Finding Your Public Interest Area
How Technologists Can Find a Fitting Cause to Pursue
Most of us have had at least one skill that we tried to develop as a hobby. Maybe it was a new instrument. Maybe a new spoken or coding language. That tends to end up like when you learn a language without being around other speakers. You eventually hit a plateau and find it hard to stay interested or have a lasting impact.
A popular way to solve this is by turning this skill into something profitable. But this isn't the only way. For many, solely making money off the technology isn't fulfilling on its own. The call to action for public interest technologists is to find public interest issues that are fulfilling and will make great use of their expertise.
If you aren't sure how to start using your skills and expertise for social impact, here are a few tips:
The easiest to get that public interest spark going is by reading up on current events that catch your interest. The term public interest isn't a specific list of topics. If we look at how the term is applied to public interest law (according to Harvard Law School), the list can range from civil rights to poverty, disabilities to education, or physical safety to local agriculture. We have also put together a list of public interest areas that include:
Prosocial Design and Development
Citizen Behaviour Change
Immigration & Asylum
Disaster Relief
Public-interest Journalism
Public Data
Employment & Worker Rights
Access to Internet
Public Health
With this definition in mind, you might look at a few stories and think about what structurally leads to the issues that the public interest area is facing. Is it a lack of information security? Is it a distribution problem? Are communities being silenced? When you think of these questions in
If this is not a community or field that you are very comfortable with, keep that in mind when starting to think of the uses for the technology. This consideration leads nicely into our second tip.
One of the biggest mistakes of well-meaning technologists is finding a problem in a community or public interest area and then just assuming the technology they are familiar with will provide a solution. If you have a certain level of privilege and confidence, people might already believe that your technical expertise will be a positive impact on the issue at hand. But this confidence can also be damaging and lead to people becoming skeptical of the technology as a whole.
To avoid this problem and begin to understand the fit better, talk to people. People can be your average community member. They can be frontline workers who face this issue daily. They can be funding bodies. You want to be able to build the narrative around what this technology could mean and how it would be culturally accepted. Some of these nuances will never be obvious from simple news articles and reports.
When you've reached a level of understanding of the public interest area and where a certain technology could benefit, start small and get feedback. It might be tempting to want to change the world from the start but the most sustainable way to make sure the solution is operationally, culturally, and ethically viable is by having a prototype you develop with the intended community.
This prototyping process benefits everyone. For the technologist, you get to see if this is a public interest area that you would actually enjoy long term. For instance, some technologists decide to work on well-being projects rather than more specifically medical projects because of the amount of time and bureaucracy involved in the medical industry. If you think of a mental health journaling app with anonymization and a medical patient identification system, both still serve a public interest goal in a similar direction but will fit different types of technologists.
To summarize, public interest areas are nuanced yet valuable and rewarding avenues to develop as a technologist. Finding the public interest area that suits you should not be rushed if you want to have a long-term social impact. The PubinTech project works to support technologists on their journey to becoming true public interest technologists.
