A competency is defined as “mastery of learning by students through their demonstration of knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and behaviors” (Gervais, 2016). Sometimes called learning goals or learning objectives, competencies reflect student’s learning and development during their time with us in higher education. The foundation of competency-based education linking theory to practice and providing students with dynamic opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge skills and understanding.
ComPITence helps professors teach students the tools to enter the field of public interest technology, and helps students and those already in the field to develop PIT skills and access PIT jobs, materials and organizations.
To do that, our team of experts from the tech industry, non-profits, and academia, created a list of academic competencies–reflecting the values, knowledge, skills and behaviors a public interest technologist needs. We encourage instructors to adopt these competencies in course and curricular design. We also created a toolkit with of syllabi, books and job hunt information to help people learn about the field. This work is supported by funding from the Public Interest Tech University Network (PIT-UN) and is freely available to any instructor interested in infusing PIT in their courses.
Over the course of 2024, eighteen collaborators from academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector came together to create the ComPITencies. This process kicked off with a series of in-person workshops, hosted by Fordham University (NY, NY) in January, 2024. The collaborators represent the facets of the PIT ecosystem including: PIT-UN faculty from computer science, communications, operations research, human computer interaction, law and social work, computer scientists and business development specialists from IBM, and representatives from our responsible tech advocacy partner, All Tech Is Human. Design partner, SOUR, delivered workshops focused on inclusive design and competency development. Next smaller working groups met virtually between January and July to formulate their recommendations for PIT competencies, teaching and curricular materials. The next in-person meeting in July, 2024 synthesized the competency recommendations, where we dove into the values, knowledge, skills and behaviors that a competent Public Interest Technologist would demonstrate. Lastly, the group met virtually in September 2024 to finalize the materials you see here.
PIT-UN Team
Dr. Lauri Goldkind, Professor of Graduate School of Social Services at Fordham University
Dr. Jesse Baldwin-Philippi, Associate Professor in the Communications & Media Studies Department at Fordham University
Dr. Laura Bingham, Practice Professor of Law at Temple University Institute of Law
Dr. Djallel Bouneffouf, Senior Research Scientist at IBM
Rachel Dietkus, Digital Services Expert at United States Digital Services (USDS)
Dr. Becky Duane, Business Development Executive at IBM
Dr. Diana Freed, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at Brown University
Rebekah Tweed, Executive Director at All Tech is Human
Dr. Erhardt Graeff, Associate Professor of Social & Computer Science Olin College of Engineering
Dr. Reneta Konrad, Assistant Professor of Operations and Industrial Engineering in the Foisie School of Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Dr. Raj Korpan, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY)
Fred Lederer, Chancellor Professor of Law at William Mary Law School
Dr. Miao Liu, Research Scienstist at IBM
Manish Nagireddy, IBM Researcher at the MIT Watson AI Lab
Arushi Saxena, White House Presidential Innovation Fellow
Dr. Kevin Harris, Program Chair of Computational & Information Sciences at Stillman College
