2013. A digital platform that supports far-flung workers to publicize and rally support over shared grievances, it has helped its users to pressure Netflix into providing all of its workers with parental leave, NYU to stop posting ads for unpaid internships, and Jimmy John’s to allow workers to show their tattoos. It also is a hub for employees at global chains, including Starbucks, Uber and Publix, who can click a button labeled, “Join this Network,” and instantly connect with (in the case of Starbucks) some 38,000 other fellow workers who have already signed up with Coworker to receive updates relevant to them. Data aggregation tools make it easy for networked workers to come up with media-friendly statistics like, “fifty-seven percent of Uber drivers surveyed say they’ve bought, leased or made substantial investments in vehicles to drive for Uber.” Additionally, Coworker offers event management and communication tools that connect people who’ve signed a petition with partner organizations that sponsor campaigns on the site.

“Every campaign, even unsuccessful ones, builds a network of employees inside that company,” explained Jess.

If a Starbucks worker today launches a petition on Coworker, she can immediately have access to everyone else connected to the site who has ever signed a Starbucks worker’s petition in the past. This model of organizing that Coworker utilizes, Jess explained, is known as “distributed organizing.” It can be understood, she added, as “tools and strategies to equip people to go off on their own, without direction from some sort of central body or institution or group.”

“When I think of distributed organizing,” Jess said, “I think of creating the conditions for people to lead their own campaigns. Sometimes it’s messy, because people are making decisions that maybe a professional organizer or an institution wouldn’t make — but it’s really a strategy of building power and supporting their leadership in a variety of ways.”

Workers inspire each other all the time, Jess explained, and Coworker is one vehicle that brings un-unionized workers — often who don’t necessarily think of themselves as “workers” — together and become politicized.

“Christie Williams at Starbucks was campaigning to end the ban on visible tattoos,” Jess recalled. “She didn’t think much when she started the campaign. She was just angry. She found our site through a link in a New York Times article about Starbucks and decided to launch her own campaign and ended up mobilizing tens of thousands of coworkers around the world. Not only that, she inspired workers at other companies to run similar campaigns — like at Jimmy John’s — and win those campaigns. She inspired a Publix grocery bagger to campaign Publix to allow for people to have beards, which has mobilized more than 10,000 Publix grocery store employees. There’s also the spreading of ideas where people see that a person is campaigning for something in their workplace, and I have the same issue in mine and I can do that, too. It’s a shift in how people think about their agency in the workplace.”

Today, Coworker has a half a million users. Jess wants to see that number grow to two million.

“I’d say broadly speaking we see ourselves as part of the future of the labor movement worldwide,” says Jess. “We’re interested in leveraging technology to turn labor institutions as they traditionally existed inside out and make the resources, the knowledge and strategies that have previously been locked away in traditional institutions available to everybody.”

Jess has long been inspired by the power of the Internet to create community and effect change.

“As a queer teenager, the first people that I came out to were on AOL,” she said. “That’s how I found community. I found people to give me rides to punk shows on AOL punk chat rooms.”

Jess was raised by a single mother who worked as a freelance graphic designer in Connecticut during the 1980s and 90s.

“It was precarious,” she remembered. “The income was inconsistent. There aren’t many protections today, and there definitely weren’t any protections back then for freelance workers to get money from clients who stiffed them. I watched all that happen as a kid.”

Notably, Jess added, her mother was not represented by the labor movement or even respected as a worker — a fact that continues to influence her approach to worker organizing today.

Jess’ first job after she graduated from Bennington College in Vermont was as an organizer for ACORN.

“I lasted about six months there,” she recalled. “The night that I quit, I had a two-hour long conversation with a woman who worked at Wal-Mart, and there were tears shed. I couldn’t get her to sign the card. We had this amazingly wonderful connection, but she was just like, ‘That is not going to do a thing.’”

Jess paused. “She wasn’t wrong. I had a lot of questions about the way the place was run. It did a lot of good in the world, but also it was really hard on organizers when they opened up a new chapter, which they had just done. It was, ‘you got to get cards signed.’ It just didn’t feel very generative.”

Jess’ next job was for the progressive consumer rights advocacy group and think tank, Public Citizen, in Washington, DC.

“I created a position for a digital organizer,” she said. “I convinced my director to allow me to step into it. That was a time when there weren’t digital organizers for organizations. That was really the only way to get into that field, and I knew that I had a passion for the potential of the Internet.”

Afterward, Jess directed online campaigns for the service employee’s union, SEIU, for several years. She left to work for Change.org. In 2012, at a RootsCamp conference organized by the New Organizing Institute, she met Nathan Woodhull, a software engineer interested in progressive social change. At the time, Jess and Michelle had been brainstorming ideas for the online platform that would become Coworker. But they had hit a wall. Neither of them knew how or wanted to build software.

Jess remembered, “I was literally saying that to somebody at RootsCamp, and they walked me over to Nathan. We realized we both had the same vision for what distributed organizing could be. A partnership was born from that moment.”

Nathan founded ControlShift Labs, which powers the Coworker platform. ThoughtWorks, a Chicago-based software company that sponsors social and economic justice projects, provided development support to ControlShift to build customizations specific for Coworker’s needs.

