 Author of Women of Color in Tech, a book that seeks to inform and inspire women of color to pursue careers in tech in a variety of different sectors, including careers in civic tech. I'm truly honored and excited to be serving as moderator for this afternoon's discussion, and to be joined by many wonderful and accomplished leaders representing nonprofits, government and industry. All the panelists that are with us today are deeply committed to bring more civic-minded technologists into the workforce. Before we start, a few housekeeping items. Please utilize the Q&A feature if you have a question for any of the panelists. Be sure to include the name of the panelists if your question is for a specific individual. Otherwise, I'll make the assumption that this is an open question for anyone that is on here. We will have a formal Q&A discussion, but please feel free to go ahead and ask questions as things come up. Panelists, as a reminder, I will direct questions to you as we go through the discussion, and if you'd like to ask a follow-up question, just be sure to mention the panelists that you are addressing. With that, our discussion today seeks to establish the need for public interest technologists across several sectors. Technologists, both in the U.S. and worldwide, are needed to help governments, social service providers, advocacy groups, and many other sectors to use technology to find ways of working and confront and address the challenges and inequities that inevitably arise with technological innovation. We're going to touch on a variety of different topics, including how we can better create career pathways for students, barriers that we will need to overcome, and how we can ensure that we are building a diverse and inclusive talent pool. With that, I'd like to now formally introduce our wonderful panel. Georgia Bullen is the executive director at Simply Secure, an organization that helps practitioners design technology that centers and protects vulnerable populations. Georgia is also the chair of the advisory committee at Measurement Lab, a project that provides the largest collection of open internet performance data on the planet. She has been an advocate in the internet health movement through her work and passion around issues such as net neutrality, security, privacy, and equitable access to technology. Georgia previously served as the director of tech projects at New America's Open Technology Institute. Robert Domanski is the New York City government's director of higher education for the mayor's tech talent pipeline industry partnership. Rob oversees the CUNY 2x tech initiative. This initiative, a $20 million investment in the City University of New York, seeks to grow New York City's tech workforce by doubling the number of graduates with tech bachelor degrees by 2022, increasing employability of such graduates to grow the local pool of high quality diverse talent, and increase the rate at which the New York City tech industry consistently draws from this pool of talent in their hiring practices. Rick Kempinski is the senior manager of federal workforce programs at the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to inspire a new generation of civil servants and to transform the way government works. Rick leads the partnership's internship and fellowship strategy and manages several key programs, including the cybersecurity talent initiative, the call to serve innovation internship program, and the Harold W. Rosenball Fellowship in International Relations. Travis Moore is the founder and director of Tech Congress based at the Open Technology Institute at New America. Tech Congress connects Congress to technology talent training and ideas, and organizes the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. And finally, Dr. Stephanie Rodriguez serves as vice president of policy and engagement at Anita B.org, a leading voice for women in technology across the globe, where she advances policy for workforce access, equity and inclusion. This includes a new initiative called the United States of Technologists, an effort to drive a surge of 10,000 technologists working towards the public good in local, state and federal government. She's a longtime volunteer in education, literacy and mentorship programs. Panelists, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Allow me to kick off by directing my first question to Travis. Travis, what do you think is the one thing that people get wrong about public interest technology or about the pit ecosystem in general. I think so it's great to be here with with everyone. And thanks for having me. So, Suzanne, I would say, I think the thing I come from a government perspective, having served in government and operating a fellowship in government. And I think the thing that people get wrong is just how entrepreneurial, these roles are Congress, for example, is 535 different small businesses. These are teams of 2030, like 40 max. And so when you end up as a public interest technologist on this team, it's generally speaking, only otherwise populated by lawyers or public policy folks the public policy backgrounds, you have a perspective that's not otherwise available and you know what you don't know. So you can do extraordinarily entrepreneurial and impactful things so use a couple examples. We had a fellow organize the first hearing on facial recognition technology back in 2017. We had a fellow introduce the first bill in Congress to allow defendants to have access to algorithms that are used in the criminal justice setting for evidentiary purposes. We had a fellow get the open government data act signed into law. And that's because they're able to bring these skills and expertise to government and and really pave, pave away. And so, I think we shouldn't think of government as as bureaucratic because because there is a ton of opportunity for folks that have this skill to really chart new paths. Wonderful. Thank you. Yeah, I think it's really important to really understand how, you know, diverse and all of the different things that we can, you know, get involved in when it comes to public interest technology and really, you know, getting people to understand that. And I don't know if on the panel have any additional thoughts. This is Rick. I just want to add that I think one, one thing to think about is that there are technology opportunities, at least from my perspective on the federal government side throughout the entire country so folks do not have to only look at opportunities within the DC area. There's also opportunities for recent graduates and students where they're located where they're going to school right now in the state, although on a federal government level. So just be looking for opportunities and have them look for opportunities if they're thinking about, you know, a career in public service and more in the federal government side of what's going on in their own area for the federal government. So something to be thinking about as well. I think another piece that I always like to make sure we talk about is that technology isn't just someone who studied computer science and went into coding and is doing the, like, making and writing of this of software. One of the things we use every day our technology paper is technology pens and pencils or technology sticky notes or technology. And so to have really successful technology work you actually need people from diverse backgrounds. We're thinking about the many facets of the way technology is entering our systems and the way that the systems are interacting as a whole so it's much more socio technical approach to things. And I think one of the gaps we see a lot is actually that there are very few people with design or community backgrounds that are working on technology projects and how critical that is to actually the success and thinking about needs and engaging with community as part of that process. I think you just add that, you know, I'm not sure that people get this wrong but I think perhaps it's underappreciated, which is the transferable skills and relationships that you build when you work in public service through government and what that means when you do or don't leave that role. And so I think we talk a lot about the incredible value of lifelong civil servants, and there's another incredible value of having experts in the public sector who understand how government works and understands how to work with government players so that when they're back in their private sector roles, we can still accomplish really innovative and effective public-private partnership strategies that are also super, super important for government to execute some of its core functions. And sometimes I think that the learning and the transformative skill sets that you develop through government service can sometimes also be an underappreciated value. Stephanie, thank you for bringing it up. I wanted to ask a follow-up question. When it comes to, you know, having more of that government interaction, what kind of barriers do you think that we need to overcome to kind of get more of a stronger partnership? I can take a stab at that one, Suzanne. I think some of the barriers are just in connecting and being engaged. So I know when I first entered government, I was super nervous. I didn't have a lot of experience advocating as a citizen