 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this episode of our Public Interest Technology University Network Webinar Series. My name is Saif Ashuf, and I'll be proudly serving as your moderator. And I work at Florida International University as the Vice President of Engagement. And as part of the Public Interest Technology Network, I have the joy of also serving as the co-chair of the Communications Committee. For everyone who's joining us today, just a quick reminder, if this is the first time you're engaging with the Public Interest Technology University Network about who we are, the Pitt UN Network, as we call ourselves, is a partnership that fosters collaboration between universities and colleges committed to building the nascent field of public interest technology. And more importantly, growing a new generation of civic-minded technologists. Through the development of curricula, research agendas, and experiential learning programs in the public interest technology space, all of our members, these universities, are trying innovative tactics to produce graduates with multiple fluencies at the intersection of technology and matters of the public interest. We're so proud to share that right now, our Public Interest Technology University Network is up to 36 members. There are 36 institutions across the United States and in multiple geographies that are committed to growing this nascent field of public interest technology. I want to welcome everyone here today. And I want to go ahead and start off because we've got a lot of ground to cover. I want to encourage everyone who's on the webinar today. Please feel comfortable in dropping comments, questions, ruminations, if you will, into our chat. This is meant to be an opportunity for all of us to learn and grow together. And for today's discussion, we're so very fortunate that we're going to be focusing in on the intersection of equity, racial equity, and exponential technologies. And who better than two leading scholars within our network to give us insight, perspective about their teaching learning, their research, and their practical application in this domain than the two individuals that we are so fortunate to have with us for today's conversation. Firstly, we have Dr. Charlton McElwain. Dr. McElwain serves as the Vice Provost of Faculty Engagement and Development at NYU. And we also have with us this afternoon, Dr. Michelle Claiborne, who serves as a director at the Research Data Services and Sciences at UVAs Library. Welcome. Thank you so much for having us. Absolutely glad to be here. Well, I am very excited for today's conversation. And I want to let everyone know who's looking on in the chat that if you have questions, please feel free to drop them into the chat. And without further ado, we've got a lot of ground to cover here today. We're going to start off with Dr. McElwain. And I have to say, before you begin, I was, I did my homework, sir. You know, I read up the book. I also have been all the way through a lot of the work that Dr. Claiborne has done. And so the floor is yours. We're going to get a presentation from Dr. McElwain, and then a presentation from Dr. Claiborne. And then we're going to get to some live fire questions for both of our esteemed colleagues. So over to you, Dr. McElwain. Thank you for that introduction and I won't tell everyone how much I paid you for the book plug there, however, short, but I'm looking forward to the discussion and the rapid fire and indeed there's a lot of ground to cover when we think about this issue of racial equity and technology. So we'll start off with just a little bit of introduction to the work that I've been doing over the last few years, and then go on through a number of the prepared remarks before we go into other presentations and the Q&A. So if we can go ahead and get the slides of mine on screen, that would be great. I'd say four to six years. I've been working on a lot of things, but they're sort of crystallized in several different works that have come out. Dr. McElwain was back in 2015-2016 with a publication and study that we called, Beyond the Hashtags, the online search for offline justice, which was a 120 page report that I'd done in collaboration with two colleagues, including Freelon at the University of North Carolina, Meredith Clark, who is at the University of Virginia, and that was an attempt for us to try to do a deep dive into Twitter and the open web and really understand the way that the Black Lives Matter movement got started and how it proliferated in online spaces and really to try to understand this idea of connection between internet and racial justice and the ways that people might use online tools to push for racial justice. So that was one. A second was a study that was published in a journal article called Racial Formation, Inequality at the Political Economy of Web Traffic, and that was my attempt really to try to do a deep dive into the landscape of the internet, the internet environment and try to understand where, if racial inequality is persisting in this place, if you will, where we live so much of our lives increasingly, how racial inequality forms in online spaces. And so that work was detailing how that happens. And then, for the last five years, what's dominated my life and research in a very special way is the book that came out last year. That's how I've mentioned Black software, the internet and racial justice from the Afro-Net to Black Lives Matter. And that book, which began as an attempt to try to say how do we account for the Black Lives Matter movement, really turned into something different. And it turned into a 60-year history that looks at the relationship between African-Americans and technology and how that has changed over this period of time. And so, what I want to do in the next few minutes is to walk you through a brief history that highlights for me in many ways and models for thinking about tech equity and identifying the ways that our current tech landscape, particularly within the context of the internet, created and reinforced structural, racial inequalities. So I'll highlight some stories from across time, some in the past, some more recent. And so if I can have the next slide, this is one of the places where I began as I started my search back into the 1950s and 60s to try to understand the relationship between what was going on at the time that is the height of the civil rights movement and the rapid development of computing technology. One of the interesting things that I found was this story that really the ways in which racial inequity was conceived of, identified at least sort of on the agenda from the very beginning. And so here we have Jay Willard-Warch, who was the Labor Secretary under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and this headline and this story which came just several days coincidentally before the Voting Rights Act was signed. Labor Secretary in his newsletter came out with this pronouncement, head on collision course for civil rights and automation. And when you read through his words, there are machines now which can play excellent games of checkers, they can play pretty good games of chess, and you read on through and the point that works as making is simply this that already, and this was in 1965, we were imagining that our technology was going to outrun the intellectual and the work capabilities of African Americans in particular. And the point that he was trying to make is that these two things in many ways were at odds, though I think his pointing that out were for other reasons other than necessarily thinking about equity in the ways that we talk about today, but it was interesting to me to think about a period of time where we know about the civil rights movement, we know about the history of technology and its development and computing during this time period. But we've always been told the story that these two were very separate stories not stories that very much had one to do with the other. And so this became the impetus for much of the book which was trying to understand these deep connections from the very beginning, and particularly as they relate to a conception of equity and inequity with respect to technology. So as we move from J. Willard works and if I can get the next slide to another figure that many of you probably are familiar with a Philip Randolph, the head of the legendary brotherhood of sleeping car porters, a very large figure in the civil rights movement part of the architects and one of the architects of the famed March on Washington. And so, a Philip Randolph in many of his writings and his speeches and so forth, spoke a lot about technology again, something that most of us, at least I did not ever know about or really see that the issue of technology was front and center in many ways in the civil rights movement. But for me, Randolph had a notion of equity that I think and clear in as much as technology is a collective creation of the people the people should share in the fruits of technology, and hence the worker should not be displaced by the machine. And he goes on and