 Hi, my name is Afua Bruce, and I've been told the time is now to start this presentation. So I will kick it off. A couple of caveats for you, one, if you were looking for someone to just talk at you for the next 20 or 25 minutes, you are in the wrong place. I hope that this will be a discussion and that we all can talk amongst each other because we are here not just to make friends and to have a good time, but also to figure out some real solutions to some challenges that we're facing. And then secondly, I am Director of Engineering of New America's Public Interest Technology Program. Public Interest Technology is the term that we use and how we define the industry that we're in for how we can develop technology and policy better together. I know that there are other terms other people use, such as civic tech, tech for good, gov tech, and a whole list of other things. If you feel strongly about a different term, please put that aside for at least the next 25 minutes because I'll be referring to Public Interest Technology. And so with that, we'll go ahead and get started and tell you how I found myself in the field of Public Interest Technology. How many of you would describe yourself in some type of tech for good workspace? Okay, so most of us. And as I have done research and read a lot of research, we've got some research being conducted through New America. What I am finding is that most people did not plan on this career path when they were in school or at any time and they just sort of happened into where they are. My story is similar. My undergraduate degree is in computer engineering and I started off my career expecting to be making a lot of money for a big tech company. I started off my career working as a software engineer at IBM, working on some of their big servers and big applications. From there, I went back to grad school after doing software engineering for a few years and made what was the next obvious logical decision, which was to go and join the FBI to do strategy of their science and technology program. So I did that for a couple of years before then going to the White House where I ran the national science and technology for a couple of years and doing a lot of policy work, the National Science and Technology Council for those of you who aren't familiar, coordinates about 100 different federal and our agency groups. Federal government invests about $140 billion a year in science and technology research and development and the NSTC is the primary coordination mechanism between all of those agencies. And finally, I ended up where I am now as Director of Engineering for Public Interest Technology and so really looking at how can we develop technology in better ways? How can we develop policy, tech policy specifically in better ways? How can we take some of the technical thinking and technical innovation and apply it to the policymaking process so the policymaking process can be more reflective of people's actual needs and interests and be done in a way that gets better outcomes for people? And similarly for technology development, how are we doing that in more ethical ways and ways where we are thinking through the long-term implications of our work and ways that take into account policy because especially as policy regulation don't keep up with technology development by designing technology people essentially design policy themselves. So part of what attracted me to this phase was that technology moves quickly. My mind is like many of yours probably is always thinking of something and because of my passion on making a difference in some of the really big intractable problems that we face in society, it makes sense that we would apply technology that is moving so fast to these big problems because then we would be able to solve all of these big problems so quickly, right? That's all we would have to do. Unfortunately, as you all know, that is not all we had to do or we wouldn't have the homelessness rate that we have, we wouldn't have some of the hunger issues that we have and a whole host of other issues. And so technology goes hand in hand often with innovation. I did a quick Google search on technology and innovation earlier and nearly one billion hits came up because that is what everyone thinks. And so it would seem to me that we should be able to apply technology and this innovation to solve these big challenges that no one has ever solved before, right? If we can move quickly and if we can innovate and do technological innovation, we should surely be able to quickly solve everything because that is what we as technologists can do. If any of you have figured out how to solve homelessness or hunger or climate change and are sitting on the idea for yourselves, now is a great time to share it. Anytime is a great time to share it, but that's not what I see. Instead, I see myself and several other people who are doing this type of work and leading public interest technology programs taking on the same thing. So my life is a program lead for a public interest technology program. There are four main categories of work that I do. The first is managing our implementation projects because we need to be actually doing this work, not just talking about the need for doing this work or talking about the problem themselves and that problem admiration that I think we can also, we can often fall into, but actually doing work and making a difference in people's lives and in the structures that have created this society that we're in now. The second thing that takes up a lot of my time is fundraising for both core costs and operating costs. How are we paying people what we hope is a good and fair salary to do this work as well as creating an infrastructure so this work can continue and that people from all different backgrounds and all different situations can have access to technology, to top of the line technology solutions and policies. The third part is building partnerships with governments, nonprofits and communities in themselves so that we can actually do this work for public interest technology type work. Shall we say will not work if you are not actually partnering with the communities that are affected, if you are not actually partnering with nonprofits that are doing this work on an ongoing basis, if you're not partnering with governments. It is no good to sit in our own silos and think about how the world should be