The marriage of technology and human rights is facilitated by a shared delusion – namely, that each partner needs the other. Technologists, especially those from successful private sector backgrounds, look at the human rights world and see a paradigm ripe for disruption.

Facebook, for example, has provided internet connections in refugee camps, Google helped create an information hub for refugees traveling to Europe, and LinkedIn is trying to connect refugees in Sweden with jobs.

Technology, it seems, will provide solutions to problems of connectivity, information, and integration. When it comes to addressing human rights abuses, it will finally allow us to shine a light in the darkest places, using everything from big data to mobile phones to satellites to protect vulnerable populations.

Human rights organizations, for their part, are acutely aware of their limitations – especially the difficulty of determining what is actually happening in conflict zones or under repressive regimes. New technology, they think, might provide the answer.

 "Move fast and break things" is fine if you’re developing a gaming platform. It’s not fine if you’re working with a Yazidi population in Iraq facing genocide.

From a distance, this seems like the perfect match, with the happy couple traipsing from conference to hackathon and back again. This relationship, however, faces two key challenges.

On one hand, technologists understand their tools, but they don’t understand the context in which human rights organizations operate. Human rights is not a marketplace. For those in Silicon Valley, risk leads to reward. Failure is simply part of the price you pay. Losses are measured in money and, sometimes, prestige. Human rights organizations are playing with higher stakes. They aren’t serving customers; they’re working with and for populations at risk of a litany of horrors, from forced displacement to mass killing. Disruption and innovation are arrogant paradigms when the costs of failure are so high. "Move fast and break things" is fine if you’re developing a gaming platform. It’s not fine if you’re working with a Yazidi population in Iraq facing genocide.

On the other hand, human rights organizations might understand the context, but not the technological tools they are being offered. One problem is, as Arthur C. Clarke wrote, that any sufficiently advanced form of technology is indistinguishable from magic. In real life, "sufficiently advanced forms of technology" basically means anything more complex than email and Microsoft Office. Some human rights organizations in the field – faced with limited budgets and immediate threats to human lives – struggle to adapt to even basic forms of technology, much less anything particularly advanced.

Some human rights organizations in the field – faced with limited budgets and immediate threats to human lives – struggle to adapt to even basic forms of technology, much less anything particularly advanced.

Having worked on these issues for a number of years and attended countless meetings with both technologists and human rights organizations, we have seen many of the same challenges and frustrations arise in multiple contexts. We believe a simple framework can help both sides better understand how specific technological tools might help human rights organizations.

Technologists and human rights organizations should ask themselves four key questions before adopting new technology:

1. What is the specific problem you are trying to solve?
2. Assuming you can define a concrete problem, is it theoretically possible for a technological tool to solve this problem? Suppose for a moment that the tool works perfectly. Does the anticipated use of the tool yield your desired result?
3. Assuming it is possible for the tool to solve the problem, is it feasible for you to buy, build, maintain or secure this tool? Has the human rights organization accounted for these operating costs, in terms of context, cost, time, and capacity, in its budget?
4. Assuming that adopting the tool is feasible, do the benefits this tool provides outweigh the cost of disrupting your existing workflow?

These questions can’t be answered solely by human rights groups, nor solely by technologists. Instead, the process of answering these questions is what creates a common and shared understanding. Without a common understanding, it’s impossible to come to an honest assessment of whether or not to adopt a new technological tool – it’s impossible to know when to say yes, or, more importantly, when to say no.

Furthermore, to fully answer these questions we must bring critical stakeholders to the table – not least by bringing intended beneficiaries on board from the earliest stages.

It’s important to acknowledge that, most of the time, the underlying problem human rights organizations are trying to solve isn’t technical. It’s often a bureaucratic, institutional, process, or workflow problem, and technology won’t solve it (and might exacerbate it).

Technologists and their human rights counterparts should forego the allure of hackathons and code sprints, and plan instead for a longer-term partnership.

Human rights work attempts to prevent the abusive deployment of power against those who have little of it. While technology might disrupt some power structures, it might also reinforce them, and it is rarely designed to empower the most vulnerable populations. Human rights defenders are innovative, and they have used software to do work it wasn’t designed to do, such as live-streaming police violence against civilian populations to press for government accountability. But perpetrators of mass violence are innovative, too. Software alone is unlikely to provide clear human rights victories.

As with a marriage, the answer lies in the more fundamental work of communication. Software will offer no magic solutions. Technologists and their human rights counterparts should forego the allure of hackathons and code sprints, and plan instead for a longer-term partnership, with all the incentives that requires.
____________________

Mark Latonero is a fellow at Data & Society and at the USC Annenberg School; Michael Kleinman is the founder of Orange Door Research; and Keith Hiatt is vice president of the human rights program at Benetech and a research fellow at the Human Rights Center of UC Berkeley School of Law.

This article originally appeared in the Guardian.

The views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.