Refugee tech and a future of resilience

I'm just back from a series of Digital Impact events in Brussels, London and Berlin. This is part of a multi-country learning effort I'm leading through the Digital Civil Society Lab and with local partners in each host city.

We're documenting that work here. I won't repeat those posts on this site. However, there will more to say than any one blog can hold so I'll try to capture additional insights and findings here.

Betterplace Labs in Berlin just completed a report on Refugee Tech that is important for everyone, everywhere. Worldwide, there are more than 65 million people moving from their homes for reasons of war, disaster, climate change, famine, or political violence (or a mix of these).* As we are all dependent on digital technologies now, the ways in which both the refugees and the receiving communities respond bear lessons for all of us. Tech is so familiar to all of us its now background, but this is the point at which really understanding the positive affordances of the technology and the political realities of data and digital infrastructure becomes key.

The Betterplace Labs report focuses on integration efforts - ways in which Germans worked over time to integrate their 1 million new neighbors into their communities. This prospect - welcoming, receiving, moving forward together - is our collective future. Lessons learned now, about the politics, social challenges, technological realities of building welcoming and resilient diverse communities is information we can all use.

Digital Routes to Integration : How civic tech innovations are supporting refugees in Germany from betterplace lab

*If you are reading this in the US, and have a hard time imagining what this kind of influx is like (either from the perspective of the refugees or those receiving them), I recommend new fiction by Omar El Akkad, American War. It brings the idea of forced migration and borders to life in landscapes (political and physical) that will resonate with US residents and some of our particular political historical baggage. It's not a happy tale, and the Betterplace Labs report shows us much more positive potential futures.

Assume digital - and question your tools

Assume digital. This is the first thing I say to people when doing presentations about Digital Civil Society. Digital data and infrastructure are here to stay and we have to learn how they work - and adapt our practices to protect our values - in order to really use "tech for good."

Here's a great video from a Danish consumer protection group (shared by friends @EDRI in Brussels) that shows just how out of sync our norms are with the defaults coded into our digital tools.

When the government attacks nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations are institutional manifestations of the desire of a group of people coming together to use their private resources and address a problem or a need they care about. This is true if you are the world's biggest foundation, the neighborhood food bank, or a group of protestors.

In order to do that - to come together and take a collective course of action - we depend on a certain set of rights and freedom. The nonprofit sector and broader civil society rests specifically upon the right to free expression, the right to association, and the ability to learn, think, and make decisions without being watched. If you erode the rights upon which the sector stands, you erode the sector.

The Republican Party, the FCC, and this presidential administration are actively destroying Americans' rights to privacy. The latest step in this direction is their decision to allow people's search histories to be put up for sale. If you can't search for information privately, well you can't do much.

They are also attempting to curtail people's rights to associate freely in person or online - as evidenced by state legislative proposals aimed at preventing peaceful protest and FCC declarations to leave broadband access to the whims of telecomm duopolies.

And they are conducting a massive head fake regarding our freedom of expression, decrying "fake news" while delegitimizing informed debate, casting multiple voices as a falsely oppressive form of "political correctness," and seeking to quiet voices of disagreement. Proof here lies not only in the President's attacks on the press and news media but in efforts by the CBP and Homeland Security to identify dissenting voices on social media and the FCC's determination to end net neutrality.

Surveilling and putting up for sale all the data we generate by doing anything online or on our mobile phones. Making collective action illegal. Allowing the internet to become as tilted a playing field as the rest of the economy, making it ever harder for the little guy to be heard. These action and others all point to a deliberate effort to weaken civil society and the nonprofit sector.

The U.S. nonprofit sector is on thin ice, facing threats on many fronts.  But make no mistake - the current administration and ruling party is one of the biggest threats to the basic rights and freedoms upon which civil society in the U.S. stands. Our government is undermining our democracy.

Where and how do we give for good?

When we "assume digital," we recognize that the data sources for understanding how people use money to support change are quite numerous. In addition to making sense of formally reported information from organizations, we should look to the platforms that move the money to better understand how and where people put their money where their values are.

Here's the opportunity I think we have:

So the question is - can we ask new questions and find new answers by analyzing data from credit card transactions, social media platforms, payment processors, AND officially reported data from government agencies to understand how we actually put our money to work for the things we care about?

And what does it look like around the world? Here's info from one platform in China:

 Millions of people giving with a single shake of their phone. 

"We need to ask new questions" (@afine)