The birth of EVA: why we need to trust in tech

It’s time for a rebirth.

Here’s more about the origin of EVA, why I set this up, and where it’s heading.

First, like any good origin story, we need to go back a bit.

It’s Christmas 1999, and this naïve arts graduate is more excited about starting out in the mysteries business of the internet in the music biz than the impact of the millennium bug. 🐞

In my first decade (let’s call it web 1.0), I worked at the sharp end of ‘new media’ (for the unfamiliar: it’s now All. The. Media.). Brochure websites, webcasts and SMS was big.

The ‘Wild West’ days when anything goes. No form, no rules. Even website navigation could be, well, avant-garde. Luckily my degree educated me about Stockhausen. And John Cage.

There was little concept of digital data privacy. Email opt-out wasn’t a thing. Cookies were kept in American jars.🍪

Web 2.0 brought a new wave of creativity. Orgs and their audiences could co-create and connect as equals. I was a consultant in digital and social media. Transmedia was a thing. Much joy seeing freelancers I trained making and publish their promo videos. Gatekeepers be gone! (For a bit, anyway).

At first, we still didn’t think about data privacy.

Now, we’re living in a new wave: web 3.0 (all things AI, blockchain and *ahem* metaverse) offers connections between billions of data points and each other.

❇  We can use these technologies to empower citizens, make services more efficient and better serve customers. But all those data points lead back to a human. And your users are not just data points.

Getting users to trust your tech and use their data responsibly is getting harder.

We need a tech-enabled but human-led approach to communications. And we need to use data and AI responsibly.

I don’t know about you, but this big wave of AI fills me with equal doses of thrill – wild opportunities like the early days of the web – but also dread. I don’t want to live inside the confines of the algorithm. And I don’t want it for the next generation.

So to be part of the solution, I’m giving birth to a new thing.

Introducing EVA – building trust in tech.

I’ll be working with all flavours of organisations using AI and customer data to do it more ethically, and build digital trust with better stakeholder comms.

It’s new. It will evolve. I will bring others on this journey (who knows, maybe you).

To new beginnings.

#trustintech