Friday 16th June 2023 saw the inaugural London Tech for Good Fest at SPACE4, hosted by us. It was an absolute blast and we had a fabulous crowd who turned up right at the start and stuck around until closing time at the local despite the heat and no air-con.
So what the heck happened?
First up: Our own Chloe Cheeseman on Accessibility 101
Taking us through really practical examples and suggestions of how to make your site accessible step by step was super helpful, accessible (excuse the pun) and all delivered remotely, which to be frank, remote sessions have been known to have some tech hitches, but this was as smooth as an organic peach.
Talk 2 was Jenny from Chayn: Building a trauma informed tech product
Bringing the values of Chayn up front and centre in everything the team does to provide an inclusive and safe service for the people they work with, we were taken through all the elements of design and delivery of Bloom, their core product to support people living with and moving though trauma.
Organisations might say their values are important, but the proof will come in the behaviour and actions they take to live them. Chayn demonstrated their commitment to living their values throughout the examples we were taken through.
Contact @jennywinfield on twitter to find out more.
Third up was Cash Perks: From housing association idea to tech product
Gareth (a Space 4 regular) came to speak to us about his organisation and tech product Cash Perks. A seemingly simple product to allow people to receive money via text message. The main aim being to enable people without bank accounts to be able to receive grant funding and benefits such as the fuel poverty payments by collecting via an ATM.
Cash perks is a very scalable product, and can be used for a variety of different purposes. But Gareth wants to use it specifically for social good. His background is in ethical finance. Get in touch with him on gareth@cashperks.co.uk.
Lunchtime!
There wouldn’t be a lunch in SPACE4 for a Tech for Good event without using our Co-operative friends Wings as our delivery service. An ethical and equitable alternative to Deliveroo (other exploitative delivery services are also available), Wings is a worker owned co-operative, paying their staff and deliverers a London living wage and charging restaurants a fair service charge for being on their book. If you are in the Finsbury Park area of North London, make sure Wings become your regular delivery service.
Food delivered was absolutely delicious and completely vegan pizza, sushi and salads and not a scrap remained of the 40 pizzas delivered.
After lunch James Muldoon talks with us about Platform Capitalism
He presented a super interesting case study on the ethics of the labour supply chains required for artificial intelligence
A lot of menial data work is outsourced to developing economies. It’s marketed as ‘socially impactful’ employment eg. taking people out of poverty but the reality is very different and it can often be exploitative work.
James shared the real labour costs and potential darker side of artificial intelligence and automation and related this back to why platform socialism where workers have a stake in the organisation is so very important.
Then came two speakers from Outlandish
Rich took the crowd through on how we devise, plan and grow social impact projects. He mentioned Theory of Change and how the process is so important as it helps us to identify the differences to then unite us on a shared goal.
We also use “co-design” which refers to a participatory approach to designing solutions, in which community members are treated as equal collaborators in the design process.
Abi (with the support of her and Maddy’s kids) took us through the communication and work approaches Outlandish uses within projects with clients and internally which she believes and see evidence of creates a more collaborative and trusting working culture when used by all. There were some easy wins and quick take-aways, such as doing check ins in meetings and trying out Outlandish’s quality framework for projects (and adapting it for your own purposes), but also honesty about the difficulty of the deeper work to build real and genuine trust between people and work with difference and conflict so that the teams you work in can grow stronger.
Finally, there was a Cotech Panel, explaining what it even is!
Cotech is a network of 40+ tech co-ops in the UK. We formed back in 2016 or 2017 as peer support, because, there must be other people in the country trying to do this, right? Since then there have been multiple national meet-ups and many new connections and long term collaborations that have come from it.
If you are a worker owned co-operative in the tech space, come and get involved and meet similar (and incredibly different!) organisations to you.
There wouldn’t be an Outlandish sponsored event without some drinks afterwards, and of course a little trip to our local W.B Yeats. Getting out into the fresh air to carry on talking about all the fabulous, thought-provoking and important areas of discussion we have summarised above.
This was our first full day event since Covid and it felt great to get back into the swing of things, see lots of our favourite faces and just as many new to welcome into SPACE4 and Outlandish’s network.
A HUGE thank you to Natasha for leading on the organising and doing so much to make it happen and Maddy and the rest of the team for pulling out all the stops and working collaboratively to make sure all that came got something from it.
Watch this space for next year’s event!
