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Internet Law and Policy Foundry Hackathon: Addressing Disparities in Access
About this Event
The digital divide disproportionately impacts communities of color and other marginalized groups, who often lack reliable and affordable access to the internet. These issues have been compounded by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s policy will convene a diverse set of students and early career professionals to ideate solutions related to disparities in access to the internet.
Registration will be open until November 7 via this link (you could additionally register through Eventbrite only if you wish to donate to the foundry and help us grow.)
Registered guests will receive more details about the event.
Diversity and Inclusion Event Series: Understanding Algorithmic Discrimination.
The Internet Law and Policy Foundry’s Diversity and Inclusion Event Series: Understanding Algorithmic Discrimination.
About this Event
Please join the Internet Law and Policy Foundry for a panel discussion on how algorithms can perpetuate historical biases in areas such as housing, employment, and credit and how policymakers and internet platforms can tackle these issues.Link will be provided before the event.
Speakers and bios:
Dr. Nicol Turner Lee
Dr. Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow in Governance Studies, the director of the Center for Technology Innovation, and serves as Co-Editor-In-Chief of TechTank. Dr. Turner Lee comes to Brookings from the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council (MMTC). Prior to joining MMTC, Dr. Turner Lee was vice president and the first director of the Media and Technology Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Dr. Turner Lee graduated from Colgate University magna cum laude and has a M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University.
Hodan Omaar
Hodan Omaar is an analyst focusing on AI policy at ITIF’s Center for Data Innovation. Previously, she worked as a senior consultant on technology and risk management in London and as a crypto-economist in Berlin. She has an MA in economics and mathematics from the University of Edinburgh.
Morgan Williams
Morgan Williams is the general counsel for the National Fair Housing Alliance. Williams is responsible for leading NFHA’s strategic and tactical legal initiatives and affairs. Williams leads NFHA’s efforts to pursue pioneering litigation under the federal Fair Housing Act, often utilizing testing-based evidence and working in partnership with NFHA’s network of local fair housing centers.
Spandana Singh
Spandana Singh is a policy analyst with New America’s Open Technology Institute, where she researches and reports on policies and practices related to algorithmic decision-making, content moderation, transparency reporting, intermediary liability, and disinformation. She is currently also a Fellow at and the Vice President of the Internet Law & Policy Foundry, as well as a Non-Resident Fellow at the Esya Centre in New Delhi.
Announcing the Back to School Webinar Series
The Congressional App Challenge is excited to announce our Back to School webinar series. This series of webinars, hosted in conjunction with supporters of the program, will provide free training and mentorship opportunities for App Challengers past and present and will take place through the fall.
The Congressional App Challenge team is working to finalize the details of these webinars now, and will be announcing them as they are confirmed. Please find our current list of confirmed webinars below.
This session will serve as our official welcome to the Back to School Webinar Series. The opening will include special welcome messages from Members of Congress and supporters of the program.
Challengers will then be joined by Apple Education to learn about the fast-growing app economy and the tools and techniques that produce great apps. You’ll hear about Swift, an intuitive and open source programming language that’s easy to learn, yet powerful enough to make the some of the most popular apps on the App Store. And, you’ll learn about free resources from Apple to help you use Swift, Xcode, and the app design process that professional developers use to make apps for iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS and beyond.
Download with Developers presented by ACT | The App Association
Wednesday, August 26th
1:00 PM EDT
Register Here!
You know the phrase “there’s an app for that,” but do you have dreams of being the brains behind those apps? The companies that make up the membership of the App Association have been there, done that, and want to share their stories with the aspiring innovators of tomorrow.
Join the App Association and the Congressional App Challenge to learn how to leverage your current or future coding skills into your own app or dev shop. You’ll hear from App Association members about their experiences and what they wished they had known when they were starting their own careers.
Panelists to be announced soon.
The Congressional App Challenge’s Back to School webinar series is free to attend and open to students, parents, educators, and Congressional App Challenge stakeholders. Please contact our team with any questions.
Internet in The Time of Crisis
About this Event
* Registered attendees received an email with a link to the event. If you didn’t have the chance to register, the event will broadcast in this link. *
We find ourselves in very concerning and unprecedented times, with inequities around health, race, privacy and class all coming to the fore. The Internet now plays more of a role in our lives than ever, so how are these fundamental societal issues reflected through this omnipresent and critical technology?
Join the Internet Society’s DC Chapter and the Internet Law and Policy Foundry for the first in a series of roundtables on this question, as well as possible policy actions and responses. This roundtable will focus on issues around social media, health tech, digital surveillance and overall psychology and well-being on the Internet.
Event is open to all members of both organizations, and will also serve as an opportunity to discuss many of the topics that were covered at Internet Governance Forum USA 2020 in July. A meeting link will be sent to registered guests closer to the event.
