The Public Interest Technology University Network (PITUN), a consortium of 27 schools and universities nationwide, first convened in March and awarded the first-ever grant series earlier this month to projects from 21 of its members. The network is part of the nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank New America, which is dedicated to “renewing America.” The network disbursed funds from the Ford Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, Mastercard Impact Fund and other donors. The monies will support a year-long program that will likely formalize the developing field of public interest technology — a previously existing discipline with comparisons to the public interest law practiced by the American Civil Liberties Union and others — and could broaden its intersection with government.
The Pardee RAND Graduate School received around $35,000 to design a curriculum enabling discussion of the “ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) among students and RAND researchers,” New America said in a news release Oct. 7. Its goal, the think tank said, is stimulating “integration of ethical AI analysis into research and policy recommendations.” Pepperdine University received nearly $90,000 to help its School of Public Policy offer a “Leading Smart Communities” Professional Certificate to early to mid-career local government leaders, both elected and not. The program will reveal ways technology can make governments more transparent and responsive to residents.
Stanford University received more than $250,000 for two initiatives. Its Race and Technology Praxis Program aims to connect the teaching and practice of public interest technology, and elevate “discourse on race and technology.” And its Technology in the Public Interest Career Pipeline Project should integrate public interest technology into school culture “by branding a career pathway and developing real-world opportunities for students to explore public interest technology in practice.” The University of California, Berkeley, (UC Berkeley) received $180,000 to support its Enhancing Public Interest Technology Education project, piloting a curriculum to teach “the ethical, political, and societal implications of technology.” The course will be available to “leaders who have demonstrated the skills to engage and excel in their chosen career paths.” Among the takeaways:
• Public interest technology is the application of “technical knowledge or technical expertise” in developing policy and programs aimed at the public good, Afua Bruce, New America director of engineering and public interest technology, told Techwire. It’s attempting to “instill some of that public interest or public sector ethos into some of the technologists that are coming out of the university,” Camille Crittenden, executive director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute, told Techwire. Crittenden was a member of the PITUN proposal review committee and joined in ideation.
• Berkeley’s Enhancing Public Interest Technology Education initiative will be open source, to let others build on it and to get feedback, Jennifer Mangold, director of the Fung Fellowship at UC Berkeley, told Techwire.
“There’s very tactical and strategic aspects that we can teach our students, so when they’re building this technology, how do they think about the ethical implications or the societal implications?” said Mangold, who wrote the proposal and will lead the research. She described public interest technology as a “nascent field.”
• Its potential connections to state and local government, however, are evident. Some of the projects being funded examine bringing leaders together in AI or “other evolving tech spaces,” Bruce said, while others examine improving policy delivery and government efficiency. “I think state and local governments will certainly find that interesting as well,” she added.
Students who don’t come from government may go to work there, Mangold said, noting: “I don’t think it’s a common field. I think it’s really timely for us to be rolling this out and to actually start building the field, building capacity and kind of institutionalizing it in a way that we just haven’t in the past.”
• In August, Crittenden was named chair of the new state Blockchain Working Group created last year by Assembly Bill 2658. The group’s second meeting will be Dec. 5 at UC Berkeley. It’s charged with delivering a report on blockchain to the Legislature by July 1, 2020.
Currently, she said, a facilitator is interviewing working group members to learn about their “continued interest in applications of blockchain and how they are defining it within their spheres” and “to get a sense of how they would like to work together to be most productive, to be able to deliver the report in the middle of 2020.”
