084 – Community Tech

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel. I’m a Social Impact Scientist and anthropologist and I’m here today with Kate Fleming, one of the directors of IDEMS. Hi Kate.

[00:00:18] Kate: Hi Lucie.

[00:00:19] Lucie: Thanks for joining me.

[00:00:21] Kate: Yeah, thanks for initiating this conversation.

[00:00:24] Lucie: Exactly. It’s come about because you have been talking a lot about community tech, especially, and you had lots of ideas about it. And I find it really intriguing because I’ve met small projects of community tech, but you have huge aims. You have, from my understanding, you don’t want just a small community to do its own little thing in its corner. You want to try and revolutionise what it means to be a community even, or like you want to…

[00:00:54] Kate: Yeah, I think community, when we talk about tech, it’s still cast to the geographic lens of something small, something constrained, but then that’s not what tech is. So if you are just designing something at the community level and you’re thinking in that closed way, then you’re cutting your community off from the opportunity of technology, which most people want, which is community in some broader way that’s divorced from geography, where it might be of affiliation or interests or values.

And I think when people talk about community tech, and I think this relates to platform cooperatives, or applying the cooperative model to a digital context, there’s still a lot of an intellectual framework or even like a values framework or principles framework that is carried over from the industrial age. It’s from when you were working with people in a factory or in some geographically constrained context where you’re organising around production of goods, I think material goods.

[00:02:03] Lucie: But that’s really interesting. Yeah, the dichotomy between how community, is defined, often in community tech, when people talk about community tech. It’s usually two different things, totally different things with community being, as you just said, small and geographically local. Whereas tech always means this big thing.

[00:02:22] Kate: Yeah.

[00:02:22] Lucie: Whereas in normal, I think I’m happy to say that nowadays most people agree that there are online platforms or communities or communities that are formed on online platforms. But community tech doesn’t seem to take that sort of community into consideration.

[00:02:39] Kate: Yeah, I think it feels somehow informed by a nostalgia. To really own and connect with community you have to push back against a lot of those scale norms of tech. But I think that’s because we’ve associated scale with something that’s flattening, it’s impersonal, it’s taking power away from the community.

There’s a lot to unpack in there, but it feels like it’s about, to some extent, redefining what scale has to be. What something has to be when it crosses geographic boundaries. Like, why can’t I collaborate if I’m based in London? Why can’t I have a community that’s people from lots of different places, but where we have some sort of connection where our values or what we’re working toward together? We would still very much identify as having a community.

And yet somehow the framework of tech through that lens, yeah, we just don’t apply community, or at least I don’t. When I hear someone say community tech, it always pulls back to something smaller, to they’re afraid of scale, they’re afraid of big, how do we wrest control away? And it feels like something adversarial that doesn’t need to be. Why is that the conflict?

It seems like if we can redefine community, and I think we need different words because I think community is trapped in a lot of thinking about geography and proximity. And it can feel quite tribal to me in that sense.

[00:04:16] Lucie: Yep.

[00:04:16] Kate: Or you want to close yourself off. Which again, it all feels antithetical to the opportunity of the internet. But we’ve also seen how flattening and, yeah it’s a really complicated issue. So it’s language, but it is also practice and design.

[00:04:31] Lucie: And do you have any suggestions for what would be better language than community tech? I have to ask.

[00:04:38] Kate: Yeah, no, I mean, I think… It’s funny, because you asked me this question, oh, you asked me a couple of months ago this question, because I said oh, I don’t really the idea of community tech, somehow the word, the language isn’t right.

So then I went down the path of citizen tech, civic tech, but those are often already used in relation to political technology. So something that’s getting people engaged in politics in a country specific sense. So, when I think about it, a lot of what I’m thinking about is how do you create citizens of technology?

Like, how do you make people feel responsible, accountable? There’s a sense of participation in technology, which is not how tech has been created. It’s not how most of us experience tech. It’s like somebody designed a platform. I have no say over it. I certainly don’t benefit from it in any community way. It’s just there, it solves some problem for me. It’s helpful, but I am just a passive user of it.