because I just wasn't really very active. So even really understanding how the different branches of government work together was a learning curve for me. And so I think there's something to be said about general civic engagement, helping to sort of bridge some of those gaps between how public and private sectors are working together so we can identify those opportunities a little bit more efficiently for where lovers can be pulled in where subject matter expertise is welcome in all of the myriad ways that you can deliver that expertise inside and outside of government. Thank you for that. Georgia, I had a question for you and you kind of spoke about that in your previous response. When it comes to, you know, developing these programs, what kind of challenges have you encountered and what are opportunities for growth or for potentially overcoming those challenges? Yeah, I think, I mean, a lot of it is what Stephanie was also just talking about like those communication gaps and actually the facilitation and organizing needs. I think a lot of times a lot of the projects we work with, we find, know that there are problems with the tools or the system or the program that they're doing, they're not really sure how to identify what they are, or they've heard complaints from people and they're not really sure how to synthesize that or how to facilitate like learning more. And so we, a lot of what we do is work with people to help them build processes that are about getting that feedback, creating those feedback loops, and just having a more open process that allows for people to all be heard and all of the issues to be understood. I think a story that I tell from one of my first jobs I was working in a software company. And I was a part of the design team and someone came in and they said, you know, I was working with the users at this like one client site and I found this issue but we should change it so that the background of everything in our software is white. And I was like, what is the context of what they're doing? Like tell us more about that. What we found out was that the group, when she expanded on it, what we found out was that the group using our software actually was using it for presentations. And so their whole thing was that they wanted all of the PowerPoint features because that's what they were used to and that's the context that we used to working in. So it wasn't just that we needed to change a color and like directly respond to the way that complaint was we kind of we really needed to understand the context which meant asking more questions sort of working with people to see what they were actually struggling with and and create that feedback process so that we could instead provide customization. Right and that's, that's like a very tactical example about like a software feedback process but I think the same can be applied to, to program designs right if you look at any of the programs that all of us here work on a lot of what we're trying to do, how do we help support exploring challenging questions that are coming up in so many intersectional facets of our community and society, right it's not just like oh we need to figure out how we deal with the Internet, it's like the Internet is everything now so we need to understand how all of these systems come together, what the problems are with the needs are and work together to solve those. Okay, any additional comments from the panelists, I can weigh in on, I think, some challenges, which is, which we felt pretty acutely at the beginning, which is, it requires on the level of government to bring in a public interest a degree of maturity on behalf of the staffer or the principal, when you are going to them and you're saying, you know, these are incredibly hardworking, mission driven, under resourced folks. So part of the, part of the pitch that you're making to them about why they should take on a technologist is, is, yes, you are wonderful, but we also think that you could use some help here. There's a blind spot, which is a knowledge or understanding of technology that requires a real level of maturity on behalf of, of the, of the government staffer and and for that reason, you know, our focus as an organization has always been. Go to, go to the evangelizers, go to the members of Congress, go to the staffers that already are deep believers in the use and future of technology, and that want more tools and in our toolbox. So if you think about opportunities, it's, it's about identifying those individuals in other governments. You know, also, especially we talk a lot about executive branches, we're in legislatures, the judicial branch is a completely blank slate here. There is virtually no one working in the judicial branch context to think about improving court systems or access access to expertise and decision making for judges so huge opportunities there and the evangelizers exist. The challenge is we have to find them and we have to work with them and we have to understand their unique challenges and and and and then do that matchmaking. And this is Rick, I just want to add, I'm on the exact one the executive branch side so I can kind of speak to that and by as we were setting up the cyber security talent initiative I can say I agree with Travis. We had to find the champions who really understood that set finding entry, especially our program is entry level specifically. A lot of folks want talent that is has many, many years of experience in technology that just probably there aren't that many people who have that experience quite yet. And really we want them to take on this entry level town develop them and build those pipelines for the future to build up those those future cyber leaders. And it's taken a little bit of a time to get them to understand that that our program is offering multiple ways to develop them they're not alone in that process. So we want to help them develop folks by giving them technical training professional development training in addition to the on the job training that the agency is providing. And so we're all in this together to help build those technologists to be the future folks and then obviously our program is also cross sector opportunities so they're going to spend two years in the federal government and then be invited to apply to one of our private company organizations. So they're going to be very marketable to to those companies by the all the training that they're getting in their first two years in the public sector. And then they're building their networks that is going to be beneficial to the private companies as they're thinking about how to work more closely and effectively with the federal government. So things I think are looking up I think the program is launched really happy with our first cohort, and we're hoping that through building these technologists we can get even more technologists in the federal government. If I could jump in this is Rob. Following up on Rick's comment. It really gets to the heart of the question of what qualifies want to be a public interest technologist right and what type of training what type of education. Do we really view as being essential to qualifying for that type of title as distinct from just a technologist period. At the core of it when we start talking about like workforce development. Really, it's impossible to imagine how feeding into curriculum and again I work in higher education. But without, you know, focusing and targeting curricular changes and incorporating a lot of public interest tech principles frameworks theories and the actual tools used by practitioners into curriculum. And really that's what I think is essential to you know training the next generation of technologists to be public interest technologists. I certainly agree and so what are what are ways that we can help in that regard what what are ways that pit or other organizations, how can we help build those those next level of technologists. Robert following up with you sorry. Well first of all, if the goal right there's always this definitional problem with public interest tech. If the goal is training the next generation of technologists, then, and again, I come from certain sector. But if that is the goal training the technologists, then we do need to put a focus on supporting the technology education. And yes that means computer science departments, computer information systems departments and so on. Those are the folks that will be the software engineers in a few years and in the years to come. And so it's really matter of supporting those departments, making sure that students of all backgrounds are getting through towards their degree completion, ultimately getting internships and jobs, and by supporting that pipeline, as you said right. That's really how we can inject a lot of these values, a lot of these thought considerations into curricula, so that ultimately all these future technologists are getting that education. Thank you. And so to actually follow up on that Rick. One of the questions I had for you was in terms of diversity and equity and inclusion. What are some things methods that we could be to making sure that this pipeline not only has the technological skill, but it is representative of the diverse public that we're serving. