 Good afternoon and thank you for joining the building blocks of a PIT career panel that's looking at public interest technology in academia. I'm Sylvester Johnson and I'll be moderating this panel. It's been long said that public interest technology is only part technology. Policy and practice are just as important. In addition there's not one way to enter the public enter technology career path or even just one discipline. So this panel today examines what universities and faculty need to understand and what the best ways are to push forward and to create the public interest technology practitioners of tomorrow. I'm very excited to have with us four guests of Benjamin Boudreau, who is policy researcher and Professor Grant, Chris Berry who's a William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at the University of Chicago, David Eves who's a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and Ellen Seguro who is the professor and Stephen Fleming Chair in telecommunications at Georgia Tech. So I want to invite each of our guests to briefly introduce themselves and to answer this question to get us started. What do you think is the role of curricular innovation in advancing public interest technology? So Benjamin we could start with you. Great, well thank you very much and thanks very much to PITUN for having me here this afternoon. My name is Benjamin Boudreau. I am a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and a professor of public policy at the party RAND Graduate School, which is a public policy PhD program housed at the RAND Corporation. My research focuses on the ethics and policy of technology, especially artificial intelligence and cyberspace, and I teach an ethics course at the party RAND Graduate School and lead the ethics thread, which is intended to identify ways to integrate ethics throughout the entirety of the PRGS curriculum including in coursework on the job training and dissertation research. Now with respect to the importance of innovation, I think simply put innovation is really crucial for universities to get a handle on blind spots or gaps and to challenge and not get stuck in the traditional ways that things are done that might be subject to various types of path dependencies. And I think innovation can help make for a much more holistic coherent educational program that ensures that tech can work for the public good. I think unfortunately in many cases technologists have not always considered whether they should build a specific tool or how to build those tools in a way that envisions the types of ways a tool could be misused or abused. And I think that requires not always technical skills but skills such as the imagination to reflect on particular misuses of skills. It requires empathy for those particularly affected by these tools and it requires inclusive processes where you consider a diversity of perspectives early in the development and the design of technology and indeed even in coursework related technology. And I think in particular requires a focus on vulnerable and marginalized communities that are often left out of those sorts of conversations. And I think all of that requires innovation to add into traditional programs. Thank you very much. I look forward to the continuation of the panel. Thank you Benjamin. Alan, could you go next and get us started. Tell us about yourself and also your thoughts about what role you think curricular innovation needs to play. Sure. Thanks, Sylvester. You threw me a small curve. I'm accustomed to being last in these sort of round robin things. So thank you for elevating the letters D to coming after the letter B. Ellen Zagura. I am a computer science professor at Georgia Tech. I may be the primary technologist on the panel. I'm not completely sure. We'll hear from the other backgrounds. And I'll kind of confess to having been pretty much a straight up, narrow technologist for in both my research and my teaching for quite a large portion of my career. It's sort of the first half of my career. And then around the 2007, 2008 time period, I really started expanding the research that I was doing and then eventually eventually the teaching so the teaching followed to to incorporate much more in the way of kind of social concerns and socio technical emphasis. And I called it, you know, computing for good at the time. Now that phrase or at least that that kind of X and social good is getting a lot of traction in a lot of places. So so I kind of initially came at it, expanding some of my research and actually, to be honest, expanding a project based class where students worked on projects, mostly computing students projects for nonprofits. And so I think that was a really that was a form of curricular innovation that happened in a particular context. So it didn't it didn't break everything. We had a we had a project based senior design class. And what that what we did was we sort of steered and curated the projects to be in a particular direction. So that's that's a form of innovation where you kind of work within a structure, but that has some flexibility. I guess I'd say another thing that I've done that is is a little more outside the, well, doesn't break everything, but breaks, but breaks a little a little bit different. Also at the undergrad level, is a class on technology and sustainable community development. And that's really an interdisciplinary disciplinary class. And a wonderful former president of Georgia Tech, Wayne Clough said the only thing harder than interdisciplinary research is interdisciplinary teaching. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. It means you hit up against some of the things like how our teaching assignments done and how is course credit allocated these things that seem so mundane and yet can be hard realities within the university setting. So I think, you know, we know that this topic area is interdisciplinary. And so figuring out ways that we get that kind of education to our students, creatively, I think is is part of the of the challenge for sure, but also can be part of the fun. So looking forward to talking more about things others have done and things we've done. Excellent. And David, can you go next and tell us about your work and then what role do you think needs to be played by curricular innovation? Again, because it's 2020. So my name is David Eves. I'm a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School where I teach on digital transformation in government. So I'm very interested in how how governments are using technologies to create public goods or create deliver public services. Although I'm also very interested in how technology might reshape the structure in the machinery