Human-Centered Design in Democratic Development: E...

In the fight to defend and strengthen political pluralism across the world, the democracy support community has developed an astounding number of resources - playbooks, guides, infographics - to empower civil society, government, and other stakeholders to effectively defend and advance democracy. IRI has been part of this effort for over 40 years to strengthen democracy around the world, creating diverse resources to support its partners. While this extensive set of resources is intended to assist democratic actors, IRI's partners began to raise concerns about how difficult it can be - and how much time can be lost - to sort out the resources that are best suited to inform their work.

IRI's Civic Tech (CivicTech) and Government Tech (GovTech) partners brought this challenge to the attention of IRI's Technology and Democracy (TechDem) Practice - which focuses on supporting democratic actors to leverage digital technologies for democratic outcomes - through recurring engagements via its global network of 200+ CivicTech and GovTech actors. While the TechDem Practice regularly elevated relevant resources to the network, many network members expressed that they were struggling to navigate and keep track of the expansive web of existing resources, often resulting in partners recreating the wheel or not referring to useful existing guidance at all.

In response, the TechDem Practice sought a more constructive way to share existing resources to help partners envision different approaches to effectively use tech to advance and defend democratic principles. IRI has developed the interactive Actionable Steps Workbook to Make Technology Work for Democracy as a living database to help partners more intuitively identify useful guidance, tools, and examples of how to use tech for democracy. The TechDem Practice approached the development of the Workbook with a focus on Human-Centered Design (HCD), a powerful methodology that has evolved over decades, gaining prominence through its application in technology and later embraced in the field of international development. Its focus on empathy, iteration, and collaboration has made it a key approach in creating more user-friendly, sustainable, and impactful solutions.

IRI implemented this design methodology and incorporated multiple rounds of user feedback, review and testing, designing the workbook in a way that prioritized partner requests. This included conducting user-testing with partners in three in-person convenings held in Latin America, Africa and Asia to ensure global perspectives and feedback were incorporated. IRI also collected feedback from partners through more global forums, including during an interactive user-testing session at RightsCon as well as a session organized through our global CivicTech network.

This resulted in an Actionable Steps Workbook that now exists as an intuitive, navigable database that IRI plans to continually update with new resources. The Workbook can be navigated via an interactive decision tree that presents a curated list of resources more specific to the user's interests. Users can answer a short set of questions, such as selecting their stakeholder group (civil society or government), key democracy challenge they'd like to address (such as transparency, freedom of expression, etc) and tactical approaches they're interested in learning more about (such as advocacy, policy development, or coalition building). Once these questions are answered, partners receive a curated list of resources to help inform and inspire their work. Recently launched to IRI's partners, we encourage you to take a look to more easily find resources in the tech and democracy space relevant to your work.

The Actionable Steps Workbook reflects one of the TechDem Practice's guiding principles: centering partner needs at the core of its work. The TechDem Practice plans to build on lessons learned in the creation of the Actionable Steps Workbook as it turns to develop a responsive, partner-informed playbook to support lower-capacity local governments to take steps to digitalize in line with democratic principles. IRI will again use an iterative approach to guide playbook development. This will include a series of co-creation workshops with experienced local government partners, to be followed by validation exercises and user testing with the intended end users, lower-capacity local governments. Through the process, the playbook will capture the collective knowledge of the field and will ensure the resource is easy to use. Stay tuned as the TechDem Practice progresses on this resource - follow us on LinkedIn or reach out to us directly at [email protected] for more information.