Beyond Big Tech: Advocacy Technologists within Mission-Driven Civil Society Organizations

A new class of technology professionals is shaping policy, informing legal arguments, and bolstering advocacy efforts from inside nonprofit and civil society organizations. This career path might be claimed by a number of different new sociotechnical domains: public interest technology (PIT), civic technology, data for good, technology for social justice, and others. Yet it is still unclear exactly what professional roles are emerging, what sorts of people are filling them, and what such individuals' work looks like and achieves. This work presents an interview study that seeks to characterize a specific sub-population of technological practitioners who are contributing materially to mission-driven projects from within the civil society or nonprofit sector: advocacy technologists. I present four patterns of praxis (i.e., professional practices and paradigms) common to advocacy technologists: their disposition as critics who interrogate technological paradigms and who introspect on their own ethical footprint, and their professional position translating between technical and non-technical worlds and trailblazing into new career paths. These four patterns demonstrate that advocacy technologists are choosing to occupy a precarious new niche within advocacy work ecosystems that has great potential to impact policy and design outcomes. Indeed, these practitioners enlist computational strategies to advance advocacy goals, situate deep sociotechnical expertise within policymaking contexts, and further civil society as an active site of tech design in its own right. This study contributes to the growing body of literature in human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) that explores computing technologies' role in processes and places of sociopolitical change. Ultimately, this work proposes that mission-driven civil society organizations and their technologists are not only underexplored sites for HCI and CSCW research, but also potentially rich collaborators for sociotechnical researchers who seek to deepen their impact on policy and social change.