Tech & Social Justice Initiatives

A People’s Guide to AI: This is a comprehensive beginner's guide to understanding AI and other data-driven tech. The guide uses a popular education approach to explore and explain AI-based technologies so that everyone—from youth to seniors, and from non-techies to experts—has the chance to think critically about the kinds of futures automated technologies can bring.

Algorithmic Justice League: aims to highlight algorithmic bias through media, art, and science; provide space for people to voice concerns and experiences with coded bias; develop practices for accountability during the design, development, and deployment of coded systems.

Allied Media Projects: Through hosted conferences and project sponsorship, the Allied Media Network is a nonprofit organization committed to supporting the communication media sector in creating more “just, creative and collaborative world” that is committed to social justice.

Center for Media Justice:Aims to build a powerful movement for a more just and participatory media and digital world—with racial equity and human rights for all.

Chupadatos: This project gathers stories from across Latin America about the mass collection and processing of data that governments, businesses and we ourselves carry out to monitor our cities, homes, wallets and bodies.

ColorCoded: A tech learning space that centers historically-excluded people in the co-teaching, co-creation, and co-ownership of new technologies.

Data 4 Black Lives: an group of various multidisciplinary organizers who aim to use data to “create concrete and measurable change in the lives of black people. By convening an annual conference, the group speaks to data scientists, policy makers, researchers, students, parents and more to “chart out a new future for data science.”

Design Justice: Design Justice network members rethink design processes, center people who are normally marginalized by design, and use collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.

Equitable Internet Initiative: The program’s mission is to ensure that more Detroit residents have the ability to leverage online access and digital technology for social and economic development.

#MoreThanCode, by the tech for social justice project, is a “participatory action research project intended to better understand the types of work currently being done with technology for social justice (and more broadly, in the public interest), as well as the pathways people take into this work.”

PROP’S Court Monitoring Project: A New York City Based project that collects data within courtrooms about arrests and summonses in order to hold leadership accountable for to the police reforms they have promised to make.

Fairness, Accountability , and Transparency Initiatives

Auditing Algorithms: An organization tasked with the goal of producing documentation outlining “that will help to define and develop the emerging research community for algorithm auditing.”

AMC Fairness Accountability and Transparency: A multi-disciplinary conference that brings together researchers and practitioners interested in fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.

Statements

Data & Society “Algorithmic Accountability” Statement: This statement seeks to help assign “responsibility for harm when algorithmic decision-making results in discriminatory and inequitable outcomes.”

Data 4 Black Lives letter to Zuckerberg urges Zuckerberg to “1. Commit anonymized Facebook Data to a Public Trust. 2. Work with technologists, advocates, and ethicists to establish a Data Code of Ethics. 3. Hire black data scientists and research scientists.”

Equitable Open Data: A set of guidelines for advancing “equitable practices for collecting, disseminating and using open data.”

Principles of a Feminist Internet, statement by the Association of Progressive Communications.

Science for the People Statement “calls for pickets at Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce offices and stores to protest these companies’ contracts with ICE.”

Tech Workers Coalition Community Guide “seeks to redefine the relationship between tech workers and Bay Area communities. Through activism, civic engagement, direct action, and education, we work in solidarity with existing movements towards social justice and economic inclusion.”

Statement on Project Maven by Google employees opposing the company’s contact with the Department of Defense for Project Maven, a research initiative to develop computer vision algorithms that can analyze drone footage.

#NoTechForICE, petition against tech company contracts with ICE

#TechWontBuildIt Statement by Amazon employees against the company’s facial recognition contracts with law enforcement

For a Comprehensive List of Organizations Visit: #MoreThanCode

Films

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry documentary by Alison Klayman that “documents the life and work of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei. She showcases his artistic process as he prepares for a museum exhibition, his relationships with family members and his clashes with the government.”

Baited a four-part documentary series on how rapid datafication is amplifying social inequities across India.

Black Mirror by Charlie Brooker. “Sci-fi anthology series explores a twisted, high-tech near-future where humanity's greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide.”

The Cleaners on Netflix, “a look at the shadowy underworld of the Internet where questionable content is removed.”

Coded Bias on Netflix, a documentary film that “investigates the bias in algorithms after M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini uncovered flaws in facial recognition technology.”

The Great Hack by Karim Amer & Jehane Noujaim. “Exploring how a data company named Cambridge Analytica came to symbolise the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as uncovered by journalist Carole Cadwalladr.”

Hunger, Gamified about how Indian food delivery apps are designed to exploit workers.

The Last Angel of History by John Akomfrah. 45-minute documentary, directed in 1996 by John Akomfrah and written and researched by Edward George of the Black Audio Film Collective, that deals with concepts of Afrofuturism as a metaphor for the displacement of black culture and roots.

These Networks in Our Skin by Mimi Onuaha. Short film that “draws from traditional Igbo cosmology to offer a dreamlike visual lexicon of what it might mean to recreate the Internet, starting from the values infused in the cables that make it up.”