Michelle Shevin: Senior Program Manager, Public Interest Technology Catalyst Fund, Ford Foundation
What does your work look like, and what have you been working on lately?
On the Technology and Society team we are working to fund the public interest technology ecosystem, and the Fund that I manage is working to catalyze infrastructure to support centering the public interest in technology activities across sectors, toward sustainable structural change. If that sounds like a philanthropic jargon (fair!), consider a parallel: in the previous century, philanthropy worked to fund public interest law infrastructure, including institutions (like the ACLU), norms and narratives (like pro bono practice), legal defense funds, etc. This infrastructure has helped sustain movements for civil rights, gender equality, immigration reform, and environmental justice. We now see a need to build parallel infrastructure for tech, so that “innovation” across sectors centers public interest values like equity by default. In practice, I’m funding and thinking a lot about algorithmic justice, centering impacted communities in data infrastructures, and how to equip policymakers and other leaders to make more informed choices about “technology modernization.”
How has your career path unfolded?
My career path probably started with voraciously consuming science fiction as an adolescent - William Gibson was my #1 favorite. Next, while studying anthropology at Barnard and gravitating toward the weird and wonderful world of biotechnology, Dr. Severin Fowles encouraged me to start asking questions about "what is at stake" in shifting systems. I wrote a senior thesis that borrowed heavily from STS to problematize the boundaries between nature/culture, human/non-human, and the ways in which technology provokes these boundaries to collapse. I then accidentally got a master's degree in security studies from a military institution in California, where I learned about "wicked problems," design thinking, and the national security state... and from there I worked for a boutique consulting firm that used scenario planning and other human foresight techniques to, ironically, (and among other things), predict how predictive analytics was about to change everything.
How did you get into the field of Public Interest Technology (PIT)?
A few years into working in the uncanny (Silicon) valley, where I felt we were shouting a bit too uncritically about technology disruption ('isn’t it crazy how we are headed toward Minority Report world?!'), I headed back to NYC to work at another consulting firm, where we used lateral thinking to help identify innovation communities that could apply their smarts to thoughtfully defined problems in another discipline. We would bring together stakeholders around “prize challenges” – so if a sponsor was looking for advances in, say, computational fluid dynamics, we’d bring epidemiological modelers, hydrological experts, and others together to advance the thinking in the field. All of these career experiences drove home how easy it is for values like equity, justice, transparency, and accountability to be an afterthought in tech and innovation work. And how urgently our most important problems demanded we center these values. Finding out there was an emerging “public interest tech” ecosystem thus felt like coming home.
If students are interested in pursuing a career in PIT, where might they start?
The fact that you are seeing these words means you have already started. Welcome. Keep nursing your interests and passions, and by being inquisitive about power and the ways it is working in the systems you see. Whether you are an artist, activist, organizer, researcher, writer, journalist, coder, hacker, and on and on -- this field needs your brilliance. For what it's worth, for every job I've ever had, I never even knew it existed 6 months before I started. Translation is perhaps the most critical skill here -- so if you are looking for job opportunities, look for places where digitization and datafication are rapidly shifting the playing field. Those places need people to translate what is happening across disciplines and sectors, and they need people to think critically about trade-offs and clarify what is at stake. If you are interested in systems change, philanthropy and government can be good places to look. If you are interested in building, the private sector needs people who can build with equity and ethics at the forefront. If you are inspired to make sure future generations don't inherit silo'd ways of thinking about technology and social systems, education and academia will be undergoing a sea change in coming years. The best place to start is where you already are.