A collective conversation about new practical ways to build software that is useful, simple, long-lasting and focused on solving people's real problems.

Technology in recent years has adopted a complex, wasteful and expensive approach to serving its purpose, impacting energy use and other vital resources such as fresh water and minerals directly and indirectly. Even in the open technology movement, the way software is developed and technology solutions are conceived, coded and deployed does not adopt a climate-friendly, accessible and sustainable approach. The same goes for technology in the public interest, leaving its beneficiaries many times with limited choices: they would either adopt a free version of complex software that has a massive environmental cost or invest considerable amounts of money in projects that ambition to match their commercial competitors without any sustainability concerns. 

Although sustainability decisions are highly contextual to diverse social realities, it is time to equip the technical and political teams that create technology for the public interest with evidence-based information that they can apply to their contexts and make more conscious decisions about the ecological impact their systems produce.

This effort is bringing the community of developers working on public-interest technologies together to start a debate about the climate and ecological impact of developers' decisions. Understand the potential climate and ecological impacts of various development decisions and show the approaches that can be taken to the problem to inform programmers' decisions. Start changing the way we do technology through different metrics, community practices and guidelines.

There are events planned later on.

Keep an eye on our networks or come back to this page later for details.

These are the iterations already carried out as part of The Tech We Want initiative.

By clicking on each of the banners below, you can access the recordings and read the documentation.

Here we list a number of applications that, in one way or another, put the principles of The Tech We Want into practice.

A core aspect of OKFN's ethical approach is to lead by example, and the first featured tool developed by OKFN uses the principles of The Tech We Want.

Below are the software programmes that were selected for demonstrations at the first The Tech We Want Summit through an open call.

The Tech We Want initiative is proudly supported by the following organisations:

Why don't you join us?

Get in touch to discuss how we can work together to promote inclusive, sustainable technologies for all.