of course, much of this is wrapped up in the context of the labor movement and fears that the development of computers and computing we're going to put certain folks out of work, particularly African Americans, but his conception of equity is what I really want to bring forward. Number one, this was a conception of equity that was about representation. That is, who is involved in the design, the development of technology. The other in his conception of equity was about the community. That is, that technology was something to be used by and for the community itself, which ties into a third aspect of how Randolph conceptualized tech equity, which was that about distributed benefits. That is, if we are collectively designing, building, deploying technology, then that technology should work equitably for everyone. It should not serve some more than others. And so a very, again, sophisticated notion of what it means to think about equitable technology, both in terms of what we aspire to, but also in terms of where we have gone off the rails in some sense. Next slide, please. Another person I want to highlight another figure in civil rights movement, long term activists, journalists, one time head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, who I also drew a number or a significant sense of what it means to think about tech equity. And I point out this particular quote, which comes in an op-ed that was written in 1968, the pages of the Los Angeles Times. It's one of my favorite op-eds. I've probably read it hundreds of time now because it is so deep in both its imagery, but really the message behind the conjecture and the title of the op-ed is computerized the race problem. And so in part of it here, you see that Wilkins says for the Negro farm worker, the computer is but one more signal that he has been kept at arm's length while the rest of America pressed forward into the computer era. In the mass, he never got a chance to acquire the learning and the skills which would have enabled him to progress toward the use of data processing. And so what Wilkins was getting at in the context of the full op-ed in this quote here was a notion of tech equity that was about fair. And when I say fair nets, it's not necessarily in the sense of justice as we sometimes think about it, though that is certainly important. But Wilkins talked about it more in terms of a fairness in interacting with a community of people and saying, here is something I hold out for you as an aspiration, the ability to acquire new technology to benefit from that technology to be able to design, bill, do everything you want. With that technology. And at the same time, we're saying that we're doing everything we can to deny that access, deny that ability to use the technology, deny groups of people the ability to benefit from that technology. And so Wilkins sense of tech equity was really about the reality of our technology aspirations, our aspirations for equality, equal opportunity, so forth to match what we do, our policies, the ways in which we engage technology and make that open and useful for the full community. Next slide please. Dr. McElwain, before you jump to the next slide on what I think is so powerful about what you just said is it frames so well. We think of algorithmic bias in the present day, and yet and yet we see these figures who almost are looking into the crystal ball and anticipating all of that. That was coming. And these are, these are leaders that are writing and reflecting 60 years ago at the dawn of the computer revolution. Yes, and indeed thanks for calling that that out because it, it was the thing that really stunned me when I got into this work to see that here was a group of people. 60 years ago at the dawn of all of the stuff that we think of about the modern technology industry and infrastructure today, who were thinking about writing about engaging about technology, and particularly from this standpoint of equity and what they could see very clearly. Right, so most of these folks were civil rights folks first, they were not technologists they weren't hanging out at MIT or at Stanford, most didn't have fancy PhDs or were engineers and so forth. But they knew was history, they knew that with every new technological innovation, people of color African Americans in particular were always left out left behind, and in most instances that those that technology was used and designed against them very deliberately. And so from the very beginning, they could see the future, because that future looked a lot like the past, and they're present that they very much knew. And so the missing link was indeed this idea that these were folks that we did not engage at that time, as our new technologies were being formed, had they been perhaps we might have saved ourselves from some of the problems that we find ourselves in in now. But we did make some strides and so if we move past the 60s through the 70s and up to the 80s. We find ourselves in a particular moment that might be a moment that we say if there was ever a kind of moment of idealism when there was some aspect of this equitable technology particularly in the framework of the Internet was demonstrated and showcase. It was in the period of time between about 85 and the end of the 90s. So the precursors of the Internet are coming on board, and then into the mid 90s and later 90s the full public development of the Internet for commercial and all other purposes. And in that period of time you saw something again that fascinated me in terms of what I called a discovery, which were people that I had only known through the term of the digital divide which of course pointed out for everyone in terms of policy and so forth. Black folks who did not have access to technology black folks or folks, etc. But that was the message. And so to stumble then into the 70s, the 80s and 90s on African Americans who were powerfully engaged in these new technology technological systems, networks, the precursor and then the actual Internet as we know it today. I think demonstrates at least a sense of that tech equity and here, pictured on the screen you have some of these folks come all Alman sewer in the upper right, who in 1988 built Afro link software made millions of dollars as an entrepreneur but started it really because he saw software being built that didn't represent people who look like him people who shared his culture and the culture of black people around the world. You had people like Anita Brown, who was a 58 I believe year old grandmother, when she first got online, but built what was a legendary email lists serve and she was legendary in the early Internet sphere for building black geeks online, a large and flourishing network of African Americans in cyberspace as we called it at the time, the afro net, which was a bbs network. First and began in the late 80s and survived up through the early 90s or so and then kind of died out as the open web came on board, but these are all and many others instances were African Americans were connected to this technology were in positions of both having access, being able to design, build and benefit from benefit from this technology whether that benefit was monetary and for commercial is, or what rather was for communal purposes and you had both in the proliferation of this technology folks who said we want to advance the economic prospects of African Americans through this new medium, as well as do good for uplifting African American communities. Next slide please. So here's the punchline right we all know 92 93 94 we know Clinton's building along with many many others of the information super highway and the policies that drove it. But one of the things that happened was that by the end of the 1990s everything that you saw in that previous slide was gone. The entrepreneurs were gone. They had sold their company some had made a lot of money others did not other folks venture simply toppled because they did not have access to resources or capital or many other things. But I think the point being is that one of the reasons this was the case was because we did not have a sense of tech equity at the time that this was being built. We had one that was kind of if we build this thing the internet the information super highway, they will come and it was kind of that not race targeted not targeted all kind of a call and the assumption was if we build it, it's open for everyone and because it's open to everyone, everyone will benefit. And of course what we saw was quite the opposite that is time and time again when we do that what simply happens is those who have power those who have resources those who have networks where those two things thrive and access to those things. Those are the people who benefit most and this is what you saw, particularly with the rapid commercialization of the web that began late in the 1990s and beyond. And so I will, I will finish with this final slide if you can go to it. With the the outcome of the story I mentioned earlier or the research study I mentioned earlier that was featured in this Atlantic piece several years ago about the