 Hi, I'm Erhard Graf, Assistant Professor of Social and Computer Science at Olin College of Engineering, and Olin's Pitt U.N. designee. I'm excited to tell you about Olin's Public Interest Technology Clinic, PINT. PINT describes themselves as a student-led effort to cultivate pathways and opportunities for Olin students, faculty, and staff, to be creators, engineers, designers, artists, and activists who leverage their skills for justice, equity, inclusion, and doing good in the world. All credit to the awesome name and logo. Go to the students, who in fact run this organization. I am humbly and intentionally a near-faculty advisor to PINT. Shortly after Olin joined the university network, a team of students and I, most of them first years spent a semester imagining what a public interest technology clinic at Olin might look like. We came up with a set of core objectives, including community building and student leadership development, exploring pathways for careers in public interest tech, having local impact through public interest tech projects, understanding the social and political dimensions of technology, developing public interest tech skills through practice, and shaping the culture of engineering and education at Olin. The students translated these objectives into a program of activities designed to invite Olin students into that work, offering pro bono technical consulting projects with nonprofits, skill shares open to the whole Olin community for developing a breadth of technical and non-technical skills, events and speakers to raise awareness and spark conversations about social justice, civic and public interest tech, and ethics. And they even developed a physical space on campus for co-working on public interest projects and for regular conversations. Let me briefly describe the student-run consulting clinic. There's a lot of value in the relationship building part of public interest tech work, reaching out to potential partners, building trust with stakeholders, maintaining those relationships. Students have to learn how to develop mutual expectations and co-design with partners to scope their projects. They develop project management and technical skills that are pulled by the demands of the project themselves and the needs of the stakeholders. The work is context and application driven, and the motivation is high because of relationships and accountability to the community partners. We had three project partnerships in the first year. I want to highlight one of those projects that I believe encapsulates the holistic learning experience possible with real-world applications like this. The clinic team partnered with an organization that aims to prevent human trafficking. The organization wanted to automate the collection of all data, including photos, about women being offered to Johns on certain websites. The students were motivated by the belief that they could create significant positive change through this project. It was well-scoped, within their technical abilities, and seemed like it would help many people. However, investigating the requested system's technical requirements quickly led the students to ask difficult questions about data handling and privacy. The questions became increasingly ethical and moral as the students learned more about human trafficking, realizing other stakeholders like voluntary sex workers would be at risk and that their partner lacked survivor representation and was organized around serving law enforcement rather than victims. The team decided to adopt principles for their work that demanded data only be delivered to local law enforcement when those law enforcement agencies had expertise handling human trafficking survivors, that they maintained a policy of not arresting victims, and that they worked with survivor advocacy groups to help the victims afterwards. The students chose not to design the requested web scraper in the end because they could not be assured how cases would be handled start to finish. They were uncomfortable, possibly putting victims and other stakeholders in greater danger. They explained their decision at length to their partner and even produced a presentation for the Olin community entitled Design No Harm that celebrated the end of their project as a success. You should really check out the presentation on Pines Facebook page. It's fabulous. All of Pines work has been generously funded by a grant from the Public Interest Technology University Network. I am the principal investigator, but I want to emphasize that the grant was actually fully co-written with the founding student organizers and based on our visioning work during that first semester together. I want to specifically name those students on our first grant. Shreya Chattery, Sam Datesman, Emma Pan, and Arwen Sadler. Our grant was critical in creating another key offering of real-world learning, Pines Summer Fellowship Program, which I think illustrates the way we translate practical education and opportunities into public interest tech career paths. Completely designed and executed from start to finish by Pines student organizers, Sam and Ruby. The Pines Summer Fellowship offered three fellowships to Olin students covering salary and cost of living for the summer so that they could embed themselves and community organizations as public interest technologies. The students selected for the fellowship had to develop their own partnerships with those community organizations and it was kind of like a design your own internship