I keep reading about everything that is going wrong.
A government takes something that belonged to everyone and gives it to a few. A war destroys in one afternoon what took generations to build. A company collects more information because it can, not because it should. An algorithm decides who receives help, who is suspicious, who gets the job and who is quietly excluded.
Then I close the article and return to work.
There is a backlog to refine. A meeting to attend. A bug somebody marked as urgent. A dashboard that needs another number nobody will remember next week.
Sometimes I wonder if this is what life has become for many of us.
We build systems all day while the larger system appears to be falling apart.
We write code, manage products, move data, secure servers, design interfaces and automate processes. We solve problems for companies that already have hundreds of people solving problems for them.
And somewhere else, a school cannot update its website.
A nonprofit loses donations because its form stopped working.
A family gives up on a government benefit because the application makes no sense.
A journalist stores sensitive information in an account protected by a reused password.
A town discusses flood protection using five spreadsheets that contradict each other.
There is a sizable distance between the technology we know how to build and the technology many people actually live with.
The world is not moving uniformly toward progress or collapse. It is dividing into different trajectories.
In 2025, 74% of humanity lived under autocratic government, compared with 50% in 2005. Only 26% lived in democracies, and just 7% in liberal democracies. Yet decline was not universal: V-Dem identified 18 countries undergoing democratization, including Fiji, Timor-Leste, Montenegro, Senegal’s neighbour The Gambia, Mauritius, Botswana and the Solomon Islands (source).
The civic picture is even narrower. CIVICUS reports that only 7% of the global population lives in countries with free or relatively open civic space. Civil society is under severe pressure in 122 of 198 countries and territories; in 2025, protesters were detained in at least 82 countries and restrictive civic laws were adopted or proposed in at least 66. (source)
At the same time (source):
- 117.8 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2025—about one person in every 70;
- 68.7 million were displaced inside their own countries;
- 68% of refugees were hosted by low- and middle-income countries;
- 65% remained in countries neighbouring the place from which they fled.
Humanitarian agencies estimate that roughly 252 million people require assistance in 2026. The coordinated appeal is approximately US$34 billion, but only about one-third had been funded by midyear (source).
Meanwhile, the World Bank identifies 39 fragile and conflict-affected economies containing more than one billion people. Approximately 421 million people in them live on less than US$3 a day, and these countries are projected to contain nearly 60% of the world’s extreme poor by 2030. (source).
What should we do with that?
Where should someone with digital skills go if they want to help build a better future?
For a while, I thought the answer had to be a place.
Brussels, where rules written in one room can affect millions of people.
Tallinn or Helsinki, where digital government is treated as infrastructure rather than as a collection of unrelated websites.
Bucharest or Chișinău, where institutions are still changing and where one functioning public system can alter how people relate to government.
Kyiv or Lviv, where rebuilding will not mean only replacing roads and buildings, but deciding what kind of state will emerge from destruction.
Nairobi, Dakar or Accra, where young populations, growing cities and digital systems are colliding at enormous speed.
Suva, where technology is not only about convenience but about helping communities prepare for a changing climate.
These places matter.
There are moments in history when a city becomes more than a city. It becomes a place where decisions are still open, where institutions have not yet settled into their final form, and where a capable person can enter a room and change what happens next.
But most people cannot simply pack a suitcase and leave. They have children. They have parents who need them. They have a mortgage, a partner with a career, a visa that does not permit heroic improvisation, or a bank account that makes a five-year experiment impossible.
Maybe they are already exhausted.
Does that mean they cannot help?
I do not think so.
I think I was asking the wrong question. The question is not only where I should live.
The question is: Where is something I know how to do desperately needed?
That place may be on another continent.
It may also be twenty minutes from home.
It may not even be a physical place. It may be an open-source project maintained by three people who are tired of answering the same questions. It may be a privacy tool that works well but is impossible for an ordinary person to understand. It may be a public dataset that exists technically but is so badly organized that nobody can use it.
In digital work, geography is strange.
I can live in Toronto and contribute to a project used in Moldova.
I can live in Bucharest and help design a system discussed in Brussels.
I can test software used by humanitarian organizations without standing in a refugee camp.
I can improve the security of a local organization without ever calling the work “public-interest technology.”
The world does not always need me to arrive physically.
Sometimes it needs me to stop scrolling, open the repository and solve one problem.
What are you actually good at?
We describe ourselves using job titles.
Developer.
Designer.
Product manager.
Data analyst.
Security specialist.
But a job title says little about the thing another human being might need from us.
What can you actually do?
- Can you enter a conversation where five people disagree and discover the one decision that must be made?
- Can you look at a system nobody understands and explain how it works?
- Can you make a service usable by someone who is frightened, tired or unfamiliar with technology?
- Can you take a process that requires twenty emails and reduce it to three steps?
- Can you find the security mistake everybody else missed?
- Can you turn a mountain of inconsistent data into something a person can use to make a decision?
- Can you write instructions that do not make the reader feel stupid?
These are not small abilities.
Inside a large technology company, they may feel ordinary because everyone around you has some version of them. Outside that environment, they may be rare.
A competent backend developer can be one person in a department of two hundred. The same person can be the difference between a small organization having a functioning system and having no system at all.
A product manager may spend years moving features between quarterly roadmaps. The same person could help a public institution understand why citizens abandon an essential application halfway through.
A designer may spend months changing conversion rates by fractions of a percentage. The same designer could make a service usable by people with disabilities, older devices or limited digital literacy.
The skill is the same. The consequence is different.
Do not begin with your idea
People who work in technology like to build.
We see a problem and immediately imagine a platform.
A dashboard.
