TFGL2021 - S2 - Ep2 - Correctionist History
Welcome to this episode of the Tech For Good Live podcast.
Ben White is on hosting duties this week and he is joined by TFGL team members Greg Ashton and Sam Milsom
Transcript
Ben: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Tech for Good Live podcast. While the UK faces confusing weather combinations of freezing temperatures, snow and glorious sunshine, we are here to provide you with some consistently gloomy forecasts. This week on the pod we will look at why Wikipedia is putting the ‘his’ in history, an exciting new youth focused development by the NSPCC and Facebook comes out swinging like, well, Nick Clegg swinging in a fist fight. And by fist fight, we obviously mean a 5000 words medium essay. That's what we’ve got coming up. Let’s get podcasting. And today we have, checks list, Greg Ashton. So Greg, if you were a weather formation, what would you be?
Greg: Oooh. Probably some kind of cumulus. I can never remember the names but the stormy one. It's always really high.
Ben: Alright, is that because, is there any elaboration there?
Greg: No no. I just like it.
Sam: I feel like I’m reflecting on the Manchester weather at the moment. So I want it to be like it was last week, so 20 degrees, blue skies and sunshine, but really I'm sort of feeling like it’s insane moments of extremely cold snow out of nowhere. That’s me.
Ben: Okay and yes, I’m Ben. I will be your host. And if I were a weather formation, I would of course be a total whiteout obscuring any sense of perspective, order or coherence in an all encompassing veil of feathery confusion.
Greg: That’s so accurate [laughs] I’m glad you wrote it.
Ben: It could have been written for me and I wouldn't have changed a word.
Greg & Sam: [laughs]
Ben: So yeah this week, let's talk about, we're going to be kicking off with a stat. So Greg, can you give us this week’s stat of the week.
Greg: Sure. It seems appropriate that we have probably the most bearded man podcast we’ve had in a while, to talk about sexism on Wikipedia. So Wikipedia volunteers are 90% male, and less than one in five biographies are about women. This has been around for a while, actually this is an issue that I've heard about going back years, and it does reference this article from LX references a situation going back to 2019. So there was a computer scientist called Katie Bowman who went viral, because her team captured the first image of a black hole, so a pretty big deal. So, prompted a Wikipedia volunteer to draft her biography but the same day it was nearly stopped by one of the other volunteers. Now the reason this happens is, so anyone can draft an article for Wikipedia, and then the editors decide by consensus whether to keep it or whether to get rid of it based on this esk of notability. So Pai is an example of where it was saved because some of the volunteers knew who she was but it could have so easily gone the other way and it happens so much and that's why less than one in five biographies are about women, because the majority of volunteers for Wikipedia are men and they just don't know anything about women and it goes back to that thing that you said in the intro Ben. Like, history, histories always been told from the perspective of the male, and it's only in certain extreme cases where you have, you know, queens where you can't get away from the fact that they're in a position of power, that they can't be written out of history.
Ben: Yeah. The black hole might have done it as well. It does seem like a really egregious example. It's hard to kind of understand why you’d justify any nomination for completion there. Sorry Sam, I’ve got a leg so I’m gonna be doing this throughout the podcast. This is gonna be great fun. If you have something to say, please say it.
Sam: I think like this is an issue that's been going on for years particularly like in stem and the science, there's been a movement to try and increase diversity in Wikipedia, I mean, for years. I mean, I think like the Royal Society or one of the many royal societies, I can’t remember where one. Is there a general royal society for science? I don’t know. But they've been, you know, doing Wiki-edit-athogs way back since 2015. I know like, Ada Lovelace Institute was running them quite regularly and, sort of, they run my meetups. Guess like day events or evening events, people get together to try and increase women biographies on Wikipedia. I've actually been involved in a couple of myself and I tell you, it's really, I don’t know if you’ve ever added or edited Wikipedia yourself . It’s really easy to sign up for an account, and to edit something that already exists, but it's really difficult to create something new. Like it's really difficult, particularly if you want to create a page about a person. It’s a much harder process. And I think like Greg said, it has to go through a process where it has to be sort of validated. And you’re already talking 90% of the people that are validating it are probably going to be male anyway. And I think you need secondary, secondary sources. So often, particularly against STEM and science, there aren't going to be as many secondary sources out readily or easily available because that's the whole problem right? Those sources don’t exist. Well, they should.
