Why universities need 'Public Interest Technology' courses
A new field of "public interest technology" is emerging, and it's reimagining the landscape of technology to serve the greater welfare of society.
Harvard Law School professor, Susan Crawford, explores the need to develop more paths for people to enter the field in this op-ed from WIRED.
Published in Wired | August 22, 2018
Why Universities Need 'Public Interest Technology' Courses
By Susan Crawford
POLICYMAKERS AT ALL levels of government are struggling to thoughtfully harness data in the service of public values. Many public servants grew up in an era of firmly separate disciplines: You were either an engineer or an economist, either a programmer or a social worker, but never both. In an era in which data is everything, the risks to core democratic principles—equity, fairness, support for the most vulnerable, delivery of effective government services—caused by technological illiteracy in policymakers, and policy illiteracy in computer scientists, are staggering.
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