Fresh out of graduate school, Alix Dunn found herself in Cairo, working for a human-rights organization as the Arab Spring broke out nearly eight years ago. After protesters poured into the city’s Tahrir Square, ending the 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak, Dunn saw a moment waiting to be seized.
“It felt like a massive political shift that presented lots of opportunities that hadn’t existed before,” says Dunn, now 34.
But the American, then working for the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, also saw those opportunities slipping away. She was surprised at how little help was available for activist groups that needed technology to do their work. “There was no place to call up and say, ‘We’re this shape and size, these are our constituents, this is what we’re trying to accomplish. What might we be able to do with technology?’ "
So she, along with researchers Susannah Vila and Christopher Wilson, set out to build the Engine Room, a nonprofit that could connect social-change groups around the globe with the appropriate technology to accelerate their work and advise them on how to best use technology and data.
Now a $1.5 million organization, the Engine Room has had an outsize influence on how big global organizations like Oxfam International collect and use data in their work.
It’s also working with grass-roots groups, largely in the global south, to bolster digital leadership among organizations that aren’t, as Dunn puts it, “pale, male, and stale.”
“Instead of measuring our success by how much money we raise, we want to measure it by how many of our partners we’re able to connect with funders,” she says. “Over time, we’re cutting ourselves out as the middlemen.”
Rare Skills
About 45 percent of the charity’s revenue comes from fees it charges for its services, with the remainder coming from major grant makers including the William and Flora Hewlett, Oak, and Open Society foundations.
Over the last three years, Hewlett has given the Engine Room three six-figure grants totaling more than $1 million. The nonprofit won Hewlett’s support in part through its approach to partnerships with grass-roots organizations in the developing world, which David Sasaki, a program officer at the grant maker, calls “more respectful” than many of its peers.
“We would hear from the partners the way they had benefited from working with Engine Room — which, as a funder, I rarely hear,” Sasaki says.
“Usually what I hear from organizations that are ‘in country’ — like an advocacy organization in Tanzania — would be, ‘Why are you wasting this money on [international charities] when you could just be giving it directly to us instead?’ But they seemed genuinely appreciative of how Engine Room worked with them.”
Sasaki calls Dunn “wicked smart” and says she possesses a rare set of skills. “She understands the psychology that motivates individuals, the bureaucracies that guide and weigh down institutions,” he says. She also foresees the unintended consequences when changes are made within a network or system.
These multiple perspectives make Dunn a deft leader and collaborator, he says, whether one-on-one or working within an established institution.
“She’s constantly thinking about where we should be positioned five years from now,” Sasaki says.
Another reason for Dunn’s success is that she doesn’t get caught up in the hype surrounding technology, which Sasaki says can be a “debilitating” trait. “As more of the new philanthropists come from a tech background, having her experience and her steady, not-giving-into-the-hype-cycle perspective will be more valuable to civil society at large.”
Leading the Way on Privacy
One of the Engine Room’s biggest contributions, Sasaki says, has been to help broaden the debate about the ethical use and collection of data by nonprofits. About five years ago, the Engine Room began pushing the idea that human-rights groups should devise and adopt policies aimed at the responsible use of data. At the time, Dunn says, the nonprofit conversation about data was too narrowly focused on staying on the right side of data privacy laws and on tightening security safeguards to ward off hackers.
“We felt that that was far too limited,” Dunn says. “We decided to not only say it should be more than that, but what does that look like?”
In 2014, the Engine Room convened 35 policy makers, activists, technologists, data scientists, and designers to talk about how a civil society should use data responsibly. More events followed, including one about consent issues when gathering or distributing data.
Engine Room partner Oxfam adopted in 2015 the first responsible-data policy for an international charity. “They’re really focusing on it as a pillar of their strategy, which is exactly the kind of influence we want to have,” Dunn says.
Now when Oxfam collects data, if a user scrolls through the consent form too quickly, the scroll automatically slows down to give the person a chance to read it. It also now defaults to a “data minimization” approach. “Instead of trying to collect everything they can collect, they focus on collecting only what’s necessary,” she says.
In 2017, USAID put out a public call to seek ideas for responsible-data policies to help it craft rules for its grantees. In May, the European Union will introduce new regulations for collecting and using data.
The goal of the responsible-data movement, Dunn said at a Stanford University conference in February, is to make sure that how an organization handles issues like privacy and consent don’t conflict with the group’s overarching mission. “Basically, it’s thinking about people’s rights when we think about data,” she said.
An International Staff
Dunn says she’s always been interested in the “scrappy” business of forming and running organizations.
The charity leader grew up in Memphis and New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina hit, Dunn wrapped up college in Colorado and wound up living on the Gulf Coast. She spent a year helping a family friend set up a business, handling tech and other functions for the enterprise as its “minister of information.”
She enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Oslo to pursue her interests in tech, media, and democracy. After that, she worked for human-rights groups in Cairo and created the Engine Room.
Her organization, chartered in the United States, has no brick-and-mortar headquarters. Dunn and two other colleagues live and work in London, but a dozen other employees are spread around the globe.
The arrangement allows the Engine Room’s staff not only to live where they want to but also to work more closely with its far-flung partners.
“It’s the way to go, especially for human-rights work,” says Ryan Schlief, leader of the International Accountability Project, another nonprofit that has worked with the Engine Room and whose entire staff also works remotely. “Often, we must act quickly with the best information about the local context.”
Schlief’s organization focuses on giving communities affected by international development work more of a say in decisions made by governments and charities. He admires how Dunn’s organization promotes transparency by discussing failed projects on a blog on its website.
Last year, for instance, the blog included a post by one Engine Room partner, Amnesty International, about why it was abandoning a “panic button” phone app that was meant to summon emergency help for human-rights defenders in dangerous situations. (One reason: a glitch that resulted in too many false alarms.)
And every year, the Engine Room produces an internal “failure” report, with each employee talking about something he or she did that fell short of expectations.
Publicizing missteps, Dunn says, “decreases the amount of waste, and maybe we save another organization a lot of time and headache. And maybe we actually turn a failure into a success: We can model and show leadership for other international organizations like ours. We can demonstrate that we’re all in this together.”
However, Dunn cautions against taking such efforts too far, saying, “it’s important not to glorify failure in the sector.”
