All Tech Is Human raises $2.5 million to expand! New hires, upcoming livestreams, and more!
Plus videos and pictures from our DC gathering, hackathon announcement, and join our six working groups.
🥳Yep, there is no typo in the headline: All Tech Is Human raised $2.5 million to expand our work! In today’s newsletter, you will read about our livestream happening this Thursday, our Responsible Tech Mixer in NYC on March 11th, and two new hires announced today.
🎊We’re still riding high from an incredible gathering in Washington last week, our new mentorship program cohort kicking off, and we’re being flooded with interest for our six (!!) new working groups. Thank you for all of the support!
👋We are excited to announce a new livestream around problematic deepfakes that is extremely timely (speaker info soon). Our organization is also busy expanding our education materials and Responsible Tech career resources and lining up additional gatherings in NYC, London, DC, SF, and beyond (interest form). Lastly, with our new hires, we will be ramping up our Responsible Tech University Network.
✨All Tech Is Human is building something really special—a better approach to tackling thorny tech & society issues. Right now, society is stuck. We aim to get us unstuck by building the world’s largest multistakeholder, multidisciplinary network in Responsible Tech that moves at the speed of tech, leverages collective intelligence, and diversifies the types of people involved in the process. Yeah, we’re going big.
Together, we work to solve tech and society’s thorniest issues. Read about all of the ways for you to get involved below 👇
🤯We’re growing into a Responsible Tech juggernaut!
First off, thank you to everyone reading this newsletter who has believed in the mission of All Tech Is Human. We have spent the last five years mapping the ecosystem, building an incredibly large and powerful community, and creating a new approach for tackling complex tech & society issues. Spoiler alert: it’s working.
🙏Thank you to the thousands of individuals across the globe who have participated in our working groups that have created valuable resources like the Responsible Tech Guide, mentored others in our mentorship program, shared resources in our Slack community, attended or spoken at our gatherings and livestreams, shared (and found) jobs through our Responsible Tech Job Board, and so much more. Today we are thrilled to announce support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Oak Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Siegel Family Endowment, and Mozilla Foundation that allow us to offer numerous free activities and will help us have major expansion in the years to come! And you can see all of our activities here.
“Re-envisioning the intersection of technology and human dignity is a critical inquiry if we hope to create new resilience in a time of accelerating societal change. Our investment in All Tech is Human's work recognizes their potential to actively construct a diverse, global ecosystem to find new solutions and build broad consensus on digital challenges. ATIH and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation share a commitment to moving quickly and responsibly, prioritizing lived experience and shared intelligence, and diversifying the tech pipeline to ensure a responsible, safe, and inclusive technological future.” -Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation President
👋Would you like to help spread the word about All Tech Is Human? Here is a LinkedIn post about this announcement, along with a personal post from founder David Ryan Polgar. The funding announcement below also includes some FAQs about our work and accomplishments! Check it out.
📚We’re giving away 200 copies of Frank McCourt’s new book Our Biggest Fight at our upcoming Responsible Tech Mixer in NYC on March 11th!
Our upcoming mixer in NYC is shaping up to be big! The first 200 attendees who register and show up will receive a free copy of Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in a Digital Age. Please keep in mind that all of our mixers reach capacity; so sign up, show up early, and meet others who deeply care about building a better tech future!
This mixer is being done in collaboration with our friends at Project Liberty. There will be food, drink, and a fireside chat w/ Frank McCourt and Jennifer Strong (Host of SHIFT Podcast, PRX Pulitzer Fellow for AI Accountability).
👍Join us this Thursday for our livestream!
Sandra Khalil (Head of Partnerships; Trust and Safety Lead at All Tech Is Human) will be moderating a conversation about the current state of tech-facilitated and enabled gender-based violence this Thursday at 4pm ET. She will be joined by Nakshathra Suresh (Co-Founder of eiris), Hera Hussein (Founder and CEO of CHAYN), and Sudeshna Mukherjee (Policy Communications Consultant).
🥳All Tech Is Human is thrilled to announce two key new additions to our team so we can continue to grow the Responsible Tech movement!
We’re growing our capacity to further our mission and help improve our broad range of activities that have helped make a larger and stronger Responsible Tech ecosystem. Steven Kelts will serve as the Director of All Tech Is Human’s Responsible University Network while Sherine Kazim will serve as the Operations and Strategy Lead. Please welcome them to the team! Check out the announcement and their incredible backgrounds here.
“I have dedicated my entire career to putting humans at the center of all experiences, looking at the whole self to determine what people want, need and love. All Tech Is Human takes that one step further encouraging us to create a future that is better aligned with public interest. That deep commitment to improving the responsible tech ecosystem is exactly why I joined the team – positive impact, at scale.” -Sherine Kazim
"I've been working on the pipeline into responsible tech careers for years, so All Tech Is Human is just a natural fit. I've run programs working with programmers and engineers, getting them to consider ethical issues; and I've worked with humanities graduate students, getting them engaged with tech issues. We've really got to expand the pipeline from both of those sides -- that's something All Tech Is Human understood from its founding." - Steven Kelts
📸 Scenes from Responsible Tech DC






🎊We had a packed house of 200+ individuals across civil society, government, industry, and academia join us for our Responsible Tech DC gathering on Feb 28! Our gathering focused on reducing online harms against youth, uplifting healthy digital spaces, and strengthening the field of Trust & Safety. We’ll have key takeaways and more to share in our next newsletter. Check out two panel videos and pictures right now.
