ABSTRACT

The CSCW community has long discussed the ethics and politics of sociotechnical systems and how they become embedded in society and public policy [5,11,13,20,30]. In light of the Black Lives Matter protests and Hong Kong protests, technologies such as facial recognition and contact tracing have re-invigorated conversations about the ethical and social responsibility of tech corporations, tech workers, and academics in science and technology. The goal of this workshop is to move beyond a call for the usual suspects of participatory design and human-centered design by committing to concrete steps to transform society through advocacy and activism.

MOTIVATION AND BACKGROUND

Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and adjacent academic communities have continued to steer the computing world in more ethically and socially responsible directions with academics engaging political economy and social inequality [9], working to expand HCI methods to support labor [15], exploring theoretical and methodological approaches that consider issues of gender, sexual orientation, and power in the design of socio-technical systems [14], exploring grassroots approaches to better align CSCW with politics of collaboration [17], mapping out what it means to engage inhuman-centered data science [22], as well as engaging in debates about an “alternative, post-capitalist,grand vision for HCI”, that is, what kind of futures do we see ourselves working towards [10]. An increasing investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) also comes at a cost of drawing necessary resources away from social services that support vulnerable communities.For instance, a Bill was introduced in the Congress of the United States to fund the development of predictive analytics in the child-welfare system [1]. However, most child-welfare agencies themselves remain underfunded and overburdened [28]. As computing professionals, we must not only challenge the technological solutionism that is often marketed to fix socio-political problems but also advocate against “pseudo-participation” to ensure that communities have the agency to refuse design of a technology [26]. This workshop seeks to bring together academics, designers, and practitioners to further extend the conversation towards institutional and extra-institutional efforts within our community to collectively organize around social responsibility. What are we learning from these initiatives and how are we helping the community progress towards socially responsible computing and doing our civic duty to work toward social justice? What gaps remain, or where do we think more organizing or coordination could occur in order to address deep-seated problems in computing? The goal of this workshop is to further these conversations and discuss pragmatic measures that computing and information professionals can take as insiders via advocacy and as outsiders via activism [24, 27]

WORKSHOP THEMES

Advocacy and Coalition Building

As we move toward transforming the norms of our academic and professional practice, it is important to include and advocate for those left out of the conversation for far too long. For example, the SIGCHI community has silenced the voices of racial minorities and women of color, erasing and appropriating their work while simultaneously promoting diversity and inclusion [18]. How might we push institutions to be truly inclusive of a wider range of views and participants? How might we acknowledge longstanding inequities like anti-Black racism that plague design fields and technology design? Most importantly, how might we uplift the voices of marginalized designers and community-led organizations, and be “accomplices” in coalition with equitable and just visions for our professional community like those put forward by our Black colleagues [19, 25]?

Collective Organizing and Activism

Tech workers assumed the role of activists when they united under the banner of#TechWontBuildIt to protest their employers’ contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense or Immigration and Customs Enforcement [16,29]. Echoing calls in adjacent academic communities, it is also imperative to pay close attention to“when not to design, build, or deploy”[2]. The emerging “design justice” movement exemplifies designers making such commitments [7]. There is demonstrated energy within CSCW recently for activist technology and social movement engagement [8,17,21,23]. However, even tech workers, so highly valued in our global economy, have limited power in deciding what they build.What is necessary to strengthen ethical and democratic accountability in technology production?How might we as a professional community refuse to design technology that undermines democracy and exacerbates inequality? How might we instead advance the development of tools co-designed with grassroots organizations that counter harmful tech? How might we disseminate methods that enshrine social responsibility and ethics so that they are inextricably entwined with CSCW, whether practiced in academia, industry, or government?

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