An application.
An AI assistant.
A new organization with a name, a logo and a roadmap.
Building gives us the feeling that we are moving. But sometimes the most useful thing we can do is resist that feeling. Before building, find out who is already working on the problem.
What do they need?
What have they already tried?
What failed?
What boring limitation prevents them from doing more?
Maybe they do not need another platform.
Maybe they need somebody to repair the system they already have.
Maybe they need documentation.
Maybe they need the application translated.
Maybe they need backups.
Maybe they need someone to review the security of a form that collects information from vulnerable people.
Maybe they need one integration between two existing tools.
The technology world produces enough abandoned prototypes. A better future will not be built from more demonstrations. It will be built from things people can use on Monday morning.
Where can digital work matter?
I see five areas where the difference between what is needed and what is available is still painfully large.
1. Public services
Government software is not simply software. When a shopping website is confusing, someone abandons a purchase. When a government service is confusing, someone may lose access to healthcare, housing, benefits, education, legal documents or the ability to operate a business.
The people most affected are often those with the least time and the fewest alternatives.
They use older phones.
They have limited internet access.
They do not speak the official language fluently.
They are tired.
They are afraid of making a mistake.
They cannot call a lawyer or ask somebody in the company Slack channel for help.
A public form that works properly may not look revolutionary.
For the person who needs it, it can change an entire month.
2. Privacy and digital rights
We are building identity, surveillance and decision-making systems into ordinary life. We are doing it quickly.
What information should be collected?
Who controls it?
Can two parts of a person’s life be connected without their permission?
Can an automated decision be challenged?
Can someone prove who they are without revealing everything else about themselves?
These questions are often treated as policy questions and left to lawyers. Then they are treated as technical questions and left to engineers.
They are both.
We need people who can read a privacy policy and then open the code. People who understand that a system can be legally compliant and still be wrong. People willing to ask not only whether a feature can be built, but what kind of relationship it creates between the user and the institution.
3. Climate and resilience
Climate change is physical, but preparing for it increasingly depends on software and data.
Where will flooding happen?
Which buildings face the greatest heat risk?
When should an alert be sent?
Which road, hospital or power system is most vulnerable?
The data often exists somewhere. The problem is that it is incomplete, inconsistent, buried in reports or displayed through a dashboard nobody understands.
A beautiful visualization is not enough. The question is whether somebody can use it to decide where to place resources before the water arrives.
4. Humanitarian systems
People escaping war or disaster do not stop needing technology. They need information, identification, communication, money, shelter, healthcare and a way to find family members.
But the software must work on inexpensive phones, in several languages, with unreliable internet and under conditions where a data leak can put someone in danger. This is not the right place for experimentation performed for personal satisfaction. It is a place for careful work through organizations that understand the consequences.
Sometimes the most valuable contribution is not a new feature.
It is making the existing feature work offline.
It is removing unnecessary personal data.
It is translating the interface.
It is creating a backup process that someone has actually tested.
5. Sometimes it might be an organization near you.
This may be the least exciting answer. It may also be the most useful. The school, clinic, library, charity, cultural group or local newspaper near you probably has a digital problem.
Maybe its website cannot be updated.
Maybe the person who created its accounts left three years ago.
Maybe it stores everything in one spreadsheet.
Maybe it has no backups.
Maybe its donation form has been broken for months and nobody knows how much money has been lost.
Nobody is going to publish an article about the person who repaired that form.
There will be no international conference about it.
The organization will simply start receiving donations again.
Is that enough? I think it is.
How much time do you really have? It is easy to be generous with an imaginary life. In that life, I have ten free hours every week.
I wake up early, finish my work, exercise, read, maintain relationships and still have enough energy to contribute to an important project in the evening. My real life is less obedient. Some weeks I may have five hours. Some weeks I may have one. Sometimes I have time but no mental energy left to use it well.
The answer is not to promise more. It is to promise less and return.
Two hours a week for a year is more than one inspired weekend followed by silence.
One pull request every month can become part of a project’s rhythm.
One afternoon helping a local organization can become a relationship.
One small piece of work can become another.
The people doing meaningful work do not always need enthusiasm.
They need someone who will still answer after the first problem becomes boring.
Complete one small piece of work. Then notice what happened.
Did anyone use it?
Did the organization respond?
Was the problem real?
Did the work matter?
Would you do it again on an ordinary Tuesday when you are tired and nobody is watching?
If the answer is yes, take the next step.
Not ten steps.
One.
Should you ever move?
Maybe.
Some work cannot be done through a screen. Trust needs rooms, faces, repetition. It needs the same conversation more than once. It needs language, patience, and the humility of being there long enough to understand what the dashboard cannot show you. Perhaps the work will eventually take you to Brussels, Tallinn, Chișinău, Kyiv, Nairobi, or Suva.
But the move should come after the work has already begun. A real organization should need you there. A relationship should exist. The problem should be more than a backdrop for your own reinvention. Otherwise, it is too easy to turn another country’s struggle into a chapter in our personal story.
What does impact look like? Usually, smaller than we imagine.
- A public service that works on an old phone.
- A nonprofit that stops losing people in a broken form.
- A privacy tool that no longer requires an expert.
- A humanitarian system that still works when the internet does not.
- A local organization that can keep going after the volunteer leaves.
Where should you go?
Go where the problem is real.
Go where your skill is useful.
Go where others have already started.
Go where you can stay after the excitement disappears.
That may be another country. It may be an online community. It may be the institution where you already work. It may be the library down the street.
You only need to help one important thing work better than it did before.
Find one system that matters.
Make it work a little better.
Then come back tomorrow.