Tech & Democracy working group, Tech Stewardship online program, livestream on youth & tech, in-person mixers and more!
Plus a sneak peak w/ two podcast interviews from our "All Tech Is Human Library" at Unfinished Live, videos from our gathering w/ the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and much more.
🥳We’re thrilled to offer a free program to earn a micro-credential around Responsible Tech leadership! Through our partnership with Engineering Change Lab Canada, you can join the Tech Stewardship Practice Program for the Fall.
We’ve heard from so many members of the community since our founding in 2018 about offering programs designed to sharpen leadership skills in the Responsible Tech movement. After years of conversation with Engineering Change Lab Canada, which was in attendance at our pre-Covid summits in NYC where we’re based, we have formed a partnership to help improve this program designed for a diverse range of leaders to build confidence, literacy, and intentionality in their role with aligning technology toward the public interest.
All Tech Is Human will have a Fall cohort that you can freely join by October 7th! The program is designed to be self-paced online, with 12 hours worth of material suggested to take around 12 weeks. Those who sign up will be in an All Tech Is Human cohort that will also have a mid-way and wrap-up check-in.
👋Join our Tech & Democracy working group! All skills levels and disciplines welcome; collaborate on a report to be released Feb 2023
The future of technology is intertwined with the future of democracy and the human condition. Here at All Tech Is Human, we see the immense need to unite a broad range of stakeholders to co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest and ensure a thriving democracy. In other words, the “tech conversation” is less about the technology and more about understanding values, social impact, and how we can find consensus to improve the current situation (and prepare for foreseeable issues).
One of our key activities at All Tech Is Human is our open working groups, which work to not only create valuable resources with the input of hundreds of individuals but serves to build community across stakeholders, promote knowledge-sharing, and surfaces areas of collaboration.
Our Tech & Democracy working group will build off the learnings from our recent in-person mixer in NYC alongside TheBridge and the Institute for Security and Technology (read summary article), along with our recent online mixer (read takeaways) that had breakout rooms around the topics of Data Privacy, Misinformation & Disinformation, Combatting Online Radicalization, Digital Governance, ad Multi-stakeholder Collaboration.
Questions about the working group? Reach out to Cate Gwin, who is heading up the group.
👍Please welcome Selene Hernandez, who has joined the All Tech Is Human team!
We need more social workers involved in the Responsible Tech movement. Fortunately, our organization has had the privilege of involving noted professors in social work such as Desmond Patton and Courtney Cogburn, and have had a significant level of conversations with social workers wanting to get involved. Our organization is honored to welcome Selene Hernandez to the All Tech Is Human team, who will be with us through May 2023. For those of you at Unfinished Live in NYC, you may have meet Selene who was at our three-day activation and attending various talks throughout the conference.
Learn about Selene’s background, what drew her to the Responsible Tech movement, and what her ideal tech future looks like!
“Falling into becoming a whistleblower was sort of a matter of circumstance. The fact that I talked to the COO, I talked to the board [of Theranos] and everyone was like, ‘We don't know what to tell you. We don't think you're right about this.’ …And then deciding to go external to actually talk to the media and talk to regulators is sort of what brought me into that sort of whistleblower territory. But that wasn't really my intention. My intention was just basically to say, ‘Hey, you need to stop processing patient samples. Turn that open sign to closed…and go back to the drawing board because this technology's not ready to deploy.”-Erika Cheung
👀Here is a sneak peak of two podcast conversations from our “All Tech Is Human Library” at Unfinished Live
We recorded 16 (!!) conversations in front of a live audience during our three-day activation recently in NYC for Unfinished Live. This was an incredible experience where our team had conversations with hundreds of individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds who deeply care about co-creating a better tech future and tackling thorny tech & society issues. Fresh off the release of our new Responsible Tech Guide, we also handed our physical copies of a Responsible Tech Zine we developed for new voices and disciplines to get informed and inspired to join the movement.
Starting on Tues, October 11th, we will be releasing one recorded talk a day on our website, on social media (find us on LinkedIn + Twitter), our community Slack group, and on a soon-to-launch page for this project! Outside of Douglas Rushkoff and Erika Cheung, you will also hear our interviews with Marshall Davis Jones, Dorothy Santos, Renee Cummings, Meredith Broussard, Vilas Dhar, Tom Thorley, Diara J. Townes, Reid Blackman, Gabo Arora, Amira Dhalla, Chris McClean, Jeffrey Edell, Gabo Arora, Sahar Massachi, and Jamie Cohen.
“You get this modern tech fantasy of building a car that can drive fast enough to escape from its own exhaust and it doesn't work.”-Douglas Ruskoff
🤯Thank you for everyone who participated in our mentorship livestream and applied to the program. We had over 560 applications…
🚣♀️ We’re gonna need a bigger [Responsible Tech] boat…Our Responsible Tech Mentorship Program received an outpouring of interest to the point of being oversubscribed for our continued growth as a non-profit. The most recent mentorship program featured 180 participants (45 mentors, 135 mentees) and we have plans to expand the program to a little over 250 participants for our upcoming cohort which runs from November 2022 to April 2023. Our organization is currently looking at ways to handle the immense demand.
Questions about the program? The Responsible Tech Mentorship Program is run by Rebekah Tweed.
🚀Our Oct 13th Responsible Tech Mixer in NYC has already reached capacity. Join our waitlist to be notified of any openings + upcoming mixers.
After announcing our mixer is our last newsletter, we quickly reached capacity. Our organization is continuing to look into ways for us to accommodate the growing demand with our expanding Slack community, job board, mentorship program, Responsible Tech Talent Pool, open working groups, university ambassadors program, mixers, and summits. All of our activities feed into each other, so now we have created a monster. On the plus side, we’re directing this monster to tackle thorny tech & society issues.
