About us

What is the Progressive Technology Project?

PTP is a social justice movement partner with a mission to strengthen grassroots organizing groups to achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently through the strategic use of technology. PTP is committed to social justice work because we believe that real political change can only be achieved when people of color, indigenous people, immigrants, women, low-income, LGBTQ, and people whose lives intersect these communities collectively build power in their communities to drive systemic change that dismantles oppressive structures, inequalities, and conditions. Learn more

Powerbase

The database for community organizers

People Of Color Techie Training

Fighting racism within movement technology communities

Technology Strategy

Bringing politics & technology to organzing, grassroots fundraising, and communications

Voter Project

More than voter turnout

Digital Security

Holistic approach to movement security

Next Gen Technology

What is revolutionary technology and how do we develop it?

Testimonials

We have worked with hundreds of movement organizations over our 20 year history.

  • I learned things in this [Grassroots Fundraising & Technology] training that will greatly increase my organization’s ability to have successful fundraising campaigns.

    Misha Cornelius

    Black Organizing Project

  • PTP helps our organization combine communications and technology to go further.

    Christina Parker

    Grassroots Leadership

  • PowerBase is a gift for organizations large and small that want technology that is designed by and for organizers.

    Robin Schneider

    Texas Campaign for the Enivironment

  • Thanks to PTP’s REVERB team Iowa CCI has not just one, but TWO new websites that are simple, affordable and – get this – useful.

    Hugh Epsey

    Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

From our blog

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Amazon and Palantir feel the heat

on July 12, 2019

Progressive Technology Project staff joined many Powerbase using organizations this week to protest both Palantir and Amazon’s contracts and complicity with ICE. Over a hundred people showed up monday morning in front of Palantir’s office. Several days later, hundreds more protested Amazon’s annual developers conference at the Javitz Center in New York. Over the last several years, corporate technology’s true colors have been emerging: Facebook’s pathological disregard for privacy, Google’s employment of over 120,000 temp and contract workers (more than half their total workforce), and Yahoo’s security breach exposing 3 billion accounts just to name a few.

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The Technology Behind ICE

on January 28, 2019

What do databases, the cloud and a morally unjust immigration system have in common? It turns out: quite a lot. According to a recent report from mijente, “technology companies [are] playing an increasingly central role in facilitating the expansion and acceleration of arrests, detentions, and deportations.” In the course of researching Palantir, the relatively unknown software company with huge Department of Homeland Security contracts (founded by the famously right-wing Peter Thiel), mijente discovered that many roads lead back to a much more familiar company: Amazon.

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Voices of Resistance: Using technology as a movement-building tool

on April 23, 2018

Progressive Technology Project Executive Director Alice Aguilar has been interviewed by Rebekah Barber on Facing South! Check out the full interview. From the Intro: This week the nation’s attention was focused on the nefarious ways technology is deployed, as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about how his company has violated the privacy of its customers and allowed the vast amount of data it collects from them to be used for ethically and legally questionable political propaganda efforts.

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Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

on April 16, 2018

To many of us, the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal sounds like old news: we have known that Facebook is collecting a dangerously large amount of our personal information for years. However, there is something different with this scandal and it may change the way the US movement thinks about the corporate Internet and our strategies for change. Since the rise of centralized Internet services like Google and Facebook there have emerged two main arguments against them.

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