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Further investigating how existing digital systems impact vulnerable communities, exploring the links between digital rights and climate and environmental justice, looking into how biometrics are being used in the humanitarian sector, understanding how responsible data practices can be implemented by social justice organisations, and more.
Supporting our partners, and one another, as we navigate another uncertain year.
Supporting activist communities to choose and implement the tech they need to conduct their service delivery, operations and organising.
Working with social justice actors as they seek to responsibly integrate data and technology into their work, and to mitigate potential harms caused by digital systems.
As tech-related social injustices expand, this year we've seen more groups and organisations pushed into urgently dealing with the potential harms related to technology: from investigating how surveillance technologies could harm their communities, to fighting digital ID systems that pose threats to human rights, to facing ciberpatrullaje and internet shutdowns by authoritarian governments. These threats resonate with much of what we outlined in our most recent strategy — which will continue to guide our work.
Throughout 2021, in the context of the ongoing public health emergency, civil society organisations have continued to transition to digital spaces, shift their programmatic work, adapt internal operations and change technical infrastructures. The stakes around technology and data use are higher than ever – we’ve seen how a reliance on videoconferencing, for example, opens up new risks that some organisations are unprepared to mitigate.
We're starting 2022 eager to support civil society organisations to go through digital transformation in responsible, slower, sustainable ways; we'll make sure to share our learnings as we go.
Spread across 11 countries, our team worked with partners around the world, conducted a number of research projects and played at least 20 rounds of online pictionary during the course of two (also online) retreats. In 2021 our team supported one another through challenging times, as the ongoing pandemic continues to affect us all in different ways. We ended the year with a core team of 18 individuals on four continents.
As the world faced the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was clearer than ever that strengthening civil society's ability to work with technology and data in responsible, effective ways continues to be fundamental. This year, we supported over 60 organisations in more than 20 countries with their tech and data projects.
Based on our experience with LiTS and research projects, we prepared some resources to support organisations in making tech-related decisions:
The Responsible Data community is celebrating 8 years of its existence: What started as a relatively small group of practitioners wanting to address the challenges and opportunities for responsibly using data for social change has grown into a community of over 1200 members, who continue to have healthy debates and share resources about strategy, compliance, innovation and emerging risks.
To mark the community's growth, we invited 13 experts and members of the community to write about how various Responsible Data-related topics have evolved since we first convened the community. The collection of articles includes a look back at the origins of the Responsible Data Community, a discussion around responsible approach to informed consent, considerations about responsible data in fragile and conflict settings and much more.
To expand participants' chances to get to know each other, we held a second iteration of the RD Community Connections, an initiative designed to facilitate more serendipitous connections between RD community members. We had over 20 participants from 8 countries, from academics to public sector workers and practitioners from humanitarian organisations.
During 2022, we'll be working with a Community Manager who will support community members, curate accessible resources and sector developments that might be of interest to those on the list; and host community calls to provide connection and network opportunities. Keep an eye out for new and exciting chances to engage with the RD community.
Through the tumult of the year, we've been reminded that provisioning support is a privilege, and it's one that requires we design our internal and external processes with care at the centre.
This year, our team dedicated time to cultivating practices and considering new approaches — both internal and external — that would best ensure our ability to continue supporting our partners. Internally, this resulted in us implementing systems to encourage individual and team-wide learning, and strengthening our HR capacity to ensure our policies are effective, efficient and in line with our organisational values. In terms of how we support our partners, this has led to us adjusting our intensive support format and investigating ways to support members of the Responsible Data community.
In the face of the ongoing climate emergency, and as the fight for environmental justice becomes more crucial, we began a new research project supported by the Ford Foundation, Ariadne and Mozilla that aims to explore the areas where digital rights and environmental justice intersect, and identify opportunities for strategic action.
At time of publishing this retrospective, we're still in the early stages of this research — if it resonates with your work in any way, we'd love to hear from you!
While predictive analytics (PA) use has been increasing over the last decade in a range of sectors, these systems are often designed with consenting adults in mind, without a focus on the unique needs and vulnerabilities of children.
In partnership with UNICEF, we conducted research into predictive analytics specifically in relation to children. We found that, while PA has the potential to offer benefits in certain contexts, using it to generate predictions targeted to individual children carries significant potential risk, and comprehensive risk mitigation measures are needed to avoid causing harm.
This year we conducted a research project on intersectional partnerships between social justice communities and digital rights communities during the pandemic. We sought to understand the impact that data and technology practices shaped by Covid-19 have had on social justice communities.
