Recommendations to Tackle Challenges

BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs are passionate about making a positive impact in their communities and understand the vital role that technology plays in society. As technology accelerates and impacts marginalized communities, it is imperative that the voices of BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs be elevated. For this to be effective, individuals’ tacit knowledge has to be made explicit for it to be shared. Having a shared-knowledge space where practitioners contribute to learning through their lived experiences has the potential to benefit all participants. Given that PIT is still in a development phase, the opportunity exists to proactively shape the nascent field while emphasizing diversity and inclusion. A foundational step in this direction will be creating an open knowledge network of BIPOC PIT practitioners.

In addition, the existing funding structures need to be re-imagined. As they exist now, the lack of access to funding and capital to BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs potentially prevents the possibility of innovation and alleviating some of society’s toughest social problems. While the Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country have forced a reckoning with profound racial injustices and have caused the venture capital industry to look at its track record on race in a new light, system change is not expected to happen instantly.¹ Therefore, it is time to consider the role of alternate institutions supporting the impressive work of BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs. For this reason, we propose that the field of PIT should consider the role of Colleges and Universities as an avenue for funding and support. These partnerships could be similar to the experiential learning course offered in our research, offering capacity support and stipends to BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs. From our work on this project, our research team was able to provide one of the participating entrepreneurs access to various policy departments to support ongoing research and application development. This interaction demonstrated a knowledge transfer and potential shared knowledge space for further collaboration.

These knowledge transfers among the BIPOC PIT Entrepreneurs in our study offer potential to strengthen policy creation and develop effective social innovation. The PIT field is increasingly interdisciplinary and there is no one pathway into the field. Our study examined only the pathways of BIPOC tech social entrepreneurs, however it is imperative that BIPOC practitioners from all disciplines are provided the opportunity to build community, share knowledge, and work together to solve society’s most pressing issues.

Our findings begs the need for a system to develop and manage knowledge throughout the PIT network that can help address the potential funding challenges, skill development, and pave pathways and support for BIPOC PIT practitioners and students into the field. Our team has been funded by New America to begin building a PIT Knowledge Network (PIT-KN). Knowledge networks are not new and are rather ubiquitous in the private sector. Most knowledge management projects have one of three aims: 1) to make knowledge visible and show the role of knowledge in an organization, mainly through maps, yellow pages, and hypertext tools; 2) to develop a knowledge intensive culture by encouraging and aggregating behaviors such as knowledge sharing (as opposed to hoarding) and proactively seeking and offering knowledge; 3) to build a knowledge infrastructure—not only a technical system, but a web of connections among people given space, time, tools, and encouragement to interact and collaborate. ²

The PIT-KN seeks to integrate many individuals and groups onto the platform to create and share knowledge. The intended outcome of this knowledge network would connect BIPOC PIT Entrepreneurs and practitioners to university resources and allow their work to be seen by potential funders, thus increasing their chances of funding. Current discovery efforts have been focused on understanding the dynamics that can establish a culture of knowledge creation, sharing, and innovation with multidisciplinary individuals and groups working within the field of PIT. Using our own project team as a model—that has diverse talents and perspectives to share.

Unlike conventional knowledge networks, intentionality must be taken into consideration of the PIT-KN to ensure that the experiences and learnings particularly from underrepresented BIPOC practitioners are not crowded out by existing practitioners who may benefit from unequal access to support and resources within the field. The PIT-KN implements “diversity by design” by intentionally embedding in a diversity, equity, and inclusion practice led by underrepresented PIT practitioners. An MIT Sloan Review report, Designing Effective Knowledge Networks, states that, “Knowledge network members come together around a common goal and share social and operational norms.”³ Our approach is to develop a system that will help elevate the localized, subjective, and lived experiences of these practitioners. By doing so we expect to have robust contextual information and a shared understanding of how marginalized communities experience technology, how technology often accelerates inequities (often unintentionally) when layered on top of systemic racism, and what can we do to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive field of PIT at scale. The PIT-KN will elevate knowledge of BIPOC practitioners through blogs, white papers, reports, as well as story-centric mediums such as speculative fiction, art, and essays. The PIT-KN will look to incorporate learning from a wide range of submissions and will encourage diverse practitioners and students to bring their wares to be highlighted and build the foundation for further community exploration and knowledge transfer. The PIT-KN efforts represent an opportunity to scale DEI values using technology. For this reason, the team has engaged in a co-design process that centers segments of BIPOC practitioners in the field to help better mitigate implicit biases, establish comprehensive problem definitions, and implement a tech-based solution that benefits all communities.

Safeguards in our design efforts must also be extended to development and implementation of the PIT-KN. The project team is well aware of the historical and contemporary narratives associated with the strong resistance, violence, and subjugation of physical and digital spaces of BIPOC thought, scholarship, and entrepreneurship. For example the firing of Timnet Gebru from Google and the resistance of Joy Buolamwini by Amazon for developing knowledge that pointed out algorithms with harmful implicit biases can not be overlooked. Historically, events such as the Tulsa Race Massacre in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Okla. (and many other places that represented economic sustainability and an opportunity to build wealth) where residents were met with racial violence, death, and destruction—and where justice has yet to be delivered a century later suggests that systemic racism is still very deep seated. More recently, digital spaces such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have become hostile places as the accounts of online harassment of BIPOC users, specifically Black women, have been reported and largely ignored. A governance structure and rules of participation need to be adopted in order to actively address these concerns that undermine our DEI efforts. This can be accomplished by assigning practitioners to roles (moderators, facilitators, project managers, etc.) that safeguard and protect those in the process of knowledge creation and the sanctity of knowledge development. Introducing new assessment tools and onboarding requirements that seek to vet potential knowledge network users and ascertain whether or not their values are aligned will be helpful in community building.

Lastly, exploring new approaches of valuing the voices of BIPOC practitioners is a considered necessary function of inclusion within the PIT-KN—to include underrepresented voices without demonstrating that the field values their lived experiences, skills, and knowledge would lead to frustration and low participation. It’s important to leverage the platform to crowdsource knowledge and insights on how to best achieve this at scale and build this insight into the development feedback loop. The PIT-KN will provide a space for skill development through guided modules as well as knowledge sharing from one another.

The importance of knowledge development and innovation on the actual practice of inclusion with BIPOC practitioners can not be overstated. Many college and university leaders within the PIT-UN have announced new initiatives to diversity, equity, and inclusion—a renewed motivation sparked by current social justice and protest efforts—an opportunity exists to develop critical knowledge that has the potential to create innovative models of inclusion. As a first step, to address funding needs of PIT entrepreneurs and secure their maximum participation we recommend providing catalytic funding support to kick off knowledge creation and provide new discovery opportunities within the PIT-KN. Doing so could help bridge the early stage funding gap or the “valley of death” as it’s often referred, where many new ideas and efforts stall. The PIT-KN would offer PIT entrepreneurs and other practitioners who have been underrepresented the ability to access new resource opportunities, including funding, in-kind support, and recognition within the field of PIT as knowledge creators. Along with these catalytic supports, access to university resources such as students, pilot partnerships, and to journals via the university library will alleviate potential funding challenges. This research and knowledge development effort represents an invitation to join as a collaborator and contributor to this nascent initiative.