There's an "Alt Tech System" growing - one that communities around the world can access to empower themselves
This report from Power to Change - The Case For Community Tech - popped up excitingly last week. We are constantly searching for frameworks and examples that can put radical technologies in the hands of communities.
This is a report that includes many players in the field - including the state - but we wanted to highlight their fourth area of concern, which they call the “Alt Tech Ecosystem”. Excerpted below:
The Alt Tech ecosystem
The Alt Tech ecosystem is populated by many technology approaches and communities that operate outside or on the edges of market and state-driven technologies; it is a place of pluralism, in which many complementary approaches operate in entanglement with one another…
Just like civil society, the Alt Tech ecosystem is populated by many different kinds of groups and organisations, and these create and shape technologies for community benefit. The community groups and businesses discussed in this report are just a few examples of the multitudes that occupy this space: other contributors include, but are not limited to, academics, artists, activists, citizen journalists and citizen scientists, hobbyists, social entrepreneurs, and open-source developers.
There is space online for everyone — and that space will be improved by offering more amenities, and more shared services and tools.
The interactions here, and the sometimes blurred boundaries between active technologies and communities, generate resilience and possibilities, and help create a more diverse and representative technology, which in turn leads to more choice for everyone.
Rather than fighting for competition within a market context, the Alt Tech ecosystem is a place of cross-pollination in which more reuse between communities can be fostered over time, bolstering and building a more diverse and representative technology landscape.
The Landscape
The Alt Tech landscape is a naturally decentralised environment which contains many different communities. These include, but are not limited to:
those making and maintaining alternative physical networks
the vibrant Tech For Good community
the Wikipedians and Wikimedians [Volunteers that write and edit wikipedia content] sharing knowledge and information with the world
the social and charitable technologists
the open hardware specialists and Fab Labbers driving retrofitting and repairable hardware
the developers maintaining open-source repositories.
There is crossover between community tech organisations and all of the above. For instance, some of the community organisations we spoke with also support Fab Labs, which are spaces for small-scale manufacturing. The intention behind them is to “democratise fabrication” and create a space “where individuals have the opportunity to develop and produce custom-made things which are not accessible by conventional industrial scale technologies”.
While not every Fab Lab will be rooted in a community mission, using technology to create change at local (rather than planetary) scale with a high level of customisation is consistent with the way that community businesses also use software.
There is not space here to capture a full list of every Alt Tech community, let alone to describe them in detail, but it is important to understand that Community tech as described in this report both contributes to and derives benefit from this interrelated set of people and technologies — which, through being open and accessible, also provide essential infrastructure for the rest of the Internet and other emerging technologies.
A popular subject within Alt Tech strategies and programmes is how the world might be remade and rethought, particularly in those seeking alternatives to the dominance of major platforms. Digital technologies are very often associated with scale, so some of the better known approaches do not start with the direct needs of specific communities, but aim instead for more systemic change, oriented towards the general public.
All of the examples given below are from North American research and advocacy organisations, and they share a desire to recapture and redirect some of the Internet experienced by early users, before the market was shaped by the dotcom bubble in the 1990s.
For instance, Ethan Zuckerman’s work championing Digital Public Infrastructure, based at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, looks to reclaim social media platforms as civic spaces. Aligned to this, the New York-based New Public researches and builds projects that create “healthy public spaces”, and they have identified 14 positive attributes for distributed social networks, arranged under the headings Welcome, Connect, Understand, and Act.
Another North American project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Public Interest Internet, seeks to reclaim and amplify the pre-platform Internet, a place described by former EFF employee Danny O’Brien as:
the real internet... Often run by volunteers, frequently without any obvious institutional affiliation, sometimes tiny, often local, but free for everyone online to use and contribute to, this internet preceded Big Tech, and inspired the earliest, most optimistic vision of its future place in society.
This ‘real internet’ is anchored in the potential of the 1980s and 1990s, when open-source software was what Nadia Eghbal calls “the vanguard for the rest of our online behaviour” and “the poster child for a hopeful vision of widespread collaboration”.