For more information about the organizers:
Speakers and bios:
David Morar
David Morar, PhD, is a researcher and public policy professional, a three time ICANN Fellow, who has done work throughout the spectrum of technology policy issues, both nationally and internationally, from privacy and open data to ethics and content issues (e.g. disinformation, moderation). Dr. Morar is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Elliott School of International Affairs, with the Digital Trade and Data Governance Hub, and a Fellow at the Digital Interests Lab. He is also an Associate Researcher at the Big Data Science Laboratory at the West University of Timisoara, Romania; and a Researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies in Public Policy, Governance at Paraiba State University, Brazil. Most recently he was a Policy Manager focusing on disinformation and data science ethics with Data for Democracy, and has previously been a Google Policy Fellow with the Global Network Initiative and the Internet Education Foundation, among other fellowship positions.
Muira McCammon
Muira McCammon (@muira_mccammon) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where she studies military policy, new media, and the history of deletion. Muira wields public records requests and web archives to answer questions about the web that was and will be. She recently published “Tweeted, deleted: an exploratory study of the US government’s digital memory holes” in New Media & Society and has a piece forthcoming in Information, Communication, and Society entitled “Anticipatory witnessing: military bases and the politics of pre-empting access.” She holds a Master’s in Law from the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a Master of Arts in Translation Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously a fellow at the Harvard Law Library Innovation Lab and a former Fulbrighter, Muira is writing her dissertation about communications within and about Guantánamo Bay. Her work has appeared in Slate, VICE, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Columbia Journalism Review.
Suchi Pahi
Suchi is a data privacy and cybersecurity attorney with a passion for tech. She has a depth of experience in managing incident response and health privacy regulatory issues, as well as in building effective cybersecurity programs, partnering with product teams to create products that embed privacy, and counseling clients on privacy and cybersecurity implications of new technologies or services. She is currently a Director of Privacy and Business Affairs at Rally Health, Inc.
Yasodara Cordova
Yasodara Cordova is a technologist working at the intersection of product and policy at the World Bank Group, where she helps teams to deliver digital innovation in governance infrastructure. She is driven by curiosity and ethics; her work fuel is the willingness to deliver useful products where technology is a central piece, and the will to challenge technology when it is exploitative, or generally unsuited to a beneficial purpose.
The 2020 Congressional App Challenge Launches Today
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives has come together to launch the 2020 Congressional App Challenge. Registration is now open for students, and more detailed rules and guidelines can be found on our website.
The Congressional App Challenge, the official student coding competition of the U.S. House of Representatives, is an initiative encouraging American students to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science through a series of district-specific competitions. Over 250 Members of Congress have already signed on to host App Challenges in their districts, with many more expected in the coming weeks. This remarkably bipartisan initiative is co-chaired by Rep. Suzan DelBene (WA-01) and Rep. French Hill (AR-02).
In five short years, the App Challenge has become the largest series of student app developer competitions in the world. The challenge is open to middle and high school students who reside or attend school in a participating congressional district. Eligible students can submit applications to the program through October 19th, 2020.
“Urging students to pursue these careers is important not only because of the COVID-19 crisis, but because we are also facing a larger competitiveness and innovation crisis in America” said DelBene and Hill in a joint statement. “The Congressional App Challenge inspires students and workers to pursue these technology careers.”
The CAC was created because Congress recognizes how essential computer science and STEM skills are for economic growth and innovation, and that the U.S. is currently experiencing a dearth of adequately trained technical talent. By some estimates, there are nearly a quarter of a million unfilled programming jobs in the US. The COVID-19 crisis will likely exacerbate this talent deficit. However, the virtual and decentralized nature of the CAC will provide students with the inspiration and tools to pursue these crucial skills despite the interruption to their regular educational routine.
The Congressional App Challenge winners receive official recognition from their Member of Congress, and their app is displayed in the U.S. Capitol for one year.
The CAC aims to bridge the gender, geographic, and racial gaps in tech by building the domestic pipeline of future tech innovators. The program has inspired over 25,000 students across 48 states to code over 6,500 apps for desktop PCs, web, tablets, mobiles or other platforms. Participant demographics for the 1,132 past App Challenges surpassed all tech industry diversity metrics. This year, the Congressional App Challenge strives to build upon this success.
C-SPAN Tonight: USDOJ & R Street’s Baker Debate Crypto
Last month the Internet policy community came together at State of the Net in Washington, DC. Among the most pressing debates was the use of strong end-to-end encryption. After a feisty panel on crypto C-SPAN producers interviewed two of our key speakers, Justice Department Associate Attorney General Sujit Raman and former FBI General Counsel James Baker.
That debate, filmed in the lobby of State of the Net, will air on the C-SPAN show “The Communicators” through this weekend and into next week. The first airing will be tonight, February 21, at 10:30 am. Visit C-SPAN here to be alerted to additional broadcast times and streaming.
Watch Reps. McMorris Rodgers & Hurd, w/ FEC’s Weintraub, on C-SPAN This Weekend
The award-winning C–SPAN show “The Communicators” will broadcast in-depth interviews from the State of the Net tonight at 10:30 pm ET and through the weekend on C–SPAN.
The first set of featured interviews include Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, and Rep. Will Hurd. Each interview expanded on their comments at State of the Net.
Visit C–SPAN here to be alerted to broadcast times.