Recently, ACT | The App Association’s Amplify Diverse Talent Working Group hosted Tech Desert: Addressing the Needs of Underserved Communities Through Technology, a webinar highlighting companies that are bringing technologies to underserved communities, the unique obstacles they’ve faced, and the roles legislators and industry leaders can play in empowering tech innovators at large.
The practice of building software around the so-called “typical user” can often lead to “edge cases” being ignored or not thoroughly considered, leaving entire disenfranchised communities in the dark or— at the very least—unnecessarily vulnerable. To make matters worse, when tech does reach disenfranchised communities, discriminatory data practices have severe consequences that disproportionately harm people of color, queer people, women, immigrants, and the working class. Without tech literacy education, the consequences come even harder, and for those who have been burned before, building trust back is difficult.
During the webinar, panelists discussed the unique challenges that entrepreneurs in the app economy have faced when trying to build technology for these underserved populations and explored how we can use tech innovations—and empower tech innovators—to challenge the power imbalances in our society and make a more equitable and diverse community of app users and makers.
Panelist Adriana Holst highlighted her work on BenchMark, an app that aims to support the unhomed population in Appalachia and help address some of the poverty disparities in the community through crowd-sourced data. She highlighted a different way to think about the term “underserved,” noting that we generally assume we are talking about people of color, the LGBTQIA+ community, those who have varying levels of ability, women, and gender nonconforming folks in these conversations. While all of these groups are certainly included, she suggested we define underserved (especially in the context of this discussion) as any group that technology either does not properly reach or reaches with increased dangers. Other groups she highlighted include people in rural communities, the working class, undocumented people, and people without housing.
Following Adriana’s insights around gaps being filled through technology, Avery Freeman, an App Association Summer Intern and an incoming graduate student at Duke University, noted that while technology can certainly close gaps and empower users, there have been many times where these underserved communities face harmful data discrimination practices, putting them at further risk. These risks range from nonconsensual surveillance to general bad data collecting sharing practices and everything in between. She’s spent a significant portion of her academic career researching and understanding discrimination in Artificial Intelligence (AI). She also noted that something we forget about bias is that sometimes lack of data can have just as much impact on the overall usefulness and quality of a dataset as human bias, which still is disproportionally the root cause of bias in AI.
Panelist Morgan White of member company MotionMobs discussed how increased surveillance causes disproportionate legal action against marginalized communities and nonconsensual surveillance leads to legal issues for unsuspecting folks. Similar to our webinar last year around the privacy of verbal communications in disenfranchised communities, Morgan highlighted how technology can help solve the problem by connecting members of these communities with information and educating them on what to do in certain situations where surveillance may occur, how to recognize situations in which surveillance may be occurring, and connecting them with legal information and, in some cases, legal representation.
And Betsy Furler of member company For All Abilities shared misconceptions about the intersection of accessibility and technology. She shared her background as a speech pathologist and highlighted the role technology plays in giving a voice to many of the children with whom she works. However, Betsy realized there was a role technology could play in improving work environments for neurodivergent members of the workforce. What she found as she developed her app was that technology could address the needs of all members of the workforce including those who have unique skillsets, needs, and accommodations that fall outside of the traditional perception of disabilities.
For those interested in hearing more on this topic, including more about the amazing tech solutions from Adriana and Betsy, you can view the webinar in its entirety below. The App Association looks forward to continuing the conversation around similar issues, so if you would like to learn more about the Amplify Diverse Talent Working Group or become involved in future panels, webinars, and events, you can email Caitlin Irr at [email protected].
View the webinar video here.