It is a known truth, that often the oppressed know more about the oppressor than the oppressors know about themselves. This knowledge is the fundamental tool in decentered communities’ resilience and resistance, and with it, they generate their own power, adopting methods of self-protection in order to navigate the threats and risks they face. We work to work these communities specifically, to push for tech futures that embody justice, and meet the needs of these groups for their resilience and resistance and to push against carceral harms.

The De|Center advances change to tech design and building processes so they do not become continuous tools for oppression but have built-in support for harm mitigation and reduction. Our center has set core activities:

Step one: Community-based research

We create authentic, reciprocal partnerships with our communities, working together rather than in hierarchical structures. This allows us to identify and pursue the work that’s actually needed, and to do it with intentionality.

Through these relationships, we investigate how oppressive policing and surveillance tactics are combined with emerging and everyday technologies to harm decentered communities and other marginalized and at-risk groups. Working with and as part of decentered communities, we do in-depth research on how states and law enforcement use technology, often in combination with more traditional policing methods, to persecute and surveil. We also continue to assess and research existing and potential harms from emerging tech.

We consult with the communities and organizations about what they want to see changed on the platforms they use and how those changes should be made, and their preferred modes of engagement with companies and technologists on these issues.

Step two: Continuous assessment and community accountability

DFM has been implemented for a number of years, but we believe a truly powerful methodology of this kind needs to be deployed intentionally, reflective of context, and regularly updated. For DFM to reflect needs and methods to advance justice, human rights, and equity through concrete changes to technology tools, we continually reflect on and assess our processes in order to remain flexible to changes and barriers that arise.

Further, we look to put our money where our month is through direct mutual aid funds for criminalized and marginalized community members who need them outside our collaborative work.

Step three: Tech interventions and translations

We translate community needs, our research and documentation, as well as necessary legal, historical and socio-economical context, into implementation of DFM-informed concrete changes to features, products, and structures of the relevant tech.

The research and work we do with decentered communities provides the outline and priorities of the most important harm reduction features or changes needed from companies for their safety, security, and privacy. We, along with our aligned advisors, are also experts in ensuring the translation of documented harms and injustices, as well as community wants, into implementable tech changes that are privacy, equity, and security informed. We know without such interventions, new features can cause more harm than good without the right implementation guardrails. With this layout, we reverse engineer harmful methods to create implementation frameworks for:

• Changes to existing features,

• New innovative harm reduction features,

• Security and policy practice changes, and

• Outline of broader needs from companies.
  

The De|Center team remains engaged as the changes are implemented, calling on community expertise as necessary, to ensure their implementation vision is thoroughly achieved.

Step four: Collaborative workshops

We draw on a rich network of technologists, platform companies, and digital rights advocates to shape collaborative workshops and convenings. These community-focused, community-led, equitable forums are intentionally structured to avoid extractivism, centering respect for diverse expertise and lived experience. Participants collaborate hands-on at every stage, from framing problems to scoping solutions.

Step five: Mainstreaming DFM

We strive for a world where DFM becomes a dominant methodology in design processes and tech building teams, so that from inception and ideation, decentered communities are created with and for in an equitable, justice-focused frame with an eye towards harm reduction. We adapt and update the methodology as a living framework, and provide consultations, talks, write op-eds, engage with students and academics and in engineering and products design pedagogy to push for DFM to be adopted from the beginning to the end of design processes.

In our mainstreaming, we look to prove empirically that this is possible even in the corporate and capitalistic models in which our tech is built, that DFM methods improve technology in general including for the most impacted. We want to ensure that this methodology is accessible and widely adopted – even when we can’t directly facilitate it.