After listening to Hard Fork this week, am playing around with NotebookLM, Google's new AI tool designed around "sources" uploaded by users and developed in collaboration with Steven Johnson.* Am excited that Google Labs is back and also, I agree with Casey Newton that NotebookLM is very "old school google": geeky, experimental and niche.
Listening to the podcast encouraged me to play around a bit with NotebookLM so here are some results. Sadly I think that sharing the notebooks themselves is limited to specific signed in accounts, so am provided a few podcasts and notes in Google docs. LMK if that's not true and I'll link to the complete notebooks.
First, I was about to visit the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunkers from which UK military command worked during the World War II. As a sidenote, they are really interesting. Especially the Map Room, which reminded me a lot of the way the Situation Room in the White House is a data collection hub in addition to a place for national security meetings. They also have a recreation of a July 9, 1944 Chiefs of Staff meeting debating Churchill's suggestion to consider bombing small German towns in retaliation for German bombing of civilian targets in London. That recreation is interesting both for the substance they discuss and also because it is very similar inn form to thousands of meetings I have been in, from a product team trying to decide whether to implement Sergey Brin's latest feature idea, to the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights team figuring out whether to make a West Wing suggested change in the document. Seeing that recreated was great.
Anyhow, before going to the War Rooms I printed to PDF three Wikipedia articles about Churchill, London in World War II and the Blitz and plugged them into NotebookLM. The resulting notebook was interesting and somewhat useful (here's some output from the notebook and podcast it generated). The podcast in particular was less of a primer than an bit of additional colour, though when I asked specifically for the notebook to tell me what I should know before visiting, it did a good job of summarizing some basic facts (see the end of the output document). I tried similar things for an upcoming Berlin visit including a set of web pages that focused on the history of Hitler's rise to power and a separate group focused on the airlift, the wall and the cold war in Berlin. These were also worth the time and interesting.
Then I split this blog up into 20 pdfs and uploaded them. That project was less successful. The podcast is cringeworthy and the notes are of varying quality.* Perhaps this is unsurprising given the really diverse set of posts I have up here. Seems that NotebookLM does better with documents that are thematically aligned or different descriptions of a single phenomenon. On the other hand, I liked that NotebookLM is not shy in saying when a source does not answer whatever question I asked (see the end of the notes doc).
In all, I enjoy these specific purpose built AI tools. I'm glad for the whimsical podcasts being added to a relatively dry product, even though I'm not sure they have a purpose. I'm thrilled that Google Labs is back and is trying stuff (I hadn't noticed before now). I'm not confident this is a thing that I'll keep using beyond the novelty but I'll keep playing around with it and seeing what sticks.
* !!! Really excited for this because I'm a huge fan of his work. If you haven't already read his books, I recommend either Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation or Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software as starting points.
** I tried it again from my non-Google Workspace account and got a very different set of results. I think these are substantially better, though still contain some straightforward errors. It could be that the NotebookLM running for Google Workspace accounts is different than the one running on regular Google accounts, so your mileage may vary.
Notebook LM
Posted by A M on 9/30/2024 0 comments [ Labels: ai, google ]
Google Timeline to Countries and Dates
I recently needed a list of all of the countries I had been to and the dates I was in each. Naturally I thought of my Google Timeline (formerly "location history") as a way to do it. Google Timeline is a data store of all the places you have been over time. It is extremely detailed and, at least for me, seems relatively complete. To view yours, go to your timeline.
To get your timeline in a form you can manipulate, you can use Google Takeout, Google's data portability service (big kudos to Fitz and the whole Google Takeout team). My file contained over 2.8 million locations, so the first thing I did was used geopy to throw out any locations that weren't at least 50 miles apart (see code). That left ~12,000 entries. For each of the 12,000 entries, I rounded them down to reduce calls, then used geopy to reverse geocode (look up the street address based on the latitude and longitude), threw out everything but the country, and outputted any change with a date (see code).
This was somewhat similar to a project I did more than six years ago, though Google had changed the format of its timeline file, so I needed to rewrite it. It should be pretty easy to also produce a country chart, but I haven't done that yet.
