What's New in Public Interest Technology?

EVENTS

• Wednesday, August 31, 12-1 PM PDT: Desirable Inefficiency and Data Scraping: The Role of Friction in Privacy. The rapid evolution of data scraping technologies is forcing us to reconsider some evergreen questions: What content is public? What is private? How do we decide? For the next event in our series on data scraping and privacy, we will be joined by Paul Ohm, Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law Center, who will discuss an emerging and underappreciated approach to digital system design called “desirable inefficiency.”

  Designers have turned to desirable inefficiency when the efficient alternative fails to provide or protect some essential human value, such as fairness or trust. Desirable inefficiency is an example of a design pattern that engineers have organically and voluntarily adopted to protect and make space for human values. Ohm will join UC Berkeley’s Tejas Narechania to discuss desirable inefficiency as it relates to the role of friction in privacy and the emergence of more powerful data scraping technology.

• Wednesday, September 21, 12-1 PM PDT: CITRIS Research Exchange: Alison Post on Open Government Platforms for Transit. Transparency reforms instituting sunshine laws and open public meetings have been actively promoted in recent decades as means of keeping elected officials and bureaucrats more accountable to the public. Advances in communication technologies have enabled a new generation of such transparency-enhancing reforms and practices — including open data portals, posting program information online and security alert systems. Under what circumstances do local governments adopt such technologies? This talk investigates this question by examining patterns of adoption and utilization of one technology — online scheduling information for public transit — for a comprehensive set of local transit providers in California, drawing on original, webscraped data.

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

• The Mixed Success of COVID Exposure Notification Apps. A brief on the efficacy of COVID exposure notification apps from data journalist Dana Amihere.
• Public Interest Technology to the Rescue. Hana Schank and Tara McGuinness, co-authors of book Power to the Public, discuss how the core principles of public interest technology can better government service delivery.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.