Tech4ALL Digest, Mar 11

Our Progress

• 💪🏽 We hosted a two-day designathon at University of California Santa Cruz’s Silicon Valley campus on February 22nd and 23rd, working with more than 20 students from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to design a grassroots, community-driven model to gather and govern representative speech data from and with the stuttering community. The students conducted community research and proposed amazing design protocols within the 48-hour challenge. Check out student teams and their designs
• 🤝 As we embarked on the PJMF-funded project to collect diverse, representative stuttered speech data for more fair and inclusive speech AI models, we began with a series of listening sessions to gather the stuttering community’s perspectives and needs. We were glad to find our community just as excited as we are about our human-centered, stuttering-affirmative approach! 🤗 Read the summary of our learnings here, and the full report here. If you are a person who stutters, we invite you to share your perspectives on stuttered speech data collection and governance with us here – it takes a village (and you will be compensated)!
• 👩🏻‍🏫 Shaomei was invited to give a guest lecture on “AI Risks and Biases for People with Disabilities” at Stanford University CS 377Q Designing for Accessibility class! She appreciated the opportunity to educate the next generation of technology designers and builders for a more equitable technological future and enjoyed the Q&A session with the students – they asked great, insightful questions 🤓!

This video shares the story of a woman who experienced the tragedy of stillbirth, only to find herself arrested and charged with “concealing birth.” After a brief jury deliberation, she was sentenced to prison time, followed by years of supervised parenting restrictions. Full video >> How My Stillbirth Became a Crime | NYT Opinion

One Product

OpenLitterMap empowers people to document environmental pollution through a simple process: photograph litter, tag it, and upload it. This free, open-data platform maps plastic waste and other pollutants globally, creating valuable environmental insights anyone can access and use. Full info >> OpenLitterMap

One Tip

This article makes a compelling case for elevating social innovation as a central approach to addressing global challenges. The authors identify three key opportunities: crafting better narratives about social innovation’s impact, mobilizing more diverse funding resources, and strengthening the ecosystem through system orchestrators. Full Article >> From Margin to Mainstream: Social Innovation for Systems Change

One Event

Date: 2025-03-22

Join New York City’s vibrant civic tech community from March 22-30, 2025, for Open Data Week—a citywide celebration of public data. This free festival features dozens of events across the five boroughs and online, including Data Through Design’s art exhibition and BetaNYC’s School of Data conference. Full Info » NYC Open Data Week 2025

Jobs

Education Analytics transforms education through rigorous data analysis, helping schools and districts make informed decisions that benefit all students. Now they have job openings from accountant to data engineer. Full Info >> Education Analytics