I continue to believe that data portability will not take off and be demanded by users until there exists useful things to do with the data. Hopefully scripts like these can help contribute to that.
Posted by A M on 2/26/2024 0 comments [ Labels: code ]
Biden Admin Artificial Intelligence Executive Order & OMB Guidance: Some thoughts & a calendar
Take what I say here with a grain of salt because my old team worked on this (and I worked on earlier iterations and the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights).
Now that I've had a chance to read the U.S. AI Executive Order (here's a version of the order that prints in fewer pages) and the accompanying -- and equally important -- Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Draft AI Guidance, I wanted to share a couple of thoughts and a calendar to help folks who are tracking the various deliverables assigned in the AI Order and the OMB AI Guidance.
President Biden speaking at the AI Order signing ceremony. |
Much has been said about the size of AI Order but what struck me about it was its willingness to contain tensions. It has provisions dealing with concerns about AGI and existential threats as well as the current and historical harms from AI that are impacting people now. It has numerous specific provisions that are more national security focused and also many that are more typical of domestic policy and equity. It has a number of provisions that may impose burdens on new entrants to the AI space but also provisions that would radically lower barriers to entry. It addresses numerous AI harms but also contains provisions that recognize and seek to catalyze its benefits.
All of this speaks to the nuanced understanding of AI that exists in the federal government from President Biden to the various folks working day to day on getting the Order together. I believe that's a product of greater tech fluency throughout the White House and federal agencies and the way the White House has prioritized AI policy.
Another striking thing about the AI Order is the sheer volume of deliverables it launches. I'm going to want to see what becomes of them, so I made an AI Order and OMB AI Guidance Calendar (and in iCal). It might be helpful to you too. You can import it into your Google or iCal calendar. Please let me know if I got a date wrong or missed one.
The calendar only contains entries tied to dates and contains one hundred entries. There were a lot more actions that eitherstarted immediately or were not associated with a date by which they had to be done.
In creating the calendar, it was also striking that the AI Order requires some deliverables that are quite distant from today. I'm generally pretty skeptical of requirements far in the future for the reasons Jen Pahlka describes so well in her great book Recoding America.
I will add more entries from the OMB AI Guidance once it is finalized but for now the calendar contains the most important one: December 5, 2023, the date that comments are due. There is a helpful guide to commenting on the Guidance as well as a Regulations.gov page for submitting comments. Please consider giving it a read and submitting comments.
I'm excited that the AI Order and draft OMB AI Guidance are out in the world and look forward to hearing what folks think about them.
A good group of the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights team posing together at the AI Order signing ceremony. |
Posted by A M on 11/08/2023 0 comments [ ]
My Time in The Biden-Harris Administration
I recently (ok, not that recently) left the Biden-Harris Administration after serving in a variety of ways over the last few years. Initially I was part of the transition team. Then, after a break, I became Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy US Chief Technology Officer (CTO), in the Office of Science and Technology Policy through the wonderful National Science Foundation Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Directorate. I'm grateful for the time I had in the administration, the phenomenal people I got to work with, and the impact we had together.
Joining the small but mighty CTO team in the fall of 2021 was quite different from when I held a similar role in the Obama-Biden Administration. For one thing, I was joining at the beginning of an administration, not the end. For another, President Biden had learned a number of lessons during his long career and time as Vice President that led his administration to keep a rigorous focus on the priorities President Biden had outlined on the campaign and to prioritize effective implementation of policy initiatives at the highest level. Finally, from a tech perspective, the government in 2021 was different than in 2014.
The first US CTOs extended our government’s capacity to use technology effectively and brought tech expertise to White House policy making. In 2009, few agencies used modern technology fluently. Many career techie civil servants were pushing for change but were met with the various forms of resistance as Jen Pahlka details in her exceptional book, Recoding America. The first three US CTOs, Aneesh Chopra, Todd Park, Megan Smith and their teams were successful in a wide array of policy areas. They opened data sets for transparency and innovation, championed expanding digital medical records, helped increase access to broadband, brought more tech expertise to policy tables, and much more.