and design solutions for those worlds if we haven't taken the time to build partnerships to actually implement those solutions and to carry them on and also to actually get input from people who will be affected by what we're doing and implement from there. And the final category is learning from other people in this space and teaching others in and about the public interest technology space. So I will be the first to admit that to New America is not are not the first people to sit around and think, hey, maybe we should do technology and policy development in a different way. Maybe they would go hand in hand. It's been going on for a long time and it's important that we learn some of the lessons of people who have been in this space for a while and what's gone well and what hasn't gone well. But also as we continue to evolve our model of how we operate and our model of how we do business, it's important to share back of those lessons learned the broader community so that we can all move forward together, which brings me to the common struggles. So as I go to different conferences, I build these relationships with other people who are doing this work. It can really be boiled down to people who are passionate about a mission, all we see additional things that can be done. As much progress has been made, we may pat ourselves on the back and may congratulate each other for a little bit and we quickly move to what else can be done or we quickly move to how can we sustain this? How are we going to fund this work? How are we going to find more people to do this work? How are we going to continue to attract people to do this work and make these ideas scale and grow? And so we're all facing these problems and part of I think what this well is down to is really what do we mean by innovation? So the idea that tech and innovation go together, innovation being creating new things or creating things in a new way. I think we really need to ask ourselves in this space are we innovating what we work on and just applying techniques that we've seen in other sectors in other industries? Or are we actually innovating in how we do the work? And I would argue that we should continue to be more mindful or try to be more mindful about innovating how we do the work. So how we structure ourselves, how we search for funding, how we actually organize ourselves and build different models to do the work. I think that if we continue to rely on models that have been successful in other spaces, we will recreate some of the challenges that we've seen in other spaces. I think that for continued progress and sustained impact in this tech for good or public interest technology space, we really need to focus in on three main areas. The first is diversity and inclusion. The second is the working model. So exactly how we structure ourselves and how we organize ourselves to do the work. The third category is funding the work itself. And on the first point, diversity and inclusion. This is one of my favorite slash least favorite topics because for as much as I think we use the terms, we're struggling with diversity and inclusion. I sometimes wonder if people are actually struggling with it or if we have mentioned it once and assume that it's going to take care of itself. So, Paulo Guadino, who's the founder of a company named Hilaria and also the quantitative study of diversity and inclusion at the City College of New York describes it as without intentionality, you will regress to the means with diversity and inclusion. And the mean for what the diversity makeup of at least big tech looks like is not good in that it doesn't reflect what America looks like and it doesn't reflect what the world looks like in general. I think it's important that we be intentional about the stories that we tell about who is doing this work and the roles that people have to play. And we also acknowledge that there's a difference between designing for people and designing with them and also including people at the table and actually inclusion, which would mean that you actually hear everyone's voice as opposed to just having them at the table. The second category that I would or that I would argue that we need to really think thoughtfully through is our working models for how we do this work. New America, one of our big funders is the Ford Foundation who is funding a lot of fellowships in the public interest technology space in the broader civic tech and more space. There are fellowships after fellowships after fellowships, which are great. They are one model. Could there perhaps be another way? Organizations that are in this space broadly tend to fall into organizations that are doing some combination of consolidating, analyzing or presenting data. Other organizations really base their work on community partnerships being placed within a community or around a specific specific mention and thinking of a couple of mission technologists, organizations where they are really embedded in the community and using your data to advance those community issues. And the fourth category of the working models are people who just create a standard business and say, here's what we're serving and here's what we're selling and go from there. The third category is how we fund the work. So again, I think there are four areas here. We have our philanthropic dollars going, which brings with it his own struggle with managing expectations and desires of funders, finding multi-year funding, covering core costs, academic grants, a lot of research, especially, and test cases are done in the university space and looking at how universities apply for and receive grants. The third are physical sponsors, such as such as just different organizations that hold entities essentially so that they can process their money from corporations or other places to fund operating expenses. And the fourth category are social enterprises of people who use that designation to create essentially a business to to market and sell their work. And so with these three categories, I'd like you all to be able to think through what is one thing that you can do in one of these three categories that you can leave here this week and do differently or what throughout the rest of the conference, because I know this is our first session of the two day conference, what is something that you really want to key in on and take from the rest of the talks and the