Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy
Annual report 2021-2022
Contents
1. Foreword
2. Annual highlights
3. Meet the team
4. 2021-22 achievements
5. Stage 2 growth
6. Governance
7. Financial reporting
1. Foreword
Prof. Gina Neff, Executive Director
At the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, we study
how digital technology is transforming society to ensure democratic
accountability over the increasing power of tech across the globe.
Through our ambitious research
agenda, we aim to deliver positive changes to society’s relationship with
digital technologies.
Our work centres on
four research themes:
• Public understanding of digital
technologies
• The significance of
work and its future in a digitised world
• The environmental
impact of the digital technologies
• The relationship
between trust within society and digital technologies
In our first full year in operation, we developed key
research across these four themes and our team has grown to a total of 8
researchers & professional staff.
This report covers the period April 2021 to March 2022 and
outlines our activities and future plans.
2. Annual highlights
Our year in numbers
21000+ website views
6000+ users to our website
2000+ followers on social media
1000+ attendances at our hosted and participatory events
8 core team members
Report launches
We have published three
reports over the last year:
-
Safety-by-Design in the Draft Online Safety
Bill -
written evidence submitted to the UK Parliament Joint Committee on the Online
Safety Bill.
-
The effects of AI on the working lives of women, working with
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United
National Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), this report explores the impact of AI on
women at work.
- The Cost of Convenience, a report featuring 12
‘provocations’ written by academics from across the globe, from Perth to
Calgary, who are working at the technology-environment nexus.
Policy impact
Over the last year, we
led policy and research activities around the UK’s Draft Online Safety Bill.
Working with the Joint
Committee for the Draft Online Safety Bill of the UK Parliament, we organised a
two-hour workshop on the role ‘safety-by-design’ principles could play in the
Online Safety Bill. Our workshop included DCMS, Ofcom, civil society
organisations, private sector companies, and academic researchers.
Following the workshop,
we submitted a report as written evidence to the Committee and its contribution
to the Bill scrutiny process was clearly recognised at the start of Joint
Committee’s report.
Events
We have led and participated in a rigorous programme of over
20 events, reaching over 1000 attendees in the last year, including:
-
SXSW 2022: The Right to Truth & Trust in an Age of #Misinfo
-
COP26: The New York Times Climate Hub
Debate: Our Obsession With
Technology Will Slow Down the Green Transition
- EU AI Week: Break the
Bias - Women in AI
Media engagement
Over the last year, our
team and research has been featured on the BBC, The New York Times, the
Financial Times and Reuters.
Our team has also
written editorial articles in publications, including the Observer and Fortune
Magazine, and appeared on several podcasts, amplifying our research agenda.
BBC news
- Should bad science be censored on social media?
The Observer - John Naughton - Can big tech ever be reigned in?
FT - Social media sites should not ban misleading content, UK
scientists say
Talking Politics Podcast - The Next Big Thing - John Naughton
and David Runciman
3. Meet the team
Professor Gina Neff, Executive Director
Hunter Vaughan, Senior Research Associate
Louise Hickman, Research Associate
Hugo Leal, Research Associate
Julia Rone, Research Associate
Irene Galandra Cooper, Researcher
Project Administrator
Jeremy Hughes, Communications Coordinator
Francesca Barraud, PA. to Prof. Neff
Tech Impact Network
We are the first of an
international network of research centres funded by Minderoo Foundation, the
Tech Impact Network, which aims to re-balance power in a networked world.
CRASSH
The Minderoo Centre for Technology and
Democracy is hosted within CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social
Sciences and Humanities).
CRASSH is an interdisciplinary research centre within the
University of Cambridge. It was founded in 2001 as a way to create
interdisciplinary dialogue across the University’s many faculties and departments in the arts, social
sciences, and humanities, as well as to
build bridges with scientific subjects.
CRASSH serves to draw together disciplinary perspectives in
Cambridge and to
disseminate new ideas to audiences across Europe and beyond.
