Decisions around technology are often taken in offices in Silicon Valley or in the hallways of government offices. These technologies then go on to impact the lives of everyone. With greater access to the internet, more and more people from rural and vulnerable communities (‘First Mile’) have now gotten access to these technologies but their demands and needs neither shape technology design by corporate firms nor are central to government agenda.
This session will try to understand how communities can become central to the design, development, and deployment of technology. Together, we will hear practitioners and participants from different communities and intermediary organisations (NGOs/tech activists/GovTech developers) highlighting ways and means of adopting a ‘First Mile’ approach in technology development. The session will delve into real-life stories of such implementation and marks the start of a continued collaboration towards design technology of, by, for the people!
The session brings together different forms of practice in the ways of shifting power in tech through community-centric (First Mile) Design. The insights of these different groups of people, technologists and activists from different contexts can help surface modalities and processes, what does or does not work and resultant tensions that arise.
These can lead to the cross-pollination of strategies across themes, inform future work, surface nuances, spark ideas in participants and further the cause of community-centred and driven tech. To ensure that the discussions are translated into the real world, we hope to bring out a synthesis document (compilation) of the discussion and pre-session research and conversations with possible panellists. The document is intended to be a “quick & dirty guide” of actionable insights and practical strategies to give people ideas on how they can jump on to the community-centric tech design bandwagon.
- We hope to compile the discussion from the session and some pre-session research into a document that provides a framework for any civil society or local community to take up this task, mobilise and structure themselves to bring about a change (A quick and dirty guide to experiments and initiatives for first-mile development of tech). The document will also contain case studies and examples from the session, interesting questions and survey results. Participants from the session can contribute to these documents.
- We also hope to make a repository of these community-centric solutions and resources to make them available to most people and also have a section where people can raise requests for something that is needed. The repository would need to be a community effort with people contributing solutions and picking up requests to solve them.
The session format is agnostic to the number of participants including the interactive activities. We hope to foster a discussion around this topic - less participants would mean more engagement and more participants would mean more ideas. In both situations, a varying number of participants shouldn’t impact the session. The compilation and repository that will be developed as an outcome of the session are designed to reach a broader audience than the immediate participants of the session.
Gaurav is a YLT Fellow in India working on Responsible Technology. He has a Master in Public Policy from the University of Oxford and an engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur.
Fellow, Young Leaders in Tech Policy (International Innovation Corps). Working with the Foundation for Ecological Security to develop community centric technology and data governance.
