 Hello, good morning I'm so thrilled to be here. I am in Gozie, Okinawa I am a associate professor of law and an assistant professor of Computing and Data Sciences here at Boston University I'm so excited to be moderating this incredibly important panel on Partnerships within and between universities this panel is incredibly timely as you all know Public interest technologies an emerging field and it's interdisciplinary by nature and requires us to build partnerships between colleagues within our department Outside of our departments as well as to build partnerships with different institutional actors across campuses as well as External partners and as this is an emerging field public interest Technology practitioners often have to be not only intentional, but they must develop Relationships with colleagues at different universities in order to build up their research and teaching practices and to thrive in the field they must share and gather resources and Build vibrant communities of practice and it's this inter institutional partnerships that deepen the resources of Pitt and Extend its reach and I'm so excited to have with us today Some great speakers who can speak about interdisciplinary partners inter partnerships and so I'm going to allow them each to briefly introduce themselves after that There'll be a moderated Q&A and then I will open it up for audience questions. So if you wouldn't mind us starting us off Hello. Hi. My name is Elena and Eva. I represent the University of the South, Sohani I am the director of the data lab program there and I'll tell you briefly what data lab is It's a summer fellowship for undergraduate students The goal of that fellowship is to train aspiring data scientists to work on problems that really matter So problems of social good We work with nonprofits and government organizations to define projects the students Led by industry experts and academia experts in the fields Form groups they work on them at the end we deliver to our clients whom we call partners And then we do it again the next summer I'm also Many years ago. I helped start DSSG data science for social good at University of Chicago Now at Carnegie Mellon. So data lab is a sister program to that except data lab focuses on undergrads specifically in Social good domains Healthcare education transportation public policy And so-and-so very happy to be here Good morning, everyone. How are you doing? My name is Maya Turner, and I am a BU alumna I was the former project manager for the tech for change pick club initiative at Boston University And I helped lead the effort to run the first ever civic tech hackathon that took place in this very room Back in February and I'm so thank you. I'm so excited to talk about the partnerships I had in order to make this initiative come to life We were working with Howard University very closely with their club you and club there We also worked with the National Society of Black Engineers at Boston University Which I happen to be the president of as well, and then we also were working with BU spark Which is a tech incubator on campus, which is very much was our sponsor for this whole initiative So very happy to be here today and discuss my experience I'm also currently a software engineer at Netflix. Yeah Hi, everyone. Good morning It's really wonderful to be here. My name is Laura Bingham I direct the Institute for Law Innovation and Technology at Temple University based at the law school and You know, I just want to thank the organizers Boston University New America for allowing us a chance to reflect on partnerships I'm relatively new. This is my first convening. I'm new to this community My background is as an anti-discrimination lawyer. So I spent the formative part of my career dealing with institutional big structural discrimination cases I worked trans nationally and So I have a deep familiarity with the power differentials The when you're working with a big global organization, but you're trying to solve problems with clients and communities that are truly vulnerable for instance and and sort of the the Skills and capacities that you need to develop to listen I think that's very much a part at the center of what we're trying to do with this community It's also right at the center of the core values that we built into Islet as we call it the Institute at Temple So I felt like when I joined two years ago and discovered one of the first things I did was to sign up for pit UN to apply to be a member Because I felt like this framework was really going to help co-create something bring some of those same values into the the academic sphere that I was entering and also bring across some of the the challenges and the skills and the capacities that you learn when you're trying to take on big structural issues in Community with a range of different partnerships. Thank you Buddy can you hear me? All right. Hi. I'm Brooke Williams. I am a professor here at BU an associate professor of the practice of computational journalism and My colleague Zebo over there the executive director of spark and probably a lot of other amazing titles We co-founded a Lab here. It's called the justice media computational journalism co-lab and in that lab journalism students and students from the competing in data sciences partner on they team up and Work for a semester sometimes longer on data-driven Investigations for news partners. We have local hyper local neighborhood news partners. We have States, you know, Boston all the way international and international and our students have published close to two dozen pieces of work that are Holding powerful accountable and informing the public about You know, what's going on in in government and other areas of importance? We focus on justice Which I think is pretty much all investigative journalism, but we only take projects on that focus on justice That's it. Thank you so much Hello, everyone. My name is Larry