In the beginning, Jess recalled, it was often difficult to explain Coworker’s mission to advocacy groups and social justice foundations. Today, platforms like AirBnB and Uber have made digital platforms familiar to most people. But up until recently, Jess said, “we were educating the philanthropic world, as well as our partners, like folks who use our tool set, which could be worker centers, trade unions, folks in the labor movement, about what we’re trying to do,” she said. “We’re no longer having to explain what a platform is, how this is different from other digital organizing efforts. There’s just been an insane amount of confusion.”

Technology aside, Jess said, Coworker’s mission is simple: to empower one worker at a time to organize in their workplace.

“Most people in the United States don’t have experience with workplace organizing, unions, or any kind of power-building in the workplace,” said Jess. “Those traditions have largely been lost. How do we get folks to actually think of their relationship with their employer in the context of power, and make the behavior of organizing with coworkers and speaking out in the workplace a normal behavior, something that is part of the culture, not just in the United States but in the corporations?”

Ultimately, Jess said, Coworker dreams of growing as big as the multinational corporations that employ today’s workforce.

“We think that there’s enormous potential for workers at global corporations where there is command and control from a central headquarters, and those folks make decisions about the working conditions and wages of workers inside that company, perhaps up and down the supply chain worldwide,” she said. “Technology makes it possible for workers in different parts of the world for the same company to join together, collaborate, advance ideas and share information. I think of our work in a much bigger scale than I think the labor institutions we encounter might, because they’re bound by the countries they operate in and the labor laws in those countries. We have a dream of ten percent of every Fortune 500 company using the platform.”

Practitioner Profile: Jen-Mei Wu

Wed, 30 May 2018 16:00:00 +0000

LOL — or, Liberating Ourselves Locally — is the only people-of-color-led, gender-diverse, queer and trans inclusive hacker/ maker space anywhere.

“At least we’re the only group that calls ourselves that,” said Jen-Mei Wu, a social justice-minded engineer who lives in Oakland, California. She was the one who, in 2011, put out the original call for a “people of color-led maker space in Oakland.”

LOL, which combined forces w/ Peacock Rebellion, a “queer + trans people of color crew of artist-activist-healers”, is in a great position to be a long-term resource for the community after a successful campaign to preserve the building for the community.

On any given evening, LOL’s storefront might offer a “Hack, Learn and Share” gathering or a soap-making workshop, screen post-apocalyptic themed movies, provide practice space for emerging queer and trans stand-up comedians, or serve as meeting space for neighborhood racial justice activists. For a while, a local barber gave low-cost buzz cut fades in one corner of the shop. Recently, LOL hosted a three-day Dalit History Month Community Technology Weekend to bring together activists, software engineers, artists, and technologists “to develop solutions that improve and further the cause of Dalit self-respect.”

The eclectic mix that makes up LOL’s programming reflects ebbs and flows of Bay Area activist priorities, but they also reveal some of Wu’s political and professional connections. Born to Chinese immigrants who worked in mathematics and computer programming in Michigan, Wu and her sister became familiar with coding when they were young and were encouraged to pursue careers in technology.

“Ironically, both of us dropped out of Engineering programs in college,” she said.

Wu studied English and History instead and got involved in economic justice activism. She hoped to make a living as a journalist or graphic designer. But such jobs were scarce, and after school, after working at a couple of software companies, Wu “accidentally” fell into providing tech services for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) instead.

“I had just quit a corporate job and was trying to figure out what to do with my life,” she recalled. “A friend told me that a labor union was having an emergency and asked if I could help out. At first, I was volunteering; They said, ‘We need this on a regular basis.’ That’s how consulting started.”

For nearly a decade, Wu worked as an independent contractor and eventually ran a business providing IT, telecom and software development services for government and corporate clients as well as for nine SEIU union offices and several nonprofits. During that time, she watched many staff organizers burn out after a few years on the job.

“I noticed this pattern where the union had so many people that wanted to work for them, it was really easy for them to say, ‘Just work as hard as you can, we really have to get this done, all these people are counting on you,’” said Wu. “You have a lot of people who put in a lot of hours; They themselves are not being taken care of. I saw the difference between how non-profit workers and volunteers were treated versus government and corporate workers. In a lot of cases, the corporate and government workers had much more sustainable situations.”

Her observations led her to come up with her own rules for treating her employees fairly. Trying to make nonprofit work sustainable — even as a tech consultant — was definitely fighting the current in an environment where free and underpaid labor was taken for granted, she said.

“I think you should get paid for every hour you work, and if you work overtime, you should get paid overtime pay,” she said. “We gave people benefits. I couldn’t pay people for 40 hours a week, so I made sure they got paid a higher hourly. Then we had full-time be 30 hours a week. We did a lot of creative things to make things work for people.”

After years of working as an independent consultant for unions and nonprofits, Wu — who is now at Oaktown Labs, where they are hoping to start an anti-displacement software engineering apprenticeship program — decided that it would be more sustainable for her to work in the private sector and devote off-hours to unpaid political projects. In 2010, Wu began meeting with fellow activist-minded techies, cultural workers and community organizers that she had met while defending affordable housing in Oakland’s Chinatown. Together, they wondered if a community space that existed outside of nonprofit or business models could lead to new kinds of activist and community projects. That question led to the experiment that today is LOL — which is generally broke and largely funded by donations from the people who use and run the storefront.