Through desk research, regional community calls and interviews, our research showed that digital inequities have deepened during the pandemic and many activists are now facing a digital emergency. The research highlighted that intersectional collaboration between social justice and digital rights activists is critical going forward, particularly considering how Covid-19 has magnified and deepened existing inequities. Read our report here.
This year, we accompanied FRIDA in their development of processes for retaining, archiving and deleting the data they held. We worked closely with their team to ensure that their information management practices aligned with their organisational values and workflows.
As part of this work, we developed a resource called “Becoming RAD — How to Retain, Archive and Dispose of data responsibly”, designed to support organisations taking the first steps towards responsible data retention, archiving and deletion practices. The tipsheets are available in English on our website and in French (thanks to information management non-profit CartONG).
Operating in 38 countries, L'Arche is an international organisation working to increase access to support networks, housing, and other supportive programming for people who have disabilities.
Together, we worked to improve the organisation’s strategic use of technology to build an effective, digital workplace. After conducting interviews with team members in multiple countries, sharing an internal survey and undergoing extensive research, we were able to identify a CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) system that looked to be the best fit for L’Arche’s evolving needs and work together on an implementation plan for the organisation to carry out across its teams.
Since our pro-bono Matchbox intensive support programme was launched over seven years ago, we have partnered with selected organisations through an open call selection process.
In 2021, we revamped what our Matchbox programme looks like, changing both the process through which we partner with organisations and what our support looks like. As we revamp Matchbox, we expect these changes to make room for more flexibility and more organic relationship-building with our partners, and to enhance the quality of our support. Learn more about how your organisation can join the programme.
Drawing from our 2020 research with PILPG and HURIDOCS on how technology could better fit the needs of human rights documenters, we published “Tech tools for human rights documentation: a snapshot of the landscape.”
This resource gives an overview of some of the tools currently being used for human rights documentation, including data collection tools, secure camera apps, and database management and publishing tools. Drawing from interviews and published learnings, it also discusses some of common challenges — and mitigation strategies — faced by tool developers working on technology designed for use in a human rights documentation context.
What could a rights-respecting, locally relevant, justice-oriented approach to digital ID look like? Building on our previous work on people's lived experiences with digital identification (ID) systems — and together with Open Society Foundations and a team of in-country researchers working in Indonesia, Jamaica, Pakistan and Uganda — we set out to answer this question.
We found that creating digital ID systems rooted in justice is a process that depends heavily on:
What a year. As we stepped into year two of the global pandemic, we slowed down internally, and acknowledged that providing meaningful and useful support to partners means recognising their realities and their context, and following their pace, needs and the often unexpected ebbs and flows of the pandemic. For us at The Engine Room, the year hit hard on a personal level, as our Executive Director, Julia, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Our priorities, therefore, included giving her the time and space she needs to heal, and our team stepped up in so many ways to make that possible.
This year, the extended nature of the pandemic was felt on many levels — from thinking holistically about what operating in a remote-first model might look like in the long-term for many of our partners, to focusing on strengthening digital infrastructure instead of on short-term fixes. Internally, it meant strengthening documentation practices and building internal processes to allow for people to step away when they needed to.
Programmatically, this meant updating our work in a few key areas. We redesigned our Matchbox intensive support programme in a way that builds upon the light touch support that we provide to dozens of groups a year & — streamlining the intake process to ensure that we're providing intensive support to those who both need it and have the capacity to partner with us on it. Our research projects reflected an increase in interest about the intersection of digital rights and various social justice movements and issues, like environmental justice.
In the spirit of slowing down — and to acknowledge that though much about the world has changed in the last two years, a lot of the inequities that fuelled our strategy refresh early last year remain more entrenched than ever — we made the decision to extend our latest strategy through the end of 2023. This allows us to double down on our focus on strengthening digital resilience within civil society, critically assessing the way that power moves within and through our technology and data practices, and using the tools we have to push for accountability.
This was also a year, I hope, of growth on many levels — of cultivation, collaboration and making space for ourselves and each other. We've learned (and are still learning) how to be gentle with each other, to give space to acknowledge the grief many of us have felt this year, and to use everything that has happened to start 2022 determined to continue pushing for more equitable and just distributions of power.
I'm so proud of everything we've achieved despite the hardships we and our communities have faced — not just the easy-to-describe, measurable programmatic work that you'll read about in this retrospective, but the less visible internal work too, identifying practices that will make ours an even more supportive workplace, listening to our needs, and figuring out ways of showing up for each other. I'm grateful for all the support we've received, and am looking forward to working with many of you in 2022.
— Sincerely, Zara Rahman
