Dr. Warigia Bowman represented the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service as she participated in a global summit on the Grand Challenges in Tech Policy for the next decade. She was invited to join a small group of highly respected, interdisciplinary international individuals August 2-4, 2016 in Seattle, Washington. The Global Tech Summit was sponsored in part by the Hewlett Foundation, Microsoft, and the University of Washington Tech Policy Lab (http://techpolicylab.org/). The Summit brought together experts in law, information, policy, computer Science, engineering, the social sciences, diplomatic missions, and the private sector.
At the summit, thirty individuals representing countries such as Japan, Rwanda, Egypt, Scotland, Canada, Holland, the United States, Sri Lanka, and India, worked together to develop global strategies for making progress on grand challenges for tech policy. In the view of directors Yoshi Kohno, Batya Friedman, and Ryan Calo, well-selected grand challenges convey a sense of vision and push a field forward. At the same time, they must be tractable—that is, consist of actual projects of reasonable scale and ambition—for meaningful progress to be made. In this vein, the Global Tech Policy Summit aimed to (1) to frame an initial set of grand challenges for tech policy for the coming decade; (2) to identify actionable research and policy work to be conducted during the 18-months following the Summit to make progress on those grand challenges; and (3) to form collaborations and a conduit for continued discussion toward addressing and continually re-evaluating those grand challenges.
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