Partnership with The Webby Awards, NYC mixer, and announcing our mentors!
Partnership with The Webby Awards, NYC mixer, and announcing our mentors!
Plus videos from our SF mixer + panel last week, upcoming DC mixer, livestream on Nov 9, additional podcast episodes from Unfinished, and much more.
🥳All Tech Is Human and The Webby Awards are partnering to expand the Responsible Tech ecosystem!
Our non-profit’s mission is to improve (through expansion and greater cohesion) the Responsible Tech ecosystem so we can better tackle thorny tech & society issues. That is why we are thrilled today to announce our partnership with The Webby Awards, where over the coming year we’ll be expanding the Responsible Tech ecosystem and community by uniting a diverse range of stakeholders and celebrating the work being done in the space.
The Webby Awards has introduced categories recognizing some of the great Responsible Tech work being done and recently released a report on Industry report titled It's Up To Us: A Responsible Tech Future. Lots more to come about this partnership in future newsletters!
🗽If you’re in NYC, join our in-person Responsible Tech Mixer on Wed, Nov 30th!
Yeah, we like people. We like bringing them together, which always leads to magic in the form of knowledge-sharing, collaboration, and friendships. It’s good to have friends in Responsible Tech.
For those in the NYC area, please join us for our in-person Responsible Tech Mixer on Wed, November 30th from 5:30 to 7:30. These are always super casual affairs, with the underlying goal of improving the Responsible Tech ecosystem. Since our founding in 2018, we have brought together thousands of individuals through our mixers, summits, open working groups, community Slack group, livestreams, and more (see all of our projects).
See, a perpetual problem individuals bring up to us is a desire to understand the ecosystem, find pathways to grow in the field, and have a sense of being tethered to the larger community.
That’s where we come in. Join us at our NYC mixer to meet others!
🤯We are blown away by the generosity of the Responsible Tech community for our mentorship program
In our last newsletter, we mentioned the names of a few of our incredible mentors that are being paired up with mentees for our Responsible Tech Mentorship Program. Our mentorship program, running from November until April 2023, has 281 participants (71 mentors and 210 mentees). We received 543 applications to participate in our program, so we are actively looking at ways to expand (ideas? reach out!).
🙏We are also pleased to announce the participation of mentors Urba Mandrekar (Senior User Researcher, Microsoft Mixed Reality), Susannah Shattuck (Head of Product, Credo AI), Tom Thorley (Director of Technology, GIFCT), David Bill (Senior UX Designer, Amazon), James Estrada (Associate Director of Innovation, Latinx Innovation Lead, Planned Parenthood Federation of America), Michael Swenson (Manager, Policy Programs, Discord), Molly FitzMorris (Senior Strategist, Responsible Innovation, Google), Tarika Marshall (Head of Residency, Rolls Royce Limited), and many more that you can see HERE.
Our mentorship program, similar to our Responsible Tech Job Board and our Responsible Tech Guide, includes a wide range of roles in the ecosystem to create positive change from within (tech companies), outside (civil society orgs), and reimagining (startups). Our mentorship program, along with our job board, is run by Rebekah Tweed.
🌉Thank you, San Francisco. We’ll be back.
We had an incredible time last Thursday at our in-person Responsible Tech Mixer in San Francisco! While NYC will always be home for our non-profit, the incredible vistas from the 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower (SF’s Empire State Building, minus King Kong) were quite breathtaking. Our organization previously held a summit in SF pre-Covid in September 2019, along with a more recent mixer in April alongside the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and held at the Internet Archive.
Similar to our mixers in NYC and also our mentorship program, this gathering had far more interest that we could hold with our capacity of 150 and we had a sizable waitlist. We are currently looking at expanding our capacity for future gatherings. Our mixer drew a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels, with a smorgasbord of Responsible AI practitioners, Trust & Safety professionals, students, academics, entrepreneurs, and representatives from many of the organizations heavily involved in the Responsible Tech movement. A big thank you to Avanade for supporting this mixer.
Watch our panel conversation with Rachel Gillum (Vice President of Ethical & Humane Use of Technology at Salesforce), Chris McClean (Global lead for digital ethics at Avanade), and Bogdana Rakova (Senior Trustworthy AI Fellow at Mozilla Foundation). The conversation was moderated by David Ryan Polgar (Founder & Director of All Tech Is Human).
Bogdana (aka Bobi) also reminded us that this panel discussion coincided as a 🎂 four-year anniversary since our inaugural summit held in Oct 2018 in NYC! Our kick-off summit featured speakers such as Douglas Rushkoff, Kathy Pham, John C. Havens, Pamela Pavliscak, Mitu Khandaker, Cennydd Bowles, Sara Holoubek, and more. We have been helping grow the Responsible Tech movement ever since. Onward and upward + THANK YOU to everyone who has helped us grow!
🙋What are adults missing about teen tech use?! A lot. Let’s discuss!
