Because IBM relies on diverse communities to help innovate technology

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By Ruth Davis, director of Call for Code

We all like to romance how technology can make the world a better place. This is why many of us choose to work in the technology sector. We are drawn to the opportunities that take advantage of powerful technology and make a difference in the lives of those around us. Technology can help extend our healthy lives, fight climate change, improve education, and bring us closer.

But we have also seen what can happen when solutions designed to solve complex problems prove insufficient. Innovations that make a quantum leap can create unforeseen consequences or have flaws that prevent them from having the intended impact. Why is this? Most of the time, these struggles are due to a lack of open innovation.

Truly transformative technologies require a diverse group of creators, a solid and cooperative ecosystem, and a powerful platform to make them effective. When one of these components is not evaluated, we see disappointing and sometimes disastrous results.

At IBM, we’ve learned a lot about this through our work on Call for Code. We rely on the diversity of our global open source community to help build real-world solutions to serious problems. By developing applications with the guidance of experts and community leaders, we hope to have a greater and more lasting impact. Call for Code is the largest good technology initiative of its kind, with over 500,000 developers and problem solvers from 180 countries creating open source solutions to do the very real and complex work of making the world a better place.

Last year we called on IBM’s powerful network of in-house innovators to take action and apply their expertise to combat the challenge of racial injustice in three focus areas: police and justice reform and accountability; diversified representation; and reform of policy and legislation. Just a few months later, seven projects were shared online for anyone to contribute their code and improve them. These projects are driven by the enthusiastic support of the open source community and our ecosystem of partners, including the Linux Foundation, during our Call for Code work. The goal is to create practical tools to address one of the most difficult challenges of our time: racial injustice.

Among the projects is Five Fifths Voter, a web app created to help underrepresented communities exercise their voting rights by determining optimal voting strategies. Five Fifths Voter is an application that provides access to personalized voting information such as polling location, state voter requirements, voting methods, voter submission deadlines, and accessibility needs. The tool is designed to help promote the defense and access of voters at the local, state and national levels by creating a leaner process for voters in communities without traditional access and education on voter rights and the voting process.

During National Voter Education Week, Metropolitan Los Angeles’ YMCA plans to adopt Five Fifths Voter. In addition to sharing information on upcoming elections, the app is tailored to the diverse needs of the community, such as translating content into 11 languages ​​and including additional resources for young voters.

This is just the beginning. Legit-Info, another open source project, helps people understand how proposed policies affect them and their communities and what they can do in response. Legit-Info uses IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding to sort legislation and share content based on user locations and issues of interest in an easy-to-read way that can help them decide what to do.

Both Five Fifths Voter and Legit-Info demonstrate what is possible with open innovation. When diversity, collaboration and agility are all appreciated during development, the technology we create becomes more accessible, effective and useful. The contribution of the open source community has brought to light problems and needs related to the vote that in the past had not been given priority. By including input from diverse communities, we can create better applications that capture the potential of the technology. Open source levels the playing field, so everyone has the opportunity to shape technology and effect change.

You can find out more about our projects here. You can also view the full GitHub repositories, download the code, and help improve these projects here. The projects were built using technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, Blockchain ledger, Node.js, Vu.js, Docker, Kubernetes upstream and Tekton. The Linux Foundation and IBM are asking developers and ecosystem partners to contribute by testing, extending, implementing and adding their diverse perspectives and skills to make them even stronger to drive positive change in our communities.

Learn more about how IBM’s open source community is creating change.

This post was created by IBM with Insider Studios.

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