Practitioner Fellow Projects

This project challenges the notion that parents should be the absolute owners and controllers of their children’s DNA. Citing various instances where parents—through direct and indirect means—facilitated turning over DNA to law enforcement without adequate safeguards, Nila maps the harms of collecting children’s DNA and potential regulatory frameworks that consider all stakeholders: children, parents, private companies, government, schools, and even physicians, to protect children’s rights over their own data. (2022)

Laura and Elizaeth’s project tracks public sector narratives of problem-solving and progress, documenting incentives and tradeoffs between technical interventions and the rule of law within digital state technologies. Their work examines how current and proposed accountability measures fail to meet the challenge of pervasive data systems, questioning whether governance by cycles of harm and redress is an inescapable part of an inevitable transition to a more datafied future, and if that future is the only pathway to public infrastructure and service delivery. (2022)

This project seeks to understand the distinct impacts of regulating hate speech on Black people who are tasked with the jobs of content moderation and platform policy enforcement. While the literature regarding the field has revealed exposure to hateful content to be some of the most harrowing upon commercial content moderators, the specificity of the harm created upon those most impacted has yet to be interrogated. Based on interviews with six individuals who identify as Black Americans and work within varying tech companies in Trust & Safety departments, Anika documented anecdotal evidence of the harms thrust upon Black bodies to share the realities and stories of what it is like to work in these spaces, and, in turn, how we can learn and grow as institutions. (2022) 

The AI Harm Pipeline, seeks to log data habits of AI harms that are reported throughout Africa through detailed interviews and case studies of those inputting data, those managed by automated systems, and those harmed by the effects of content moderation. The AI Harm Pipeline will create a publicly accessible database of government and private sector use of AI tools and systems, and research the impacts of selected cases of tools on various stakeholders, shedding light on feasible recommendations for future and current automated systems. The project will additionally include a series of exhibitions displaying stories of those affected by automated systems. (2022)

Panthea’s project, The Healing Justice Collaborative, explores the impacts of unaddressed trauma on our societies, pathways to collective healing that center structural equity and justice, and how the realms of public policy, international development, and global governance can learn from practices in the arts, healing justice, and conflict transformation. Through research, programming, and advocacy, The Healing Justice Collaborative seeks to bring together communities, artists, healers, mediators, and policymakers in exercises of radical co-creation to imagine bold alternative futures, design viable paths forward, and enact courageous proposals for change. (2022)

In partnership with the Virulent Hate Project, Evelyn’s project analyzed the influence of news media in the context of anti-Asian sentiment and racism during 2020. In collecting over 4,500 pieces of news coverage relating to racial unrest and violence, Evelyn and her team members documented key findings surrounding what types of coverage received the most attention, how the media is portraying these kinds of events, and recommendations moving forward for journalists and news media to accurately and empathetically portray the Asian-American experience. (2022) 

Decentralized finance provides businesses or individuals access to financial tools without intermediaries. With COVID-19, defi tools have taken a front seat in shaping the future of finance however Black American and other communities of color are being left out of the powerful use cases of this blockchain technology. This projects goal is to create a decentralized finance platform to serve unbanked communities of color. (2021)

This software framework will be able to orchestrate and interoperate a large number of existing governance libraries and platforms. Instead of hacking together a bunch of disparate and overlapping tools and platforms, imagine an app-store-like user experience for community management. (2021)

The pandemic has accelerated the roll-out and deployment of digital identity solutions, many of which rely on the use of sensitive personal data, advanced biometrics, and/or new and experimental technologies such as blockchain or distributed ledger technology. The pathway from vendor to end user is typically a matter of obscure procurement processes without much of any consultation of the public or civil society along the way, and without due consideration of the risks to many of the fundamental rights of impacted populations. This project will examine some of the emerging trends in digital identity and attempt to map the core human and civil rights implications of these trends from the perspective of civil society organizations and actors. (2021)

This project will confront the harm caused by algorithmic policing tools. (2021)

This project aims to unlock a new generation of smart smallholder farmers by designing and developing a set of learning resources targeted at teenage children of smallholder farmers as agents of knowledge transfer and innovation. The goal is to leverage the tech-savvy and passion of these teenagers to democratize access to these skills and tools that can help tackle existing smallholder farming challenges. (2021)

One of the biggest challenges in advocating for digital rights is a lack of translation to local languages. The goal of this project is to work with both language and digital rights practitioners to develop a lexicon and linguistic practice around digital rights advocacy in East Africa. More than just translation, it will use publishing on various platforms and formats to stimulate conversation on digital rights in languages other than English. (2021)

This project seeks to provide civil society organizations and policy makers in Sub-Saharan Africa a toolkit for assessing the ethical and human rights implications of algorithmic technology. (2021)

Managing data’s fluidity within and outside computerized systems is at the core of every sector in our digital civil society. Yet, unevenness in representation within the data workforce persist, especially for Black women. The existing global data workforce through their technologies are making decisions that routinely and adversely impact Black women. This project seeks to document Black women’s identity in data roles, explore the social, political and economic factors impacting their engagement and shift the power dynamics for their inclusion in a robust digital civil society. (2021)

As the data-driven digital economy evolves, digital trade has become more prominent in global trade talks. The stakes are high for tech companies in trade talks, as they stand to benefit greatly from the elimination of domestic regulations. This project’s aim is to hone the power of strong digital policy advocacy to influence trade policy. It aims to ensure that digital rights advocates have access to tools, knowledge, and support for policy entrepreneurship to influence the outcome of trade talks. (2021)