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm really proud of the work that CTI did in this arena. We, for our first cohort, were above the national average and a lot of the demographic groups for our first first throughout the entire group from application to applicants to finalists to participants. We did a lot of outreach to HBCUs and Hispanic serving institutions. We worked really closely with several membership and student organizations to really get the word out there and to have diverse group of folks applied to the program. We really targeted not only those groups but also non-traditional colleges and universities, so a lot of online schools, places like Western Governors University, to really get the word out there and think about people who are not only early in their stage in their career but also maybe been in the workforce for 20 years and are doing a career change, for example, or even veterans who are looking to come back and really focus on cybersecurity in particular. And so we were just really happy with that. So just really making sure that you're casting that wide net and really targeting folks that you kind of want to make sure that the pool itself is really diverse. I'm open to other thoughts on that from the panelists, but the way that worked for us for at least for our first year was really successful and we're really happy with the outcome. I think one strategy that we're taking is to make sure folks know about the opportunities that exist. So it is wild, like you don't know what you don't know. And it's kind of wild how insular knowledge about some of these amazing pathway programs and opportunities really can be. So if you're in a technical training program and you didn't have Rick come visit you, like happened to me when I learned of one of these policy programs, then how would you know that that's even a pathway that is available to you? And so I need to be.org with the United States of technologists are one of our main goals with that effort is to really be a hub of information and almost a one stop shop if you would for information and resources on where you can find opportunities in public interest technology and tech where technologists who are interested in serving in government can identify those opportunities, along with resources to make you more competitive along those application processes so it's it's pretty different right using your computer science background to plan that that software engineering job at a corporate entity that it is to get inside and navigate USA jobs dot gov. And so really making sure that folks understand what is expected and how to navigate some of those mechanisms, while at the same time working to make those mechanisms a bit more inclusive. I think it's a multi pronged approach. I was to jump in and add, I totally agree I feel like I spend a lot of time, just as much as I kind of my personal time either reposting jobs, places, trying to like reach out to people directly. I used to do it individually actually just started my own mailing list to send things out I think. I think one of my best friends run as well from the Congress community. There's a few different sites I've tried to like aggregate the lists and get those out to people that I know that jobs get posted on. And I know that that's still one that's like as individuals doing that's never going to be enough. I think now that I'm also in a position where I'm running a small nonprofit part of what I would love to see and what I've been trying to do is figure out how to navigate the universities offer so that I can actually hire students as interns or do things that are coursework related. We've done this a little bit with Berkeley now and I still don't really know that we're navigating it well. I would love to be able to know I have I have an eight person team so it's also really hard for me to necessarily go and sign up for every university's program and a lot of them are pretty different so someone had pointed me towards. I think Harvard has a job site for their MBA students for that might want to work in public interest instead and I'm on there and I can post things no one's ever applied to them. I don't really know how to frame it for them I don't know the program super well so it's hard for me as a small nonprofit to navigate that but a different one that we've actually had work really well as we work with the NYU business transaction law clinic and that's been really great to get connected with students that are I mean they're getting to learn about our technology work that we're doing and sort of human rights work that we're doing civic tech work that we're doing but they're coming out of a law program and that you know people are going to come from different backgrounds nonprofits need all kinds of help. And we're great learning space and I would love to see a way to better connect those dots that actually helps nonprofits navigate the university ecosystem because it is large and hard. But I'm happy to help give people that work experience and can pay them many many contacts so it'd be great to know how to get connected to more people who want to do the work. I'd like to plus one everything Georgia just said and really the theme we're all discussing right now is focused on individual opportunities whether internships or hiring. I do think it's worth mentioning what an opportunity there is on this front as well in terms of institutional selection. So for instance, when potential funders when nonprofits, you know even different governmental actors, consider what institutions that they should be funding for these types of efforts. I think institutional selection really should matter right. And we want funders to be reaching out to HPC right we know that again I work for the New York City government and the City University of New York has 80% of all of its students are from minority or underrepresented groups, fully 42% of its students come from households and then $20,000 a year in income, and you know typically a lot of opportunities tend to be offered towards the more well capitalized, you know colleges and universities, and yet if a more conscious conscious decision was made more frequently to invest and provide opportunities to some of these institutions, I think we see a lot of progress being made. If I can weigh in from the organizational perspective, one really fantastic opportunity is that we are all running programs that didn't exist six years ago. So much of the problems around diversity, equity and inclusion are seem to be based in inertia, old ways of hiring old ways of recruiting. So I don't know how to solve this problem project include out of the K poor center has a playbook, and it's got like 80 recommendations for things that you should do to build a diverse equitable and inclusive organization so when we started with this, we just took that playbook and we adopted it from from day one and I'm proud to say to date over 40% of our fellows are people of color over 30% are vets to rick's point huge opportunity with veterans. So we set a goal that 51% of our outreach. This Georgia has been a huge help here, but 51% of our outreach every recruitment cycle would go to communities underrepresented in the tech community that we adopted the first in Washington politics of diversity referral award, which is one of five interventions that the K poor center says are are significant in terms of improving your di and your organization. And, you know, at the end of the day we publish our metrics every recruitment cycle, and we talk openly about how we are trying to learn when it comes to di. So I think there's a huge opportunity for all of us programs. Those of you at universities, those of you starting programs at universities to just bake it in from day one. And again, I want to point people to project included is a great great resource. Last thing I will say is, I'm going to give a plug because Georgia mentioned it for those that are interested in policy opportunities, and you're technical we have a we have a resource a jobs list. Tech Congress dot io slash resources. You can sign up for it. It's a monthly newsletter it's specific to, you know, I'm studying computer science or engineering or informatics and I want to go work on data privacy or facial recognition or algorithmic accountability. We think it's important to have a specific, you know, job list for for those folks. Thank you. I actually want to circle back to a theme that Georgia brought up earlier, and it's talking about, you know, getting that visibility into all of these opportunities, not have it be so kind of siloed or you know kind of tribal community building this awareness of public interest technology careers as well as as training. So, Robert, I actually would like to ask this question to you. What are some ways that we can, I guess, greater solidify the visibility of public interest technology careers. So every institution is going to be different. I would start out, I would recommend by targeting university systems. So, for instance, large state systems with State University of New York, the City University of New York, each of which has, you know, well over a dozen different colleges within it, and kind of promoting and making connections with both the administration and the faculty at those institutions, I think would go a long way. If I can add this is Rick when we did our first round of CTI recruitment. Just