Tech & Democracy: A Better Tech Future Summit 2023 🇨🇦
All Tech is Human and The Consulate General of Canada came together to bring 120 individuals across civil society, government, industry, and academia for Tech & Democracy: A Better Tech Future Summit on Wednesday, March 1, 2023.
Tech & Democracy: A Better Tech Future Summit was focused around uniting stakeholders, promoting knowledge-sharing & collaboration, and understanding values and trade-offs to co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest.
📕 This gathering coincided with the release of All Tech Is Human’s Tech & Democracy report
People from Accountable Tech, Civics Unplugged, Consumer Reports, Data & Society, Freedom House, Free Press, Google, Integrity Institute, Just Tech, Meta, Microsoft, Moonshot, Mozilla Foundation, Project Liberty, Public Knowledge, Tech Policy Press, UNDP, UNICEF, a mix of governmental officials, and a good selection of universities attended the event, and hundreds more joined the livestream.
You can join the conversation about how we can construct our better tech future by viewing the panels and fireside chats! If you decide to share this page or a video from this event on social media, please make sure to tag All Tech is Human and the Consulate General of Canada so we can amplify your voice!
Panel #1: Digital Governance and Policy: The Role of Democratic Governments in Regulating Speech Online
Central question: How can democratic governments regulate tech companies to strengthen information integrity, while safeguarding the right to free speech?
Jameel Jaffer is the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. Under his leadership, the Institute has filed precedent-setting litigation, undertaken major interdisciplinary research initiatives, and become an influential voice in debates about the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age.
Learn more about Jameel Jaffer:
Website | Twitter | Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University | The Drone Memos
Katie Harbath is a global leader at the intersection of elections, democracy, and technology. As the chief executive of Anchor Change, she helps clients think through tech policy issues. She is a senior advisor for technology and democracy at the International Republican Institute and is also a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Integrity Institute and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.
Learn more about Katie Harbath:
Twitter | Anchor Change
Nicole Gill is co-founder and executive director of Accountable Tech, an advocacy organization focused on repairing our information ecosystem to foster a healthier and more equitable democracy, where she leads organizational development and strategy. Since its launch in May 2020 Accountable Tech has helped pass the California Age Appropriate Design Code, pressured Facebook to turn off its toxic group recommendation system ahead of the 2020 elections, and launched an international coalition calling for a ban on surveillance advertising.
Learn more about Nicole Gill:
Accountable Tech | Twitter
Omer Aziz is an author, lawyer, Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and former foreign policy advisor in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's administration. He is the author of Brown Boy: A Memoir, coming out in April, creator of the Minority Views podcast, and a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines around the world. At Harvard, Omer is working on a book about the re-emergence of fascism in America. Find a longer bio here.
Learn more about Omer Aziz:
Brown Boy: A Memoir | Harvard Radcliffe Institute | Twitter
Panel #2: Applications for Emerging Tech in Tech and Democracy
Central question: How can we ensure that emerging technology is aligned with the public interest?
Amira Dhalla is the Director of Impact Partnerships at Consumer Reports, works with organizations on projects to improve the safety, security, and privacy of consumer products and tools, while also shining a spotlight on marketplace issues including discriminatory technologies, deceptive design, digital access and inclusion.
Learn more about Amira Dhalla:
Consumer Reports | Twitter | LinkedIn
Renee Black is the founder and CEO of GoodBot which promotes the development of healthy technology ecosystems for people and communities at home and around the world. GoodBot aims to monitor harms caused by technology and highlight current and emerging technology and governance practices to mitigate harms towards creating a more humane future. We are conducting research into the current standing of the Canadian responsible tech ecosystem through the development of a solutions inventory with the goal of highlighting governance trends, acting as a connector for organizations and individuals working towards common goals, and towards informing new institutions to meet rapidly evolving technology governance priorities.
Learn more about Renee Black:
GoodBot | LinkedIn
Noelle Russell is a multi-award-winning technologist with an entrepreneurial spirit who specializes in helping companies with emerging technology, cloud, AI and Web 3.0. At Accenture, she is leading the Global AI Solutions team and empowering companies with Inclusive Innovation using Conversational AI, LLMs and GPT capabilities. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, AWS and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for Data and AI literacy. She has built over 100 conversational AI applications since 2014 and has over 2 million unique users on Amazon Alexa. In the last year, she was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for Artificial Intelligence (for the 2nd year) as well as VentureBeat’s Women in AI Responsibility and Ethics award.
Learn more about Noelle Russell:
Empowering Inclusion with Technology | Talking Supply Chain Podcast
Panel #3: Preserving Democracy in the Rise of Digital Repression
Amy Larsen is Director of Strategy and Business Management of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward team, where she leads the team’s strategy on cybersecurity & election integrity, disinformation & information integrity, protecting journalism, medial literacy, and corporate civic engagement. Previously, Amy worked as an attorney at Davis Polk, and then within Morrison & Foerster’s National Security and Global Risk + Crisis Management groups, where she represented technology companies, and led various pro bono projects, including a crisis simulation tabletop exercise for election officials in 2020. Amy also served as the lead associate in the pro bono representation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.