of that government to allow it to to be more effective and and not just more efficient, but more effective in how it does that. The project I have a hit project that was funded for which I'm very grateful where I've been pulling faculty from around the world. And at both at public policy and public administration schools and then also civil service colleges, which are kind of like the internal universities run by governments. And that project initially was just for those of us who are thinking about digital transformation, do we have anything in common? Like do like is there actually anything shared among us? And the wonderful conclusion was the answer was yes. And then we spent the first year thinking about what were the core competencies that we thought we all shared. And so we drill down on kind of eight competencies, which are kind of like, you know, the plankton of education, if you can get those right, everything kind of like built on top of those. And for me that there's two pieces of innovation that I'm particularly focused on in the curriculum. The first is most of my students are somewhere going to go become experts in a kind of a pit type topic. But most of my students are not technically savvy. They are going to be consumers of public interest technology information. They're going to be managers and leaders in public sector or maybe nonprofit, even for profit institutions, they're going to be consumers of this and they need to be able to without, you know, frankly, putting it to finally, they need to have much stronger kind of BS detecting skills in order to identify, you know, what are the risks, what are the opportunities and when is someone leading them on. And I think schools of public policy have been good at thinking about that problem in other areas. So, you know, we teach economics, we teach statistics, but you don't leave public policy school most part as an economist or as a statistician, you kind of know enough to be able to challenge people. And so the innovation that I'm really interested in is figuring out what's the minimum viable knowledge that someone needs to have about public interest technology issues to be effective in a leadership role, even if they're not a hard technologist themselves. And that's, that's the kind of innovation I'm really, really interested in. That's terrific. And Chris, could you also introduce yourself and weigh in on this question of the importance of curricular innovation? Thanks, Alvestor. It's great to, to meet everybody who I've met virtually, I guess I'm meeting virtually a second way, but it's good, it's good to see you here. So my name is Chris Berry and I'm from the University of Chicago where I work in the Harris School. And I'm one of the founders of a program we have called computational analysis and public policy or CAP. And this is a joint degree between the Harris School and our computer science department. And we founded this about six years ago now. And at the time there really wasn't any program like that that existed. And it was pretty speculative when we did it. And it kind of arose from some of my work that I do, I do urban policy. More generally, I encounter a lot of conversations with people in city government, just describing for me the kind of student they were looking for. And it always included this kind of computational technical set of skills that were not the traditional statistics and economics that David was describing, but really focused on computer science. And this was at the same moment when again, it wasn't every city at that time that had an information sciences department or a data science division now virtually every major city has those. But it was so at that moment, we just we kind of saw this this coming up through government and we created this degree. And it's been a great success for us to talk more about that in subsequent questions. But I think to your question, Sylvester, about the role of curricular innovation, I see it as actually just definitional of the field. The the curricula that we are constructing now will help to find what this field is. Because although we're all here at this conference labeled public interest technology, my guess is if we asked all the attendees what that means, right? Me, your definition, we'd get many, many different answers. And it's just like any other field in it. I wouldn't even say this fields in its infancy is really embryonic even. And if you think of a field like like Ellen's field like computer science, it's not that somebody one day just stood up and said, I declare the creation of this new field called computer science. And here's what it is. It emerged organically through innovations of people working in different areas, people in math and statistics and operations research, you know, they began to get together and over time to find that field. I kind of think that, you know, the syllabi that we're constructing now in the classes that we're constructing now, you know, over a couple generations of students will define what this field really means. So if there really is something called public interest technology a decade from now, it will have a commonly agreed upon meaning because of the stuff we're all doing now and what we're teaching our students. So I just see this as really definitional work. And I'm really grateful to pit you in for the grant that they gave my group and the rest of you as well to do that kind of work. That's exciting to hear. And I think that it's really important to note all of you have been pioneering curricular innovation and have received funding through the public interest technology university network to make some significant inroads in changing the way students are learning about what counts as knowledge, how to understand and participate in a technological society in a ways that it's civic minded and that produces positive outcomes. I know that because you've been doing this work, all of you have in different ways learned what works and what doesn't you encounter different challenges and have been effective in creating a very exciting new course work. And I'm wondering if you could share one or two strategies that you think can enable colleges and universities to better prepare students for a career in public interest technology. What do you think is practical and transferable by way of lessons learned that would benefit others? And, Alan, we're going to move you all the way to the top so you can't say you've not been first. You're number one now and then I'll ask David to follow up and answering this question. But if you could just share with us what you think has been a useful lesson or two that would be helpful strategy wise or tactically rather at other