Who we are, what we value, and the change we want to see
Data, Tech, & Black Communities (DTBC) is a community of impact — we work with and for Black communities in the UK to make technology a more positive influence in the lives of Black people. Black people aren’t the only marginalised group in the UK, so interacting with and sharing knowledge with other marginalised groups is core to our ways of working.
Join us as we share what we value, how we work, and most importantly, why you should care.
Better together
We believe the resources we create and share as part of this project can be valuable to other marginalised communities in the UK. So we actively encourage anyone working with a marginalised community to reuse our methods, tools, lessons learned.
We will support work that reduces the harmful (and sometimes unintended) consequences of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and practices such as extensive use of personal data. In addition, we encourage work that actively explores building life-enhancing technology in the first place.
Who are ‘we’ exactly?
Our community of impact is a group that works towards our shared cause — to make technology a positive impact on UK Black lives. When we use the terms technology or tech, we also include data, and our focus is on data-centric digital technology. Working together, we are learning how tech can support efforts to create a lasting, positive impact for Black communities and other communities often described as ‘marginalised’.
What’s a marginalised community?
Marginalised communities are excluded from mainstream life, which means they don’t have equal access to the same social, economic, educational, or cultural advantages. A community might be marginalised due to one or more of these factors: their race, how they identify their gender, who they love, their age, physical ability, their language, if they’ve been to prison, are working class, or if they are immigrants. In addition, people from marginalised communities can identify as white, Asian, disabled, LGBT+ or a number of other identities.
Black people are diverse; we are disabled, LGBT+, working-class, and many other identities. So we have a common cause with members of these communities, and all of us would benefit from better uses of data and technology. Marginalisation leads to unequal power relationships between social groups, and data and technology can make this worse. That’s why we believe that we work better together.
Our community evolved out of a project funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. Our community stewards are currently three Black women working in technology: Tracey Gyateng, Ade Adewunmi, and Dr Mwenza Blell. Our role is as caretakers of the community until we’re no longer needed. In the formation of DTBC, Edafe Onerhime was a founding steward and has been instrumental in developing DTBC.
Now you know a little more about who we are, what do we hope this community will achieve? What do we value? How can you get involved? For more on that, read on.
What do we want to achieve?
We started with the simple question: How can technology and data be designed with empathy and justice?
The most effective way of assessing how just and empathetic data and digital technologies are, is to ask the question: Do they serve marginalised communities well, or do they reinforce existing inequalities? Unfortunately, marginalised groups are often the proverbial canaries in the coal mine — we feel the negative impact of data and technology in our communities first and hardest. That’s why understanding how data-centric technologies impact us is crucial for the wellbeing of wider society.
In focusing on the impact of data and tech on Black communities what did we hope to find? Insights to help us understand how to build back better and fairer for everyone. We aimed to do this in a way that supports people rather than simply extracts their time, knowledge, and skills while leaving them out of the implementation process. This approach informs all our work.
What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
Many data and technology organisations essentially test their products on an unsuspecting public — that’s you and me. This is often described as the ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ approach. In doing so, they transfer the burden of testing and validating the merits and safety of their products onto us.
The side-effects of products built in this way often fall first and hardest on marginalised groups. Sometimes these harms are obvious and direct, but often they are broad and diffuse.
These corporations’ approach has several implications:
1. The speed of tech product development means there’s insufficient time for piloting, evaluation, and public engagement. As a result, the potential negative impacts of the products and services aren’t identified and can’t be proactively addressed
2. The harms can take time to appear and can pop up in unexpected places, so it takes a while for people who are affected to join the dots, and organise to bring about change. And even when they do, corporations with a vested interest in staying the same have the funds to lobby governments and promote stories that convince people that the problems aren’t so bad or aren’t down to their products. So, for example, it took years to link the emergence of Airbnb and housing shortages in cities like Barcelona and Edinburgh.
What’s our ultimate goal?
In a nutshell, we want to see uses of data and technology that support equity and human flourishing. That means creating more just and fair technology. It also means identifying and redesigning or discontinuing data-collection practices and data-centric technologies that don’t do this.
That’s why we’re looking at data-collection practices and data-centric, digital technologies that cause problems for Black communities, which might otherwise fly under the radar. We know that keeping track of these technologies and addressing them is an uphill battle for civil society and a particular nightmare for groups already fighting social injustice.
This is the perspective that shapes our core goals. We support people to do this vital tracking and mapping work, and together, we can address the emergent issues. Often when grappling with the fallout from bad tech, we feel it on an individual level. However, we believe that this can’t be fixed on that level; we’ll get much further by organising and taking action together.
Where do we start? We believe we start with the organisations already serving Black communities. Why? Because they already have connections to people in their communities and the organisational infrastructure to be effective.
So what do we bring? First, we recognise that this work isn’t the primary mission of most community or grassroots organisations. As a result, many community organisers and leaders who are already working hard to improve the lives of those they serve don’t have the time, resources, or technical know-how to engage with the issues caused by data and tech confidently.
It’s not just a case of capacity and confidence; it’s also about access. Community organisers and leaders may lack access to and the ability to influence ‘Big Tech’ or the institutions that embed these data-centric products and services in our lives. They may lack the contacts and context they need to make meaningful and positive changes.
