We are digital development practitioners in international development. Where does that role exist in domestic nonprofits working in the USA?
A fascinating new research study by Lauren Chambers, a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, identifies four patterns of professional practice among “advocacy technologists” working in US civil society organizations. Every single pattern will sound remarkably familiar to anyone who’s spent a decade building digital development programs in international organizations.
These advocacy technologists are:
- Translating between technical and non-technical worlds,
- Interrogating dominant technology paradigms
- Introspecting on their career paths away from Big Tech,
- Trailblazing new professional roles without established pipelines.
She presents this as groundbreaking insight into an emerging professional class that’s choosing to occupy a precarious new niche within advocacy work ecosystems.
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The Four Patterns We’ve Always Known
While I appreciate her work, this is not a new paradigm for us. Digital development practitioners have been carving out this exact niche for the past two decades within international development organizations. The patterns she identifies are finally happening in the US social impact ecosystem.
1. Translating Between Worlds
The study describes advocacy technologists as bridges who help colleagues understand technical constraints and possibilities. As one participant explained, they serve as translators between what someone is asking for and what we can actually build.
Sound familiar? Every ICT4D practitioner has spent countless hours explaining why making a proof of concept takes, like, a day… and then making a thing that a billion people on the planet are using is like building a jetliner.
We’ve been the ones explaining to program managers why building sustainable digital health systems in rural Kenya requires fundamentally different approaches than Silicon Valley deployment models.
2. Interrogating Tech Hype
Her advocacy technologists resist magical thinking around technology and push back against colleagues who want to throw AI at it without understanding the underlying problems. She frames this as a crucial counterweight to techno-solutionism.
Again, this describes the core competency we’ve been developing since the Principles for Digital Development were first established.
ICT4D practitioners have been myth-busting and contending with fantasy-level optimistic assumptions about technology’s transformative power since before Facebook existed. We learned early that successful digital development requires starting with user needs and existing ecosystems, not with the newest technology trends.
3. Introspecting on Meaningful Work
The study’s participants chose advocacy technology because they couldn’t stomach working for companies focused on profit over social justice. They actively rejected high-paying Big Tech careers in favor of values-aligned work, even when it meant lower compensation and less career stability.
As one study participant noted, companies fundamentally are about profit, not about protecting people and social justice. And we committed our career to helping people and trying to support social movements. Yep, I can relate. This moral clarity has been foundational to digital development careers for decades.
Digital development practitioners made this choice long before it became trendy. We’ve been prioritizing impact over income since ICT4D emerged as a distinct field, often accepting significant pay cuts to work on programs that advance equity and human dignity rather than corporate market share.
4. Trailblazing Without Support Structures
Lauren’s research documents how advocacy technologists struggle with limited recruitment pipelines, isolation as one-person tech teams, and lack of professional development opportunities. The study calls this a precarious positioning within advocacy organizations.
Every digital development practitioner recognizes this immediately.
How many of us ended up in ICT4D through circuitous paths, cobbling together technical skills with development knowledge because no formal training programs existed? How many have been the sole “tech person” in organizations that didn’t quite understand how to integrate our expertise into their programming?
Critical Difference: Scale and Systems Thinking
Here’s where the comparison becomes instructive rather than merely validating. Digital development practitioners operate in contexts that demand systems-level thinking from day one.
We don’t have the luxury of working within single organizations or even single countries.
Our work spans complex multi-stakeholder environments where government coordination, donor priorities, and community needs intersect in ways that require sophisticated analysis of power dynamics and institutional constraints.
The most successful ICT4D initiatives demonstrate this systems approach: they prioritize government ownership over NGO control, integrate with existing infrastructure rather than creating parallel systems, and focus on human-AI collaboration rather than technological replacement. We learned these lessons through decades of implementation experience across vastly different contexts.
Domestic advocacy technologists are just beginning to grapple with similar questions about institutional power, stakeholder coordination, and sustainable impact. These roles need institutional support, which the international development sector has been providing through organizations like USAID’s digital development initiatives and multilateral agencies’ technology programs.
Convergence of Both Communities
The emergence of advocacy technologists in domestic US contexts creates unprecedented opportunities for knowledge exchange between international development and domestic social impact work.
We’re seeing similar patterns emerge that require specialized skills to navigate responsibly.
- Technologists leaving lucrative private sector careers for mission-driven work,
- Organizations struggling to integrate technical expertise into advocacy strategies,
- Recognition that technology decisions are fundamentally political decision.
Both communities represent growing demand for alternative professional futures where technology work serves human flourishing rather than corporate extraction. As one advocacy technologist noted in the Berkeley study, public interest technology embodies self-determination, and the right to privacy, and the redistribution of imbalanced power structures.
Digital development practitioners have been implementing this vision for decades through programs that strengthen democratic governance, expand access to essential services, and amplify marginalized voices. Advocacy technologists are now applying similar approaches to domestic policy challenges around criminal justice, reproductive rights, and economic equity.
Moving Beyond Don’t Be Evil
The four patterns Lauren identified – translating, interrogating, introspecting, and trailblazing – describe the professional competencies needed for any context where technology intersects with social change. The real opportunity is the potential for both communities to accelerate policy and design outcomes that serve public interests rather than private profit.
- Advocacy technologists bring deep knowledge of US policy processes and domestic advocacy strategies.
- ICT4D experts offer proven frameworks for responsible technology implementation and systems-level change in resource-constrained environments.
The convergence of these expertise areas could reshape how we approach technology governance both domestically and internationally. Instead of accepting the false choice between technological inevitability and technological resistance, both communities demonstrate that technologists can actively shape technology development to advance justice, equity, and human dignity.
Can we build the institutional support structures, professional development pathways, and collaborative networks needed to make this vision sustainable and scalable?
