The public interest was rapidly adopted and popularised by human rights lawyers in the 1960s and has since been incorporated into other fields such as journalism and technology.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales argues that applying a detailed definition is likely to result in unintended consequences, in Acting in the Public Interest(2012).
Public interest has been considered as the core of "democratic theories of government” and often paired with two other concepts, "convenience" and "necessity".
Public interest engineering is centered around the development of human and environmentally sustainable structures and system.
The U.S. Digital Corps offers internships designed to help build a federal government workforce skilled in using technology to address local, state, national, and global needs.
The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, passed in 2018, aims to improve how the public interacts with information on federal government websites.
[17] In 2023, The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, in partnership with the Rita Allen Foundation announced plans to fund cross-field civic science journalism collaborations intended to build awareness of civic science issues and potential solutions.
Free legal aid for those who cannot afford representation is a well-known form of public interest law in the United States.
[21][22][23] Citizen science involves efforts by everyday, non-professional community members to contribute to and support the development of scientific information in a variety of fields.
Around 385,000 people from 192 countries participated in the four-day program in 2022, and the data is used by researchers to track bird species and direct conservation efforts.
[25] Public interest technology (PIT) shares origins with the field of science, technology, and society (STS), which according to Stanford University, started before World War II and was formalized in the 1980s[26] and combines history, anthropology, sociology, economics, ethics, and other approaches to the relations between social contexts and the practices of science and engineering.
PIT emerged as a field of academic research and action in higher education in 2019 with the establishment of the Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN) by New America.