This guide seeks to propose a shared framework for working to counteract systemic digital inequity in both the process and the product of civic technology communities of practice and place.
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Contributions to this ongoing framework are welcome. Issue a PR to make additions or suggest changes.
Please note that we are writing this guide iteratively in stages, and it is currently not ready for critical feedback (though contributions are welcome!). No part or parts should be taken to represent the official views of Code for America, the Code for America Brigade Network, or the local organizations which the authors represent.
If a public process, service, or system doesn't work for all users, it doesn't work. If a democratic government systematically devalues or ignores the needs of any one group of people, it ignores the very basis of democracy upon which it is built. For government to work for the people, by the people, and of the people, it must work for all people, not just those with the money, power, or the extra time to participate in exclusionary systems.
Nothing about this is new or unique to today's technologically-driven world. Exclusionary government policy empowered by private sector prejudice has long plagued U.S. Democracy – from Jim Crow laws in the early 20th century to the Defense of Marriage Act in the 1990s.
Exclusion, whether tacit or explicit, undermines the very supposedly equitable political system in which it operates. When we leave out or don't do enough to compensate for systemic power imbalances, we fail to live up to the ideal of "government by the people, for the people, of the people" on which our nation was founded.
In the early days of the Web and even in the early days of the civic-tech movement not too long ago, it was regarded as basic logic that the 'open, interconnected, permissionless nature of participatory media and a networked information era' would be a harbinger of greater democracy, leveling the inequities in
equity, civic innovation
Equality isn't equity
Civic tech *must* figure out IDEA; cannot exclude anyone.
Acts as if the problems are solely personal behaviors
Diversity sought as an end goal, but only as a token.
Focus is on symptoms of problem, not the root causes of exclusion.
<Introductory treatise on why IDEA must come before technology, solution, policy, decision-making>