internet being segregated in a sense. And what that study merely pointed out was that over the years that the internet proliferated and grew to what it is we now know. The structural racism the structural inequalities, the structural design of web space like geographical space was becoming segregated and contributing to, at least in my argument, inequality in the same ways that we have been used to for decades and decades. And so this study simply pointed out that we travel to different places online that those places tend to be racialized in nature in terms of their content their imagery ownership and other things that those sites that are racialized greater greater traffic greater visibility greater value those racialized is black are invisible less traffic devalue and therefore have fewer benefits. And then a large aspect of this is that search engines and social platforms steer much of this traffic one way or the other and become the arbiters of unequal visibility and value that reverberate in many different ways and build. I think this this context that we're in now that is rampant with inequality in terms of our digital environment in many the same ways that have persisted historically in so many other institutions from banking to housing and others. So with that I will stop I know that I've probably gone over my time anyway and I look forward to Michelle's presentation and then our conversation after. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much Dr McElwain for your presentation. There's a lot to dig in on in the Q amp a my brain is going in a lot of directions and I know everyone who's looking on on the chat has questions and so without further ado. We're going to hand the floor over to Michelle clay born at UVA who's going to give us a presentation about this equity Atlas tool that her and her team and her colleagues have worked upon Michelle. Thank you so much. And if we could start the slides right away that'd be great. Thank you again for inviting me to talk about this work I'm really excited about it. I talk call it here co creating the Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas and I kind of want to answer three questions about what that answer three times what that is in the talk. And so if we could proceed to the next slide right away. There's a easy answer to what this is right there's a technical answer to what this is which is a much more straightforward one it's an open source community data visualization and storytelling platform. It's a web application right to help us map and compare spatial and population data using open source tools, and with all the code for data preparation and acquisition and web development available on GitHub, so that others could understand the work could contribute to the work, and in fact could replicate the work and make it better in their own way. And as prototype and I've given you some screenshots from the prototype the URL is also available here. We want people to be able to answer questions, like in the first case how schools are operating in different contexts of child poverty, or in the lower left panel how sort of the location of white affluence right in our region to sort of see those things differently. And so for this prototype we primarily been compiling frequently requested data that we hear our community asking for, largely from government sources from census from CDC and other public sources. We're beginning to collect more data from state agencies education and employment related and increase and and with some of our local governments who providing more data on sort of infrastructure inventories that we can incorporate into this tool. So conversations with local governments and nonprofit agencies around in our area about creating a resource for integrating data generated in their work serving their missions, possibly through the equity at list either in its current form or what it might evolve to, or through something we maybe haven't yet begun to imagine yet. So, so that's sort of a technical answer to what it is. So the next slide. I want to give a more conceptual answer to what is it. It's a community centered engagement tool oriented towards equity and justice. The intention of the work in this was really to make data about local disparities visible and accessible as a policy tool for leaders, and as a social accountability tool for citizens. And so just to give you a little bit of context about Charlottesville, you know Charlottesville is this wealthy, you know, beloved, vibrant region, but with vast inequities. And so I pulled a few here from the many I could have chosen from, including things like where one of the regions was one of the highest wage gaps in the nation between the highest earners and the poorest. We're one of the top school districts in not top we're one of the school districts of the worst, the biggest achievement gap between black and white students right we have some, you know, very extreme inequities in this region and, you know, not unrelated to our long history of racism and slavery right. We're also, you know, now ensconced in a public discourse as a place where white supremacists decided to become visible marching again not three years ago next week. And so that's part of our context right the place in which we're operating. We began initially as a collaboration between teams in the library and I'm just going to take a moment to say aside to my university public interest university network colleagues not to overlook your libraries as a resource of extraordinary talent and collaborative energy. The collaboration between teams in the library and in the burgeoning equity initiative, which itself was an interdisciplinary team of faculty from the social scientists from the arts from design and urban planning from health and policy and law. The equity initiative since has since become the equity center. All of the folks involved are committed to sort of wanting to make this community better right in particular with better regards to racial equity. And all the folks involved in this effort are committed to a shared data ethics that really begins with do no harm in particular to low income and traditionally marginalized populations in our, in our area. So we began working closely with the Albemarle County and Albemarle County is a county in which the university situated their brand new office of equity and inclusion and they were embarking on their first county equity profile. So we work together with deeply with them to support one another to share feedback and to help one another understand collectively our region's needs as we were gathering information. And as this work has become more unfolded in the democratization of data initiative, which is one of the main initiative pillars within the brand new equity center, we were able to build a data ethics brain trust of sorts to help keep us on the right path. We have representatives from our local food justice network and our local public housing alliance and our local African American Heritage Center. Our local regional health district right so we have people that we talked to all the time that come and tell us when we're starting something new or adding something like what's where's the harm and how do we not do that right what can we do better. So, in a very real sense I would say the planning and building of this technology has itself been a community building effort. And this co creation the sort of work of collaborating is across these divides is no small thing and so I want to park on that for just a moment. So as public interest data and technology work, you know, often, if not always means we're moving outside of the Academy I think this is a really important point. And so while individuals on the team had already been working to build relationships of trust with various community partners across our region city government county government nonprofit leadership and grassroots community organizing efforts. We're all still working within a university and that comes with some baggage that we've you know we've had actively acknowledged and work with our community relationships have often begun with the need to hear and acknowledge legitimate past challenges that our partners have had with the university from, you know, from our public housing residents who had have put up with dozens of different studies being done on them at the same time by student researchers by course projects by faculty, generally without any compensation or even usable research findings provided back to them in return to, you know, prominent local organizations who get asked to take on student volunteers or interns, and sometimes find that they're doing a lot of uncompensated teaching with very little to show at the end in fact, on top of their very busy mission driven work. And so we, you know, we hear these conversations and we need to we need to receive them and we need to absorb them and and be really responsive about it. Lastly, I hope this one is a little bit unusual, but you know we're also in these conversations have to recognize that for UVA some parts of our region still call the