EVENTS

• Siegel Family Endowment invites you to join them at Data on Purpose 2022 on Friday, June 24 from 2-4pm ET! Presented by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, this four-day open-access virtual conference will bring together some of the sharpest minds in the field to explore how to advance public interest technology responsibly and equitably in academia, civil society, and the public and private sectors. They are thrilled to sponsor this event, alongside the Ford Foundation, and offer FREE registration to all. You can sign up here.
• Black Engineer Week. San José State University’s Black Alliance of Scientists & Engineers (BASE) is hosting Black Engineer Week from June 17-24. Attend events such as networking workshops, a golf event, hiking, and a Juneteenth celebration with San José Tech Interactive. If Black Engineering students and colleagues who are PIT-UN network members are interested in joining this event, they can email Professor Folarin Erogbogbo directly at folarin.erogbogbo@sjsu.edu. These attendees’ registration fees will be waived. 
• William & Mary Law School: 2022 Online Summer Program. CLCT has developed a series of  introductory law classes for high school and university students.  Online classes last from four to a maximum of 14 hours and are designed for students who are keen to explore what studying law entails, and for those who have a passion for government studies. There are three classes offered and they run from June through July.

CONFERENCES

• The Refusal Conference
• Responsible Tech University Summit
• A BETTER TECH: PIT Convention and Career Fair
• IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS)
• PIT-UN Annual Convening

WEBINARS

• Challenges and Opportunities for BIPOC Public Interest Technology (PIT) Entrepreneurs (University of Michigan). Panelists representing various perspectives in public interest technology ecosystem provide an overview of what a “PIT entrepreneur” is, discuss the challenges faced by BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs, offer a student perspective of participation in a PIT-focused experiential learning course, and gather feedback from panelists and attendees on pathways to support BIPOC PIT entrepreneurs.
• TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellowship Webinar. The TechCongress team and alumni discuss the Congressional Innovation Fellowship and what it’s really like to serve as a technologist in Congress. 
• Building a Cybersecurity Clinic (MIT). In this conversation, Professor Lawrence Susskind and his students, with the help of Stephanie Helm, director of the Massachusetts Cybersecurity Center at the Mass Tech Collaborative, explain how universities and colleges can launch their own regional public interest technology clinics, engage local and regional organizations as clients, and identify best practices in their clinical education model.
• Educating Future Data Workers About Ethics, Bias. Moderated by PIT-UN’s director Andreen Soley, speakers Meredith Broussard, a data journalism professor at New York University; the Rev. Dr. Kathleen M. Cumiskey, a professor in the Psychology Department, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program of the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island (CSI); Mihir Kshirsagar, who runs the technology policy clinic of Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy; and Mona Sloane, a senior research scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, took on the idea of ethics and bias in data work and discussed why educating future data workers is so important. The conversation highlighted some of the inherent problems with data, including the fact that there’s no escaping bias.
• Power to the Public: A Discussion about the Promise of Public Interest Technology. Co-authors Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank discuss examples of real change that have been brought by governments and nonprofits using data. They highlight how designing policies alongside and with the people they serve — and focusing on how they are delivered — are important pillars of how organizations must work to succeed in the digital age.

BOOKS

• Power to the Public (Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank)
• We the Possibility (Mitchell Weiss)
• A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide (Cyd Harrell)
• Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Ari Ezra Waldman)
• AI Ethics (Mark Coeckelbergh)
• System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein)

