Humane Tech Community Position Statement - Humane Tech Community

Summary

‘Product’

Problems

Our embracing of exponential technology innovations that put profit over people are causing us increasing harms that we are unaware of, or feel powerless to change. These harms affect:

  1. Wellbeing: prolonged social media and device use is afflicting mental and physical health and deteriorating our social skills.

  2. Freedom: surveillance capitalism is destroying privacy, wasting our attention, diminishes our rights, and increases inequality.

  3. Society: fake news, disinformation, censorship is eroding trust and social norms, even civics and democracy itself are at risk and we can be manipulated by malicious actors.

Solutions

We educate people, creating awareness on how tech harms affect them and what they can do to mitigate or entirely avoid them.

We actively collect, create and improve solutions in cooperation with many partners and we will then promote them to the broader public - our audience - and stimulate their widespread use.

These solutions, when technological in nature, are called humane technology.

Key metrics

  • Growth of public audience receiving our message
  • Growth of active community members that contribute
  • Retention of active members over longer periods
  • Number of partners that we actively cooperate with
  • Number of successful campaigns (based on individual criteria)
  • Surveys on clarity of message, quality of solutions, continuous feedback

Key resources

Resources needed for a MVP:

  • Community team to facilitate, organize and moderate
  • Volunteers documenting, blogging, writing articles
  • Technical volunteers to design / develop website
  • Campaigners to help spread the message

Unique Value Proposition

Humane Tech Community is unique, because of:

  • Acts as binding force, forging partner relationships in a fragmented landscape of similar initiatives
  • Does not compete with anyone and instead fosters a culture of cooperation to the broadest extent
  • Tackles the huge problems we face with a mindset of positivity, optimism, solution-orientation
  • Provides an environment and vibrant culture to members that is fun and intrinsically rewarding
  • We are a global team that stimulates face-to-face cooperation in worldwide meetups and events

User Profiles

  • All people, everyone, but with primary focus on these groups:
    • Parents and their children
    • Technologists and scientists
    • Government and businesses
    • Educators

User Channels

  • Center for Humane Technology, other influencers
  • Personal networks, friends, family, mouth-to-mouth
  • Meetups and events, conferences
  • (Online) Media, articles, press
  • Community hub: website and forum
  • Partner activities and references

Contributor Profiles

  • Informed people with ‘willingness to act’ in these categories:
    • Educators and campaigners to raise awareness and inform
    • Technologists, researchers and leaders to find / build solutions
    • Creatives, designers, artists and other craftsmen
    • Helpers and maintainers to strengthen the community

Contributor Channels

  • ‘From audience to activist’ (user to contributor)
  • Center for Humane Technology, other influencers
  • Specialist technology channels, humane businesses
  • Other communities and partners, cross-pollination
  • Universities, schools and education centers

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://humanetech.community/2019/04/position-statement

We made this Open Canvas as part of our participation in Mozilla Open Leaders: “Work Open, Lead Open!”.

See the following links for more informaiton (also includes our Vision Stands):