And so a lot of it is thinking toward what would it look like for me to feel that I have a role in the upkeep, in the direction, in the policy, in the design and all these different things. Not that I have to be an expert in all those things, but recognizing that some part of this community is always going to be working on some aspect and I can opt into any particular piece of working on something that I feel I have something to contribute to, or I’m particularly interested in becoming knowledgeable about, or learning about.

[00:06:12] Lucie: So, this idea, I’m still going to call it community tech, sorry, just so that we can call it something.

[00:06:20] Kate: We don’t have a better word. Yeah.

[00:06:22] Lucie: But it’s not only about having a technology which is specifically designed for a particular community. It’s also about that community being able to continue to develop it to suit their needs as they evolve, and to be part of that process, the creation process.

[00:06:38] Kate: Yeah, I think it’s more, again, I come back to a word like citizen. If I’m a citizen of a community, of a country, of a anything, there’s a sense of this works because I’m engaged, this isn’t just here, it’s something I pick up and I use, and maybe I throw some money at, and if I don’t have money, then I don’t get to access it. It’s like the idea that people, sometimes people who are younger can be… they don’t even have the concept of borrowing a book, it’s like you rent a book, because libraries have been co opted by Amazon or these things where you have this sense of everything is a paying dynamic in a very commercial sense, as opposed to public goods, civic institutions, things that exist for the benefit of the whole.

[00:07:27] Lucie: I think your explanation of, yeah, being like a sort of citizen of a country, that sort of engagement with, for some of us, the decisions that the government make and that implication that hopefully you can affect the decisions. I find that really helpful, but I’m wondering then, is an equivalent like open source type technology, and I’m thinking more sort of R, that there is RStudio, the statistical analysis software, but apparently there is a group of R specialists who work on it and help develop it, but most users are just happy to use it. I’m wondering if there’s a sort of similarity there.

[00:08:04] Kate: I think there is, and I think the issue like government or like democracy is that it’s systemic. Most of the time, I’m not that interested in participating in democracy. There are lots of ways where I just don’t really care. But pretty much everyone has something they get worked up about that they do care about, that they are invested in, that they will put time into.

When people have kids, they get very involved in school organisations or school boards or those kinds of things. Or if you were involved in church, a lot of people get very involved in working in their church. The community that matters to them or the system that matters to them, they can be quite invested in being active, actively engage with what happens in that system and participating in it.

So I think if you take something single like R, there’s going to be a finite set of people who are that interested in representatively participating, building that out. But if I look at a cross section of tools or like a suite of tools, then I think it’s easier to see, you might be really interested in R, but I’m actually really interested in this kids app or this app for making sure that workers get paid ethically.

Everyone’s going to have things that they actually do care about. And if you start to have technology where you can see that’s an option, where you can see ways to participate and you actually understand it enough to feel like you could add value, I think you could start to see that there are all kinds of ways that people would become more participatory in what technology is.

But right now, if there is something open source, it’s chaotic, it’s standalone. It’s not something that I think often people who are non technologists, which I would classify myself as on like a coding level, how can I contribute to that? You don’t really see what role you’d have. And I think open source is not always easy to use for people who are not technical.

So I think it’s like building out more layers of the system. Like, I think there are a lot of people who are really interested in AI policy or technology. I mean, I hear all kinds of people talking about what should AI policy look like. But they experienced themselves as totally outside of technology and having absolutely no influence, because they don’t have any influence. And so you can start to think toward what would it look like If we did have more ways for people to participate and be engaged and express that engagement, find an outlet for that engagement.

And again, I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I think within the context of a very specific example, even something like R, you could start to think through who are the stakeholders in this, the users of this platform, the designers, the coders, all of these different people, and what would it look like to have all those voices represented in some way that contributes to what this is.

[00:11:08] Lucie: Yeah, I find it interesting that you just mentioned the word represent, being represented, which I don’t know if I’ve heard much about in many other discussions about community tech. There they often talk more about sort of, specialisation to suit exactly their needs or they want to be independent, or have more control over their own data nowadays, that sort of idea. Representation is interesting.

