What is community tech, and why do communities care about it? We discuss examples of community tech we’ve seen through our research to explore how communities are creating their own sociodigital futures and discover what can be learnt from community alternatives to big tech solutions.
With Anna Dent, Matt Dowse, Helen Manchester and Martin Parker.
Find out more about our work with communities and their sociodigital futures.
This podcast is brought to you by the Centre for Sociodigital Futures – a flagship research centre, funded by the ESRC and led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other Universities in the UK and globally. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.
The following transcript is automatically generated
This podcast is brought to you by the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, or ‘CenSoF’, a flagship research centre led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with 12 other universities exploring sociodigital futures in the making. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.
00:00:31 Martin Parker
Hello my name is Martin Parker. I’m professor at the University of Bristol, working with CenSoF and it’s my pleasure today to be chairing a discussion about community technology. We’ll explain that term as we go along, but essentially think about it as a way in which a variety of, if you like, grassroots groups are trying to retain control over their data and over the artifacts that they use. I’ve got three guests with me and I’ll ask them to introduce themselves in turn. First of all, Matt.
00:00:57 Matt Dowse
Hi there. My name is Matt Daws. I’m a researcher at CenSoF.
00:01:09 Anna Dent
Hiya, my name is Anna Dent. I was until recently, head of research at promising trouble, and I’m now a freelance research and policy consultant.
00:01:17 Martin Parker
Thank you, Anna. And finally.
00:01:19 Professor Helen Manchester
Hi everyone. I’m Helen Manchester. I’m a professor at the University of Bristol on participatory sociodigital features.
00:01:27 Martin Parker
So Helen, can I start with you asking you, who do you think makes asked sociodigital futures and could you say a little bit about what you think sociodigital futures means?
00:01:38 Professor Helen Manchester
Sure. I think one of the problems that the Centre that we’re all involved in is looking towards is really around who gets a say in futuring and who gets to make futures and I think one of the issues around sociodigital futures, which is really how the social and the digital fit together, is that very often it’s the large technology companies, it’s the policymakers, it’s the tech entrepreneurs who are often young, white men who are doing the tech design. They’re the ones that are having a say in what happens in the future of digital technology?
So what we’re really trying to do in the Centre, I guess, is to ask what might happen if we look to other places to find alternative ideas about what sociodigital futures might be and how people might experience them.
And also so that other people can feel that they have agency in making sociodigital futures that are not those large tech companies who have particular ways of seeing the world, and particular ways of working that really centre around kind of capitalist economics, I guess, and individualism. So we really want to think about more collective, more collaborative futures and futuring around sociodigital.
00:03:03 Martin Parker
That’s great. So you seem to be implying that lots of people are getting left out of making the future. What kind of groups are you thinking about?
00:03:10 Professor Helen Manchester
Yeah, I think that’s right. So we’ve been really interested in working with communities who have been minoritised, communities that have experienced social and digital inequalities throughout their life courses.
And to think about how we might work with them, what kind of methods, what kind of approaches we might adopt to really increase their capacities and agency around influencing these futures that are quite difficult to feel like you can influence because they are led by these you know very, I guess, very rich, very powerful kind of forces in the world that seem very difficult to interact with.
00:03:59 Martin Parker
That’s really helpful. So turning to Anna then. Do you sort of reflect on what Helen’s been saying in terms of the construction of our collective futures with particular concern with digital technologies?
00:04:11 Anna Dent
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of the work that we do, did at promising trouble is looking to how to empower communities and how to allow community to have more of a say and more of a stake in technologies. So both from a kind of theoretical research perspective, but also from a very hands on practical point view I’ll probably say a little bit more about the community tech programme that that we’ve been running in a in a moment.
But yeah, it’s absolutely as Helen was saying, how can you allow make space for and really actively encourage others that are not the big tech companies to shape the spaces that we all exist in. I think there is to a certain extent, governments are also shaping those sociodigital futures, but they’re still doing that within the landscape that’s been created by big tech companies.
So carving out different spaces is challenging but possible and I think one of the big things that we’ve reflected on in the community tech programme is it’s about assets and wealth as well as the tech that we will use day-to-day. It’s about who actually owns things and who benefits from the wealth that’s created from technology and obviously, in the main that is not you and I.