keynotes to address in these three areas. And so we have a few more minutes, 10 more minutes. And so I would like to actually take five minutes for you to pair up or in groups of three and talk with your neighbor and your new best friend for the next 12 minutes. Anyway, what is one thing you'll do in one of these categories? And so don't want you to necessarily try and solve the world's problems. If you can, in the next five minutes, awesome. Please come tell me afterwards. But in groups of two or three, pick one of these three areas and talk through what is something you could do differently or some way in your day job, you could make a difference and think of new ways to improve how we conduct business is in regards to diversity and inclusion, in regards to different working models and in regards to funding the work. And I start my timer. OK. Oh, great. Check, check, check, check, check. Check, check, check, check. All the mics are working now. I love hearing the engagement, looking around. I didn't see any conscientious observers from this process. So that is great. I have a wonderful mic runner here, Daniel. And so I am curious in the five minutes that we have left, because I think Daniel will forcibly push us out at that time. Is there anyone who would like to share back either reflection based on my talk or, more importantly, what you talked about in your small groups? Is there anyone who has a joke they want to share? That's great. No jokes, I'm terrible. OK, wait, how does an ocean say hello? It waves. It waves. Look at that. Look at that. Clearly, it's my friend, it's my girl. I was excited to see the framework that you presented with these as the three priorities. So we're a nonprofit also in the tech for good space. And we've identified these as priorities for us as well around accessibility, operational efficiency and revenue generation. So I feel like even just hearing you articulate those as shared challenges is really valuable. I don't know what we want to say that we're doing specifically on those. But in terms of the intentionality around equity and inclusion, that's something that we're really focusing on. And maybe a question for you is we're realizing, you know, this is obvious, but you need to put real resources towards this. You know, that's staff time. That's maybe spending money on things and how you talk about that in order to sort of get the funding required to be intentional and making people realize that it does require real work and real resources. Yeah, excellent. I will quickly respond to that and then call on someone else. So I think admitting you have a problem is the first step to fixing the problem. And so I think I find it actually really encouraging when other organizations in the public interest technology space recognize that there are actual challenges that we need to, like you said, put resources behind them. I think one of the things that we have found in New America to be successful and also we found through research of other organizations to be successful is really embedding the equity and inclusion conversation into the work itself and so not trying to fund it necessarily as a separate task that is off here. We do our work and we do diversity and inclusion, but really building that language into the grants and to the programs themselves. And so it's embedded throughout the organization as opposed to being its own vertical. Other reflections or other insights from conversations. Four responses to that. I think, okay, cool, this is on. I don't work in Tech for Good, but I work at like a big company and one of the things that I'm on a design team, one of the things that stuck with me that I wanna take back is the concept of designing with instead of designing for. So I think that's something that gets lost very easily. So, yeah, that's it. Thanks. You hand back there. So our group talked about diversity and inclusion and I think we all shared the frustration that probably many people in this room should have about how can we do it. But the one thing that we felt that actually can really be effective is mentoring people at a very young age because the diversity at undergraduate level is much higher than when you get higher in the career. So encouraging young people to stay on that path can we think, we hope, really make a difference. Yeah, keep that, I think that's right on. Mentoring is important. The leaky pipeline, are people familiar with the term leaky pipeline? Some people are nodding their heads. It's essentially, excuse me, especially when looking at diversity, just the different points at which people fall out of the pipeline for various reasons. Even when you look at rates of interest into technical careers, for example, at the high school level, black girls have I think the highest interest in STEM careers. And yeah, when you look at the number of graduates or even 10 years out of graduation, what that looks like. And so the resources that should be applied, mentoring and others to address that leaky pipeline are really important. I think we have time for one or two more reflections. One thing that I've really noticed helps is explicitly inviting single people. Like when I have conversations about this, a lot of groups kind of just could give a call out, like we want people of color to come to this event. And that's like something a lot of people don't show up to. But if you're talking to these people, one thing that I've started doing is just, if I see someone, a woman who even the smallest interest in programming is like a personal mentorship, like I'm here for you, I invite you to do this. And I think, and now, oh, and the other point is, to also team up with organizations that that's their goal. So recently I started working with an organization in Arizona that, especially for Latinx communities. And there's a whole slew of people associated with that community and have the passion for that, as opposed to just kind of like giving the call out. And I don't know, I'm trying to kind of think about that as like a more focused, and it takes a little bit more effort, but I think it brings a lot more to the table. Yeah, so we're finished. Targeted and specific partnerships and invitations are really important. Thank you so much for your time today. If you have questions or want to follow up with me, here's my email and Twitter handle. Thank you, and have a great rest of the conference.