👍Designing for Youth Around Autonomy, Inclusion, and Safety
All Tech Is Human Head of Partnerships & Trust and Safety Lead Sandra Khalil moderated a conversation with Adele Ann Taylor (Youth Digital Programs and Partnerships Senior Manager at Thorn), Dr. Siva Mathiyazhagan (Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Strategies and Impact at the SAFE Lab, University of Pennsylvania and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University), Victoria McCullough (TikTok's Trust and Safety Outreach and Partnerships team for the Americas), and Ava Smithing (Director of Advocacy and Operations at the Young People’s Alliance) in a panel conversation about youth empowerment through autonomy, inclusion, and safety.
🤔What is the Current State of Trust and Safety?
Andrew Zack (Policy Manager, Family Online Safety Institute) moderated a conversation on the current state of Trust & Safety that featured Vaishnavi (Founder and principal of Vyanams Strategies), Chanel Cornett (Senior Counsel on the Trust & Safety and Privacy teams at Zoom), Dave Byrne (Founder of TrustRaise) about the current state of Trust and Safety amid tech layoffs and an evolving tech landscape.
Would you like to see us come back to Washington, DC?! Reach out our way and help make it happen.
👏There is a wide range of events, resources, and projects throughout the Responsible Tech ecosystem that you can get involved with.
Do you have a resource you would like shared with our community? Ping Sandra Khalil from our team. We like to uplift the entire Responsible Tech ecosystem!
😍In this week’s community submissions, you’ll read about events and resources from Damiano DeMonte (Mozilla), Luise Eder (2024 Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute at Oxford University), Andrea Powell (Reclaim Coalition), and Slack community member Alyssa Boicel who has been organizing gatherings in Philadelphia!
📆The Responsible Tech Mentorship Program kicks off this week with 100 mentors and over 300 mentees from 63 countries! We’ll be announcing all of our mentors on the website in two weeks. If you’re on the waitlist for this round, there might be a few spots opening up soon, and you’ll be contacted via email if you’re a match. Read more about the mentorship program here.
🦶Our executive director, Rebekah Tweed, kicked off PwC's Women in Technology Fest 2024 today in an opening plenary fireside chat with PwC's Principal, Technology Impact Leader, Mitra Best. Video arriving shortly.
💰We launched a new channel in our Slack community to discuss grant opportunities in Responsible Tech. Our Slack also has numerous resources and jobs being shared, conversations about happenings in Responsible Tech, and multiple location-based channels that are leading to new connections and in-person meet-ups! (Apply to our Slack | already a member? Sign in here)
🌵Our Siegel Research Fellow, Sara M. Watson, recently took part in a two-day gathering for the fellowship program. Sara will also be at SXSW this year, along with Sarah Welsh (who is based in Austin). Check out Sara’s SXSW list of events and add others you know about!
🔔David Ryan Polgar will be speaking at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia on March 14th on Artificial Intelligence, Elections, and the Future of Democracy. This panel also features Caitlin Chin-Rothmann from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Katie Harbath from Anchor Change, along with moderator Michael X. Delli Carpini. Both Caitlin and Katie are previous speakers at our previous summits!
👋Hundreds of people across the globe, and of all different skill levels, are joining our six working groups. Are you?
🏆We're thrilled to announce the winners of the Responsible AI Governance Maturity Hackathon from our recent collaboration with TechBetter, supported by Notre Dame’s IBM Tech Ethics Lab. Congratulations to our winners Anastasiia Gaidashenko, Katherine Grillaert, and Narcisa Codreanu! And a thank you to Ravit Dotan, Borhane Blili-Hamelin, Ric McLaughlin, Carol Anderson, Benny Esparra, and Joshua Scarpino for hosting and helping organize. Watch for the release of a report on the Hackathon, spotlighting many of the participants and providing insights into their findings and reflections on the experience of evaluating organizational maturity in Responsible AI.
🎊David Ryan Polgar will be keynoting Encode Justice’s upcoming AI + Tech Summit in NYC on April 13th. Also on the stage will be All Tech Is Human’s Senior Fellow Renée Cummings! Encode Justice is the world’s first and largest youth movement for human-centered AI. Powered by 1,000 young people across every inhabited continent, the org believes that AI must be steered in a direction that benefits society. So do we! Learn more and sign up here.
👋Together, we work to solve tech and society’s thorniest issues.
-All Tech Is Human | Drop us an email today
💡 Have an idea for a project together? Fill out our form and let us know!
⭐ See all of our projects, including upcoming summits and mixers, knowledge hubs, our previous reports, working groups, affiliates, Responsible Tech University Network, mentorship program, livestreams, job board, community Slack group, Responsible Tech Guide, our talent matchmaking service, our Responsible Tech Talent Pool, 600+ Responsible Tech Org List, Tekalo (matchmaking for social impact) and much more.
🦜Looking to talk with others in Responsible Tech after reading our newsletter? Join the conversations happening on our Slack (sign in | apply).
🙏 We’re continuing to grow and have plans for far more! Are you part of a foundation that wants to support our mission? Reach out directly to Founder & President David Ryan Polgar and let’s make magic happen.