For a short while in 2014 I found myself homeless on the streets of Toronto.
The experience was one of the primary foundations that inspired my passion for this Digital Nation initiative, catalyzing the ideal that technology has the potential to be used in innovative ways to help tackle these types of societal challenges.
This is a particular type of technology often called ‘Social Tech’, and our ambition is to showcase innovations in this field and how they can be married with Inclusive Service Design best practices, to identify, and action, the transformational role technology can play in bettering society, tackling deep issues such as poverty and homelessness.
Social Tech Innovations and Support
For the Social Tech Action Project the key question and objective is how do bring together the right group of stakeholders, identify social impact needs and scale the impact of those projects? For example organizations like the Homeless Network are at the front line, so the fundamental question is what can tech and entrepreneurs do to best help them?
One simple but powerful example of Social Tech in action is Proxy Address. This utilizes Digital Identity technologies from Edinburgh-based Amiqus to address the simple but absolute problem that many homeless people are denied social services because, obviously, they lack a postal address.
The key policy question is how do we scale these types of innovations to a national and deep scale? Adam Lang of NESTA explores this in a series of articles, on How we improve social innovation in Scotland, through Changing the narrative, Rethinking risk and most importantly, Providing more space for experimentation.
Adam makes the critical point that “we need more approaches to testing, designing and scaling practical solutions to shared social problems”, through more innovation labs that try out new ideas and then integrate lessons learned into public policy. This is what a Social Tech innovation group would be ideal for.
Through the use of open source and hackathons much of these are easily translated into actionable tech innovation projects that can be piloted for little effort and cost, so the potential for real impact is distinctly tangible.
Social Ventures
Additionally there is the factor of business models and startups that pioneer new approaches to tackling social challenges. This can be based on using new Social Technologies to do things differently, and also importantly simply using existing technologies in new ways.
The greatest challenge we face in addressing poverty-related social issues is the dark stereotypes harboured about poor people and grotesquely amplified by the tabloid media.
For example one of the key aspects is challenging society perceptions and ultimately government policies, achieved not through a sophisticated new digital business model but rather through effective PR and content engagement. Individuals like Nigel Farage et al utilize technology and media very effectively to sow exclusion and intolerance, and we can repeat the same effect but for inclusion and positive not negative ideals.
There are often dark stereotypes peddled about the homeless, that they are all where they are due to substance abuse and do little to help themselves, indeed it is broadly applied to all aspects of poverty. Those on welfare are demonized as lazy and taking advantage of the system. Immigrants receive the same treatment. It greatly impacts how they are treated.
Helping Invisible People Become Visible
So one of the most important steps we can take is to challenge these nonsensical and harmful stereotypes that influence people’s perception of those affected: That the homeless community is made up of every possible human story across the spectrum of life you might imagine.
The use of media and technology can play a huge role in helping achieve this. For example in Canada a teen photographer set out to capture the photos and life stories of the homeless around cities in North America, such as the man from Winnipeg who lost his three year old daughter and whose wife committed suicide, published into a book Nowhere to Call Home with a goal of encouraging others to see the homeless as people not stereotypes.
An especially powerful initiative is the Invisible People Youtube series. The host has spent years interviewing homeless people across the world building a vast library of the most painful human experiences you can be exposed to, entirely destroying the idea that there is a single stereotypical homeless story.
Showcasing Scottish Social Tech Pioneers
This highlights Invisible Cities, a social enterprise that trains people who have experienced homelessness to become walking tour guides of their own city. Passionate about social impact, storytelling, and community empowerment, Zakia Moulaoui Guery founded and launched Invisible Cities in 2016, to challenge perceptions of homelessness and provide meaningful opportunities for people to share their experiences and knowledge through unique walking tours.
To help grow this sector and the impact it achieves we’ll run an ongoing showcase of these inspiring social entrepreneurs like Zakia. There are many in other fields breaking down barriers and pathfinding new ways of working that purposely include previously excluded social groups, such as Gavin Neate and his venture WelcoMe.
Gavin is pioneering #Tech4Good, an entrepreneurial solution for ensuring businesses are suitably cognizant of the needs of disabled and visually impaired visitors to their stores, hotels and airports, and also for governments to ensure all their facilities are equally welcoming.
In conclusion – A vision for a digital nation can’t simply be a bland goal of more technology being used only for the sake of more technology. Artificial Intelligence, the Blockchain, Cloud computing et al, achieve nothing on their own, it is only when we direct them towards a human purpose, and these social innovators provide the guiding light for this purpose.