university the plantation amongst themselves. Right. So that's, I think it's I just want to lay out some of the environment in which building those relationships has to overcome multiple obstacles. Which means that we've needed to be willing members of our team have needed to be willing to demonstrate time and time again that we're prepared to be present and to listen and and to be held accountable and to be responsive to criticism and and and this may all sound obvious but I don't I work with people sometimes when they start this they don't realize that and so I want to say it out loud. And to be engaging and truly bidirectional learning and commit to putting in the hours right so not just our students putting in the hours, but the faculty and the staff and the teams really putting in the hours in the community as well. So that's, that's a lot of what we've done to build relationships of trust that have allowed us to have some success and it has paid off. We've begun taking the prototype to additional groups, largely through invitation where people have come and say hey we'd love to hear more we're doing and how it might work with our mission, including a coalition of youth development professionals, working with an innovative job networking program at our local community college, some nonprofit umbrella organizations that sort of serve the whole region who want to understand better how we can work together. And we're sort of now at the point where we're verging on sort of too many wonderful opportunities which is a really, really different place than where we started a couple years ago and so it. I think it's honestly one of the things I'm most proud of for our team is is that work, and it's helping us to imagine new directions towards which we can build. But all throughout this stream of the work we've done so far we've asked ourselves, you know how can or even can universities be really good partners to their communities. And, and there, there's some great models out there and there are great programs out there but I feel like it's one of those questions that we come back to on a really regular basis it's never answered right. And recognizing that, you know, we're operating within large, often wealthy institutions who are regions don't always perceive as benevolent, because they haven't always been benevolent. And so, while our individual partnerships, and some of these centralized research efforts we've become have been positive, we're still operating in an organization that makes big impactful decisions that many in our community perceive as extractive or less than benign on land use and building and on labor and employment and on admissions and access right so that's an ongoing conversation that we're having. And I want to answer the question one more time about what is it with the third slide or the next slide. Which is really, you know, if the first was technical and the second was more conceptual this is more aspirational right what can it be in here my answer is that it's a social technical infrastructure for resident and student engagement. So this spring, as as the pandemic struck, and this early summer, the equity Atlas became a point from which we could jump off to do work we hadn't anticipated in response to our community needs. And the work we had been doing in the years to build those relationships provided these opportunities where suddenly we could work with the local operations team in our region to help understand the barriers and burdens of sheltering in place so that they could better understand what resources were needed and how to allocate them. And we were able to work with a local journalist this summer who wanted to illustrate inequities and policing based on stop and frisk data obtained through years of four year requests that nonetheless had not been really used as part of work on social determinants of health and how COVID has been impacting that as well. And we were able to work and support equity center faculty advocating for more protections and resources for our frontline workers in our community so these are just little slides I'm will be shared afterwards and each of these link to the actual platform it goes to as well. So, so it provided new sort of ways for us to be thinking about how we could be doing this work responsibly with our community. And throughout this work we've had a handful of students in the trenches with us right working developing their data science and technical skills. But we see opportunities for so much more in that realm. We imagine this as a platform that could be used in the growing body of community engaged courses that are beginning to develop in the university to help our students begin to see the larger picture of their community that they've joined. And we want we imagine bringing more students into an ongoing this ongoing having an ongoing initiative that they can come to to further develop help us further develop and add to the platform through more formal coursework and internships, which provides them a tangible example of using their growing data and technology skills towards partnership that it's intended to be advancing equity and justice. But most importantly, we're in the midst now seeking funding to develop and implement more community centered education and feedback sessions to support a wider community participation of this community participatory research through engagement with a diverse set of residents most especially those who've been most harmed by inequities and those against whom technology has often been weaponized. So that's our really next desired step is how can we generate wider participation in these in this co creation effort, how can we importantly adequately account for the power asymmetries embedded in the advanced skill sets and build tools that counteract those traditional hierarchies right so we have one local leader in public housing who set out right you know data about me is never helped me. We have a lot of convincing to do or we need a lot of learning on our part right and how that how that can be inverted. Which brings again to the sort of final theoretical question from our end that we struggle with this is to what degree can technologically or data intensive initiatives, even those committed to openness and transparency ever be sort of small D Democratic ever be for everybody. So all of the great work that's been coming out and teaching us about the ways that race is embedded in technology and in data collection systems and uses should give us pause right and Dr McElwain's work is emblematic of this from from now I'm going to read the name down. Oh yeah, Randolph's right comment about how does it share how do we share the fruits of this of this not of this teaching this technology. Our local leader who doesn't think the data about her has ever helped her does not feel like she's sharing the fruits of this technology right and so that's work we need to be doing. On top of which we're also working in an environment with long standing and deep inequities and who has access to education and training so Dr McElwain's Roy Wilkins I may have gotten the name wrong right saying you know we're not given the chance to develop these skill sets right that's that's still true in so many ways when we when we see the kind of achievement gaps that we see in our region. And so in that kind of context, you know how can these technologies be small d democratic and can they really promote racial equality. At a minimum we know that we're not going to do that by only partnering with community organizational agency leaders. We need to be working with the people whose lived experience we're hoping to make more visible and to improve. We need to learn what's missing what questions aren't being answered largely because state and economic systems don't ask the questions that would spur them to collect that kind of data and information. And frankly, we need to be working with the populations and be prepared in those conversations to tear down what we built and start over if that's if that's where the conversation leads. So I hope the answer to that last theoretical question is yes but I think it's one that's very open and that we have a lot of work to do to understand how to make that so. And with that I'll leave you there's a final slide with some citations for some of the data earlier but that's not probably something you're going to use unless you go grab those slides later but thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Dr. Clay born as you were presenting it immediately occurred to me. We have a student here at our university who's a data scientist and has been engaged in in work along the lines of the equity atlas that you you've created and one of my colleagues and I were reflecting on the fact that the work that students like that and of course faculty and scholars like yourself. Are doing what would it mean if a 18 year old version of former now recently deceased Congressman John Lewis, if an 18 year old John Lewis had access to this type of data. And so myself and that student were having a conversation about that. And what was