Technology for Environmental Impact
Lesson 2: Additional Resources
The Tech for Good Community offers a curated listserv, a long list of other organizations working in the space, and many related resources for those building tech for social and environmental good.
Data Collection and management:
- The Engine Room’s Rainforest Technology offers a comprehensive guide to using technology to monitor and share information on rainforests and their local communities. For more general resources on using technology and data for social impact, explore The Engine Room site.
- Bringing field surveys into the modern, mobile world
- Open Data Kit
- CitizenScience.gov’s Manage Your Data offers a guide for citizen science projects.
- Using evidence to influence policy: Oxfam’s experience offers examples (not conservation-specific) of how data can influence policy, and how to present persuasive data to change policy.
- Making Messy Data Work for Conservation
Community Involvement:
- Examples of projects that thoughtfully engaged local communities as partners:
- IUCN: Failed conservation projects or improved outcomes?
- IUCN – Many hands to govern the land framework (not tech specific, but includes a set of principles to strengthen inclusive decision-making and involve communities )
Ethics, data, risks:
- The Ethical Toolkit from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics is an excellent, rigorous resource with guidance on how to implement and monitor a responsible technology; Responsible Data 101 also offers a simple set of principles for using data responsibly.
- Algorithmic Justice League
- Data for Black Lives
- MIT Data + Feminism Lab
- AAAS: Machine learning ‘causing science crisis’
- Responsible AI for conservation
- Towards Ethical Deployment of AI for Conservation Systems
- AI’s next ethical challenge: how to treat animals
- Conservation and people: Towards an ethical code of conduct for the use of camera traps in wildlife research
- Ethics of drones in conservation:
Working with Indigenous Communities, and TEK inspiration in tech design:
- The Contribution Of Traditional Knowledge And Technology To Climate Solutions (chapter 3)
- Global Indigenous Data Alliance
- First-ever compendium of indigenous technologies provides a powerful toolkit for climate-resilient design
Lesson 2: Extra Resources for Educators
- Airumaküchi: Hunting for sustainability can serve as a more in-depth alternative to the Pangolin DNA video. It delves into community involvement with technology, and demonstrates a combination of high- and low-tech solutions to address the given challenge (sustainable hunting) from a number of different angles.
- For students whose projects will be working with indigenous groups, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance’s CARE Principles of Indigenous Data Governance would make a great substitute for the Data Ethics Canvas.
- Let’s stop dumping cookstoves in local communities. It’s time to get implementation right is a case study that can serve as a bridge between the questions around context and local community in this lesson, and the question of scale in the next lesson. Improved cookstoves are a great example of a technology that is technically sound, but has failed to scale in many contexts. Many of the programs trying to introduce them have made mistakes related to local preferences, technology understanding, and community engagement.