Thread by @schock

As a faculty member at MIT who is part of the Center for Civic Media community I do have a fair amount to say about the Media Lab and MIT re: what I believe needs to happen to transform these institutions, but I will say it when I feel able to do so.

Just for starters, here are a few proposals that I've gathered from many conversations in the past few days:

* Transparency: public audit of all the money that's ever flowed into the media lab.

* Accountability: concrete steps to redress all specific harms by donors.

* Reflection: public, deep, long term and ongoing reflection about how the institution can do better.

* Stop actively harming people. This includes: resolve active internal problems with sexual harassment, gender bias, racism, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of oppression.

* Put your money where your mouth is: move all ML funds from current investment porfolios to socially responsible funds.

* Ethical screen: create a very clear ethical screen for incoming money in the future, with a mechanism for oversight and review by community-led civil society organizations.

* Make it Viral: in all the startups the ML (& MIT) foster, put mechanisms and support in place to help students create companies that are legally bound to do way better (e.g. make this list viral within all spinoffs that receive ML/MIT support).

There is so much more to say, and a lot of specific harms that are still not public and will need to be addressed.

This is all I can say right now.

Thank you everyone in the ML community who has been walking the talk, especially Signe Swenson and @grok_.

Stay safe. <3<3<3

Note: I'm not at all convinced by @lessig defense of anonymous philanthropy.