institutions. Well, thanks Sylvester. You're really making me feel good here. My limited chance to be number one. So I guess maybe what I want to share is an evolution in a series of ways in which I have been involved in structuring experiential learning for students around these are computing students primarily doing projects for nonprofits because I'm actually on my third iteration of this and I'm the iteration not current iteration fixes several things that troubled me about prior iterations and so I want to both share what was the problem and also what I think is really working well as a structure. So as I said, I taught a project-based class that students, master students in undergrads took. Undergrads got senior capstone credit for it and I did that probably over about eight years and then for a couple reasons we stopped teaching it that way. I then had a summer data science for social good renamed civic data science summer program with a nod to Chicago there and that was a 10-week NSF funded REU program research experience for undergrads and the the thing that I became troubled with about especially the first version was that students can't write software that you would like to turn over to somebody in a semester just just can't be done and and and and further more nobody writes software that you can turn over to somebody that just keeps working for you know six months much less forever so I really started to feel this was an ethical issue that we were you know partnering with nonprofits who were so enamored frequently of technology and thought that our students were amazing which they were but they were not amazing in this way they were not amazing in a way that they could magically produce well-working software and then these nonprofits have very little in the way of capability to maintain and support software themselves so that incarnation I'm currently involved in is a something called a vertically integrated project team it's a it means that this project team persists semester over semester students can take can join it and earn credit actually undergrads and graduate students can join it and earn credit and they typically will do so over many semesters so it's not uncommon for a student to come in say the second first semester of sophomore year and remain on the team until they graduate so the students are long-lived and the projects are long-lived and this solves in a very nice way the problem with trying to sort of fit project work into a semester the group I'm working with I'm also trying to encourage them to think much more carefully about projects that will be useful to many nonprofits so moving away from a one-off model of software of software development to the thinking about services software services software platforms that will be useful to many different groups so um all right so that's that it doesn't work well first off it's under computer science students are very interested in working on real-world problems they do a huge amount of coding that just gets thrown away at the end of the semester because it's an assignment so they are very interested in doing this kind of work um but it needs to be structured if you're trying to seriously deliver something so that you recognize the limitations frankly of software development development as a process and software developers especially those who are learning uh Ellen I I love the I so I love the kind of critical nature you bring to that I often talk about this and not my thinking someone definitely I read but like the puppies versus cattle problem that you know building someone custom code is like giving them a puppy and they now have to take care of that puppy for forever and if they don't have those skills uh like that's a real burden you just imposed on them versus like I'll maintain this cattle over here for you and you don't have to worry about it um and so even just like those types of simple concepts are actually often helpful like a lot of students get enamored in wanting to buy puppies and let's be honest a lot of public leaders get enamored in buying puppies that really are not sustainable and the organization doesn't have the capability of taking care of um I think for me the one of the things I had the privilege of doing was trying to do a map of what was going on in relation to public interest technology across the university and I think one thing that's nice to try to explain to my students and just organize people's thinking and I'm not trying to say that this is the only or necessarily the right way but we did kind of two things one as we seized on language that Ash Carter uses but actually I think comes from Manavir Bush from before which is um you know there's there's there's there's technology there's policy for technology and technology for policy and so for me like the tech for policy is really my domain it's like how do we use technology to improve public good outcomes but then there's also how do we use policy to constrain or manage technology so this is like should we regulate the big tech companies and how and so I think that division is already a very helpful division to get people to think about you know where do they want to spend their time and energy and then the other is is um are you coming at this from kind of a humanities perspective or are you coming at this from more of a technology perspective and I found like what we did is just create a really nice matrix we're like okay are you tech for are you tech for policy or policy for tech and then are you coming from the humanities are you coming from and then we could just plot people and I think one of the things that's really helpful and worth thinking about is some of the best work actually happens when you are able to link two people together it's very rare to find an individual who has both sides and so it's really about connecting students and connecting faculty members together so that you have a humanities perspective and a technology perspective and there's an enormous amount they can learn from each other and I find that actually just even just having them sit down and observe each other the humanities person never has to become a tech expert they don't have to learn how to code but there's a lot they can learn about the affordance of the technology and how it works just by sitting next to that person and the same is true in reverse that you'll never necessarily become an ethics expert as a technologist but you'll learn a lot of the questions a lot of the frameworks and they both leave much much more empowered and so I think like those types of mappings allow the students to go see where they want to be and I think if we're really lucky but let's not go overboard it can