to underscore what Robert said, we found out through our evaluation on our metrics that the way that a lot of our applicants found out and students found out about it was through faculty. And then directly was is definitely something that we need to be doing even more of so that students know about it. I think also having faculty and career services just understanding that a career of public service is a very viable career that it is something along the same line is going through academia or going to the private sector. So we need we need that buy in as well I think from those, those folks at the university which which isn't usually a problem, especially in the public policy side, but getting more of the computer science information technology schools within the universities and colleges I think are really important and that's a lot of the work that we're trying to do the CTI it's just really getting in front of those folks to tell their students that that there are great opportunities within the federal government space. And then I think I was going to say another thing. Oh, just having the folks who've actually had experiences in the federal government or in public in the public sector. So talking to the ambassadors to that work, I think is really important so people who have that career can go talk to their alma mater's, and really kind of beast, be speakers and go on campus and really, you know, talk about how is mission driven and not the salary that you're going necessarily in the beginning to go work for the federal government, but that you eventually can get a career that's really rewarding, and it impacts huge, you know, huge amounts of folks and huge scales of people. So you are building your career. And then obviously, those folks can also act as mentors and I think mentorship is a huge, huge part of the success of anyone in this field. If you have someone that is helping you guiding you on your career path. And if you find someone who can help you in that because you admire their career. I think students should be looking out for that as well. So you actually mentioned something that I was very curious about and it tends to come up in conversations that I sometimes have with that with mentees and that is around a salary. It's not that I don't want to, you know, pursue a career in public interest, but I worry about, you know, is it going to be on par with what I'm making in the in the private sector. And to follow up on that, do you think that there that there is a pay gap. And if that is the case, what are I guess some ways that we can incentivize students to kind of look at it and frame it differently. So is that directed at me personally. Yes. Yeah, I guess I guess when I said the salary word I should have known that this was coming. I'll say that from what I understand, especially in the cybersecurity realm that I've been learning a lot about over the past year and a half, setting up this program. I think at the entry level there is definitely a gap. As you grow in your career and as you get a higher up in your level there is less and less of a gap so I think that that might be true. So I do think that is a challenge I think that's something that would love the federal government, specifically to be addressing and fixing to make make entry level talent more competitive against obviously people like the Silicon Valley is and other private companies out there. But what we do with the partnership I mean we we often talk about obviously the missions of the federal government and specifically each federal agency has its own mission within the federal government that we hope that is an incentive to the folks who are interested if you go work for the federal election commission or if you go work for the environmental protection agency, you believe in those missions as well which I think is really helpful. So it's less less so about the money or the salary it's really about the rewarding experience you're going to get. And so, but I think what CTI has done is we're, we're, we're helping folks through our different components so we have a professional development program that they're part of so helping them develop in communication skills and goal setting and career pathing in, you know, all those professional development and leadership skills that we think that they're going to help them in the future become cyber leaders. We also have a technical partner named cyber vista, who's providing technical training while they're there so that's all part of the program that the agencies don't have to pay for the participants don't have to pay for it's just baked into our program. So they're going to be developing those technical skills along the nice framework so that they are marketable going forward to either stay in public service, or in the private sector or whatever sector they go to, developing their skills that way so they're getting those for free and then what I already mentioned the mentorship program, we are connecting them, we have a program that we are connecting each participant with a cyber professional in the public or private sector to help them on their career path and give them that development to help them talk about what certifications they might need and how to get to where they want to go. So I think, you know, not a lot of jobs do that all of those things so I hope that that's helping them decide to choose this as a career path. Oh, and then finally sorry one last thing is if they are selected with the private company, they actually get up to $75,000 other student loan assistance is covered so that is another obviously incentive that our program offers, not every pathway is that it's a great selling point for our program. If I may. I think what we want to be careful to avoid is equating this idea of public interest technologists needing to be in the public sector. Right, and again when we think of public interest tech, not just public tech, right it's an important distinction because in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the next generation technologists will work in the private sector and I think for public interest tech as a movement, I think it's really important that we are equipping all the future technologists with this public interest tech background and education, so that as they go forth in their public in their private sector roles, excuse me, that they do have a grounding and are well equipped to kind of take all the considerations that we discuss in the space with them wherever they go. Those are super super important point, Rob. And, and I think what we're seeing right now especially I need to be.org our technologists who for a variety of reasons like living through a global pandemic and a reckoning on racial justice around the world and these huge implications for news consumption and media and election security are all impacting our lives so acutely that what we're really seeing is people start to evaluate the bottom line that their talents are forwarding. And, and this calculus of what do I want to achieve in my career has always been more than salary for I think a lot of people and is only becoming more so about what is it that my talents will have an impact and changing and so I think there's a lot of room to talk, not just about the salary and I would say to George's point earlier where technologists aren't just folks with computing degrees. A lot of us I'm an immunologist by training people tell me I'm a technologist. A transition to the public sector was actually a salary increase from the path I was taking in biomedical what lab research doing postdoctoral training right so I think that there's a lot of nuances in these pathways that technologists are coming from and and I think Rob, like we should just put you on a bullhorn because it's so important that this public interest ethos and this focus on ethics and the intersection of industries and ethics and policies that impact them. Technologists should be taking that no matter the sector that they're in. Yeah, if I could just jump in as well. I think the other thing is, it may be your first job, the salary might not be the same, but there, there are plenty of high paying jobs and government and nonprofits like and there's plenty of public data about that if anyone wants to go dig into 90s and learn more about it. So to think that you can't build a like well paid career in the space is actually just wrong, like you absolutely can. Your entry point might not be the same. And that you know I think has a lot to do more with like the way that we understand and look at equity and honestly some labor issues in the industry and things like that but that we could work on as a as a community right like maybe nonprofit the government should have better starting salaries maybe foundations and grants and things can reward that more and ask to see those levels come up. Those are things that would help in addressing di issues as well if you're talking about before. We need to make it so that these opportunities are not only available to people with the privilege to take those pay cuts when it is a pay cut. And we need to make the pathways to making those careers that are sustainable lives possible right like that's that's something that we need to do across the board. And you absolutely can make money and not only can you make money and get