4. 2021-22 achievements
Among our output for 2021-2022, we would like to highlight in
depth four signature achievements in the last year:
-
Creating policy impact- Draft Online
Safety Bill, UK Parliament
-
Enhancing public understanding of
digital tech
-
Addressing the climate crisis
-
Launching our Centre
Creating policy impact - Draft Online
Safety Bill, UK Parliament
We
are determined to make positive change, through policy change.
In
the last year, that work has begun in earnest.
In
Autumn 2021, we were approached by Damian Collins MP, Head of the Joint
Committee of the Online Safety Bill and David Slater, Clerk for the Joint
Committee, to co-host a workshop with the Joint Committee.
The
workshop examined the challenges and opportunities of mechanisms to ensure
online safety, the experiences of diverse user communities, monitoring and
interoperability across applications, and experience with the Ofcom regulatory
frameworks, with a particular focus on the technical concept of safety by
design.
Thirty-two
attendees from the Joint Committee, DCMS, Ofcom, civil society organisations,
private sector companies, and academic researchers attended the two-hour event
in October 2021.
The
discussion brought to light aspects of the practical implications of the Bill
that may otherwise be more difficult for the Committee to appraise. This format
highlighted the information gap that still exists between Parliamentarians and
the actual impact anticipated by different stakeholders of the proposed
legislation.
Throughout
the discussion, Committee members asked open-ended questions which further
research could help answer.
Our
workshop contributions on Safety-by-Design were clearly recognised at the start
of the Joint Committee’s report in late 2021.
Many
of our written recommendations were integrated into the report, including:
●
Detailed and clear definitions of harms
within the Bill
●
Clarity on the powers of the regulator
● Importance
of marginalised groups for help on devising codes of conduct
The
policy workshop and report has subsequently anchored several follow-on
activities for the Centre on the topic of online harms, including:
●
Co-authored a letter to the Joint
Committee on technical standards and regulation with the IEEE
● Collaborated
on gender-based harms practical guide
Launch
of Royal Society report on misinformation
Published
in January 2022, a new report from Royal Society: “The Online Information
Environment: Understanding how the Internet shapes people’s engagement with
scientific information” is a partnership of many organisations and actors
including the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.
The
report recommends wide-ranging measures that governments, tech platforms and
academic institutions can take to build resilience to misinformation and a
healthy online information environment.
Hosted
Fighting Hate with Love – event with the Women’s Forum
In November 2021, with the Women’s Forum for the Economy and
Society, Prof. Gina Neff hosted a panel on online harms with experts from
technology companies and legal experts including the head of AI/ ML Ethics at
Twitter, Rumman Chowdhury; the head of safety at
Twitch, Sara Clemens; and Kate Scott, Partner at the law firm Clifford Chance.
Enhancing public understanding of
digital tech
Through a rigorous programme of events and strategic
engagement with external organisations across academia, industry
and the media, we have continued to fulfil one of our core objectives:
Enhancing public understanding.
We have led and participated in a significant programme of
public engagement, launching three reports and
reaching over over 1000 people at events in the last
year. A few highlights:
The effects of AI on the working lives
of women - International Women’s Day report
Released on International Women’s Day 2022, a new report
studied the impact of AI systems on women’s opportunities for work.
The report revealed that AI systems can present both
challenges and opportunities since they have a gendered effect on labour, care,
and domestic employment.
The report is authored by Prof. Gina Neff from the Minderoo
Centre for Technology and Democracy and researchers from the University of
Oxford, together with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), the United National Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
EU AI Week: #BreakTheBias: Women in AI
Prof. Gina Neff participated in a
high-level event to celebrate International Women’s Day as part of EU AI Week.
This discussion brought together
policymakers, business leaders, the European AI research community, and the
start-up ecosystem to address the gap between policies and practice and discuss
joint action to build an AI ecosystem that is as diverse and inclusive as the
societies we aspire to create.