Suskind. I'm on the faculty at MIT I've started and run the cybersecurity clinic at MIT I'm also part of a Harvard MIT tufts joint venture that's celebrating its 40th anniversary this year But I remember so distinctly 40 years ago the parallel Meetings in which and we were just dealing with four or five universities wondering whether we could build a new field of negotiation and dispute resolution and 40 years later there is a field and it was constructed by faculty from 20 different disciplines three primary universities Quickly became self-financing by taking the teaching materials that we were all separately making and Distributing those globally so that people could more rapidly build the field and then we started all offering executive training and the executive training and teaching materials generated the revenue to fund the scholarship the research and the administrative work so I've I Understand we're at a moment Can all the schools and potential allies and partners represented here? commit To build a field People will do different things. They'll define the field different ways We've never defined the field together in exactly the same way. It hasn't stopped it But the issue is commitment and it's my hope that as a result of today and tomorrow We can firm up a commitment to help build together Not just under one umbrella a lot of separate things But people working together to help build public interest Technology as a field. I think you all so much For those important introductions and just showing the diversity of your experiences. I think are really Interesting conversation together just to take us back a bit back a bit I want to dig deeper into the concept of public interest technology and how it can operate as a Framework for project creation implementation and success and so on that front Maya if you wouldn't mind if we speak start with you Can you speak to how the framework of public interest technology has helped you specifically identify a problem and how it's helped you? design an effective project of course So for the first ever civic tech hackathon I don't know if you guys know the hackathon is but it's a usually a 24-hour event where we have students from across The country come together ID a create a project from scratch a technology a technology a technical solution to a problem And they present it at the end and usually stay up all night. They don't sleep They have like coffee and they make a project So for the civic tech hackathon we specifically want to focus on public interest technology And what problems that we can solve using technology that we usually don't try to solve using technology So one of the tracks that we had we had three tracks But one of them was to develop a technical solution to help single parents now We try to keep it broad We also had some questions to help students like think of a solution to solve this issue but just the overall winner actually addressed this problem and They developed a finite a financial literacy app to help parents teach their children how to save money and how to Grow generational wealth because they saw that was a problem that if you are a single parent usually you don't come from the most economic Economically stable backgrounds was important for children to know as they grow up how to use money in a correct way and how to save money And how to not to build economic stability for themselves so that's how that's an example of how I used or the The tech for change big club initiative at Boston University used a pit framework to address a pressing problem Thank you so much Laura. Can we turn to you? Sure so You know, I think when I when I joined temple I was as I was saying when I was doing my introduction I was much more familiar just kind of going back to and dreams comments that opened us up you know much more familiar with Folks who were on the receiving end of innovation as sacrifice, you know and When I came into temple The first people that I connected with actually thank you Maya for explaining what a hackathon is I was a group in Philadelphia called legal hackers that were interested in hosting the first ever Philadelphia social justice hackathon and You know, I approached it with some skepticism Because I felt like it was coming from the same place of you know solutionism, right and But this this was really a transformational experience for me It the the public interest technology frame Allowed us to connect across a few different universities in the Philadelphia area around the problem of Real serious gaps in access to justice access to legal representation And I discovered projects that were at Penn at Drexel at Villanova that were really looking at this and looking at how Technology with the understanding that it was just one tool Could be translated could be much made much more accessible in itself could be much more approachable and Part of closing some of these gaps So we organized last fall around this time a social justice hackathon. We did it very Thoughtfully and conscientiously in the communities So we actually opened it up to members of the community who would walk off the street and kind of come in be in a project And that that was the foundation of some of the most important partnerships that I have now in Philadelphia across different Academic institutions, and I think we'll go into it later But this this was the basis for how we organized our career fair, which is coming up on Saturday Thank you so much Laura Larry there's There's people there are people who've been teaching cyber security in universities for some time But about four or five years ago I Looked around at MIT. There were people teaching Cybersecurity in computer science and in the management school and all the people who were graduating We're going to work in the private sector where you can get paid a good salary to be a chief information security officer and My teaching in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning led me to be concerned that Nobody was teaching cyber security for folks who would go work in cities and The task is different very different you really need to teach a different course in a different way and Because MIT had recently joined Pit UN there were some seed funds available and we use those funds to create a Cybersecurity clinic for public interest technology in our case cyber security clinic to protect Infrastructure critical urban infrastructure We designed the course and we began to hear from people in other places. Oh, could you share some of those materials? We would like to teach cyber security. We're not a computer science department I said, well go find some buddies in computer science on your campus I mean my my my advantage at MIT is MIT undergraduates about 40% of them are majoring in computer science 40% of 4500 undergraduates are majoring in one of 35 fields and If I could get some of those undergraduates mixed with graduate students who were working in urban management and public policy They would be great teams and so we built the cyber security clinic around that idea and Immediately the connections with other schools started and because my Berkeley colleague who you'll hear in the program tomorrow. I Said MIT and Berkeley should see if we couldn't organize the schools That are trying to do cyber security in the public interest Which is not every place teaching cyber security and We slowly and then suddenly built a consortium the consortium of University-based cyber security clinics Cybersecurity clinics org describes the 17 schools roughly now that are members and We have a monthly Phone call which are Berkeley colleagues organized and people talk about the issues they're facing in building out their clinic or New schools come on saying what's the first thing I have to do? How do I convince the university to let me do it doesn't have to be in a computer science department? every issue about public interest technology is embodied in the cyber security Institution building tasks and we in just four years to build a consortium of schools to share all their teaching materials they're all online to help each other to Find a way to help build the field together and it's a wide open system It's not closed anybody in any way so my sense is That the collaboration between people with a shared interest in different universities Can lead to institution building to advanced public interest technology Thank you so I Work across the street mostly in the College of Communication and I spent a lot of time Looking calling Zeba and other people over in the computing and data sciences to say I don't know we get a thousand PDFs from a government agency and we want to convert them into structured data We know it's possible, but we don't know how to do it We teach data journalism But does it get into AI and these very complex computational methods that are taught here and that students study for four years? No, it does not so After several years of little projects Like me calling and saying hey, do you think you could help me get a machine to read all of these court decisions? We decided why not make it a formal lab a Co-disciplinary lab right where students work together on teams to do this type of work That's very important to the public interest The investigative journalism is absolutely crucial to public interest And so and so that's that's what we did and that's how we thought about you know public interest technology as we did it and I would It's been a real success the students have Not built silos we encourage them to not build silos to really actually work together so we have you know data science students going out and not Conducting interviews, but being there right and then we have the journalism students sitting down at the computer and Sort of asking questions like what could we ask this data to further our project and Working with that computer science students to write those queries or to write those algorithms to scrape documents Or other things There's a lot of information out there that journalists need and we need public interest technology framework in order to make that information Usable in a way that we can analyze it and determine what is going on and inform the public and It's been amazing to see all of the things. We've done things that I never imagined we would at one example is a Story that was on NBC showed a pay gap at a university and we had we'd used an algorithm to assign gender and My mind just was kind of blown thinking as a journalist all the things we could do if we can accurately assign gender to names With all the state out there looking at gender disparities and inequities So anyway Yeah, so hearing all these interesting and very different stories It makes me think how mine fits inside so My background is machine learning and AI I've spent About 20 years working on delivering AI for clients then doing AI research in Industry labs and AI is a tool Right, and on its own it doesn't matter. It matters what you apply it to so There was a time not Still happens now, but but mostly you know if you think ten years back maybe the greatest minds in AI We're working on what on ads on sponsored search, right? And I think everybody has seen going back to what Larry was saying this boom in interest in computer science, right? How many people are majoring how many people are if you look at resumes and I spent a lot of time looking at grads resumes Almost everybody who's done any computer science right is saying I'm a computer scientist and almost all of those are saying I do AI right I do machine learning I've also spent a lot of time recruiting for industry and when I talk to people what what is it that we work on? You know, how would you spend your time here? Well, we work on these projects in this project And you know when their eyes light up is when you mention anything about social good, right? I think It's a little