help the faculty kind of maybe navigate this world too that's great Chris and then I'm going to ask the two of you in that order to also think about what you've learned from your work in developing new ways for students to experience their understanding of technology in a way that is civic minded that promotes public entries that's rooted in the kinds of teaching that you've already developed that you think might be transferable or useful for others who are interested in this work I think one of our biggest lessons though thus far has been that there's tremendous student interest in this field just tremendous but many of them don't know where to go to find the either these kind of courses or these kind of projects and so they need a little bit of calling it out to their attention so they need to sometimes have things labeled a certain way so that they know what you know what classes should I be taking where should I be going and we found that that really is first of all important because you know as I was kind of leading to earlier this is not a pre-existing field so a student can't just decide hey I'm going to go major in major in public interest technology or I'm going to go take this course many of them they think that they'd have a sense that this is going on they think that you know data science for the social good for example would be a great idea but you have to kind of help them take the first few steps and understand how it fits together and then what I also think is important I like David's discussion of the sort of mapping about what's going on university wide we had to go through a similar exercise and I would think virtually every university that's going to get into the space should plan on doing that kind of an exercise just to get a catalog of who all around the university is doing something that touches on this because I think it's probably going to be many more than you think going in and once you have that map at least in our case what we had is a lot of discrete pockets of activity and some people know each other and but a lot of a lot of people didn't especially people in very different disciplines you know David mentions there's the humanities that might be engineering you know computer science math public policy so what we found is really important is it won't do for the students to just take a random smattering of these courses and then have it have it rely on the student to figure out how it all fits together right so in other words you can't go take you know your computer science your programming class and then take a public policy class and then say ah now I know how can you know computation applies to public policy there's that glue gluing the different parts of the map together that are not already put together in the students mine is really important and has been I think one of our hardest steps at the University of Chicago is we always said ah students will take you know these five technical courses and these you know five substantive courses and then they'll have covered everything and but then we'd say well we really should have this integrative course you know a course that shows them how the technical stuff fits into the substantive stuff and it's that glue course that that's been the hardest really to put together because there aren't so many people yet in academia I'm talking about faculty now who are doing that glue work there's just there's more people who are doing you know they're a bit of the work then who are drawing all the bits together and so I think for the university it's important to realize once you've done that mapping there's probably going to need to be at least some additional work of the glue and whether that's through coursework through seminars and workshops however it's going to be I think we can't rely on students to take this smattering of courses from different parts of the map and then on their own figure out how it fits together we need to do that that one more step of providing a course a workshop maybe an applied kind of project like Ellen was describing some additional step that brings it together and I think that's really the key thing that that move your university from having a bunch of people who are kind of interested in this to really being able to do this yeah and I would agree largely with that in fact everything heard so far and the importance of some of the mapping of just trying to get a sense of the landscape of where there's opportunities to integrate this sort of thinking across a curriculum so at the party ran graduate school we do have a standalone ethics course that looks at the ethical issues related to technology but we didn't want it to just be a one and done box checking exercise we really wanted to try to use ethical thinking public interest thinking throughout the curriculum into other existing courses and you know it's not just ethics it's other sort of related concepts like responsibility accountability humanity equity right really trying to find ways where we could bring those types of concepts into the existing courses and what we've done is rather than try to sort of in a draconian way from on high you know say that courses need to add these very specific learning objectives to the way they traditionally been done we've really tried to work hand in glove with the professors of these courses and talk with them about where they might be able to comfortably bring ethical thinking into their existing approaches you know and helping them finding space to for instance question maybe some of the assumptions underlying the discipline or helping them think about some examples related to public interest that they could easily adopt and just just integrate smoothly into their existing ways of teaching courses and so for instance some examples of that would be you know in the data science courses looking at issues related to AI bias and inequity but doing that in a way again that's not intended to detract from the existing learning objectives right recognizing the importance that of you know the sort of existing teachings that the professors in those cases wanted to instill to their class but sort of expanding what they're doing and applying it in this way that's hopefully sort of expanding the conceptual framework that the students you know it can bring to bear when they're thinking about technology and we've really found that this sort of very specific tailored approach is the most effective to really do it in a way that resonates with the faculty you can't you know sort of again force it on them if they're resistant or it doesn't come naturally to them so it really requires a lot of I think individualistic sort of one-on-one customizing approach