What's in a name?
The story behind TIOF's name and of Data-centric Digital Rights advocacy.
The contextual conundrum
When explaining our advocacy, I am typically faced with a broad lack of understanding on what it is that we are trying to do. Short of being able to produce a 5 sentences elevator pitch, I usually brave myself into a roughly 2 hours long explanation about the problems The IO Foundation has identified and how we are trying to tackle them. This ranges from the journalist of the day, the HR/DR advocate you meet in one of those events you need to be at or that random friend you make in a casual embassy cocktail.
The reason for this curse is tragically simple: Context. Or lack of thereof.
In my other life, during a hiatus in Melaka (Malaysia), way before I got TIOF running through my veins, I met a traveler who left me with a seed of food for thought that keeps sowing fields and fields of ideas: everything is about context.
I found that simple statement to be magnetic and worked up my brains for days. Ever since, it's been a centerpiece on my perception of the jigsaw of life.
As months passed and my long-lasting concern with how technology was affecting people’s lives increased, I grew restless. A decision-time moment spontaneously manifested when I realized that I quite literally couldn’t sleep. The only reasonable alternative was to attempt changing a problem that instinctively was there even though I wasn’t necessarily able (or equipped) to verbalize it or shape it with relatable metaphors.
What I didn’t realize at the time was those problems were only the first yellow bricks on the not so golden road towards impact.
Being a young organization, one of the first endeavours is to get out there and start making connections. You need to mobilize your networking abilities, meet new people on a daily basis, identify allies and, most importantly, raise awareness about your advocacy and the problem you are trying to solve. Ideally, you’d do all those with an open mind to counter arguments as well as to complementary ideas. Assuming that the person in front of you may know something you don’t is a really good move.
My first interactions were met with raised eyebrows, surprise, disbelief, dismissing comments, a few instances of honest curiosity and a general lack of interest. I was frustrated and at times discouraged by it. Good news was that resolve didn’t vanish, so I knew there was life after coma.
Now, it could be argued that I was the one unprepared and certainly there was a component of it since I was still trying to piece some concepts together in my head. What I came to realize however was that another component was playing a bigger role: pre-acquired context. If context is necessary to understand things, there is certainly none to draw from at this moment in time.
The mention of so many other advocacies goes frictionless to the general public because people have already gone through the process of learning their underlying context. Do we really understand Human Trafficking? Or animal protection? Not really: we know very little about their intricacies, the legal system behind them, the people who are committed to create harm about them and most of the time even less about those even more committed to stop the culprits and generate a positive impact.
We do know the basics of it, though: Someone is getting harmed and we don't like that. Not. one. bit.
How is this possible? It is possible because we have been relentlessly being informed about them through media, movies, music, books and countless efforts by nonprofit organizations which equally struggled with that same problem some time in their past. This contextual awareness takes years and it only materializes when agents of change meet the right enablers. This interaction will open the floodgates of information we so desperately need to relate to pressing problems we are not naturally occurring in our daily lives.
The inevitable consequence of years of awareness raising is that we somehow grasp the mechanisms behind those harms so we can apply our personal value system and form an opinion on the advocacies. If the opinion is emotionally charged in the right proportion, we are likely to join the ranks of those convinced that better is possible.
Now, when we introduce TIOF as a nonprofit advocating on Data-centric Digital Rights what do people really know about THEIR data? How about the Data Protection Laws that (allegedly) govern those? And about the technology and infrastructures that data flows through? Care to comment on the gains that others may have on accessing your data?
Welcome to the decontextualized universe of your data, the Representational Entities they construct and the Digital Harms they can be exposed to.
That’s by and large the biggest problem we face as an organization. It’s hard to mobilize stakeholders when they can’t emotionally relate to the problems you are laying out in front of their eyes. Same goes for citizens, who are the ultimate beneficiaries of your efforts. I call this the context scarcity effect.
Certainly, this is not to say that there isn’t a portion of society, technologists and certainly even policy makers that aren’t aware of the challenges brought by the digitization of societies worldwide or that instinctively feel something is off. In the numbers game universe however all these are far from reaching critical mass.
A sad reality of human condition is that we need a tipping point to attract the right attention. That may not play well when it comes to the data + digital combo.
There is a dire need to address this lack of awareness and that can only materialize by reaching out to all necessary stakeholders as all of them will be a factor in the solution to the equation.
Data-Centric Digital Rights
When we started The IO Foundation, we knew what we wanted to help with. Putting a name to it proved to be an exciting journey and when we finally found it I don’t think we realized in that very moment how spot-on we had been.
I won’t go into lengths about the whole advocacy in this article as I already covered it in a prior article: Let's talk Data-Centric Digital Rights
General concepts are nevertheless in order and I’ll concentrate on that.
What is the problem(s) that we identified?
We do not have a general understanding (nevermind consensus) on what is data.
While we have a rather good understanding of harms that can be inflicted upon humans, we haven’t come up with an equivalent approach with data.
Failing to accomplish the above, we are unable to set proactive ways to avoid those harms. That’s what we generally understand as Rights.
