This blog post was written by Val Elefante, a researcher on the Accelerating Makers team at TechSoup. Val is a researcher, project manager, and strategic designer specializing in community-led, responsible development of emerging technologies including AI and the decentralized web. Learn more and connect with Val on LinkedIn.
I attended Aspiration’s Nonprofit Software Development Summit (DevSummit for short) in Oakland, California, this November. Aspiration is a nonprofit organization working to help nonprofits, activists, foundations, and technologists adopt more effective and sustainable digital strategies and technology solutions to support social, racial, and climate justice. Their manifesto captures it best when it says, “Nonprofits should strive to remain in control of their technology destiny.”
As a researcher on the Accelerating Makers team at TechSoup, my work has been focused on researching and accelerating use cases of decentralized technology for nonprofits and social impact. Therefore, my goal going into the conference was to connect with folks building decentralized tools (Makers) as well as nonprofit "integrators" (or user communities) to learn about the risks, benefits, challenges, and triumphs of building and using DWeb tools.
Before I get into what I learned, I want to first paint a clearer picture of the event to give you a better sense of just how special and meaningful it was.
A People-Centered, Low-Tech Tech Unconference
Aspiration has been hosting DevSummit and convening folks working at the intersection of progressive activism and technology for 20+ years. Executive Director Allen Gunn (aka Gunner) takes on the role of lead facilitator, functioning as the metaphorical glue that makes the entire event hold together (more on this in a bit).
The event's epicenter is the main room of Nile Hall in Preservation Park. The ~2,000-square-foot room has red carpet floors, 30-foot-high ceilings, and multiple large windows lined with ceiling-to-floor drapes. Everyone can almost fit in one big circle of chairs around the perimeter plus an extra row or two within the circle and a few people sitting on the floor. This is important because every day starts and ends with a round of reflections as we pass the microphone around the room alongside a bottle of hand sanitizer. The magic of the event is derived from here. Looking around at everyone, hearing their voices, getting a momentary glimpse into their lives, passions, and visions for a better future is what truly makes this event so special.
We come back to this formation often, but the big, deep conversations happen during the five “working sessions” held over the course of the three days. The session topics each day are emergent (meaning they are derived from participants). If there’s a conversation you want to have, you can ask Gunner to put it on the agenda, and either you can facilitate it or, presumably, he will help you find someone else to facilitate.
Facilitation can look a lot of different ways and is unique to the facilitator, but essentially it entails introducing the topic and guiding the conversation. Unlike presenters, facilitators are not expected to have all the answers (or even any answers) about the topic. Instead, they have the — perhaps sometimes even more challenging — responsibility to try their best to make sure everyone who speaks is heard and respected and that the topic is sufficiently addressed.
In this model, everyone is empowered to facilitate (if they want to), which makes for a diverse array of topics and presenters. Topics included redefining confidence, building sustainable free and open-source (FOSS) platforms, closing racial and gender gaps in tech, technology and chronic illness, internet shutdowns and circumvention technology, co-ops and distributive leadership, non-extractive research and storytelling, fundraising, taking control of the algorithm, effective communication and listening, and so much more. In the spirit of valuing openness and accessibility, Aspiration publishes its event agendas and even session notes online.
To an outsider looking in, the event probably doesn’t look like a tech conference at all. Many of the sessions are facilitated using easel pads, Post-it notes, and Sharpies. Groups of about 8 to 12 participants “break out” and go to different rooms or sit outside to enjoy the 65 degrees and sunny weather around the fountain at the center of the historic Preservation Park. Note taking with pen and paper is encouraged, and device use is suggested to be limited to parental obligations and emergencies only. Again, it was evident that the rituals have been set to foster the most meaningful human-to-human connections possible — and they work.
My Big, High-Level Takeaways
I had so many incredible and enlightening conversations both during facilitated sessions and spontaneously during lunch breaks or between sessions.
The first day was a “pre-event” attended by a smaller group of about 30 people — most but not all of whom were DevSummit veterans or involved in the Infrared Network, an alliance of alternative internet infrastructure providers. I learned so much on this day — basically receiving a crash course on “movement hosting” and how important it is for people and groups working on liberatory social change to have control over our own means of communications. Projects including May First Movement Technology, Riseup, CiviCRM, and the Tor Project provide all kinds of secure services, including website hosting, email, mailing lists, VPNs, online chat, file sharing, and web browsers owned and controlled by movement organizations themselves — not corporations or the government.
