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Professor Gina Neff is Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on the effects of the rapid expansion of our digital information environment on workers and workplaces and in our everyday lives. Here, she describes some of the impacts of her interactions with CSaP.
"For me, CSaP’s support has been career-changing, and it has allowed me and the Minderoo Centre to grow our professional networks far beyond what it previously was."
The meetings I have held through CSaP have helped to build my confidence when speaking with regulators and policy makers. I have also participated in a number of CSaP Policy Workshops, which has helped to significantly improve my understanding of how regulators and policy makers think about research and evidence.
These conversations helped make clear the gaps that exist in the current research landscape and provided me with ideas and connections for developing new research to fill these gaps. Importantly, CSaP brings together academics, regulators and policy makers in a way that ensures that each group gains from the conversations.
CSaP’s support for early-career researchers has allowed these scholars to have remarkable and demonstrable policy impact early on in their careers. For example, a Policy Workshop organised by CSaP on ‘ESG dual-use technologies’ was co-led by Johannes Lenard, an early-career researcher from within the Minderoo Centre’s Digital Good Network.
"The magic of CSaP is its deep networks in the policy ecosystem and experience in working through science policy questions for concrete and tangible outputs."
Policy engagement is often viewed as being something to be completed toward the end of a project cycle. CSaP’s support has allowed researchers to inform and shape policy throughout their research projects and to create scope for capacity-building activities among researchers internally. One significant benefit of engaging with policy makers during the research process is that you are able to share ideas with people in government and learn about any constraints or gaps which may exist.
Frequently, researchers assume they have to be full experts in their respective fields. However, when working with policy makers, we are often having to communicate scientific knowledge to non-experts and, in general, I believe that every academic has knowledge and insights that are relevant to policy.
Although there will always be a need for fundamental research, policy engagement can help us understand what gaps exist when it comes to research on the applications of many technologies and their policy domains. For instance, through meeting with regulators I learned that an assumption which was widely taken for granted in my field did not have the clear evidence backing it that we had assumed existed.
Successful policy engagement tends to emerge from the work which surrounds the research, such as the meetings you organise with policy makers after a project is completed. Our first report through the Minderoo Centre was on assessing police use of facial recognition technologies, which was led by an early-career researcher. This report has since allowed UK policy makers to better understand the challenges associated with facial recognition policies.
In addition, a training session organised by CSaP helped us to sharpen our ability to deliver evidence submissions. This led to a direct conversation with regulators, which in turn led to a keynote presentation for regulators in the area we are working in. Many academics do not properly consider the impact they want their evidence submissions to have, and do not necessarily tailor or adapt their submissions for that purpose. CSaP’s support helped us hone these submissions, generating concrete impact.
"For the Minderoo Centre, CSaP has improved our game and has helped us grow in ways that would have been unthinkable without CSaP’s support."
Another project I am currently developing, that benefited from the engagements CSaP has helped facilitate, is about leading civil society coordination on evidence submissions. The aim is to help inform how civil society can increase the amount and quality of submissions they work on, and we are co-developing this initiative with partners which include the British Academy and the Royal Society.