“People’s Community Control of Modern Technology”: Community Organizers and Data Justice

Recent widespread public protests in the United States against police violence, racism and other issues demonstrate the importance of community organizing, grassroots activism dedicated to building voice and political power.

Community organizers work in all part of the American political spectrum, but they share an approach to democratic participation, a professional culture, and many job-specific tools and techniques. Community organizers have also made extensive use of a less obvious political tool: data.

Contemporary community organizers in working-class communities of color, like other kinds of data professionals, create, aggregate and visualize data to inform organizational activities, to communicate with various audiences, and to demonstrate their value to funders and the public. Paradoxically, many of the same community organizers also criticize via their work the design, development and use of data-intensive technologies in a variety of domains, including law enforcement, public education, public health and pandemic response.

In this talk, I will report preliminary findings of an ongoing research project that seeks to describe and understand the data practices of community organizers in working-class communities of color, focusing on the risks organizers and community members must address in their pursuit of racial justice projects that turn on uses of data.

Roderic Crooks is an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine. His research examines how the use of digital technology by public institutions contributes to the minoritization of working-class communities of color. His current project explores how community organizers in working-class communities of color use data for activist projects, even as they dispute the proliferation of data-intensive technologies in education, law enforcement, financial services, and other vital sites of public life. He has published extensively in HCI, STS and social science venues on topics including political theories of online participation, equity of access to information and media technologies, and document theory.