Wu is currently dreaming up ways to finance truly free coding camps for long-term, Oakland residents — particularly those who are Black, Indigenous, and Latinx. Investment in such spaces could, over time, slowly change the demographics of the majority-white and male open source programming world, which largely rely on volunteer or underpaid labor, she said.

The main goal of LOL, said Wu, is to empower Oaklanders with skills from the past and present that lead to greater self-sufficiency. Right now, she added, few people know how to make most of the things we use every day — whether it’s an app, or a t-shirt — from scratch.

“People used to be able to make shirts at home, right?” she mulled. “You could spin the cotton and the wool, and dye it yourself. We are so far from that. Many items that you get, you have no idea who worked on this, how they were treated, and so on.

We want to give people the power to make a thing. Some of that is tech, and tech is really easy in some ways, because there is a lot open source. We could teach people how to do programming; we could teach people how to make maps; we could teach people how to do stuff that they’re used to seeing, but they’re not used to knowing how to put it together. The idea was to be a space where you could have more of a community focus. Like instead of having a shirt that’s made in eight countries, have something that’s made and grown in Oakland.”

It’s ironic, she added: “A lot of people who have the skills to do things completely from scratch are the people who are not generally associated with the ‘maker’ community.”

LOL, Wu said, also hopes to turn hipster “maker” culture on its head by offering space, skills and support to low-income Oakland residents who had difficulty finding employment — like undocumented migrants or people coming home from prison — who could benefit from selling their wares in the store.

“‘Making’ is a re-branding of stuff that people have been doing since the dawn of humanity,” she said. “A lot of people who are ‘rediscovering’ things like fermentation or knitting are now selling things on Etsy, and they’re actually making a pretty good living. Yet, other people who have these skills, and haven’t had to ‘rediscover’ them — because they’re just part of their lives — are making way less money. We wanted to close that gap. We want to provide a space where people could start their own business, or learn about technologies for selling their own designs and work to a larger population. This is the big dream.”

Practitioner Profile: Aliya Rahman

Wed, 30 May 2018 15:50:00 +0000

Growing up in Bangladesh, technologist and social movement trainer, Aliya Rahman, remembers the “revolutionary energy” of her childhood.

“I grew up as the first generation after independence in Bangladesh,” she said. “You saw what happens after you get free, where you have to govern, and people need water, food. I got to see a country being put together. I grew up seeing garment workers, who were almost all women, protesting on the street.”

Aliya also watched scientists in Bangladesh build the infrastructure of their newly-independent country, working to alleviate the effects of mass poverty and harsh climate conditions.

“That was really my background,” said Aliya, who went on to pursue aeronautical engineering at Purdue University in Indiana. “That’s how I understood the role of science and tech.”

Aliya was born in the US to a mother from a rural, farming community in Wisconsin, and a Bengali father who had fled the 1971 genocide in his home country. When things calmed down in Bangladesh following the liberation war, Aliya’s family moved to Dhaka. Aliya was only a few months old. By the time she was six years old, she realized that she was “definitely different.”

“If I had the language, I would have known I was queer as hell, even as a little child,” Aliya said. “Really genderqueer. But people did not have the language for stuff at that time in that country. Homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment in Bangladesh, and I thought I probably shouldn’t stay there.”

Aliya also realized her proclivity for mechanical thinking early on.

“I used to just love watching machines,” she said. “This dude in Bangladesh invented an irrigation pump that would help farmers get through famine without having to buy gasoline. They could just use cow dung instead. I had this love for science, and there are all kind of avenues for people with American passports who are women of color, having public university interests and first-generation college stuff. I caught wind of that, and I ended up applying to college.”

At her first semester in college, Aliya was introduced to computer programming in a coding class. She “really took to it” and was asked to help teach the next term.

“I started teaching security, Excel applications, math and basics of coding for first-generation, incoming college students at Purdue… all these public school students,” she said. “Folks who were from farms and shit who were like, ‘Computers?’ You know, who had similar experiences to me in Bangladesh. We didn’t have broadband, we didn’t have electricity a lot of the time.”

During her junior year, Aliya was organizing a job fair at Purdue and growing increasingly disillusioned with the careers offered in the science field — most of which were in weapons design. Then, 9-11 happened.

“Two of my cousins, who were Muslims, died in the towers,” she said. “All kinds of stuff happened that literally just threw my identity and my background as an activist and engineer into this fucking shit pile. For me, that was a really important moment in starting to dig deeply into US social movements and understanding what race means here that it doesn’t in Bangladesh, and understanding that I stepped into rural Indiana — where brown folks are used against Black people. I was also dating a trans man at the time, and we were in rural Indiana, so just by necessity I became pretty involved in organizing.”

Meanwhile, the aeronautics industry changed overnight.

“Everyone who was formerly a Star Trek nerd was having to work on missiles, and I didn’t want to do that shit,” Aliya recalled. “I switched out of an engineering program and finished with a teaching degree in Chemistry.”

After graduation, Aliya spent several years teaching at public high schools on reservations in Arizona. She found herself increasingly drawn into activism and organizing. Since college, Aliya had taken part-time positions with and volunteer roles for LGBT and racial justice organizations — but she hadn’t previously considered organizing as paid work.