That is not the communities around us. That’s not the marginalised communities that Helen was talking about. So the work that we’ve done is very much trying to find an alternative to that.
00:05:46 Martin Parker
- Just pushing back just to kind of be clear, I mean, isn’t it the case that companies like Microsoft and so on have been producing stuff which is free and useful and helpful and part of all our lives in this sense? So what’s the, what’s the nature of the complaint?
00:06:00 Anna Dent
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, probably all of us and most people listening, if not all people listening, have used Google, have used Microsoft, have used eBay, have you used YouTube, all of these things? And it’s not to say that these things are all universally awful. It’s just that they are one thing and to imagine that there is no alternative, that there is no other possible way of living your life digitally is very constraining because you’re basically only using what you’re given by the Microsofts of the world.
And it kind of ignores the fact that there could be a whole host of other ways of living online of living our lives and the digital tools that we use. They don’t have to be the Microsofts of the world. Those things are fine and useful. But there are other things that could exist and that do exist that really just make for a much richer digital landscape.
00:06:58 Martin Parker
OK, so that’s an argument for diversity, for variety or something like that.
00:07:03 Anna Dent
Absolutely. And just to go back to the point about ownership and wealth that the wealth created by technology is just so mind-blowingly enormous that some of that, maybe some of that could go to smaller organisations, to local communities and not all be concentrated in Silicon Valley or in London or wherever these, you know, tax havens, some of these places are based in. Maybe some of that wealth could be distributed more evenly.
00:07:36 Martin Parker
OK, that’s great. Thank you. So that’s a beautiful segue to Matt. So, Matt, you’ve been doing quite a lot of work with various organisations that are engaged in what we’re calling community technology. Could you tell me about some examples that you’ve seen of people doing things differently?
00:07:52 Matt Dowles
Yeah, sure. So our initial phase of research about community technology, we’ve kind of spoken to maybe 30 odd organisations and individuals who are doing things differently.
And just to kind of frame this within something that Anna just mentioned, for me, there’s something about the generic nature of the tech that is provided through multinational corporations, which seems to be being pushed back against by people who practice community technology.
So, for example, I met somebody, and I’m not going to mention any names of organisations from the research, but I have met with people who, for example, are working to produce certain kinds of digital platforms so that certain groups of people can communicate well together, right, because they’re off the shelf oven ready solutions that are provided for them, they kind of produce a certain kind of way of working together.
For example, I’ve come across people who are using very basic tech like Excel, which is obviously a business kind of database software, but using it to understand how they might share seeds to seed wildflower meadows across the UK, for example, right so people adopt in different ways of working with tech that they buy off the shelf.
Other people I’ve met who are trying to kind of disrupt the way in which tech is often just a black mirror or a black box, and they’re trying to remake what tech is like. I’ve met, people who’ve knitted robots, for example, or done kind of worked with communities to make air pollution sensors so that those air pollution sensors are owned by the community and they can hold their local authority to act about the data that comes from those things, they’ve made them and stuck them on lampposts.
You know, that’s the kind of thing that we’ve seen in, in the Community tech as research so far, as well as many, many other things.
00:10:18 Martin Parker
I was just thinking about that sort of metaphor of taking back control, which I know has other connotations too, but it’s, kind of, you’re giving us a sense of a bunch of people who are trying to control both the data and the technologies that they’re using for various social purposes.
00:10:29 Matt Dowles
Yeah, I think so. And also to understand that the tech doesn’t have to be the same, we don’t, you know, the way that we are presented with tech is that we probably all have the same phone made by the same company. And I think a lot of community tech practitioners are thinking about the ways in which you can make a piece of tech or user piece of tech in a very bespoke way that is very particular to the community that they are part of. Yeah, so that, I think that that’s a really important aspect of Community technology.
00:11:02 Martin Parker
- So that’s kind of community technology in practice in a sense then, isn’t it? A variety of different ways of doing things, which is pushing back against the domination of a few very large companies. So turning to Anna then, can you give us examples of the ways in which you’ve seen communities doing technology differently and pushing back against this, sort of, domination, monoculture in a sense of technologies?
