Public Interest Technology
“We need technologists who work in the public interest,” security researcher Bruce Schneier famously said. And we couldn’t agree more. But while the notion of public interest technology has been pretty well established in the English-speaking world over the last few years, in Germany it’s still very much a new concept. We’d like to change that, and discuss what this means, how we can go about it, etc. We look forward to a particularly active debate!
This ThingsCon Salon is co-hosted by Peter Bihr and Sven Ehmann (Fellow at the Urban Ideation Lab at B-Part Am Gleisdreieck).
The presentations:
Katharina Meyer
Katharina is responsible for strategy and outreach at Prototype Fund. She is a historian of technology, conducts research on social development environments and curates knowledge and (art) objects for museums, projects or conferences. In 2016 Katharina co-founded the project Polynocular Tech Lab, which investigates and promotes transdisciplinary approaches in hardware, software and process development and was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies with this project.
Follow Katharina on Twitter, and read her German-language introduction to public interest tech on Medium.
Kasia Odrozek
Kasia Odrozek is a long-time open web and digital rights activist, entrepreneur, lawyer and political scientist. Kasia runs Mozilla’s Internet Health Report, a compilation of research and stories explaining what’s key to a healthier internet. Before Mozilla she worked on creating open culture and developing mediawiki software with Wikipedia communities. She is also a recipient of the Google News Initiative grant with her startup TapeWrite where she led product and worked on alternative funding models for audio publishers. Since 2011 she has been a contributor to Global Voices, an international blogger community where she reported on digital and human rights issues such as surveillance and copyright. She is a believer in the ability of people to reinvent the way power and ownership are distributed in tech.
Follow Kasia on Twitter.
Thanks to our venue, the Urban Ideation Lab at B-Part Am Gleisdreieck. S-Bahn Gleisdreieck. For more info on the location, see the B-Part website.