program. It was guided by what the fellows wanted to learn and do and what the organizations they wanted to work with most needed. One of the inaugural fellows partnered with a nonprofit that supports students facing socioeconomic barriers to their education. She created structured virtual resources for their students, redesigned their website to meet their current needs and used the human-centered design to create events to serve students as effectively as possible while keeping them safely distanced during the pandemic. Another fellow partnered with a Latino cultural arts and social services program and helped them build flexible, resilient IT infrastructure to support their operations throughout and after the pandemic. Our third fellow helped the coalition on homelessness write local policy and legislation with other organizations to create alternatives to a police response to homelessness and to advocate for the health and safety for people who are homeless during the pandemic. Sam Ruby and I met weekly with the fellows throughout the summer to talk about their experiences and learning and to reflect on the relatedness of each fellow's public interest work. Last March, pint organizers Shreya and Sam presented their insights from launching our student run public interest tech initiative at the public interest tech undergraduate informatics education conference at UT Austin. While pint has been focused on creating a really valuable experience for fellow Oliners, they've also been reflecting on what makes pint effective and disailing those ideas so that students at other schools can replicate the model. This is what the students talked about at the conference. Specifically, they have been constructing a pint in the box or in a box toolkit with resources for students elsewhere to launch their own pint and they've thought carefully about what are the necessary conditions. This is a good opportunity for me to talk about Olin College where this is happening. Olin was founded with an explicit goal to lead the transformation on undergraduate engineering learning experiences to educate the next generation of innovators who want to better the world. Through this work, Olin has established strengths in project-based learning and practical education. We have signature capstone programs and design depth courses which involve direct teaching or mentorship from a majority of the faculty in hands-on and community engaged design. More importantly, we have a proven track record of students as innovative education leaders. Olin began with a partner year in which 30 recent high school grads spent a year co-creating the curriculum they and their peers would experience as the inaugural class a year later. Students continue to be part of the creation and redesign of courses at Olin. The combination of practical engineering opportunities and student-led learning is core to Olin's commitment to public interest technology. It's no surprise then that pint is a community effort. Here is a list of all the past and present student organizers of pint and a non-exhaustive list of faculty supporters who have helped advise pint and support its grant writing and fellowship program. Thanks especially to Steve who has stepped up as a faculty co-advisor. I believe that pint and the students who run it exemplify the best of public interest tech and the best of Olin College. I encourage you to learn more about their efforts and consider starting your own pint. I would be happy to put you in contact with the team. Hello, my name is Gary Johnson and I'm the program director and founder of Coal for South Florida. I'm joined here today with Eileen Guerra who is our program associate and Livio Zarnando who is our program manager. We're going to be talking a little bit about how our project people budget went and our collaboration with Miami-Dade College with Funding through New America to work on a tool that makes it easier for residents and government to help make collaborative decisions that impact the budget. So what was the role of this project? I tell people all the time one of the biggest things we looked at is how might we improve the way data is collected from public feedback from communities like in Miami, Florida so that it can make budgetary decisions. What is people budget? People budget is an open source initiative aimed at addressing this question to local government and communities. Through this project with the help of Miami-Dade College, we got about 10 plus students as well as a professor and a project lead, Livio Zarnando, who helped work with the team. And one of our biggest focus is to make sure that the project reflect the diversity and inclusion that Miami is meant for. So we looked at making sure that it had a wide range of contributors. The students as well as the staff that helped on this project were mostly Latinx. Some are black and African-American and others are white and Caucasian. But one of our focuses was also making sure that this area had equity and inclusion. So for this group, we also looked at getting people who've never coded before. They're new to coding, which is most of the group, experienced people as well as professionals such as Livio and I. I'm now going to hand it over to Elaine so she can talk a little bit about our UX process and how we went about researching our community. Thank you, Gregg. So today I really want to share with you all how we're going about user research and using that feedback and insight from users to better this project, this