Mentorship Program, summit for improving social media, Responsible Tech Mixer in SF!
Plus our recent livestream on generative AI, upcoming NYC mixer + panel on algorithmic bias, and a rousing talk by Douglas Rushkoff
🥳 Applications for our Responsible Tech Mentorship Program are now open!
Do you want to tackle wicked tech & society issues? Applications for our free six-month Responsible Tech Mentorship program are open until May 19th! With over 700 people on our waiting list, we cannot accommodate all requests but are aiming to expand our program to meet the growing demand.
If you’re interested in either leading a mentor group or joining as a mentee, please apply. Serving as a mentor is a great way to pay your knowledge forward; outside of the rewarding experience of lifting up others, mentors also interact with other mentors.
How does our program work? We’ll assemble groups of 3 mentees to 1 mentor for a 6-month program that will include one meeting per month. Meetings are virtual, and the program is open to our global community (we take time zones into consideration with matching). Groups will explore an area of the Responsible Tech ecosystem including (but not limited to): Accessibility, Data Privacy, Trust & Safety, Responsible AI, Tech Policy, Research, Tech & Democracy, Product, and UX Research.
We’ve developed this free program in order to help strengthen and grow the Responsible Tech ecosystem by facilitating connections and career development among talented students, career changers, and practitioners. By expanding pathways for more disciplines and backgrounds to actively get involved, we can help build a better tech future.
💡Our experience growing the Responsible Tech movement since 2018 and interacting with thousands of individuals through our regular summits & mixers, Slack community of over 5k members from 65 countries, open working groups, interviewing hundreds of individuals in our reports, livestreams, university ambassadors’ program, and our previous mentorship cohorts has brought into focus the hurdles that individuals face when aiming to get more involved in the Responsible Tech ecosystem. All Tech Is Human is designed to elevate new voices and blaze pathways for future leaders in the movement!
All Tech Is Human brings together people, organizations, and ideas to tackle wicked tech & society issues and co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest. Our activities grow and strengthen the Responsible Tech ecosystem, which speeds up society's ability to consider the impacts of technology, leads to greater multistakeholder collaboration, and diversifies the backgrounds and disciplines involved in the process. You can read about our theory of change here, and watch an explainer video here.
"I’ve just wrapped 6 months as a mentor and am blown away by All Tech Is Human’s ability to connect the responsible tech community. Providing support to others looking to grow their career in RT is hugely rewarding - a chance for me to pay it forward as someone who has benefited and continues to benefit from mentors in the field…If you’re looking for mentors in responsible tech or you’d like to help more people on their tech ethics career journey this is a fantastic way to do it." - Monika Viktorova
“I can’t say enough good things about this mentorship program. I myself benefited from it when I transitioned to responsible tech and as it was a tremendous help for my career, so I wanted to give back as a mentor to a community that had given me so much. By mentoring amazing younger folks for the second year in a row I learned as much, if not more, about the field — and myself — as I previously did as a mentee. It takes a village to make change happen, and we can all be part of it: responsible tech implies needing and listening to diverse backgrounds and voices. If you are a voice in responsible tech, are passionate about tackling thorny tech & society issues and in creating a tech future aligned with the public interest, I strongly encourage you to consider applying and contribute to the All Tech Is Human mentorship program" - Mélissa M'Raidi-Kechichian
🎙️Renowned media theorist Douglas Rushkoff delivered a rousing talk, “I Will Not Be Autotuned: Crashing Technosolutionism” at our recent Responsible Tech Mixer in NYC.
🍿Grab your popcorn and hit play. Author of Survival of the Richest, Team Human, Present Shock, and Program or Be Programmed Douglas Rushkoff took the stage at our April 26 Responsible Tech Mixer. As a note, the individual referred to off stage in the talk is Greg Epstein (humanist chaplain at Harvard & MIT; NYT bestselling author) who is writing an entire chapter about All Tech Is Human in his upcoming book, Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why it Desperately Needs a Reformation.
In this talk, Rushkoff interrogates the role of tech in our lives: Why does digital technology seek to eliminate the characteristics that make us most human? How can we escape zero-sum thinking? What are the ways we should consider the role of AI in our lives – and in what ways is AI a mirror of our own histories?
This gathering, as seen above, is part of our new Responsible Tech Mixer + Interview Series that takes place each month in NYC for a broad range of 200 people. We mix together students, Trust & Safety professionals, researchers, artists, designers, startup founders, engineers, attorney, psychologists, and everyone in between. In order to tackle wicked tech & society issues, we need a global multistakeholder and multidisciplinary approach. You can read about our approach here, along with checking out our Responsible Tech Guide—our flagship resource (new version arriving in September).