Ben: It’s kind of particularly moveable because I think many of us will remember Wikipedia being heralded as this kind of great, open source repository of knowledge and you know, there's going to be an amazing set of things that follow Wikipedia and that bit never quite happened. So to go full circle and see Wikipedia falling prey to the kind of inherent biases that kind of plague this type of community, is pretty miserable. Do you know Greg, is this something that we're going to kind of address in a more systematic way than just having people desperately trying to search and insert more content, kind of around, you know, women's biographies and women's versions of history. I mean, that feels like a heroic effort but maybe not a systematic one.
Greg: I mean, the problem with this is we're going back to 2019 and it goes back to 2015 and it goes back right to the start. So, to talk about that, you know like improvements or things getting it clearly isn't doing it at pace. But there are things happening. I mean, there are fights for change. So there's a group called Women in Red, which apparently, named for the red link on the site, that represents missing articles and in less than six years they've turned over 17,000 red links to blue. So that's, you know, they're making a difference there. They're trying to fill in those blanks. But it's like Sam said you know if you if you don't have the supporting material, that secondary reference material, then it’s not going to get approved and the problem with that is, is not just about Wikipedia. That's about, you know, history in general, and I'm sure some people would accuse these campaigners of revisionist history, and being too woke and going on some kind of woke campaign to rewrite history and introduce women into it. But obviously the revision was done previously and this is just a correctionist history. Yeah, it's a, it's a tough one, because as well, I mean, this is assuming that all those men, 90% of men are just, yeah it sounds like you're accusing them of being like complete assholes, but actually, you know, I'm sure I’ve done it in the past, you know, any, any man you’ve got biases built in. You don't know what you don't know. You don't know about these individuals, these women that have done things through history because the information has not been presented to you. So through no fault of their own that, you know, if they’re running through a process of looking for secondary information, and checking whether there's more information about these individuals, it's not really, like they're not doing it maliciously. I’m sure. Yeah, it's a tough one, when you've got that kind of hanging over you.
Ben: That does kind of lead us reasonably nicely to, I'd say, into the kind of next story that we're going to talk about, which is a kind of an attempt to systematically involve a broader range of people in sort of topics that are relevant to them. So this week the NSPCC, I think maybe technically last week but you know, Easter. The NSPCC has launched its new board for new people in an attempt to make it much more central to the charity. So Greg, can you tell us a little bit about how that works.
Greg: Yeah, so NSPCC have always been keen to involve young people in, in every level of what they do, so they've set up this new board for change. I mean the change obviously implies that they're looking at a wider reaching future scope, perhaps transformational and they're working with, I think it's around 16 young people from all walks of life from across the country over a two year period, and they're going to be involved in sharing what's important to them, taking part in various meetings, workshops, and campaigning and sharing views and opinions. So I think there's going to be kind of a marketing aspect to this but then also working with NSPCC on answering some big questions that they have as an organisation and driving that change that comes from the name in the board.
Ben: So it's always kind of great to see people take steps to sort of involve a wider range of people from outside the institution, particularly, you know, your beneficiaries. I think it's something that we do bang on about quite a lot. I’m trying to think of a sort of example where this worked well outside of kind of anecdotal experience of it. Are there any other kind of good examples of boards that you know you guys are aware of where it's really helped kind of shape and change let's say the direction of a product and this is gonna lead is what we're talking about in just one minute. But kind of an example where the board is working really well?
Sam: I'm just trying to think. I'm always slightly, right, I love the idea of these boards but I'm always slightly cynical and that it is just what you said. That it's a bit of a sort of, you know, just like an outward facing thing and I would love to see. I haven't got any examples or evidence of these actually working in that way. So, if anyone knows of any, I’d love to hear.
Greg: I do. So I worked with a carers organisation in Bath. The name escapes me now. They were much much smaller, like a tiny little organisation, but they had carers, So young people and carers across all ages but they had a lot of young people on their board and they were going through a period of transformation. It was really, they were really keen to get them involved, partly because it was all new to them, so getting these younger voices in was a way of like, getting that wisdom that they just didn't have into the kind of planning and strategy of what they were doing. I've done things as well in the past, you know, engaging with young people and it's hit and miss. But I find it's largely hit as long as you structure it appropriately and you're not focused too much on the marketing aspects. You actually give some agency and empower those young people to, to actually influence what you're doing and not just have it as, you know, kind of them waving and smiling and then everybody's in the back, carrying on doing the real work. Yeah, it could have a real real impact. Some of the kind of real wisdom I've seen come from young people in those workshops and things have been astounding.. Far and above what you'd expect from their age. So it's just setting up the right situations in order to tap into that and then making use of that, making use of that wisdom.