This project explores the drivers, politics, profiteers, and pitfalls of how data is governed by both indigenous and foreign technology companies within sub-Saharan Africa. (2021)

This project will explore how policymakers can work in partnership with communities to identify missing datasets, best practices for ethical intersectional data collection and pathways to support data accountability. (2021)

This project seeks to create a sentiment labelling library for words in AAVE for the purpose of improving sentiment analysis for black speakers and helping provide insight into the black community through sentiment analysis. (2021)

RUBY is a digital toolkit to support young people’s advocacy campaigns for racial justice education in public schools. Inspired by Ruby Bridges, the first African-American child to integrate a white Southern elementary school, RUBY is a digital toolkit for Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth activists and advocates to support civic campaigns that push for comprehensive and accurate Black and ethnic studies curricula in K-12 public schools across the United States. (2021)

People who are already pushed to the margins by society aren’t touched by civic engagement campaigns that rely solely on existing digital tools. This project seeks to use a racial justice lens to identify the biases and limitations of digital civic engagement tools, identify the supplemental digital strategies and tactics that will allow practitioners to engage underrepresented audiences, and will document those learnings so we don’t have to recreate the wheel each time. (2021)

The aim of this project will be to strengthen the capacities of African civil society organizations in the detection of disinformation and hate speech, and pair it with their acute knowledge of the local political and social context, in order to eventually create a reliable system that can spot such content before it becomes viral on social media platforms. The system will entail multi-stakeholder collaborations, which will involve civil society organizations and content platforms. (2020) 

This project seeks to build upon the existing City of Minneapolis’ Strategic and Racial Equity Action Plan­­ by adopting technology considerations such as transparent design in facial recognition,  predictive analytics used in bail algorithms, data collected from body cameras and video surveillance. (2020)

Digital technologies used for agricultural production, often referred to as AgTech, is a burgeoning industry currently valued at $17 billion and expected to grow exponentially. With all this excitement around technological growth, there has been virtually no exploration of how AgTech will impact the millions of farmworkers in the US, the majority of whom are immigrants. This project will explore the impact of the emerging AgTech industry on farm labor, and how the industry can be held accountable to support farmworker communities rather than harming them. (2020)

Mutale Nkonde’s work centers Black people in public discussion and policy considerations about technology. During her fellowship Nkonde launched and built AI For the People (AfP), a communications firm working to increase the participation of Black people in all aspects of public sector technology. AfP works across the landscapes of media, technology, film, television, art, and public policy to change tech-neutrality narratives and help communities advocate for anti-racist policies, specifically regarding artificial intelligence. (2020) 

This project seeks to identify pathways for civil society to advocate for a public interest Internet infrastructure. It strives to do so by identifying research and advocacy opportunities developed through a growing network of civil society actors, scholars, and technologists continuously cooperating to explore and prototype practices for strengthening civil society’s impact. (2020)

The use of DNA testing is spreading around the world, but within these technologies lie a great deal of assumptions and biases, and many uses are based on science which has deep xenophobic assumptions at its core. Through this project, I will document their histories and how these technologies have been developed as a way of building up an evidence base to support civil society in advocating for these issues, and identify potential advocacy strategies that can and have been used to mitigate negative impacts. (2020)

The emergence of AI in the consumer credit market has brought new types of opportunities and risks for historically disadvantaged populations seeking loans.  This project’s contribution will be to develop a mechanism for monitoring disparate impact by testing for and reporting on lending practices that are unfair, deceptive or abusive to vulnerable groups and communities. (2020)

This project is a global alliance to create, pilot, and apply Affirmative Action Algorithms that upturn the current path of Automated Decision-Making systems at a critical point in history, fostering social justice through gender and racial equality. (2020)

A centuries-long conflation between safety and security has helped propel society down a trajectory prohibiting numerous opportunities for visionary resistance to societal ills. This project seeks to create tools and initiatives for systematizing true safety by minimizing the conflation between safety and security, countering the public safety narrative which has become synonymous with surveillance and activating opportunities for visionary resistance. (2020)

As with ayeta, the protective gear that ancient Yoruba warriors wore for protection against gunshots during warfare, this toolkit will arm civil society actors — who protect the rights of citizens in their countries — with the information, resources and community they need should their work put them in harm’s way. The toolkit will also built on existing resources to allow Africa’s digital rights advocates and organisations to have access to information that can help them run efficient campaigns. (2020)

This project aims to understand pathways to technical intuition, build and test instruments that can accelerate technical intuition development, and explore scalable development of technical intuition by non-technical audiences. (2019)

This project will produce a policy white paper exploring “regulatory sandboxes” in a U.S. context for emerging technologies aimed at promoting financial inclusion.

This project aims to develop the next phase of OpenArchive, a free and open-source mobile application that routes mobile media to user-created collections in an accessible public trust.

This project proposes to answer questions about the creation of trusts and ideas of mutual benefit for data trusts as used by civil society organizations. Can CSO data trusts benefit the public?

The research project aims to advance our understanding of the interactions between human values and these powerful emerging technologies, and to inform the debates about what role Al can and should play in caregiving.

With the amount and diversity of giving data available from #GivingTuesday, the leadership team set out to learn more about the drivers behind it, the behaviors around it, and what might inspire more of it.

The Privacy Patterns project aims to increasing awareness around privacy issues associated with the collection, use and disclosure of personal data, combined with the lack of guidance or regulation for civil society organizations.

Josh Levy, Non-Resident Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab, built the Digital Security Exchange to connect U.S. civil society organizations with digital security experts.

In order to understand and reimagine political structures, process, and associational life, we must simultaneously critique and reconsider our communications tools.