difficult to engage people in social good or public's interest If you say why don't you come work for us you make a lot less money. How does that sound? But we're we're lucky because Technology and in my case a I had machine learning You don't have to make a big sacrifice and say, okay, I'll just live on the street But I'll work for public good. You really don't have to there's many amazing opportunities to make a difference in Healthcare and education as I was saying before so we started But ten years ago data science for social good With this thought of we want to train more computer scientists to work and not actually computer scientists I take that back want to train more data scientists from various backgrounds computer science statistics economics Social sciences to work on problems that matter and how do we do that? How do we create a community? How do we show the possibilities? How do we find real projects? So it isn't another class, you know and another kind of bootcamp or common code with us And then you'll be qualified to work on this later. So This is how the DSSG data science for social good was born and many programs that have kind of blossomed out of that since and it has now spread across many universities on different continents and the the idea is that There's a lot of pent up Interest in working on these things on making the world better It doesn't have to happen when you've made your millions and then you're thinking okay How about now I work on social good. We have to capture the interest while People are getting trained while they're Passionate and choosing what to work on we have to give them kind of viable options, right? And we have to do it across Across interests so hence the multidisciplinary Emphasis of this panel which makes me very happy. So we work with so students from all over the US apply we work with Experts from Various domains because as I was saying before AI machine learning is not a domain right as a tool So we need to have people who understand health care. We need to have people who understand homelessness We need to have people who understand Predatory lending all these problems that we're trying to fight And so we collaborate with people from both academia it's a little bit I'll get into the challenges later from academia and from industry and What our program is made of is this made of people? with very very diverse backgrounds who are passionate about working in technology and making a dent in a social good public interest kind of Endeavor Thank you all what we've heard from all the panelists is how not only is Public interest technology as a framework important to how they approach their research what work they've done in their experiences, but that it really requires collaboration and so at this point Let's turn to that question of partnership and some of its difficulties and how do you do it? How do you? Develop partnerships within and between universities and Laura. I'd love to start with you Could you let us know what kinds of partnerships? Did you need to develop in order to make your work possible and how did you incentivize? People to join you. How did you collaborate with faculty and students? Sure. Um, thank you. Yeah, I so I think There's so many different ways to answer this question and you know, I feel like our Institute and and you know kind of the culture around it's very much an informative sort of base building stage so, you know the first the earliest partnerships and and This is just gonna be a sustained effort are with students and with community organizations Our mission is built around inequity in terms of representation and and like taking that message to our students making sure that they understand that You know public interest law let alone public interest technology is some is a place that is welcoming where people belong So that that whole set of work You know involves these critical partnerships, right? But I wanted to talk maybe a little bit about the career fair just to be more specific And and because it's something that we're just deeply involved in our career fair is focusing on on Specifically law and public interest technology because we're based at the law school We're sort of starting where we are within the community where we're most closely based and this is a multi institutional thing So we're doing it in partnership with that same set of universities that I spoke about before But one of the one of the challenges that we have with getting our students to Really feel empowered to come into this space and learn about it is is this financial Exactly what Elena was talking about right with these are students who are in a professional program there's a long tradition of You know two tracks public interest law Where your salary is going to be very low and you need other kinds of resources to come in and do it So they're huge diversity and equity issues there already That the students are engaging with deeply and and then the private sector where there's a lot more emphasis on career pathways It's just much clearer and there's a lot of channeling in that direction and so With the messaging in the organizing around this career fair one of the partnerships We really need to forge is with with employers Because we can make the case and we can talk we had people there is that social justice commitment very much so But it does need to translate into a career pathway. And so the the career fair work We've I think that's going back to the public interest technology framing being kind of adaptable and flexible Is allowed us to cast a broader net in terms of the employers that we're bringing to campus now This in this first conversation with our students about what this is and what opportunities it could bring for them in the future so I think we've that's why the framework has been so helpful and being able to Define it in relation to public interest law But also saying how this expands how it's