Carrie James and Emily Weinstein are Principal Investigators at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where they have worked for over a decade leading research about youth and technology. Their projects focus on the ways social media shapes adolescents’ everyday lives, including well-being, civic participation, ethics, and family life. Emily and Carrie’s new book, Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (And Adults Are Missing), details insights from research with thousands of teens which we will be discussing during our livestream on Nov 9th with your questions.
Project Zero is also part of the HXproject.org (alongside All Tech Is Human) which is developing a new “approach to talking about, engaging with, and designing technology in a way that is aligned with our needs as humans — not users.” Earlier this year, our organization released its HX Report: Aligning Our Tech Future With Our Human Experience. Susan Crown Exchange, which has been involved with the HXproject.org, just launched the Thriving Youth in a Digital World website and the ‘Youth Voice in the Digital Age Challenge,’ to close the chasm between the people designing our internet, and those using it. There is a lot happening in this space!
Directly related to this topic, All Tech Is Human recently held youth-focused gatherings at the Australian Embassy in DC (Youth, Tech, and Wellbeing) and with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (Building a Better Tech Future for Children).
🏛️Responsible Tech goes to Washington…join our in-person mixer on Sun, Nov 13th!
We couldn’t resist a good Mr. Smith Goes to Washington pun, given that we love both Jimmy Stewart movies and puns here. See, we’re trying to reduce the harms of technology and ensure that you have a wonderful life. That should be more realistic than a six-foot tall rabbit (a Pooka if you’re nerdy).
Join us in-person for our Responsible Tech Mixer happening on Sunday, Nov 13th in Washington, DC! Looking over the current registrations, we have a really nice mix of policymakers, org leaders, students, integrity workers, and those focused around youth, tech, and wellbeing. We hope to see many of you there!
🎙️The Responsible Tech field is filled with incredible humans working to build a better tech future. We interviewed 16 of them for our podcast series recorded at Unfinished Live!
We are still energized by our whirlwind experience with our three-day activation at Unfinished Live in NYC that happened in late September. We chatted with a broad range of individuals interested in getting plugged into the movement, along with interviewing sixteen individuals who are heavily involved in Responsible Tech.
🎧LISTEN to our conversation with Amira Dhalla, Director of Impact Partnerships at Consumer Reports.
🎧LISTEN to our conversation with Sahar Massachi, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Integrity Institute.
In our last newsletter, we posted our first seven episodes in the series with new episodes that arrived daily. Check out newly-released episodes with Tom Thorley (Director of Technology at the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism), Diara J. Townes (engagement journalist), Reid Blackman (author of Ethical Machines), Gabo Arora (immersive artist), Chris McClean (global lead for digital ethics at Avanade), Jeffrey Edell (CEO of MeWe), and Jamie Cohen (Assistant Professor of Media Studies at CUNY Queens College and Head of Education at Digital Void).
All Tech Is Human’s David Ryan Polgar kept busy at Unfinished Live outside of interviewing the sixteen individuals for our series, also recording with Unfinished about the need for social media companies to diffuse power. On a related note, David will be speaking this Friday about building the Responsible Tech movement during the Social Impact Tech Summit.
😎Cool happens in Responsible Tech
🎉Our Slack group for the Responsible Tech community just surpassed 4k members across the globe! We also now have over 500 people in our Responsible Tech Talent Pool. Find all of our projects and sign-ups here.
🎟️ We have ten free tickets to the 2nd annual Responsible Innovation Founders Summit, happening on November 10th both in-person (NYC + SF) and virtually. Just use the special code: ATHVIP
“Mozilla’s Data Futures Lab is looking to fund organizations building technology to mobilize communities around sharing data in support of public interest causes in any domain (incl. labor rights, racial justice, consumer advocacy, and more). Apply before November 11, 2023 to be considered for a grant of up to $100,000 USD and access to a network of experts and peers over 12 months starting January 2023.” -Solana Larsen
“I have been running a new organization titled Analytics for Advocacy where we equip justice-oriented advocacy groups with the policy, data, tech, and community engagement resources to effectively build political power, pass legislation, and push policy change.”-Alisar Mustafa [Volunteer with Analytics for Advocacy here]
“The Lithuanian Embassy is hosting a dialogue with me about my book, History, Disrupted, and my research on how historical information / disinformation circulates on the Web — and the effects on international relations and democracies around the world. Vivian Salama from The Wall Street Journal will moderate. Please join me for this important conversation [Nov 10th in Washington, DC]. Seating is limited; Special Lithuanian refreshments will be served.” -Jason Steinhauer
🏈Let’s tackle wicked problems.
-All Tech Is Human | Write us at Hello / AllTechIsHuman.org
⭐See all of our projects, including our new Office Hours, mentorship program, talent pool, job board, upcoming gatherings, livestreams, working groups, previous reports, community Slack group, Responsible Tech Guide, our talent matchmaking service, our Responsible Tech Talent Pool, and more.