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Background

Today was the first day of a 10-week course on Responsible Technology. We spent our time together norm setting, getting to know one another’s areas of interests within responsible technology, and learning about our instructor’s perspective on responsible technology.

What am I looking for from this course?

• In the last few years I have waded deeper into the intersection of technology and social justice. It all started with this and this blog post I wrote.
• Curious about how to build technology that makes the world a better place, I joined the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and currently lead design for Trust and Safety at WMF. My team seeks to make Wikipedia a safer, more accessible, and healthier place for its volunteer contributor community.
• Any product at WMF is collaboratively designed with our communities. Thus far I have worked with English, Korean, Bangla, Italian, and Indonesian Wikipedia, as well as folks from Wikidata.
• Also at WMF I am in a tactical working group focused on creating an “inclusive product development playbook” that centers equity. The playbook was born out of a need to build products for historically marginalized communities, as well as create more trust between the Wikipedia community and the Foundation. I hope this course can help me strengthen the playbook.
• In the last ten years in Silicon Valley, I have witnessed and experienced inaccessible, opaque, and top-down product design processes. This creates a low trust, high dependency environment for the end-user. To build safe, accessible, and trustworthy technology we need new methodologies, and designers who approach design with a critical lens.
• On a personal note I think this course may provide:
  • clarity on if I want to go to grad school to study these topics further.
  • fodder for idea generation. I’m a big fan of experimenting with bite sized ideas.
  • focus + understanding of what my purpose is in the space.
  • tips on how to get shit done in this space and overcome constraints of systemic barriers.
  • exposure to new topics in the space.

What topics am I interested in?

• Participatory design
• Design from the margins + digital colonialism
• Surveillance and privacy
• Systems thinking
• Methodologies that have been developed to create equitable design