Turning Leaves into New Beginnings

Welcoming our fall cohort, funding success, and more

Oct 13, 2024

Happy fall and welcome to the October edition of the Paragon Policy Fellowship newsletter! Here’s what the team has been up to since our last issue:

Paragon Honored in the 2024 PIT-UN Network Challenge
Paragon Co-founders Featured in the PIT-UN Newsletter
Looking Back on our Summer Cohort
Introducing our Fall Cohort
Alumni Opportunities: Research Interest Announcement
Tech Policy Reading List
Job / Opportunity Board

Paragon Honored in the 2024 PIT-UN Network Challenge 🌐

Paragon is partnering with Brown University, Arizona State University, and Howard University in the 2024 PIT-UN (Public Interest Technology University Network) Network Challenge! This year’s Network Challenge focuses on funding cross-disciplinary educational and career pipeline initiatives led by PIT-UN schools to advance the public interest technology workforce across government, industry, and social impact sectors.

Congratulations to Principal Investigator Suresh Venkatasubramanian and his team for empowering students to explore tech policy, and enabling local governments to build tech capacity through a partnership with the Paragon Policy Fellowship. The team will receive $90,000 to enhance curriculum and career advancement opportunities for Paragon fellows, culminating in a publicly accessible playbook to help other organizations develop public interest tech pipeline programs.

Paragon Co-founders Featured in the PIT-UN Newsletter 🗞️

Our lovely co-founders Jennifer Wang and Kayla Huang were recently featured in the October 2024 PIT-UNiverse Newsletter! Click here to read Paragon’s origin story in Jenn and Kayla’s own words. 💫

Summer Rewind ☀️

Paragon’s Summer Cohort concluded their projects with final presentations on Monday, September 16. Over the course of 12 weeks, Fellows had the opportunity to present their projects to White House OSTP staff and explored various roles in public interest tech in speaker sessions with Chloe Autio, Adjunct AI Policy Advisor at the Institute for Security and Technology and Faculty Lecturer at the Future of Privacy Forum, Obinna Ugwu, User Experience Researcher at Meta, Rianna Pfefferkorn, Research Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and Nicole Decario, Director of AI & Society for the Allen Institute for AI.

Our 7 teams worked on projects ranging from digital privacy to language access homelessness data integration. Read more about each project below:

City of San José, CA - An AI Risk Assessment Procurement Framework: As the leader of the national GovAI Coalition, San José sought a uniform, adaptable AI product risk evaluation framework for its members. Paragon Fellows reviewed federal, state, and local public-use AI guidelines and research-proven risk models to create a tiered AI assessment matrix with 60 risk indicators.
County of Santa Clara, CA - Cybersecurity Cybersecurity Risk Classification & Prioritization Rubric: Santa Clara's existing vendor cybersecurity tool complicates government prioritization and response to data due to high notification volume. The Paragon Fellows created a vendor risk ranking rubric for more effective response and resource allocation.
City of Lebanon, NH - Digital Privacy Framework: Paragon Fellows created a framework with best practices and tailored recommendations for internal process development, guidelines to improve data security with third-party storage vendors, and public communication to raise awareness on data privacy and the city’s improved practices.
City of Lebanon, NH - American with Disabilities Act Compliance: To comply with new federal ADA web accessibility guidelines, Fellows identified existing barriers, explored assistive technologies, evaluated tools, and researched accommodation procedures. They produced best practices for Lebanon’s communications, conducted an accessibility audit, and recommended guidelines to secure third-party data collection.
State of Georgia - Generative AI Standards Recommendations: Fellows were tasked with developing policy guidelines for internal government usage of GenAI. With consideration of implementation and staff learning challenges, the Paragon team created an AI citation guide, model bias assessment guide, risk mitigation framework and rubric, and researched potential social inequities exacerbated by AI usage.
City of St. Louis, MO - Language Access-Technology Interface: Paragon Fellows sought to improve service and information access for the city’s growing immigrant community. The team evaluated existing tools, government initiatives, and challenges with low-resource language translation to prepare a research report, presentation and resource list for the Office of New Americans.
California Health and Human Services Agency - Improving Data Usage to Address Homelessness: The Paragon team recommended sharing tools and procedures to create a data pool for future research and evaluation, standardizing data entry mechanisms and privacy measures, and ensuring a consistent definition of homeless across different agencies.

Congratulations to all our Fellows for completing their projects, we are so proud! 🎉 Be on the lookout for project updates on our website in the near future.

Introducing our Fall Cohort 🍁🍎

On Thursday, September 19, Paragon welcomed 65 project leads and fellows from 41 colleges and universities into our Fall 2024 cohort. The fellows will work on 7 projects with government partners including Brownsville, TX, Los Angeles, CA, Santa Clara, CA, Tempe, AZ, and the State of Georgia. Welcome to the Paragon family and we can’t wait to see what you all accomplish!

Alumni Opportunity: Post-Fellowship Research Support 📄

Paragon’s Advancement Team is interested in assisting program alumni with gaining research publication experience and recognition of their hard work throughout the fellowship. This is a great way to boost your credentials and gain additional experience. If you and your team are interested in publishing your research, please email or send a Slack message to Sofia Rodriguez, Director of Research (sr110@wellesley.edu, CC paragonfellowship@gmail.com) to get involved!

Tech Policy Reading List 📚

Opportunity Board 💡

The Centre for Long-Term Resilience seeks a remote freelance communications coordinator. Learn more here and apply by October 20, 11:59 pm BST.
Coding it Forward 2025 Fellowship applications open October 15. Learn more here.
The UCLA Easton Technology Management Center is hosting its 2024 Tech + Society Conference on October 25. Learn more and register to attend in-person or remote here.
The Center for Research on Foundation Models and Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy are hosting a Workshop on The Future of Third-Party AI Evaluation. Learn more and register here by October 28.
PIT-UN is hosting its 2024 Summit from November 7-8. Learn more and register to attend in-person or virtually here.
The GovAI Coalition Summit hosted by the GovAI Coalition and the City of San José is happening December 4-5. Learn more and register here.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) seeks remote contract Cybersecurity Consultants. Learn more and apply here by December 31.
The Stanford Cyber Policy Center is starting its weekly Fall Seminar Series. Learn more and register here.
Public Citizen is hiring for a full-time Technology Accountability Advocate based in Washington, D.C. Learn more and apply here.
Tremau is hiring trust and safety policy interns. Learn more and apply here.

TIP: Remember to follow Paragon on LinkedIn to keep up with our latest happenings!

Thanks for reading until the end! If there are any topics you would like to see covered in future newsletters or have an opportunity/event you would like to publicize, we would love to know through this feedback form!

— Contributed by Kaitlyn Cui

Paragon Policy Fellowship