clear was his passion was around the arc of justice and civil rights, but he saw himself within that journey through his work as a data scientist. So I wanted to say that what you're doing with the regional equity atlas is very much the blood work, if you will, of justice and inequity. So any any thoughts on that when we think about sort of the next generation of of young people and students that we're all working to build curricula to support. How does that gel with you, Dr. Claiborne. Yeah, I mean I think that is very much one of our goals right is to have avenues where we could bring students into work. Maybe not just set them free on their own but in mentored and guided ways to build to also be part of those relationships because I think it's hard to sort of build the technology and the back end. And when you're not necessarily embedded in the conversations and relationships that stimulate the need right inside. So I think we want to be able to bring students into the whole work of not just sort of building their technical skills, but building their, their sort of community empathy. Right and understanding of of how that's being used or how the people they imagine using it really see it. I think we have a lot of imaginations about how we expect folks to use our work and one of the things that we want to do in building sort of deep relationships is be able to bring students in to sort of to see what that's really like and how often we're not quite right about our imagination of what people want or what they're planning on doing with it. Dr Claiborne I appreciate the fact that you mentioned we think about the field building that we're engaged in in public interest technology. And we're going to, we're going to jump back to Dr McElwain in just a second, but that you, you mentioned attributes that are not often linked to zeros and ones the idea of empathy, and the idea that dignity has to be in bed has to be embedded. And if you will into the code, if we want to be engaged in, in transformational work with community in and amongst communities, as opposed to towards communities. Yeah, and I love that juxtaposition right not that sometimes I use the helping on but I like your towards communities better which is not what we want to be doing right we want to be mutual you know in mutuality right and working in an embedded way. I think that, and I will say that I said that's one of the things I feel most proud of the team I work with is, is, is the effort and time and commitment to building those relationships, which is hard to scale and hard to do and hard to get 10 year credit for to be honest but it's important. And so I feel blessed to work with a group of people who are committed to that kind of effort. And I'm going to jump from that final thought that you shared. Dr. Clay born right back to Dr. McElwain, and as I said, and yeah I'm trying to get an A in your class, even though I'm not enrolled in it by by by establishing that I've, I've tracked closely your work as well as that the work of Dr. Clay born, but in the opener of your book, you have a line that just jumped out at me, and I'm going to read it that way I get it right. And you wrote, and I quote black software is also a story about how computing technology was built and developed to keep black America docile and in its place. I mean, it's, it's a heavy statement and very biting, I guess to say to say the least, in terms of our institutions, our tech companies and really thinking about those formative years of computing technology in the mid 1960s. But what I mean to say there was something very real what is sort of embedded in that moments story which is as the time that we're at our sort of zenith in some sense of the civil rights movement as computing technology is really taking off and some very explosive ways. We asked ourselves a question as a nation and that was, what is this new thing good for right computers were built as things that could solve problems. And so when that became the case and we looked around and ask ourselves what is our number one problem that needs to be solved in 1964 1965 throughout the latter part of the 1960s the answer to that question was very explicitly black people. And that came in the form of, you know, a problem of crime, a problem of urban environments, a problem of the urban underclass, all mass these things but essentially what it was was that there were African Americans on the street of every city protesting for their rights, doing so there on the streets in the halls of Congress, etc. And when the president came and said, look, we've got to do something about this problem. He asked and called into being a commission that he mobilized to say, I want you to find the causes of crime. I want you to find and tell us how to fix it. But most importantly, I want you to take this new computing technology and tell us how we can solve this problem. And the science and technology task force that he built as part of that commission did just that and what they came up with wasn't set of automated policing systems that were very much the forerunners of what we know now in terms of predictive predictive policing, facial recognition, all of those things that were embedded in our society as early as 1965. And so that is my very real sort of indictment on that moment on our institutions that all had a hand in saying that problem is a group of people going to deploy our technology to solve that problem. Would jump out at me as I started to work my way through your book and in the work that I'm a part of down here in Miami in community engagement, we oftentimes are engaging amidst an environment of the physical manifestations of redlining and the ghost of Jim Crow that's still very apparent. What as I was reading your book, you know, it struck me, Dr. McElwain is showing us a historical narrative that redlining was written into the code. If you will, of how the modern both commercial software infrastructure was developed, as well as the research public institutional infrastructure is that is that a fair sort of construct context to draw from because you tell the story of like, you know, as the heyday was approaching the 90s and some tremendous content spaces like net noir and others and there was this coming of age, and then quickly it all went away for a whole host of different reasons. Is that is that a thread that that you were that you were you were getting at in what you were talking about your book. Yeah, it was very much a part of that and it's, you know, I usually put in the terms of sort of course correction. That is, we see very explicitly in those formative years that non white folks were not part of the development of systems and technologies did not have a voice in terms of how it was framed the problems that were meant to solve etc. And all of that was driven by the relationship that we saw black people and others having to technology but also to society right and one in which reinforces a particular power dynamic and what happens over the years is that starts to change right people begin to have access to technology who previously didn't you start to see pockets of diversity and engineering schools and part of technical education, a lot of people through the federal government and jobs and so forth who got their formative access to computing technology, and they innovated and they use those innovations for the betterment of the community many of them used it to spur economic growth. And that's what you saw in that heyday in the early mid 90s, but it's, it's just uncanny and scary how in a moment that all disappears. And so I typically talk about this course correction the moment in which there does seem to be some potential to make particular communal economic social games that there is a reversal to say, Hey, that's not the way this was meant to be. So let's structure and embed in that structure, what was meant to be which was to keep certain folks on top and empower and others on the margins. I, there, there's a corollary conversation to that that we could engage in at another time around a recent effort. I won't say which tech company and which institution of higher ed of insert name of HBCU at a major tech company and so you fast forward from that from from when there's the disappearance if you will, of that robust presence of the black Internet, and then you jump about 20 years and then you see the course correction manifesting itself in a very different way. And, you know, it gets it gets to the idea that Dr. Claiborne you really touch upon a lot, which is the idea of how information really is power. I mean we're in 2020 it's a census year, and we think about the fact that we have this this real challenge, because on one point distrust is quite great, but those are the data points which are used to inform public funding mechanisms and so I'm wondering with the type of work that you and your colleagues are leading upon. How has this sat with regional policy planners and economic development entities because when you start to dig into the data, we know that lofty fluffy narratives start to go away. When you really dig into the