tool, and really learn about the who, the why, and the how, right? Because who's going to use this tool? Why might they want to use it? And how is the best way they can use it? So feedback is our North Star. Go ahead. So our North Star metric is obviously reducing the participation gap for people who struggle to understand how the city or the county budget decisions impact them. Not a lot of people understand the city budget or even know what the city budget is. So we measure success by user engagement and finding appropriate budget area projects to focus on, especially during this COVID-19 pandemic time. So how did we begin user testing? At the beginning, we used the awesome budget party and we conducted one-on-one user sessions with 10 South Florida participants. And from these sessions, we understood that all 10 testers enjoyed the simple instructional steps to the tool, but six out of 10 did not really understand or get the purpose of how their decisions were going to impact. And then three out of 10 testers were curious to see how the process might be. So from that, our decision was to build our own participatory budget from scratch, adopting simple and instructional steps, focusing on one area and also making it easier for people to see how other people are voting in the local area. So when we began testing in Miami, we really focused on testing for navigation and ease of use. We explored if the users found the right information and we also asked about demographics, right? So like Greg mentioned, we really wanna do it and make it diverse and inclusive. So we wanted to hear from everybody and we collected these test results in Microsoft forms and we did it pre-COVID times, so in person. So from these sessions, we learned the lesson, right? We learned these key results and three of them were interface design, okay? So these are essentials. Interface design meant that it should be easy, right? It should be simple and feel modern to them and it should be understandable, right? So experience design means that it should be accessible to everyone because not everyone might understand what the material is being presented by, right? Or why it's presented and then easy setup. So it should be easy to just use the new or existing content and then publishing it on an easy to share report, okay? So Power BI. So like Greg mentioned at the beginning, we really want to focus on diversity and almost half of the population of Florida is minorities. So Hispanic, Latinos, Black, African Americans and Asians and other races. So we really want to reach out to them and we know that the minority have to go through a lot especially now during COVID times and most of them don't have the resources to learn more about their public budget or their city budget and how they can engage with that. So if you go to the next slide, Greg, our current work in process is that we've been doing surveys in English and in Spanish. We've been doing it outreach through email and social media platforms. And of those survey participants, we, some of them will be selected and then we'll proceed with a more in depth review or interview, sorry. And then choosing between 30 or 60 minutes these interviewer, interviewees participants will be compensated. So one thing that we found out is, you know, these are the surveys, these are examples of the surveys. And one thing we did find out is that we really want to build this movement. Okay, we want, according to a study in OpenGov partnership, if you go to the next slide, Greg, participatory budgeting causes a relative increase, okay, an allocation of budget. So we want to go from education to engagement to change. Okay, so we believe that providing this tool for cities and other groups to organize will help inform and engage communities, especially underrepresented communities related to the local budgets. Thank you. Do you want to talk a little bit about our goals from short-term, mid-term and long-term? Awesome, awesome. Well, you know, Code for South Florida, we focus on really, we want to level the playing field for everyone through the power of technology and really drive more interest into the public interest space. You know, in the short term, we definitely want to, you know, we want people to be able to make more equitable and just decisions for their needs. And we want underserved communities to really have more representation in public processes for governments and for public decisions of public interest. You know, those are mostly our short-term goals. You know, in the middle of that, we definitely want to increase public acknowledgement of the information that we're putting on the platforms that we're building. We want to create more channels for to increase transparency on data and what government is doing. And through that, we hope that we can reduce corruption, clientelism and preferences within local governments using through the people budget tool. Long-term, we hope to really generate some social capital around this project. And with the information that this tool is providing, we really expect to develop active and more active citizens in democratic processes. And that captures a lot of the work we did. Through the process, we started through Discovery. We did a prototype and leveraging the research and leadership of Livio who helped the students coordinate and become more acclimated to agile. We built a prototype and we shared this prototype with the city of Miami, with Miami-Dade County and the city was very excited. They actually let