BrownBagTV

A Technology Action Plan for Social Justice –

With the recent events, Dakar finds itself in a unique time in our history where previously deaf
people have found hearing aids; previously color blind people have found glasses; and
previously foul mouthed people have found censorship. We need to capitalize on this trifecta
with laser focus and poignant zeal by supporting the organizations on the front lines of this
change.

Our impact comes from listening to the needs of the people within our community and
being reactive and responsive to those needs through our knowledge of technology. We do this
by arming them with technology. Our fight needs to be taken to the system from the inside out
and technology is our weapon of choice.

Black Lives Matter has put forth four technology projects that they need. From these requests, Dakar
has created initiatives that start with the Digital Pathway Initiative, that umbrellas subset of solution that assist their technology needs.

There is also a project centered on eradicating Qualified Immunity  Dakar would like to
put together and propose to the Institute for Justice. These projects are:

1. Team Fellowship for Data Science (Institute for Social Justice) — This program would
be done in conjunction with leaders in tech-philanthrophy. 

2. Bad Apples — A facial recognition system that helps people and governments monitor
suspicious police interactions with the populace. The system would help citizens
centralize their interactions with police with the ability to upload photos and videos. A
simple one-button mobile app that when pressed immediately starts streaming a camera
and microphone to a specific website. This would be a national public database of police
officers who have had their licenses revoked for misconduct including domestic violence
and excessive use of force.

3. Allyship — A centralized system to help identify politicians that support policies that
can help achieve better policing.

4. Blue Yelp — A rating system assigned to current politicians on how they have
supported these initiatives that affect the mortality of black lives.

5. Blues Clues — A database of ideas — a backlog if you will — of how we can implement
social justice reform through technology.

1. Data Scientist
2. Database Engineer
3. Front End Developer (ReactJS/NodeJS)
4. Project Manager/Scrum Master/Agile Technologist
5. Server Side Engineer (Java/Spring/Spring Boot REST technologies)
6. QA (JMeter/Selenium)
7. DevOps (AWS/Cloud computing/Terraform/Docker)