SXSW 2022: The Right to Truth &
Trust in an Age of #Misinfo
At SXSW 2022, Prof. Gina Neff participated in a panel
discussion, with Phil Howard, Director, Democracy and Technology Programme,
Oxford University and Tawakkol Karman, Activist,
Nobel Laureate and member of the Oversight Board.
In the event, they called for an International Panel on the
Information Environment (IPIE) — strong, independent, and credible. It would do
what the IPCC did to make the environmental crisis a global issue, providing
recommendations, based on evidence, for transparent standards for achieving a
healthy global information environment.
With diverse expert voices and international thought leaders,
this panel explored the importance and practicalities of creating an IPIE and
building that future.
The Costs of Data: CRASSH Inaugural
Annual Lecture
In this inaugural annual lecture for the
20th anniversary of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social
Sciences and Humanities, Prof. Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo
Centre for Technology and Democracy raised alarms about the costs of data to
societies, democracies, and the environment.
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other
Stories from China’s Tech Countryside
Xiaowei Wang joined us online
to discuss their book, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in
China’s Countryside, exploring the political and social entanglements of
technology in rural China.
The Consequences of Gender-Bias in the
British Computer Industry
Four years ago
a historian of technology, Mar Hicks, provided the first deeply-researched
answer in a study of how the British industry changed by redefining
computer-related employment in gendered terms.
Now that the consequences of gender-bias
and imbalance in the modern tech industry are becoming striking, this webinar
looked back on this path breaking study with Mar, and Dame Wendy Hall.
Addressing the climate crisis
Addressing the environmental impact of digital technology is
a core initiative in our research.
Over the last year, we have launched in
our environmental workstream, and cemented our position as we research the
environmental costs of our digital ecosystems.
COP26
In November 2021 during COP26, Gina Neff
participated in a debate as part of the New
York Times Climate Hub in Glasgow: ‘Our Obsession With
Technology Will Slow Down the Green Transition’.
At the debate, Prof. Gina Neff delivered
a warning of the role of tech in the green transition.
The
debate examined whether technological innovation- so often presented as the
ultimate manifestation of human ingenuity, and relied
upon as the silver bullet of global solutions – fails through its current
methods and priorities, to account for the more complex picture we need to
build lasting solutions.
The Cost of Convenience - academic
workshop and zine publication
We convened an international workshop
exploring the ‘cost of convenience’ and the opaque impact that digital
technology has on the environment. We accepted over 35 participants to this
workshop, from an international group of applicants, including Australia,
Singapore, Germany, Brazil and the United States.
Subsequently, we published The Cost
of Convenience,
a report featuring 12 ‘provocations’ written by academics from across the
globe, from Perth to Calgary, who are working at the technology-environment
nexus.
Working with an emerging UK-based
graphic designer, we styled the report as a ‘zine’ to capture the urgency of
addressing these critical challenges.
FOSS
In Autumn 2021, a team of researchers led by John Naughton,
Chair of our Advisory Board, worked with a creative partner to produce a short animated film on the environmental impact of digital
technology.
This video, titled: ‘Costs of Convenience – The secret life
of your smartphone’, explored the ’embodied’ emissions of the smartphones,
released as part of Cambridge Creative Shorts for the Festival of Social
Sciences 2021.
This video challenges assumptions about environmental costs
and seeks to upgrade the smartphone industry’s environmental commitments, not
consumer phones.
Watch the film: https://www.mctd.ac.uk/watch-the-secret-life-of-your-smartphone/
Launching our Centre
We formally launched the Centre in September 2021, and since
then have continued to forge a unique identity that furthers our organisational
goals.
We have created a brand that is radical in its approach to
what is normally seen with academic institutions and one that does not fall
into the trappings of tech cliches.
Created from the angle brackets used in coding, each colour
of the logomark represents one of the 4 pillars of our initiatives coming
together at the centre. It sets a dynamic tone for the rest of our brand.