ADDITIONAL READING

• How to Start a Cybersecurity Clinic. Ann Cleaveland and Lisa Ho of UC Berkeley, and Gregory J. Bott and Matthew Hudnall of the University of Alabama, offer three key lessons for those interested in how one founds a cybersecurity clinic at their institution.
• SSIR, Keys to Unlocking an Inclusive and Just Tech Future. Raymar Hampshire, Jessica Taketa, and Tayo Fabusuyi of the University of Michigan Public Interest Technology Knowledge Network (PIT-KN) lay out important steps for doing PIT work rooted in inviting the knowledge and experiences of marginalized communities into the public discourse.
• Forbes, How Do You Diversify And Strengthen The Cybersecurity Field? Recently, the National Security Agency (NSA) teamed up with Bowie State University, a Historically Black University in Bowie, Maryland, for an 8-week intensive program focused on diversifying the cybersecurity profession and engaging African American students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The program culminated with the students presenting their research to NSA leaders and representatives from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence during a virtual challenge showcase.
• Op-Ed: Building Ethics in Public Interest Technology. Andreen Soley, director of PIT at New America, argues that PIT-UN-funded projects demonstrate the viability of a university-to-government or university-to-nonprofit pipeline for future public interest technologists. Yet, these early gains will only matter if we extrapolate the deeper lessons of the Network Challenge projects.
• Data.org, Rising Equitable Community Data Ecosystems (RECoDE) Report. Drawing from the insights of nearly 500 people, representing communities across the United States, this report shares findings and actionable recommendations for creating equitable community data ecosystems. While US-based, the report themes transcend national boundaries, as we all wrestle with the role of data, and tech in our lives.
• Wired, Can an Online Course Help Big Tech Find Its Soul?. The Foundations of Humane Technology is an eight-hour class for Silicon Valley’s disillusioned workers. Learn more about the course.
• Cornell Tech is hiring a Public Interest Tech (PiTech) Initiative Director. PiTech is seeking an inaugural Initiative Director to run this newly-launched program, whose impact is critically important to the Cornell Tech campus mission. Apply here.
• Harvard’s Tech Study Plans Now Available. Harvard is pleased to announce a special research opportunity – curating descriptions of research experiments that, if conducted, could yield timely publishable results with real-world impact. These experiments are ideal for class projects, independent studies, quick research papers, and thesis work.   They are aimed for undergraduates but also work for graduate students. Visit techstudies.net to learn more.
• What can browser history inadvertently reveal about a person’s health? The Penn-CMU Digital Health Privacy Initiative is trying to answer that question by mapping third-party tracking across the online health ecosystem. Their work shows possible implications for ad targeting, credit scores, insurance coverage, and more.
• Bridging the Computer Science-Law Divide. Georgetown University’s Institute for Technology Law and Policy and Boston University’s School of Law and Faculty of Computing and Data Science partnered to write this report, which is funded by a PIT-UN grant. The report compiles practical advice for bridging Computer Science and Law in academic environments. Intended for university administrators, professors in computer science and law, and graduate and law students, this report distills advice drawn from dozens of experts who have already successfully built bridges in institutions ranging from large public research universities to small liberal arts colleges.

• Justice by the Numbers. Learn how an innovative partnership between lawyers for the ACLU of Massachusetts and public interest technologist Paola Villarreal resulted in the single largest dismissal of wrongful convictions in US history.
• Transformative Justice and Knowledge Production in Tech. Techno-capitalism is renegotiating the social contract but knowledge about technologies is too often sequestered behind the locked doors of industry. Given these obstacles, how can researchers both inside and outside of tech companies do the difficult work of research, critique, and resistance? Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble, co-founder of UCLA’s C2I2 and Dr. Timnit Gebru, founder of Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research (DAIR), join J Khadijah Abdurahman to discuss these questions further.
• On the Evidence: Ensuring Equity as Wastewater Testing Matures in the United States. On this episode of On the Evidence, guests Dr. Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, Dr. Otakuye Conroy-Ben, and Aparna Keshaviah discuss the challenges of and opportunities for ensuring an equitable approach to wastewater monitoring, and the importance of representation from historic Black neighborhoods, Indigenous communities, and rural communities.
• Forward Thinking on the social contract in a postpandemic world with Minouche Shafik and Andrew Sheng. In this episode guest interviewer Jonathan Woetzel talks with two leading economists spanning Europe and Asia about the state of the social contract that underpins society.