so that's one thing we've done one other thing I might mention here and this was funded in part by the PITUN so I want to want to thank them very much for allowing us to undertake this initiative but it was an attempt to try to adopt the existing hackathon concept which comes out of computer science or cybersecurity where you know teams compete to you know find vulnerabilities or the sort well we wanted to apply that sort of concept to looking at ethical risks associated with with with the technology and in particular we partnered with a group that was working on a COVID-19 surveillance tool and a data management platform and what we asked the students to do was work in teams to find potential ethical and equity ramifications of the use of this tool you know and also also privacy but but really we're trying to steer them towards how could this tool be used in ways that would foster inequity and what you know this required grouping this the students together in ways where you had people who were very comfortable with the data very comfortable you know with the more quantitative pieces but also students that tend to think more at the systems level think more holistically about you know policy and how you know sort of data might be put into practice by policymakers and the students came up with some really interesting you know somewhat scary examples of all the ways in which this tool might be misused and they didn't stop there they also offered some actionable recommendations for you know how the data might be visualized to prevent some of the misuse or other sort of use restrictions that might be built into the tool so they can mitigate some of the worst challenges and so what we've done at party ran just to sum up is both you know work with the existing classes as much as we can but also try to explore some of these you know you might call them innovative initiatives to try to you know expand the mindset of the students yeah all of those are I think very important lessons and strategies I really appreciate your sharing the insights from the work that you've done because you all have been successful in getting students in role and really shifting the way that the learning happens and even the collaboration among your faculty on your campuses one of the things that is so fascinating about public interest technology is the ambition behind this effort because it is definitely concerned among other things with creating a new field with both responding to something that's already there so it's not like there's no need for public interest technology anyone who's even halfway paying attention to the debates that are happening globally about technology recognize that the urgent need of this but then also of course you were talking about this definitional work that needs to happen and and that is part of what public interest technology is doing it's giving a name to something that once you tell people about they might say oh yeah that makes a lot of sense but there's still some newness to it and when you consider that within the context of the classic questions that students and their parents often ask about their education what can i do with the degree in x or what what degree should i get in order to get a high paying job or to have security and i don't mean that cynically we'd have anyone would have to be pretty mean-spirited not to take seriously the fact that our students come with very urgent need of needing to figure out how they're going to participate actively in an economy that is even more nimble and fast more shifting than it was years ago and they often encounter quite severe financial burdens going to college so no one should ever be cynical about those questions the the challenge is to actually articulate clearly and in the compelling way for students what makes sense as possible pathways so could you share with us the ways that you've been communicating the importance of public interest technology as an area of study as part of their knowledge as an emerging field and and how you have approached that value proposition and maybe we can start with david and chris and if the two of you could share with us what you have found to be useful in helping students or other stakeholders parents or administrators just to really grasp the legibility in the right way of why this is important and why it needs to be part of understanding the possible career paths so I think the story that kind of comes to mind is maybe we shouldn't be thinking about this as the the ceiling that people are reaching for but the new floor that we're trying to establish and um so I'm Canadian and in Canada when you do an engineering degree when you graduate you get a ring and there and you're and you swear an oath you actually swear an oath to not do harm and and and traditionally the ring is made out of the steel of a collapsed bridge I think in particular is actually the second nearest bridge in Vancouver that collapsed and they the engineering society bought all of the old steel and so you had you wore with you this reminder of the responsibility that you have as an engineer towards a code of conduct and a standard that has consequences when it when it's not achieved so I kind of see part of the effort of public interest technology not as like oh if you do this new jobs will be open up to you but it's more if you do this you will simply be an an ethical member of society and someone who can be trusted in a job and that will be required just to get a job whatever it's going to be and so that that for me is like the real aspiration I do want us to reach and push but actually would I'd actually I'd love us to raise the floor and so that whatever anyone says all I'm going to do a an engineering degree or a public policy degree there's just an assumption that the issues and the challenges that we're talking about here are embedded in that and while they may not have a ring and they may not swear an oath we're trying to imbue them functionally with the equivalent of that so when they go to the workforce they bring that with them and maybe to kind of just close that out was it like personal example I had a student who after I helped her get a job at Facebook as a product manager and I remember her emailing me a year afterwards and saying you know your class was so helpful and and she was like I was sitting in the room during the launch of a new project and they went around the room and everybody said like what was getting them excited or what were they worried about and everybody was talking about various technical challenges and some marketing challenges and it got to her and she says well I'm just really curious and worried about what this might do to like the