Co-Designing a Prototype and Long-Term Roadmap

We partnered with the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) and a community of advocacy and legal aid organizations to co-design a prototype and long-term roadmap for an algorithmic harms reporting tool. AJL was founded in 2016 by Joy Buolamwini, the organization “combines art and research to illuminate the social implications and harms of artificial intelligence.” AJL centers minoritized communities most negatively impacted by AI.

The Algorithmic Justice League came to Bocoup to co-design the program Community Reporting of Algorithmic System Harms (CRASH). AJL wanted the program to center accessibility, be trauma informed, commit to strong consent and secure data storage, and to center the priorities of the most impacted people. AJL launched a prototype of CRASH in 2020 and received approximately 150 harms reports and we joined in 2021 to identify and recruit co-designers.

When people, especially from minoritized backgrounds, are harmed or targeted by unethical AI their next steps aren’t clear. The goal of CRASH was to create a place where folks can report what happened to them and to hopefully help them process the grief of the event. Once the data is collected the goal is that it can be used to create real change – with amalgamated reports going out to auditors, news organizations, the FTC, or lawyers to draft class-action lawsuits. CRASH empowers those that AI seeks to disempower, and amplifies their voices. Bocoup assisted in the creation of co-design onboarding and feedback integration. We also helped to expand the existing form and integrate administrative and moderation workflows, taking lessons learned from ajl.ai and applying them to produce a system.