Technology for the Public Interest

Technology for the Public Interest – Tech4PI

Technology for the Public Interest – #Tech4PI, is a field dedicated to leveraging technology and proven sustainability models to support social sector organizations in delivering on their missions.

Tech4PI Principles Based on Experience Creating and Commercializing Tech for Good

A 3-year journey incubating 7 successful tech for good ventures at Giving Tech Labs, inspired the first draft of these principles. It is a checklist we followed to create successful incubations such as VidaNyx. When we did not follow one of these principles, we failed to deliver real sustainable, and impactful Tech4PI.

With the input from our Advisory Council and other experts, as well as constant learning from the data captured over time, we make these principles the core guiding elements of Tech4PI built under the GC Insights exchange.

The Tech4PI Certification Badge

When an independent software vendor (ISV), social entrepreneur, or tech innovator meets the full set of Technology for the Public Interest Principles listed on this page, they can display this certification badge on their website, which links to their listing in our platform as a Tech4PI Certified technology solution or service provider.

In GC Insights you can find Tech4PI certified solutions or service providers by using the filters on the Solutions Section. You can identify these organizations by the orange lightbulb badge:

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The Principles of Technology for the Public Interest – Tech4PI

Build Long-lasting Operational Capacity with Sustainability Models in Place

Tech4PI fights the well-intended approach of the tech sector that deploys volunteers to create temporary solutions that are eventually abandoned. Capacity building means helping to teach people to fish instead of giving them fish as technology does not solve problems, people do.

By focusing on systemic issues, Tech4PI can define sustainability models anchored on delivering value by saving costs, increasing capacity, achieving profitability through revenues, or attracting sponsors and donors that connect with the measured impact.

Measure Impact at a Systemic Level

Tech4PI focuses on a crisp definition of quantifiable impact on mission delivery, with clearly defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI). It embeds the measurement of those KPIs in the technology built and in the fundamentals of the business models, tying the unit economics to the achievement of the goals related to selected KPIs.

Most technology, even tech related to entertainment, helps to make the world a better place. Tech4PI aims to create technology and business models that deliver measurable, sustainable, long-lasting impact to improve people’s lives by addressing a particularly urgent need, as defined by one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals – UN SDG and related issue areas.

Data Driven, Under Ethical Principles

We are experiencing long-term damaging effects of technologies, such as social networking, which was created with good intentions but turned into weapons against the fabric of society by disseminating misinformation and selling users’ data in the name of profit.

Tech4PI seeks to transform data into knowledge, working under ethical and privacy principles to process the data collected as part of mission delivery. This knowledge can help to reduce operating costs, increase capacity, identify opportunity areas and accelerate learning by having access to data at a large scale.

Centered on Empathy and Inclusion

We have made tremendous progress by connecting through tech. Still, we are also distorting societal values and mental health through social networks that have become the channel for standards of beauty, success, or performance that are impossible to match.

Tech4PI should always create empathy and make us feel that we belong, connecting us with others and enabling collaboration, participation, and unity.

Change Through Collective Impact

To deliver systemic change requires the participation of society’s different sectors.

Tech4PI operates and thrives in an ecosystem where technologists can connect with and support organizations that serve the public and general public interests.

This includes nonprofit organizations, government, philanthropists, universities, and private sector companies operating under a crisp definition of impact with measurable improvement in human life and conditions.

Founding Partners

Driving Impact Together