They also made significant strides, working with many others at the White House and across government agencies, in building the capacity of the federal government to deliver modern technology. That included helping to create the US Digital Service, the Tech Transformation Service, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, and supporting the creation of agency digital services (e.g. the Defense Digital Service, Health and Human Services Digital Service, etc) and the transformative work of the federal and agency Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Data Officers (CDOs).
One of the most exciting things about being back in government in 2021 was how different it was from 2009. In 2021, there was significant tech expertise in all of the White House policy counsels, from the Domestic Policy Council, to both the National Economic Council and National Security Council. Even without counting the excellent CTO Team, the Office of Science and Technology Policy had significant technical expertise in its other divisions – including Alondra Nelson’s incredible Science and Society division. Both Alondra and Arati Prabhakar, two of the three Office of Science and Technology Directors during my tenure, were highly technically sophisticated. In addition, leaders at agencies across the spectrum were increasing technical fluency at all levels.
Senior Staff at the Office of Science and Technology Policy circa May 2022. |
Furthermore, the centralized tech experts at the US Digital Service, Federal CIO, and GSA were – and still are – thriving under strong leadership of Mina Hsiang, Clare Martorana, and Robin Carnahan. Many agencies have digital services groups of their own, while others have bulked up their CIO, CTO or other offices to more aggressively pursue strong digital service delivery. And, if you looked into the teams working on the biggest problems, such as climate change or COVID-19, you’d find strong tech experts.
I love walking meetings. This is staged for the White House photographer. In real ones I wouldn't be wearing a suit. With me are two wonderful members of the CTO team, Ismael Hussein and April Chen. |
While the government environment was changing, the CTO team’s core mission remained the same. Our priorities were to build tech capacity and advise on policy, all in the service of delivering on the President’s agenda and delivering results for the American people. The CTO team still works hard on establishing good tech policy, including in the areas of artificial intelligence, digital assets (cryptocurrency), privacy, platform regulation, advanced air mobility, web accessibility, broadband access, wireless spectrum policy and in many other areas. Also, under the leadership of Denice Ross and now Dominique Duval-Diop in the role of U.S. Chief Data Scientist, we had the privilege of continuing to support federal data science expertise, including in the development of equitable data that can be used to ensure government benefits and services reach those who need them the most and that data science is a key part of policy implementation.
Delving deeper on the team’s artificial intelligence work the US CTO team was deeply involved in President Biden’s work on AI. The team helped draft and launch the landmark Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. We spearheaded the Biden-Harris AI CEO convening that resulted in a set of commitments from the largest AI companies regarding AI. We led, hosted or participated in the various White House AI processes to create federal AI policy as well as subsidiary policies such as the National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan. We put forward the National AI Research Resource to ensure public sector participation in AI research and development. We also hosted the National AI Initiative Office, the federal coordination body for AI policy. That comprehensive approach to AI is similar to how we approached other policy areas.
There is still a ton of work to do and the leadership team now in place on the US CTO team is phenomenal. Deirdre Mulligan is the Principal Deputy US CTO and is someone I’ve wanted to work with – or for – for more than 20 years, Austin Bonner is Deputy US CTO for Policy, Wade Shen is Deputy US CTO for AI and leads the National AI Initiative Office, Denice Ross is now Deputy US for Tech Capacity, Dominique Duval-Diop is US Chief Data Scientist, and Nik Marda, the longest current serving member of the CTO team, is the Chief of Staff. Working with each of them, and the rest of the CTO team is what I miss most about having left the administration. Watching them take the team in new directions will be the best thing about sitting on the sidelines.
Zoom tiles from a meeting of the CTO team. |
Our third US CTO, Megan Smith, sometimes joked that the CTO team’s job would be fundamentally different when there were as many tech experts in all the rooms as lawyers or economists. That dream imagines a government that always delivers services effectively, efficiently, and equitably on behalf of the American people. A government that understands, and can keep up with, technologies and the disruptions they create to mitigate harm and ensure that people can maximally benefit from our phenomenally innovative nation. I was privileged to be able to work towards that dream.