data and you look at disparities. How has your equity Atlas been either embraced or challenged by those in those office holders that are in responsible for for regionalized planning. So, you know, I think we had. I'm going to frame I'm going to regret my framing of this we've had good fortune of working with our county and our city, who have been actually really open and ready to be introspective and my, my hesitation there was I think honestly much of that stimulus came from our August 11, August 12 2017 events right it put people in a frame to be like Dear God. This is off the rails and we need to we need to get our house in order and so. So I think the local leaders and we've been working really deeply with the county like talking to the planning, bringing it to the planning team and the planning commission and asking how it can be better and bringing it to the board of supervisors and getting their input and trying, you know, and working with our partner in the office of equity inclusion in the county who's really trying to help bring the her partners in the county on board with being accountable and being measured in these ways. I think that was not going to be the case a few years ago I think it's been a sort of a shift and we still see that hesitation and some of our rural localities and so we want to take the regional picture not just the very local places where are but the, the, the counties around us from which many of our, our workers live, you know where people come into the, the Charlesville region for entertainment and leisure. Right. And so we want to take a bigger view than just a smaller place and it's actually in some of those surrounding localities where they're less prepared to be confronted with with with things they might think of as metrics that are measuring their performance and so So we've had mixed reaction right into be honest right now we've been focusing on the localities that have been open right we've been focusing on Charlesville and all moral are to jurisdictions where we're at who for a variety of reasons have wanted to understand better what's going wrong and we're hoping that there'll be a sort of dissemination effect that if we can get some of the center localities on board we can start to reach out and build more trust with the rural localities but that's been that's not been the place we've been super successful yet in the rural areas. I've got a million more questions but this is a public interest tech webinar and everyone who's on the chat. I'm going to go ahead and jump now to their lineup of questions and I also want to let everybody know that we have the opportunity as a public interest network to continue to do a lot more of these types of conversations. I didn't mention at the beginning of our conversation that we already had an awesome conversation a couple of weeks ago that was all about public interest technology and how that pertains to the student to the student journey and we had our partners at coding at Ford Chris quang we had our colleagues from a number of our different pit UN institutions involved so we're going to keep going we've got a couple more chats planned just over the next couple of months on local government public interest tech in the international arena but now I'm going to jump to questions so I'm going to go ahead and and jump right in here okay and we've got a lot we've got 10 questions I don't know if we're going to be able to get to all of them but let's move fast and furious my friends. So the first question we'll start with is for Charlton. Dr McWayne given your talk and larger body of work. What one or two initiatives do you think might be most useful for universities that are part of pit UN. Anything else related to teaching research and or community engagement. Yeah that's a question. I think things and I think first mention is embedded with where we started with Dr. Claiborne's talk and about students and community. So I think the more that we reinforce and provide both pathways and opportunities for students interested in technology in some way shape or form to be intimately connected with working with learning from members of communities that we want to serve. I think that goes a long way to producing that kind of equity that we talk about because it means that the knowledge that they're bringing to bear on these questions are not the knowledge that they simply come up with or that we were reinforcing the academy of a particular type. It means that it's knowledge about particular communities that then will come to bear on that technology. So that's one and then the second I would say is thinking about partnerships. You mentioned slightly earlier that we've had these moments where higher ed institutions partner with tech companies and others. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think what's happened time and time again over a 50 year history is that we've done that but really haven't had the commitment. We wanted the name. We wanted the PR and the recognition from working but we haven't had the sustained commitment to do so. And I think if we figure out a good way to sustain that I think that could be very powerful. Thank you for sharing that and I think that you definitely honed in on one of the great challenges of the brand alignment goals of those companies and the role of institutions in inquiry. Dr. Clay born this next question for you. I think you touched upon pieces of it but I know that we've had a couple of people in the chat ask how has the equity atlas been used to shape or inform university policies and they're specifically asking about the living wage effort at UVA. That is a great question and I would say that's probably more aspirational than realized at this point right we we have even as I say this I hear the criticism right we have not been as engaged in sort of making transparent information about our university and maybe that's one of the things we need to to move towards. We have had some very nascent conversations that are promising but you know conversations are often promising and then nothing, but our county and our city and our university are working collectively towards sort of trying to have ideas about what frankly an equity MOU and things like the equity atlas have been raised as possibly helping to help with vertical accountability across those collaborations. And so that's one of the things we've just sort of started to think about is what could we what are the things that we could help provide and elevate as information or data that would help the sort of big anchor entities be more responsive to each other as well. And so we have it I would say we haven't had a six we haven't successfully influenced that yet, but I think it's a really excellent question and something that has sort of just started where we have some opportunity hopefully it'll raise some opportunities to turn the lens a little bit inward and promote more understanding we did work with a project I will say this this is unrelated to living ways but we did work with a project in a digital humanities group in our library this year that was trying to sort of spark gathering data on how the university has expanded their land and used it in ways that that's impacted the community and so we'd love to spark and be in support, more work like that that we could then elevate through the equity atlas as a way of sort of turning turning the lens on us in in a critical way. I love that on so many levels and I'm going to get personal and kind of vulnerable here for a second. I mean this this is what we do on our public interest technology university network chats. It's a it's a little bit of a different frame. My colleague and I were working on an initiative with some of our community partners and we faced exactly the type of challenge that you describe. And so I went back to one of my mentors and I asked her about what this actually means and both of you talked a lot about dignity and her response to me was, if you're representing an anchor institution and you're building in roads with communities. You're not supposed to be looking through the window. You're supposed to be looking at the mirror. And it's very clear from what you talked about. By the way, you just gave all of us a homework assignment back to Claybourne. I love the idea of our pit UN network thinking about what does an equity MOU look like with the communities that we're serving. Andrean, I think we just that might be the subject of a of another chat or another conversation but I want to I want to keep going on the Q&A. Dr. McElaine, it would be hard pressed to imagine that we would have the conversation today and somebody would not ask you to share some insight on what you hope will come from the recent tech antitrust hearings. That took place last week that had the big four tech CEOs on deck actually via zoom in front of a joint session of Congress so thoughts or ruminations on that. Well, not a lot. Mostly because I didn't have the opportunity to watch them regrettably as sort of on the list and maybe we'll get to them or maybe not. So, so what I'm going to do is not answer that question but maybe answer perhaps in something that I can imagine was said or not said in that instance, which was thinking about simply the responsibility of tech companies, particularly of these four, given their outsized relationship basically to the full infrastructure of where we work and live and play and do every aspect of our everyday lives and I think time and time again, you know, the question becomes, what is their commitment and is there a real commitment to equity. And if there is which I hear a lot of lip service to if there is that I think they are bound to really rethink and rethink with different partners and people what that actually looks like and what that actually means for their business model and everyday way of working. But I'll go back and review the the one and then I can answer that question more specifically. