Who does the hard work of bridging context and technical skills?
For technology projects to be successful and have impact, we need to move past the binary of “hard” and “soft” skills, and recognise the value of people who combine context with technical knowledge.
Among groups working in social change, working with technology and data is all the rage. From the much-hyped data revolution of the United Nations, to pressure from donors to be more technologically innovative with proposed projects, to the slightly misled attempts of technologists to meet the needs of refugees with hackathons and mobile apps.
Spoiler: many of these don’t work. Many critics have written before about the failure of techno-centric solutions in addressing social problems and why doing good with tech is hard.
So, what sorts of skills does it take to recognise that these kinds of solutions won’t work, and to build ones that do?
I say tomato, you say…
When we talk about communication between different geographic-based cultures, it’s relatively accepted that an idea expressed in one culture can mean something totally different in another.
For example: if I turn up unannounced at a friend’s house in Germany and expect to be given a bed for the next two weeks, it might well be considered impolite and slightly out of the ordinary. If I do the same in a country with a different hospitality tradition like Bangladesh, it’s much more culturally acceptable.
What about the way we express our technical ideas?
An idea expressed by a group of developers with computer science training might well be understood in a totally different way by activists with lower levels of technical literacy. They come from totally different backgrounds and work with different priorities, and this can make a big difference to how a project develops.
Worlds colliding
Activists, social change advocates, and human rights defenders work in very different worlds to those working in tech. One of the biggest differences I’ve observed is the perception of risk.
One project I saw ground to a halt because the tech company who had been contracted to build an app for a social change group working with a vulnerable community was aiming for a 1% risk that the app wouldn’t work among the target group. The social change organisation who had contracted them refused to move forward piloting the app with anything less than a 0% risk of bugs — which the tech company couldn’t guarantee. For them, a 1% risk meant putting 1% of their already vulnerable community at risk, and that was far too many people for it to be a viable option. And there it stalled.
These misunderstandings might not sound like much, but they add up. The number of dead dashboards, mobile apps, unused portals, and platforms is growing by the day, and the amount of money and effort being put into them is an incredible waste.
Good tech + good communication = :-)
For a technical project to be successfully implemented within the social change sector, a combination of context and technical skills is needed. It requires deep, sector-specific understanding of the threats and risks faced, as well as thorough tech knowledge, to implement the project from a technical perspective.
In projects where this is done this well, there’s been someone playing a role that is often taken for granted, and is somewhat invisible, between these groups. The person who takes what a human rights defender is saying and helps them articulate their needs to the person who is coming up with the specifications for a tool, with necessary context. Or vice versa, the person who converts what a developer is saying about the limitations of a certain technology and adds context to make sure that the activist really understands what is being said — and its consequences.
This role is crucial. It can make the difference between a new technology project causing real world harm or that same technology being thoughtfully and responsibly used, responsive to the needs of those it will be affecting, and sensitive to context. I’ve observed a range of people playing this role and making huge differences to the way in which a project happens. Despite this, it remains invisible as an archetypal role in tech projects.
The role exists under many names, and it’s often present in an ad hoc way. Some product managers do it. Some UX designers do it. Some community managers do it. Some people think of it as tech translation, or playing a bridge or a broker role, or even being a catalyst or champion among a community.
Whatever it’s called, it’s also under-appreciated. In our tech-focused world, we often hold those with so-called “hard” programming skills up on a pedestal, and we relegate those with “soft” communication skills to being invisible caretakers. It’s not an accident that this binary correlates strongly with traditionally male-dominated roles of programming and largely female-dominated roles of community management or emotional labour. It’s worth noting too, that one is paid much more than the other.
This binary is unuseful and outdated. For tech to be implemented well among communities with low tech literacy, we need more than someone with coding skills. We need people who can communicate well between different groups, making sure that the developer is speaking the same language as the activist and that, despite heavy contextual differences, their goals and aims are aligned.
Projects which have failed in this space often don’t fail because the technology has been badly built. They fail because communication between the groups involved fell apart at some point.
I believe a key way of addressing that problem is by identifying and recognising this translation role in technology projects. Through my fellowship at Data & Society, I’ll be examining this role in different activism, advocacy, and human rights spaces. Is my hypothesis, explained above, correct? And if so, what qualities are needed to play this role, and how have people done it in the past?
If you’d like to talk about any of the above — whether you agree or disagree, or if you think you play (some part of) this role — please get in touch with me on zara@datasociety.net.
Points: In this Points original, “Who does the hard work of bridging context and technical skills?” Data & Society fellow Zara Rahman shares the thinking behind her Tech Translation project: Who and what needs to be present for a technology project to reach its goals among activist and human rights defender communities?— Ed.
Zara Rahman is a feminist and information activist who has worked in over twenty countries in the field of information accessibility and data use among civil society. She is Research Lead at the Engine Room, a non-profit organization supporting the use of technology and data in advocacy. She is a 2016–2017 Fellow at Data & Society.