Here is the other good news: there has always been a method to our madness. Ever since our inaugural summit in Oct 2018 in NYC, we saw a hunger for a bottom-up, multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder, and highly-participatory model that understands values, builds community, creates a hub of knowledges, and therefore allows us to co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest.
For those attending our upcoming mixer in NYC on October 13th, it will also feature a fireside chat with Marta L. Tellado, president and CEO of Consumer Reports + author of Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace.
🚎Our Responsible Tech Mixer in SF is gathering steam…join us on Thurs, October 27th!
We are putting together an exciting mixer + panel gathering for 150 individuals in San Francisco on Thursday, October 27th from 4-6:30pm. We hope that you can join us.
This gathering, with support from Avanade, will also feature a panel around Responsible AI that will be announced in our next newsletter…for those in the Bay Area, sign up before this one also hits capacity.
📱3500 teens, two Researchers & one important question: What are adults missing about teens and technology?
Turns out, quite a lot. That’s why we’re thrilled to welcome noted researchers Carrie James and Emily Weinstein from Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School to our livestream series where will be incorporating your submitted questions and discuss their new book, Behind Their Screens: What Teens Are Facing (And Adults Are Missing).
We’ll also be building on our recent gathering with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (Building a Better Tech Future for Children), the Australian Embassy in Washington (Youth, Tech, and Wellbeing), and our HX Report: Aligning Our Tech Future With Our Human Experience.
👋Speaking of our recent gathering with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, here are two videos for it! Above is the panel discussion, which features moderator Mina Aslan (Headstream) with Emma Leiken (Omidyar Network), Bre’Lynn Lombard (TikTok, Minor Safety), Ishva Mehta (Headstream Accelerator), Michael Rich (Digital Wellness Lab), and Guilherma Souza (Headstream Accelerator). This panel was introduced by All Tech Is Human founder & director, David Ryan Polgar.
Below, check out the keynote talk from Elizabeth Milovidov, Senior Manager, Digital Child Safety at the LEGO Group, who discussed the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) project and the importance of designing digital media experiences with children's well-being in mind.
📖Have you read our new Responsible Tech Guide yet?! It is our flagship resource that provides an overview of the people, organizations, and ideas of the Responsible Tech movement.
If you look under the hood of All Tech Is Human, you’ll notice that we have a pretty powerful engine. How did this happen? Well, our organization is being informed by thousands of individuals that participate through our wide range of activities. So through our livestreams and reports we have directly interviewed over 500 individuals (!!) across civil society, government, industry, and academia and our Responsible Tech Guide features resources from over 300 organizations. We receive perpetual feedback through our community Slack group, and have been informed by hundreds of individuals that have participated as working group members of volunteers. Add on the feedback we receive through our in-person and online gatherings, and we are sitting on a mountain of intelligence.
In other words, we don’t take a top-down approach here at All Tech Is Human.
Over the years, we developed a structure that acts as a flywheel to constantly inform the community while also being informed by the community and crafted around consensus. This differs from a traditional model that relies on select experts to develop content that is then disseminated to the community. Our aim is to for the broad community be able to actively co-create a better tech future that incorporate their values. No application without representation.
You can watch our explainer video, our theory of change, and our overview presentation.
😎Cool happens in Responsible Tech
Former Columbia researchers Kathy and Elizabeth are hosting a casual NYC meet up for ex-academia + research-y folks in tech on Oct 6, 6pm. RSVP here.
“On Oct. 19–21, a group of volunteers in the Tech Workers Coalition are hosting our first intergenerational tech & labor teach-in. It's a mix of roundtable discussions and skillshares, most featuring elders who have organized many decades ago, including members of IBM Black Workers Alliance, Computer People for Peace, Polaroid workers against apartheid, The Lucas Plan, and workers organizing at National Semiconductor. This event is for people working in and around tech. It is free of charge, and we've set up a mutual aid fund for those who need financial assistance to take time off to attend – and for people with ability to contribute to help fellow workers. We’re recommending people form small groups with friends and coworkers to attend the whole event or specific sessions. We'll have a pre-event gathering and opportunities to talk 1-on-1 with organizers beforehand too. See twcteachin.org for the vision and registration info, and stay tuned for the full schedule in the coming days!” -Danny Spitzberg
"Please join Headstream in SF on November 3rd, 2022 (6-8pm PT) for a happy hour and networking at the Hotel Kabuki. This event is open to all professionals, innovators, and individuals passionate about youth digital wellness. At Headstream, we support all stakeholders who are reshaping the digital ecosystem to one that empowers younger generations through the force of technology. We want to bring you all together to connect and amplify your impact. Please join us for some food, drinks, and opportunities to collaborate in real life. We are excited to see you all in person! RSVP to join us." -Dani Bicknell
“In light of increased digitization of personal information, it has become critical to support policymakers on the federal level working towards data protection policies in as many ways as we can. To garner this pipeline, we are supporting the Future of Privacy Forum — a global non-profit focused on data protection headquartered in Washington, D.C. — to launch the Privacy Papers for Policymakers (PPPM) Awards. This award provides academics, students and researchers the opportunity to inject ideas into current policy discussions around privacy, bringing relevant privacy research to the attention of the US Congress, federal regulators and international data protection agencies.” - Lama Mohammed
*Do you know of a cool happening that should be featured in our newsletter? Reach out to Sandra Khalil, who heads up our knowledge management activities.
🚆We’re building a high-speed Responsible Tech train. Jump on in!
-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 and more.