Braid: Elevating underserved PIT practitioners and student voices through collaborative online storytelling

Braid, an online collaborative platform, provides a virtual environment for the community of underserved public interest technology (PIT) practitioners and students where individuals can network and learn from one another using the rich insights generated from community member stories. Its primary objective is to help shape PIT into a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable environment with the end goal of creating technological solutions that benefit all. This is imperative due to the increased relevance of technology in making resource allocation decisions, particularly in the public domain. A PIT space that elevates the lived experiences of underrepresented communities and that is inclusive of all voices is a requirement in ensuring fairness and equity in society. Working with a community of underserved PIT practitioners and students, Braid provides the digital infrastructure needed to address the constraints that limit underserved PIT practitioners' effective-ness and impact in PIT. Crucial to achieving this objective are storytelling activities. Braid's storytelling-driven approach supports individuals by providing prompts and a user-friendly experience to help translate their localized, idiosyncratic experiences to one that others could learn and benefit from. Overtime, we envision having a content rich platform, both in terms of the volume of participation and the variety of experiences that allows us to synthesize trends or patterns across these unique individual insights into explicit knowledge that affords streamlined learning. This feature will be invaluable in creating a critical mass of individuals, with diverse experiences that have historically been at the peripheries, as co-creators of tech solutions that are more representative of the population.