Grassroots Open Assistive Tech supports disability rights and the principles of disability justice.
We also believe in our right to repair, modify, and tinker with the assistive technology that is critical for our daily lives. Freely sharing information about how to build low-cost assistive devices is an important tool for liberation and empowerment for disabled people around the world.
Access to modify our more complex technological devices – for example, power wheelchairs, hearing aids, cpap machines, or insulin sensors and pumps – is also critical for us to customize these devices to our individual needs, and to share that information back out to the world as a public good.
Assistive tech isn’t just about “things”. To implement, maintain, and customize assistive tech for a disabled person needs an ecosystem of things, expertise, people, and a web of information, an ongoing commitment to develop and integrate the use of this tech with people’s lives.
Additionally, the smallest spark of information about assistive tech can lead to huge impacts. People may live with impairments for years or for their entire lifetimes without them, or anyone around them, coming up with ways that work in their local situations, with materials and resources available to them, for empowerment. This is part of why GOAT is committed to preserving and curating every scrap that we can, of the history of assistive technology.
Principles of Disability Justice
https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/
The disability rights movement is incredibly important in our fight to gain, keep, and defend our access to exist in the world: our right to education, to live independently in our communities, to self-determination, to free movement in public spaces.
In addition to these rights, we consider the disability justice principles as guidelines to keep our work grounded in the complicated intersectional identities and factors that affect us. Gatekeeping of assistive tech resources disproportionately harms the most vulnerable among us.
The EFA
We are a member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance, a grassroots network of community and campus organizations across the United States working to educate our neighbors about the importance of digital rights.
As a member organization of the EFA, we believe that technology should support the intellectual freedom at the heart of a democratic society. In the digital age, that entails advancing:
Free Expression
People should be able to speak their minds to whoever will listen.
Security
Technology should be trustworthy and answer to its users.
Privacy
Technology should allow private and anonymous speech, and allow users to set their own parameters about what to share with whom.
Creativity
Technology should promote progress by allowing people to build on the ideas, creations, and inventions of others.
Access to Knowledge
Curiosity should be rewarded, not stifled.
We uphold these principles by fighting for transparency and freedom in culture, code, and law.