How can we create viable alternatives to Big Tech infrastructures?

Cassie Robinson, independent consultant and lead on the design of the Power to Change Community Tech fund, spoke to Stephanie Woodrow, Portfolio Manager, Impact on Urban Health; Dama Sathianathan, Partner, Communities and Networks, Bethnal Green Ventures; Grace Pollard, Senior Policy Researcher, New Local; and Helen Goulden, Chief Executive Officer, The Young Foundation.

Cassie  

When we think about building resilience and adaptivity to our big global challenges, being reliant on big infrastructures is precarious. How do we localise some of our infrastructures? Whether we can ever build viable alternatives to the big tech monopolies is a big question, but I want to believe that we can.

Community tech feels like it is linked to that. It also links to the idea of communities having more agency, accountability, control, and stewardship of technologies that they're using. There's potential in community tech to shift away from the big tech. 

Helen  

I agree, but my thought about that is when it comes to localising infrastructure, any tech is going to sit on a national infrastructure; the telecommunications network. So there’s already a challenge there, you’re already reliant on something much bigger. 

Sebastian Thrun said recently, as machines become smarter, it's harder and harder to make a contribution, but people want to make a contribution. Human beings must know more about how technology works, and so there’s something in the community tech space. In the same way that the majority of people would have known how to change a tyre and fix bits of their car years ago, they can't now because it's computer-driven. There's something deeply dangerous about a scenario where people are not able to control, fix or understand the technologies they depend on.

So at one level, community tech is absolutely squarely in that space, so I have no problem at all with the ethos and the values that underpin it. And that desire to let a million flowers bloom has some great upsides in terms of agency and empowerment, but there's some downsides. Most new social platforms struggle to get ongoing funding and to find the skills to maintain them, and getting people to use them is very difficult. And there is rarely a satisfying business model. (Hyperlocal Media suffers the same challenge.) Funding a proliferation of unconnected platforms to me is not the answer. 

A prevailing narrative is that localization to the most granular grassroots level is always good, and centralised functions are always bad. In my work and that of the Young Foundation I'm wholly in support of greater devolution, local empowerment and local governance models. And yet, with tech, I don't buy that as much. We need a national, civic piece of infrastructure that makes it easy for provider X or venture Y to plug into something bigger; take advantage of some common standards, audiences and functions, but still work effectively at a hyper-local level.

If I've developed a piece of software to successfully campaign to keep my pub open in Newham, why shouldn't someone in Dumfries be able to take that as well? There is an argument for horizontal scaling as much as vertical deepening of engagement within a specific community or place. But if we ever want to rival the likes of  WhatsApp or Google, you've got to have a massive national story for that, and you've got to put millions and millions of pounds behind it; and have the confidence to back it for the long-term.

Cassie 

The scale of something like you're talking about needs a lot more than some grant funding. I'd love to come back to that idea of civic infrastructure at scale, and how that might actually become a reality. 

Dama  

It’s interesting to think about the level of agency you have where we see decentralisation happen, particularly when it comes to tech products and services that have the ambition to scale. The more a particular product or service is adopted, the less likely it is that you have power as an individual to actually engage or to influence that product or service. This is why I think community tech is really interesting in trying to change that power dynamic. 

There are also always questions about the virtue of Tech for Good, and this will probably happen with community tech as well, because there's still a large proportion of people who believe that tech has equalising effects. But it doesn't, because it's never neutral. It always depends on who the communities are behind building, creating and distributing the technologies. A really interesting aspect of this could be in thinking about inclusive innovation, how we diffuse power back to the people and back to users. 

Bethnal Green Ventures has tried to shift the needle in this area. 

Cassie  

Grace, in terms of the community power narrative and the policy work that New Local has been doing, how does the idea that you need some national infrastructure that’s not locally based sit with that?

Grace  

A lot of what we're thinking about at New Local is with the public sector, and how they work with communities. Technology doesn't come up in the conversation as much as it perhaps should. The big things that stand out for me are around sustainability and resilience for community organisations. A reflection on what the role of tech is there is interesting. 

The question of scale is also really interesting. The bespoke element of community tech is obviously really appealing, because a lot of community organisations are trying to do a deeper set of things in a place rather than just one thing and then scale up everywhere. 

But equally, I agree with Helen’s reflection that sometimes organisations in different places are trying to do similar things. If something works in one area, it could be picked up and adapted and used in another area. I'm very interested in how that could happen, that question of learning and transferability. 

There are lots of questions about ownership and power in individual places, and a lot which resonates with the community tech space. But there is also that very practical question about time spent getting these things off the ground, about sustaining them, and funding them. So when Helen was talking about the idea of national civic infrastructure, I can absolutely see the appeal of that. 

My final reflection is, what if you think about this as a form of community wealth building? What is the role of the public sector, or private sector, in investing in and supporting skills within community organisations to do this?

Steph  

I've been thinking about this in terms of connectivity. One of the things that Impact on Urban Health is really interested in is how to ensure that communities in Lambeth and Southwark where we work can benefit from digital innovation and see it as a way of addressing inequality rather than widening it. 