“I had never seen someone who was a paid organizer in Bangladesh,” she said. “That would be a good way to die, you know?”

Aliya became a field organizer at the Center for Community Change in Ohio, working with people returning home from prison, and with immigrant organizers. Afterward, at Equality Ohio, a nonprofit LGBT advocacy group, she worked on policies that affected trans prisoners, and healthcare and poverty issues.

“I was a field director, which means I was expected to be moving people around and making sure we were talking to the right folks,” Aliya explained. She also had the sensibility of an engineer and coder.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God, we have stuff on zip disks, guys,’” she recalled of the Equality Ohio office. “There was like spreadsheets here, and paper there. So I ended up having to write a bunch of software to help us do our work, right? I called it the Gaytabase, and it was this Django app that helped our ED to know what district she was in, when her flight arrived, or where we’re at with a certain bill in a district, and all that kind of stuff, right?”

That was 2012.

“Basically, since then it has been a combination of organizing, teaching, and software or hardware,” Aliya, who considers herself a “para-political organizer,” said. “That mix has kind of been my life, and I feel good about it. You can lose campaigns, but when I have invested in a person, or I’ve done good program design — so someone was able to leave one of our programs really with job skills and shit — you can’t take that away. That’s meaningful to me right now when I’m like, ‘Okay, so what the fuck that we’re doing is going to work right now.’”

Aliya took a job with Code for Progress in DC in 2013, where she developed their fellowship program that paid people of color, women, and low-income activists to learn coding.

“They could go back into the organizations and movements they were working in with some kind of capacity, and we paid them stipends in order to do that, live in DC and get connected to the movement, and so on,” Aliya explained.

Aliya worked intermittently with then-White House Chief Technology Officer, Megan Smith, “mostly around making sure that we actually had folks who were doing grassroots technology coming to the events where we’re discussing the work of those people.” But Washington, DC, wasn’t Aliya’s kind of town.

“I honestly got tired of it and came back to the movement to work at Wellstone,” she said.

Wellstone is a Minnesota-based, nonprofit advocacy organization that trains the community activists and political leaders that broadly make up the progressive Left to create change using a combination of electoral politics, public policy, and grassroots organizing. Aliya is their Director of Movement Technology. On a typical day, she fields queries from partner organizations like the Sierra Club, Center for Media Justice or Ella Baker Center, on issues like how to identify malware or secure a cell phone before an international flight. She might travel to coach trainers, develop curriculum on social media messaging or data-driven campaigning, write code to track how trainees talk about organizing concepts on Twitter after participating in Wellstone workshops, and provide emotional support to organizers of color struggling with workplace racism and patriarchy.

“Wellstone has gone from being a nice, white people-run organization to an organization run by people of color who are mostly queer, largely immigrant and overwhelmingly femme-identified or gender nonconforming,” Aliya explained. “It has meant a really dramatic shift in our curriculum and how we talk about technology.”

To that end, Wellstone seeks out and prioritizes hiring people of color, and especially Black women, to lead technology trainings.

“White folks need to be taught to learn how to respect the intellectual ability of people of color,” said Aliya. “We didn’t drop out with this shit in our DNA, right? This is a practice thing. Every data training that we do which is led by Black women, by the end of the training some trainee will come up to them and say — and it’s every year — ‘I have literally never seen another Black woman at this. It was really meaningful for me to be here because of this.’”

Barriers to technical training for people of color exist on multiple levels, Aliya noted. Once, as an experiment, Wellstone offered its tech workshop without any scholarship seats.

“It was literally all white people,” Aliya said.

Aliya’s work at Wellstone includes hosting movement technology and data workshops. She encourages organizations to send staff to her trainings who don’t have the word “tech” in their titles.

“A lot of the training we ended up creating was for folks who would probably say, ‘I’m not a tech person,’ who are either in fundraising, or community organizing,” she said. “They’re folks who are working with lists of people all day long, crafting survey numbers. They are the people actually collecting the data when they’re door knocking, having community meetings or doing direct action. Those people absolutely deserve tech training.”

However, the tech industry is so deeply segregated, Aliya said, that teaching technology skills to students of color can be a challenge.

“Because so many people talk about diversity in tech, I don’t use that word,” Aliya explained. “I say ‘desegregation,’ because it’s so structural. I want people to talk about power and policy as well as everything else. The retention numbers are almost worse than the hiring numbers. That’s where you know you fucked up. If someone fell out of your workforce, that was your fault, most of the time. I used to be a bartender, right? Nobody tried to stop me from making a drink. This is a job where you wake up every day, and there’s a giant machine hoping you fail or disappear.”

What Aliya tries to do in her classes, she said, is intervene at the beginning of a student’s downward spiral: “If I teach folks who have been coding since they’re in middle school or whatever and they make an error, their computer gives them an error message. You’ll see them be like, ‘I wonder what’s wrong with the program.’

I swear, when I look at our folks, when they get their first error messages when they start to code, you’re gonna see people’s brains and whole body language start shutting down, because their assumption is, ‘Something’s broken with me.’ It’s really just a comma out of place in a line somewhere, but you’re watching a spiral happen and people going, ‘Oh, my god, it’s broken. I got the program wrong. Maybe this isn’t for me. People always say this to me. I’m gonna go find another job.’ Boom.”

