All Hands on Tech

9The Citizen Tech Landscape

Dr. Martin Luther King famously noted, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In a far less profound and important—but still interesting—context, we’d argue that the arc of the information technology universe is long, but it bends toward citizens. Tom is getting up there in age, and he started his career in computing several decades ago by helping citizens do what we now call data science. Ian is substantially younger, but he’s been working with citizen automation tools (or what became them) for more than two decades now. We’ve both seen considerable bending of the arc already.

In this chapter, we’re not going to tell you about punched cards and living room—sized computers. But citizen enablement with technology has been happening for long enough so that there ought to be some lessons we can learn from it. We can also draw from trends taking place in other realms of information technology to explain and predict what’s been happening with citizen-oriented tech. We’ll also describe how the previously separate domains of citizen application development, citizen automation, and citizen data analysis and science are converging.

The earliest use of the word computer referred not to a machine but to a person who performed complex calculations—as at NASA in the triple Oscar-winning film Hidden Figures. It’s possible that the shift to AI for citizen development will be as momentous as the shift from human to machine-based computers. ...