us know they want to continue this work and see how we can move and get this into a pilot for the next budget cycle. So that's a little bit about our results and we're hoping to go for the future of the project. If you want more information about us, you can go to codeforsouth.com. You'll find out more of the projects that we're working on. Hi, I'm the Reverend Dr. Katie Comiskey and I'm a professor in the Psychology Department at the College of Staten Island, which is part of the City University of New York. I also serve at the College of Staten Island as the academic coordinator of CSI St. George and extension of our campus on the North Shore of Staten Island. I titled our talk, Calling All Innovators, Influencers and Activists, Building a Diverse Tech Talent Pipeline through Intentional Learning Communities because this is the strategy that we use to recruit and garner student interests of a cohort of students who were just recently graduated from high school. One of the goals of our grant is to build diversity into our tech talent pipeline. And as I mentioned, we're located at the St. George extension of CSI. We have recruited a cohort of 24 incoming first year students who were recruited from four area feeder high schools. These 24 students participated in a pre-college paid summer workshop series that focused on college readiness, mainly because many of our students are first generation college goers, as well as helping to collaboratively define for ourselves what tech and the public interest is. These students were matriculated successfully into CSI for the fall 2020 semester, taking the majority of their general ed courses together for their entire first year. The focus of this grant is building this intentional learning community focused on public interest tech. So in order to do that, we've partnered closely with faculty. I worked closely with the faculty who are teaching all eight of our courses and four in the fall over the summer in sort of to help situate their curriculum in public interest tech, as well as our collaboration with an outside entity that the college fully supports called the CSI tech incubator, which is a site that works to develop new talent and diversity of new talent in the tech industry. We are also in the process of building a community advisory board of local civic leaders and tech professionals that would then eventually help to build the more experiential and service learning components of our grant. The eight courses that the students will be taking this year, four they're taking right now, focus on art, English composition, psychology and civics. In the spring they'll be taking courses related to ethics, philosophy, computer science and media literacy. All of the courses in their first year will have modules focused on public interest tech, as I said as they and their professors define it, as well as coinciding synergistic activities and events like the convening today. We received additional support through our CUNY Wide Grant through New America to build open educational resources into these courses and we're able to offer our first full year of courses at low to no textbook costs for all of the students. We were also able through our grant to buy all students laptops and so we really feel as though having access to free and open resources is an essential part of public interest tech, however it's not enough. And so we are encouraging student involvement and currently building peer support networks utilizing low cost, low-fi applications so that all of our students will hopefully be successful especially in their first year and in their first semester of college. When we convene together in November, we hope that our panel will be able to discuss the following points. First, I'm going to be bringing students from our cohort to the panel itself. So first year, first semester, college students will be participating with us in our panel. And we hope that we can discuss how to actively engage the assets of students to encourage buy-in into public interest tech. We also hope to discuss how we could use public interest tech to center new discourse and anti-racist and anti-poverty movements and to leverage local driven solutions to social injustices. And finally, we hope that we can discuss how public interest tech can also provide an interdisciplinary venue to drive workforce development for 21st century, hopefully post pandemic worlds. So we look forward to seeing everyone in November. Thank you. I'm Shoshana Cohen, the director of community-engaged learning at Stanford University. I work with faculty to incorporate community-engaged projects into their courses. And I'm Leslie Garvin, senior program director for Cardinal Careers. My group works to make public service careers more visible, valued and accessible to Stanford students. Both of our programs are part of Cardinal Service, a university-wide initiative housed at the Haas Center for Public Service to elevate and expand service as a distinctive feature of a Stanford education. Interest is high. More than 3,500 students participated in some form of public service last year. Stanford is known for seeding many of the world's great technology companies and a significant percentage of undergraduates choose engineering and computer science attracted by financial incentives, heavy recruiting and our proximity to the Silicon Valley. The goal of our PIT initiative is to ensure that all students have numerous pathways for developing their interests and skills and effective