your loans forgiven. You can have maybe a better working schedule you can have like better equity and have a mission to work with so actually I think it's probably where more people should want to be. If we really want to think about it. If I can also just at plus one all of that but also say for those of you students that are thinking about whether or not this is a career pathway that I might want to take on whether or not two or three or four or five years or one year in government would be a worthwhile experience. We're at a time where if we fast forward 10 years 20 years from now government and technology are colliding the infrastructure of our daily lives is technology. And so, and as we evolve as a workforce, the people that are going to be most successful are going to be the inner or the folks that are most interdisciplinary. We'll set whether you're working at a tech company or whether you're working in government or whether you're working in civil society or whether you're working at a university that is going to be really really important is to be the bridger. And so spending time in government or a public policy to get that education so that you can be the bridger be the translator be the connector. When we look 510 20 years out, you are going to be the people that are going to be, you know attached to the CEO's office, or the executive director because you will be able to see the forest through the trees. You know how tech is changing society so this is, we view our fellowship program as like a master's degree and how government and public policy works. So I think it's important to bring that learning frame to how we think about how you should think about setting yourself up for a career, you know, 15 years down the line. I was going to say it looks like we are without our moderator leader for a minute so I was going to grab one of the other questions and ask it to everybody if everyone wants. Which maybe a question is the how can we ensure one of the questions that's supposed to us is how can we ensure investment in placement and students and it might be a good to pack folks who are running programs that are about that placement want to build on that career pathways. I don't want to take that. So how can we ensure investment in placement and students in programs. Nobody. I can hop in there, though, anyone else working with government. I think all it's incumbent on us as programs to be really thoughtful about I'll go back to our test number one for felt for fellowship placement is go to the evangelizers. You want to go to the people that are already trying to solve the hard problems relating to technology and want more tools in our toolbox so that's one we have a three part test around this. When we think about how we place our fellows. So that's one go to the evangelizers to is go to the go to the office or the member or the entity that has the jurisdiction that has the platform to be able to solve the problems that you want to solve. And so that requires, you know, really working hand in glove with the government partners to understand, you know, where where government can affect change. And then I think third our third test is making sure that we as organizations are placing people with organizations where they're going to have, you know, they're going to have a direct connection to the to the principal or the boss, where they're going to get the resources that they need where they're going to be where they are going to be seated among, you know, among the full time staff and a core member of the team. These are these are things that we as organizations need need to do. And then bringing them the support the networking the mentorship there's so much and this conference is a great example of it. It's a great network building that we can be doing to be building this community and I think it's incumbent on all of us as organizations to make that a core element of our program. Yeah, and this is Rick, I will say that finding the champions are always is always key to get them to then tell other agencies all about the opera, their experience working with the participants which then make them want to to to be part of the program. We created an executive advisory council that is comprised of every agency participating in every private company participating at the CIO level, and the Chico level together so that they are helping us advise us on improving the program, thinking about what skills are coming up that we should be recruiting for who we should be talking to what other groups we should be talking to to make sure that we are incorporating our DEI efforts into the program. We are very helpful, and at a very high level within the federal government and within the private company side. So that has been really helpful for us to get those champions. And I think just helping them think about workforce planning and thinking about how many, how many opportunities are exists that are open, and how many of them can be filled by this program specifically so really thinking about re evaluating whether the higher level positions can be maybe rethought of as more of entry level for the couple of entry level folks to help help fill those gaps that they're missing. And then finally like Travis said we're just working to get these opportunities, you know we're doing all the recruiting for the federal agencies we're doing a lot of the matching and the skill, working with the universities directly so that they don't have to that saving them time and resources. And so hopefully that is something that's really beneficial to them as well. I think something that doesn't cost money but is very helpful in in this is ensuring that there are campus evangelizers. So it's great to think about our programs and working with agencies in the evangelist inside agencies but I was going through graduate school, it was a secret that I was applying to a science policy fellowship and that I was actively looking to transition away from the bench. And so, you know, since I've graduated, I've had faculty reach out and asked me to come back and speak as an alumni around my pathway, but that's kind of recent. And so, I think it's amazing to have such a strong network of universities in at the pit UN network of schools who are focused on this. How do we get more universities in this network how do we ensure top down and bottom up on our campuses that this idea of, you know, cross sector cross disciplinary know how being a core utility of a technologist. You can see the broader impact of our technologies I think is so critical and and that actually doesn't take a lot of money right that takes a culture shift, where the, those most elite researchers and faculty who are driving students interest are including these is critical parts of that conversation. And, plus one that I'll also say that while evangelizers are so important on campus and students get exposure to them. I think nothing bolts. Ultimately, we need some type of training we need whether it's in the formal curricula, or whatever it is. In the beginning we need hard like education in this space. And I think right now in the public interest tech movement. It's not quite clear, not only how to define public interest tech, but also what an education public interest is like. So it's distinct from what's already out there. And I think one of the reasons conversations like this have a lot of promise is that, as the different, you know, stakeholders, the various, you know, academic communities come together and talk about this it would be great going forward. If more research was done on what would consist of an effective public interest tech education at the college level, right, having that research done the pedagogy that would be included. These would all be important factors for us to get to the question of then how to actually train the individuals that will then go forth and do the work. Thank you for that and my apologies I had some technical difficulties on my end, but back with you and so Robert I actually did want to follow up on that comment that you made about making the curriculum. You know, for public interest technology, who should be involved, you know, in that making should should private sector be involved should like who should be in the room as they're they're creating these programs. Well, first, let me say that, and this is from firsthand experience in the work I do faculty create curriculum, period. You know, industry and outs external partners can help inform curriculum, but ultimately only the faculty and do my opinion rightfully so are the ones with the authority to actually create an approved curriculum. So getting it done that is almost the only pathway. With that said, there are lots of opportunities that already exists there's infrastructure for at most colleges for, you know, whether nonprofits whether the private sector to engage with faculty to help inform their curricula. This can come in the form of like faculty grants course innovation type grants. There's also a big push for open educational resources and a lot of effort behind that currently to try to work where faculty and industry work together to develop meaningful curricula. So there is a lot in place already that can be leveraged, but I think that is the way to make it happen. Absolutely. Well, thank you for that. So I wanted to go