Learn more about Amy Larsen:
LinkedIn | Twitter
Jason Steinhauer is a bestselling author, public historian, podcast host, founder of the History Communication Institute, creator of History Club and a Global Fellow at The Wilson Center. He served as Founding Director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest; is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute; is a contributor to TIME and CNN; was a past editorial board member of The Washington Post "Made By History" section; and is a Presidential Counselor of the National WWII Museum. His book, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past examines how the Web and social media have changed what we know about history, and is a bestseller in multiple categories.
Learn more about Jason Steinhauer:
Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | History Club | History Disrupted
Caitlin Chin is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she researches the societal and geopolitical implications of technological change. In this role, she analyzes the effects of digital surveillance, competition, and content moderation policies on democratic institutions and gender and racial equity. Prior to joining CSIS, Caitlin worked as a research analyst at the Brookings Institution and as a fellow at Atlantic Media’s National Journal. Caitlin received a B.A. in government and Spanish from the University of Maryland and M.P.P. from Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy.
Learn more about Caitlin Chin:
Center for Strategic and International Studies | Twitter | Brookings Institution Work
Michael Miller is a Distinguished Lecturer of Political Science and Deputy Director of the Moynihan Center at The City College of New York (CCNY), where he leads the Moynihan Public Scholars Fellowship. Miller is a scholar of media, technology, and politics, with a focus on the ways that authoritarian regimes have adapted modes of information control—censorship, surveillance, and propaganda—to digital media environments. Prior to joining CCNY, Miller was a program director at the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), where he led the Media & Democracy program and the Just Tech program, and served as chief editor for the Just Tech Platform. Miller received his PhD in political science from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY).
Learn more about Michael Miller:
Twitter
Fireside Chat #1:Kate Klonick in conversation with Justin Hendrix
Kate Klonic is an Associate Professor of Law at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brookings Institution. For the 2022-2023 academic year Klonic will be in residence as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Rebooting Social Media Initiative.
Klonic’s research focuses on private governance of online speech. Her most recent work in this area focused on the development of Facebook's new Oversight Board, the independent body that hears appeals on content from Facebook users and advises the platform about its online speech policies. The results of this research were published in a feature in the Yale Law Journal in June 2020 and The New Yorker in February 2021.
Klonic holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Editor at The Georgetown Law Journal and the Founding Editor of the The Georgetown Law Journal Online; and a PhD from Yale Law School where I studied under Jack Balkin, Tom Tyler, and Josh Knobe. Between law school and my time at Yale, she clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York. Before attending law school, she worked as a journalist in New York City. This background, as well as Klonic’s training in cognitive psychology and U.S. history, inform her methodological approach to researching emerging issues in law and technology.
Justin Hendrix is CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, a new nonprofit media venture concerned with the intersection of technology and democracy. Previously, he was Executive Director of NYC Media Lab. He spent over a decade at The Economist in roles including Vice President, Business Development & Innovation.
Learn more about Justin Hendrix:
Tech Policy Press | Twitter | LinkedIn
Fireside chat #2: Nathaniel Lubin in conversation with Olivia Carville
Nathaniel Lubin believes we have the tools to fix what’s broken in technology. He has spent his career exploring how and why we're falling short -- and leading teams that build real solutions, ranging from the local to the structural, that improve trust and promote a healthier relationship between society and the internet. First in politics and since with technology companies, media, investments, and foundations, Nathaniel is credited with developing and executing innovative approaches to improving online engagement, combating misinformation, and more effectively measuring the impact of digital content on behavior.
Nathaniel is an Operator-in-Residence with Laconia Capital’s Venture Cooperative, an RSM Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, and a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University’s Digital Life Initiative. He’s been a Langfeld Behavioral Science Resident at Princeton’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science and Public Policy, a member of the Nationswell Council, and a member of the Council for Responsible Social Media.
Learn more about Nathaniel Lubin:
Website | LinkedIn | Harvard Berkman Klein Center Profile
Olivia Carville is a reporter on Bloomberg's investigations team and a regular contributor to Businessweek magazine.
Previously, Carville was an award-winning journalist for national newspapers in both Canada and New Zealand. She moved to the U.S. in 2017 to complete a master's degree in business reporting at Columbia University, where she was awarded financial journalist of the year.
Since joining Bloomberg’s New York office in 2018, she has received national recognition, including being named a finalist in the Livingston and Loeb awards and winning the Women’s Economic Round Table global prize for excellence in business journalism. Carville has also served on the board of the New York Financial Writers' Association for the past four years.
Learn more about Olivia Carville:
Bloomberg | LinkedIn | Twitter