"What have you been doing to help promote democracy recently?
Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, has certainly been doing his part.
His invention may have helped decimate classified-advertising revenue
for print newspapers, but last month, he gave $20 million to a team of
experienced journalists to investigate the power of Big Tech. In June, he gave $20 million to the CUNY journalism program,
so the next generation of journalists can do the same. And today (Oct.
10), he announced he’s helping to fund a new competition called The Responsible Computer Science Challenge to incorporate more ethical training into undergraduate computer science curricula.
The
initiative, which was incubated by Omidyar Network, and is also backed
by Mozilla, and Schmidt Futures, is soliciting proposals from professors
and graduate students about how to make ethics a central part of a
software engineer’s education. A panel of independent judges will award
up to $3.5 million in prizes to the winners.
The competition couldn’t come at a better time."
