A Day in the Life at Significance Labs
On Sunday, we held our first A Day in the Life. We are thrilled by the outcome – technologists and community members learned a lot. We at Significance Labs also gained new insight into how we can create a space for diverse communities to exchange experiences and ideas and how we can improve it for next time.
A Day in the Life is designed for technologists who are interested in learning about how technology can improve conditions for those currently underserved it, but who don’t have a full summer to commit to it (like those in our Solvefor{s} Fellowship). For our first iteration, participants were a mix of people from a wide variety of backgrounds. Technologists across the industry participated- we had engineers and product people from Google, Huge, the Acumen Fund and Foursquare. Community guides were diverse in age, experience and neighborhood. They came to us from the Brooklyn College Community Partnership and Green City Force. We made sure to pair up participants according to interests and areas of study- this proved to be crucial for successful and mutual exchanges.
We held a feedback session at Significance Labs offices to share experiences and ideas. Though it was a short time to be in a neighborhood and observe challenges community members face on a day-to-day basis, we were excited that A Day in the Life started the conversation. The group raised a number of themes for discussion, ranging from transportation to food justice to employment and mentorship. There were ideas around how to enhance the EBT system with real-time information accessible to users. Others thought about how to increase information about career paths, like what an engineer does on a daily basis. Discussions also covered access to job opportunities and how technology could improve the experience for job seekers.
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