media and democracy and like it was like a neat she's like like a needle scratched in the room and every turn and like that prompted a conversation and I was like that for me is a huge win for what Pitt could do so if we could if we can get one person in every room like that to ask that question I don't think we'll have solved problems but at least we'll have advanced the cause and trying to address them Well I don't disagree with anything David said and I think that's wonderful aspirationally and and and as part of the definition of what this this field is all about I will take you Sylvester though more at you like what are we going to tell the parents and the people who are concerned about getting jobs and and I want to tell them first of all about all these kids are going to be ethical and do a good work that's absolutely right I would say from our perspective or at least in our experience that the job prospects have been the least of our issues in fact you know the the students that that that we're turning out in this joint degree with computer science are some of our most successful easiest to play students they they get jobs that they're happy with doing really important work and I think in in part is because that field I described in my opening remarks you know of the cities who are who are creating information departments and all the different you know entities now dealing with data science and in all kinds of organizations that are doing public good there's just so many jobs and such a recognition on many I won't say all but very very many organizations that they want to have folks with these skills so I would say you know the the worst case scenario is you come out with some really marketable technical skills so if you go into this you know thinking you're going to save the world and you decide at the end of the day that what you want to do is is cash in I hope you don't decide that but if you did you have an opportunity to do that and in every year you know we have a few students who you know end up at Facebook and Google and not that they are cashing in or not doing social good but you know who kind of get lured into a more what we call a more traditional programming job for example and that avenue is open to you and your parents should feel you know should feel assured going to bed at night feeling good that you know in the worst case scenario your kids going to be able to earn a living now I agree we hope that you're going to take this field on as your as your profession and as well and continue to do social good but but I think the sort of skills that are associated with public interest technology are also you know marketable and private interest technology and and so this has just been from our perspective at least a win-win our students get great jobs that that and I think are some of our most satisfied graduates with the work they're doing oh that is both of those are very helpful to hear what you found to be effective in articulating this value proposition wondering Ben and Ellen could you give us your thoughts about this sure thanks and I have somewhat of an easier time on this since the graduate school in which I am a professor only offers one degree which is a PhD in public policy so the students have a pretty clear direction of their interest in some form of a public service whether that's position in government or in a research organization to do public policy related research or perhaps even academia so the the verity are sort of primed for thinking about the implications and applications of various elements of technology but what we try to do though to really ensure that that message hits home is to really help provide opportunities to ensure that the students understand the ways in which the public policy world involves just a significant amount of pluralism related to what constitutes the public interest and that there's just a lot of very reasonable disagreements in this space about what is ethical and what is valuable and sometimes these disagreements are very difficult to navigate and perhaps you know they might involve very difficult trade-offs that might not be an easy way to accommodate all perspectives and so what we attempt to do is try to expose the students to this pluralism of values through a lot of facilitated conversations and opportunities for them to engage in dialogue with each other where they can both better understand their own fundamental values and commitments but also engage with others whom they might have some fairly significant disagreements on some sensitive matters and try to encourage them to engage in these discussions in ways that are really geared towards learning both personal learning but but also geared towards engaging in conversation that's respectful and in that public policy world you know especially in the context of recognizing the plurality of values you know we really try to underscore the importance of inclusive processes where you know before putting in place a policy or before even making a recommendation for what a policy ought to be it's very important to get as many different perspectives as possible and in particular on those communities that are not typically represented in these conversations or don't have as much of a voice in some policy discussions that you know sometimes can be left out or marginalized so we again try to find opportunities to encourage students to conduct that type of inclusive consultation and also put it into practice and so you know those are sort of how we try to train them to be prepared for this particular world but some of the some of the the challenge of actually explaining the value proposition of thinking about you know ethical issues or you know the importance of public interest fortunately the students generally my experience are already pretty prime for that here now yeah thanks so I'm I'm going to take your question I think more literally and and I'm you know I'm at a very different kind of institution than those that are represented by by others on the panel so not everybody knows Georgia Tech is a public institution and and and it's in the south and it it draws a number of students who are first generation or coming from relatively modest means so the kind of pressures to you know want to get into a well-paying job are real then you know the need and and the desire to do that I guess the other hat I'm wearing here is so I have two two daughters one is majoring in psychology and I I have to say this gives me a little bit of heartburn with all apologies to anyone who majored in psychology and made their way to a good place you know this this is I think this question is real for for many students and for many parents you