Ben: Yeah. I don't want to say it's particularly pertinent to people, because I think you can find a whole range of examples. But if you think about how much, you know, how much digital product development and digital in general was focused on kind of capturing the intention engagement of young people, you know, kind of, well below the kind of consciousness of most of the adults surrounding them. It feels that, you know, if you’re going to listen to any kind of group, and you're going to try and involve any kind of group, I know this is a broader initiative but particularly digital initiatives, you have to get their perspective. You know, it's become a big moan about big tech so I won’t go into it but Amazon will routinely scan anything that is uploaded to kind of AWS for viruses but it won’t perform perfunctory scans for illicit images of children and young people despite, you know, some capability being there and at least having a warning system. And I don’t think it's a decision that has been kind of taken consciously. That's just something that's been omitted because of a lack of perspective and the more that we can get young people’s perspective in the charities that support them and also relevant to us, the digital products that are made, the kind of more, you just shine a light on those things that can be solved and probably aren't super intentional. They’re just kind of laziness or blindsided ness. .
Greg: Yeah. And I think there's that balancing act as well with those things where you can get that wisdom from the young people but also that the stuff that they don't know and don't understand about safeguarding and protecting and that kind of stuff. So it's a real balancing act from the organisation to kind of temper what they've learned against, you know, some harsher realities. NSPCC though have been doing that for years and they've been getting really good at toeing that line and balancing that. About you know, going to where young people are delivering something in a way that appeals to them but not going so far that they're creating any additional risk and that kind of stuff.
Ben: So from one board to another. Another great example of a young people’s board you know, making a real difference, was my sixth form college. We successfully loosened some of the restrictions on school uniforms but that really pales into insignificance compared to the next board’s efforts, next guy's efforts. Nick Clegg and Facebook. I forget what this board is called. Something like Facebook's Counter Balancing Don't Be Evil Board. Nick has recently kind of published an essay and given a couple of interviews in what seems to be a coordinated attempt to kind of reposition some of the recent criticism of Facebook. So, Greg, you want to kind of lead on that one?
Greg: Yeah, so Nick Clegg thing is part one of a new offensive from Facebook, that has been gearing up, particularly since the election. Yeah, so the board that you were referencing there Ben was the Oversight Board. The Facebook Oversight Board, which is a supposedly independent oversight board which has final say but hasn't really been seen to have much impact so far. But this latest onslaught from Facebook, so they've added, they've released a bunch of new changes. Some of those changes were released quite a while ago but they've loaded them as new changes, supposedly to give people more control over what they see. So for example, you'll be able to select whether you get a chronological view of your newsfeed or whether you'll be able to filter and things like that as well. And then we've got the follow up which was Nick Clegg's 5000 word medium post entitled, You and the algorithm, it takes two to tango, which is just, it's just an absolutely brilliant title. I mean it was gaslighting from the start there. And this is just a long, long post about why it's not Facebook's fault and you should all be grateful and yes we shouldn't be making these decisions there needs to be some kind of legislation from governments across the world.
Ben: I mean there's a lot to unpack here. Sam, what did you make of this?
Sam: Saying this just straight out the back as someone whose family is vehemently anti Facebook, I don't know whether I can have a particularly clear headed view of this. My initial thought was, I don't know, I used to feel sorry for Nick Clegg a little bit. Like when he went into the coalition with the Tories he was just used as this tool to kind of buffer the austerity and all the other evil things that David Cameron wanted to implement. And I just sort of wonder whether this is becoming a bit of a career thing for him. Does he know that he's essentially doing the same thing for Mark Zuckerberg here or is he aware of it? I really don't know. But I don't know. There's something about trying to put the blame, it feels a lot like it is just trying to put the blame on the user of Facebook like that. You know, it's your response, you know, and I think he says when you're using social media you are an active participant, you know that we're not passive. And I don't know how much I agree with that. You know, bear in mind I haven't used Facebook for a couple of years, but I do use Twitter, and I do find myself quite passively scrolling through it, you know, and not thinking about it, and you do take in what you see and you do take in what you read and what we consume does affect our mental states. It does, you know, like I'm pretty sure there's plenty of studies that back this up. So I think that that seems to be his sort of driving argument through this article and I'm kind of reading this going, I’m pretty sure that that has already been debunked quite a lot of times, to be honest with you. I don't, don't agree with it at all. I think it's just, yeah, it's a bad excuse. I'm not with it, but then as I say, I'm very anti Facebook. I think everyone should just delete it anyway. I don't think it can.