P.S. Now is a critical time to come into government as a techie. The potential to make a deep positive impact on the lives of people is huge. It is also a time of tremendous opportunity because of President Biden’s genuine empathy in understanding people’s needs, as well as his focus and excellence in execution in delivering on their behalf.
If you are interested in getting involved, please consider applying to join the United States Digital Service, Tech Transformation Services, Presidential Innovation Fellows,US Digital Corps or the broader set of government technical jobs on the Federal Tech Jobs Portal.
One of my favorite views. When leaving around sunset, there would often be a murmeration of starlings near the edge of the South Lawn with the Washington Monument in the background. |
Posted by A M on 10/24/2023 1 comments [ Labels: usgov ]
The Last Four Years
I haven’t shared an update here on what I have been up to since the end of the Obama Administration, so now’s a good time to write some of this down.
Like many, I was extremely worried by Donald Trump’s election to the Presidency. Doing all I could to get to a different result in 2020 drove much of my work since 2017. I also tried to extend my non-profit work and grow my fundraising ability because I came to the sad realization that my fundraising ability is worth at least as much, if not more, than my strategic advice to the non-profits I care about (and I am not very good at fundraising).
All of the projects below were overlapping, and most were not full-time. They combined to be a ridiculous amount of work sometimes, and nearly no work at other times. The list below is in somewhat chronological order.
- Thanks to Megan Smith and Tom Perez, I got to help bring in Raffi Krikorian to be the first Chief Technology Officer of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Tom understood the value of tech and how badly Democrats were being beaten in this regard. He helped re-up tech within the DNC and the team has done amazing stuff under Raffi and Lindsey Schuh Cortes, and now Nellwyn Thomas and Kat Atwater.
- Thanks to Mike Yang, Haley van Dÿck and Mikey Dickerson, I helped found Alloy.us and was its General Counsel for the first year. Alloy’s mission was to help improve data and technology for the progressive ecosystem. We were originally focused on legal data sharing among progressive organizations and campaigns, but once the Democratic Data Exchange (DDx) got up and running, and based on feedback from potential users, we shifted to improving basic data availability and update frequency, as well as voter registration. The wonderful Kendall Burman took over as General Counsel on January 1st, 2020. Alloy is now in talks with CiviTech to have them carry on our mission. I’m thankful for the incredible people we were able to hire, many of whom I had not met before, and for the fact that Alloy seems to have had a positive impact on the election and Georgia runoffs through its set of partners.
- While working on the tech and data side for Dems and progressives, I also got drawn into, and did some funding of, and fundraising for, a wide set of organizations and candidates. One of the most amazing things to come out of 2016 was the incredible set of new organizations and candidates. The narrow 2016 loss to the person who would become one of the worst presidents in American history was also a catalyst for a bunch of more established organizations to do great work. I am really grateful to the many, many people who shared their wisdom and time as I was getting up to speed (I still am). I am also grateful to the folks who did the work of registering a record breaking number of new voters, helped to elect good candidates, including President Biden, and then protected those victories against the efforts to undo them. Before 2016 I had no idea of the richness and variety of people and organizations that are part of the big tent of the progressive community and Democratic party. It looks chaotic at times, but I was constantly blown away by the talented, committed people who work in politics. Many do so without much compensation or limelight, and nearly everyone I met shared a basic common purpose that was tied to getting real benefits for people.
- Thanks to Eric Goldman, Adelin Cai, Clara Tsao, and Denelle Dixon-Thayer, I got to help found the Trust & Safety Professional Association (TSPA) and the Trust & Safety Foundation Project (TSF). I’ve wanted to do something like this for fifteen years but it took others to push for their formation. I had the good fortune of getting to know some great Cognizant folks, including Kristen Titus and Davis Abraham, and many others while fundraising for TSPA and TSF. And then I got to talk to many old friends and make some new ones as we considered who would be the perfect first Executive Director. I couldn’t be happier that Charlotte Willner took the job. Being so immersed in a community I have been around for a long time was deeply satisfying. And the collective “FINALLY!!!” we heard on launching underscored to me that community building is important and should never be put off.