Ultimately, our goals are to:
- Help leaders identify links between the current uses of data and tech and, where they exist, negative impacts within their communities.
- Support leaders to meaningfully increase the positive impacts of data and digital technologies and reduce the harms.
How will we achieve this?
Beyond our rationale and goals, what are our values? How will we ensure we don’t end up exploiting, extracting, and harming the very people we aim to support? We began by crafting principles that shape our approach and objectives. We wrote these down so our stakeholders knew what to expect from us.
What are our principles?
Our experience as technologists and feedback from the organisation leaders, technologists and academics whose opinions we sought, helped us identify and refine six principles that we felt should guide our work.
We were also inspired by the principles of the Design Justice Network, which proposes an approach that “rethinks design processes, centres people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.”
We have six deeply held and actively practices principles:
- First, we work in open ways. In practice, this means sharing our work and ideas. It also means being transparent about our working methods and welcoming to our methods being reused and repurposed.
- We recognise that we do not hold all the answers; we are humble and constantly learning from others.
- We are respectful of people’s time. This means reading up on their prior work (rather than asking them to re-state it for our benefit) and compensating them for their time as appropriate.
- We aim for our work and events to be accessible to all, making adjustments when we need to.
- We include a mix of people, from people on the frontline to academics and technologists, and focusing on issues that directly impact Black lives. We meet at times that would work for people.
- We make the data and tech as relevant as we can to the lived experience of all the people we work with.
What’s our approach?
Principles alone won’t make action happen. So we translated our values into four essential steps that we apply to everything we do.
We began by creating safe spaces for people to share, learn and set our community’s agenda. Next, we worked hard to remove as many of the socioeconomic barriers to engaged individuals taking part in this effort, as we possibly could.
We built on existing work and existing relationships while reducing the potential for the negative impact of hypervisibility for those taking part. Marginalised people are disproportionately at risk of threats, abuse, and retaliation for organising. We worked hard to be thoughtful and keep everyone who got involved safe.
And our objectives?
There’s a lot of work to be done to fulfil our vision “to make technology a positive impact on UK Black lives”. So what can we do within this space? Working with Black communities, we want to:
- Engage: Actively engage with Black communities through Black leaders- mentoring organisations acting as intermediaries.
- Inform: Support Black leaders to more effectively recognise how Big Tech’s products and services currently affect, and could further affect, the lives of UK residents.
- Connect: Develop and enhance relationships between Black leaders and technologists and academics who are working on or studying the impact of the data and tech industry.
What did we assume?
We started this community with some assumptions. We want to share the key ones with you. Challenge us if you think they need to change.
We assumed:
- The leaders of organisations working formally and informally in Black communities don’t have the time, capacity and set of skills needed to do the work of fully mapping the harms and benefits of data and technology to impacts while doing their core work.
- Big Tech does not work in isolation; it depends on a network of organisations and institutions, schools, employers, businesses to build an ecosystem that enables its products and services to function at scale. It is this ecosystem that embeds data and technology in our everyday lives.
Any work we do must focus on the entire ecosystem. You can’t address the challenges of data and technology by only looking at Big Tech.
The bigger picture we began to reveal after our initial discovery highlights our assumptions: Scrutiny required! Making technology a positive impact on UK Black lives.
This image doesn’t convey all our discoveries or realisations and there are definitely things missing. However, we do think it works well as as a rough guide to where our heads are at as we move from our initial discovery work to our first project. The image outlines what the big change we want to see — data-centric, digital technologies that enhance Black lives — might look like in practice. For example:
- we think it would like data about people being available to them so they can use it to improve their communities.
- giving people this degree of agency is also why we believe that conversations about data and tech must be centred in real life. We think it’s easier for people to push for positive change if they understand how technology’s positive and negative impacts play out in real life.
- we want to see tech and data evolve to help us engage in our communities and outside our communities safely and effectively.
- we want to see a public that’s informed about and shapes ‘Big Tech’,
- Lastly, we want equitable and effective regulation of data and tech that gives people the levers to make these changes.
We believe that these things, however desirable, can’t and won’t just happen. There needs to be sustained resourcing of the organisers and community groups that are facilitating this work on the ground. That means leaders in this space need access to money, networks, relevant tech, and the internet.
As we build and shape our community of impact together, we’ll test these assumptions and use what we learn to fill in more blanks.
What can you do now?
Thank you for coming on this journey with us. Here are three things you can do right now:
- Read our very first article: ‘Scrutiny required! Making technology a positive impact on UK Black lives’ where we kicked off this work. It will take around 5 minutes.
- Get in touch: Contact us about this project, let us know what you think, who else we should speaking to, and how we can make this a success.
- Share what you know: Contribute to our public bookmarks — ‘Data, Tech & Black Communities’. We’d love your resources, examples of data and technology’s impact on Black lives, or links to other work in this area. If you need help using our bookmarks, read ‘How to use our resources’.
Acknowledgements:
- Illustrations from BlackIllustrations.com — Life is Good — Lifestyle Pack, New Year, New Vibes Illustration Pack, and The Disability Pack.
- Photo by uncoveredlens from Pexels and modified in Canva.
- We’ve licensed diagrams we created under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
