Responsible Tech Summer Cohort, New Advisors, and more!
Responsible Tech Summer Cohort, New Advisors, and more!
We have a lot of work to do building the Responsible Tech pipeline and would love your help!
👋We are building a Responsible Tech Summer Cohort. If you would like to volunteer to assist with our projects, apply to the program!
Our organization has been quite busy as of late. We are currently building out our Responsible Tech Mentorship Program (221 mentees, 46 mentors), revising and expanding our Responsible Tech Guide (over 27k reads, 85 people in working group), expanding our Responsible Tech Job Board, providing growing support on our rapidly-growth Slack group (over 1.4k member, sign up here), and organizing + gleaning insights from the tremendous amount of observations and feedback we receive by operating as a hub.
Read our recent presentation here. All Tech Is Human is a non-profit (through our fiscal sponsor, Hopewell Fund) committed to growing the Responsible Tech pipeline; making it more diverse, multidisciplinary, and aligned with the public interest.
If you are into knowledge management, community management, or other ways that you can help out our growing organization, we’d love your help!
😃Please welcome our new advisor, Dr. Karina Alexanyan!
🤗And let us introduce our new advisor for the Responsible Tech Mentorship Program, Arushi Saxena!
📚 Our Responsible Tech Book Club is discussing Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin this Friday at 12pm ET!
And just in time for this discussion, Ruha Benjamin has released a discussion guide for the book! Our book club is run by Felicia Chen and Grace Juster and connects through our Slack group + virtual meet-ups and breakout rooms. You do not have to have read the book to join this important conversation! Reach out to Felicia and Grace on our Slack.
“The All Tech Is Human reading group deep dives into texts that critically analyze existing technologies and their impact on society. We bring together participants from a wide array of backgrounds, with the aim of fostering an inclusive community in which we grow in our understandings of responsible tech and the roles we can play in shaping the future generations of technology." -Felicia Chen
🤔What is motivating you to be part of the Responsible Tech movement?
We asked this question to our mentorship program recently. The definition we are using for the Responsible Tech movement is around reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that technology is aligned with the public interest.
"I want to participate in shaping responsible relationships in the tech world."
"Racial & gender justice."
"I want to be able to combine my passion for technology & social good and make an impact in my community."
"observing the discordance / lack of understanding bw policymakers + technologists."
"I want to better understand the duality between the amazing benefits of innovation and the disruptive harms of irresponsible tech development."
What is your motivation? We will feature some of the submissions in our upcoming revised Responsible Tech Guide, to be released in September!
🛑 What’s the biggest roadblock to the Responsible Tech movement?
Building a better tech future means aligning a lot of stakeholders: we need more socially-responsible tech companies, engaged citizens, a diverse tech pipeline with a wide range of backgrounds, policymakers that are more proactive and less reactive, and much more. There are a lot of interlocking parts at play, which is why we have intentionally created an organization that welcomes and learns from individuals across civil society, government, and industry.
As an organization, we are constantly learning from the community and its needs and evolving accordingly. Recently we asked on Slack, LinkedIn, and Twitter about the biggest roadblock to the Responsible Tech movement. We also posed this question to our Responsible Tech Working Group. What’s your vote? VOTE HERE.
📝Responsible Tech community notes…
Albert Kim is creating a community for folks who are in the beginning or early career phase of accessibility! It’s called Accessibility (A11Y) NextGen. Read about it here and say hi to Albert on our Slack.
“I started Accessibility NextGen meetups because there is currently no centralized community that gathers people early in their career path or learning phase of accessibility and human computer interaction. By filling this gap, I hope that I can make our world more accessible and inclusive to people with temporary, situational, and/or permanent disabilities as well as the growing population of elderly. In the coming few weeks, Accessibility NextGen plans to bring internship opportunities, mentorship programs, volunteering activities, community service work, Hackathons, and study groups in peer support systems. Also, we will balance professional activities with casual social events like game nights, watch parties, celebration of GAAD, and hangouts. I hope that I can eventually be able to show to the world that the accessibility field has a community for young professionals and we can make a positive impact on society through accessibility while working in the tech industry.” -Albert Kim
John Fallot is on the board the Prosocial Design Network, a non-profit on a mission “to promote prosocial design: evidence-based design practices that bring out the best in human nature online.” This new organization is exploring evidence-based solutions to bring out the best in human nature online. This takes the form of our Prosocial Design Library, which is an open-source library of tested and untested interventions with citations to match. To get involved, head over to their site and join their Slack group, which tends to hold internal Zoom meetings every Tuesday around 1pm EST. And if you are on our Slack, you can ping John directly about it.
A big round of applause for Garnett Achieng, Data & Digital Rights Researcher at Pollicy, who has been named a 2021 Tech Policy Associate Fellow at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change! Garnett’s work will focus on online gender-based violence, a recent topic we discussed in our livestream series with TheBridge.
“All Tech Is Human exposed me to a world of young people who are about to graduate or newly graduated looking to make a difference and knowing they are being connected with people who are already in positions of influence. I think norm making, especially on a level that requires global buy-in, takes time and is important work. All Tech Is Human is helping develop the kind of norms and values that are currently lacking to guide and govern the future of technology, one that is 'all inclusive'. It is raising the standards on ethics. Technology touches us in all aspects of our life, and all cultures and races.” -Ayca Ariyoruk, Director of Global Partnerships and Communication, Soliya
🤦♀️We don’t just need people in power to be more responsible. We need to bring new voices into power.
-All Tech Is Human | Write us at Hello@AllTechIsHuman.org
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