00:11:27 Anna Dent
Yeah, absolutely. I think before I give an example or two, the probably the primary thing that we’ve seen in the work that we’ve done on community tech is that organisations start with the challenge, they start with the issue, they start with what they want to change and then they find a tech solution if that’s appropriate.
So they’re not starting with a shiny piece of technology that they are trying to shoehorn into to use. They’re really starting with what the community wants and needs and building the tech to meet those needs.
So one example, which really in the very early days of our community tech programme was one of the first people that I spoke to, an organisation in the South West, rural South West, they recognised that there was a care desert, so there were people that needed care at home and there were self-employed carers, and they just couldn’t find each other.
And the Council didn’t recognise this, and so the community thought we want to take this into our, to our own hands. And they started off very much bits of paper and maybe some spreadsheets, very kind of analogue lot, lots of labour involved in in trying to match up people that needed care with carers.
And slowly but surely, they’ve built that up into their own software platform, which means that people who want care can find carers much more easily. Carers can find work locally so people are able to find each other, to stay local, to stay in their homes, it keeps the money circulating in the local community and that’s all really been enabled by them developing their own piece of software which they have then gone on to share with other parts of the country, other organisations, other local authorities that have really recognised the value in starting with people and starting with ‘how do these people want to and need to connect and what technology can we create to enable that?’.
So that was for me a really kind of inspiring early example. I think another thing which is really central to a lot of community tech is the desire to keep ownership of data or keep privacy around people’s data. So I think a lot of community organisations are aware that if they use proprietary software, if they use big tech platform, that the data that they store on those platforms might not be completely secure or might be taken and used for other purposes, and so that’s been another South West organisation has created their own CRM system, that’s a customer relations management system, so that all of the data is kept in house.
So that they keep ownership of it and that their members can really trust where the data goes and what it’s used for. And again, that’s been picked up and used by lots of other organisations both in the UK but also across Europe, because again, they really recognise the value of that.
00:14:29 Martin Parker
Matt, I think you had some examples of that too?
00:14:30 Matt Dowles
This kind of theme I think of people getting together and doing stuff through community technology is, something that I’ve seen too in local food networks, for example, and also organisations that provide translation services, or so we kind of see this emergence of a type of different groups of people coming together using technology for their own purposes, and I think you’re dead right, the work of community tech comes out of particular kinds of contexts rather so you, you almost have this, this thing where community changes tech rather than tech changes community and I think that’s quite an exciting kind of space for people to be working in.
00:15:21 Martin Parker
So we’ve had a series of really interesting and inspirational bottom up examples there of communities doing technology differently, pushing back against what I was calling the monoculture.
So I mean, this sounds lovely, but you know, Helen, what are the obstacles to this sort of thing happening more widely?
00:15:42 Professor Helen Manchester
Yeah, I think it’s absolutely brilliant to hear all these amazing examples of what can happen and what is possible when communities come together around technology. I suppose I’m a little bit cautious about sort of, yeah, celebrating this so much because there are so many community and voluntary sector organisations who are really struggling with funding. There’s no long term funding for their work.
They’re in a kind of survival mode very often, even though they are at the bedrock of communities as we saw through the COVID-19 pandemic and do like vital work within communities. So I think for many of the community and voluntary sector organisations that we’re working alongside, we find that they don’t have the capacity to think about technology as something that could offer tools and ways of working for their communities.
So it’s really tough, I think for many community and voluntary sector organisations to actually make the most of this. And also really to enter that space around futures and futuring. Very often the technologies and tools that are being designed are for now rather than thinking about how we might, I guess, use the potential of emerging technologies that could really do amazing things for communities and collectively within communities.
So I guess I’m really interested in how we can, how we can grab some of that potential of the emerging technologies that we’re working with in the Centre to increase the capacity of community and voluntary sector organisations to work alongside communities in in really exciting ways. And you know, building from some of these amazing examples that Anna and Matt have talked about to spread the word around how this might support communities to ‘take back control’ if we’re going to use that phrase.
00:17:53 Martin Parker
Just kind of summarising what you’re saying. So I mean a lot of the organisations that we’re talking about are time and resource poor, and presumably it’s much easier then to imagine set up a Facebook group or something like that. That’s like almost like a kind of default, isn’t it? Because we know how to do that, and it’s free, right? You don’t have to pay money for it. What’s the problem with that? With that, if you like, that response?
