Professor Johanna Weaver: An Australian University First To Make And Shape Our Tech Future

Ground-breaking courses for people who want a career in making, shaping, and governing tech policy in Australia are set to be offered by the Australian National University’s Tech Policy Design Centre.

Led by Professor Johanna Weaver, founding director of the ANU centre, a pilot course will begin in April after its design has been completed by a combination of industry and government experts.

“When I talk to people who work in technology policy now them about their career paths, most say they have had this circuitous route where they have started in policy or law or very different fields. There isn’t in Australia a curriculum for people who want to have a career shaping the future of technology. There is nowhere you can go and study that,” says Professor Weaver. “So, we are going to establish a course to do exactly that. Initially it will be just professional development courses so 4 modules this year and 4 modules next year. But we are looking to build this out into potentially micro credentials and/or a Master course.”

The Tech Policy Design Centre opened in 2021 to focus on hot button tech issues such as who owns our data and has permission to use it; the increasing influence and power of tech giants; promoting online rights and safety, while protecting against online abuse; and mitigating the impact of misinformation, disinformation, and foreign interference on democracy.

The new courses aim to extend the Centre’s reach, aiming at three target audiences.

“We are the National University, so our target audience is obviously public servants in Canberra; another is people who work within large tech companies on government relations and government engagement; and then the third set is actually technologists. We want to have people who are building the technology. I really believe if we don’t bring those three communities together and have conversations and build a common language among those different communities, we’re not going to be able to build the future that we all want to be living in going forward,” Professor Weaver says.

A passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion, Professor Weaver describes herself as an unapologetic international law nerd and is proudly neurodiverse – as you can tell from her candid but brilliant email sign off below:

“I am dyslexic – expect big thinking and small typos.

“If this email arrives outside of your working hours, there is no expectation for you to respond immediately. Please action within your normal working pattern.“

Before joining ANU, Professor Weaver was Australia’s independent expert and lead negotiator on cyber issues at the United Nations as well as a lawyer who held senior positions in cyber affairs at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Professor Weaver says the new tech policy courses will be unique in content and intention.

“They are not going to be your standard university courses. They are very much going to be inter-disciplinary. Every course that we do will have an applied policy element – so looking at a policy issue that is LIVE, on the front page of the newspapers, being talked about today. There will be an exercise dimension to make the learning practical, for instance we might look at what is Australia’s policy on misinformation and disinformation, and you are asked to role play as if you were in government or industry,” explains Professor Weaver.

Professor Weaver says a key motivator for the designers of the curriculum is to give policy makers of the future the necessary tools to navigate a rapidly changing technology landscape.

“We need give the students the tool kits to be able to interrogate other frameworks and the next set of technologies because we’re never going to be able to teach in a classroom the regulations that keep pace with innovation. So, we need to be teaching and providing the frameworks that allow us to move quickly and at speed of innovation. Therefore, some of the course will be technology focused – artificial intelligence has to be part of it given the year that we’ve just had – but a lot of what we’re doing is about building a framework to give people the tools to be able to deal with these issues going forward.”

Watch Women Love Tech Editor Robyn Foyster’s Interview with Professor Johanna Weaver about her inspiring career below:

You can contact Professor Weaver on her LinkedIn here.