Responsible Tech University Ecosystem

All Tech Is Human has been busy understanding and mapping the emerging Responsible Tech ecosystem since our founding in 2018. In particular, we have developed a deep understanding around careers in Responsible Tech, skills desired and needed, and education journeys.

We are now bringing these insights to you in our new Responsible Tech University Ecosystem Mapping Project. The first of step creating and sharing this table of Academic Programs in Responsible Tech.

Our organization relies on a unique “grassroots-power model” that rapidly circulates power and ideas across a multi-sector, multi-stakeholder, and multidisciplinary interconnected community. By having relationships that cut across universities (student leaders + professors), industry, and the diverse range of individuals looking to break into or expand their careers in the nascent Responsible Tech space, we have a unique understanding of the field and how it can be accelerated. Our bottom-up approach of having hundreds of relationships and bringing them together in our global network allows us to move at the speed of tech and avoid the turf wars and bureaucracy that often slow down major institutions. We then connect our growing knowledge and network with multiple nodes to rapidly circulate insights, while simultaneously incorporating feedback and new information.

Our Responsible Tech University Ecosystem Mapping Project was launched by program director Rebekah Tweed through our University Ambassadors program at the start of 2022. We began with input from our 80+ ambassadors detailing the academic degrees, certificates, research centers, faculty, and student clubs at their own universities for use as an internal resource so that students interested in Responsible Tech could connect with one another on their own campuses and reach out to peers, faculty, and student clubs for support and deepening engagement. We recognized the need to expand this resource and share it with the wider responsible tech community and have been broadening its scope for months.

We chose to accelerate our timeline for release as layoffs have swept the tech industry and tech workers consider their upskilling options. Building on the excellent work of others, like Dr. Casey Fiesler’s crowdsourced database of tech ethics courses and syllabi, we have created this table of socio-technical academic programs, as we’ve noticed an influx of programs dedicated to tackling thorny tech and society issues. While this initial release is a simple list of academic degree and certificate programs, we plan to incorporate additional categories of faculty, student clubs, and research institutes, as well as funding opportunities into future iterations of this resource.

We know that many academic programs that spawn significant interest in responsible tech are not explicitly multidisciplinary socio-technical programs, although many have clearly stated aims of matriculating socio-technically minded graduates — from technical programs like Computer Science, Data Science, and Information Science to social sciences and humanities programs like Communications, Philosophy, and Digital Humanities. We are building a separate list of these single-discipline programs but are not including them in the table at this time.

We have endeavored to make the socio-technical academic programs as comprehensive as possible, as we have not yet seen those compiled into one resource, and we need your help! Please submit additional programs that we have missed at the link below. Specific disciplines like STS, HCI, Tech Policy, and Cybersecurity have been explored elsewhere, so while we have listed as many of these programs as we encountered, those disciplines are not comprehensive, and we intend to expand these areas of the list to become more comprehensive in the future.

We welcome global community input on additional programs that should be included — please submit through our form here.

Where do we get our insights from?

Our non-profit has a wide range of activities dedicated to strengthening the overall Responsible Tech ecosystem and co-creating a tech future aligned with the public interest. Our Responsible Tech University Ecosystem project is informed by our university ambassadors (80+ universities), Responsible Tech Job Board, talent pool, global Slack community of over 4.5k members, our working groups & reports, mentorship program, summits & mixers, Tech Stewardship Practice Program, and more.

The three key workstreams of our organization are multistakeholder convening & community-building, multidisciplinary education, and diversifying the traditional tech pipeline with more backgrounds, disciplines, and lived experiences.

RELATED RESOURCES:

“This is a critical moment of change in education, where universities have a unique and powerful opportunity to change the way the next generation of technologists view the world, and their role in building it. College students go to school looking for opportunities to succeed and flourish as they start training for careers and adulthood, but they also come to college with visions of and hopes for changing the world for the better. These future leaders will seek out and be excited by programs that foreground courses, curricula, programs, and faculty committed to guiding their visions.

The tech ecosystem desperately needs colleges to teach this future workforce how to grapple with the urgent and complex questions of how our technologies connect with, enhance—or block—human flourishing. All Tech Is Human has accomplished a massively important and impactful resource in mapping out the current status of this environment, in creating and publishing the Responsible Tech University Ecosystem. This guide will bring visibility to the programs that already exist. It will elevate and amplify the work of these programs, creating opportunities for those who want to support this work or contribute it to connect and enhance the work already being done. It will help students choose programs and schools that will connect with their visions of becoming future leaders, and it will help tech companies understand what skills, background, and understanding a responsible technologists might bring to their companies and organizations.

What All Tech Is Human has accomplished with this guide is the creation of a powerful new map that will help guide the growth of a new profession, a new field of inquiry, and ultimately, we can hope, a new age of responsible technological production.”
- Deb Donig, PhD. Assistant Professor of English Literature, Cal Poly, SLO | Lecturer, UC Berkeley MIDS Program, School of Information

“There are so many different ways to think about the questions and issues that technology presents—they cannot be understood, or managed, with a single perspective, skillset, or discipline. That is exactly why we started Tech & Society… to be a force on campus that leads to philosophers and computer scientists working with lawyers and policymakers. That’s where the magic happens. And from what we’ve seen so far, you can’t mandate that magic. One of the exciting things about Georgetown is that it combines an existing depth of expertise in tech, with a set of core values that root the work here in the public good and a profound care and responsibility for one another and our environment. This has been the secret for us—existing expertise and existing values. We identified what was already present and designed an approach that meets people where they are and makes it easy (and valuable and fun!) to engage.”
-Evagelia Emily Tavoulareas, Managing Chair at Tech & Society at Georgetown University

“Over the past decade, it’s been impossible to peruse headlines without seeing some new tech ethics controversy. And some of the related commentary has included: Why isn’t anyone teaching these technologists about ethics? But of course, they are! In response to this question, in late 2017 I created an openly editable spreadsheet, inviting educators to share syllabi for tech ethics courses; today it has over 300 courses, and of course this is only a small subset of what’s out there. Meanwhile, I also frequently get questions on social media about where to find jobs in responsible tech (in which case I point them to All Tech Is Human’s job board!), as well as where to go to study these things. It’s great to see effort going to mapping the academic landscape, because not only does it demonstrate just how important this topic is and how universities are taking it seriously, but it also helps our emerging technologists map their own futures.”
-Casey Fiesler, Associate Professor in the Department of Information Science (and Computer Science, by courtesy) at the University of Colorado Boulder

ACADEMIC PROGRAMS IN RESPONSIBLE TECH

About the Project