Launching Responsible Tech NYC, upcoming HX report, 20 PIT orgs, new Slack groups, and more!

Plus, 180 participants to join our mentorship program next month & videos from our Responsible Tech University Summit

🗽All Tech Is Human is spearheading the creation of Responsible Tech NYC!

Back in October (when the pandemic numbers were much lower), we held a very successful Responsible Tech Mixer in Manhattan. The energy was palpable, and most of the conversation centered around ways that the broad community of people & orgs focused on building a better tech future could come together. That’s why All Tech Is Human is spearheading the creation of Responsible Tech NYC.

We are thrilled to be able to announce some of the collaborating organizations in this new initiative, including New_Public, TheBridge, Cyber Collective, Tech 2025, Soliya, Digital Void, and A Better Mousetrap. Would you be interested in getting involved in Responsible Tech NYC? Reach out! We’ll be adding new collaborators in the coming days, so if you are part of an organization that wants to take part in this initiative we’d love to hear from you. The current plan is for an upcoming mixer and a workshop in the Spring, as we look for ways to tie together the Responsible Tech community.

👍Our organization is growing in it’s mission to co-create a tech future that is aligned with the public interest.

We are thrilled to announce that Cate Gwin has joined our team as a Program Associate, assisting with our university ambassadors program, mentorship program, Slack group, working groups, and more. Our organization has grown significantly since 2018, and Cate will be a tremendous asset around knowledge and community management. Read about Cate’s background here.

📅HX Report: Aligning Our Tech Future With Our Human Experience is coming out on January 31st

Our working group has been busy putting together a report that is looking at the complex issues related to better aligning our tech future with our human experience. This report, exploring the concept of HX (Human Experience), will arrive online on Monday, January 31st and be followed by a livestream conversation on Feb 8th.

Would you like your perspectives featured in our upcoming HX Report? We are reaching out to a broad range of backgrounds about what their ideal tech future looks like. Participate in this interview form for possible inclusion in the upcoming report.

🙏 Thank you to the nearly 100 people who joined last week for our online Responsible Tech Mixer!

There is a lot of interest around being connected with others who deeply care about building a better tech future. Our organization is looking at ways right now to expand and improve our online Responsible Tech Mixers. For our mixer last Wednesday, nearly 100 people from various backgrounds and perspectives joined in and took part in seven breakout rooms for smaller group discussions. Interested to see what was discussed? Check out the notes from the mixer, which include many of the backgrounds of the attendees and various resources.

🤯Our Responsible Tech Mentorship Program is launching in Feb with 180 participants.

We have been busy going through a significant amount of applications to set up our 6-month mentorship cohort that will pair mentors up with three mentees (related to topic interest, location). In our next newsletter, we will be announcing the 45 mentors that have been selected for this cohort, who will be paired up with the 135 mentees joining our program. In addition, there will be cross-learning opportunities for the entire cohort of 180 individuals in the program.

There is a really good mix of backgrounds and perspectives joining the mentorship program, as we had applications from 25 countries (Kathmandu, Kazakhstan, Singapore, Nairobi, Bahrain, Iceland, Lagos, Myanmar). Looking over the applications, we have noticed an uptick in interest related to Trust & Safety and also UX, along with a fair amount of policy backgrounds. The challenges cited in the applications indicate a struggle to find appropriate internships, fellowships, and entry-level roles. There were multiple mentions of self-doubt from those deriving from non-technical backgrounds (a perception we are trying to change), along with a a need for those outside of the US, UK, and Europe to find likeminded individuals and communities.

👩‍💻 Did you know that technology can be used for greater purposes than getting your food delivered faster?! There is a vibrant community committed to leveraging tech for the greater good!

There is a growing public interest technology (PIT) community, including organizations and initiatives such as Aspen Tech Policy Hub, Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, Code for America, Coding it Forward, Day One Project, DemocracyLab, New America's PIT-UN, Partnership for Public Service, White House Presidential Innovation Fellows, TechCongress, Tech Talent Project, TheBridge, and many more. Check out our list of 20 public interest technology organizations you should know about!

One of our major roles here at All Tech Is Human is being a connective tissue that binds together the various people and organizations in the nascent Responsible Tech movement. That is why we put out the Responsible Tech Guide in September 2020, which gets updated by a working group for a new release each September. The Responsible Tech Guide now has over 35k reads and has become a go-to resource for those looking to understand the ecosystem, pathways, and ways to get involved in the larger movement.

Have you checked out our list of over 250 Responsible Tech Organizations? We have been updating our list recently, and added organizations such as the Integrity Institute, Better Images of AI, the DISCO Network, and the Distributed AI Research Institute. Are we missing an organization? Let us know!

🎓We are continuing to go over learnings for our Responsible Tech University Summit held last month.

Ever since our inaugural “ethical tech summit” we held in NYC in October 2018, we have noticed a major need for guidance and support of the broad range of students (undergrad, grad, law students, Ph.D. candidates) from a variety of backgrounds (that’s a good thing!) that are interested in getting more involved in the Responsible Tech movement. This is why we launched a university ambassadors program, as we are learning a considerable amount from our ambassadors distributed at over 75 universities across the globe.

You can read about all of the speakers and panels we held during the Responsible Tech University Summit HERE, and you can watch the full six and a half hour long video HERE. In the coming weeks, we will make additional videos from the summit available to the community.

😎Some cool happenings in Responsible Tech

👋We just added specific locations to our Slack group for the Responsible Tech community, which now has over 2.3k members (not yet a member? Join here).

• Are you located in the NYC area? Join the #nyc channel.

• Are you in the Bay area? Join the #san-francisco-bay-area channel.

• Do you reside in Washington DC? Join the #washington-dc channel.

• Located in London? Join the #london channel.

🤔Can we create a vision for Web3 that is aligned with our interests?! Check out the new community called Questioning, aimed to designing a future that we can want. “Questioning is a community/project to consider approaches to web3 to create opportunities that are human-centered and not about financial gain.” Check out their upcoming event on January 20th.

🎙️There is a new public interest technology podcast that just got launched! “think civic is a podcast and newsletter for exploring civic responsibility in tech, policy, design, and more. Tune in to hear your hosts Ajay Jain , Evan Debroux, and Chizo Nwagwu engage with thought leaders to early-career civic technologists. We hope our audience takes away new perspectives about what “thinking civic” to our guests working in this interdisciplinary space.” You can follow their podcast and happenings by subscribing to the think civic substack.

💡No application without representation. If technology deeply impacts someone, they deserve to be part of the process of how it is developed & deployed.

-All Tech Is Human | Write us at Hello / AllTechIsHuman.org

All Tech Is Human links and projects