Methods

Secondary Research
Landscape Analysis
Digital Ethnography
Social Listening
Surveys
Interviews
Focus Groups
Ecosystem Mapping
Grounded Theory
Strategic Planning

Challenge

Omidyar Network, a social change venture, wanted to understand what technology-related issues digital natives (Gen Z) cared about, learn more about the youth activism landscape related to digital tech, and understand the barriers young people face to engage in tech activism.

This would enable them to strengthen the intergenerational coalition focused on counterbalancing technology's growing harms and ensuring technology is a force for good.

Outcome

An overview of seven tech or tech-adjacent topics digital natives care about, recommendations to help ON understand where and how to support youth activists and inform future investments and programming, and a heatmap of the digital native activism landscape.

This project led to the creation of a $2 million Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund (RTYPF) to support young people working on responsible tech issues.

Process

We combined secondary research on tech-adjacent issues, digital ethnography, social listening, surveys, interviews, and focus groups. We employed qualitative analysis using thematic analysis and grounded theory, followed by landscape and opportunity mapping. Platforms like Dovetail for interview summaries and analysis, and Miro for synthesis and visualization, were instrumental in our process.

Secondary Research on Tech-Adjacent Issues & Digital Natives 

We reviewed trends, polling, articles, and books to build our knowledge of what values and issues matter, understand the landscape of active organizations, identify participants to speak to, and build our understanding of digital natives overall. This informed our understanding of the landscape, key players, and publicly available discourse around issues. I also supplemented our research with books to understand digital native mindsets, experiences, and perspectives that informed their activism.

I also expanded the lens of our research beyond just researching tech issues to look at their opposite: positive versions of the world people were building as alternatives to current platforms, policies, or issues through things like products, art, and speculative work. This area of inquiry became one of our focus areas for the second phase of research and inspired my personal interest in Web 3.

Digital Ethnography & Social Listening

We spent hours on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and Geneva to understand the conversation and relative heat of different issues and learn how digital natives leverage digital platforms for activism (their communication norms, patterns, and strategies).

Interviews and Focus Groups

We held 60-minute conversations with 36 digital native activists and subject matter experts on youth tech and activism, which added color and context to our secondary research and introduced us to emergent topics and new people to speak with. We also ran focus groups with digital natives working with a Gen Z consulting agency to generate additional issues and get feedback on our existing categorization.

Interview summaries were created and shared with the client in Dovetail so we could easily include video and audio clips and avoid extra production work creating summaries in PowerPoint. I also developed interview summary templates within Dovetail to standardize our approach.

Synthesis & Analysis

Thematic Analysis & Grounded Theory Coding

We conducted top-down and bottom-up coding based on the themes we discovered during our initial landscape analysis and emergent concepts from our interviews using Dovetail, a qualitative research insights platform. Grounded theory is an approach to qualitative data analysis that stays close to the interviewee's voice by reviewing transcripts in-depth and highlighting sections, which helps mitigate bias in analysis that can happen when we rely on notes or gravitate towards articulate or memorable interviews.

I combed transcripts and coded sections covering issues, perspectives, mindsets, activation journeys, and organizing experiences. I developed a set of codes related to our topic issues and also added codes from the ground up based on our interview content. Quotes could then be filtered by codes, exported to CSV, and dropped into Miro for further synthesis and analysis.

Landscape & Opportunity Mapping

We mapped the social proof from social media channels to visually represent the landscape. We also translated our codes into an opportunity map, which helped us codify the individual and systemic factors at play around different issues that matter to digital natives and how those influence their individual and collective activism efforts.

Insights

Digital Native Context: A Collective Awakening

I created a timeline of important events and technological shifts to visualize the foundational experiences, mindsets, and perspectives that shape the “why” behind what issues matter to digital natives and generational “rupture moments” where large-scale changes happened. Growing up online and always being connected exposes them to a continuous stream of world events and second-hand experiences that can spark a call to action. Different events and issues will resonate among different people, but the collective result is a generation attuned to the systemic, interrelated nature of many of the issues they care about.

