Upcoming panel on Building Positive Digital Spaces to be held at the Responsible Tech Summit on May 20th
All Tech Is Human is thrilled to announce our first panel at the upcoming Responsible Tech Summit, an all-day gathering of 120 leaders focused on improving digital spaces which is happening on Friday, May 20th. We have assembled a panel to explore “Building Positive Digital Futures” that will feature Joi Rae (Head of Operations at New_Public), Gabo Arora (Award-winning immersive artist, former UN diplomat), Dona Bellow (Advisor, Trust & Safety Professional Association), and moderator Saima Akhtar (Associate Director, Vagelos Computational Science Center at Barnard College).
The Responsible Tech Summit on May 20th seeks to unite a diverse range of stakeholders to build on each other’s work and co-create a tech future aligned with the public interest. This timely gathering is an all-day event (9am to 5pm) with panels, fireside chats, and plenty of networking and collaboration. Talks will be livestreamed for a global audience. The Responsible Tech Summit: Improving Digital Spaces will be held at the Consulate General of Canada in New York, our event partner
This gathering will be in person, while the talks on stage will be livestreamed for a global audience. To find out more about the upcoming Responsible Tech Summit and how to get involved, read here.
Joi Rae is a dedicated public servant who currently serves as Head of Operations and Partnerships at New_ Public, a nonprofit committed to building healthy digital public spaces. She has previously worked in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. Joi has previously served as the Chief of Staff of a non-profit organization focused on eliminating America’s STEM teacher shortage. Prior to that, she spent nearly a decade working in various positions in New York City government at the NYC Mayor's Office and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
Gabo Arora is a world renowned multi-award winning immersive artist, professor, entrepreneur and former UN diplomat who works with the most cutting-edge emerging technologies, including virtual and augmented reality, to tell some of the most important stories of our time. Widely recognized as a pioneer of new documentary formats, his work, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has been described by the BBC and LA Times, amongst many others, as “game changing”, “powerful, moving and without precedent”, and “transcending all the typical barriers of rectangular cinema.” He has designed and led campaigns of significant measurable impact, raising many millions of dollars, for the United Nations, UNICEF, USC Shoah foundation and the Nobel Peace Prize committee. He has had the honor of being the UN’s first-ever Creative Director; a Davos World Economic Forum Arts and Culture Leader; a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; and is the Founding Director of a new lab and academic department - the first of its kind - dedicated to Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies (ISET) at Johns Hopkins University. His creative tech and production studio LIGHTSHED.IO is based in Brooklyn.
Dona Bellow serves as an Advisor to the Trust & Safety Professional Association, which supports the community of professionals who help develop and enforce the principles that define acceptable behavior and content online. In addition, she currently leads Policy & Responsible Innovation programs at a social messaging startup.
Dona began her tech career at Google, conducting policy evaluation and operationalization for legal content removal requests, and managing the Child Safety program which led her to become an advocate for reviewer wellness and mental health. In this role, she also came to appreciate the importance of collaborating early on with product development teams in order to minimize the downstream impacts managed by trust & safety teams, and in this context, she went on to co-develop a review program supporting product teams in mitigating abuse-related risks prior to launch. After leaving Google, she continued growing her expertise in connecting safety risks, policy analysis and product development, as a Community Policy Manager at Airbnb and then as a T&S process analyst at Twitter. Later, she joined Meta as a Responsible Innovation Manager supporting product teams to better anticipate and address potential harms in technology, including its impact on vulnerable groups.
Although she's lived in the U.S. for many years now, Dona is a proud native of Togo and grew up in France, where she completed her degree in international human rights law.
Dr. Saima Akhtar is the Associate Director of the Vagelos Computational Science Center (CSC) at Barnard College. She is a computational social scientist with a background in architecture and software engineering. Prior to joining Barnard, Saima was a postdoctoral associate in the Yale University Department of Computer Science, where she managed digital cultural heritage preservation projects between the fields of computer science and architecture.
All Tech Is Human specializes in bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders to tackle thorny tech & society issues. Previous summits, livestreams, and reports our organization have featured individuals from Aspen Institute, Berkman Klein Center, World Economic Forum, Data & Society, Mozilla, IEEE, DataKind, Center for Humane Technology, IBM, Salesforce, New_Public, Deloitte, Accenture, the New York Times, Avanade, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, TikTok, Discord, Sesame Workshop, Consumer Reports, Google, the FCC, Hulu, Roblox, Partnership on AI, Web Foundation, Omidyar Network, Tony Blair Institute, and many more. All Tech Is Human held a virtual Responsible Tech Summit on September 15, 2020 that drew over 1200 registered attendees across 60 countries. Pre-Covid, the organization held summits in NYC, San Francisco, and Seattle. Its inaugural summit was held in NYC in the Fall of 2018.
Two of our recent reports dealt specifically with improving digital spaces. Our most recent is called the HX Report: Aligning Our Tech Future With Our Human Experience. All Tech Is Human is a member of the HX Project, alongside organizations such as Aspen Institute, Data & Society, Project Zero, and Headstream, to have an “approach to talking about, engaging with, and designing technology in a way that is aligned with our needs as humans — not users.” In our HX Report we took a holistic approach to improving digital spaces, looking at product design, business models, content moderation, digital citizenship, tech augmentation, and tech & wellbeing.
And previous to the HX Report, our organization released Improving Social Media: The People, Organizations, and Ideas for a Better Tech Future. These two reports featured resources from over 150 organizations doing valuable work in the ecosystem, and included profile interviews with over 80 leaders focused on improving digital spaces.