Mapping Experiences of Injustice: Developing a Crowdsourced Mapping Tool for Documenting Good Practices for Overcoming Social Exclusion

Social justice seeks to support fairness through fostering relationships that enhance and strengthen responsibility for one another. It is built upon the principle of equality of opportunity. In the context of government and governance it is often linked to specific policies or programs that seek to ensure the fair (re)distribution of services and benefits. Information communication technologies (ICTs) have opened new opportunities and challenges for enacting social justice. We have identified eight groups who are often excluded from full access and participation in the digital realm: low-socioeconomic status individuals, remote and inner-city groups, indigenous groups, recent migrants, the homeless, people with disabilities, people with mental illnesses, and senior citizens. In order to better understand the relationship and tensions between and within these populations, and digital inequalities and social justice, we have developed an interactive website that uses crowdsourcing to facilitate the sharing of examples where organizations and governments have directly engaged with excluded groups using ICTs and more specifically, sites using ICTs with open data. Recognizing the existence of these efforts to address and overcome these inequalities, we provide a platform for the discovery and sharing of good practices. We anticipate that this platform will bring together activists, academics and government personnel in order to collectively learn as well as contribute to how ICTs and open data can act as a means to enhance social justice