Digital in international develelopment - what is good practice?!
Digital innovation is a red-hot topic in development aid these days. However, also outside the realms of development aid, it has been noticed that digital tools do not make things better automatically. It depends very much on how these technologies are used, whether they can play a real positive role for the people who use them or are effected by them.
Such thoughts have led some institutions to look at principles that should be applied to development cooperation, to avoid such dangers and to leverage digital potential. This led to the "Digital Principles for Digital Development".
So this meetup we looked into good practice for digital development and these principles, nine guidelines designed to help integrate good practices into technology-enabled programs and are intended to be updated and refined over time. They include guidance for every phase of the project life cycle of development aid projects, and they are part of an ongoing effort among development practitioners to share knowledge and support continuous learning.
There are a lot of resources available on these Principles:
- The "Principles" website.
- There are resources and toolkits available about the Principles.
- Organisations and companies can endorse these principles for their own work.
This is what PositiveBlockchain recently did, and here is why we did it.
Because PositiveBlockchain believes technology is neutral by design, it is not "good" nor "bad" as such. Especially humans designing, implementing, using technologies have the responsibility to integrate social and ethical principles in their practices to make sure technology innovation benefits the people and communities involved and leads to effective progress.
The principles must be adaptable, and commendably they postulate that. And of course there are fields that need to be discussed. These fields reflect the fact that the Principles were created by large, centrally organised institutions in privileged settings.
Three areas we discussed, which I want to briefly touch upon here:
- Without questioning this, the principles refer to the waterfall model of software development. However, especially with regard to the strongly user-oriented approach, which the principles also advocate for, an agile approach is much better suited. And the general observation is that in complex (social) situations, the attempt to approach problems in a planned manner is doomed to failure (but that is another topic).
- The whole principles make no specific reference to gender or race discrimination, although those are central challenges for both social reality and technical implementation. Just as an example we looked into why facial recognition's racial bias problem is so hard to crack
- Last, but nor least, the Principles should apply also to the curation of the Principles of Digital Development themselves. The process should "design with the user" and should "be collaborative", "incremental and iterative". The principles also ask for ensuring "that the design is sensitive to and considers the needs of the traditionally underserved" (quotes from the Digital Principles Core Tenets).
If you are interested specifically in good practice in blockchain projects, have a look at the excellent Blockchain Ethical Design Framework for Social Impact to learn more.