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I also want to point to everybody who's here that there's a phenomenal data science journalist who's out there on Twitter named Cheryl Dorsey, who has a firm called TP insights, and she just aggregates data has put out some some very damning infographics about big tech as it pertains to diversity, equity and inclusion. And somebody by the way I think we have to figure out we got to get her involved with the with the public interest technology network I think Charles is extraordinary people she actually did her her master's work over there at Columbia's J school. And so that's a perfect segue to the next question. It's an open ended one, which we all could reflect on but I'll direct it towards to Dr. Claiborne. Who else do we need, and who do we need more of involved in this work. Who's missing who's not with us, who do we need to get to the table with us in this work. Yeah, so I think I'm suppose it depends on what we're defining as this work right in the public interest technology university network. You know we have a I think a particular view of it but I think in fact your example of the data science is an excellent one and we, you know we need to get. Honestly, I think we need add activists and advocates in this work and so I'll give a call out to the University of Virginia School of Data Science is actually now hiring a position for data activists and residents. Somebody to be part of the university while doing, you know, and learning and developing projects that are about direct advocacy not straight up academics, I think that's a brilliant idea. And, you know, universities being more open to that kind of knowledge creation. As part of the university enterprise I think could be a really brilliant addition to public interest technology. As a way of bridging some of you know some some sort of space between the kind of, you know, community itself and academic environment we're living in right I think there could be bridging people like that who would maybe would all learn and could actually probably stretch the reach of the work, even greater so that's one model that's just started that I'm excited to see how it plays out. Dr McElwain any any thoughts on on voices that need to be engaged with us or that we should be seeking out as we are doing this work and this work defined very broadly. Um, yep Dr Claiborne Stowell stole my thunder and I agree and sort of expand and thinking about, you know, the activists and advocacy community and folks who can build bridges basically so people who are multilingual, both professionally and in their political work and able to build those bridges I think for so long one of the reasons that's gotten us in the situation that we're in is that we have been so siloed and so we academics talk to the other academics, activists talk to activists and see other academics as I won't mention some of the names. But so I think the ability to sort of bridge that work and I think, you know, journalists you mentioned I think those are very key people that often are able to do that work because that is embedded in their job in terms of being able to understand people tell stories and do so from multiple sort of vantage points. So I think I may sort of stick there in terms of the journalist community, the activist community, and having that as a bridge for all of us to sort of speak in and through. And I'll finally just say that, you know, when we think about the community and just sort of saying people, right and I, I often think when I'm doing this work and engaging something, you know, what would be this be like if I just showed up in my family's place or at the family reunion in North Carolina and say, hey, what do you all think about X, Y and Z. And what I could imagine is 100 different responses, none of which I would have ever imagined before. And I think the more and more that we can frame just everyday people, if you will, into the conversation and into relationship with the work that we're doing, I think that's the voice we really really need to highlight. Well said, I think that that would both of you touched upon I'm going to third the motion for what both of you all just said there about the individuals and the voices that we need to be engaging with and Dr. Clay born. We have a great question here that I know you referenced pieces of this as did Dr. McElwain but the question is, your talk provides a great example and model for the kind of work we we could be doing throughout pit you went. How have you addressed potential concerns of universities swooping in and telling communities what they need, rather than letting communities determine their agenda. You hinted at this in your talk, but can you share a bit more about how you all have been able to do this. So part of we were we benefited from in no small part the fact that the university president had recently begun a, I'm going to get it wrong, a community partnership council. That's not right, but he put together a council of members of the community to serve on a advisory group to directly to him. And we've been able to use that resource to help identify what the needs are so for instance when we started thinking about what are the what are the what are the data pieces that people keep asking for. They were instrumental in defining that by sort of shaping their agenda around some big sort of buckets of concerns right around no early childhood around health inequities right they define some things and we're like okay great. Let's take a picture. Let's go with that. But we've also again used our sort of brain trust where we run things but you know we we call, we call on them regularly and run things by them and this is where we benefit from a structure and equity center, where we actually have local equity center who are compensated for their time and I think that's a really important structure we don't do that nearly enough, right and so we so we have lot less guilt upon calling upon them to sort of review work and give us feedback or tell us what to do differently. Because they're also being at least recognized for the expertise that they're bringing and not just called on to help us for free all the time. So I think those structures have really helped us in place but again I like I said at the end I think one of the one of the tests we haven't passed yet is you know taking it to some of the communities that we have that some of our team have deeper relationships with but we want to make sure we're ready before we engage on their time and we want to be able to say we want to be prepared to compensate them for their time as well. Like for instance in our public housing community just sort of be like what is this, how does this help you how does this hurt you right, how is this completely irrelevant to you let's let's figure that out. And I think when we get to the point where we're ready to do that we really do have to, you have to be if there's so much humility here right you have to be like you know what I spent, I spent years of my life on this. It's done start again right and that has to be okay and that's I think a really hard recognition right to get to sometimes but I think we have to keep putting it to the test and be prepared to backtrack and not be so invested in how cool really thought that piece of code took me really long time and I really like the function that it does but you know what it's not useful and I need to let it go right so I think we have to come to it with that attitude. Thank you so much for sharing that Dr. McElwain. When you spend time with your incoming students at NYU, and you reflect on those kernels of movement and progress in and amongst the Black Lives Matter movement vis-a-vis its online manifestations. What are the points around that that give you the greatest hope or sense of optimism about this next chapter? And are there points to be optimistic about? Yeah, that's a great question and it usually depends on the day what my answer this question is because typically at least lately the stories I've been telling are tremendously optimistic. And I have to say time and again the optimism comes from the students right they are unwilling to say we cannot do this or they are unwilling to say you failed over and over again which