Prior to this recent mixer, we held the NYC book launch for Meredith Broussard’s More Than a Glitch. You can watch our fireside chat with Meredith Broussard here and learn about our May 31st gathering below in this newsletter. We are always looking for new people and organizations to involve in our projects, along with exploring new locations to hold our gatherings. If you have a suggestion, ping Josh Chapdelaine from our team.
🎉 The theme for our major summit in NYC in September is Improving Social Media!
We are busy putting together a major gathering in NYC in mid-September focused on actionable ways to improve social media. All Tech Is Human previously released a comprehensive Improving Social Media report and held two previous summits in partnership with the Canadian Consulate in New York related to this important topic. While those two earlier events brought together 120 people across civil society, government, industry, and academia each time, for our upcoming one in September we are aiming to bring together nearly 500 people. 🐣Yeah, we’re rapidly growing.
👋 Want to get involved? We are currently seeking out a wide range of people and organizations to involve in this key gathering that aims to move the needle with social media to offer best practices and suggestions for improvement. And directly following this summit, we will be holding our Responsible Tech Summit: A Better Future for Youth with the Australian Embassy in DC!
📚 We are building our 2nd annual Responsible Tech Summer Readings List and would love your suggestions!
We like books here at All Tech Is Human, and we like to celebrate the authors that write them. That’s why we built out a physical “Responsible Tech Library” for our three-day activation last September for Unfinished Live (where we recorded a fifteen-episode podcast series in partnership with Project Liberty), and regularly feature authors in our summits, livestreams, and reports.
We also like to hear directly from you about the Responsible Tech related books that you would recommend that others check out. In our upcoming Responsible Tech Summer Reading List, we will release an expansive reading list, along with including select submitted quotes about why this book should be highlighted.
👍 As an extra benefit, our aim is to utilize key books as a gathering mechanism for people to come together to discuss, debate, and find moments of collaboration. You may recognize some of the submitting individuals from our Slack group (not yet a member? Join here), which is a nice way to spark up a conversation around a shared interest. Building community is something we find incredibly important, and books are central to this.
💙 We’ve missed you, San Francisco. We’ll be back this summer.
While most of our team is based in NYC, All Tech Is Human has regularly held gatherings in San Francisco to bring together a broad range of people, organizations, and ideas to tackle complex tech & society issues. Back in September 2019 (remember pre-Covid?) we held a summit for 200 people at Thoughtworks. And last year we co-hosted a tech policy mixer alongside the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change that was held at the Internet Archive (a funky church holding our digital past), along with a Responsible AI mixer + panel conversation that was held at the iconic Salesforce Tower.
🤔Would you like to get involved with our upcoming Responsible Tech Mixer in SF? Have suggestions for us? Fill out our interest form. And if you are in the Bay Area, ping team member Karina Alexanyan who is based there.
👩💻Are you interested in the growing field of Trust & Safety? Attend our upcoming livestream!
Elevating new voices is central to our mission here at All Tech Is Human. A major hurdle that we hear countless times is that individuals want to get more involved in the Responsible Tech ecosystem, but finding a pathway in is often difficult. This is exactly why we first released our Responsible Tech Guide in 2020 (updated every September), and continue to expand on activities related to diversifying the traditional tech pipeline with more backgrounds, disciplines, and perspectives. Increasing diversity = a better ability to tackle wicked tech & society issues.
If you are interested in the area of Trust & Safety, please join us for our upcoming livestream on Wed, May 24th at 1pm ET on Building a Career in Trust & Safety. We will be joined by special guests Alice Hunsberger (VP of Customer Experience at Grindr) and Pearle Nwaezeigwe (tech policy professional), who will be in conversation with All Tech Is Human’s Rebekah Tweed.
Join our upcoming roundtable about creating a Youth-Led Responsible Tech Movement! Virtual and in-person (NYC) attendance.
We believe in centering youth in the Responsible Tech conversation. Ever since our organization launched in 2018, we have been committed to assisting 18-to-25 year-olds in finding pathways into the Responsible Tech movement through our mentorship program, Responsible Tech Guide, Responsible Tech University Ambassadors, open working groups (where emerging talent mix with established professionals), volunteer opportunities, our new Welcome to the Responsible Tech Movement primer, and more. Last year, we released our HX Report: Aligning Our Tech Future with Our Human Experience which featured profile interviews with youth leaders. And in March, we organized (alongside Mozilla Foundation) the MozFest panel Building the Youth-Led Movement for Responsible Tech.
