What We Do Together

SlashRoots' 2024 Annual Letter

Hello friends,

Welcome to SlashRoots' first annual letter. David and I plan to use these letters to reflect on SlashRoots' work and speak frankly about the progress we are making and where we are not.

2024 will be 13 years since we hosted SlashRoots’ first hackathon, organised around the release of Jamaica’s first open data platform. In that time, SlashRoots has lived multiple lives.

The SlashRoots Hackathon became Developing the Caribbean (DevCa), a regional innovation festival with hackathons and conferences held simultaneously in as many as six islands and with more than 340 participants at its peak. We've helped shape policies and legislation on open data, data protection, digital identity and digital literacy.

In 2017, we co-founded the Caribbean School of Data, a regional digital skills-building initiative that helped upskill thousands of young people across the region.

Hackathon participants at the 2013 DevCa Conference

Throughout this time, our cornerstone has been using human-centred design practices to help organisations better understand and make progress on complex problems. We've worked on challenges ranging from praedial larceny and electricity theft to assisting individuals in managing non-communicable diseases.

When we felt problems required new institutions, we worked with others to create them and have done so both in Jamaica and globally for open government, civic tech and digital ID.

While we believe that SlashRoots has done positive and impactful work since its inception, we also recognise that the problems we face as a society are rapidly increasing in complexity and dynamism.

Whether adapting to the existential tradeoffs created by a warming planet or helping communities strive in a digital world where the future of work and its present are changing rapidly, new approaches are needed to respond to our evolving problems in the timeframes needed. 

In the field research: SlashRoots Researchers meeting with Farmers

The Caribbean's current pace of development and the siloed, institutional responses that are commonplace will not suffice. Our region is already the most unequal in the world, and the uncertainties we face risk adding rocket fuel to the disparities that plague us.

David and I believe changing this trajectory requires opening spaces for reimagining how we look at problems and the roles available to solve them. We must create new entry points for more actors from across government, markets, AND civil society to work together. There are knowledge and capacities within communities and civil society that are being ignored. Distributing the ability and opportunity to solve problems will unlock new pathways for ideating and creating solutions to outpace the exponential nature of the problems we face.

Mobilising this kind of collaboration and building a body of evidence for this approach is at the heart of what we aim to do this year and over the next decade.

A shift in how we work.

Cultivating spaces for collaboration and experimentation starts with being more open in our own work. While we have always worked closely with those affected by the problems we work on, we could have done a better job sharing the progress and outcomes with our community to gain a broader perspective and enable additional contributions.

This annual letter and the monthly newsletter we started publishing in October last year are the beginning of our commitment to work and learn in the open.

Cultivating spaces for collaboration and reimagination will also include creating spaces for discourse, as we are doing with the Digital Democracy Series. In our first session, we began to wrestle with how we all might think differently about inclusion as digitisation gathers pace. We will return to the topic of inclusion and its intersection with many other themes throughout the year.

Many of the problems we are struggling with as a society have yet to be solved at scale. Making progress will require acquiring new knowledge, know-how and connections. A shift to openness is not just a nice-to-have, but strategically advantageous. Engaging more societal actors around the problems can accelerate our learning, leverage a wider capacity to solve, and build the momentum needed for adoption.

Last year, we helped secure Jamaica's commitment to another Open Government Partnership (OGP) action plan cycle. While OGP isn't well-known across Jamaica yet, its structure, which requires and provides space for high levels of collaboration between innovators within the public sector and civil society, is a unique opportunity to develop an institutional mechanism for scaling diverse and open collaboration. This is a hypothesis we aim to explore this year as we work with the Ministry of Finance (the host Ministry) and other members of the multi-stakeholder forum (the OGP oversight body) to build on the lessons from the last two years.

Inclusion at the centre of society’s transformation

A rapid digitisation of society is underway around us. One of our great fears is that this digital transformation replicates and amplifies the biases and inequities we all see around us daily in the software and digitised processes being developed. Avoiding that future requires greater intentionality.

Launch of the OneCity Project, A 3-year collaborative research engagement funded by the Fondation Botnar

We’ve observed that the teams implementing these digital services and the decision-makers who shape policies are often unaware or aren’t given the time and resources to understand how exclusion, harm and suboptimal outcomes can manifest in their work. Additionally, stakes are even higher today as governments across the region implement new foundation systems for identity, payments and exchanging data to enable citizen participation in an increasingly digital world. This new "digital public infrastructure" will significantly increase the visibility of the individual to society, and we must be thoughtful in their realisation.

In response to these challenges and the scale of digitisation, we are expanding our human-centred design work from focusing only on specific services and problems to include initiatives that make it easier for teams and organisations to better engage with those impacted by their work. The only sustainable way to build services that meet the needs of your users is to engage them in the design of those services. Later this year, we will launch a new Inclusion and Usability initiative built around this belief.

We will also deepen our engagement with the implementation of Digital Public Infrastructure across the region and the new ecosystems that will emerge around them. We are starting with Jamaica’s new national ID system (NIDS). Building on our earlier contributions to the NIDS’ drafting of the NIDS law, we are following it as it transitions to operationalisation. From the regulations to the Project Birthright campaign and the expansion of the pilot, we aim to make contributions to help realise a new national ID that is inclusive, safe, and rights-respecting.

The Role of Civil Society Organizations

Lastly, we want to share some reflections on the changes we are observing in Jamaica’s public discourse.

The Internet has given us a platform to reach the entire human population. We have access to more information and are more connected to each other than ever. This has strengthened transparency and provided new ways to engage with and hold leaders and institutions accountable. But it is also enabling cruelty and divisiveness to take root in our discourse.

We believe all calls to marginalise, dehumanise or position any Jamaican as an outsider are wrong. Our motto, "Out of many, One People", is a clear rebuke of this rhetoric.

We should always remember that we are all members of this Jamaican society first. We are not consumers of products, voters or subjects to be governed, nor government representatives or members of political parties foremost. We are members of this community. As members of this community, we have standing to engage in, ask questions, and contribute to shaping its direction.

Our national project requires contributions from all of us. It doesn’t function without civil society and community-based contributors. What we need are more effective and scalable ways to mediate issues and tradeoffs as a community–not the marginalisation and painting of any specific organisation or individual as a pariah.

Building scalable options for citizen co-creation is core to SlashRoots' mission. We want to expand the number of persons who feel they are making meaningful contributions to our shared national and regional goals. 

2024 and beyond

2024 represents another year, one for us as a team. In 2023, we re-examined and sharpened our articulation of our purpose and long-term goals and brought on new team members to help us execute. We're excited to move into the next phase of our new strategy.

This is the work we hope to do over the next year. This is the work we hope to do with you.

Onwards and upwards. 

David & Matthew