I thought our guest speaker today, David Eaves from the Kennedy School, was excellent.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A particularly thought provoking idea from the end of our session was whether Dr. Martin Luther King\u00a0Jr. would have had the same success in his civil rights pursuits with the advanced surveillance capabilities of today\u2019s FBI. Thinking about this in a more modern context, while it is indeed true that advanced surveillance capabilities (both online and otherwise) have allowed the government\/FBI to track dissenters, the same advances in technology have also further facilitated dissent. During the Arab Spring, Twitter quickly mobilized large numbers of protestors, leading to far more efficient organization than phones or word of mouth conversations would have allowed\u00a0in Dr. King\u2019s time. We have also seen online hacking itself and release of hacked data as a form of dissent against various governments \u2013\u00a0a type of protestation not possible without the internet.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I also want\u00a0to touch on Eaves\u2019 idea that empathy is integral to success in the civic tech world, as empathy allows an implementer to better understand the needs of a user to ensure that the user experience is as excellent as possible. Empathy seems to be an important skill not just in this field but in many, so I\u2019d be curious to hear more of Eaves\u2019 thoughts on how we better teach empathy (and if it can even be taught in a classroom setting) as we train future policy makers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One additional thought from the readings \u2013 one of the problems with Healthcare.gov was the management structure of the group that ran the project, which brings us back to the integral issue of management structures in technology teams. In my post in\u00a0Week 1, I touched on this issue with how management style may have positively affected the products created by the original ARPANET team, so it\u2019s especially interesting to see this\u00a0idea re-emerge later in the semester.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I thought our guest speaker today, David Eaves from the Kennedy School, was excellent. A particularly thought provoking idea from the end of our session was whether Dr. Martin Luther King\u00a0Jr. would have had the same success in his civil rights pursuits with the advanced surveillance capabilities of today\u2019s FBI. Thinking about this in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/37"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sdfblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}