RightsCon Toronto 2018

Technologists and policy advocates are often in the same spaces, but it’s hard to create opportunities for real collaboration between them. Even when everyone speaks the same language, it often feels like technologists and policy advocates are actually speaking different languages. Bringing together the collective knowledge of activists, policy advocates and technologists to build public policies for technology issues is a pain point of most civil society organisations, but a necessary one in many cases. It involves a range of skill sets and experiences, and especially people on both sides of the aisle (technologists and advocates) who can speak to the other group. Since it is hard to find individuals to have this mix of skill sets, we built a pilot project that brought together policy advocates working on internet freedom issues together with technologists from the same regions, in a 4-day Hackathon, to talk, present, and come up with prototypes for projects that they could collaborate on. We built a methodology for the Tech Policy Hackathons, and tested it out in two Hackathons in 2017- one with partners in Latin America, and the other in South Africa. In this session we present to you our methodology and learnings. We will also use this as a platform to invite questions from the audience to answer to more nuanced needs. The session itself will be a mix of sharing of experiences and sharing of the methodology.