Afternoon Lightning Talks

We will have a second round of policy-makers discussing their work and spotlighting methods and insights. This round will include these talks:

Design and Policy Decision-Making

What is the policy decision-making cycle and how can designers influence it? Chelsea will describe Public Policy Lab work to design new policy solutions, highlight shortcomings of a design approach, and propose areas that require further exploration if designers seek to assist policymakers in affecting significant social change.

Chelsea Mauldin, Director of Public Policy Lab, New York City

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TechPlomacy: How Denmark is ‘prototyping’ foreign policy in the digital age

Denmark is the first country to appoint a Tech Ambassador and elevate technology to a foreign policy priority. What started as a de facto experiment is now a full-fledged diplomatic effort to put society (and its inhabitants) at the core of technology. The team behind it will explain why and share lessons from the first 12 months on the ground in Silicon Valley and globally.

Mikael Ekman, Deputy Tech Ambassador from Denmark 

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Designing policy and ethical frameworks for cross-border data access needed to power precision medicine.

Accelerating precision medicine depends on the ability to collect and glean insights from genetic and other biological data, behavioural information, and the environments in which people live and work. By combining insights from this data, we aim to diagnose disease and tailor treatments with increasing specificity, improve the quality and effectiveness of care, and reduce costs.

However, the complicated and dynamic landscape of data privacy and localization laws adds great complexity to the collection and utilization of data—both between countries and even within single governments. This lightning talk will introduce the Breaking Barriers to Health Data project, which aims to create a scalable framework to support the effective and responsible use of cross-border (‘federated’) data systems. This framework is being developed initially for genomic data, but can be applied to different types of data, multiple use cases, different jurisdictions, and other industry areas.

Sobia Hamid, Lead at Precision Medicine at World Economic Forum

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Prototyping Agile Public Policy

The Civic Design Lab (CDL) builds the creative capacity of today’s public servants by applying design thinking, racial equity lens, and systems thinking, and by extension more effectively addresses civic resiliency challenges for Oakland residents.

This lightning talk will give a brief overview of how CDL became the first government innovation lab to institute a policy that formalizes design thinking as a core method for policy development and service improvement in local government. CDL is hiring!

Alexandra Jaeyun Lee, Creative Director of Civic Design Lab