Technology for Environmental Impact
Course Content
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Lesson 1: The Role of Tech: Opportunities and Pitfalls
Technology enhances our ability to understand and instigate change within systems. In this lesson, we explore the different levels of insight and influence that technology can help us have within a natural system. helping us address the environmental crisis, and what could (and can’t) it help us do?
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Lesson 2: Ethical and Impactful Tech
In this lesson, we’ll dig deep into the design of your tech and some key considerations as you think about how it will be deployed. Beyond just considering the physical environment that a technology is deployed in, we need to design for the political, cultural, and social environment that a technology will work within.
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Lesson 3: The Lifetime of a Technology
In this lesson, we’ll look at what needs to be considered over the lifetime of a tech intervention. How will the tech scale and last? How will it be retired? What is the tech’s long-term future?
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Explore More
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Building communities to achieve massive scale
Examine and discuss some examples of organizations that scaled up in creative, thoughtful ways that are now much larger than the original technology. This discussion will invite you to think more creatively about scaling – not just making more pieces of your technology, but empowering others and building new systems for collaboration.
With a partner, pick one of these platforms to explore: iNaturalist, eBird, Zooniverse, Wildlife Insights, or Adventure Scientists.
Discuss:
- What decisions did this organization make in order to build a scalable platform?
- What do you see them doing to amplify the impact of those involved? What risks might this entail?
- What incentives do people have to be involved and help scale it? Do you think the organization’s doing enough to incentivize engagement? What more could they do?