Ben: It takes two to tango. I mean if you just feel about the kind of context that is coming out into, to kind of use that phrase just seems like almost perversely ill judged. And I yeah, I totally, totally agree. I think that any social media platform, as it expands tends towards the media platform, and you know you kind of move from a model of sort of like interaction between the community to sort of passive consumption and production as it’s monetised and it scales and that's probably lacking inherent characteristic of Facebook. But the way, without getting all mental, the way they’re going about defending this just seems crazy to me. Just seems to be kind of saying well, you know, you're the user, you have responsibility to put effort into using our product in a way that you never had before and actually, it’s your fault that you're kind of being exposed to all this sort of stuff. I mean there's one argument which they're desperate to make, which is that they are in no sense a publisher of anything. Which again you can understand from a sort of like a legal standpoint, but to go about it this way, and to be so kind, like, I don't know. To be so kind of brazen in trying to insinuate that if you see something on Facebook you don't like then you're essentially, you've not been monitoring it well enough yourself. It just seems like a really odd stance and a hard one to kind of like, where does that policy end up.
Greg: And I think that there's something in the way that he really wants us to, he really wants to sort of get the point across that the Facebook algorithm is not the problem, you know. Like, stop this demonising of algorithms, it's not the algorithm, our algorithm’s fine. And there's a little bit of me that sort of thinks, you know what, you’re right to an extent. There's an argument that you know algorithms are only as good as the data you're feeding it right. But we all know Facebook's track record with data, so I'm a little bit unsure of that as an argument, but again, like his argument seems to be, well it's your responsibility to understand how the algorithm works. It’s like, well no actually, it's your responsibility to communicate it to us in a way that we can understand. If you can't do that, then, you know, but at the same time, we can't. I mean they’re very, very complicated things and you can't expect every user to fully understand it. So I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't know man.
Ben: It makes sense if Facebook is like a publicly owned, publicly controlled space and therefore genuinely it is your responsibility to make the algorithm better and you also have the ownership of the kind of the data it scrapes and sort of full control over that. Like, it feels like you're releasing the responsibility of kind of, you know, influencing the algorithm with none of the actual control or power that goes with it.
Greg: That's the key part. So Clegg doesn't say, he doesn't say anything that is incorrect in his article but he's literally only talking about one type, the tip of the iceberg. Everything he said is correct, if you only look at that tiny bit, and the bit that he's missing is power. That's the key thing that's missing from that equation. So he uses an analogy of you, your partner rings and says what do you want for dinner. No, you ring your partner and you go to a shop. She says buy whatever and I'll cook something. So you buy stuff from the store. You only select things that you want and then you take it home and your partner cooks whatever it is from the things that you bought. So you don't know what you’re getting at the end but it's all things that you've picked up along the way. But the bit that is missing from that analogy and he did say, oh, it's an imperfect analogy and I'm like yeah, because the bit that you're missing is during that journey your partner has been tracking your phone, knows exactly every store that you've been to along the way, has a go at you when you get in because you went to some store that you weren't saying you were going to go and she wants to know why you were there, and who you're with, and how long you were there for. And then your partner cooks that dinner and then takes some of the drain cleaner that you bought and goes next door and poisons your neighbours. And it's just like, your analogy is great but you're just missing all the other shit that Facebook does along the way. Like power is the key there. Yes, you have some agency in what you do on Facebook. You select your groups, you read the articles that you want to read but the power sits with Facebook. You don't control what it is that they see because that's been limited either through controls, or through access to knowledge. So understanding. And he says, well, we need to be clearer about how algorithms work. Yeah, but you're never going to be that clear about how they work because that's where your money comes from. So, I just, yeah. Everything he said is correct but he misses this big thing, which is power and that's why when people say it's gaslighting, it's gaslighting because it's the abusive partner coming home and saying, well, you brought this on yourself, because, you know, you're only here because you want to be here. And the reality is that power struggle. And Sam, you know, I think you're right. I think we need to get rid of Facebook but you know the reality for millions of people across the world is how do they do that, you know. Charities as well. How do they get rid of Facebook because it does continually make them millions in donations. And when you can't step away from something because they have all the power, then that conversation of agency is just completely shot out on the water.