know students come to Georgia Tech generally because they want a technology degree and we're surprised you know we are we have a little bit of breath but we're not that broad so I think this the sort of issue I see is students know a path that will get them a good job and it's how do we and we can open their mind to the possibility that they'd actually like to do more than meet a better floor which I I do agree the floor needs to be raised David so I'm with you on that we can open up their minds to the idea they'd like to go beyond meeting a floor and actually kind of do something not just do no harm but actually see if they could do some do some good but we do struggle against the the appeal and of the high tech companies and and I you know I struggle personally when students will take a class or come to me and say well I really do want to go in this direction you know where should I what should I do so I I actually find this to be a question that is not I don't have the ready answer that I wish I did now one answer maybe is go to grad school right and so take your technology base your computing base and add to it you know a public policy degree or something that's gonna give you that that avenue into a particular set of jobs but that is a hard sell for a you know a kid who's just finished a four-year Georgia Tech five-year six-year undergrad degree and could go get this you know this this job they're probably not not going to be tempted to grad school immediately yeah now all of you raise really insightful approaches to understanding but can be useful in enhancing the legibility of the value of public inter technology for learners for students and also pointing to the challenges so we we're at our Q&A point just to remind everyone who's watching if you haven't already feel free to send us your questions and even responses to the panel but I want to put one question out here for our panel to respond to and and this is about departmentalization and that often becomes compartmentalization and other places is more collaborative but what do you think about the experience you've had with navigating either departmental boundaries or disciplinary boundaries in the work that you've led for curricular innovation because public interest technology is is a disciplined crossing endeavor so any any one or two of you might respond to that so I've been lucky and I'm not quite sure why I probably but I've I've taught these classes I've been allowed to get teaching credit for teaching classes where there is often someone you know there's some team teaching going on and instead of someone being counting and saying well because there's you know two of you you get half credit when we all know that actually it takes twice as much effort so I've been I've been lucky I think that does partly reflect some commitment value commitment on the part of the university to this kind of content so that's my that's my positive story and yeah is any other maybe one more response to that if not we have other questions I I guess I've been also lucky you know along with with Ellen to have a lot of institutional support for this and in my sense is that particularly I mean we're here amongst a bunch of people who are members of Pitt U.N. and their universities have you know have made a commitment to do this and so we may not be typical and maybe other places where this is much harder but I've also found a lot of support for this and it won't happen automatically it does take a lot of leg work from the interested faculty members I think but yeah I I like Ellen feel like that you know my sense is that universities guess they have a sense that this is bubbling up and is going to be something and none of them really want to know what it is but they also don't want to be left behind on it whatever it is and so you know they're kind of willing to to put in a little bit of resources in the early stages to just make sure that they're they're included in it and so I I think we've we've benefited from it from that well thanks that's great so we have we have another question from our viewers and this one is about equity among the students and who gets jobs the possibilities and opportunities that come with public inter technology and so this viewer from the audience is saying that they worry often that students who are are legible as very smart students will always end up being more affluent or tend to be more affluent and they will tend to benefit more from these new initiatives and new efforts that are emerging including public interest technology and then the concern is how to create more equitable access to these new initiatives and opportunities particularly to to black indigenous and other students of color and this could go for faculty as well so I'm wondering if any of you have thoughts about how those things can be balanced the awareness that more affluent students will all of the things been equal tend to actually get the lion share of these new efforts and are there ways to make the opportunities to come with public interest technology more equally accessible maybe I'll just I'll say two things about that one I think there's some there's some hope and maybe some data to indicate that in computer science having an emphasis on public interest or social good or you know whatever phrase you want to use may actually make the field more appealing to groups that have traditionally been underrepresented and that might include women and and people of color and indigenous so you know this is actually this would be using the pit as a lever in the office maybe the opposite direction that is to try to try to attract and retain because potentially of a more satisfying kind of experience people who otherwise would would not be represented I when I ran this summer internship program that was a very competitive program where they get lots of applications and with NSF's encouragement and also we thought that was the right thing to do we aimed for a fairly diverse set of students in the internship program and and we're quite successful had excellent applications so I guess that's the that's a positive spin on it it may not be exactly what the question asker was was sort of after but I think on the computing side that these kinds of emphases can really make a difference in a positive direction for equity and diversity again well that's a great response to the question any others other ideas yeah if I can I think this is a wonderful question and one that you know I think a lot about when I'm kind of trying to select course assistants and research assistants my ability to shape kind of the broader you know entrance into the university is more constrained particularly as a lecturer but what