‘Public interest’ is defined by the New America Foundation as inhabiting a space outside of the market, drawing together expertise from what might otherwise be regarded as a hybrid of the political milieu and civil society, where “politicians, administrators, public officials, and even CEOs and nonprofit leaders” come together in “the study and application of technology expertise to advance the public interest/generate public benefits/promote the public good.”
One of the paradoxes of the Internet is that every nation state has a different patterning of social and political infrastructure, and tries to recreate that online.
In this case, many North American conceptions of public interest speak to the local institutional landscape, which is inhabited by fewer universal public services than in the UK and many European countries. As such ‘public’ in this sense does not mean an entity that is owned and accountable to citizens because of taxation, but something that is in the wider service of the general population.
Civic Tech
Public interest tech may still be emerging, but civic tech is an expansive, global movement that has been running since the mid-1990s. The digital tools and services that citizens use and need are diverse: from tools to provide feedback on rubbish collections, air quality and planning consultations, to data and mechanisms to support democratic transparency and accountability — this is a thriving network of alternative technologies. At the time of writing, many thousands of examples can be explored on the Civic Tech Field Guide.
While some civic tech is created or commissioned by governments, the majority is made by activists and social entrepreneurs. Fix My Street is a website run by MySociety, and allows people to tag necessary street repairs. Products like this act as useful intermediaries for communities to interact with local and national governments, and are often supported by a diverse range of income sources, including charitable funds, donations, and commercial services.
There is a high degree of collaboration in the civic tech community, supported by regular conferences and other gatherings. There is also some reuse of tools and code between regions and practitioners: MySociety make their code open and available to use by other practitioners in countries including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria and Cameroon; communities are often supported by multi-disciplinary groups of organisations, combining research and technology skills with investment.
As demonstrated, civic tech is a relatively complex and mature landscape. The mission and vision of individual bodies might vary, but most echo the ambition of the Charter Project Africa, which is to “promote the usage of civic technology to amplify citizen voices”. And as Weiyu Zhang of Civic Tech Lab at the University of Singapore says: “Civic tech promotes democratic engagement by citizens, for citizens.”
Although many civic tech initiatives may seem small, and are deployed at a local level, it’s clear that combined together, they have a global impact.
The risks of Alt Tech
The plurality of Alt Tech would likely be perceived by wider tech ecosystems as a risk to scale and efficiency. But scale and efficiency are not the most important considerations in every context. Our contention is that the broader societal impacts of vibrant technology pluralism are much more positive, and are essential to a thriving online future.
In his analysis of the built environment, Richard Sennett draws a distinction between the cité (the place) and the ville (the space). The ville is the built environment: the roads and buildings, hospitals, and schools; but the cité is the spirit; what Sennett calls the “consciousness” of a place that makes it attractive to live in. If Big Tech is the ville of the Internet, then Community tech and the other inhabitants of the Alt Tech ecosystem are the cité, where social norms are created, ideas emerge, and the sparks of life are felt.45
This means that fostering alternative technologies comes with different considerations, and risks — but the majority of risks can be mitigated by rolling out effective support. Risks to consider:
Maintenance and sustainability
Some community technologies are created by single developers. If software is not sufficiently documented, or developed with reference to external standards, it can be difficult for others to maintain or reuse
Bespoke technologies also may also be built in an incremental and additive way, becoming overly complex and inefficient to run, manage and host. These technologies would also be challenging for others to use and update, which in some circumstances could make repair difficult or impossible.
Lack of shared responsibility
Having a single gatekeeper in an organisation could mean that technical expertise becomes siloed
Lack of exposure to a broader community of practice may lead to unusual ways of working, and mean that community organisations do not benefit from shared knowledge.
Privacy and security risks
Bespoke software may suffer from increased exposure to cyber attacks or security breaches, because they may not employ the same security measures as mainstream software which is built by large teams with much bigger budgets
Higher risk of being out of step with legal standards and obligations, including local data regulations, GDPR and accessibility.
The existence of disaggregated community data sets also poses an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, the lack of aggregation is a useful counterbalance to the growing surveillance and convenience economy; on the other, there is a risk that community data could be excluded from important data sets that drive national policies, particularly as artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly relied on to deliver public and corporate products and services.