back on something that was mentioned earlier so Stephanie, I did see in your bio that you that you, you know, we're in another path before you earn your current path and so for people who perhaps have a wealth of experience in other places. How did they make that transition into a more public interest technology faced, you know, kind of role. Stephanie, I think there's like a there's a how and a why component and and certainly the why is I had an interest in being more directly engaged in societal change in a way that I could see immediately and so I went down the single path that I was aware of to make a transition from academic research to policy in STEM, and that was through the AAA science and technology policy fellowship. And at that time, I did not even know where to start looking for additional opportunities and it is only because a prior student that I had known also did this right that I even knew about the opportunity because it wasn't it wasn't faculty or career counselors or anyone else who was sharing that information at that time. So it was word of mouth and then we did start getting some some foot traffic at my university again from that one singular fellowship pathway. But but that was the route I took which was a pathway program where you apply directly to that right similar to Travis's program and Rick. So, so these, these on ramps into government that then help you learn what it's like to be in government and also start to elucidate all of the pathways by which you might stay. And some of those right have those transition to FTE opportunities and some don't. But it was definitely to Georgia's point like the first job, not the last job on that trajectory. For sure. I'm sorry, go ahead. I'm just going to say this is Rick, I worked on the AAA science technology policy fellowship program for nine years. So I got to talk to people like Stephanie out in the field. Obviously, as we were talking to students for CTI last year, the folks who mostly had an interest or why they showed up to our information session was often because maybe they knew someone who worked in the in the public sector, or their parent was in the military or a foreign service officer or something and their experience and background led them to that and I want to get to the people who don't think about it. I want to get to all the folks who don't think of this as a career path where are those there are so many folks in that in that in that space, and I need to I think we need to find them but I specifically as part of my charge is looking for those folks and wanting them to know and then they can go and spread the word to Stephanie's point earlier as well. But working on those two programs, I've been working in that for for many years now, and we hear that very often it's often word of mouth, it's often people who had that experience. And we have so much more outreach to do. Just to jump in I do think there's a huge opportunity like Stephanie was mentioning about having alumni come back and speak at their universities. That feels like a really untapped opportunity that we could do more of. The other place I think it'd be really interesting and we did this once while I was at the Open Technology Institute and it actually got us to interns that then I one of them is definitely still in the public interest space which is cool not and she's working at like a small organization and we went to one of the job fairs of one of the universities so we had our director at the time was an MIT alum and was willing to spend the money to get us a table and we were in a back corner and we didn't even get that much traffic at the table but we did have some jobs that we were able to advertise and we did make two hires out of it and I really wish I've always wanted to see. It's more and it's hard again for smaller organizations to kind of go to all the job fairs but could we have a public interest table at every job fair where we work on that together and it's more like sourcing from all of these job lists and maybe there's folks who can speak to the broader sector and we can actually have those opportunities you places that ways can ways that people can come and give back to the university and and expose those opportunities right they you know the challenge is frequently those are designed more for industry tend to be fundraising events for various clubs and things on campus but maybe we can carve out a space and also make that a way that we're helping the community as a whole grow and give visibility to these opportunities. Thank you Georgia. Yeah, I think it's really important that we utilize evangelist in any, you know, way shape or form to make sure that you know we're spreading the word and we're evangelizing it. And there was actually something I was thinking about that Robert said earlier, which was just really thinking about really broadening our understanding of what public interest technology careers are, because I do think to Robert's point there is a misconception that it's, you know, only in certain areas. So, Robert, to that point. What can, what can other organizations what can private industry do to help kind of broaden that definition of what public interest tech looks like. Sure. Well, I think, and maybe some of you on the panel or some of those in the audience would be going to help me out with my understanding of this. But I think, first of all, I'm curious, you know, the role of an evangelist going to campus would be to try to highlight to understand why, you know, society has a great need for public interest technologists. I think what I would love to see is if anyone has it more data on what is the actual job demand side look like. So for instance, like, is there a specific role I could search for on job sites called public interest technologist, or maybe it's public interest engineer, like, what are the actual job titles, right, what information is out there about the different types of roles available to students, and really what is the demand, like our Microsoft and Google hiring folks specifically for these roles, or are they really just hiring software engineers the way they usually do. And if on someone's resume it highlights that they took a class related to, you know, ethics and artificial intelligence that that's a plus. I think there's a lot to do there, just in terms of what does the employer demand data really look like for these roles. And to the extent that, you know, the private sector industry partners would be able to, you know, share such information. I think that would be helpful towards that. But when I was still at New America, when we put out a record, a report called more than code, which is still it's online at more than code dot CC, the folks are familiar with it. And I, what we ended up doing we kind of, we're kind of we didn't look as much of the data as we would have liked to because it is hard to get kind of to Robert's point it would be great to get access to some of the data that a lot of these job websites have. And that could help us do some research in this space, but what we did end up doing was based on the terms that people use to describe their jobs and their roles. We actually set up a proxy search website that's at jobs dot more than code dot CC that lets you search based on the way that people were describing their work against job postings on idealist so that you're not looking for public interest tech and not finding but have many words associated with that and are broadening that search so you might find things that you didn't know were there. I think that was our us trying to figure out we did a little bit of data collection around that and some of that's in the report. But I think it'd be part of the issue, part of the issue that you brought up at the beginning Robert is the definitional question of we use lots of different words for this. It might not be specifically a technology role like sometimes the fellowships aren't on job boards like it's kind of difficult. You have to look in a lot of places, but the thing that we thought was useful about that was at least making it easier for people to potentially find something based on a set of words and see what the diversity of options where they were out there. So I think there's a, I think there's a huge opportunity to expand on that and do more research as well. Absolutely. I was even doing that in my research just trying to see well where is like a centralized, you know, kind of place to find, you know, these types of roles and, you know, are people in the private sector, you know, kind of looking, you know, for the different facets that make, make this up. So that's the question. And this is open for, for anyone. Do you think that there needs to be a greater awareness of how public interest tech relates for the private sector. I don't, I don't have an, I don't have an answer to that Suzanne but I think the last question was making me think of examples of private sector work that whether we would or wouldn't classify it as public interest tech, I think the technologists who work on those portfolios would right so if you are on the various Amazon teams working to get net carbon zero across all of their delivery systems that requires so many different kinds of engineers so many different kinds of, you know, pipeline developers and everyone else right across that that