Digital Public is excited to announce that our team won support for The Digital Governance Design Clinic program from the inaugural cohort of the National Science Foundation’s Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technology (ReDDOT) program. Our partnership with Development Gateway: An IREX Venture, Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, will expand The Digital Governance Design Clinic by leveraging experiential education to engage emerging doctors and lawyers in the digital transformation and governance of their profession.

In our experience, the work of digital transformation is governance work. It requires individuals, communities, and the people that represent them to appreciate and leverage the power they have to ensure that technology not only works for those who deploy it, but also for those impacted by its deployment. The people who have the clearest norms, the highest standards of integrity, and the largest liability are the professions that require practitioners to take on fiduciary duties - essentially, the legal responsibility to hold others’ interests above your own. The Digital Governance Design Clinic is focused on supporting emerging practitioners in fiduciary professions to critically understand the digital transformation of their field and, based on that experience, proactively participate in the processes and institutions that set their standards of practice. 

As with all good work - there’s more of it than any one organization or group can do - the Digital Governance Design Clinic is an effort to ‘build a bigger boat,’ for high-integrity digital transformation. We believe that by both investing in the capacity and political engagement of emerging professionals in duty-bearing fields, we can improve short-term, practical outcomes and help raise the bar for technology deployment practices in high-impact settings by prioritizing the needs and perspectives of the experts most responsible for the outcome of those impacts in the long-term. From a different vantage point, we see the work we'll be doing through our clinics as fundamentals of the discussions that happen within communities of people that are often under- or poorly represented in the fields of law and medicine, as clients and patients.

This award opens up significant opportunities - not only to formalize the model our partnership is piloting, but to engage more professionals in more important digital rights and governance issues.  If this topic is of interest to you, please contact us to discuss and think together about the moment we are in, and the ways in which we can all better work from where we exist in our professional interests, education, and advocacy efforts.