In my previous life I was a policy researcher, working with communities to measure the impact of federal and local policy in their neighborhoods. An essential part of that work was community surveys, something that often our partner organizations would see as important but laborious and expensive tasks. On one particular project, we decided to invest in tablet computers to complete our community surveys, making a previously arduous job a more streamlined endeavor that could better incorporate community members in the process of data collection.
In theory, survey administrators would go door-to-door throughout the neighborhood in pairs with a community member, tablet in hand. After gaining entrance to someone’s home with help of the community member, they would read the survey aloud as prompted by the tablet, which was dynamically programmed to respond to a person’s survey answers. As a result, the survey could be anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes, depending on the type of survey respondent. Instead of carrying around pads of paper, leaving sensitive information more vulnerable to loss, the data was uploaded to a remote server which was now password protected. This level of protection allowed us to get much deeper than we would otherwise, asking folks to disclose their feelings of safety, detailed information about their children, and the private details of their life in the neighborhood.
In practice, it did just that. It was extremely successful in that got the organization the information they needed, and community members were able to take part in the larger survey effort, which took about six weeks to complete. However, with some distance I feel discomfort in the work we did for a few reasons, only a few of them having to do with the technology.
As a researcher, our interactions with the community were primarily extractive exercises. Though we were intending to cultivate community in our survey effort, showing that this was a way for everyone to have a hand in the reimagination of this neighborhood, what instead we did was pass this detailed information on to higher powers, who then made decisions without continued input. Having completed a few of those surveys myself, many of these interactions were bolstered by trust that giving up this information would be for a greater, distant good. As a result, folks would discuss this sensitive, personal information, receive $50 in return, yet in some cases, were never heard from again. We listened to stories of disenfranchisement, heard tales of repeated efforts for neighborhood revitalization, all of which were hard to capture in the survey we provided, and harder still to continually act upon as the project went on.
Recently the project itself was sunsetted due to limited grant funding, leaving all of that detailed survey information locked on a server in my old office, where no one in the community has access to it despite all of that effort. It’s since left me thinking a lot about the use of technology for social change as one discrete moment in the timeline of a project. As a one-off community exercise, our survey was very successful. For those six weeks, folks felt as though they were really contributing to something and were generally thrilled to be a part of it. We got the change we hoped to see, but only for that particular moment.
In retrospect, I regret that there were not more pathways for this to be more democratic, more participatory the entire way through. Nobody in the community has access to this treasure trove that we made together, and that stops all future use of this resource by anyone else who wants to take it up and enact change with it themselves.
As I know now, the nature of research creates power dynamics that are hard to overcome by the sheer will to be better. With some distance, maybe there is a place for this kind of research in an ecosystem of discussions about social change. However, they are distinct from efforts to truly push social change—for those we all need to make better efforts to embed that by design.