Lab: Tech excludes communities its meant to serve?

As we look back at the intersection of tech and impact over the last few decades, we noted that. - Before 2010, there was limited role of tech in the impact sector. - Between 2010 to 2018, it was tech enabled impact (data to measure impact, MIS, online giving, etc) - Since 2019, we seem to be in the era of tech IS impact. (Haqdarshak, UPI, etc) And here lies a huge opportunity to uplift millions of lives. or is there? > Tech can be a great ally but often such technology excludes the key user communities (Vulnerable groups, Frontline workers) that it's meant to serve . - User community agency and co-creation are not central to the design process. - Process excludes lived experiences of communities or on-the-ground experiences of frontline workers - Complex problems need ongoing dialogues, trust and collaboration to solve at scale - Solutions are most often expert-driven, proprietary, inaccessible and un-affordable - Primacy to the tech deployed rather than enabling the agency of the user communities .png](https://t4glabs.org/markdown_attachments/6100/qD8hx91GNiPlSV61Sa2qdA) **WHAT?** This unique Lab is an effort to help Leadership Teams, Senior Management Teams, Programme Teams, Frontline workers, Communities of Change making organisations, Foundations to discover how tech is impacting their theory of change and to co-create a strategy to leverage tech in an in inclusive, meaningful way to better serve the needs of the communities they work with. **HOW?** Over 6-8 online sessions of 2 hours each with around 2 hours of group/self work distributed over a period of 6-8 weeks we hold space for you to help you think through the tech strategy for your mission. .png](https://t4glabs.org/markdown_attachments/6099/bGTvRX-6idK2_OMs2GwxsA) Aspects that we cover: 1. Reconfirming Intent with the team and empathy talks. 2. Mapping out Stakeholders, Imbalance of power in design of technology solutions 3. Fixing broken dialogues between various stakeholders and processes that will help give more agency to vulnerable communities and frontline workers in solution design 4. Understanding benefits that communities need and how/if tech could provide those features, understanding the long term negative impact it could have. 5. Co-creating a shared understanding of the impact of tech 6. Co-creating a simple 3 year strategy to leverage tech to serve the vulnerable communities that we work with. Please write to [email protected] for any queries. Credits: We are inspired by the work of Fields Of View, FOSS United.