different and how this can be a field Where where everyone actually is welcome the first question that you always get is but I don't have a computer I don't have a this background. I don't have a science background. I'm not a patent agent coming into law school so I think that Finding employers that will help us Deliver that message that actually they they are looking for a broader set of skills And they do have this commitment that that's been a sort of critical partnership It's a work in progress for sure to build those connections And Larry you kind of talked about this a bit before but could you speak a little bit more about the kinds of partnerships? You needed and talked to us a little bit about Not only faculty and students and institutionally, but also external funders so my experience after many decades of trying to get Schools and departments to work together is to zoom in and find an individual in each of those schools and departments and Find people who have their own incentive their own reasons from wanting to work together you can get Heads of universities to sign agreements that they'll cooperate It doesn't mean anything until you make the connections between the individuals so We're using our time at MIT To see if we can learn more about how to help individuals with a shared interest in public interest technology Learn from each other talk with each other And then I hope we can scale that up within Pit UN if you have a chance you look at technologist dot MIT dot edu Publication that we made to it's free To try to get people at MIT who would not Ever run into each other talk to each other teach together Share students advise these these together and yet once they discover they have a shared interest in Public interest technology all the boundaries melt away for those individuals The editor of the technologist is here one of our students Emily from a and What we're looking for is to use this year just to model how to make this partnership between different departments and fields work within one university and then hope with pit UN to scale this up and We interview two faculty two students every month and we say we go to them on purpose You're working on an interesting technology either new or redoing old or studying technology could be anything And we say tell us about your technology and you know 700 words then Is your technology doing anything in the public interest? Innocent ask them second question and we write out their answer and then we ask them a third question What more do you think you could be doing in the project that you have in the work you're doing to better serve public interest and They struggle to answer that and we condense Emily condenses that interview faculty student to every month will we're gonna get around to 24 faculty in all different parts of the campus and we're Looking at cross-cutting themes. What do they have in common? Well, how can they talk to each other and I'm convinced that when we can help Individuals with a shared interest in public interest technology regardless of their fields Understand that they have common interest in public interest We can scale up that conversation But I think it's about getting individuals to talk to each other and see what the reason is that it's beneficial to work together not because we're trying to build institutional arrangements in some Way that says the field is growing because it won't be unless there's individuals collaborating Thank you for that and particularly raising the importance of individuals speaking to each other because that is critical to Building up partnerships Brooke. I'd love to hear your views So it was important for us to build trust with news organizations in order for them to work with us especially journalism students and competing in data science students Who haven't graduated yet? So there's structure that we put in place that helped to build that trust We have spark at CDS As a part of our the justice media collab and provides project management Troubleshooting, you know technical Assistance a lot of experts in residence. So there's a lot of structure already a lot of support for the students in addition to Me and my co-professor so we co-teach the class and then you know It takes time to build trust with external partners And it takes publishing so once we published several articles, you know some big ones like on the front page And People started to notice and that was one one that one path The other path is that you've heard of news deserts. You've heard about what's going on I I don't think journalism students who are looking in to get into investigative journalism have like a Path that's toward money Yeah, there's really one path and it doesn't lead there Anyway Yeah They So with this framework We we've we've shown the the partners that that the students are passionate We've made the the course like application only like the the lab itself And so we get the the brightest and the most eager students that really want to pursue this and In terms of incentivizing as I was mentioning, there's these news deserts. There's areas in Boston All over there's newspapers. I mean the Boston region I can think of dozens and dozens of newspapers that desperately need help covering local government covering the state Legislature covering things that matter to people that live in those areas that are really important and it can be done much more precisely and have more impact if it's done with computational methods and so Really just explaining that to editors explaining the how Important this public interest technology this computational aspect is to journalism Which is also in the public interest And showing the proof of it right showing the impact that it's had Has been really important Yeah Okay, I Want to talk about how Laura and Larry you guys are talking about how financial was a component that is often deters students into getting into Pit initiatives Well, at