Sam: I'm glad you mentioned the analogy. Like I got fixated on that a bit too much. I was trying to, even though he kind of admits it's not a perfect one, but just for me, that's invited more criticism. Like, it actually links to what you're saying about our power grid. What kind of worried me more about that analogy is that Facebook sees itself as being in a partnership with me. Like, really? Like, you’re a tool that I use, you know, I mean like, for me, Facebook, you're the shop. You're the shop that offers me the food that I choose not to go in. I choose to go elsewhere but do you know what I mean? Like, you're not the partner, you shouldn't be the partner that comes home and cooks food with me. You shouldn't be that, you shouldn't be that entwined in my life, in people's lives. You’re a service that offers something to someone and they should have the choice to take it or not. Yeah, I mean I know he said it's an imperfect analogy, but it’s Facebook so I’ll lay into them all I want really.
Ben: We could do another half hour deconstruct. I love listening to you. Your take on that is absolutely brilliant. I love that analogy. I love kind of what's baked into the analogy because it reveals so much about the perspective of the person who's kind of trying to reach for a comparison. I think you say, Sam, the concept that Facebook is the person in which you are with an intimate relationship and would bring you what your system is you need, it's just like an insane starting point.
Greg: [laughs]
Ben: Is that honestly how Nick Clegg uses Facebook? You got to take the rough with the smooth. Facebook must be really under. You should be doing more. It just makes me so angry. Bonkers.
Greg: One thing I would raise on this. So all of this, the changes to the interface, the Nick Clegg stuff, also, Amazon's Twitter stuff that's been happening recently. I don't know if you guys have seen it. Amazon got called out recently because they suddenly turned into this snappy little bitch on Twitter, where they were attacking senators in the US, clearly having a go at them about the conversations about breaking up Amazon and doing more legislation against Amazon. And then also you had the tech companies appearing before Congress last week and that was another shit show. But the thing that I'm getting from them is that they know winds have changed. Amazon’s chosen the fight approach. Facebook has chosen the flight approach. Well, what they've chosen is the play possum, pretend like they're going along with everything and then spend millions on lobbying because the the thing that keeps coming out with messaging at the moment, you even get it on adverts on podcasts talking about like Facebook calling for legislation to police what they're doing. And it is clear that they're just waiting for the conversation to start, then pump a shitton of money in it, and then get the result that they want from it. And that's the bit that worries me. Because I mean, I've said it before, I'll say it again, we're beholden to the laws that are made in the US now because we are limited in what we can do against these companies because they're not UK companies and if the decision goes a certain way in the US and they are terrible for lobbying in the US, then we're going to see the results of that over here.
Ben: Let's go from one enormous tech company to another. How are we going to bash Google this week, Greg?
Greg: It's not a Google bashing actually.
Ben: What?! No wait.
Sam: We can make it one, I’m sure.
Greg: It does raise some questions. So Google have announced that they're going to make Google Maps routes greener. So, I'm not 100% sure how. I think it does like the fastest route currently, but if you do, like I want to get to this place, then Google Maps kinda does fastest route, but they're going to make it so that it shows a greener route so that you use less petrol and those kinds of things depending on how you're travelling. So it will give you the least carbon heavy route in order to get to a place.
Sam: That's really interesting. I mean, that's obviously going to depend on them knowing whether the bus, you know, like all the buses that go down my road, some of them seem to be, you know, use renewable sources. Some of them don’t. So it's gonna need to know all of that information, I would assume.
Greg: Yeah, they know all that information. They know everything.
Sam: True, true. That was very naive of me, wasn’t it? [laughs]
Ben: Just by googling it.
Sam: [laughs] Was it Citymapper recently released a thing where you can take routes based on your mood, which I think is quite interesting.
Greg: Really?
