Ethan Zuckerman responding to Shane Snow’s apalling piece on “fixing” the prison system.

This piece is so good I desperately want to quote the entire thing. But I would be remiss to rob you of the constant head nodding that occurs when reading it, so instead I’ll leave you with just my favourite part:

Of the many wise things my Yale students said during our workshop was a student who wondered if he should be participating at all. “I don’t know anything about prisons, I don’t have family in prison. I don’t know if I understand these problems well enough to solve them, and I don’t know if these problems are mine to solve.”

I dislike discouraging the act of trying to chart unknown territories in an effort to solve problems in novel ways. But too often, especially in the tech industry, I see technology that lacks empathy and understanding of the market it desgined for, and as a result, I think for those of us working in tech industry, its worth considering these questions for ourselves, and in the context that is relevant to the problems we want to solve.