- I’ve also spent a good amount of time working as a Board Member at Creative Commons and Data & Society. They are two great organizations from which I have learnt a lot. I am the Board lead for fundraising at both places, and so have been asking many of my friends for money to support their wonderful missions. Being a Board Member is also something I am still learning, and I have been thankful to get to watch others who are better at it than I, and to have such an intimate view of these two very different organizations during these exceptional times. I still also exist as a fanboy for the work that Creative Commons and Data & Society each do, so it is great to feel like I am helping them achieve their goals.
- More recently, thanks to Yohannes Abraham, DJ Patil, David Recordon, Ginny Hunt, Mina Hsiang, Eric Hysen, Clarence Wardell and many others, I was lucky to get to work on the Biden Transition (and with my old friend and mentor Nicole Wong). That was a huge privilege and again underscored that working with a great team, on hard problems, with one clear purpose is a wonderful experience. I am so pleased for the folks who are going into government (and will try to write more about some of them soon). If you want to learn more about transitions, Transition Lab is a fabulous podcast and episode 46 (!!) is with Yohannes.
I would not have thought in 2016 that I would have spent a large portion of the next four years in politics and political tech. Nor would I have thought I would have helped found three non-profits. So while I continue to be on the Board at Alloy, Creative Commons, Data & Society, TSPA and TSF, I really don’t know what the next of these updates will look like. After President Biden’s heartwarming inauguration, I am very hopeful for us all.
Finally, if you got this far and are wondering what to donate to in the new year with the hellishness of COVID still in full swing, please consider using this tool to find your local food bank and donate. I have a longer and slightly older list of COVID charities here, but know that many are having a very hard time getting basics like food and shelter, so please be generous.
Posted by A M on 1/21/2021 1 comments [ Labels: about, politics ]
First Amendment and Earlyish Content Moderation
This thread got long, so here is a perhaps more easily read copy of it:
One thing that came up on #InLieuOfFun that I didn't get the chance to answer was @klonick asking about whether the earlyish content moderation was based on "First Amendment Norms." I think the answer to that is a bit more complicated than it may seem.
1/
Am speaking from my experience at Google (outside counsel 2000-3, inside 2003-9) and Twitter (2009-13). Others may have used different approaches.
2/
By "First Amendment Norms" I take @Klonick to mean that the platforms were thinking about what a govt might be OK banning under 1st Am jurisprudence in the US.
Of course, the platforms aren't govt & 1st Am doesn't speak to what govts ban, only what they cannot. But still...
3.1/
To restate, "1st Am Norms" might be something like platforms ~only~ removing what was removable under US 1st Am jurisprudence ~and~ had been generally made illegal in the US (or elsewhere if doing geo-removals), irrespective of 47 USC 230.
3.2/
First, lots of content removal was simply not cognizable under 1st Am analysis. Spam was a significant issue for Google's various products & Twitter. I don't know of a jurisdiction where spam is illegal & it is unclear whether a govt banning it would survive 1st Am.
4.1/
Nevertheless, spam removal (both by hand and automated) was/is extremely important and was done on the basis of improving user experience / usefulness of the products.
4.2/
Similarly, nudity & porn were sometimes banned for similar reasons. Some types of products (video) might be overrun by porn and be unwelcome for other uses / users if porn was not discouraged through removal, especially early. And yet, the 1st Am is quite porn-friendly.
4.3/
There were also some places that might look like they fit 1st Am norms but were really the platforms deferring to courts. For example, a court order for the removal of defamation would result in removal (irrespective of §230 immunity).
5.1/
You can square that w/ 1st Am norms but the analysis was not based on what types of defamation or other causes of action the 1st Am would allow, but rather deferring to courts of competent jurisdiction in democracyish places.* <- this last bit was complicated + inexact.
