Case Study: A Data Hub for Affordable Housing, Part 6
Human beings are the signal. Everything else is just noise…Computers were and are nothing more than tools, boxes of beautiful ideas that are only as valuable as they are human — ones whose connections can destroy us as easily as they can draw us together, if we are not careful. But at their best, they can connect us with the thing that really matters: the people who will stand with us on the precipice of our lives, gazing down at the chasm of the next challenge, and hold our hands as we jump into the unknown. — Laura Hudson in Wired
During a recent check-in with our leadership team, a colleague asked, “Whose job is it to go more than halfway?”
“Halfway” was a theme in our larger conversation; we were discussing our progress at the midpoint of the accelerator. We were six weeks in, and I was pleased with our progress toward defining a sustainable business model. I was looking forward to following our problem interviews with solution interviews, to engaging with a new group of users we’d identified, and to getting the prototype in the hands of possible early adopters.
But in the social impact space, the question of meeting a user group just halfway seems…well, half-a*****.
Because we are asking individuals with lived experience in complex situations to do the emotional labor of teaching us, in our privilege, what their most difficult days look like. We are inviting them to use their time to play with our apps and systems and tell us what they see. We are persuading them to tell us personal details, to share where current systems are failing them, to be vulnerable and confess their shortcomings and missteps and reveal their pain to us.
That’s a long journey to take on spec for a stranger.
If these experiences and perspectives are so valuable that they are considered essential inputs to our solution design process — if we are building a true user-centered experience, and literally cannot do it without them — than what might we owe, other than a built solution that, at the end of the day, may or may not work?
Respect, of course. Integrity, dignity, confidentiality. Patience. Curiosity. Humility.
But that feels as though it’s still just playing at the edges of halfway.
What is the appropriate compensation for time spent and insights offered? Should a social impact project have to pay its focus group participants the same as if they were a soft drink company or an international hotel chain? Who decides what compensation is appropriate, ethical, and sufficient? Who determines whether it impacts the quality of the data collected? When in the development cycle should compensation even come into play — is it only after a prototype is ready for testing?
I believe, thanks to the variety of voices on our team, that we’ve done some good soul-searching around this. We’ve come up with some practical ways we can honor people’s time and contributions to our process, while still bootstrapping (read: volunteering) an open source, social impact venture. Service is at the heart of the data hub project.
But what of for-profit ventures geared toward amplifying the voices of or meeting the needs of the underserved? What is their most impactful investment in those user communities as they research, design, and build a tool that may or may not see the light of day — and even if it does, it may not solve the problem that’s been dragged into the light, the wound that’s been reopened, the mistake that’s been revisited and laid bare? When a business stands to generate revenue thanks in part to the labor and lived experiences of an underserved group, what is that labor worth?
I don’t have these answers. Not by a long shot. There’s no accrediting body to make these determinations, no licensing agency to hold us accountable. We are all making this up as we go along, with our conscience, however imperfect, as our guide. Some days we get it more right than others. Every day we can try to do better.
Every day, we can remind ourselves of our privilege and we can use it to go a little more than halfway.
And so: we iterate.
Jennifer Houlihan is managing director for Austin CityUP, a smart city consortium in Austin, Texas.