🧠 For our upcoming intergenerational roundtable, we are exploring Responsible AI. This will be our third youth-led roundtable, in a collaboration series with Civics Unplugged. Check out this write-up from our last discussion on social media and tech policy.
Are you interested in youth issues at the forefront of Responsible AI? Let us know! We will be joined by a Responsible AI leader to discuss the implications for our future, and how youth can take a leading role in this rapidly-evolving conversation. Submit your interest here and contact Sandra Khalil or Elisa Fox with any questions.
👋 Our upcoming Responsible Tech Mixer in NYC is focused on algorithmic bias and its impact on communities of color. Join us!
For our next Responsible Tech Mixer + Interview Series in NYC, we are collaborating with Consumer Reports and the Kapor Center to bring together a broad mix of 200 people to celebrate the release of Bad Input (short film series), have a panel conversation, and build community. All of our mixers fill up and reach capacity, so sign up today.
Our panel conversation, which will also be filmed and released in a future newsletter, will feature will feature Crystal Grant (Technology Fellow for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project; featured in Bad Input), Lili Gangas (Chief Technology Community Officer at the Kapor Center), and moderator Brian Vines (Deputy, Special Projects at Consumer Reports).
👍 We can improve our tech future by diversifying the types of people involved in the process
With the recent additions of Elisa Fox and Sarah Welsh to our team, we are greatly expanding our Responsible Tech Job Board and our Responsible Tech Talent Pool. Here at All Tech Is Human, we believe that positive change happens from within major tech companies, from outside pressure/oversight/research, and from reimagining positive tech futures. Our job board, talent pool, and mentorship program support all three pathways for change.
🕵️Here are a few recent additions to our job board we’d like to highlight:
Responsible Computing Challenge Fellow at Mozilla Foundation
[Paid] Interns at Real Facebook Oversight Board
Director of Inclusive Experiences at Electronic Arts
Senior Product Marketing Manager, Responsible AI GTM at Microsoft
Programme Officer, Digital Rights and Policy at Article 19
Senior Data Scientist, Auditability tools, Digital Ethics and Responsible AI at IKEA
Critical and Emerging Technologies Impact Fellow at U.S. Department of Energy, Office of the Under Secretary for Science and Innovation
AI Ethics and Policy Reporter for Bloomberg
😂 A lot of people come up to us and say, “Wow, All Tech Is Human is doing so many activities.” To which we reply with a snicker, “Just wait until the next newsletter.” In this section of the newsletter, we provide an overview of some of the newly announced projects and activities, along with recent livestreams and gatherings, to provide you with a better sense of everything our non-profit is working on.
Some of the best ways to stay abreast of everything we are doing is to join our Slack group for the Responsible Tech community and check out our Linktree. Over on our Slack, multiple location-specific channels (i.e. Boston, Chicago) are discussing informal in-person gatherings. We also post a lot on our LinkedIn page, where we posted about our earlier AI & Human Rights report which is getting a lot of buzz.
📜 Our latest report is on Tech & Democracy, which you can freely download here. And for those looking to learn more about the Responsible Tech movement, we recently put out a primer here along with launching our knowledge hub focused on key topic areas.
🤾 Our monthly livestream series (Digital Playground) in collaboration with New_ Public exploring healthy digital spaces continues to roll on; the most recent livestream featured Anil Dash, and on Thurs, May 25th from 3 to 4:30 pm ET we will welcome Bhavik Singh—the founder of soft networks, an exploratory design and development studio that likes to make social software that feels like a long, slow walk in the woods. Join us for this exploration of software and space to create your own. Register and participate!
🙋 Did you tune into our recent livestream with Brandeis Marshall and Reid Blackman on Generative AI: Hype, Harms, and the Responsible Tech community? If not, or if you would like to rewatch the conversation and share it with others, check out the video above!
🤔 Have you read our Ten Principles of All Tech Is Human? We don’t just need a tech shift; we need a paradigm shift and that is what our organization is doing with our highly participatory approach that moves at the speed of tech.
✍️ One of the key takeaways from the Responsible AI roundtable seen above (done in collaboration with Responsible Innovation Labs) was the importance of a cross-sector approach and fostering collaboration and best practices across different sectors. AI-enabled solutions are increasingly pervasive and transforming a wide range of industries, the cascading effects of which should not be afterthoughts. Gathering stakeholders from different sectors is essential to addressing AI's complex ethical, legal, and social implications and ensuring that these technologies are developed and deployed responsibly and equitably.
