Cool Happenings in Responsible Tech! November 7th and beyond.

There are so many great happenings in Responsible Tech! Interested in having your project or event potentially featured? Please email Sandra Khalil, our Head of Partnerships.

Here are a few events and happenings we’re highlighting this week…

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“Hey everyone! I’m Glenn Ellingson, a Visiting Fellow at the Integrity Institute. We have just published a pair of election integrity best practices docs (part 1 is why & how to get started; part 2 is about setting specific goals and how to reach them). This guide is written first and foremost for our fellow professionals working at internet platforms of all sizes and types as we head into a huge wave of global elections in 2024 (65 elections in 54 countries, by one count!), but also provides an insider perspective to inform anyone thinking or writing about, partnering with, influencing, or simply demanding better from internet companies around elections. Have a look and then please, we would love to hear from you! Is this helpful? What would make it better? What else could we do for y’all? You can hit me back on the ATIH slack or email.” -Glenn Ellingson, Integrity Institute

“We are excited to announce the launch of Stanford Internet Observatory’s pilot grants program to support research on online trust and safety issues in the majority world. This program will fund 6-10 proposals providing up to $15,000 per project, addressing a range of topics not limited to fraud, harassment, information interference, abusive content, encryption, internet connectivity, child safety, and content moderation outside North American and Western European context. We are grateful to the Omidyar Network for support of this initiative.Awardees will have opportunities for mentorship and feedback on their research, with the grant program culminating in a virtual symposium. Please find more information about the program here.

We kindly ask for your support in sharing this opportunity within your networks, helping us reach the right audience for this important research.The application deadline is January 30, 2024, and award announcements will be made by March 1, 2024. Here is the application link for proposal submission.Thank you for your support in advancing the understanding of the trust and safety discipline worldwide. For any application related questions, please email internetobservatory@stanford.edu.” -Shubhi Mathur

"Hi everyone! My name is Chris Kuang and I help lead the U.S. Digital Corps, which is a two-year, paid, full-time public interest technology fellowship for new and recent graduates in the United States. We opened applications this week for our 2024 cohort of fellows who will start next August, and we're seeking people who want to bring their tech, data, and design skills to help government work better for all Americans. The five skill tracks that we hire in are software engineering, product management, design, cybersecurity, and data science & analytics. USDC was also named as part of the White House AI Talent Surge in President Biden's recent executive order on AI and we'll be hiring for people with AI and AI-enabling skills as part of our data science & analytics track. Applications are open until November 17th and you can find more details and sign up for an upcoming info session on our website.” -Chris Kuang

“Hi everyone! My name is Aaron and I'm one of the teammates at Impact Labs - our aim is to inspire and empower young techies to do the most good they can with their career! I'm excited to share that applications for the Impact Fellowship are now open! The fellowship is a free 2-week in-person opportunity for ambitious and kind-hearted young technologists who want to build a better world! The fellowship is based in SF and runs from January 3rd to 17th. We have awesome speakers and technical workshop leaders join us during the program, and fellows team up to hack together on a socially impactful project that they can continue working on after the fellowship ends. This will be the 7th annual cohort of the fellowship and it's always a blast! Learn more and apply by November 15th at www.impactlabs.io/fellowship.” -Aaron Mayer, Impact Labs

“Hey everyone – this is Steve Downs from Building H, a project to build health into everyday life. Our team recently released a report on social media, video games and social connection. (You can find it here, on Medium.) It’s from a survey we conducted of 3,100 US adults where we looked closely at overall levels of loneliness and social connection, social media use, video game use and how use of those two media are influencing the social connection of their users. We dug quite deep on social connection, asking people how using social media and video game platforms helped/hindered over a dozen different aspects of social connection. There’s a lot in the report, but the most interesting finding is a bit of a paradox: greater use of both social media and video games is associated with more loneliness, yet the more people use both, the more they say that it has helped with many aspects of social connection.

Some key findings:

Forty-six (46%) of US adults are lonely. Loneliness is most prevalent among people aged 18–29 (55%). Women (50%) are more likely to be lonely than men (42%).

Heavier users of both social media and video games are more likely to be lonely than lighter users.

Paradoxically, heavier users of both social media and video games rated their influence on social connection more positively than lighter users.