5.2/
Where we refused, it was often about fairness, justice, human rights, or jurisdictional distance from the service, not the 1st Am per se.
5.3/
All of that said, I do think there were times when we look to the 1st Am (and freedom of expression exceptions more generally) to try to grapple with what the right policy was for each product.
6.1/
For example, understanding what types of threats we would remove from Blogger, we used US precedent to guide our rules. My memory is hazy as to why, but I believe it stemmed from two factors: (a) that we felt that we were relatively new to analyzing this stuff but that
6.2/
the Courts had more experience drawing those lines, and (b) that the Courts and Congress, being part of a functioning democracy, might reflect the general will of the people. These were overly simplistic ideas but that's my memory.
6.3/
In summary: while I think there is something to the idea that 1st Am norms were important, I think the bigger impetus was trying to effectively build the products for our then users -- to have the product do the job the user wanted -- within legal/ethical constraints. But...
7.1/
But, we did all of that from a particular set of perspectives (and that's what the 1st Am norms are probably part of) that was nowhere near diverse enough given the eventual reach and importance of our products.
7.2/
I'd love the read of others doing or observing this work at the time on whether I'm misremembering/misstating @nicolewong @goldman @delbius @jilliancyork @adelin @rmack @mattcutts @clean_freak @helloyouths @dswillner +many more + those who aren't on Twitter… (please tag more)
8/
And, in case you want to see the question I'm referring to, from @Klonick on #InLieuOfFun look here at minute 22:11 (though the whole conversation was good):
https://youtu.be/oYRMd-X77w0?t=1331
9/9
Posted by A M on 5/07/2020 0 comments [ Labels: expression, law ]
Product Counsel: Origin Story
This post is co-authored by Nicole Wong and I.
We both set to work trying to figure out how to help Googlers launch successful products that were legal (at least in the countries where we operated). We each had some experience with this as outside counsel, and we were both pretty unsatisfied with the typical model of legal review for products.
That model was taken from big companies which historically treated legal review like part of an assembly line (towards the end). The product teams would develop products and then check in with a line of legal subject matter experts for sign-off before launch. For example, a product that matched people to their perfect pet might get designed, written, tested, and be ready to launch when it was then taken for review by a commercial lawyer for the terms of service, an intellectual property lawyer for trademark and copyright clearance, a patent lawyer in case anything new had been invented, a regulatory attorney for regulatory compliance (sometimes including privacy), and maybe an export control lawyer and a similar set of experts in the countries where the product was launching. Law firms are typically departmentalized in similar ways, aligning along legal subject matter specialization, and consequently smaller companies who don’t have in-house counsel often need to hire multiple specialized lawyers.
There are four major problems with this process:
- legal approval in each area is binary and too late: by the time the product is built, there is a large amount of pressure to launch with little ability to make more than cosmetic changes to the product;
- legal approval is too fragmented: a product might need several different legal approvals (or rounds of consultation and then approval) from in-house and/or outside counsel. That would take too long and be very inefficient for a product team, which would have to explain the product to each new counsel. On top of that, no counsel would be able to weigh risks across domains to come up with more holistic tradeoffs.
- legal would understand the law but not necessarily the product: dividing up legal counsel by area of legal specialization means that each lawyer has a depth in law and a breadth in products.
- legal becomes “them” versus the product team’s “us”: last minute binary review by people who don’t know the product or the product team unnecessarily forces misalignment between the team trying to get something done for the users and the business, and the lawyers. That misalignment can result in all sorts of bad, from simple misunderstandings to adversarial behavior.
This approach is not without downsides. Perhaps the biggest is that product depth can come at the expense of legal depth, which meant that we sometimes incurred costs working with outside counsel and experts in legal areas and countries outside of our expertise or missed legal issues. However, we remain convinced that the vast majority of significant mistakes in-house departments make in our industry are the result of not understanding the product rather than not understanding the law. Another downside is that while being part of the “us” of a team is satisfying, can result in a much better understanding of a product, and better teamwork in identifying and fixing problems, it can also mean you are in the team “groupthink” as opposed to removed from it. Careful attention must be paid to all of the ways to reduce groupthink and it is imperative that you actively seek input from folks outside the bubble if you are going to effectively understand the various impacts your product decisions are likely to have in the world. We found it really helpful to discuss product features with advocacy organizations and they frequently improved the products. But, there were also definitely times we screwed up.
