Entrepreneur, activist and writer Anil Dash, recognized as one of the most prominent voices advocating for a more inclusive and ethical technology industry, will visit NC State to give the 2017 Rolf Buchdahl Lecture on Science, Technology and Human Values.
Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, and today advises major startups and nonprofits, including Medium and DonorsChoose. He is CEO of Fog Creek Software, which has incubated landmark startups like Trello and Stack Overflow, and is now focused on Gomix, a new platform for creating apps quickly. In 2013, Time named @anildash one of the best accounts on Twitter.
Dash’s talk, “Toward a More Humane Tech,” explores the advocacy of having a “moral imagination in a digital sphere.” The Buchdahl Lecture will be held on March 22 from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in the Duke Energy Hall in Hunt Library. The event is free and open to the public.
“We are thrilled to have a thought leader like Anil Dash come to NC State,” said Blair Kelley, assistant dean of Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs at NC State. “He works at the highest level as a tech entrepreneur and is also deeply committed to making his field more accessible and diverse. He consistently challenges his peers to think about the ethical commitments that should undergird their work.
“He’s also incredibly engaging. I first encountered him on Twitter as a fellow avid fan of Prince. In following him, his feed and his larger body of work provide an interested lay person with an important perspective of the current conversations in tech — and some sense, about where that conversation could or should be going in this generation. His work is truly interdisciplinary. at the intersections of tech, music, art, history, and a broad engagement with the public.”
NC State’s Science, Technology and Society program in Interdisciplinary Studies is hosting the public lecture. The Buchdahl Lecture series, inaugurated in 1981, was endowed by a gift from Rolf Buchdahl’s family. The series focuses on issues at the intersection of science, technology and human values. Buchdahl, a retired industry researcher, was a visiting scholar in the Science, Technology and Society Program in the late 1970s.
More on Anil Dash:
In addition to his current work, Anil Dash cofounded
Makerbase, an online community for people who make apps and websites;
Activate, the boutique management consultancy which defines strategies for the most important companies in media and technology; and the nonprofit Expert Labs, a research initiative backed by the MacArthur Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that collaborated with the Obama administration on direct public engagement in policy making.
A blogging pioneer and a unique presence on social media, he helped start Six Apart, the seminal social media company that invented the publishing technology behind many of the earliest and most influential blogs on the Internet. As a writer and artist, Dash has been a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, has had his works exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and DJed the XOXO arts festival.
