Marginalized individuals and practitioners bring the vital lens of their lived experiences to the field when it comes to leveraging technology for the common good and solving complex problems that disproportionately impact marginalized communities, like social justice, climate change, and access to quality health care, education, transportation, and affordable housing, just to a name few. Yet, the knowledge, voices, and expertise of those communities are often excluded from the design, development, and use of technology.

Often, the knowledge of a few subject-matter experts takes precedence and is elevated above all. If we continue to accept the status quo wherein the technologists who design and create our technological solutions remain largely white, male, cis-gender, wealthy individuals, then the technologies that shape our lives will continue to reinforce marginalization and perpetuate power imbalances. Recent negative treatment of public interest technologists like Timnet Gebru and Joy Buolamwini or the Socialgrlz S3 Trio, a team of young Black girls in high school who participated in a NASA innovation challenge and were targeted by racist harassment on the agency’s competition website after jumping ahead in votes, are just a few examples of the need for physical and digital spaces where historically marginalized people can share and develop knowledge together with allies in the tech ecosystem. These rooms and Zooms are critical to delivering the type of solutions that are fair and just.

There are a variety of systemic factors that have led to this status quo. In our report titled, “​​Building Career Pathways for Diverse Public Interest Technology Entrepreneurs,” we outline some of these factors like learning the unwritten rules, facing implicit biases, and encountering limited social capital and funding opportunities. But we believe the solution lies—at least in part—in creating a democratized, diverse, and inclusive community of researchers and practitioners in public interest technology that promotes knowledge development.

From our viewpoint, PIT entrepreneurs from marginalized communities have minimal visibility in the social sector. To address this diversity, equity, and inclusion problem, it’s vital to develop digital infrastructure that brings the knowledge of marginalized technologists into the public discourse. Below are three design principles that technologists and funders should consider when working to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive future of technology.

  1. Use storytelling to share knowledge and build collaboration with marginalized communities during co-design efforts.
  2. Create pathways for students to learn by doing at the intersection of technology and society.
  3. Develop, adopt, and invest in systems that equitably manage knowledge contributions from marginalized communities at scale.

Read the full article about inclusive technology by Raymar Hampshire, Jessica Taketa, and Tayo Fabusuyi at Stanford Social Innovation Review.