Not only do these organizations provide online services, but they also store sensitive movement data on servers they own and operate. Alternatively, they might support organizations in “self-hosting” or setting up their own servers and networks to store their data. When it comes to storing data about social movements — the people, events, communications, and strategies — having servers owned and run by people who share the values of the movement is extremely important. Security and privacy need to be taken seriously with protections from corporate and state surveillance, censorship, hacks, doxxing, extractive data scraping, and (I’m sure) many other threats I don’t know about.
Many organizations do not trust for-profit companies to provide these services because of the large-scale nonconsensual collection and commodification of personal data happening to maximize profits: “surveillance capitalism.” Beyond that, companies providing cloud-based data storage (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) are also incentivized to charge high fees and lock in organizations, making data portability nearly impossible and giving organizations little to no flexibility or control over their operations and communication processes. For some organizations, relying on any single company (or any single entity) with complete control over your data is a risk. What if that one security system is breached? What if the company fails or changes ownership and is no longer values-aligned?
I met a woman who told me about how NGP VAN — the single main customer relations management (CRM) platform used by essentially all Democratic candidates for all campaigns across the entire country that stores voter file information (names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, etc.), manages communications, and handles compliance reporting — was acquired by a British private equity firm in 2021. This made me question: Should Democrats trust them with managing the platform, operations, and data? Do we expect the firm to treat the platform differently from any of its other portfolio companies — as in cutting costs, firing people, and possibly even degrading service in order to maximize revenue? Sure enough, earlier this year, the company suddenly laid off 10 percent of its employees in pursuit of “long-term, efficient growth.” The woman who told me about this had been recently laid off and came to express deep concerns about the future of the platform under private equity ownership.
From many conversations on the first day, I realized that the questions about data — how data is collected, where it’s stored, who owns it, who can see it, who can use it, and for what purposes — are at the center of the internet battles we currently face. We deserve more agency and control to answer these questions for ourselves, our communities, and our specific needs and vulnerabilities.
Today, for-profit companies have dominated the space, showing us that the commodification of data can lead to immense financial gains. Meanwhile, we, as the data source, are excluded from those rewards. Governments also collect and store our data, and while they might not be commodifying it, it’s possible you might not trust, agree, or consent to what they’re doing with your data.
Therefore, going forward, we might consider envisioning a future where our data is held by values-aligned nonprofit organizations, under collective community control, or even held by us individuals. This brings me to the next topic of interest — the decentralized web.
Data Sovereignty in the Decentralized Web
One of the big promises of the decentralized web is greater data sovereignty. Data sovereignty is defined as:
a group or individual’s right to control and maintain their own data however they see fit, which includes the collection, storage, and interpretation of their data.
Rather than on servers and networks owned and controlled by centralized corporations or governments, data on the decentralized web is stored in servers and networks often geographically distributed and run by volunteer nodes — none of which have any outsized power over the rest. Generally speaking, without centralized entities (governments or for-profit companies) collecting, storing, and taking ownership of the data, users can have more control over their data, such as who can access it and for what purposes.
One of the emerging use cases of decentralized technology is in the realm of identity verification and management systems. To me, digital identification is one of the most helpful use cases to look at to understand how decentralized technology works and why it is important. The organization leading the charge on researching and developing out the standards for these decentralized identity (DID) systems is the World Wide Web Consortium, a multi-stakeholder member organization that develops web standards in the open. At DevSummit, I met a member of W3C, Kaliya Young (aka Identity Woman), who has been working on DIDs for over 20 years.
In short, DIDs are a type of unique identity (think driver's license, email address, SSN, Instagram handle) that is managed completely by the ID holder and can be verified without the use of any centralized entity (government, bank, company, etc.). These systems utilize distributed ledger technology (i.e., blockchains) to securely store and verify the identity information as well as cryptography to ensure privacy.
Right now, we have many different IDs that allow us to do all types of things like buying things online, receiving government benefits, or signing in to platforms, and yet we don’t actually own or have control over any of these IDs. Our access to them can be revoked at any time. In the case of decentralized digital identity, users can choose what data they want to share with whom and can even delete data associated with their digital ID and eliminate their digital presence entirely.
Decentralized digital identity systems are actively being developed and implemented by folks in various sectors including for-profit companies (such as Microsoft), governments, and nonprofits. They are coming soon, and I anticipate that DIDs and the surrounding public discussions will help people understand why it’s important that we have more control over our data and perhaps even push people to seek more control over other types of data too — medical records, customer information, art, social media posts, newsletters, and so much more.
