Emily best & sara m. watson
a people’s history of tech
Sara M. Watson (she/her) is co-founder and lead curator of A People’s History of Tech. As a technology critic, her work aims to offer embodied, practical, and accessible tools and framings for examining our relationship to technologies, culture, and power.
Her intersectional career covering data, privacy, and emerging tech bridges industry, policy, and academia. Sara has been a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University where her work on personal data and privacy raised awareness of data’s role in the digital economy. As a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, her research on the media’s evolving coverage of technology advocated for more constructive technology criticism. As Siegel Research Fellow with All Tech Is Human she mapped the responsible technology ecosystem. Sara has also covered emerging tech trends as a principal industry analyst at Forrester, Insider Intelligence, and the Gartner Research Board.
Emily Best (she/her) is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a platform that makes entertainment more diverse, inclusive, connected, and essential. She believes storytelling is an essential driver to build equity and sustainability for everyone. In 2022, she was selected as a Luminary to join The Tech We Want, a multi-year, multi-million dollar initiative to build a new technology ecosystem that rewards responsible innovation supported by Omidyar Network. She leads The Tech We Want’s first public output: A People’s History of Tech, a collective storytelling project to build a more just and representative history of technology so that we may build a more just and sustainable future. She is based in Atlanta, Georgia and serves as a mentor for Techstars, PlugIn South LA, Harlem Film House, and as a board member to SHRM ATL and Film Impact Georgia.
session description
Emily and Sara met at The Conference 2014, and now—10 years later—are bringing their latest collaboration to the Structuring Structures session, and as an immersive experience in the mingle area of Slagthuset. They’ll share some of the norms, values and stories being built intoThe People’s History of Tech—a living artifact of and witness to the human impacts of technology—and unpack how to harness our power as citizens and stewards of the future of tech in open-source, inclusive ways.