Event: Community listening – What have we learned about the role of technology?

On May 5th, 2026, The MERL Tech Initiative is hosting an event about tech-enabled community listening and the place of emerging technologies in this work. 

For those working across the social impact sector, it’s not news that effective, inclusive, and adaptive programs often benefit from having high-quality, timely data that reflect the diverse needs, experiences, and priorities of the communities they aim to serve. Over the past decade, several tech-enabled approaches have emerged to help organizations collect rapid insights that inform programmatic decision-making and enable responsive, relevant, impactful adaptation of activities and approaches. With the goal of making feedback faster, more efficient, and bringing previously unheard voices to the forefront, so that they can, ideally, be considered in programmatic decision-making, many of these tools and strategies seem to address – at least in part – this long-standing need for the sector to listen to communities in a participatory manner. 

In the past couple of years, many have become interested in the potential of AI tools to further enable existing program design, consultation, and evaluation efforts and to develop innovative ways to gather community-level insights to inform decisions. There is more discussion needed, however, on how well emerging tools might work technically and ethically – how can aspects of inclusivity, accessibility, co-design, trust-building, and data privacy be addressed – and how effective they might be in gathering relevant, accurate data in real-time or near real-time information. 

For this online event, we are honoured to be joined by a group of speakers doing fantastic work in community listening, feedback loops, and enhancing learning across a variety of sectors to share their experiences and insights with us:

• Jessica Mayberry: Jessica leads Video Volunteers (VV), an NGO advancing the ‘right to voice’ for marginalized communities as a pillar of inclusive democracy. VV envisions a world where lived experiences of marginalized communities are centered, diverse platforms amplify their voices, and grassroots stories drive systemic change. To date, VV has directly impacted over 40 million people through solutions sparked by grassroots storytelling. Currently, in collaboration with the Aapti Institute, VV is studying how AI can be used to listen meaningfully to development-related content created by marginalized communities—at scale and on their own terms.
  
• Soledad Muniz: Soledad is currently Director of Programmes at Insight Share, an organization harnessing participatory media as a community engagement, accountability, and people-led development tool. Soledad works at the intersection of participation, arts, media, and locally-led change, with a strong emphasis on accountability and community listening at the centre of everything she does. She has decades of experience working in participatory communication, especially when it comes to deploying participatory media in international development and humanitarian response. At Insight Share, the recognition that MEL processes can be extractive has led to them proposing instead approaches that focus on building trust, boosting people’s expression, and consciousness. 
  
• Gabriella Prandini: Gabriella Prandini is a senior humanitarian leader with over 20 years of experience. As Managing Director of Loop, she leads the organization’s growth and strategic direction, advancing an independent community feedback and accountability platform that enables people affected by crisis to safely share their experiences and influence how aid is delivered. She brings deep expertise in participatory approaches, trust-based partnerships, and the design and strengthening of community feedback mechanisms. With a strong focus on accountability within humanitarian systems, she has designed and implemented community feedback mechanisms at country level across diverse and complex operational contexts, combining strategic leadership with hands-on field experience.

Some of the questions we’ll explore together include: What has changed over the past decade with regard to tech-enabled community listening? What remains the same? What are the emerging possibilities with tech-enabled community listening? What drives them? What’s different about AI, if anything? What are the major challenges or tensions in tech-enabled community listening right now?

About MTI’s Community of Practice: Our community of practice is composed of over 1.8k practitioners in development, humanitarian, human rights, peacebuilding, and philanthropy, who focus on responsible, appropriate, and effective applications of tech and AI within MERL, specifically, and programmatic work more broadly. Membership is free (as is attendance in events). You can sign up here.