[00:11:32] Kate: Yeah. I suppose it’s what makes all democracy work. You never have the expectation that every citizen has an opinion about everything at all times, and not everyone does.

[00:11:45] Lucie: Apart from, I think, in Switzerland, I think they have lots of referendums. And I’ve heard that, yeah, people do get a bit tired about it because they don’t necessarily, as you say, have an opinion about it.

[00:11:56] Kate: And also, California does this where it has propositions. And what happens is, it’s a nice idea, and sometimes it is great, I’m sure there are things where everyone could be informed, but a lot of times direct democracy is not great because you have people who don’t know enough. You can lobby, you can do ads, you can do various things that create a perception of what something means. Or even just like gaming the system where I think California has lots of things where it’s vote no on this thing, and people think voting no means one thing, when in fact, voting no means exactly the opposite of what they actually want, but they’re just manipulated through the process because it’s a lot of work to keep yourself very informed about what are often very complex issues and complex decisions.

So I would much rather be able to identify somebody who I know is really invested, really an expert, nominate them, elect them, however that works. This is where it gets hard because it’s like, what level of complexity do you want to bring to creating representative systems? What is too much work? What is too much detail? What is people having to vote all the time?

That’s not realistic. Yeah, I don’t have a clear vision broadly. I think through any given example, you can start to think for this example, this would be a useful exercise in democracy in this way. I’ll come back to sex workers again, because it’s something that I have thought a lot about and have really studied, but one of the issues in sex work is you have a lot of sex workers who don’t want to be public in any way. They don’t want to be a member of a cooperative. They do not want to have to vote on stuff. They want to dip in, dip out, have no identity, have nothing.

And then there’s this other category of people who are really activists, really involved, very participatory. But how do you make sure that that activist group that has certain values isn’t completely swamping those quiet people who might have different values and different interests, but also don’t really want to put themselves forward?

You can see that even in that it’s like designing some way to make tech represent all interests. And you can’t please all the people all the time, but in some way, making it at least feel fair, or inclusive, are really hard problems.

[00:14:24] Lucie: They are, exactly, those are huge questions, and even if you just identify one type of community then just trying to answer those questions or find a balance to those questions, even for one community, it would be very challenging.

[00:14:38] Kate: Yeah, and you can end up with a tyranny of a minority. These are all things that have been thought through in the political context. As someone who loves American history, you see the founding fathers working through all of these issues. And obviously we see today, there are all these things they didn’t anticipate that created real problems. But you see them trying to balance, centralised federal interests with localised state interests, or even community level interests, like hyper local kinds of things, minority factions with majority factions, and you can end up with a tyranny of a minority where obviously you’re trying to solve for a tyranny of a majority.

And also, is it a tyranny if it’s a majority of people? I don’t know, maybe that’s just what democracy is. I’m studying for my indefinite leave to remain Life in the UK test right now, and the language they use in the UK for elections is ‘first to the post’, which just means you got the majority of the votes, so now you win. Yeah, so even in democracy, these are really hard issues, and you’re always going to have people who don’t feel represented. Yeah, so there’s no perfect answer.

[00:15:50] Lucie: This question doesn’t necessarily follow on, but do you think, thinking of like a distinction between creation and then use and ongoing management of some technological, like app or whatnot. Do you think something can be created and then brought into a community and then once they start managing it, can that still be community tech if it’s coming from outside?

[00:16:13] Kate: Yes. So the reason I think that, and we were talking about this a little bit before, which was I think part of the motivation for this conversation, is it’s very hard to ask a community of people who are living their daily lives to be the drivers of technical innovation. You would have to decide, I think of when I have a new idea for something, I have studied so many things, I’ve looked at tech, I’ve looked at the social problem, I’ve looked at the economics of it. The amount of things I had to, or number of things I had to study to even begin to see how some convergence of thinking could create some channel of innovation. It’s really unrealistic to think that everyone can be in a place to generate that kind of thinking or ideas.

