Technology & Human Rights Fellow (2026-27)
aleja jimenez jaramillo works toward open, inclusive, and just decision-making about technology. Their current role as the City of Boston’s inaugural Director of Tech Governance and Policy allows him to do this in two ways. From a governance perspective, aleja focuses on facilitating effective decision-making about the planning, development, deployment, and maintenance of technology to deliver exceptional government services. As a policy professional, they seek to clarify what excellent technology work looks like for City employees and enable them to meet that standard.
Prior to their role with the City of Boston, aleja has worked in the education, human services, and startup sectors in roles spanning user research, data analytics, business development, and people management. aleja received his S.M. in Technology Policy from MIT and his B.A. in Neurobiology from Harvard.
Fellowship Project: This project will explore how procurement procedures can be updated to defend against the “technical capture” of public sector institutions by generative AI tools.
Public-sector deliberation is a procedural foundation for protecting human rights. It ensures that decision-making about how the state relates to and mediates relationships between individuals is transparent, accessible, and accountable. In a time of fiscal austerity, governments are rapidly adopting generative AI to speed up, outsource, or skip manual work. The diffusion of these tools across organizations results in “technical capture”, an evolution of regulatory capture in which deliberative authority migrates into privately developed and managed systems that cannot be interrogated, contested, or held responsible. Procurement protocols and requirements may serve as an intervention point to resist this type of cooptation.
This research is being conducted in partnership with NuLawLab’s Smart Human Rights Cities Project.