At CAT Lab Summit on New York State Tech Policy, a Call for Listening

For most of us, daily life depends on government data of one kind or another. Your payroll taxes (or unemployment check), the bus schedule, your property taxes or medical bills—all of these are generated from or through government information systems. The links between those government systems and the lives of local residents were the primary subject of CAT Lab’s October 2025 Summit on New York State Technology Policy.

How does policy shape the use of technology by state agencies, by doctors and city planners, or by students instructed to surrender their phones during school hours? As importantly, how do officials determine the policies that govern technology? Who is in the room when policy is developed? Whose experiences are considered? And who is watching to make sure the resulting rules work as intended?

Keynote speaker Senator Kristen Gonzalez, who chairs the N.Y. State Internet and Technology Committee, told the group, “When it comes to government, it’s about trust. What does it mean for a New Yorker if they can’t even trust the information they’re receiving from their local government?”

At the heart of CAT Lab’s mission are the “relationships and collaborative models that ensure that technology serves the public interest,” CAT Lab’s Deputy Director Elizabeth Eagen told attendees. By promoting research that centers the experience of communities, CAT Lab works to “foster practical working relationships between researchers, communities, and legislators.”

Safety and public trust aren’t built from regulation alone, but from how people see themselves in the infrastructure we are creating.
— Shannon Dosemagen, Senior Fellow, Open Environmental Data Project

The one-day Summit held in New York City was curated around that interdisciplinary approach: Political leaders, civil servants, and policy experts sat with community advocates, educators, doctors, and tech researchers to consider issues such as public service delivery, medical data, and police surveillance. “Today isn’t about CAT Lab,” Director Nathan Matias said at the outset, “it’s about all of you. We want to zoom out and ask how we sustain trust and join up community, policy and research to make technology equitable and make it work for people.”

In one session, education researchers from the Virginia governor’s office and Sesame Workshop talked with a high school senior and a teacher about New York State’s new school cellphone ban. Citing one of the benefits for his school’s community, the student, Shok Samiev, noted that since phone use went down, attendance at student clubs and extracurriculars has gone up. The teacher, Chris Kazim, said he now has his “loudest classroom in 10 years,” which he takes as a positive sign. But Shok said he wondered whether a ban during school was a “band-aid” for mental health issues, since “a  lot of the terrible things that happen online, such as cyberbullying, tend to happen at home, after school hours.” He also mentioned that, at his own school, students had found a way to break the magnetic seals securing the phones “on Day One” of the ban.

Reality checks like these reflect the spirit of the day’s conversations. Across the disciplines represented, from research and medicine to law and public service, attendees agreed that it is community realities that drive good technology decisions. “The people who are the closest to the problem,” said longtime NYC Analytics Director Martha Norrick, “have the best ideas, or at least the experience to help you not waste your time.”

But expertise and lived experience don’t always connect comfortably. In a session on public health information, Dr. David Scales acknowledged that when scientists “decide what is dangerous or not,” it isn’t always easy integrating community knowledge beforehand. Citing his recent research paper with Cornell’s Claire Wardle, Advocating for a community-centred model for responding to potential information harms, Scales asked, “how do we flip this relationship” between science and community, “so the experience is where it should be?”

If you want young people to participate fully and authentically in research, it’s important to tell them “the why,” what it will be used for. Otherwise, you have to take the results with a grain of salt, because it’s just another assignment.
— Shok Samiev, H.S. Student

Echoing Senator Gonzalez’s call to strengthen trust, panelist Shannon Dosemagen said “deep community centered investment,” should drive policy design. “Safety and public trust aren’t built from regulation alone,” said Shannon, a senior fellow and former executive director of the Open Environmental Data Project, “but from how people see themselves in the infrastructure we are creating.”

Shok Samiev put the same advice a different way. If you want young people to participate “fully and authentically” in research, he told us, “it’s important to tell them ‘the why’ of the research, what it will be used for.” Otherwise, he warned, “you have to take the results with a grain of salt, because it’s just another assignment.”