😎 Cool happenings in Responsible Tech
Why do we have a streak of optimism here at All Tech Is Human? Because we interact with so many people and organizations that are committed to building a better tech future! And in order to have a stronger Responsible Tech movement, we act as a connective tissue to elevate resources and ways to get involved. Good things happens when a diverse range of people, organizations, and ideas come together. All Tech Is Human serves as a catalyst for positive change.
Do you have something you want others to know about? Ping Sandra Khalil from our team. All Tech Is Human also runs a Responsible Tech Community Calendar; submit directly for consideration.
“Hi friends! If you’re interested in learning about responsible research data stewardship practices, please consider joining the Future of Privacy Forum this Wednesday, May 10, 2023, from 1:00-2:30 p.m. EST for their annual Award for Research Data Stewardship Ceremony!
This event is FREE and virtual to attend, where you’ll learn about FPF’s award, the winning partnership and their research, adherence to privacy protection is the data sharing process, and more. Let me know if you have any questions, and I hope to see you all at the event!” - Lama Mohammed
“To anyone interested in designing social media for youth mental health, I have an event for you to mark in your calendar. My name is Helen Moore - I am at Stanford studying Data Science and Social Systems with a minor in Ethics and Technology. In addition to my academic pursuits, I am helping organize an event at the Stanford d.school focused on ideating about the redesign of social media as well as understanding the social media policy landscape. This is an event focusing on bringing people from any and all backgrounds into conversation with one another. We will have policymakers, technologists, advocates, and high school and college students all in one space. This event will happen at the Stanford d.school, Building, 550 Panama Mall on Friday, May 19th, 5:00-8:30 pm. There will be a dinner and panel until 6:30 followed by interactive ‘tinker stations’ and the recording of youth testimonials. We welcome anyone who is in the area and interested in attending to sign up on our website. If anyone has any questions or would simply be interested in reaching out (which I would thoroughly enjoy!).” -Helen Moore
“Hi ATIH-ers. Trust in Tech here! We just recorded an episode with OpenAI - makers of ChatGPT on how they approach Trust and Safety work!In this episode, Alice Hunsberger (head of CX and T&S at Grindr, redteamer for GPT4) and Sahar Massachi (co-founder of the Integrity Institute) talk with Dave Willner and Todor Markov about all things AI. We’ve got a deep dive into what Trust & Safety looks like at OpenAI, what projects they work on, how their teams are organized, and how they moderate their own content. We also get philosophical, talking about what the giant leap in generative AI means for the Trust & Safety landscape as a whole, and specifically what T&S and Integrity practitioners need to be thinking about right now, as well as what the next few years might look like. Give it a listen, let us know what you think, and subscribe!” -Talha Baig
“Hi community! I’m Maria Luque, and besides running Mission-Oriented I run strategy at a public education initiative supported by the European Commission called AI4Gov. It’s an educational consortium where top-tier EU universities teach a holistic curriculum around AI through a master programme: how to design, govern, deliver and implement artificial intelligence systems within government and public agencies, with a human-centric approach to it. The master programme is already considered a flagship initiative throughout the EU, and we want to fine-tune and better up the educational curriculum. Why? To help set a standard competency framework for “functional specialists on AI in the public sector” for Europe and beyond. To do this, our research team has set up a survey, so that responsible tech professionals can participate and give their opinion on how important certain skills and competences are for them.
Feedback from our community is critical, and will help us design training resources that meet the needs of future responsible AI specialists. The survey is here, and will take aprox. 10 - 20 mins to complete. Last but not least: all responses will be kept anonymous and confidential, and we will not share your personal information with any third-party. The survey will be open until 21 May 2023 - ish. If you have any questions or suggestions, radical ideas to pitch re: AI4Gov, or the likes, ping me.”- Maria Luque
🤦♀️ In order to reduce the harms of technology, we need to incorporate the ideas of those feeling the effects—not just those creating them.
-All Tech Is Human | Write us at Hello / AllTechIsHuman.org
⭐ See all of our projects, including our new Tech & Democracy report, Responsible Tech University Network, mentorship program, job board, upcoming gatherings, livestreams, working groups, previous reports, community Slack group, Responsible Tech Guide, our talent matchmaking service, our Responsible Tech Talent Pool, 500+ Responsible Tech Org List, knowledge hub, our Welcome to the Responsible Tech Movement primer, and more.