Last week Project Tech4Dev brought together six organizations that use tech, data and AI to build capacity in the social sector. The event described us as Ecosystem Enablers. All participants agreed that it was a fuzzy term and yet an accurate description of what each organization was doing. We all had different goals yet some common concerns. While it wasn’t explicitly presented as such, in this piece, I explore ecosystem enablement as a theory of tech for social change and how it sits alongside Tattle’s view of civic tech.
There are many theories for how technology intervenes in economic development and social change. Kentaro Toyama’s tech as an amplifier theory states that technology amplifies intent and capacity. More recently, Arvind Narayan and Sayash Kapoor proposed a theory of AI as a normal technology- it is neither good nor bad nor neutral. At Tattle we have our civic tech view- new technologies reshape the relationship between civil society, government and corporations (Tattle’s goal is to use tech to shift the balance in favour of the first).
Last Friday, I sat with another theory of technology - tech as ecosystem enabler. Seven different organizations, each working with data, tech and AI for non profits came together to discuss what it would take for all of us to be more effective at increasing the capacity of the social sector organizations that we work with (kind of meta, I know). Of the six organizations in the room, I thought I knew the work of three fairly well. Yet, the two days made me look at all of them anew. Instead of discussing our programs at a birds eye view we focused on the operational challenges and business models. There was a lot that was different between the organizations. For one, within the broad umbrella of the social sector ecosystem, we are all looking at a different sliver. Second, we had different theories of enablement. Two organizations were building platforms serving mid-sized nonprofits. One was focused on collaboratives for governments and civil society. One was focused on using tech for fundraising support, one for legal support and one for building and managing their digital presence. In our sliver of low resourced media and gender justice organizations, tech is a tool to protect, coordinate and amplify marginalized voices.
And yet we all had a common concern that, as important as we believed that the tech was for the organizations in our specific sliver, their ability to absorb and work with tech was limited. We spent a fair bit of time thinking of time-bound, skill specific cohorts as a model to build capacity, both for the seven ecosystem enablers in the discussion and for the organizations that we work with.
On the second day, each organization pitched to the group how they would use additional money for a year to build their organization’s capacity. This meant a proposal to engage more organizations through our work, but in a sustainable way. Even the exercise was liberating– lately, managing a social impact organization, let alone growing it, has felt like solving a puzzle where more and more pieces are lost by the day. Free form capital, not tied to a specific program, can substitute for many of those pieces. But this wasn't merely a thought exercise. In Shark Tank style, each organization got asked hard questions about their proposal. The pitches were also rated by others on criteria such as reach and traction, collaboration track record, grant-absorption capacity, and cascade effect. Thinking and pitching our work against the criteria specified for ecosystem building meant that through the two days I was flitting between the two frames of tech for social change- Tattle’s default civic tech framing and that of ecosystem enablement. The ideation and reflections from the event haven’t entirely settled but my current position is that there are overlaps in the two frames but they are not the same.
Each theory of technology abstracts a lot of underlying assumptions. It is thus, as much a statement of values of their proponents, as it is a theory of what tech does. I think this is also true of the theory of tech as ecosystem enablement. So for the two days, I had to think of Tattle through the lens of a slightly different prioritization of values. And while it wasn’t always comfortable, I think it was productive.
In six years of experimenting with civic tech I have had to accept that even the best of tech projects require the right conditions to succeed in enabling civil society coordination. We have some successful products but we've contributed our fair share to the graveyard of proof of concepts in the civic (and feminist) tech world. In the ecosystem enablement and cohort frame that we were deliberating over the two days, the collective action and the tech product development came together in a different way. We realized that organizations (gender justice organizations were on our mind) working towards a similar goal can come together in the learning journey of using and building tech while pursuing their independent organizational goals. In some ways, this presents a more straightforward business model for technology providers in the social sector than our primary civic tech frame. And that might be the counterbalance needed to get to civic tech projects that scale and are sustainable.
The two days resulted in lots of questions and ideas. But more importantly it also resulted in a peer group for deep deliberation on the same.