The Tech Policy Design Centre has been made a permanent fixture at the Australian National University and will be supported by a new advisory group featuring current and former Australian tech regulators to help meet “overwhelming demand” for tech policy expertise.
The new nine-member advisory panel revealed Wednesday includes eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, Atlassian global head of policy David Masters, former Tech Council of Australia chief executive Kate Pounder, and former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and now-ANU Professor Rod Sims.
Founded as a pilot initiative in September 2022, the Tech Policy Design Centre (TPDC) will now permanently sit in the Australian National University’s (ANU) College of Law.
With the backing of additional ANU funding, the research centre will feature an expanded research agenda and will run new policy design courses, creating a skills pathway for a career in tech policy design.
It will move from a project-based research approach to a program-based approach, enabling work to be more targeted to particular areas of focus like online safety, human-technology interfaces, data, and digital infrastructure.
ANU made the decision to underwrite the activities of the centre after it successfully proved there is an “overwhelming demand” for tech policy design expertise across government, industry, and civil society, TPDC founding director Professor Johanna Weaver told InnovationAus.com
The full list of advisory board members, who will meet for the first time on Wednesday are:
- Dr Tobias Feakin, formerly Ambassador for Cyber Affairs and Critical Technology
- Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner
- Professor Elanor Huntington, Executive Director, CSIRO
- David Masters, Global Head of Policy, Atlassian
- Professor Rory Medcalf, Head of the ANU National Security College
- Kate Pounder, former CEO of the Tech Council of Australia
- Professor Rodney Sims, Crawford School of Public Policy, formerly Chair of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission
- Brett Soloman, Executive Director, Access Now
- Prof Anthony Connolly, Dean, ANU College of Law
Professor Weaver said the advisory board was deliberately filled with individuals that represent the “full complexity [and] the different perspectives that exist in this field”, with the diverse views reflected in the research work and education programs of the centre.
“We have people from government, from industry and also from civil society. Not all of these board members necessarily hold the same views about what things should be prioritised and that is actually the very merit of the board and the work that we do,” Professor Weaver said.
The secure future has enabled the centre to hire two senior staff, Zoe Jay Hawkins as head of policy design, and Simon Paul McAllister as head of education design. A further two positions will also be filled soon.
The new education curriculum will focus on training people to use a tech policy design ‘toolkit’ to design tech policy “at the speed of innovation” rather than learning about solutions for particular emerging technologies.
“Every public servant needs to be able to talk about technology policy, in the same way that we expect every public servant to be able to talk about human rights,” Professor Weaver said.
She said there is a need for both tech policy generalists and tech policy specialists in the public service and private sector.
“The education program that we’re developing will have foundational courses, which will be aimed at upskilling and creating this generalist cadre, and then we’ll also have more in depth courses that will be looking to facilitate the development of a more specialised tech policy cadre”.
Professor Weaver said she’s yet to find an organisation elsewhere in the world that “has an exactly similar mandate” to the TPDC.
