Funders Set Out to Advance Public Interest Technology. What’s the State of the Field?

Master1305/shutterstock

One of the big takeaways from IP’s white paper on giving for journalism and public media is philanthropy’s increasingly muscular approach in addressing technology’s adverse effects on society.

This work plays out on two parallel tracks. In the first, funders operate from a reactive posture. Efforts to boost news literacy or curb COVID misinformation on social media are predicated on the idea that the genie is already out of the bottle, and so funders focus their efforts on minimizing adverse outcomes.

The second track is more proactive. It finds grantmakers and civic-minded donors tackling what Jenny Toomey, the international program director of Ford Foundation’s Technology and Society program, calls “the root causes of our technological woes,” which include an outdated regulatory framework, opaque algorithms designed to amplify inflammatory content, and the regrettable fact that the individuals wielding technology often prioritize self-interest or profit over the public interest.

Cognizant of this fact, about seven years ago, Ford began awarding grants to cultivate public interest technology (PIT), which it describes as “a growing field made up of technologists who work to ensure technology is created and used responsibly.” In 2019, it earmarked $50 million for the Public Interest Technology Catalyst Fund, and partnered with the Hewlett Foundation and the Washington, D.C.-based think tank New America to launch the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) to create career pathways for civic-minded technologists.

A recently published report by New America and Boston University finds that the PIT field is growing, despite a relatively small funding base and participating institutions’ slow progress in cultivating diverse public interest technologists. Equipped with funder support, the network’s 48 colleges and universities plan to increase the number of technologists to meet employer demand, underscoring philanthropy’s unique ability to stand up a new field and address tech’s unintended harms in the absence of robust assistance from legislators and the courts.

“All government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and even philanthropies and private sector corporations are coming to the realization that this hybrid, cross-discipline, public interest technology intelligence is going to be necessary in order for them to effectively do their work,” Toomey said in an email to IP. “What’s needed is more resources to train sufficient numbers of people to fill all those gaps.”

A field takes shape

Ford traces PIT’s origins to the movements to promote internet rights and digital justice in the early 2010s. Toomey said that foundation leaders started to take a closer look at public interest technology in 2014 after its Internet Policy grantees reported that “aside from the resources we provided, the thing they needed most was access to technologists who could help them understand what was actually happening in the internet environment, how the tech worked, and how it was working in practice.”

Ford reps began researching the issue and uncovered what Toomey called “the structural impediments to the development of public interest technologies and career pathways into government and society.” Once leaders better understood these barriers and how they impacted drivers of inequality, they could identify ways to train technologists differently and create pathways for them to serve the public interest.

In 2015, Ford made its first set of grants specifically focused on PIT. That same year, Ford, MacArthur, Knight, Open Society and Mozilla foundations launched the NetGain Challenge initiative with the goal of increasing the number of people worldwide who are using their technological skills to improve civil society and government.

This was a time when tech was expanding its reach across American society with minimal regulatory scrutiny or oversight, much to the alarm of civic-minded funders. According to Ford, technology’s “rapid transformation has far outpaced government services and regulation, legal jurisdiction, public understanding and corporate norms, leaving us all exposed to unchecked harms.”

Ford President Darren Walker began thinking about the foundation’s efforts to formalize public interest law and advance civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s by making related grants in areas like academia, civil society and the public sector. Using this work as a roadmap, the foundation currently provides support to PIT technologists across three of the same areas — academia, civil society and the private sector — plus government.

Rapid progress

Over the next four years, the cascade of tech-related scandals only continued, as did the public’s grim realization that some of the people calling the shots at big tech companies were either improvising or, more alarmingly, operating without an ethical compass.

In 2019, Ford’s Board of Trustees allocated $50 million out of Ford’s reserves to a three-year special initiative, called the Public Interest Technology Catalyst Fund, to co-invest with other funders in foundational infrastructure for the PIT ecosystem. That same year, Ford, Hewlett, and New America launched the PIT-UN. As I noted at the time, the network’s goals aligned with Ford’s mission of reducing inequality. “We believe an essential element of advancing social justice is ensuring technology is a force for public good,” Walker said when the program launched.

