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A 10-week joint program from Techizen and PIT-UN that trains public-interest technologists to assess their products for societal risk, and to ship them with warranty-style assurances of social responsibility.

PIT Product Assessment Lab (PPAL) is a joint program from Techizen and the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN). Over 10 weeks, winning hackathon teams learn to assess their technologies for foreseeable societal harms, refine their designs, and publish a warranty-style statement of the risks they identified and resolved.

Many technology products create societal harms that could have been avoided had those risks been identified earlier in design. The PIT Product Assessment Lab (PPAL) extends the testing-lab model, long standard for electrical devices, automobiles, and cybersecurity, to the full spectrum of technology and the societal norms it can clash with. PPAL is a joint program from Techizen and the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN). Building on Prof. Latanya Sweeney's decades of teaching at Harvard, where student assessments have already shaped laws, regulations, and business practices, PPAL trains the next generation of public-interest technologists to evaluate their own work, and to bring products to market with clear, warranty-style assurances of social responsibility. Each cohort runs for 10 weeks: issue spotting, risk analysis, proposed remedies, and a published statement certifying that identified risks have been addressed.