least on campus. I became an employer with a the project with my project manager job And I was very liberating and empowering that I was able to provide jobs to students When I first joined the PU initiative at Boston University. There was a lack of passion. I Can't speak about what I wasn't there for but there was a lack of passion and the team I joined in October and we had The team slowly dwindled to about three people who were willing to stick it out But we had a major event to plan by February and to execute So Ziva V you spark I would say is the mate They were the best partnership I had they were my sponsor. They were my champion. So shout out to be you spark for everything but I Had to look elsewhere on campus to find Dedicated students were willing to put in the work to make this event happen and I was also by the way the president of the National Society of Black Engineers on campus and I was leading these two initiatives concurrently and when I was up when it was time for me to Find new people. I had to find I had to employ like nine people in like a few week in a few weeks before I went to break started I turned to my club because I That club was my home for three years and for four years And then I became the president and I knew all those students in the club very Intimately we were peers. We were colleagues. They were hard workers. So when I said I needed individuals to work over break went to break To be willing to put in hours for an event that is Going to be happened in two months a major event 24-hour event. That's going to happen very soon And they're gonna have to like put in a lot of work. They were hungry They were willing and they were excited that it was a public interest technology initiative And that they were getting paid so that I was able to and spark is one of the major input It's a usually is the highest like salary that you can get on campus and everybody wants to work at spark so So the fact that I could come to as a leader of my club could come to my peers and say hey I need to Employ I need to make this event happen. If you're hungry if you're willing to pull into work Let's do it so much interest so much people who are passionate So much people who are willing to get involved that it was like kind of overwhelming But it was good because I got to pick up the litter like you know I got to make my choices and I turned like a three-person team into like a 12-person like force and We put this event together There's times we're like, I don't know if you can do this You know what I mean, but it was like such success yet over like a hundred students to attend They all said wow, it's so organized. We're like wow. Thank you But I would say that Make being an employer and being able to give like high salary jobs on campus was a major part of The incentivizing but also having people who trusted me and having people who Having those connections Also allowed individuals to join in the this pit Tech for changed effort to put on the first civic tech hackathon and from there I passed a torch onto a mentee of mine who's now the project manager shout to Rania and She is now leading the team and she also Some people joined but she also hired students from Nespia So now it's it's great to see how this is like a path of employment opportunities from very talented motivating students on campus And Well, so any is a small liberal liberal arts university and Partnership between and within the university Is kind of baked into the ethos right baked into everything we do and how we do things So for data lab It's very similar We rather than starting something and then saying now, how do we how do we collaborate? It's the other way around right we set it up that it has to be collaborative It's just no way it will work unless it's collaborative and then you grow the collaborations afterwards We have different types of collaborations I'm gonna set aside the collaborations with governments with nonprofits for now since we're talking about universities the We need to Create teams of fellows and the teams have to be interdisciplinary So you can't have a team of just computer scientists or just statisticians or you know half economists and half computer scientists You have to have a mix not because diversity is good and you know, we have to promote this but Mainly because otherwise the projects don't work. You don't find the solutions. You don't have the right answers You miss things. You don't have fair and equitable approaches the The data may be biased and you may not notice that and the solutions, you know You're you've heard one of my favorite expressions garbage in garbage out, right? So that's what ends up happening So it has to be this way The people who direct Who help set up the programs set up the partnerships run the projects mentor the students They also have to come from different places Imagine if they all came from the same university, right? Right not to mention even the same department. They just would not work, right? we have to Combine and get Different areas different domains expertise and experience for example, if you work on a public health project Coming coming from industry I've seen many times that somebody says we have this data We're trying to figure out this pattern. Can you do it back? Yeah, we have the data. We can do it, right? And you can't unless you talk to somebody who has worked with the data who has worked in this domain Who has faced challenges? Then you understand that you don't really know what the fields mean or how the data is collected And why there might be bias here and not bias there and what you What a successful solution means a very tiny anecdotes on the side In data science for social good, we had a project to to early diabetes detection in underserved populations including homeless populations and One of the patterns we found not surprisingly in the data is that if you smoke then your odds of Getting diabetes are