00:18:17 Professor Helen Manchester
I mean, I don’t think there’s necessarily a problem. It’s okay to set up a Facebook group. I would say that a lot of the Community and voluntary sector organisations that I’ve worked with are not really even doing that. Everything’s about face to face, so, you know, even the technology that is there that could support their work is not really being utilised now. I think there are issues obviously that Anna has already touched on around using proprietor tools software such as, you know, those social media sites. And not everybody wants to do that and there are ethical questions around that, I think.
00:18:55 Martin Parker
So Anna, you’ve been doing a lot of work in the kind of policy area, really, haven’t you? Can you talk a little bit about those kinds of obstacles? Almost the sort of the ways in which policy makers and big technology firms and so on are kind of establishing certain ideas of futures that most of us don’t have access to?
00:19:13 Anna Dent
Yeah. I think one of the things that has really emerged for us over the course of the Community Tech program is questioning what we think of as innovation and who does innovation and where that happens. I think if you put into an image search ‘innovation’, it would probably give you a, you know, a picture of someone in the lab coat or someone in a shiny office on a tech park next to a motorway. And there’s an idea that innovation is about money and universities and big businesses and nothing else.
00:19:50 Martin Parker
And white men.
00:19:50 Anna Dent
And white men, for sure. I mean, that almost goes unsaid, but it probably should be said. And so the idea that innovation can happen down the street, in the community centre, in an organisation working with young people, a disabled-led organisation, the idea that these are places where innovation happens is not something you hear very much and is something that we absolutely found through the program is not on the radar of policymakers that innovation is about big stuff and enormous economic growth.
And actually, yes, that stuff is important. But innovation can happen everywhere and having a more diverse ecosystem of innovation and therefore of who gets to create different futures can only be a good thing. Can only strengthen, you know, the skills, the ambition and the potential of all of our communities is to recognise and for policy makers to start unlocking things that will support innovation to happen, so that might be about skills that might be about funding and you know Helen’s point about community organisations being in survival mode is absolutely right and the capacity to think about building your own bit of technology is not there for a lot of community organisations, but there are things that policymakers could do to help unlock that. And you know, all these conversations always seem to come back to money, but unfortunately they do very often come back to money.
Where do you invest the billions of pounds of government money into innovation? Some of that could be in much smaller places than the big technology parks.
00:21:40 Martin Parker
Again, this is about the production of futures, isn’t it? So ideas about growth, for example, are very often predicated on particular sorts of assumptions about certain kinds of organisations growing. And they’re usually we don’t usually imagine those to be kind of third sector community organisations of any kind. They would be the big companies, they would be the ones who are generating the value and so on. So there’s a problem here in terms of the way that we imagine the economy in this sense isn’t there?
Let’s just pull back from this slightly and just think about some of the things that might be necessary in order to produce, let’s say, a community technology utopia. What kinds of changes, whether in policy or attitude or money, whatever, do you think might help us produce a different way of thinking about futures with regard to social digital technologies? Matt, do you want to have a go at that one first?
00:22:35 Matt Dowles
Yeah, I guess my magic wand would be waving to try to shift the idea of the development of technology being all about profit and somehow being about social good. And I think that if you could shift that then you would then produce different kinds of organising. You might have flatter, you might have flatter hierarchies, you might have people being collaborative, not competitive, you might have organisations wanting to be inclusive rather than exclusive because there’s a particular group of people they want to sell a product too.
So I think that for me there’s really something about decentering the idea of profit from the idea of tech development and put things into the hands of communities. I mean, you know, if you put technology into the hands of capitalists, then you get a world that we have now, which is an often divisive use of technology and social media. Put the the power into the hands of communities and see what happens.
00:23:44 Martin Parker
I’m just thinking, you know, lots of people listening to this might think that companies like Microsoft and Amazon and so on, they drive innovation and it’s the profit motive that encourages them to, to drive innovation, isn’t it? Wouldn’t community technologies mean that we’d kind of stall in our search for new technologies?
