As technology continues to innovate at an unprecedented rate, governments and small organizations run the risk of falling behind. To combat this uncertainty, universities have established public interest technology (PIT) clinics to train the next generation of technologists. These clinics, modeled after clinical education in law schools, often run throughout the course of a semester and pair students with public interest organization ‘clients’ to work on projects.
At this year’s ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT), UC Berkeley School of Information Ph.D. student Lauren Chambers and Professor Diag Davenport received a Best Paper Honorable Mention for their paper on the subject, titled “Putting the ‘Practice’ in Critical Technical Practice: A Decision-Making Pedagogy for the Public Interest Technology Clinic.” The research examines how these clinics help students build the skillsets and confidence to make decisions in their projects and beyond.
In particular, Chambers and Davenport focus on the concept of critical technical practice, in which students are taught to embed sociocultural and ethical critique into technical work, as they analyze the Public Interest Technology Clinic (INFO 285) that Davenport teaches at UC Berkeley. They note that the clinic is designed around six principles that make it successful: productive uncertainty, transferred authority, consequential choices, structured reflection, modeling distal practice, and relational accountability. These principles ensure that students feel accountable for their work and the downstream societal effects their projects may have, while also encouraging students to regularly reflect on their work and to embrace the inherent uncertainty in public interest data work. Chambers and Davenport end the paper calling for sociotechnical decision-making to be treated as a skill to be taught and continuously nurtured rather than merely an object of critique.
The Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards recognize the top 2% of submissions to the conference and are chosen by a dedicated committee. The committee awarded the paper this award for “developing a decision-centered account of public interest technology clinics, showing how client-facing, consequential projects can help students move from performing sociotechnical critique to enacting accountable practice under uncertainty.”
“The value of PIT clinics lies not in resolving frictions between higher education, public interest, and civic tech, but in intentionally navigating them — and equipping students to do the same, especially as many will carry their judgment into positions of real power across the sociotechnical exosystem,” wrote the two.