very high, right? So what can we say as data scientists about it? Well put a Put a note for the doctor automatically pop up something saying please counsel your patient to stop smoking but when we worked with the Doctors who are going to use the system one of the first things she said is I would never tell an unhoused person to stop smoking Can you imagine how cruel that is and everybody's mind everybody's mind in the room were blown, right? Really you wouldn't know I wouldn't that's not how we would address it You know, this is one of their few coping mechanisms and you know You can't take it away and if you say it even if you say it they won't do it, right? And it just completely shifted everybody's perspective. So collaboration is like air right it has to be between and within universities and other groups and Otherwise it just does not work. It's a it's not a nice to have it. So it must have Yes, we've heard some really great stuff I mean in terms of how to develop partnerships you heard about the importance of trust Identifying the right partners a diverse set of partners and just the importance of personal connection But what also came out is a bit that this is challenging and so I want to turn to that before we get to audience questions What are some of the? Institutional challenges and barriers when you're trying to build a sustained partnerships within in between universities and Larry will start with you So many of you could imagine the following scenario You find partner five universities you realize you want to work together because you're all approaching an Issue from a different perspective, but you all share an interest in the subject So you say you know it'd be great if my students could take your courses Not just mine we could have a specialization that crosses five universities and one or two courses in the same field from each of those places would be on a list and students who can't get that extra dimension or that complementary Set of methods could take those courses and it's easy for the people that want to collaborate to imagine Actually retuning their courses so that they all fit together in an in a neat way Take out overlap and and really imagine a Stream of students who would be able to take the set of courses and then reality hits You try to present take your choice of the level of administrator above you department school institutions professional association you name it you can't give credit at one school for a course taken at another school and Those of us in the academy who've lived for decades with that immediate response Usually say okay. Well, we guess we can't do this because There are these hidden rules that have to do with how universities are financed and how professional associations award different school status and standing for different degrees and if suddenly they're including courses That are from outside that school then it is a question of their accreditation. You could there's ten different Directions from which you will get bombarded with a simple idea. We were trying to build a field We're working together. We're gonna make an efficient cooperative arrangement. We can't do this in our place That's the whole point of the partnership that we're making And then the question is okay, what do we know about how to work around these problems? Because there are such things They're not known to the people you are now raising it with for the first time in your place And you don't know about a lot of them But you might know about one of them and then the response will be we can't do that here and what we need is The scale of collaboration that pit UN represents So that we could take Streams five six seven streams of courses Different members within pit UN different fields lay out those specializations that no school could do on their own Generate the financial support from the Regional Industrial partners, I mean when I work on cyber security I point out there are over 700,000 Unfilled good cyber security jobs right now and no no flow of people to take them and so anything from a national Human resources standpoint that could be done Or to be done and universities will be making this possible not impossible And so we need to figure out can we share stuff online? Can we share stuff through summer study that there's a whole series of workarounds? Where you're not really getting support for the idea, but you're finding a way to avoid opposition To the idea and so this one theory of how to cope with challenges Maya And then we'll turn to audience questions Yeah, so I was just like thinking about some challenges that we face or policy can face as tech for change and The pick club initiative grows. It's just how you like scale right now at Be boss University. We do have an affiliate model where we are partnering with the National Society of Black Engineers to kind of Do the tech for change pick club initiatives, but you can also have a Club a Tech for change club and which Howard has and we want to continue to scale this up And how can we make sure that as we scale this? National in this national club network to make sure we continue We can collaborate well with schools that are not present right here or have a different model as we do One challenge that we face was just Communication with Howard at times because we were operating We were doing a lot of groundwork As as project as the project manager and making sure that like us our tree schools are on the same page Of course like we were but making sure that we had like zoom calls like weekly To make sure that we're caught up on work and like making sure that tasks are even just marked off as done So people knew the state of the work we have done was a challenge that we had Working on this civic tech hackathon Thank you all so much. I want to take our remaining ten minutes and Have some audience questions. We have some folks walking around with microphones. We'd love to hear from you all