Authors:
Daria Loi, Mark Frischmuth
In the past, I have argued that the high-tech sector prioritizes greed in its decision making and suggested that high-tech companies and those benefiting from and leveraging their output must reconsider their motivations, roles, and responsibilities [1]. This line of thinking is not isolated, as many have made similar arguments in diverse contexts from education [2] to innovation [3]. As Ralph Nader says: "When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough [4]."
In this column, I want to reflect on the experiences of the organizations that made a conscious decision to prioritize public good above greed, learn what can be done to empower them, and ensure that they play key roles in shaping and influencing the high-tech sector. To help achieve this, I interviewed Mark Frischmuth, founder and executive director of DemocracyLab, a U.S.-based nonprofit whose mission is to connect tech-for-good projects with skilled volunteers. (Full disclosure: I serve as secretary on DemocracyLab's board of directors.)
Mark, would you share some examples of what DemocracyLab has uncovered by following through on its mission?
DemocracyLab evolved from an ambitious vision of collaborative policymaking to become a platform connecting public interest technology projects with skilled volunteers. This evolution taught us something fundamental: While traditional capitalist models excel at scaling solutions that demonstrate clear revenue potential, they may undervalue important innovations that have high social impact but uncertain profitability. This creates an opportunity for platforms like DemocracyLab to complement market forces, supporting projects that might otherwise go undeveloped.
The platform's impact has surprised us in unexpected ways. While we designed it to support purpose-driven tech projects, we made a striking discovery about who volunteers and why. We anticipated primarily serving purpose-seeking professionals—established tech workers looking to contribute to meaningful causes. Instead, most volunteers were career advancers—people who use the platform to build skills and improve their careers.
Our data tells a compelling story: Eighty-five percent of volunteers participate to improve their professional skills, 60 percent of current volunteers are unemployed, and only 13 percent are employed in their desired field. Fifty-four percent of former volunteers have secured employment in their desired field, and only 16 percent remain unemployed. Particularly significant is that 50 percent of our participants self-identify as minorities in the tech industry.
This has revealed our unexpected role in addressing systemic barriers in tech education and employment. Many volunteers come to us after investing in boot camps and community college programs, armed with skills but caught in the classic catch-22: They need experience to get a job, but they need a job to gain experience.
Most volunteers were career advancers—people who use the platform to build skills and improve their careers.
What you just described expands your organization's original mission.
Understanding our volunteers' motivations and challenges has reshaped our vision of DemocracyLab's role. We see an opportunity to evolve our platform connecting projects with volunteers into an ecosystem that more deliberately develops tech talent. Our understanding of the value we create has inspired us to expand in key directions.
We're designing features for volunteers to build verifiable portfolios of their contributions, including detailed tracking, skill endorsements, and standardized ways to document outcomes. These tools will help volunteers translate their experience into compelling narratives for potential employers.
Rather than leaving volunteers to find their own way, we are also designing guided experiences to help them progress from entry-level tasks to complex responsibilities. We're matching them with mentors who create skill-based recommendations and develop resources tailored to different experience levels.
We also plan to strengthen our relationships with employers and educational institutions. By understanding their needs and assessment criteria, we can prepare our volunteers' career transitions while maintaining our commitment to public interest technology. These planned expansions maintain our core mission while acknowledging that our platform can play a vital role in democratizing access to tech careers.
I'm interested in the challenges that you face daily. What keeps you up at night?
Our core challenge is developing a sustainable funding model that matches the value we're creating. While DemocracyLab has demonstrated its ability to generate significant social impact by connecting talented volunteers with meaningful projects, we've struggled to convert this into financial sustainability.
We're exploring and actively pursuing a number of promising paths, from an innovative model to expand our project marketplace to include purpose-driven for-profit start-ups to developing partnerships and grant proposals focused on our demonstrated impact on informal STEM learning and workforce development.
In the past, we've discussed notions of shared power, prosperity, and possibility. What pathways are you exploring?
We're exploring an unconventional pathway, which challenges a fundamental assumption of our capitalist society that money is the optimal store of value. While capitalism has driven remarkable technological advancement and improved living standards globally, its mechanisms have also created significant problems. The system's tendency to concentrate wealth and corrupt political systems, and to externalize costs, threatens both social stability and environmental sustainability.