For example, how can people access affordable or free internet, because one of the key barriers is affordability; people are going into debt because they can't afford their broadband. 

One of the things we've been exploring relates to the civic infrastructure piece that Helen was discussing. One of our local councils was looking at being an internet provider themselves. But what we quickly came to realise is that particularly in Lambeth and Southwark there's a lot of communities that have suffered historical and current exploitation. One of the key concerns and barriers to digital engagement is actually concerns over surveillance. Even with health innovations, people say to us, we're really interested in that mental health app, but there's no way I want to release my personal details, because what if social services get access to that data? Or what if they start sharing information with DWP about what I'm buying online? Some people in Lambeth and Southwark would rather use free wifi in Costa or McDonald's because they're less concerned about who's seeing their activity there than they would be about the government or local authority seeing that information. 

Dama  

Another question is around how we define benefit, because ultimately, I hope that any community tech is driving social and environmental outcomes for people and the planet. But its benefit could also be financial rewards for X community that could be to the detriment of someone else. Establishing ‘do no harm’ principles into community tech is something that I'm quite conscious of, especially when you're building technologies for people. 

Helen  

Community tech needs big political backing, either from a couple of really big combined authorities who recognise the value and how it contributes to community power and levelling up, or some sort of manifesto commitment. For a political party to say, we're going to put 30 million pounds into supporting communities to make the most of community tech to help them access the things they want and need. We’re going to take a plural localist approach. People can build what they want. But it will sit on a common, open architecture, and be open to any one to adopt and adapt whatever sits on it. Given that there has been dramatically more investment into bespoke, single function national government platforms in the last two years that have no way of talking to each other, there is a very clear business case for why a government might back (and hopefully cede operational control) of a real digital commons.

You also need to think really clearly about what people want. It's a small subset of people that we're talking about wanting community tech. There's a vastly larger group of people who make use of WhatsApp, Next Door, Facebook in their day to day community, and would probably rightly say, what was wrong with any of that? 

Cassie  

Grace, when you talk about community power, what are the characteristics of that? What does community power mean? And how do you transfer those principles to tech.

Grace  

For us at New Local, we think about community power as a principle. The starting principle is the idea that communities have important, and at times the best, insights into their own circumstances and into what they need to thrive. Broadly, we think about that as meaning that communities therefore should have genuine influence over decisions and resources in places and over services as well. 

From a public institutions point of view, we think about how communities are being brought into strategic decision making, but also how individuals and communities of interest interact around design of services, and also how communities are involved in big strategic decisions. 

But then the other side of that is what's happening in communities, around social infrastructure, community organisations and mutual aid. We spend quite a lot of time thinking about what role the public sector should be playing in enabling and supporting that. So there's an interesting intersection there with the community tech conversation.

As a starting point I’d want to understand what people would want from tech. And how would tech connect people in a place? Often people don't know what is happening locally; joining up all the opportunities that are there for people is really hard. You've got lots of small organisations doing good stuff, that don't necessarily have the capacity to shout about what they're doing.

And then people have lots of insight to what's happening in their place, and it's really difficult to capture that and for people and communities to use that themselves. For that to be a source of power, and to be part of a conversation between communities and like public services in their place. Is there a role for community tech in widening participation, and how people can get involved in conversations in a place? 

Cassie 

There's so much that tech could strengthen and enable within that agenda. But there are so many people who are so far away from thinking about community tech because they're literally trying to survive. And they are likely to be only engaging in digital in relation to accessing services and trying to meet their basic needs. They are a long way away from becoming a producer or co-creator of something in their place. What can we do to cultivate that more? 

Steph  

My insight from speaking to communities in Lambeth and Southwark is to really consider where people's ambitions are, and what motivates people. Within those communities is a highly entrepreneurial spirit, but what motivates them is essentially moving out of poverty. So there needs to be an acknowledgement that it's okay that people might want to make money out of the things that they set up. Otherwise you're always going to end up with people that have come from a level of privilege where they're not motivated by [making money]. 

Dama  

I agree. There's always that element of how you sustain this long term as well, because eventually that funding will also fizzle out. When I think about how to cultivate engagement, to a degree it's also a tech question, because it requires things to be interoperable and not exclusive. So looking into tech infrastructure that allows for better interoperability or for collaboration is going to be quite crucial. 

There should always be room for exploration and what communities actually want to engage with. What I really draw inspiration from is finding out about existing community practices that are not digital and seeing where they are applied to a digital solution. My mum loves saving money. She pulled money together on a monthly basis with her other friends who are all women, which became a micro financing loan that they do on a word of mouth basis. Those types of community traditions are now being taken by entrepreneurs. Nina Mohanty has now used some similar traditions that existed in South Asian cultures and built a tech product out of this. 

Grace  

I think there's a risk of it feeling intimidating, that people don't know why they should be interested. You have got to start where people and communities are at with the problems and the things that they want to solve, and then have the conversation about how community tech could help with that. 

Cassie

Thank you. There's loads more to say, and I'm hoping we can keep you all involved in different ways as the programme develops.