Sam: I think it's a paid feature, so I haven’t tested it out but I quite like that as an idea. The idea that you can choose what, you know, so I guess the idea is if you're feeling a bit stressed out, it can take you through a park area and so on but what I would love to see is more kind of, you know, safer routes. You know like, is the route I'm taking at night, does it have streetlights, all of that kind of thing. Those things, I think. I'm wondering if there'll be a move for that next. There should be.
Greg: Yeah, that's a really good point actually. You know, like well lit areas. so the Google one will look at road incline and traffic congestion.
Sam: Right.
Greg: And then it'll show you if you want to take the fastest route, it'll show you the impact on your CO2 versus the impact on your time, so people can kind of make a decision on, oh well, it'll be two minutes faster but I'll spend X amount more on CO2. So yeah, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to start including, you know like, safest routes and things like that. Especially if you start like crowdsourcing that information, which they do for other things.
Sam: I guess it takes into account, like air quality and weather as well if it's taking into account inclines and so on.
Greg: Yeah, so that's another one that they're including. They're going to look at weather and air quality and areas. Yeah, which is a lot of scary data.
Sam: Interesting stuff.
Greg: Yeah. There was, did anyone ever see the….I think we've referenced it on the podcast actuall. There was an artist who demonstrated how Google Maps has become so entwined with our lives, that you could affect society based on like what you're seeing on Google Maps. And he basically took like a huge trolley full of mobile phones across the bridge, and then it lit up on Google Maps as though there was a huge map congestion there because there was loads of mobile phones sat on the bridge. It is interesting, like we talk about like Facebook affecting our lives and then trying to claim that they're not and Google actually, are very much so, affecting our lives, but potentially in a more positive way by helping us be greener.
Ben: Yeah. That’s amazing and with very little segue, here's another nice thing. So we normally have like a Rant of the Week or a Nice of the Week, which clumsily indicates how little it happens. You guys have probably spoken about this before as well. Everyone is speaking about. So I decided to chip in this week with a bit of a nice thing. So, I'm kind of doing a talk tomorrow to The Inspire Network, which is a group of charities being supported by The Cook Foundation. But one of my, one of my slides says digital transformation. If you're still here, you probably don't have this bit. And it's kind of glib but I think there's a lot of truth in it. I've been speaking to so many people recently that I've been able to form this weird anonymised quote out of all their opinions. What I've been hearing again and again is that, you know, we want to do more with digital, we’ve noticed this in the past and seen some kind of green shoots, but it always seemed like a massive battle, particularly without volunteers, particularly without staff, and so it became really really easy to put it off. And then basically COVID happened. We had to do it and I honestly don't know all the fuss was about. And someone literally said that to me, that actually, once we were all on Teams, Slack, Zoom whatever kind of video and text communication platform you use, like the rest of it didn't seem that big a deal. And it's kind of amazing to see. But, you know, we've seen, I mean, you guys tell me. We've had like over a year of lockdown now which has been really really prevalent in the sort of like western world and tech development world. What innovations have we seen for a year of lockdown that relies on digital devices? What like, amazing groundbreaking stuff have we kind of seen happen? I can't think of that much.
Greg: I don't think there has been anything because what everybody's done is exactly what you said. Which is, it's not that they’ve created some great new innovations. It’s that everybody started using some of the innovations that were already there and they were just under utilised.
Ben: Yeah.
Sam: It's a shift in the culture of it, I think, for a lot of charities and smaller organisations, you know, I'm actually doing a piece of work at the moment looking at that and it is talking to people who are suddenly having to use Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams or whatever it is, and they wouldn't do before. You know, we're talking about particularly the smaller organisations where it might just be three part time people who work for a charity two days a week, are suddenly they're having to use the systems that they're not innovative, but actually the innovation probably lies in the fact that it's more, there might be like potential barriers that people couldn't get past and that could just be fear of technology. You know, fear of data and yeah, for the past year they've had to just get on with it and realise they can, you know, and that's a huge lesson. So that's a huge positive. It’s a huge success in many ways.
Ben: So the theory is that actually, capitalism has failed completely, because there has been no innovation in what should have been the most productive environment, the most conducive environment for innovation we've ever seen in digital. Charities can now fill that space because they've taken that step up. They've taken that kind of like step in embedding and getting comfortable with the basics and now some of these really difficult interesting problems that charities face day in and day out, we can start to use digital as a more innovative way of tackling them rather than constantly being held back by the kind of infrastructure and the difficulty of adopting the basics. So, yeah, that's not kind of like a thing that happened but it's definitely a feeling that I've got, is this is going to be a really great time to be working in solving social problems and trying to use digital in more exciting ways than just having more people using your software.