Also, paradoxically, heavier users of social media are more likely to report that it has made them more connected to friends, family and neighbors than lighter users.

We’d be really interested in hearing people’s reactions. What do the results suggest to you? Chime in with comments on Medium. (And to learn more about Building H, go to www.buildingh.org and sign up for our newsletter.)” -Steve Downs, Building H

”Hello! I’m Nick Kessler, I help build early-stage data+AI companies at super{set} and also lead a lot of the work for the Ethical Tech Project, including our newsletter. Our work, as a “think-and-do-tank” focuses on encouraging companies to prioritize the ethical use of data. This includes weekly posts on our newsletter and developing our “privacy stack” to help engineers build “privacy-by-design” software.Our most recent initiative is our AI Consumer Survey, which we commissioned to give a deep understanding of how U.S. consumers feel about AI and data privacy. This survey will help us persuade business leaders that consumers will reward companies that take privacy and ethics seriously. We’ll be going over the survey results in the coming weeks, and will have in-person events taking place in San Francisco, NYC and Boston in October and November. We’d love to meet some of you in person - subscribe here to get notified!” -Nick Kessler

“What do we mean by age appropriate design? Why is it important -- not just for children, but for all -- to design with children in mind? In this Pop-Up hosted by Project Liberty, we’ll hear from Leanda Barrington-Leach, Director of International Advocacy at 5Rights Foundation, about the principles and approach of age appropriate design, drawing from the legislative success of the AADC in the UK as well as learnings from around the world.

Register for Project Liberty Pop-Up: Designing with Children in Mind (zoom link | email).” -Joe Tropeano

“Hello responsible tech community! My name is Sylvie Antal and I lead outreach and partnerships at Portulans Institute, a Washington DC-based think-tank focused on technology and innovation policy. On November 20th we’ll be launching our annual Network Readiness Index in collaboration with Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. The NRI is an in-depth analysis of 134 countries’ performance across four dimensions of digital readiness -technology, people, governance, and impact. It is used as a benchmarking tool in government and civil society to ensure that technology is adopted in inclusive, sustainable ways. This year’s report will draw attention to the potential for a serious crisis in public trust in the internet and related technologies in our networked world. The launch event will serve as a platform for unveiling the findings of the 2023 report and engaging in discussions about the vital aspect of restoring trust in our networked society, with perspectives from government, industry, and
academia.

The report’s global launch will be held on November 20th both online and in-person (at University of Oxford). You can learn more about the event + register here. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out at info@portulansinstitute.org!”– Sylvie Antal, Policy, Research, and Communications Associate, Portulans Institute

“Hello responsible tech-ers! My name is Jean Rogers and in addition to being a huge fan of Responsible Tech, I’m the director of the Screen Time Action Network at Fairplay. We have a youth mentoring program called NextGen Connect that I’d like to tell you about.We know young people are the generation who have been hurt most by constant screens and harmful content on social media. NextGen is an opportunity for youth leaders to make a difference in the lives of future generations of children and teens. We’ve created a unique opportunity for 18-24 year olds in the U.S. to get paid $3,000 while spending 12 weeks on their creative projects related to tech accountability with a mentor who is an expert in the field.

Applications are open now for youth leaders and you can find all the information you need to apply here and if you have any questions, please email nextgen@fairplayforkids.org.”-Jean Rogers 

“Hello responsible tech-ers! My name is Daniella Raposo. I work on the Innovation team at Consumer Reports, where we are designing, prototyping and scaling new solutions to problems facing consumers today. You may be familiar with some of our work, if you’ve played around with CR’s Security Planner or Upkept. But I’m here today to share that we are officially launching our free data privacy app called Permission Slip!  CR’s Permission Slip is a mobile app that helps you take back control of your data. With just one tap, Consumer Reports will send legally-enforceable data rights requests - on your behalf - to companies, telling them to stop selling your data or to delete it entirely. Whether you're team Android or team Apple, you can download the Permission Slip app today and experience it for yourself.

We believe privacy is a right, not a setting. We’re asking this community to try Permission Slip today, and share Permission Slip with a friend so they too, can take back control of their data. We can’t wait to hear what you think of the app! Please reach out to us at permissionslip@cr.consumer.org for any questions, thoughts, ideas and more!” - Daniella Raposo