The actual role of “product counsel” grew out of the fact that our previous job descriptions didn’t make much sense given how we were doing our jobs. So we started thinking through names. Originally, we liked “launch counsel” because it was active, aligned with what our teams were trying to do, and could describe a bunch of different areas of law. Eventually we settled on “product counsel” because it was even more descriptive of the alignment we hoped for, and was tied to the whole lifecycle of a product from idea generation through maintenance and refinement, not just launch.
Our first job posting was in February 2004. It read:
Google is looking for experienced and entrepreneurial attorneys to develop and implement legal policies and approaches for new and existing products. The Product Counsel will be responsible for a portfolio of Google products across many legal subject areas including privacy, security, content regulation, consumer protection and intellectual property. Indeed, the only product legal matters with which this position will not be deeply involved are those that are strictly patent or transactional in nature, which are handled by other existing Google lawyers.
Requirements:
Passion for and deep understanding of internet.
Very strong academic credentials.
Solid understanding of Internet architecture and operation.
Ability to respond to questions/issues spontaneously.
Demonstrated ability to manage multiple matters in a time-sensitive environment.
Strong interpersonal and team skills.
Excellent interpersonal skills, dynamic and highly team-oriented.
Flexibility and willingness to work on a broad variety of legal matters.
Superior English language writing and oral communication skills.
Sense of humor and commitment to professionalism and collegiality are required.
California Bar
=======================
Note the many mistakes in that posting. For example, the Internet is referred to with both lower-case and upper-case capitalization (back then I was incorrectly not capitalizing it). Ug.
Even so, we were very fortunate to recruit an amazing set of folks at Google to become the first Product Counsel. Some of the originals who defined the role were: Glenn Brown, Trevor Callaghan, Halimah DeLaine, Brian Downing, Gitanjli Duggal, William Farris, Mia Garlick, Milana Homsi, Susan Infantino, Daphne Keller, Lance Kavanaugh, Courtney Power, Nikhil Shanbhag, Tu Tsao, and Mike Yang (in alphabetical order). The team was eventually about forty-strong by the time we left and worked across many countries. The idea of it spread relatively quickly in the industry and now LinkedIN lists thousands of product counsel.
Product Counsel, particularly when we were still doing it and not just managing people doing it, was one of the best jobs we have ever had.
Posted by A M on 4/20/2020 1 comments [ Labels: google, law, practice ]
COVID-19 Donation List
Update: @mredshirtshaw has a good thread on a number of South Dakota Tribes' COVID-19 funds. She points to South Dakota because of the lack of a shelter-in-place order there.
Refugees and Displaced People
Update: A friend who knows more than I do about refugee issues points to the following two orgs:
International Rescue Committee, Signpost Project [donate]
EIN: 13-5660870
Signpost is designed to help refugees get good information during the crisis which the IRC's president says is one of the most pressing problems.
Refugee Advocacy Lab at Refugees International + International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP)[donate: Refugees International or IRAP]
EINs: 52-1224516 (Refugees International) or 82-2167556 (IRAP)
Matching refugees with healthcare experiences with states that need healthcare workers and the certifications they need to practice, thereby helping both.
Update: The Reform Alliance has a special COVID-19 action page to attempt to get governmental attention to this problem. Thanks @rklau.
Domestic Abuse
Children
Miscellaneous and Support
Other Good Writeups & Resources
Update: Isaac Chotiner, The Danger of COVID-19 for Refugees, April 10, 2020.
Q&A with David Miliband, the president and C.E.O. of the International Rescue Committee about the specific issues raised by COVID-19 in refugee communities where he highlights disinformation as an important issue.
Posted by A M on 4/16/2020 1 comments [ ]