“Talk with refugees, don’t just talk about refugees.” This is a slogan that did the rounds during the explosion of digital projects following the refugee “crisis” in 2015–16. We at betterplace lab urged the founders of digital projects promoting refugee integration to take this to heart. Their impact would ultimately be limited, we argued, if they were built and run by teams of Europeans with limited understanding of, and contact with, the group they were trying to help. As an immediate measure, we suggested actively seeking user input and feedback through research and focus groups, and longer-term aiming for a situation of projects developed and run by newcomers.
But what happened when we tried to put our own advice into practice?
Last summer, together with partners including the Federal Interior Ministry, we organised the second “Conference on Digital Solutions for Refugees” in Berlin, where this particular civic tech community came together to exchange and learn from each other. The first such event had been a year earlier and, although it had received positive feedback, we and others had been disappointed by the almost complete absence of refugees in the room to contribute their own , contributing their perspectives to the discussion. This time around, we resolved, would be different.
We went to considerable lengths to enable and encourage newcomers to attend. We made everything trilingual: the website, the programme, the online promotion all appeared in Arabic, English and German. And on the day, the on-stage programme switched between the three languages, with simultaneous translation into all three. The part of the day I am proudest of is the afternoon panel discussion in Arabic (pictured above), with most of the Germans in the audience donning headsets to be able to follow what was being said. Especially in the context of an event hosted by the federal government, I feel this was a potent symbolic gesture of respect and equality.
In the weeks leading up to the summit, we also invested in outreach, particularly to the Syrian community living in Berlin. My colleague Akram, himself a Syrian, posted information about the event in several diaspora Facebook groups, and judging by the comments, likes, and dozens of people signing up to attend, there was considerable interest.
Then the day came, and……only a handful of refugees actually came. Once again I looked out across a conference audience that overwhelmingly looked like me: i.e. mostly privileged white Europeans. In this sense, it was no different from almost all the other conferences on civic tech that I’ve attended over the years.
A question of power
Partly this is an issue of practical effectiveness: people will be less likely to understand and successfully address the challenges facing refugees if they have little first-hand contact with those challenges. But at the same time, I think this is one example of a serious and under-discussed issue which goes beyond the niche of migration and integration: how diverse is the civic tech community? Because when we talk about “social innovations” — i.e. new ways of responding to matters that we collectively care about — in the end we’re talking about power. Having an idea for how we should organise society differently is an instance of staking a claim to some kind of power.
Maybe that language feels uncomfortable for people used to thinking of themselves as “the good guys” who stand up for the interests of disadvantaged people. In fact, there’s nothing inherently wrong with demanding power, indeed it can be powerfully good. But we do need to recognise when and how demands for power are happening, and insist on certain responsibilities.
One of the responsibilities is asking who is getting the power. So, looking at DSI, who is in a position to launch this kind of project? Given the technical demands of building a digital product, there is already a skew towards people from a privileged educational background. We also know that software development continues to be a profession where men outnumber women (although there is great work being done to redress this). To put it bluntly, anybody who argues, as we do, for an expansion of civic tech should care about the issue of diversity — the alternative is to reinforce existing power imbalances and social inequalities.
In the world of commercial tech, where the accumulation of power is undeniable, there are now scores of initiatives to increase representation of women and people of colour. In the civic tech scene, there seems to be comparatively little discussion about representation. The handful of initiatives in this direction that I’m aware of are all in the US, for instance the Kairos Fellowship, a call to action by GovTrack and explicit efforts by Code for America to diversify their intake.
Lowering barriers first requires seeing where they are
I certainly don’t take a moral high ground on this. It’s a challenge which we’re also struggling with. Since Akram moved on to other things, the betterplace lab team has been entirely white Europeans, which is problematic for an organisation that has migrant integration as one of its focus topics. (We have recently created an internal working group on diversity to try and address this.) My point is, this blog is not a sanctimonious lecture but rather an invitation to others who are interested in finding more adequate answers to these questions than we currently have.
To return to the example I started with, our experience with the “Conference on Digital Solutions for Refugees” has made me humbler about the scale of the task at hand. The lengths we went to in lowering the barriers of language (via translation) and information (via outreach) suggest that these two are not the whole picture. Clearly there was more about the way that our discussion was framed or presented which made it feel inaccessible or uninviting to would-be newcomer-collaborators. We ought to understand why that was, and the first step will be to listen more.