Accelerating Makers at Aspiration DevSummit
Over the past six months, my team has been doing a research deep dive into the decentralized web in order to better understand and articulate how it works and what it can be used for — specifically for nonprofit organizations and social impact. If you are new to the decentralized web, I recommend browsing our Accelerating Makers website with a bunch of free digital resources including DWeb explainers, use cases, and more to understand the basics and context for this research. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date with the project going forward.
Our first big output of this research project was the collection of an initial 16 use cases of decentralized technology for nonprofits (or “jobs to be done”) including fundraising, cash aid transfers, impact reporting, digital archiving, community Wi-Fi networks, private web browsing, and more. These use cases included examples of actual teams building actual DWeb tools or products to execute these necessary jobs.
My goal going into DevSummit was to share these research findings and engage with folks around topics related to the decentralized web. I was invited to facilitate a session and even had the opportunity to meet with Gunner virtually a couple weeks before the event to chat about the topic and get his advice and guidance on how and where to guide the conversation. This was extremely helpful and made facilitation much less intimidating and highly rewarding.
I was determined to let the discussion flow, but my loose agenda for the session was the following:
- Co-create a shared understanding of decentralized technology
- Share my use case research and discuss relevant ecosystem projects
- Talk about the benefits and risks of decentralized technologies
- Emergent criteria included privacy, security, transparency, interoperability, and safety.
I titled the session “Towards an Evaluation Framework of Decentralized Technologies for Nonprofits” with the goal of working towards an answer to the question, "How might a nonprofit evaluate whether or not to use a certain decentralized tool for a certain job?" Overall, the session turned out to be a rich and fruitful discussion, and I got positive feedback from participants, which made me really happy :) Below is a collage of my easel pads, and here are the session notes in case anyone wants to dive deeper.
Where We’re Heading in 2024
Since DevSummit, we are still working on developing a framework for evaluating decentralized tech tools. We are also planning to host conversations and co-design sessions — we're calling them "Maker Studio Sessions" — with Makers and integrators to elevate questions, needs, and concerns in different areas (security, privacy, transparency, immutability, etc.) and have a dialogue about how and why decentralized technology is being used in a particular way to help accomplish certain goals. If this sounds interesting, We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to us at MakerLabs@TechSoup.org.
Conclusion
I hope you’re with me in seeing that these issues are relevant — especially to nonprofits and activists — but also to everyone. Every time we use a digital tool or service, we give it all kinds of information about us — either as individuals or entire organizations — including who we are, where we live, who we know, and what we search for. It’s becoming increasingly clear that these existing providers are accessing, using, and profiting off our data without our knowledge, let alone consent.
It’s almost like in today’s world of speedy service and simplified interface design, we have given up on trying to understand the increasingly complex systems that underlie our digital experiences. In giving up this knowledge, we have given up our agency to make decisions about our data and our digital experiences. We have sacrificed and offered up complete control over our lives and organizations to the dominant Big Tech platforms. We barely even have a choice over what tools to use — they’re all on trial for being monopolies.
And to make one thing extra clear: These companies have motivation to keep our knowledge and understanding to a minimum. But all it takes is a wake-up call … you never know when you’re going to be targeted by a scammer or cybercriminal, be censored for political speech, get doxxed, or even just start realizing that intrusive social media algorithms are taking a toll on your mental health. Perhaps you’ve already had one of these experiences. It’s time more of us called into question the status quo, started thinking more critically about our data instead of blindly trusting the people and organizations we give it to.
From all of my research into this space thus far, I feel more certain than ever about these two things:
- The future is decentralized.
- Movement organizers, investigative journalists, whistleblowers, Indigenous communities, and sex workers are consistently ahead of the curve when it comes to building and adopting new technologies. These are some of the groups who have been most severely targeted and harmed by technology; however, these obstacles put these groups ahead of the curve when it comes to designing and building the future.
We can and all should learn from how affected communities are continuing to live, do their work, and stay safe from harm. We should also all join the fight against oppression by centering their experiences (aka design from the margins) and building a better world for everyone.
Now we also know that even if the future is decentralized, there will always be people figuring out new ways to take advantage, extract, and exploit the system. I have no doubt about that — that is just the world we live in. That’s why the best thing we can do is to become more digitally literate and understanding of our relationship with data. We should learn more about how technology like laptops, phones, applications, the internet, etc., actually work under the hood. And we should use data as the paradigm or unit for understanding how these systems work. Educating ourselves is really how we will achieve data sovereignty.
But for now, working on this research of the decentralized web has made me realize that decentralized tools need to exist because we should all at least have the choice to use them. Decentralization should at least be an option if not the default.
Thank you all again for reading. Please reach out and let us know your thoughts! We look forward to continuing this work in 2024.