In one instance, Aliya was leading a coding class when she noticed that one of the students, a queer Native woman, was beginning to falter.

“She was starting to do the different breathing stuff, where you can see people kind of sighing. I just went and sat and talked to her, right?” Aliya recalled. “I was like, ‘Talk me through what you did.’

We have some very intentional teaching around the trainers who teach any kind of tech or something that’s on a computer. There are rules: you don’t touch the student’s keyboard. You’re not gonna say, ‘What’s wrong? Where are you stuck?’ Because they don’t know the answer, or they wouldn’t be stuck. You can ask them, ‘Show me what you did.’ Super relational conversations are really helpful. Sometimes it literally is just remembering trauma-centered body positioning and having a seat next to somebody and having a calm conversation with them.”

Another time, during a week-long Data and Analytics Camp in Minneapolis, Aliya stepped away. When she returned, one of the participants, a hotel worker organizer and woman of color, was “fuming.”

“I hadn’t even been gone even ninety seconds, right?” Aliya said. “She was like, ‘This dude keeps explaining at me. I can’t with the whitesplaining; I can’t with the mansplaining, and I’m so angry I want to flip a table.’”

Aliya’s response to her was, “‘It’s cool, you are supposed to be here. You got that shit right; you’re doing a good job. I’m going to talk to him at lunch. You’re actually the second person who’s brought this up to me this week.’”

“Ninety seconds,” Aliya repeated. “I was away for ninety seconds, and that was enough time for this dude to basically reinvoke probably what has been many years of this shit in the movement. That’s how people got to that state of imposter syndrome. You’re feeling no ownership, right? It’s just repeated incidents of this stuff happening.”

She paused.

“It’s not all about individual stuff in the classroom, but I will say that in order to do that well, you need a lot of coaches at the table. You can’t have one trainer, fifty people. Give a lecture, goodnight. You actually need staff. I have been asked to do volunteer training for most of my life. Let me tell you what the difference is in quality when you can pay somebody for a day of work. If we had more adjuncts, we really could do a lot more training. We never have enough sponsor scholarships for the number of applicants we have. We’ll have thirty spots for 600 applicants sometimes, right? People aren’t necessarily gonna apply again once they get turned away, because they all have kinds of shame or whatever, right? I want to change that.”

Practitioner Profile: Helyx Chase

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 19:50:00 +0000

On any given day at the office of the Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) in Philadelphia, some dozen young filmmakers and activists taking a several-month course in video production “making media that serves movements” may be found hunched over shared computers, editing videos about local criminal justice reform, immigrant and labor rights. Community members might drop by for trainings on how to livestream meetings to defend public schools, or to make plans for running an emerging media production co-op. In the thick of the activity, Helyx Chase Scearce Horwitz, independent video artist as well as MMP’s Tech Manager, is likely coordinating equipment for loan between different groups of people, detangling wires, fixing a malfunctioning printer, uploading footage from SD cards to the office servers, charging batteries, and maintaining the organization’s open-source database.

“When stuff goes wrong with media management and files are disconnected, or people can’t find things if they’re trying to set something up, I get called in,” Helyx said.

Technical troubleshooting is familiar to Helyx, who, at age fourteen, learned to code in C++ at a public high school in Upper Darby, outside Philadelphia.

Helyx paused. “I don’t like coding. But I understood it enough that I was able to do really well in this class.”

What Helyx really loved was film. At the age of nine they were drawn to their parents’ video camera. It was old enough that it only worked when plugged into a wall outlet. By eighth grade, Helyx was able to buy a new camera. Inspired by Michael Moore at the time, they filmed “everything.”

“My dad showed me ‘Bowling for Columbine,’” Helyx recalled. “That was the first time I saw a documentary and was like: ‘Oh this can be like funny and interesting.’ Up until then, documentaries were boring, so this changed the framing about what a documentary can be and how interesting that kind of story could be.”

In high school, Helyx badly wanted to study at a summer film course offered by the New York Film Academy, but they weren’t able to afford it. Luckily, their dad heard about the Documentary History Project for Youth, a summer program run by the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia — “a video center deeply rooted in Black filmmaking in Philadelphia,” Helyx described.

Not only was the program free, it even provided stipends for the ten youth accepted each year. By the end of the summer, Helyx had learned new skills in filmmaking and had also saved enough money to buy a computer on which they could edit video.

“All of a sudden, I had a home editing station,” Helyx said. “The thing about having a home editing station is then you have to learn how to maintain it. When it breaks, you’re not in a lab where someone else knows how to fix whatever has gone wrong.”

“But,” they added, “I started just figuring it out.”

In the following years, Helyx dabbled in broadcast journalism classes offered at their high school, developing a knack for live video production and technical direction. They went on to Hampshire College, where they continued to pursue video arts and dabble in computer science. Helyx moved into installation work, creating story booths that combined both analog and digital media.

“What I’m really interested in is systems and thinking about systems,” they added. “I have a mind for understanding how different components might interact with each other, but very little interest in the details of the code that needs to go into one component of a system.”

After college, Helyx moved to Philadelphia and worked a graveyard shift production assistant job at a local NBC affiliate, then moonlighted as a wedding videographer while working part-time, coordinating video equipment rentals at Scribe Video Center, where they had learned video production. Helyx recorded video oral histories and managed media for the Transgender Oral History Project, and they volunteered at Media Mobilizing Project as an editor. Eventually, Helyx was hired by MMP for a hybrid position of media production and technical support.

