The course did not change what I care about. It clarified how I do the work.
Over the past seven weeks, I have been taking Stanford’s Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy for Practitioners course through its live, cohort-based offering.
I wanted to name that directly because a lot of the ideas from my last several posts did not appear out of nowhere. They were already connected to how I think. However, the course helped sharpen and deepen them, making them more useful, and provided a cross-sector learning environment where people were thinking through ethics, technology, and public policy in real time, just like me. It can feel lonely in the world of public interest and community technology.
That part also mattered not because Stanford gave me permission to care about these topics (I already do), but because the course gave me stronger language to work with. It also gave me better frames and a more practical way to connect what I already care about to the work I actually do. Furthermore, what the course clarified for me was not that ethics matters. I already believed that. What it clarified is that ethics becomes much more useful when it moves from abstraction to practice, which is also part of the broader argument behind System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.
If you know me or read my blog, you know my work has never been about admiring values from a distance. It has always been about helping people turn values into something they can actually use, especially when nobody owns the process. That is also what today’s post is about.
Governance is where values either hold or collapse.
One of the clearest takeaways is that values do not matter if they cannot withstand contact with real systems. That sounds obvious, but I do not think most institutions actually act like they believe it. That comes from direct experience and observation.
In general, it is easy to say that you or your company cares about privacy, accountability, transparency, accessibility, or trust. However, it is much harder to make those values durable when decisions are moving quickly. That includes messy handoffs, overextending people, and having nobody fully think through what happens once a new system becomes normalized.
That is part of what I have been writing about in recent posts on what gets tracked, normalized, enforced, and trusted. To me, those are no longer separate questions but different angles. Well, different angles that raise a larger issue of whether values are actually carried into practice. They tend to collapse as soon as convenience, speed, power, or institutional pressure enters the room.
Overall, the course helped me connect dots and think more about what happens when governance is treated as an afterthought. When it is, you can usually see it when accountability gets blurry, harms become easier to normalize, and people start calling something “standard practice” (when it was never truly examined in the first place). Those issues are always staring us in the face, but time and money can be blinding.
Better systems do not appear on their own.
Another takeaway is that better outcomes don’t happen just because people dislike the status quo. People can see harm clearly and still feel stuck. For example, we see degrading workflows, can spot weak policies, or know unfair processes, but still lack a path forward. That is part of why I wrote recently about worker power, counterspeech, freedom, and collective action.
However, there are other ongoing problems. Systems can degrade and still keep people dependent on them, and workplaces can become more efficient and less “human-oriented.” At the same time, platforms can claim to support participation, but (quietly or publicly) narrow the kinds of participation that they want to allow versus what is actually possible. And as history shows us, a right can exist on paper without becoming real in people’s lives.
Ethics is most useful when it helps people act.
This may be the biggest thing Stanford clarified for me: ethics is not most useful when it stays at the level of critique alone. Of course, to an extent, critique, naming harm, and analysis all matter. But at some point, the real question becomes: what helps people move?
That is where the course became especially practical for me.
It helped me think more clearly about facilitation, implementation, and how values translate into decisions, processes, and structures that people can actually work with.
That shift is also reflected in the final deliverable I submitted at the end of the course. I focused on applying Stanford’s Ethics Toolkit to a real civic governance problem. Not because a toolkit can solve everything or because ethics can be reduced to a worksheet, but because I (really, we) wanted something more workable (well researched and credible, too) that could help people slow down, ask better questions, and connect values to practice. Thanks to its creators, we now have that AND a path forward, and that is the direction to keep moving in.
This also clarified something about my role.
For a while, I have been trying to describe what I do in a way that makes sense to more people than not. I have used terms like civic technologist, movement technologist, public interest technologist, strategist, consultant, project manager, and more. Some fit in certain contexts, but none fully capture the whole picture. What the course helped clarify is that one of my strongest through-lines is helping and empowering people to turn values into something more usable when it seems there are no options.
But if we look closer…
That can mean a lot of things. It can mean workflows, accessibility, public-facing usability, or helping a group ask better questions before they build the wrong thing. Truthfully, the list goes on, too, but let’s begin moving in a more practical direction, because none of those are separate from ethics. They are where ethics become real.
That is also why I no longer see “technology,” “policy,” and “practice” as separate buckets, or at least separated issues. They overlap constantly and shape one another. And when one of them gets neglected, the others usually suffer too.
At the end of the day. . .
Over the last several posts, I have been writing about what gets tracked, normalized, enforced, trusted, optimized, and made real.
Stanford helped me see those questions more clearly as part of a larger challenge: how people turn values into practice before harmful systems harden into routine. That feels like the real takeaway for me.
Not that ethics gives us easy answers. It doesn’t, and that’s not the point either.
But ethics can help us to ask better questions, slow down in the right places, and build more responsibly before the wrong things become normal.
And right now, that feels like exactly the kind of work worth continuing.
I’ll share more about that next week.