Practitioner Fellow Projects

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.