“I learn on the job as things are broken,” they explained. “The printer breaks and nobody can get anything done until I repair the printers. I started at MMP with moderate technical experience, and because I have had these computer science classes and other things, I’ve always been able to do things like navigate and troubleshoot software with an understanding of what is probably going on in the back end.”

At MMP, Helyx was charged with repairing and maintaining the systems of a small media production house. Sometimes, Helyx said, they felt isolated.

“I’ve really been trying to build my tech skills,” they said. “That’s actually been really hard. If you’re not somebody who can watch YouTube videos and just pick that stuff up, it’s even more challenging. There are things like Code Boot Camps, which are great if you can afford them. But they don’t focus on the systems stuff, and I’d run into the same blocks I ran into in high school

Ultimately, what has helped Helyx most is a one-on-one mentorship, provided by Oakland, California-based information systems capacity-builder, Lisa Jervis. Lisa would meet with Helyx regularly over Skype, providing coaching in database management — an undertaking Helyx was asked to take on at MMP.

“We regularly met for a year, and started with me knowing very little about databases,” Helyx recalled. “She was able to take me through thinking about data like: ‘Okay, this is a system. This is about how we organize our people and think about the ways that different people interact with each other.’ And when you think about it like that, it’s really easy to see why we need a database where we can dynamically see somebody’s employment and then click on that and see who else works at that same place. Or we can track all the people who came to an event, and we can look at both the event and see who came to it, and we can look at an individual and see a list of what events they came to.”

Helyx paused.

“I’d done this kind of research before, but without having somebody who has the expertise to tell me, ‘That‘s great that you read that article, but here’s where you should really be focusing…’ And by somebody who deeply understands both the work and needs of social justice organizations.

It wasn’t a contract consultant relationship where we said: ‘You do the needs and assessment; you tell us what database you need, and you teach us how to implement it.’ It was Lisa teaching me how to do a needs assessment, how to assess contractors who were going to build the database, and how to assess the different databases. But I was the one who was doing that work.”

Today, Helyx regularly applies those skills when confronted with new technical administrative challenges, such as coming up with ways to archive MMP’s extensive collection of digital recordings made during the last decade. To some, the kind of nuts-and-bolts technical management work Helyx does is not “flashy,” so as important as it may be to MMP’s organizing mission to train leaders for social justice movements, it rarely receives funding.

“You need a office administrator who can cut checks, balance books and make sure there’s paper ordered,” Helyx said. “In the tech realm, you need somebody who’s going to make sure that the computers get maintained and stuff like that. I think that one of the biggest problems is that there’s funding for starting projects, but the funding to maintain that doesn’t exist. People are like: ‘I want to give my money to something really exciting.’ That ongoing maintenance work is boring, but it’s crucial.”

Practitioner Profile: Josue Guillen

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 18:55:00 +0000

Immediately after the election of Donald Trump, movement technologist, Josue Guillen, was overwhelmed with inquiries from social justice organizers and activist groups suddenly worried about their digital security. Digital security — the protection of an individual’s or organization’s identity, communications and assets via Internet, electronic or cell phone technologies — had been a concern to Josue for the last 14 years, but it was largely ignored outside of activist techie circles. After the presidential election, more progressive groups and activists became concerned about government surveillance, right-wing cyberattacks and doxxing. Josue was jazzed. His role at the Center for Popular Democracy is to provide technical support and training to its 51 member groups, so he recruited an expert and put together a webinar on digital security. He wrote a list of recommendations: Use the free, downloadable encryption app, Signal, for sending text messages. Change your phone password. Change your computer password. Make sure your passwords are strong ones!

On paper, he said, it looked “beautiful.” If both the sender and the receiver of a text message used Signal, then the unencrypted contents of the message would be stored only on the phones of the sender and receiver — not by the sender’s and receiver’s phone companies, who legally are obligated to turn over, when asked, any information to law enforcement. But changing habits wasn’t as simple as Josue imagined it would be. One problem was that iPhone users were unable to set Signal as their default text messaging app.

“What that has meant is that the people using iPhones stop using the Signal app, because they don’t even notice that when they get a notification on their phone of an SMS message it wasn’t Signal, it was the default iPhone app — and then they continue the conversation without Signal,” he explained. “Then a good chunk of the organization that had everyone on Signal don’t notice that half of those messages aren’t being encrypted properly. Then people get depressed about that, give up completely and stop using it altogether.”

Half a year later, most of the groups who contacted Josue have not implemented the recommended changes.

“Being more secure is a burden,” Josue said. “There are more steps to take. There are more things to remember.”

But the real problem, he added, is that social justice movements do not own, control or invest in the technologies they rely on.

“I think that not embracing open source technology is such a mistake for movement work,” Josue said. “The dependency on proprietary software, not building our own technology shop and only working with these credentialed people that have a profit motive — and not a movement motive — is a huge mistake. We need to be building our own tools. We need to be building our own infrastructure. We are not investing enough money in that. We are not experimenting enough. We throw away so much money by spending it on proprietary tools when we should be investing it in movement infrastructure.”

