Detroit Community Technology Project

The Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP) is a Detroit-based, Black-led community-technology and data-justice group that builds neighborhood-controlled wireless internet infrastructure, runs the longest-running US grassroots data-justice programme, and produced the June 2019 report that named the case against Detroit's Project Green Light facial-recognition deployment for a national civil-society audience. Formally established in 2014 by Diana J. Nucera as one of Allied Media Projects' founding Sponsored Projects, it operates out of the AMP building at 4126 Third Street in Detroit and articulates its mission as the use and creation of technology rooted in community needs that strengthens neighbors' connection to each other, and to the planet, guided by the Detroit Digital Justice Principles of access, participation, common ownership, and healthy communities.

DCTP is the corpus's first entity capturing the Detroit data-justice strand — a Black-led, US-Midwest, neighborhood-infrastructure-and-anti-surveillance organising form structurally distinct from the West Coast community-control-of-police-surveillance work anchored by Oakland Privacy. Where Oakland Privacy's theory of change runs through municipal ordinance and a standing privacy commission, DCTP's runs through community-owned wireless mesh networks, a popular-education and toolkit-publishing pipeline, and the production of widely-circulated critical reports that supply the analytical apparatus for other groups' campaigns. Its named programme leadership has included Tawana Petty as Director of Data Justice (the role through which much of the Project Green Light fight was carried).

Origin and structure

DCTP's roots predate the 2014 formal-launch date. Allied Media Projects partnered with the Open Technology Institute of the New America Foundation in 2012 to launch the Detroit Digital Stewards programme — a community wireless-mesh-networking curriculum and training cohort that became the first US curriculum of its kind. Diana Nucera, then at AMP, co-developed the curriculum and the broader incubation model for community wireless networks. By 2014 the work had grown to the point where AMP spun it out as a dedicated Sponsored Project under the AMP fiscal-sponsorship structure, giving it programme-level independence while keeping it inside AMP's organisational and financial apparatus. Nucera served as founding Director from 2014 until her departure from AMP in mid-2019; the July 2019 transition placed Katie Hearn as overall Director, Tawana Petty as Director of Data Justice Programming, and Janice Gates as Director of Equitable Internet Initiative Programming. As of 2025-2026 DCTP is actively recruiting an Executive Director and Operations Manager, indicating an ongoing leadership transition between the post-Nucera programme directorate and the next institutional phase.

The AMP fiscal-sponsorship arrangement is structurally significant: DCTP is not a free-standing 501(c)(3) but a programme that draws on AMP's back-office infrastructure while operating its own programmes, staff, and public identity. That arrangement places DCTP inside the broader Allied Media Projects ecosystem alongside other AMP Sponsored Projects, and accounts for the joint presence of DCTP and the wider Detroit Digital Justice Coalition (which AMP also helps anchor) inside many of the same organising campaigns.

Programmes

DCTP runs three named flagship programmes that have grown sequentially since 2012.

• Digital Stewards Program (2012). The original AMP / Open Technology Institute initiative — a community-led training cohort that prepares neighborhood leaders to design, deploy, and maintain community wireless networks. The Stewards curriculum was the first of its kind in the US for mesh wireless and has been replicated internationally through OTI's seed-grant programme in Brazil, Argentina, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Namibia, and India. The Stewards have trained organisers age 21–80 across Morningside, Poletown, Field St., the Boggs School, Ewald Circle, and Southwest Detroit.
• Equitable Internet Initiative (EII, 2015). The neighborhood-scale community internet build-out that grew out of the Stewards programme — an attempt to redistribute power, resources, and connectivity to the most marginalised of Detroiters, starting in Islandview, the North End, and Southwest Detroit and later extending to Highland Park. EII operates through anchor partnerships with neighborhood organisations — Grace in Action in Southwest Detroit, Church of the Messiah in Islandview, and the North End Woodward Community Coalition in the North End — that host the network equipment and convene the local Stewards cohort. The programme has been framed by Allied Media Projects as a national model for neighborhood-based ISPs.
• Data Justice Program (2016). The strand that places DCTP inside the make-AI-good corpus rather than only the broader community-internet movement. The programme addresses the community impact of data collection and surveillance technologies, both on and offline, and has produced the bulk of DCTP's public-facing analytical output on facial recognition, predictive policing, and algorithmic data systems.