New America, a key partner in this work, “seeks to equip a new generation of students with the skills to critically assess the ethical, political and societal implications of new technologies, and design technologies in service of the public good.” The organization has received about $17 million in overall funding for PIT-related projects since 2016. Andreen Soley, New America’s director of PIT, created and has been leading PIT-UN since its launch.

The PIT-UN has grown from 21 colleges and universities since its launch in 2019 to 48 today. The network has received $18 million to date from its funders, which include the Ford, Patrick J. McGovern, and Hewlett foundations; Mastercard Impact Fund with support from the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth; the Raikes Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Siegel Family Endowment.

In an email to IP, Soley said that funder support has been earmarked for Network Challenge grants, which PIT-UN members can apply for to create PIT projects that have a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Types of projects that have been funded through the challenge include the Consortium of Cybersecurity Clinics, which trains students to help nonprofits, service organizations, and vulnerable communities to defend cyberattacks; and May’s virtual PIT Career Fair, which connected value-aligned students and employers.

Supply and demand

While the field got a swift start during a critical time, the New America report identified the need to diversify funding sources as a top challenge. This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, as funders understandably have other critical items on their to-do lists. But PIT’s potential for growth is only as strong as the community demand, and the field’s core backers believe that Millennials and Gen Z students want what they’re offering. Ford frequently cites a Deloitte study in which more than 90% of millennials said they “want to use their skills for good” and more than half of respondents said that they would take a pay cut for work that aligns with their values.

Toomey also highlighted the importance of cultivating employer demand. While business leaders can appreciate how socially conscious technologists can benefit the organization, “they are often unsure how to recruit, hire and manage these types of technologists,” she said. Toomey cited a similar disconnect in the public sector where leaders lack an understanding of how to bring PIT technologists on board, “not just to build things or maintain systems, but to advise on regulations, procurement, investment and policy.”

Funders have also been interested in the development of the field as a way to support social justice and public interest organizations grappling with what Ford calls “the constant churn and change in tech tools.” This makes a lot of sense. If philanthropy is going to move the needle on inequality, it’s going to be thanks to the work of these front-line organizations, particularly those serving historically marginalized groups that are negatively impacted by unchecked technology.

And therein lies another challenge for the public interest technology field — diversity. According to the New America report, only 10% of PIT-UN members “strongly agree that their institution does a good job attracting underrepresented students in STEM.”

Looking ahead

Although securing funders has been a challenge, it may come as a surprise that donors originally from the tech sector have been some of the most active in this realm. That’s another theme that emerged in our white paper on journalism and public media giving. More than any other type of donor, these individuals seem most eager to rein in Big Tech.

Toomey said that since 2020, Ford’s PIT Catalyst Fund has drawn more than $150 million in complementary grantmaking from partnering foundations. And as it turns out, the giving vehicles of three billionaire Big Tech donors are among its philanthropic partners — the aforementioned Schmidt Futures, which is one of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy’s grantmaking organizations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Omidyar Network, whose namesake, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has funneled support to a galaxy of funding vehicles supporting tech whistleblowers and pushing anti-monopolistic legislative measures on Capitol Hill.

Toomey believes that the confluence of events over the past five years may compel other funders to give public interest technology a second look. “The pandemic brought years of quarantine and remote work that’s been heavily reliant on the internet,” she said. “It’s brought into focus misinformation, surveillance, crypto/blockchain, biased AI, and more. It’s never been clearer how tech is threaded through every aspect of our lives and needs to be understood more clearly by government and civil society.”

Even corporate donors are taking an interest. Toomey believes the private sector “is beginning to admit that there are uneven benefits and unintended consequences that come from even the most successful tech solutions.” She noted that in early July, Apple committed $10 million to the Dignity and Justice Fund, which was established by Ford to support civil groups working to protect users from “highly targeted mercenary spyware.” The fund plans to make its first grants in late 2022 or early 2023,

To be fair, there are technical aspects of public interest technology that may scare off some funders. But PIT’s proponents believe that their peers focused on issues like racial justice, the environment, public health and democracy have a vested interest in fostering equitable and responsible technology, and that this work starts with ethical technologists equipped to make decisions that avoid downstream harms.

“This moment of revelation is building the kind of momentum which is long overdue,” Toomey said, “and I’m optimistic that with the right collaborations we can begin to solve many of these problems by working together.”