00:24:04 Matt Dowles
Well, suppose you know, it depends what kind of technology you want in the end, isn’t it? And if you want the sort of technology that will drop a drone onto your doorstep, then fine, but maybe you want a technology which is going to develop friendships or relationships in communities that promotes cohesion rather than promotes division. I think you know that there are different algorithms and algorithms I guess can do different things and the ‘for profit’ motive will produce a certain kind of thing.
A teams platform, for example, that means that everybody works in the same kind of way. Well, who says that that’s the way that that should be. And I think that, you know, we have a kind of a product of tech, which is produced by a particular kind of scaling. Community technologists find it very difficult to scale because their stuff is often, it’s like artisan work, it’s like crafted. It’s difficult to scale and put it, you know, just say everybody do it like this. Well, I think you just would get a different kind of tech development.
00:25:15 Martin Parker
Again, it’s kind of echoing what Anna was saying about sort of innovation for what in a sense, isn’t it? It’s difficult to be against innovation, but there are real questions about what gets innovated and why? That example of the drone is quite an interesting one.
00:25:28 Matt Dowles
Yeah. And I think you know you can take that phrase from disability rights, can’t you, which is ‘nothing about us without us’. You know, if you engage with communities because they are using technology, we all use technology, it’s in our lives all the time. Well, I think we should have some agency about what that technology is.
00:25:46 Martin Parker
So let me pitch that to you then, Helen, if you had a magic wand, what kinds of changes would you make in order to produce a sociodigital world that we’d like to live in?
00:25:56 Professor Helen Manchester
Yeah, I think really following on from what Matt has just said that at a really practical level, if there were was somebody in in every place-based community and working with equalities communities who was tasked to work alongside community members in a really bottom up way.
To sort of start from what matters to those communities and then to think, as Anna said earlier, okay, this is what matters. This is what we want. This is what we imagine as a preferable future for this Community. How might we use technology to support that work, and how can we do that together? Coming together, increasing people’s capacity, building tools together, bringing in partners such as universities to work alongside those people, bringing in those engineers who have worked in big labs too.
You know, we’re not saying that, you know, we shouldn’t work with them because I think we need those people with the expertise and skills, but we need to shift the conversation a little bit. And if we’ve got people working in those community organisations that have long term trusted relationships with communities, starting from what matters, then perhaps we could make a difference with this provisor of Matt’s ‘we need to change the conversation’ to start with, I guess, yeah. I think that could work.
00:27:18 Martin Parker
Yes, so an argument for kind of multiplicity again in a sense, isn’t it that there might be lots of different futures, but that very often we don’t spend enough time thinking about them and also to emphasise and I think you’ve all been saying this, that these communities are very often starting with a problem or a possibility. The technology is then a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
00:27:43 Professor Helen Manchester
Absolutely. And there’s often an idea that communities who are minoritised and not thinking about features. And I just don’t think that’s true. Like everybody is thinking about and making features all the time and if we spend the time speaking to them and asking them what they care about then perhaps we can start to design tools and technologies that really work for a multiplicity of communities.
00:28:10 Martin Parker
OK, thank you, Helen. So moving towards a conclusion, Anna, if you know has again somebody who’s been involved in this kind of stuff, in policy oriented ways for a long time, if you had, if I give you the magic wand, what would you do with it?
00:28:24 Anna Dent
I’ll take my turn with the wand. I think really, just a really practical thing from the work that we’ve done and work that Matt’s done and other people have done. We know there’s amazing practice and amazing skills out there, but it’s very hard for community organisations to find each other and to tap into what’s already been done and what’s already happened.
So maybe there’s a tech solution, some kind of way of enabling those organisations that are interested in Community tech to find each other and learn from each other so that they can make the most of what’s already out there, that they’re not all starting from scratch would really help to build on the skills, but also help with the resource challenge as well.
So some kind of dreamy platform where everyone can gather and find each other and help each other would be brilliant.
00:29:15 Martin Parker
That’s great. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the research we’re doing at CenSoF is also building those kinds of connections too, isn’t it? Hopefully pulling people with similar interests together.
That’s all we’ve got time for right now. Could I just thank Helen Manchester, Anna Dent and Matt Dowes for a really interesting conversation. Thanks for listening.
To find out more about the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, visit the University of Bristol’s website, where you can read about our research, follow us on social media and sign up to our mailing list. Thanks so much for listening.
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