For nearly three decades, Josue has been helping progressive groups adapt and create technology for its needs. Josue was born and raised in New York City by immigrants from Colombia and the Dominican Republic. At the prestigious Hunter College High School, Josue’s teachers “spent six years drilling it into our heads that we were going to be judged only by how smart we were,” he recalled. But during his first week at Wesleyan University, Josue was harassed on campus by two different white men who insisted that he was there “because of affirmative action.” Despite these encounters, Josue did well academically and planned to pursue a law degree. The year was 1985, and although he had never taken a computer class, Josue was one of two people in his dorm who had a computer and felt comfortable taking it apart.

“I was someone who could spend 12 hours playing a video game without getting up,” he said. “Technology has always been something that I’ve never been afraid of.”

One summer, Josue heard about a summer training program in California for people of color. He applied.

“I decided that it would look great on my law school application,” Josue recalled. He ended up in Oakland, at a six-week organizer training led by the Center for Third World Organizing. On the third night, Josue wrote in his journal: “I think I’ve discovered what I want to do for the rest of my life and it’s blowing my mind.”

Law school plans abandoned, Josue spent the next decade working as an organizer for labor unions and community groups before switching over to technology work. His path as a movement techie came into clear focus when he took a job with Media Jumpstart, a New York-based technology collective that later changed its name to the MayFirst Technology Collective. Jamie McCelland, a collective member and technologist there, taught Josue many of the skills he uses today.

“It was amazing, and mutually beneficial,” Josue remembered. He was able to apply his organizing experiences to his new focus: designing organizer-friendly databases.

“The big challenge is how to make it easier to collect the data,” Josue said. “I have an old mentor who believes that 75 percent of the data that gets collected never makes it into a database. It stays in the head of that organizer, and then that organizer leaves, and the organization loses all that information. Even today, if I’m knocking on someone’s door, it is still easier for me to use a clipboard and write the information down than it is to try to depend on an app on my phone when I hit a dead spot and can’t connect to the database, so I have to have paper backup.”

To address some of those issues, Josue worked with Progressive Technology Project, a group based in Austin, Texas, to develop PowerBase — an open source, online database designed specifically for membership-based organizations. One group that used PowerBase is the New York-based organization, Domestic Workers United (DWU). Josue helped DWU to create a database that would, among other things, track which members were eligible to vote at meetings.

“It makes a huge difference to build a database for a group that’s doing organizing if we understand organizing,” Josue said. “What are the fields that you need? What is the workflow? What information is important? Why? We could talk about that because I’ve knocked on as many doors than anyone I know.”

However, large corporations with ubiquitous technological interfaces often come out ahead of open source alternatives, even in social justice circles.

These days, Josue said, after four years building PowerBase, he is often forced to work instead with Salesforce — a mainstream CRM (customer relationship management) platform — because it is well-known, and member groups use it.

“Salesforce is a multi-million dollar international organization that has the ugliest interface I have ever seen, reports that are terrible — and yet people assume that because they have so much money these are problems that clearly can’t be fixed,” he said. “But, when I was working on PowerBase, most of the feedback that the world at large gave was, ‘Oh, it has a terrible interface and the reports aren’t great’ — and that’s a fault of open source.”

Currently, Josue lamented, PowerBase developers don’t have funds to improve the database so that it would be able to compete with Salesforce.

“The nonprofit running that project is severely under resourced, and this is the perfect opportunity for them to actually get a huge grant to rethink this project, given what they’ve learned in the last seven years, and to transition all those groups over to a new database that is written from the ground up,” Josue said.

However, progressive funders and organizations don’t have a history of investing in technological ventures, Josue noted: “It’s a lot safer to spend money on a Salesforce database, and spend $100,000 on a Salesforce developer, as opposed to investing that money in a movement oriented technology shop, or in an open source database project that will make the improvements available to anyone who wants to use it.”

But, he added, that’s precisely what would be smarter in the long run.

“We need to prepare people to be able to enter into the field of movement technology,” Josue said. “We need to create environments so that women of color can thrive in the technology field. We don’t think big enough, and partly because we don’t have the resources that allow us to experiment at a big scale, think big and fail big and keep going. It’s really hard to take the risks to develop tools for movement building. The pressure to succeed from the beginning or never get funding again is just overwhelming.”

Practitioner Profile: Berhan Taye

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 17:58:00 +0000

What are the technologies that intervene in war?

Former Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellow, Berhan Taye, grew up in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After studying International Relations in Sweden, Berhan’s passion for political transformation and restorative justice led her, in 2012, to a job as a communications assistant for CEWARN, a nonprofit working to mediate conflicts in East Africa. The organization relied heavily on a custom-made software tool that enabled it to track, categorize and analyze large volumes of data from seven states to predict and prevent violence. The indicator data that it monitored included the weather, livestock raids, deaths, and the movements of security forces in the region.

“We would get alerts mostly between the border crossings,” Berhan recalled. “You put in a lot of indicators, and it tells you if a certain area is in the red zone, or yellow zone, depending on what has happened in the past four weeks in that area. And it lets you know if conflict is about to erupt in a certain area.”

The tool would also list response options and recommend solutions.

One alert from 2011 stated: “The Local Peace Committees have been able to capture the perpetrators and recover the stolen animals in most cases. However, there is a need to conduct a local level consultation among these groups with the objective of pre-empting escalation of conflict associated with the onset of the rainy seasons.”