workflow. Is that public interest tech, or is that, you know, just the better bottom line of Amazon. And so I would. And the answer I'm just super curious to hear because at any to be.org we know that the especially the women who engage in our various communities are deeply committed to ethical technology whatever the industry it is that they're working on. And so, you know, we're all about coming to some common definitions and thinking through how we could get there but yeah curious with other panelists think about that. And so one of the things that we think about when we've had students work with us as it's not a lot of these issues aren't introduced in traditional parts of the curriculum in schools, so, you know, we work on a lot of privacy and security technologies are working with a lot of human rights groups on how to have freedom of speech in different contexts around the world. And that might not be a subject that anyone has had exposure to until they were working on a project with us. I would love to see more folks get that experience and then go and work in a company because the more people we have at Google and Amazon and Facebook that like know about these issues and know about how to learn more about them and the resources available the better those tools will become the best we'll have these points of friction where their technologies are causing societal harm. Right and I and then you may have more people who can flow back and forth more between public and private sector NGOs and whatnot. Like we need people to be having getting exposed to what those things mean to understanding policy. I didn't know policy at all landed in New America and my job. And it was a huge and awesome learning experience right that was I it wasn't something I'd studied before really. And I now I think now I'm way more aware of it and I think about it in all the ways that we do our work. We all need this intersectional opportunities so that exposure will make companies better and companies should value it if they see that on people's resumes. I think it's a huge opportunity. Yeah, and this is Rick I'll just say that's that's really the model that we're trying to use with CTI is really getting those folks to have this cross sector experience. We and we don't know what people are going to choose in the long term as a partnership for public service we are, you know, thinking that they would go back to the federal government. But that's not necessarily true we do expect that I think this maybe more. Like when I was taught when I came out of school I was taught you're supposed to work at one job or one organization for a very long time. And that's just not the way I think the world works anymore I think people are looking for a fluid career in many different sectors and I think you're right that makes that makes everyone benefit I think it's good to be well rounded. It's good to see all those different perspectives. It's good to work next to diverse people will also have you know different perspectives and you do and can teach you and then you bring it to the next sector that you're going to. I think that that is that should be the future. Wonderful. Well, thank you. And I think we're almost at our time we will open it up for a couple of questions and answers from our audience. But the one of the last questions I kind of wanted to to to ask anyone in the panel. You know, obviously, everyone has been affected by coven 19 in some way shape or form some people more so than others. And just thinking about the demand for public interest tech jobs. Do you think, to any extent, has this increased the demand has this decreased. What are your thoughts on the effect of the pandemic on on that demand. Maybe I can share just from my experience with the New York City government during the pandemic. One of the consequences or effects I should say of what's been going on has been that from again from what I've seen in my own personal experience, virtually anyone within the city government who has some technical skills has been called in to now, put them to use and create things that really it's not their job normally doing such things. I've done this myself. But it's been an all hands on deck type of approach to, you know, dealing with what's been going on in the big picture. And so I don't know that while there's so much being built right now through the city government, in terms of like public interest technology, right, like pandemic response related technology and tools. I don't know that any, I don't know that the majority of folks working on building those tools are public interest technologists. We just happen to be folks who, from all kinds of different actual job titles happen to have those skills, and have now been called in to put them to use to build such things. And this is over. I think the impression I have is the majority of us will go back to our primary jobs. And I don't know that there will be more public interest tech roles, necessarily in the mix, certainly thinking about budgetary concerns right now, the economic climate broadly, but it'll be interesting to see what happens. I would love to weigh in here because we have seen our fellows thrown into the coronavirus response in really, really urgent impactful ways they were in Congress for like three weeks when COVID hit. So we had one that was put in charge of leading the daily brief for a senior United States Senator we have one that's authored multi billion dollar provisions for emergency broadband deployment we have we're all on zoom right now we we had one that investigated whether the zooms claims around and encryption were accurate and led to a policy change at zoom. Lastly, Congress passed the cares act. And then during the biggest economic and health crisis in three generations, it went silent for six weeks. And that was because the institution did not have the digital infrastructure to function. So we've launched a congressional digital service fellowship to help meet some of these urgent needs. It has absolutely the Zuckerberg hearing was kind of one, like the first wave that showed the need for technical expertise this has been the second one. And I think it is absolutely a new illuminated just how critical having a technologist at the table is during this crisis. And just add even more to what Travis said, yes. And I think it's super. It's put a spotlight on the need to have technologists from all age ranges and experience background so we've seen so many, you know, technical women come out of retirement brushing off their cobalt skills so that they can help address right some of the aging infrastructures that needed to be managed and the Travis I would I would be guessing here but I would guess most of your fellows were not cobalt programmers so I think that there is, we should, like, you know, put some respect on their names or what have you right like we need technologists with all sorts of skill sets who are coming at this from all sorts of different backgrounds, especially because we're dealing with infrastructures that are aged and have these, you know, historic baselines right that need to be addressed as well. And, and to the point of like, have you seen the need go up yes, and we're seeing I think the desire of job seekers to be engaged in a way that can prevent these needs from happening in the future right we've known about broadband access issues. We've been talking about the digital divide for 20 plus years. We just didn't see fit to address it as a nation until it impacted all of us at this level. So, I'll leave that there. I'll just add back to that central. I was going to say that just to echo everyone else hasn't had a huge impact in terms of the numbers of our participants we there's a lot of interest. There's cybersecurity breaches still every day that need to be protected. So, for our program we're we still think the future is bright. I was going to say, this really does get back to I think the central question of what do we mean by public interest technologist because what I'm hearing right think of those cold, the cobalt programmers Stephanie. I'm hearing there's clearly a need if it wasn't already apparent for technologists, but I think that's maybe a little different than the need for public interest technologists, and I'm still not sure exactly what that might mean. But, you know, a retiree being brought in because they know cobalt to fix an important like state unemployment system, super important super necessary. I don't know that I would consider that a public interest technologist that when I think that's that a lot of us continue to try to struggle with technologists in public sector versus public interest technologists. