The Centre for Social Impact Technology

Reid Blackman, Ph.D., is the author of “Ethical Machines: Your Concise Guide to Totally Unbiased, Transparent, and Respectful AI (Harvard Business Review Press), Founder and CEO of Virtue, an AI ethical risk consultancy, and volunteer Chief Ethics Officer for the non-profit Government Blockchain Association. He has also been a member of EY’s AI Advisory Board, a Senior Advisor to the Deloitte AI Institute, and a professor of philosophy at Colgate University and UNC-Chapel Hill. His work, which includes advising and speaking to organizations including AWS, US Bank, the FBI, NASA, and the World Economic Forum, has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Learn more at reidblackman.com.

Afua Bruce is a leading public interest technologist who has spent her career working at the intersection of technology, policy, and society. Her career has spanned the government, non-profit, private, and academic sectors, as she has held senior science and technology positions at DataKind, the White House, the FBI, and IBM. Afua has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, as well as an MBA.

Amy Sample Ward believes that technology should be accessible and accountable to everyone, especially communities historically and systemically excluded from the digital world. They are the CEO of NTEN, a nonprofit creating a world where missions and movements are more successful through the skillful and equitable use of technology. Amy’s second book, Social Change Anytime Everywhere, was a Terry McAdam Book Award finalist.

David Ryan Polgar is a pioneering tech ethicist, Responsible Tech advocate, and expert on ways to improve social media and our information ecosystem. David is the founder of All Tech Is Human, an organization committed to building the Responsible Tech pipeline by making it more diverse, multidisciplinary, and aligned with the public interest. As the leader of All Tech Is Human, he has spearheaded the development of three recent reports: Guide to Responsible Tech: How to Get Involved & Build a Better Tech Future, The Business Case for AI Ethics: Moving From Theory to Action, and Improving Social Media: The People, Organizations and Ideas for a Better Tech Future. 

The main throughline throughout David’s work is that we need a collaborative, multi-stakeholder, and multidisciplinary approach in order to build a tech future that is aligned with the public interest. 

Liz Weaver is the Co-CEO of Tamarack Institute and leading the Tamarack Learning Centre. The Tamarack Learning Centre advances community change efforts by focusing on five strategic areas including collective impact, collaborative leadership, community engagement, community innovation and evaluating community impact. Liz is well-known for her thought leadership on collective impact and is the author of several papers on the topic. She is a co-catalyst partner with the Collective Impact Forum and a co-founding partner of the Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience (CCNDR).   Liz is passionate about the power of communities getting to impact on complex issues.

Bianca Wylie is a writer with a dual background in technology and public engagement.  She is a partner at Digital Public and a co-founder of Tech Reset Canada. She worked for several years in the tech sector in operations, infrastructure, corporate training, and product management. Then, as a professional facilitator, she spent several years co-designing, delivering and supporting public consultation processes for various governments and government agencies. She is currently a member of the advisory boards for the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), The Computational Democracy Project and the Minderoo Tech & Policy Lab and is a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.