Thank you so much. I'd like to know how do you find your projects? Laura, would you like to take that one? Okay, find them like In what sense like how do we identify what we'll work on? Okay, um Well, I think For for maybe this is true for all of us, but certainly for me I brought a scent a set of partnerships with me when I came into the role so I think some of this is really just kind of building where there are open doors, you know and Thinking about what's going to align with the values that I've talked about that we define for the Institute in the first place Are these going to be projects that are sustained sort of sustained over time? So for instance one of the product and I do I didn't mention this, but we do a lot of clinical work and that I think speaks to some of the same challenges, you know There aren't really the same kind of institutional structures necessarily to support and grow that kind of work and channel it channel students to it and one of the projects that we took on early on is a research project on Border surveillance technology with a civil society part a couple of civil society partners And it you know, it was it was sponsored by my previous Employer, which was that open society foundation. So it was a continuation of work that I had before and That project was already designed around sort of a similar solidarity building framework We wanted to partner with other Organizations across this region in the Western Hemisphere that are also looking at the problem Sort of from a transnational perspective and it was something where a lot of different research and interdisciplinary Outputs were envisioned. So it was like a pilot phase It was something we could involve our students in it reflected our values And it was something that we could continue to Fundraise for through sponsored research sort of year-on-year. So I mean, that's I think one Example of just stitching a number of pre-existing kind of platform partnerships together But also thinking about well, how can this be sustained? How can it bring in more work and kind of branch off into other projects? Larry and then I will take another question. So we run a cybersecurity clinic every semester We want to help five to seven communities the first year We called around to different cities and towns and they said who the hell are you and Are you talking cyber security sensitive stuff? You can't Students are gonna come and work in the city on this in clinical course So I said, well, okay. I need a sponsor So I went to the mass cyber council, which is a state-created entity that helps all 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts On cyber and I said, could you tell your members that for free? They could get teams of trained MIT students to come and help them. I Didn't send out anything they sent out that announcement and I got three that year and Then the next semester I went back to them and said would you do the same thing again? They said yeah, and the three that you work with I'll write them into the thing We send out then we got too many we had ten and we can only do five Then I said, oh, it's the sponsorship thing So I went to the state agency responsible for cyber security and I said You don't have staff providing assistance to cities and towns. You just have staff to tell them that they need it Would you please send out to all the cities and towns a recommendation that we can do this now? We have a cue You know I can stop teaching and the next generation of faculty that teach cyber security will have clients ready Sponsorship from within the entity if it's a not-for-profit entity find a network and Organization let them find you the projects now in our case We're not asking anyone to pay anything so that makes it easier if you were asking someone to pay That would be that much harder But you have to be really clear about what you're gonna deliver And you have to be really clear that the students you're gonna let loose on this have been trained And that's why we have a four-week online training program and an exam at the end of it And if you don't pass the exam you have to drop the course Now I've never not I've never had an MIT student not pass that exam But the same course is a MOOC for the world at large for free and the exam if you want to take it is $129 and the pass rate is 50% but if I can say We have people ready to help you then we need MIT general counsel To help us write the letter of agreement. I'm not allowed to ask students to sign NDA's MIT won't permit that But I can sign a letter of agreement saying I will make sure the students do and don't do this and everything is gonna remain Confidential and even the final product that we produce goes to the whoever signed the document in the city and We can't use it. I am allowed to strip some data from it That's unidentifiable by place to give to the research team to it's working on the problem more theoretically but we can't show off the product anywhere and What the city does with it? It's completely up to them We don't talk to the press and students have to have to understand That this is Supposed to be quiet Because we will be producing an assessment of that city's weaknesses That could make them subject to cyber attack if somebody got their hands on that so its sponsorship and time Good performance and the sponsor then takes more responsibility. I Know we're at time. I want to add one tiny thing Agree with everything and one more thing that we do is everything we produce is open source and that has a way of Spreading the word right and people find you and they come they want to talk to you also social media I think we all know the power but open source really helps because Not only not only does it spread the word but actually you Start things in other locations right that just amplifies the impact. All right. Sorry. That's it Great. This was a wonderful Panel. I just want to thank our panelists. Thank you so much