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1. Tech for stronger communities 🏘🌐
If you’re based in the UK, you will have probably come across local mutual aid groups cropping up, as well as countless positive initiatives to lessen the burden of the pandemic on the most vulnerable. One thing is clear - community engagement is on the rise, and people are choosing altruism over selfishness. This is more than just a sentiment. Rather than driving people apart, isolation is spawning a wealth of community activism - both locally supportive and holding power to account - for which civic tech has been a catalyst.
The question going forward is how digital tools can be used to empower communities in the long run. This will involve relying more on digital tools to support the democratic process and seizing on the crisis as an opportunity to foster inclusive digital public engagement in local politics. A great example of this is the Munich city government’s switch from Microsoft to Linux - a win for open source governance!
This seems to be the moment for tech for good tools to help foster a long-lasting strong local communities, but this is also the time to be asking what kind of society we want to become, and how tech for good can support that goal.
One community that remained strong whilst going remote is our tech for good meetup. Thanks again to everyone who logged in for our tech vs. coronavirus chat. For those who couldn’t make it, you can watch the talks here.
2. Tech for good vs. the ‘infodemic’ 📰
The pandemic arrived at a time when trust in the reliability and quality of news was particularly low. This is problematic when the coordinated mass action needed to effectively combat the virus relies on trustworthy public-interest news.
A few months ago, Nesta together with Bethnal Green Ventures launched a Future of News Pilot fund, supporting tech for good models to reinvigorate public-interest news. Here’s how the teams are responding to the pandemic.
Social media giants are the key locus in this debate, and they carry a political weight that they’d probably rather not have. Large platforms are continuing their efforts to quell problematic content, for example by prioritising authoritative news sources, or abating harassment. In Australia, social media giants are even being asked to financially support traditional media. In a bid to clear up its reputation, Facebook created a ‘content supreme court’ of sorts to provide final rulings on what can or cannot be accepted on the platform. Before we get too hopeful, however, we should remember that Facebook’s business model - mining and influencing human behaviour for profit - is unchanged and reports have emerged on how Facebook worked with the Vietnamese government to impose comprehensive censorship and, until late-April, allowed organisations to actively target users interested in ‘pseudoscience’.
Huge problems remain with online misinformation, which takes on a special form in the time of a pandemic. When nearly 50% of Tweets about COVID are by bots, effective responses require huge grassroots and top-down efforts to reduce the local impact of harmful misinformation. The pandemic has been coupled with an equally deadly ‘infodemic’, which should serve as a wake-up call for the role of tech for good in public interest news.
Positive responses are emerging. Luminate are aiming to create an International Fund for Public Interest Media. They are also supporting Storythings, who are hosting a webinar introducing the Public Media Stack, a new guide to ethical public media technology. The Journalism Funders Confidential is a newsletter keeping track of European media philanthropy responses to COVID-19, and Google News Initiative is increasing its donation to the Journalism Diversity Fund by 50%.
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