For Impactful Community Engagement

Checks are needed to guide the development of guard-rails for ethical and responsible community-engaged computing research. The era of "move fast and break things" can produce false starts, injured communities, and widespread techlash. The tech sector can be more socially conscious and focus on community engagement using research from universities, computing researchers, and professionals. For example, smart cities might increase efficiency and improve quality of life, but for whom?10 Research shows how smart city initiatives can harm certain groups through, for example, facial recognition technologies that misidentify, produce ethnic bias and discrimination, or create opportunities for abuse.5 Technology benefits do not always accrue evenly across community members. Ethics rarely keeps pace with technological innovation.