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed that having this discussion with you and your thoughts and expertise. I would like to take this time now to open up to any questions that the audience may have for any of the panelists. So please feel free to go ahead and share that with us at this time. If possible, if the Q&A function isn't showing up you can also send it through the chat function as well. In the meantime, if I could just fill in a quiet moment. To the other panelists I would just like to, if you're unaware of this bringing your attention to digital government organizations and societies. So, for instance, within the higher education world and the academic community. There's an entire emerging subfield for digital government research, which almost always includes a pretty significant track on ethical computer science ethical artificial science and essentially ethical technology track within those digital government organizations. So, if you are not super familiar with those or want to learn more than it is something I think that might have a lot of promise for all of you in your different work. Wonderful. Thank you. So I'm just going ahead and excuse me bringing that up for all of us to to see bear with me one moment and actually just locating the Google document so with the production mind sending that link again unfortunately it got to during my technical difficulty it got to put away. Thank you. Okay, so I'm not unfortunately seeing any questions coming up in the chat for right now so I'll just go ahead and ask additional questions if that's okay with everybody. How does your organization approach capacity building is it through your program design or through internal hiring practices. Yeah, we both. And I would say a lot of when we think about capacity, aside from our own sort of internal processes we also a lot of what we try to do in the way that we support the communities we work with is around capacity building, whether on a project that we're working on and introducing sort of design practices into that or we run actually an open community slack to help each other connect with each other. Help people connect with each other for resources and support peer support and run regular sort of calls to get people introduced to these topics and share as practitioners on how to address issues. As an organization we've also been thinking a lot about our hiring pathways. And that's where I've been starting to figure out how to explore university programs to get us connected to and, and how to post jobs that we have to them. I think that can be, I like, and I'm hoping over the next two years that we can actually have sort of a regular cycle of an internship or fellowship program, because I'd love to have folks who either, you know, we work with tons of different projects so like helping students who need ideas for school projects, or having them plug in to actually work with us directly on things. I would love to just always have students who are working with us so that they can get exposure to the type of work and have opportunities to stretch those muscles and figure out how what the work actually looks like. And where they take it from there so that's something we've been thinking about to try and make sure that we always have. I mean to some of what Stephanie was saying earlier like people have many experience levels on projects. I think a lot of times nonprofits are pretty under resourced to be able to do stuff like that but that's where I think we have a pretty good opportunity here especially. There are a lot of universities have programs where students can get paid by the universities to work with nonprofits and like we've got projects like send them away. I would love to be overwhelmed. I would love for that to be the problem. I would love to have too many students who want to work with us. Wonderful. Okay, so it looks like I've resolved the issue so one of the questions that was posed was what does it mean to be a student in a university partnered with pet what resources and opportunities can a student have from the partnership. And I'll open this question up to anyone. Okay. Let me just I can put in a very quick plug which is just that we we are going to be recruiting for our congressional innovation scholars program which is targeted at early career, finishing a master's degree program, we're going to open up applications for that in early December. Our network is perfect for us for recruiting. We onboarded six, six scholars in June they're working for people like Senator Warren, Senator Paul the Senate Commerce Committee, great, great opportunity would love to see this network help help us find some great recruits for that program. Great thank you. Next question. Can we talk some of the structural challenges that we see across sectors, like any challenges that we that we see universally. I think we've talked about a decent amount on and off but maybe to make it more explicit is honestly differences in hiring procedures and practices I think Stephanie you mentioned like navigating us jobs.gov is really different. Or, like I've been mentioning like wearing how to post nonprofit jobs on different sites, I think that can kind of speak to both procedural differences within the institutions and different practices of hiring, as well as language that people are using to describe the type of role. So, you know, it might be really when you look at a lot of nonprofit jobs it's like please come do everything because you are probably going to get to do a little bit more of everything because it's a smaller organization most of the time. And you might look at a government job and be like, I don't know what these words mean, especially together and I'm not sure this is for me. The only thing that really is it has more to do with the language that went into the program that maybe led to the job existing and you might just need someone to help you navigate it, but I see that as like, maybe a structural barrier that people right now are filling with social infrastructure like support programs and fellowship programs and and mentorship in that space. I think the only thing I'll add is a security clearances play a role while you're looking for in the hiring process that you mentioned so those might take additional time. So a lot of the times in the public sector I think there's a lot of hurdles to overcome I think is what you're saying whereas if you're, if you're interested in private sector you can get hired pretty quickly just by having an interview maybe a couple interviews whereas with the government. It just takes a little bit longer but hopefully, if that's the direction you want to go, you're finding ways to fill the time while that those processes are working out. I could add in an additional systemic challenge I think to this which is that public interest tech, to some extent by its nature is multidisciplinary. And within the academic world, you know, students who might pursue a multidisciplinary, you know, graduate or, you know, undergraduate degree, while that has a lot of benefits, if you go out onto the job market, once you receive your bachelor's within the academic world. Someone who has a multidisciplinary background to some extent is not considered a purist in either of the two disciplines that they've studied. And so, at the graduate level and the PhD level and ultimately when it comes to faculty things, I find quite often that having a multidisciplinary, like, you know, PhD, let's say, is actually somewhat of a disadvantage to aspiring academics and faculty, because they're not seen as a purist within whatever discipline the job is they're applying to. So, as a result, we end up with a lot of faculty who really don't have a multidisciplinary background to teach these public interest tech topics. And I think that's something that would be great to change at a systemic level. Thank you for that. So one of the questions that came in had to do with mentoring. So specifically, because we're having these representation challenges in the tech industry, how does that impact mentoring relationships? Well, that I can start I think that that was going to be one of my answers to the previous question as sort of a common structural challenge across all of these sectors, which is, you know, oftentimes mentorship and sponsorship, which I think we should talk about separately. Are really organic and happenstance and if you happen to have a manager that you find to be a mentor like and they have time that you may be able to foster that relationship. And I think that that tends to be true anywhere you look. What we see is that there are more formal programs and strategies in place in corporate America because of the work that they've been doing on workplace culture to set up mentor and sponsorship structures. Then then we are seeing in government. So I think government is a bit slow to implement some of these workplace policies that we're seeing corporate America and private sector places take on, but I would also put academia kind of on that slower side of culture change. When it comes to strategies around mentorship and sponsorship in terms of having formal systems in place, you know, incentivizing folks to serve as mentors and sponsors as well. And would love to hear folks know more of that happening in academia and government that I'm aware of, but I think that that is one of the things that we see a bit of a difference in, but also a little sporadic no matter where you are. Definitely unfortunately, we're just that time so but thank you for answering that question and thank you panelists for your time this afternoon. It's been incredibly insightful incredibly engaging and really driving home the point that the demand is is there and that there are definitely there's still work to be done and pit as well as other organizations and agencies are there to help facilitate that with that. Thank you all very much for your time and please enjoy the rest of the conference.