design and application of technology for the public good. The work we are doing with PIT-UN has two primary components. First, to ensure that all interested students, regardless of major, feel they are qualified to embark on a technology-related career by providing an array of experiential learning opportunities in courses, research and capstone programs. And second, to provide pathways for students to pursue careers in public interest technology through internships, postgraduate fellowships and jobs. Our Cardinal Commitment Program, we support numerous student organizations that focus on the application of technology in the public interest. Many encourage students from outside CS and engineering to engage, giving them valuable exposure and experience. As an example, the Stanford PIT Lab bridges numerous disciplines as it supports discussions, classes, projects, research and advocacy. We will now hear a few words from one of our students heavily engaged in these PIT initiatives. My name is Nick Mardo and I'm a senior at Stanford pursuing a major in political science and a master's degree in computer science. I came into Stanford with separate interests in technology and policy, no clear intention to combine these passions. But in my freshman year, I took seminars and topics including the social impact of artificial intelligence. In my sophomore year, co-founded the Stanford Open Data Project, worked as an RA at what's now called the Stanford Cyber Policy Center and built technology at the National Institute of Health. These experiences convinced me that I wasn't just interested in technology and policy, but I also wanted to work in their intersection to advance the public interest. I continued along this path my junior year, which included an independent study on AI regulation and a cardinal quarter with the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. This year, I am co-president of the Stanford Public Interest Tech Lab, which works closely with the Haas Center, the Stanford Ethics Society and Technology Hub in New America. With over 60 students working on over 10 projects at the lab, this organization now serves as one of the focal points for engaging Stanford students in public interest technology. Thank you, Nick. Ensuring that students are ready to embark on Pitt careers requires that they develop various soft skills such as comfort with ambiguity, problem solving and critical thinking, organizational management, ethical reasoning and empathy. We support numerous classes through the Cardinal Courses Program in which instructors can receive grants to fund the community engagement elements of their curriculum. As Pitt has become front and center, we've seen numerous classes developed across the university with hundreds of students enrolling. A block of our funding through the Pitt University Network is used specifically for capstone projects. Students interested in Pitt-related capstones demonstrate passionate areas such as human rights, democracy and good government, health equity, access to education and environmental sustainability. Our goal is to give students real world experiences that expose them to many opportunities to pursue Pitt as a career. I will now hand it off to Leslie who will discuss how we are developing the Pitt Career Pipeline. Thank you, Shoshana. First work exposure typically comes through internships. Stanford's Cardinal Courses Program provides stipends for students to engage in nine-week full-time public service internships. With funding from the university network, we were able to double the number of our Pitt summer internships offered from six in 2019 to 12 in 2020. Demand still outpaced the number of internships available with an average of 15 applicants per Pitt placement in the tech nonprofits. Here's an example of a Pitt Cardinal Quarter opportunity Alyssa Romanos interned at Just Fix, a housing justice tech nonprofit and built their eviction-free NYC text bot, a tool that informs tenants who are facing eviction if they qualify for the right to counsel. In terms of helping students transition to Pitt positions after they graduate, we have a three-pronged strategy. First, we provide exposure to Pitt careers. We promote Pitt careers through career panels and by inviting Pitt organizations to participate in Stanford's career fairs. We even go so far as to cover the career fair registration fees for the nonprofit and government Pitt organizations that we invite. Second, we provide accessible first jobs for students through Pitt post-graduation fellowships. These fellowships enable students to apply for specific Pitt positions on campus and months ahead of graduation, alleviating some of the disparities between the private sector recruiting and nonprofit hiring practices. You can see some of our fellowship placement partners represented with their logos. And finally, we provide Pitt job search resources for graduating students. For example, we research and curate external Pitt jobs, fellowships and internships in our weekly Cardinal Careers Newsletter Pitt edition, which has a subscribership of 420 students and is growing. In our next phase of Pitt initiatives at Stanford, we will extend Pitt-related capstone projects into new departments with a focus on the social sciences. We will also identify and promote Pitt career pathways within the private sector. We are grateful to the Public Interest Technology University Network and especially New America Foundation for all of their support. Thank you for being with us today.