We also observed and learned about core shifts in how digital natives communicate and organize, which wasn’t always posted on public social media platforms. For example, we learned conversations are increasingly happening in smaller or private groups within dedicated community spaces on Discord and emerging platforms like Geneva, and in the TikTok comments section. Many of these smaller, more contained environments provide a psychologically safer environment to explore opinions and activism with less risk of being “dunked on” for their posts years later.

The #Z7: Top Tech Issues Animating Youth

We identified and validated seven issues of importance to digital natives, then narrowed them down to three to do a deeper dive with our clients based on alignment with their strategic priorities (highlighted in bold). Read a detailed overview of all seven issues here at #Z7: A Youth-Led Agenda for the Responsible Tech Movement.

1. Digital Wellbeing

2. Digital Division

3. Social Justice

4. Alternative Systems & Economies

5. Digital Rights

6. Tech Worker Organizing & Activism

7. Climate Change

For each of the three issues, we highlighted what it was about, why it mattered to digital natives and Gen Z, provided mini profiles on organizations and activists, and contextualized the issue within the larger cultural and funding landscape.

Digital Wellbeing

The effects that technology – and particularly social media – have on one’s mental and emotional wellbeing.

Digital natives feel the psychological and emotional effects of being constantly online without always being aware of the hidden algorithmic mechanisms wearing them down.

Digital platforms are so core to digital natives’ existence that asking them to log off is like asking them to be invisible.
Digital Wellbeing overlaps with mental health, which receives a great deal of attention and funding ranging from medical institutions to celebrities.

Digital Rights

Concerns around data collection, privacy, surveillance, algorithmic bias, and censorship.

The indirect nature of the harms caused by digital surveillance and data collection means the issue isn’t a priority for most digital natives, but those who are aware of them feel powerless.

Despite the value of young peoples’ perspective, there is a sense that to be taken seriously in the digital rights discussion, one needs to have an advanced degree and a level of fluency in complex topics, which can discourage digital natives.

With digital spaces serving as the primary outlets for expression and creation, digital natives in online communities react quickly to issues that threaten them, like policy changes.

Alternative Systems & Economies

The potential for Web3 and the creator economy to enable greater freedom to pursue one’s ambitions, create a better, more inclusive internet, and address an array of techno-social issues.

Web 3 represents an opportunity to wrest control back from big tech and create a collectively-powered, values-driven internet.

While digital natives are early adopters of Web3, finding one’s place can feel intimidating, especially to people historically excluded from tech. Web 3 and the the creator economy parallels start-up and entrepreneur culture, complete with billions of investment from VC funds.

Redefining the Activist Support Ecosystem

Through opportunity mapping, we discovered the needs of young organizers can be bucketed into three categories.

Personal: Needs relating to current and aspiring activists as people so they can maintain their energy and capacity for activism over time.

Organizational: Needs associated with running a youth-led organization.

External: Needs related to interacting with others like grantees, funders, governments, and companies.

While people might think of support just in terms of grants or supporting a youth-led organization, we need to go beyond the organization itself and study up, a concept I learned from HmntyCntrd that involves looking at the surrounding ecosystem around an individual or issue to better understand the power dynamics. Making changes to the environments in which young activists work would create a more welcoming space with fewer barriers that would reduce the burden of individual burnout and change conditions to make activism more fruitful and joyful.

Results

With information from our clients about strategic and institutional resources and intervention areas we could draw from, we developed a set of recommendations across these personal, organizational, and external activist dimensions. We drew upon these, which included categories like Networking, Funding, and Advocacy. We also suggested the development of a new category, Infrastructure and Resources, to provide support for young organizers to structure and run their organizations.

Impact

As an immediate next step, we shared this work with other partners in their funding ecosystem. Later in the year, Omidyar Network and 14 other partners announced the creation of The Responsible Technology Youth Power Fund, a $2 million fund to support youth activists.

Key Learnings

1. Challenge assumptions early: We initially assumed digital natives' activism mirrored older generations, expecting linear "activation journeys" on social media. Research revealed vastly different norms, highlighting the need to question our preconceptions and pivot methods early.

2. Circle back and engage with research participants throughout the process: Keeping interviewees involved throughout the project not only validated their contributions but also tapped into their unique community knowledge, enriching our deep dives and expanding our network.

Team

Strategy Director and Designer