Alongside these, DCTP co-developed two named curricula with external partners — the Consentful Tech curriculum with the Consentful Tech Project, and the Next Gen Apps curricula with Grace in Action — and continues to host DiscoTechs (Discovering Technology fairs), the multimedia community-technology fair format Nucera co-developed as a founding member of the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. The DiscoTech format has been replicated in dozens of communities globally.

The Project Green Light fight

DCTP's most-cited contribution to the make-AI-good field is the work it has carried — through the Data Justice Program and in partnership with Our Data Bodies — against Detroit's Project Green Light surveillance-and-facial-recognition deployment. Project Green Light is a public-private partnership led by the Detroit Police Department that installed surveillance cameras at participating businesses across Detroit from 2016 onward, and onto which Detroit Police Department subsequently layered facial-recognition processing using DataWorks Plus software. By the time DCTP's critical work landed, the camera network had reached nearly 700 locations across Detroit.

In June 2019 DCTP published A Critical Summary of Detroit's Project Green Light and Its Greater Context, the report that influenced the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners' 2019 facial-recognition policy and supplied the analytical apparatus that other Detroit and national civil-society groups built campaigns around. The report is licensed under CC BY 4.0, which has helped its circulation. The following year, DCTP co-produced Vehicles of Surveillance: Detroit's Project Green Light with Our Data Bodies (April 2020), the longer-form companion piece that framed the Detroit fight as a national pilot-resistance case — the argument being that surveillance technologies piloted in majority-Black cities become national models unless they are resisted at the pilot site.

Petty's named counter-campaign — Green Chairs, Not Green Lights — proposed neighborhood presence and community relationship as the alternative to camera-and-algorithm safety, and carried the framing into community-meeting and popular-education settings across Detroit. The framing was carried into national US tech-justice discourse by Petty's July 2020 Wired op-ed Defending Black Lives Means Banning Facial Recognition, written from her DCTP perch and her concurrent Stanford PACS fellowship.

The named wrongful-arrest cases of Michael Oliver and Robert Williams, both Black Detroiters falsely identified through Project Green Light's DataWorks Plus pipeline, became the concrete demonstration cases for the framings DCTP had developed analytically. Williams's case in particular — widely cited as the first known wrongful arrest in the US caused by facial recognition — became a national talking point that DCTP's prior reports had pre-positioned for civil-society uptake.

Place in the movement

DCTP sits at the intersection of three strands of the make-AI-good field that are not always tracked together:

• The community-owned infrastructure strand — the building of neighborhood-controlled wireless networks as a redistributive answer to digital exclusion. DCTP's Digital Stewards and Equitable Internet Initiative make it the principal US grassroots anchor for this strand, and the source of curricula that have been replicated internationally.
• The community-led data-justice strand — popular education, toolkit-publishing, and participatory research aimed at giving non-AI communities the apparatus to engage AI and data-systems decisions. The DCTP Data Justice Program, in coalition with Our Data Bodies, Data for Black Lives, and the Algorithmic Justice League (the latter two via Petty's later roles), is one of the most-cited examples.
• The municipal-surveillance resistance strand — the city-specific organising against named surveillance deployments, of which the Project Green Light fight is DCTP's load-bearing contribution. This strand complements but is methodologically distinct from the standing-ordinance-plus-commission shape Oakland Privacy has pursued: DCTP's route runs through public reports, popular education, and community-meeting-scale counter-campaigns rather than through legislative apparatus, in part because Detroit's municipal political landscape has not afforded the ordinance route Oakland's has.

Within the corpus, DCTP also fills a Black-led-data-justice gap structurally distinct from the algorithmic-bias public-scientist register anchored by the Algorithmic Justice League: where AJL operates as a research-advocacy hybrid producing audits and public-policy testimony from a Cambridge/Boston base, DCTP operates as a city-scale grassroots organising group whose theory of change runs through neighborhood infrastructure and community popular education. The two are connected in practice — Tawana Petty carried the Detroit framings into AJL's federal-policy and international-AI-governance work after 2021 — but the institutional shapes are distinct, and the corpus needs both to capture the field.