And while public trust in government and policy is a rising—even existential—challenge in the United States and globally, Summit attendees also noted that in any research process, trust flows two ways. As CAT Lab has said throughout its study of community science, institutional cultures and structures often create barriers to the acceptance of participatory research.

Speaking between sessions, Maya Williams, Director of Research and Policy at NYC’s Commission on Racial Equity, told CAT Lab’s Lucas Wright about the central role of qualitative findings in the Commission’s work, using community-based research, for example, and community conversations. But she said that decision-makers still give greater priority to quantitative data, even on more subjective issues like mental health.

In response to Maya, Dr. Duncan Maru of the City’s Bureau for Equitable Health Systems described the same challenge in epidemiology—another field where information, belief, and subjective experience are vectors that exist alongside biological and environmental influences. Epidemiology “has a history of being authoritative,” Duncan said, “and it’s hard for health departments to think about information as a multi-directional phenomenon.”

Efficiency is not legitimacy, and the job of creating legitimacy is held collectively.
—Elizabeth Eagen, Deputy Director, Citizens and Technology Lab

Across the panels and conversations throughout the day, the challenge of authentic listening was a recurring theme. And on the large pads CAT Lab posted for participant input, multiple comments mentioned ensuring feedback loops with communities. “Avoid the absence of response,” one note read. Another recommended “sharebacks” with the public following any community conversation. “We’re not very good at listening,” Claire Wardle said during the session she led. “And even if we do,” she continued, “we’re not very good at saying ‘Thank you.'”

The Summit’s final session, “Optimizing for What?”, asked what measures can effectively track the success of a technology policy for communities. The answer, unsurprisingly, was complicated. Justin Hendrix, CEO and Editor of Tech Policy Press, questioned common assumptions about “the legibility of outcomes for tech and tech policy. There’s this expectation you can create the perfect model of analytics.” But the world of policy does not always generate clear-cut “artifacts” to be observed. “Laws are written by politicians, not by scientists,” he said, which “arguably is a good thing, because politicians make normative judgements.”

In other words, the “noise” that foils easy measurement may be as much a feature as a bug in tech policy. Tracking policy results requires data, but panelist Chinmayi Sharma of Fordham School of Law returned to the simple point that “government does not do a good job of organizing and handling data.” Speaking from the intersection of governance and technology, she added the sobering reminder that over American history, the pendulum has swung in the public’s perception of science. “We love smart people,” she said, “then we hate them.” Therefore, media has an especially important role “identifying emerging trends and broadcasting them in a digestible way for those affected,” she said.

Scott Babwah Brennen, Director of NYU’s Center on Technology Policy, organized and led the “Optimizing” panel. He said that, inevitably, “policy will remain a political process. Both evaluation data and results will always be the subjects of political contestation and negotiation.”

In the tensions between science and policy, between data and communities, there is no resolution, only balance. As the Summit closed, Elizabeth Eagen called on participants to continue seeking a balance between efficiency in the development of tech policy (and products) and the authenticity and accountability that can only come from continued listening. “Efficiency is not legitimacy,” she said, “and the job of creating legitimacy is held collectively.”

Policy will remain a political process. Both evaluation data and results will always be the subjects of political contestation and negotiation.
—Scott Brennen, Director, NYU Center on Technology Policy

Multiple Summit discussions spilled over into the reception, which in turn lasted until the staff at Cornell’s ILR Center needed to close the venue.  CAT Lab Director Nathan Matias said that energy level is a good sign. “An effort to deliver ideas that can matter in people’s lives depends on the relationships and opportunities that emerge in conversations like these,” he said.

The Summit was a next step in CAT Lab’s ongoing work to enshrine community experience deeper in the technology policy process. “Tech policy is usually driven by the latest thing,” Nathan said, “but change takes time—as does science. So how do you stay in for the long haul? If you really want to make change, you invest in research efforts that persist, and you invest in people.”