Throughout October and November 2021, we
produced a series of pieces of shareable content to further engagement with our
strategic priorities and team.
This included short videos for each of
four key initiatives, blog posts from each of our researchers examining the
initiative and their priorities, and related social media posts across Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
5. Stage 2 growth
Building on our existing research strands, the next stage of
development will see our team develop imagined alternatives and concrete
solutions to society’s relationship with digital technology that will benefit
us and our planet.
In 2022, our foundational initiatives have been refined to
ensure continued impact delivery:
Key initiative 1: Public Understanding
In the coming year we will:
-
Continue research into public perception
of digital technologies and the impact they have on societies globally.
-
Deliver a programme of accessible
outputs, including events, tools and resources that translate our research on
the current digital tech landscape into digestible content for different
public(s)
-
Propose policy solutions that reform
existing digital ecosystems across different territories, including the UK, US and EU.
Key initiative 2: Environmental
Consequences
In the coming year we will:
-
Map the environmental costs to
manufacture, operate, and maintain autonomous systems
-
Deliver a tool for AI engineers and
sectoral decision makers, as well as policy makers to raise awareness of the
environmental costs of AI.
-
Examine the environmental and social
costs of data centres and associated infrastructure.
Key initiative 3: Work
In the coming year we will:
-
Deliver a programme exploring the
concept of ‘Access-washing’, including a report providing a definitive concept
of the term, and publish guidelines on building an accessible infrastructure
that is fair and equitable for both workers and users.
Key initiative 4: Trust
In the coming year we will:
Deliver a programme exploring alternatives to current digital
infrastructure systems and revenue models, through engagement with groups
across society.
6. Governance
Advisory Board
Emily
Bell
Emily
Bell is Founding Director of the Tow Center for
Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and a leading thinker, commentator and strategist on digital journalism.
The
majority of her career was spent at Guardian News
and Media in London working as an award-winning writer and editor both in print
and online. As editor-in-chief across Guardian websites and director of digital
content for Guardian News and Media, she led the web team in pioneering live
blogging, multimedia formats, data and social media
ahead, making the Guardian a recognised pioneer in the field.
She
is co-author (with C.W. Anderson and Clay Shirky) of Post
Industrial Journalism: Adapting to the Present (2012), a trustee of the
Scott Trust, the owners of The Guardian, a member of Columbia Journalism
Review’s board of overseers, an adviser to Tamedia
Group in Switzerland, chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory
Council on social media, and a member of Poynter’s National Advisory Board.
Steven Connor
Steven
Connor is the Director of CRASSH, Grace 2 Professor of English at the
University of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge.
He
came to Cambridge in 2012, having been Professor of Modern Literature and
Theory at Birkbeck College, London and, from 2003 to 2012, Director of the
London Consortium Graduate Programme in Humanities and Cultural Studies, a
collaboration between Birkbeck and cultural institutions in the capital,
including Tate, the British Film Institute, the Institute of Contemporary Arts,
the Architectural Association and the Science Museum.
He is a writer, critic and broadcaster, who has
published 25 books and edited collections, on a wide range of topics, including
Dickens, Beckett, Joyce, value, ventriloquism, skin, flies and the imagination of
air.
Among his recent books are Dream
Machines, an exploration of forms of machine fantasy or ‘psychotechnography’,
and The Madness of Knowledge (2019).
Diane Coyle
Diane
Coyle is the inaugural Bennett Professor of Public Policy Cambridge. She
co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of
progress and productivity, and has been a government adviser on economic
policy, including throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Her latest book, Markets,
State and People – Economics for Public Policy examines how societies reach
decisions about the use and allocation of economic resources.
Diane is also a Director of the
Productivity Institute, a Fellow of the Office for National Statistics, an
expert adviser to the National Infrastructure Commission, and Senior
Independent Member of the ESRC Council.