Sam: I think you’re absolutely right and we’ll also see it in the public sector a little bit more as well. I mean I've been having conversations in the past year, and people have been saying, actually, we need to get our digital. We've been on the backfoot all this time and COVID has meant that we have to do all these things that we've never had time or money to do before. And also, the public sector and the charitable sector, communicating and talking more and, you know, and I think we're seeing, we're going to see a lot more of that, I think, in terms of services, in terms of social prescribing, all of those things. I think we'll start to see a lot more integration between the two. That kind of immigration that they always talk about, that they always intend to do but they never have the time and the budget to do it, I think we'll start to see it. So that's where the innovation will lie, I hope.
Greg: That is the key, what you said there. Time. Remember a few years ago? I think it was, not everyone, I could be wrong it's come off in a couple of things. They’d interviewed loads of charities about digital transformation, and the main blocker was time. And I kind of push practice of all, what do you mean by time? Because my biggest issue with that reason of time is that time is a construct. A human construct. So we make a decision about what we do with time. So, you know, I totally understand business as usual. Say you're saving ten people a day as a charity and if you spend some time on digital transformation, it might mean you can only say eight people a day, but actually that ten people, as time goes on, will get eroded and it'll slowly get less and less as you become more and more inefficient, as things change. So that ten people today may be 9,8,7, 6 and as time goes on, and suddenly your organisation is no longer relevant because other people are having to do that work and they're doing it more efficiently. And it's not an easy decision. It's not a, well in that case, let's do it now and forget those two people that we don't save for the six months, twelve months, eighteen months that we're doing this project. It is not an easy decision. But it is a decision that you've got to make about how you spend your time, and suddenly that decision was taken out of their hands. You had to do the digital stuff now, because you didn't have any time to fanny about with it. It was like do it now or people start getting hurt or you won't be able to run your organisation. So yeah, time has been a real key and suddenly time has been against organisations and they've realised, we don't have a choice, we've got to do this now. Everyone I spoke to from both charity and public sector as well has being really surprised by how quick they could turn things around. So yeah, it's a real example of like, time pressures having a beneficial effect on the organisation.
Ben: And on our final little good News of the Week. Even better than this. Netflix is going to be carbon zero by the end of 2022.
Greg: Yeah. So I don't know if you guys have been aware of, I mean, just in general, not just Netflix but any kind of server heavy online activity just churns through a ton of carbon. It's really problematic. And yeah, they've come out. A lot of organisations are coming out with like net zero, net zero as being a target. But Netflix really have kind of gone in hard and they're saying they're going to be net zero for the end of 2022. So they're going to move to renewables wherever possible and this includes their production as well. So reducing travel and things like that around their Netflix productions and where they can't, they’ll carbon offset as well, which is, yeah, it's pretty cool if you like Netflix.
Sam: I was really surprised to see that 50% of their carbon footprint comes from making content. So essentially the film and TV industry, which I think is quite well known it’s quite high anyway. But I was just really surprised that apparently only 5% of their carbon footprint actually comes from people streaming the content. I was just, yeah, that blew my mind.
Ben: It’s really expensive. But it’s just like sets and people and stuff.
Sam: [laughs]. Surely. Yeah.
Greg: Well that’s it, isn’t it?
Sam: Think I’d do it from home, via Zoom nowadays, right?
Greg: [laughs] There you go. That’s how they’re gonna do it. They're just gonna start doing it all from home.
Ben: There you go. So Netflix, that is the official Tech For Good pitch. We want two seasons with at least an option to renew for a third. So thank you very much Greg. Thank you very much Sam. That's all we have time for today, thank you to everyone listening to that. So if you'd like to tell us what you think we would love to hear your thoughts. Do get in touch with us on Twitter at techforgoodlive or email us at hello@techforgood.live and apparently iTunes is still a thing, so if you're gonna review us, review us on Itunes. Also tell your mates via whatever social media you’re currently using. We need to thank Podcast.co for hosting us in this beautiful mirrored studio.Obviously that isn't happening but, you know, the general spot that they’ve given us has been invaluable. So thank you very much for your time. Lovely to see you guys and see you soon.