Our Legacy and Work
The projects of the DDJC change and evolve continually from year to year, as we put the DDJC principles into practice and learn from our work.
Discotechs
“DiscoTech” is short for “Discovering Technology.” It is is a term coined by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition which defines a replicable model for a multimedia, mobile neighborhood workshop fair. DiscoTechs are designed so that participants learn more about the impact and possibilities of technology within our communities.
DiscoTechs feature interactive, multimedia workshops designed to demystify, engage, and inform the community about issues of Internet use and ownership, and our communications rights on and offline.
Digital stewardship
AMP partnered with the Open Technology Institute, a global leader in using wireless technology for human rights, to launch the Detroit Digital Stewards Program.
AMP and OTI produced a pilot version of the program in the Fall of 2012, then designed a 20-week version which was integrated into the Detroit Future Media training program.
This training prepares teams of community organizers, people with construction skills, and techies to design and deploy communications infrastructure with a commitment to the Detroit Digital Justice Principles. The Digital Stewards learn about mesh wireless technology, which allows neighbors to form their own local network and share an Internet connection. As a result of the inaugural Digital Stewards program, three Detroit neighborhoods are now equipped to build and maintain their own wireless communications infrastructure or “mesh networks.”
School trainings
Through the MorningSide community partnership with Ronald Brown Academy, the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (DDJC) launched a community technology project, a Website Development training series for a cohort of sixth graders. The objectives of the three session series were to expose students to the concepts of coding and introduce them to the key coding languages of HTML, CSS, and Java Script so they could create websites. They were also introduced to Leaflet, a mapping tool, to create visual displays of their memorable times. DDJC representatives shared the students’ websites, maps and distributed Certificates of Achievement at their end of year celebration on June 9.
Through this collaboration we demystified technology, engaged, and informed Ronald Brown Academy students about the impact of data and their possibilities for creating anything!
Data justice
Since the City of Detroit launched the Open Data Portal and GO DATA policy initiative in 2015, the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (DDJC) and Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP) have been exploring how to advance equitable practices for collecting, disseminating and using open data. By equitable practices, we mean accountable, ethical uses of public information for social good that actively resists the criminalization and surveillance of low income communities, people of color and other targeted communities.
In order to understand what equitable open data practices could look like in the City of Detroit, we asked a broad spectrum of Detroit residents to consider the potential benefits and harms of various data sets currently available on the City’s Open Data Portal, a website that offers access to data and information concerning City government operations and service delivery. From there, we assessed what actions can be taken by the City to maximize benefits and minimize harms, and investigated open data policies and tools in place in other cities that model our vision for data justice.