Udayan Tandon

Udayan Tandon

Ph.D. Student at UC San Diego, Department of Computer Science
IPE Fellow
3C Fellow

Publications

šŸ† Hostile Ecologies: Navigating the Barriers to Community-Led Innovation

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2022), 2022 (šŸ† Honorable mention for being top 4% of all papers)

An alternative version of this paper titled ā€œBarriers to community-led real utopias: A case study of taxis in San Diegoā€ was presented at The Beyster Symposium ā€˜22 and Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics ā€˜22. The PDF is available here.

This paper describes how the contemporary technology innovation ecology is hostile to community-driven design. These hostilities are important to understand if we want to intervene in the policy landscape of technology innovation to support viable alternatives to big tech consolidation and more democratic ways of developing and maintaining technology. We contribute a thick description of the hostile ecologies faced by transportation workers, community organizers, and allied technology researchers as they work toward building a cooperatively-owned taxi business with a digital dispatching technology. Our findings show that the hostile innovation ecology manifests as constrained access to resources, an inequitable regulatory framework, diminished agency in the software design process, and limits to the will of our community partners. We discuss the paths toward innovation for United Taxi Workers San Diego as compared with transportation network companies (e.g. Lyft, Uber) in terms of access to funding, regulation, labor, expertise, and market. We argue that a critical examination of institutions and policies in the innovation ecology is a necessary step toward charting fair, equitable, and community-strengthening pathways for technology innovation in the future.

Recommended Citation: Udayan Tandon, Vera Khovanskaya, Enrique Arcilla, Mikaiil Haji Hussein, Peter Zschiesche, and Lilly Irani. 2022. Hostile Ecologies: Navigating the Barriers to Community-Led Innovation. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 443 (November 2022), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555544

Policy Reports

Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning

Policy report synthesizing independent research on impacts of transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft on local safety, economies, and social equity. Outline of a vision for creating publicly regulated and supported ā€œfirst mile last mileā€ transportationā€ that overcomes these issues.

Recommended Citation: Irani, Lilly, Hussein, Mikaiil, Zschiesche, Peter, Tandon, Udayan, Arcilla, Enrique, Hickman, Louise, Goldsmith, Montana, Singh, Simrandeep, & Khovanskaya, Vera. (2021). Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5225091

Past Publications