Something remarkable happened earlier this year when millions of people signed up to receive free Covid-19 test kits from the federal government. The process worked. The government website was simple to use. Signing up took seconds. And most people received their test kits within weeks.
Compare that with the problem-plagued rollout of healthcare.gov in 2013 or the tortuous phone queues for vaccination appointments a year ago.
What changed? Experts in the emerging field of public-interest technology had a seat at the table from the start. The result: 18 people from two government agencies — the U.S. Digital Service, formed in the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act website debacle, and the U.S. Postal Service — built an online portal in three weeks that handled 68 million visitors in its first week alone.
The need for technology experts in the public-service arena was never clearer than during the pandemic. U.S. Digital Response, a nonprofit that places pro bono technologists with government agencies and other organizations during crises, helped state leaders tackle problems such as finding vaccine appointments and identifying nursing staff during Covid-19 surges. To make that happen, thousands of technology experts across the country, including senior leaders at companies such as Dropbox and veterans fluent in outdated government systems, volunteered their time to address critical needs in their communities.
But helpful stop-gap measures like these aren’t enough. Philanthropy must harness the momentum of the past two years to vastly expand the number of public-interest technologists — engineers, computer scientists, and other tech practitioners who have experience and training in how to use technology to equitably and effectively advance social good.
Technology experts are needed to develop more responsive, transparent, and dependable tech systems in areas such as health, housing, poverty alleviation, climate, racial and gender justice, and voting access. And they’re essential to root out discriminatory algorithms and other tech practices that result in racial profiling in many industries.
Paucity of Professionals
Despite growth in the field in recent years, the United Stated needs a much deeper bench of public-interest technologists who are trained to work in government and the nonprofit world. The government in particular faces huge shortfalls in filling tech positions. In 2021, for example, 31 percent of all federal IT jobs went unfilled.
A variety of factors have contributed to the problem. Many government-agency leaders don’t have tech backgrounds and don’t fully appreciate the need for more tech expertise. An absence of cross-discipline technology training in fields such as law and public policy has also hampered hiring. And historical government practices that favor external consultants over developing in-house expertise limits career paths for those who might be interested in public-service work.
Some philanthropy-backed efforts offer potential solutions to these challenges. For example, several large grant makers, including the Ford Foundation, where I work, supported the creation of the Public Interest Tech University Network, a consortium of 49 universities that trains students from different disciplines in technology skills that serve the public. The MacArthur and Surdna foundations were early investors in the Social Science Research Council’s Just Tech Fellowship, which supports researchers focused on identifying and addressing unjust practices in new technologies.
Public-Interest Law
But much more investment is needed in every academic discipline, in civil society, in government, and even in business. Philanthropy’s role should be seen as similar to its pivotal work in expanding the now-robust field of public-interest law. Starting in the 1960s, the field’s growth was fueled in large part by investments by Ford and others in public-interest legal education and research, legal-justice groups, and pro bono work.
Supporting the field of public-interest tech should follow a similar trajectory. That starts with investing in the development of a strong and diverse pipeline of young people interested in meaningful government careers. The U.S. Digital Corps, for example, offers two-year fellowships for early-career technologists looking to make a difference in areas such as racial equity, economic opportunity, and pandemic response and recovery. Philanthropic support is needed for complementary efforts such as the Tech Talent Project, which provides expertise and resources to help the federal government recruit more tech leaders.
Just as philanthropy helped seed a field of lawyers committed to expanding and defending basic rights, it must support researchers and scholars who are uncovering the ways technology can exacerbate systemic bias. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s recommendations on human-centered design in artificial intelligence, for example, were the result of years of sustained work by technologists to put the public interest at the center of technology innovation.
Leaders in this area include Timnit Gebru, who founded the Distributed AI Research Institute after she was fired by Google for raising concerns about workplace discrimination, and Joy Buolamwini, whose own experience of algorithmic discrimination led to her founding the Algorithmic Justice League. Expanded funding for leaders and perspectives of this kind is critical.
Democracy, Health Care, and More
Finally, grant makers should put more dollars behind efforts to bring public-interest tech expertise to areas beyond the traditional tech arena, including democracy and free expression, justice, climate solutions, and health. Most recently, tech tools have been used to amplify correct information about the war in Ukraine and weed out disinformation, such as misleading videos on TikTok and other social-media platforms.
Conversely, centering public-interest tech early could have prevented misuses such as the IRS’s recently scrapped attempt to deploy unreliable and racially biased facial recognition, or the Department of Justice’s reliance on the biased Pattern algorithm for determining which people incarcerated for federal crimes are eligible for early release.
Philanthropy can help build a field that anticipates the unintended consequences of tech design choices like these, protects people from potentially dangerous errors, and shapes technology systems that are directly tied to the needs of particular communities. We are at a critical point in the development of the public-interest technology field. Philanthropy needs to jump on board.