The software tool used incident reports to highlight hotspots and incident areas, allowing responders to act quickly — and CEWARN’s approach to conflict de-escalation was community-based: The group preferred to deploy local peace committees, comprised of elder women and youth, rather than military. Despite this, the killings mounted, and for two years, Berhan sat with perpetrators of war from every side.

“What they talked and cared about was not people,” she remembered. “They talked about their gains, interests, and who has more control, territory, weapons.”

“I felt like I was losing myself,” Berhan said. “There wasn’t a lot of change.”

She decided to return to school, this time for a Master’s degree in Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Berhan’s path to activism began at age sixteen, when a man groped her on her walk home from school. She chased him off, and shortly afterward, she began volunteering at the local women’s affairs office, where survivors of partner abuse went to testify.

“I was the note taker,” Berhan recalled. “Every day you sit there and just listen to people’s grievances. And they go back to their husbands. Some were eventually killed by their intimate partners. So just experiencing that, dealing with that every day, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s the reality of the world.’”

Later, Berhan spent time working on land rights issues in South Africa. She remembers walking through the streets of Cape Town, where “Blackness had been moved to the margins.”

“When you walk on the streets, you see the statues of a racist guy that stole people’s land, another guy that killed hundreds of people,” she recalled. “The struggle for land is really trying to understand how injustice has messed us up for so many generations. How can we move forward from the trauma that we’ve all experienced?

Today, Berhan is based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her current research on “technology for social justice” examines the work of activists who, like herself, fight for access to information and freedom of expression, but whose backgrounds may be far afield from computer science. Berhan’s definition of “technology” is expansive and inclusive.

“There’s this assumption that technology is a computer,” she said. “To me, a vaccination is technology. Our ancestors created technology: herbal medicines. In my mother’s or my father’s village, it might be water coming out of the pipes. I would ask, ‘What is your technology? What’s technology in your context?’”

She paused.

“And, of course, sometimes technology is not the answer,” she added. “Maybe the issue we are addressing is not about technology.”

In Ethiopia, the government runs the only Internet service provider. Fewer than three percent of the populace have online access. In the past year, the government has shut down Internet access several times in response to anti-statist protests that were organized online. Amnesty International and the Open Observatory Network Interference reported that the Ethiopian government censored and blocked news outlets, websites critical of its policies, and privacy software tools like Tor. Encryption tools, like Signal, are illegal.

In this context, Berhan said, outsiders who preach to Ethiopian activists “net neutrality” or software-minded solutions can seem irrelevant, or even do harm. She recalled an incident when tech activists from abroad hosted a digital security workshop for Ethiopian bloggers. The bloggers were later arrested and charged with, among other things, using an encryption tool suggested by the workshop facilitators.

“You have mostly white men that don’t understand what the digital security issues are,” Berhan said. “What people don’t understand is that I might be able to encrypt my email — but when you’re being tortured and asked for your passphrase, you’re gonna hand out that passphrase so quickly… Again, what is the technology that will work in my context? The government has every back door that they want. I think other people that come from other communities or countries might have the best intentions to help, but really fail.”

These days, the continent’s number of homegrown technologists is growing. Kenya has been nicknamed the “silicon savannah.” Currently, some 300 civic tech hubs in Africa work with community groups and on government initiatives.

“Those are the hubs for technology innovation, and maker spaces,” Berhan said. “But the focus is on innovation — for profit, rather than tackling social problems. It’s like, what is the next Uber idea? That’s what is being sought in the continent. For me, that has been really very depressing. What we’re trying to adopt is the African version of Code for America, which is really great but doesn’t really engage in political issues. Code for America is very neutral in this time of injustice.”

On the continent and elsewhere, Berhan said, funders for tech projects tend to fall into the same pitfalls common as in the development sector. Funders and project initiators from abroad often fail to recognize community structures that already exist in locations where they plan projects, and rarely do they put social justice interests first.

The attitude, she said, is often: “’Yes, let’s create something here. We appoint you as the leader of this thing. You’re gonna solve this. We’re gonna pump so much money into this. And within three years, this problem will be solved’ — which often is a lie. You go there, take their stories, exhaust the people, and then go to another. For me, it’s like, what do people have? Is this really the right tool that you want? Because giving computers to school kids is good. But if they don’t have electricity to charge their laptops with, you haven’t done much.”

“I don’t care much about creating technology just for the sake of creating technology ,” Berhan explained. “I want to see what can work in my context. If you can make my commuting easy, my trading easy for me as a farmer in a remote area, that’s great. Do that. But let’s focus, also, on the social justice part of tech.”

Focus Group Facilitation Guide

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 20:39:00 +0000

This guide was used to run focus groups in a variety of different communities of practice across the space of people who work with technology for social justice.

Feel free to use this guide, or a modified version, to run a focus group in your own community.

Link to PDF of focus group facilitation guide (12 pages)

Phase II Semi-Structured Interview Guide

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 21:54:00 +0000

This interview guide, which was the basis for all of the interviews conducted with practitioners in 2017, was collaboratively developed based on the concerns of the partner organizations on this project.

Link to PDF version of semi-structured interview guide we used for our interview process in 2017 (6 pages).