Money's primary advantages are its fungibility and liquidity: It can be quickly converted into anything, anywhere. Economists generally view high monetary velocity as positive for economic activity. However, this very liquidity may exacerbate capitalism's core problems. When capital can move instantly around the globe seeking maximum returns, it is often allocated to ventures that maximize returns by externalizing costs, creating social and environmental harm. This dynamic creates a cycle where concentrated wealth influences government regulations, further enabling cost externalization and wealth concentration.
 | Tech-for-good hackathon hosted by Democracylab. |
Equity, particularly in startups, offers compelling alternative characteristics as a store of value. It's inherently tied to long-term value creation rather than short-term profit extraction. Its value is rooted in human relationships and shared purpose, and its relative illiquidity encourages longer-term thinking and commitment. It naturally builds community around solving specific problems, and, importantly, it's harder to use for regulatory capture as value is realized through problem-solving rather than financial engineering.
While these characteristics make equity theoretically superior for storing value sustainably, there are practical challenges that have historically limited its use: illiquidity, high risk due to lack of diversification, and complexity of management. That's why we're developing Equity Forge, an evolution of our platform where individual contributors will build diversified portfolios across multiple ventures. A secondary market will provide liquidity options while preserving the benefits of longer-term thinking, and standardized agreements and automated tracking will make equity ownership more transparent and manageable.
This innovative model could help evolve capitalism by creating more democratic and accessible ways to participate in value creation, while maintaining the advantageous characteristics of equity as a store of value. The platform could fundamentally reshape access to the start-up economy by enabling skilled individuals to contribute to promising ventures, regardless of geographic location or career stage. Early-career professionals can build portfolios of equity while gaining experience. Experts established in their careers can diversify their income streams and take calculated risks. People in regions traditionally excluded from start-up opportunities can participate fully in the innovation economy. While this alone won't solve all of capitalism's challenges, it offers a path toward better alignment of economic incentives and social benefit while democratizing access to start-up ownership.
You've reminded me of the role of adaptability and struggles I often observe: designers' and technologists' stubbornness with maintaining control over irrelevant minutiae and their inability to stay focused on key goals. My final question is twofold. First, can you share one piece of advice for those who want to work in tech for good? Second, what can one do to empower organizations like DemocracyLab?
For those pursuing tech-for-good work, I'll share wisdom that proved critical for DemocracyLab: Be clear about your goal but flexible about your journey. Think of a sailor crossing a bay—they know their destination but rarely travel in a straight line. Instead, they tack back and forth across the wind, moving toward their objective even when not pointed directly at it. Or consider a skier descending a mountain: They don't just point straight downhill, but choose a path that responds to the terrain while maintaining their overall direction. This approach requires maintaining unwavering conviction in your purpose while staying humble and open to new learnings. The wind may shift unexpectedly or an unseen obstacle may appear, requiring quick adaptation without losing sight of the ultimate objective.
As for empowering organizations like DemocracyLab, while financial donations and skilled volunteers are always valuable, I want to highlight a critical need that's often overlooked: partnership opportunities. Emerging social-purpose organizations face a challenging credibility gap—established institutions want proven partners, but organizations can't prove themselves without opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities. Decision makers in larger organizations can play a transformative role by taking calculated risks on partnerships with emerging enterprises, creating innovative programs that achieve multiple objectives—from advancing the established organization's goals to giving the emerging enterprise chances to demonstrate value, and generating insights that benefit the entire sector. When these experiences are documented and shared, they contribute to the evolution and credibility of the grassroots tech-for-good movement as a whole.
This combination—maintaining clear purpose while staying adaptable, and established organizations taking strategic chances on emerging partners—can help us build a more robust ecosystem for technology in the public interest.
References
1. Loi, D. Diamonds of sadness: A story of high-tech greed, power, and hypocrisy. Interactions 30, 3 (2023), 26–28; https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2023/diamonds-of-sadness-a-story-of-high-tech-greed-power-and-hypocrisy?doi=10.1145%2F3587941
2. Champney, D. Big tech hubris and greed behind digital education failure. Public. May 12, 2024; https://www.public.news/p/big-tech-hubris-and-greed-behind
3. Procopio, J. Corporate greed and other scapegoats for the sad state of tech. Inc. Jul. 5, 2024; https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/corporate-greed-other-scapegoats-for-sad-state-of-tech.html
4. Nader, R. Ranking the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations. Common Dreams. Aug. 7, 2020; https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/07/ranking-infinite-greed-power-and-controls-giant-corporations
Authors
Daria Loi combines design strategy with experience research and innovation to enrich people's lives and humanize technology. She is the founder of imperfecta, an art and design gallery focused on women artists and minority creatives, and Oregon City's arts commissioner. She serves on DemocracyLab's board of directors, and is an honorary professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. [email protected]
Mark Frischmuth is the founder and executive director of DemocracyLab, a nonprofit organization empowering people who use technology for public good by connecting skilled volunteers with tech-for-good projects. Since launching in 2018, DemocracyLab's platform has facilitated more than 10,000 volunteer placements. [email protected]
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