In TIOF, we call the Rights applied to data Data-Centric Digital Rights.
The people who should be the most aware of all these are technologists at large. TIOF focuses on programmers as they are the final (and front) technology layer that is exposed to users.
As a result, current technical standards and data protection regulations fail to effectively protect users as they are not designed around the implementation of Data-Centric Digital Rights.
This translates in placing the burden of observance of data protection laws over the shoulders of the final users, which is a remarkably preposterous proposition.
There is a broader conversation to be had about data that is also beyond the scope of this article and that will be the subject of a future one. Suffice for now to say that data does not only live in digital domains and that you could consider digital data as the projection of the concept of data onto digital technologies.
What is it that The IO Foundation advocates for then?
That we need to quickly identify a comprehensive, universally applicable list of Digital Harms.
That we need to build the necessary proactive measures to minimize the eventuality of causing harms to data. Yes, you got it: that’s Data-Centric Digital Rights.
That we need to actively engage programmers in the conversation as we identify them as the next generation of Human and Digital Rights defenders.
That all of the above must be the foundation to enact a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights, a combination of policy and open technical standards to architect and implement technology under the principle of Rights by Design.
This is indeed a very condensed list and each of those concepts (as well as those omitted) require separate articles, which we will be publishing in the upcoming weeks.
Coming up with a name
Flashback to the days of the materialization of the organization, we were soon enough faced with choosing a name for it and finding a rationale to inform that decision. We wanted to incite change in how technology is affecting people by inspiring a different way to architect and build it. That involved developing ways to talk both to technologists and policy makers and even more importantly to get them to talk to each other at levels we felt were still not achieved. And all that while finding our place among the existing nonprofit ecosystem and predicting frictions between traditional Digital Rights activists and our potentially disrupting approach. To achieve that, we needed to ensure that our name made us relatable to all parties. After some long thinking, we came up with approaching the problem from a reconciliatory angle: how about we made up a name that uses terms that could be easily identifiable, separately, by each of those stakeholders?
From that point on, things developed fast and after a few options “The IO Foundation” won the race.
IO stands for Input Output, typically scripted as I/O. It’s a common technical term to describe data transit in and out circuitry.
Foundation stands for… well, foundation and is a broadly recognizable term in civil society that policy makers are just as used to.
Now, we knew that there was an already existing organization called “IO Foundation” (which seems to have ceased to exist nowadays) so we needed to add something else to it. More meaning-charged terms could turn the name unnecessarily complex so the simple “The” article came to the rescue.
We checked domain availability and to our delight, several TLDs (Top Level Domains) such as .org, .net or .com where available. Zero-comma seconds later we acquired them. To this date, we are still as happy about our initial choice and hope that the name does the job.
This approach has ever since become an actual organization rule that permeates into every single naming exercise affecting our projects or events. For instance:
UDDR, short for Universal Declaration of Digital Rights.
BHR in Tech (BiT), which embodies the application of the UN Guiding Principles in Business and Human Rights in the technology sector.
::Assembly, our convening event for the UDDR ecosystem that we define as
assembly noun
as·sem·bly | \ ə-ˈsem-blē \
1: a company of persons gathered for deliberation and legislation. 2: a low-level programming language for microprocessors and other programmable devices. 3: a yearly, global conference where agencies and relevant stakeholders convene to maintain and update the UDDR and their local NFDR implementations.
TechUp, our capacity building project, is a bit of an oddity. The name came up after a conversation with a Malaysian Senator who shared some personal experience during his political education. “But that is another story and shall be told another time.”
The Unicorn
During RightsCon 2019 (Tunis), a random greeting with a fellow colleague from another organization triggered a reflection that is intimately connected to the contextual conundrum. In that exchange, this person labeled us as a unicorn organization.
Now, while the first emotions that crossed my mind were largely positive (because that was the exact intention behind those supportive words), the term immediately triggered some unspecified alarm. After some thought, I realized that in the tech startup ecosystem, being a unicorn is pretty much the definition of nailing both a great idea and its implementation, to the point that your valuation raises above the hypnotic figure of 1 Billion USD. The extremely competitive scene makes these companies as rare as the mythological animal and so the term is carried around like a badge of honor.
It isn’t so much for a civil society organization. It essentially means that you are somehow unique and that unequivocally comes attached to the context scarcity effect: there aren’t enough of you out there to have the capacity to generate global awareness on the problem you are trying to solve on the necessary scale. That’s not conducive by any stretch of the imagination. Not to mention how outnumbered you are against the actors you are inevitably challenging and how little attention you may generate with funders. For those curious, I’ll share the shocking revelation that claiming funding hasn’t yet put its eyes in Data-Centric Digital Rights is a gross understatement.
I enjoy thinking that we identified an advocacy so singular that we may have the chance to shape that specific conversation -which is by the way a responsibility, mind you. I equally dread the uphill struggle we’ll be facing until other organizations are born to grow the Data-Centric Digital Rights ecosystem.
The challenge is worth it, I can assure you, and we are not afraid of it.
Not. 1. bit.
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