I find the place where I'm actually experiencing a really good story around this as a result of the pandemic is in my executive education side where I teach I'm right now I'm actually teaching an executive course and I have significantly more diversity in my executive program both internationally and also in gender and across a whole range of and I think part of it this has to do with I think the cost is lower but also just people don't have to travel like there's all sorts of barriers that have been knocked down and so part of the failing on this is universities in my mind have been very reluctant to kind of explore ways to go to where the students are and part of that is like the desire to create an experience that they build the created experiences is a bit like that's more available to some students than to others and so I strongly suspect that I have more people who parenting as a priority at the moment coming to my executive class because they no longer have to travel and they can sit there in the morning and do the course people from whom getting United States is a real challenge are able now participate or from remote communities so I just think there's a we should be thinking about kid as a vehicle by which to address some of these issues and the pandemic for all of its ills has really opened my eyes around the possibility like if my classroom could look as diverse which it is very diverse but if you could look as diverse as my executive program I feel has migrated have had that kind of shift that'd be very, very profound you know those are very I think important implications that extend far beyond Pitt as you were saying David this these are issues that extend across higher ed and definitely a time to rethink how we deliver learning and what we do so some of our our comments from the audience have shown appreciation for the attention to the lessons learned the point about students who are coding and producing a lot of software that may just get tossed away as well we have just a few minutes left so I'd love to invite a couple of you maybe then in Chris to respond to some of these comments and questions and by way of having some last words and then I'll ask David and Helen to give us some last thoughts if you want to offer any of those so here are a couple of questions you can Chris and then you can pick what you'd like to respond to one is there are there any tips that you might have for getting departments to be more acceptable of team teaching and another question ask about the these projects that students are working on of where they's they're producing software usually that gets tossed away and you think there are any possibilities of being more deliberate about making these courses or the software that they produce have a longer shelf life somewhere else I can offer a couple of thoughts about that I mean as far as making your department receptive to team teaching I don't have the magic bullet there I think that there's a lot of just institutional differences in that like as I said at least in my institution you've hit is is something that higher ups care about and so that that certainly helps in terms of justifying your case and I certainly think team teaching across units is a little bit easier an ask than you know say within a unit but I don't have the magic bullet on that and as far as you know the projects the students work on I guess what you know my view is you know an awful lot of software gets tossed out at the end of the day it's not it's not necessarily unique to to this field and but I was very interested to hear Ellen's perspective on I forget it I've got to work down your vertically integrated project team I will say that is one of the challenges we had which is it's very hard on the academic schedule you know whether it's a quarter or a semester to produce something is value of value and to complete a project and so we also have been struggling with this we've we've developed what we're calling a lab where the lab existed an ongoing basis and student cycle in and out of it because I do think even something like you know data science for social good which Ellen mentioned which we had which is a summer program even given a whole summer you know it can be it can be really hard and so we've also moved to this like ongoing lab model where the projects continue under a sort of faculty leader and student cycle in and out so as far as you know any kind of tip that would be I agree with Ellen that seems to be as the model we're gravitating toward tip right then any response to these or any last thoughts otherwise they don't have to be about the questions yeah I mean team teaching has has happened pretty easily for me in sort of the unique university context I'm in so I don't have a lot of insight on that I might go back to the point about the risk of inequity associated with a lot of PITUN type programs and just just really puts off the point I think it's already been made but you know I think all of us need to be conscientious about that risk and really do what we can to try to try to mitigate it and that could involve you know doing outreach to colleagues you know trying to direct projects towards explicitly looking at inequity and just technically directly and you know really just just going going towards it and trying to recognize it as a problem and take steps to it address it you know I think that that's not necessarily going to solve all of these systemic problems but it's at least the first step and something that you know I for one am in a position to do as a professor I can I can take steps to try to to better integrate issues of equity into everything that I do and something I aspire to do so that that would be my last comment so thanks very much this has been great I I appreciate the opportunity and Alan David any last thoughts about these building blocks of a public interest technology career I think I just say thank you for Sylvester for running a very enjoyable and educational panel so I appreciate the chance to be here and yeah keep doing the good work and I would say if you teach in a public policy public I'm in school I'd love for you to visit teachingpublicservice.digital so we list our competencies I think the the one thing I would say is I do think this is an area where practice has run far ahead of some of the academic and so finding spaces where practitioners can be engaged which is not something that universities are always particularly helpful or good at doing is I think our an area that's also worth more exploration again to our panelists thanks all of you in the audience for joining us and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference thanks very much thank you Sylvester