Also, I guess it’s a case of good ideas can come from anywhere. I’m sure there are people who have great ideas just from an aha moment. I assume even in that case, it’s that there’s a lot of history there in their experiences that have given them a unique insight. So they’re bringing like a life history that has made them see something in a way that other people haven’t seen it.

But, yeah, I think you probably, not even probably, you definitely need those innovative thinkers and someone who’s leading to create something and then, I think, then to open it for other people to participate in. It’s that people create stuff now and they hoard it and they want to control everything about it.

And while it’s affecting more and more people, they you know, entrench their own control. And it’s like an authoritarian sensibility about what tech is. Because I knew best when I created the idea, I must always know best, when actually, as it takes on life, it means there are many more stakeholders and people who should be contributing to the evolution and kind of iteration of whatever that core innovation was.

[00:18:21] Lucie: Yeah, interesting. It’s making me think of a farmer research group, which developed an app. Is it an app? I can’t, sorry, I can’t remember if it’s literally an app or if what’s the form it takes, but it’s digital technology, let’s say. And they didn’t develop it though in a way which could be easily adaptable to other farmer groups. And other farmer groups now are requesting to be part of it or to use that technology, but they would need a tech specialist to adapt it to their needs and their context. So I think, yeah, that’s something that IDEMS tries to do in terms of trying to make things more accessible for people to adapt to their needs.

[00:19:04] Kate: No, and I think one of the reasons that I found it so easy to align with IDEMS principles, like when I first started talking to David, I realised that through the lens of thinking a lot about these democratic issues of tech and citizens of tech and how you design and build tech that does serve communities and democracies and all these issues.

I’d actually realised so many of those principles were at the core of what you have to do, where it has to be open, it has to be interoperable, it has to enable collaboration. All of these things that are fundamental to building inclusive, impactful tech, I think because inclusive is aligned with democracy and ideas of giving voices and influence and power is the wrong word, but like participation to everyone. Everyone deserves to participate.

It’s like roads, we all agree, everyone gets to use the roads, and it doesn’t mean you don’t pay for stuff, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to, actually, that’s a terrible example because it’s too public infrastructure, I guess it’s you can have a toll road. I don’t know, that metaphor is not going to work. But there is obviously the public goods, digital public goods model thinking about exactly this.

But yeah, you want things to be available, certain things. I guess that’s the point. It is like roads in that sense. It doesn’t mean that everyone gets to have a Mercedes. That can be a luxury thing, you have to pay for that.

[00:20:37] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:20:38] Kate: But it does mean that everyone gets to participate in the basic infrastructure and access the basic infrastructure that makes them able to participate in society, where right now we are moving toward an internet where a lot of people can’t access tools that have become essential for participation in society, or they’re excluded in some way because they’re not compatible with for profit business models where there are costs associated with them.

[00:21:11] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:21:12] Kate: Yeah.

[00:21:14] Lucie: I think that’s a fascinating place to end, sort of going back to how, to include people and how to change from the current situation, the direction the current situation is going into, how to try and change that direction or provide an alternate.

[00:21:30] Kate: Alternate, yeah. Or at least some foundational level. I guess that’s it, there’s nothing wrong with for profit businesses. It’s when for profit businesses drive out or destroy anything else that anyone can access, and then you can only participate if you can pay.

[00:21:48] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:21:48] Kate: That doesn’t create a lot of equality of access. It’s not that everything has to be equal, but that idea that everyone should have the ability to get on the on ramp or road metaphor again, but in some way participate.

Yeah, I think just to end, I think there are so many people who are thinking about these issues of again, digital public goods or infrastructure institutions, like what we had established offline, how you recreate those kinds of spaces and values and opportunities online. And I don’t think we figured that out yet.

[00:22:32] Lucie: No, but I look forward to more conversations with you and also just in general, hopefully us working more concretely on these questions.

[00:22:40] Kate: Yeah, I agree. I’m always happy for our conversations. So thank you.

[00:22:46] Lucie: Thanks, Kate.