IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 23

is a call to address and account for technology's
short- and long-term impacts within social, political,
environmental, and cultural domains.
Technological stewardship stands as the corollary
of this mindset: a commitment to anticipate and
mitigate technology's potential for disruption and
especially harm and to guide innovation toward beneficial
ends. Adopted from the domain of engineering
ethics, where it " involves taking a value sensitive
approach to embedding ethics, sustainability, and
EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusivity) principles into
the practice and culture of engineering " [3, p. 34],
technological stewardship belongs to any who would
take up the mantle. The term has been championed
in recent years by the Canadian-based Engineering
Change Laboratory. The laboratory has developed
a technological stewardship practice program that
prompts students in tech (and tech-adjacent) fields to
learn about and reflect on the role of tech stewardship
in their personal and professional lives. To be a
technological steward means to be committed to an
ethos of care: to understanding the systematic impacts
of innovation and its philosophical dimensions, and
to cultivating the capacity to apply this knowledge to
drive development into new realms of humane engineering
and design. To be a steward is to see care as
the foundation of one's professional identity and not
as an add-on or bonus. Technological stewardship is
therefore about an optimistic turn toward the future
of more responsible innovation-about recognizing
the possibility for technology to transform culture and
civilization and to steer away from the maelstrom of
unfettered innovation.
The task of putting into productive language the
concepts that underpin this ethical turn in innovation
discourse and practice has frequently been
taken up by scholars with disciplinary homes in the
humanities and social sciences-fields adjacent to,
but often siloed from science, technology, engineering,
and math (STEM) disciplines. Because change
and action often depend upon a shared vocabulary,
this work, along with its dissemination beyond nontechnical
audiences, is vital to the broader project
of fostering a widespread culture of technological
stewardship. Indeed, dialogue and collaboration
across diverse perspectives (be they disciplinary,
economic, cultural, or otherwise) is essential for
developing actionable technological solutions that
attend in responsible ways to the evolving needs of
today's society.
September 2022
In light of this nexus of interrelated values and
goals, the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on
Technology and Society (ISTAS21), the flagship conference
of the IEEE Society on Social Implications
of Technology (SSIT), offered an exciting opportunity
to call together a diverse group of academics
and professionals to discuss their novel and timely
approaches to problems that have been broadly
conceived within this responsible innovation/technological
stewardship/ethics-focused framework.
The ISTAS21/ETHICS-2021 " Scene "
" ISTAS21: Technological Stewardship and
Responsible Innovation " was jointly hosted by the
University of Waterloo and the University of Guelph
(Ontario, Canada) from 28 to 31 October 2021.
Ongoing COVID-19 concerns prompted the organizing
committee to run the conference as a fully
virtual event, and although participants missed out
on in-person socializing opportunities, the online
venue enabled the largest ISTAS to date. Over 550
participants were registered, including just over 200
presenters, more than 65 volunteers, and representatives
of over 175 different institutions and organizations
from around the globe. Thanks, in part, to
generous contributions by conference patrons, over
150 students were able to register for free, providing
a valuable opportunity for the upcoming generation
of tech professionals to hear from and engage with
senior scholars and other leading experts in the conference's
six thematic focus areas: automation and
artificial intelligence (AI), health systems, privacy
and security, technology policy and governance,
sustainable cities and communities, and ethical and
human values in emerging technology.
The ISTAS21 program featured:
five keynote
speakers, whose talks covered the full breadth of the
conference's themes; 14 special sessions, several of
which were organized by partner organizations at
IEEE and the Universities of Waterloo and Guelph
(and are now available for viewing on the SSIT channel
of IEEE.tv); 20 paper panels, work from which
is published in the ISTAS21 Conference Proceedings;
and five networking events targeting students
and young professionals, which were organized in
collaboration with student groups at SSIT and the
University of Waterloo. These sessions offered participants
valuable opportunities to explore contemporary
issues in the conference's often-interdependent
focus areas. Highlights included keynotes on: equity
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https://engineeringchangelab.ca/technological-stewardship/ https://attend.ieee.org/istas-2021/partners-patrons/istas21-patrons/ https://attend.ieee.org/istas-2021/program/ https://attend.ieee.org/istas-2021/istas21-speakers/ https://attend.ieee.org/istas-2021/istas21-speakers/ https://attend.ieee.org/istas-2021/partners-patrons/partner-organizations/ https://ieeetv.ieee.org/channels/ssit

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

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