She
has served in public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust and
as a member of the Competition Commission; the Migration Advisory Committee;
and the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was Professor of Economics at the
University of Manchester until March 2018 and was awarded a CBE for her
contribution to the public understanding of economics in the 2018 New Year
Honours.
Richard Danbury
Richard
Danbury is an academic lawyer, a journalist and a
former practicing barrister. He directs the MA in investigative journalism at
City University, London. He practised — briefly — as a criminal barrister
before joining the BBC, where he worked for about a decade, based in News and
Current Affairs, and specialising in interviews and investigations. He spent
extended periods on programmes such as Newsnight and Panorama and the
investigative documentary series Rough Justice.
His last staff job was Deputy Editor of
the 2010 BBC Prime Ministerial Debate. While at the BBC, he was part of teams
that won two Royal Television Society Awards and a New York Festivals medal. He
then went freelance, and has worked for Channel 4, Sky and ITN, producing
interviews with just about
every
leader of a main UK political party since 2000, and
has worked on TV coverage of the past five general elections. He has also
coordinated Channel 4’s investigative journalism training scheme for the past
six years, and has been the BBC’s Advanced Legal
Trainer for the past nine years. He is a member of the Scott Trust Review
Panel, the organisation that deals with editorial complaints in relation to the
Guardian’s content.
Sheila Hayman
Sheila
Hayman is a BAFTA and BAFTA Fulbright winning documentary filmmaker, and Director’s
Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. She’s currently working on a film on Artificial
Intelligence and its implications. In 2010 her film ‘Mendelssohn, The Nazis and
Me’ was nominated for the Grierson Award as Best Arts Documentary, in 2012 she
wrote, produced and directed a multilingual miniseries about the Enlightenment which was seen by 150m people, and in 2014 she
wrote and produced a major drama-documentary about the Targa Florio road race
in Sicily.
John
Naughton
John
Naughton is Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the
Open University, Director of the Wolfson Press Fellowship Programme, the
Observer’s Technology columnist and an inveterate blogger. He was co-Director
on two earlier CRASSH research projects - on ‘Conspiracy and Democracy’ and
‘Technology and Democracy’. His most recent book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg:
What You Really Need to Know about the Internet is published by Quercus.
Julia
Powles
Julia
Powles is Associate Professor of Law and Technology at the University
of
Western Australia and Director of the Minderoo Tech & Policy Lab there.
Scientifically trained and experienced in national and international policy-making, her research focuses on civic and
rights-based responses to emerging technologies. She is an expert in privacy,
intellectual property, internet governance, and the law and politics of data,
automation, and artificial intelligence. Prior to joining UWA, Julia held
academic appointments at New York University, Cornell Tech, and the University
of Cambridge. She also worked in the Office of the Director General of the
World Intellectual Property Organisation, in legal practice, as a contributing
editor and policy fellow at the Guardian, as a bioscience researcher, and as a
judicial associate in the Federal Court of Australia and Commonwealth
Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
David Runciman
David
Runciman is Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge, a
Contributing Editor of the London Review of Books and hosts the podcast Talking
Politics. He was co-director of the Technology and Democracy project that ran
at CRASSH some years ago and is the founding Director of the Centre for the
Future of Democracy in the Bennett Institute. He has written extensively on
democracy - most recently in How Democracy Ends and is currently working on a
book derived from his recent series of online talks, The History of Ideas.
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Sarah Wynn-Williams is CEO of Frontier Tech at the Minderoo
Foundation.
7. Financial reporting
|
Income |
Actual |
|
Balance Brought Forward |
£606,982.47 |
|
Contribution from Minderoo |
£300,000 (Funds added this period) |
|
Other Income |
£721.96 (Interest) |
|
Total Income |
£907,704.43 |
|
Personnel |
£460,750.75 |
|
Events |
£5,636.43 |
|
Communication |
£51,666.56 |
|
Project-specific expenses |
£16,411.09 |
|
Travel |
£3,363.20 |
|
Total Expenditure |
£537,828.03 |
|
Reconciliation |
£369,876.4 |