means you know there's just no hope. And so the optimism I think comes from there and it comes from their ingenuity, their boldness and willingness to do things that you know we probably haven't been willing to. And so most of the time I find myself sort of putting myself in the framework of asking you know what do you need in terms of insight, information, context, history. So you can go and just something brilliant and it happens time and again that they do that they come up with ideas for how to fix things that they imagine a future that would have never entered my mind. And I think the optimism really comes from those students and it what it does for me is impress on me my responsibility to them to give them the tools to let them be the freest as as possible. And also those areas that I've been sort of engaged a lot in our folks who are leaving school and going to work at tech companies. And struggle with seeing you know what their role is as a as an employee as a worker, but also as a person of color someone who is marginalized and someone who frankly isn't willing to deal with that every day. They want to they aspire to they'd rather not jump ship and look to another career but are thinking about how do I survive this and and so really thinking through them about how can you be, you know, in essence, an activist where you work, do so smartly do so in a way that justifies your actions in a way that makes sense doesn't mean you know it won't get you in trouble, but but it gives them the tools to then work with in terms of what their best interests are. It's, you know, as you as you were talking, as both of you were speaking, it becomes clearer and clearer and we know this through the work of the public interest technology university network, our colleagues that are faculty and scholars all throughout the country, that is really what you just shared. Dr. McElwain this idea of we are equipping ostensibly through curriculum, the next generation with the tools to be able to interrogate and have an authentic sense of inquiry about the world around them and as to the public interest of how exponential technologies either collide or collaborate. But then we also are challenged to figure out how do we equip them with an ability to manifest their voice and their authentic selves within within these very complex spaces. And so, I wonder, either of you have some additional thoughts on that because we're basically at about time. We're in Miami so this is almost becoming like the mojito hour. We're not going to do that. But I mean that's kind of like the the open ended question is we're engaged in this field building I mean what you said, I mean we all dealt with as we've coached students, and then they're you know they're they're worried about, hey I'm about to take a job with big tech. I've got $200,000 worth of debt and in two years I can wipe that out but am I becoming part of the machinery that has benefited off of exactly what you've written about and the manifestations of inequity that you've talked about I mean what what what is that supposed to feel like. What are those conversations supposed to look like any thoughts, y'all. Yeah it's tough and I'll just sort of start where I left off and then and then yield the floor just to say, one thing I have learned is not to bring my, I don't know, sort of old person hat to bear rental hat to bear on how our students should navigate these waters. And what I mean by that is, you know, giving them the permission as it were to know what go and make a half a million dollars a year that could turn out very well for you, and not saddle them with the burden of you have to go to work. And you have to make some money, and you have to be an activist and change things and you have to bear the burden of your, you know corporation doing something differently. And I think it's really about helping them find that balance, where do they keep those critical tools and hone them at the same time that they're doing the things that they know they need to do in terms of their livelihood, and what matters for themselves or families, etc. Thank you Dr Clay born. You know, Dr Michael, I appreciate you saying that because I do think we often put way too much in students do it to themselves right they have to do everything and giving them permission to not do everything all at once right it mirrors our lives where we don't excel at everything, all at the same time and so I really I think I would only add to that that you know I think in our in our work in educating students, you know I, I really value trying to give students some introduction, particularly when they're coming from more science and engineering disciplines to the critical lens the critical theory kind of lens to to to understand maybe how to see the underlying structures that you miss because you're swimming in it. And you know whether that's you know bringing a feminist lens or a critical race theory lens or a queer theory lens right I think giving students introductions to some of those can help people have in their toolkit a way of not getting too subsumed by the dominant cultural expectations right like I know UVA students have a very particular idea of what the successful graduating launching experience looks like and that's that traps them right so the more we can give them some some inquiry tools to distance themselves a little bit from buying too far into that I think the more they can move from spear to spear without feeling like you know maybe they do make the the big money and then they can move from that without feeling like a failure to do something different right Well I there's so much more that we could keep going with both of you. We're so fortunate that we have colleagues like the both of you and our public interest technology university network, a big part of why we're doing this webinar series, not that we need another zoom in our life, but this is this is hopefully meant to feel a little bit different, but a big part of the reason why we want to do this and for everybody who's on the chat. Let's collaborate let's collaborate let's let's let's take upon the challenge of the words of the late john Lewis when he talked about good idea of how these tools can be utilized and quite frankly if you want to learn about how you build an equity atlas and what are the tools that you can be deploying to do so in your community. Let's collaborate with Dr. Clay born in our team. If you want to be able to to extract kernels of what Dr. McElwain's work is all about connect with him and connect with everybody that's I mean I'm on the communications committee co chair so I'm going to be the guy who's always saying let's let's talk more, but let's find ways to conspire deeply for impact because we know that our students deserve it we know that our communities deserve it. And hopefully, through the conversations we're going to continue through the this webinar series next up on deck. We're going to be learning about local government we're going to be having a conversation about public interest text in the global context, and let's do a bunch more. Let's do a bunch more let's let's have one where we bring to the table. What is the lens if we introduce critical race theory we understand gender gender studies we think about the perspectives LGBTQI a community let's let's let's keep pushing deeper and deeper but let's collaborate let's collaborate on. I promise my colleagues I might drop a Megan the stallion reference in here that's it that's all I've got, but I am, we're very grateful for everyone who behind the scenes played a role in this evening's webinar. And once again, thank Dr. Chalt McElwain at NYU we want to thank Dr. Michelle Clay born UVA. All of us are connected through public interest technology university network so we don't have to be strangers. We can slide into each other's DMs. If it's all about collaboration for impact and doing good things by our students in our community so want to thank everyone I also want to give a big shout out because she's always behind the scenes. Thank you for making things happen a big shout out to and dream at New America, and everyone who's working hard to make sure that we stay connected, be on the lookout for our next pit UN webinar if you want to be involved, and you have a colleague or someone that you feel from your that could help enrich the conversation. Let us know we want to try to get everybody in. And we're going to keep doing these until we are able to ensure that everyone in our network is properly connected and we're building the plumbing we need to move information around the right way. And so, with that, I want to wish everyone the best for the remainder of the evening, and we're, I believe we're going to have a copy of this video circulating throughout. We also want to encourage everyone subscribe subscribe to the public interest tech tech listserv get, you know, get plugged in with what we're doing. And with that, we're at 630, which means that it's it's it's closing time. I want to thank you, Dr. McElwain want to thank you Dr. Dr clay born wishing everybody the best for the evening.