Meet Senior Fellow Yaso Cordova
A get to know you series introducing the digital HKS fellows
digital HKS is an initiative at Harvard Kennedy School committed to teaching public leaders how to understand the relationship between technology, data, and the public interest by training them to assimilate how to design, build, and engage with digital technologies as they relate to civic participation, equity, governance, and accountability. The fellowship provides a space for thinkers and doers in the sphere of digital technology to explore ideas through research and engagement with the Harvard community at-large.
Yaso Cordova
Yaso Córdova is an activist, researcher, and developer. She held several positions within the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C), and as Web Specialist, she was one of the chairs of the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group. At the United Nations, working at the Brazilian Presidency and Ministries of Justice and Culture, she successfully co-led platforms for Brazil’s participatory lawmaking. She also led/participated in multiple free/open source software projects. Nowadays, she is an active advisor of the Serenata de Amoranti-corruption project, which she presented in the Brazilian Congressin 2017. She regularly writes for Privacy International/Coding Rightsand has won twice the Vladimir Herzog prize,the major prize in Brazil for journalism and human rights. She is a counselor of the Nucleus of Studies on Technology and Society of the University of São Paulo, the Nets_USP, advisor of the nonprofits Open Knowledge Brazil and the Coding Rights Group. She also co-founded the Calango Hackerspace.
For her fellowship with digital HKS, Cordova is currently investigating the relationships between internet, democracy and digital innovation in three main areas:
- Citizenship, identity, and the future of democracy
- Data trading, data flows, and economic fairness
- Messaging apps and political organization
How do you hope your work will impact the world?
The same fragmentation that reached the media space, due to social media and other websites replacing the traditional communication venues, has already hit government institutions. What we see is a profound transformation of the Democracy itself. The result of the crossroads in which we are drowned will define next update in the Democratic institutions. It can be an improvement or it will become further authoritarian. In order to make improvements, we will need decentralised identification, guaranteeing the sovereignty of diverse communities and at the same time the legitimacy of Nations; fair data flows between countries, ensuring that all nations have minimal access to strategic data; and finally, private spaces for political organization, granting anonymous and direct political participation to vulnerable populations at their very own government. I intend to analyse strategies that could lead the path to the right digital transformations on the government, and my hope with that is that we can have a better governance model to diminish the perks of climate change, inequality and other collective disasters of the Digital Era.
Do you have any book recommendations that relate to technology?
- Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway
- A Quarter Century of UNIX by Peter H. Salus
- Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks
Learn more about Yaso’s work by following the links below:
Artificial Intelligence and the Need for Data Fairness in the Global South
