 So, first of all, hi, I'm excited to be here at my very first WordCamp. Everyone has been amazing. Thank you to the organizers and also to the very trusting people who have allowed me to hold a talk with such a ridiculous name. Really do appreciate that. So today I want to chat with you all about the importance of building diversity within our community and in general among those who build the web and some practical steps to walk alongside those who are different from you. So if we're being honest with ourselves, we're all different from each other, right? We're going to talk about neurodivergence, poverty, trauma, and then after I've thoroughly freaked everyone out, I'm going to provide a few practical steps to work with others. So I want you to, oops, I think I advanced one too many, or I didn't. I deleted my own slides. So okay, I want you to quickly consider what's called your positionality. So I had definition of positionality. Positionality is basically the situation that you grew up in and how that upbringing has created your own identity. So it is usually a social and political context. And then whatever your positionality is, so how you grew up affects your epistemology, which is how you see the world. So since we all grew up differently, we all have a different world view. For my positionality, I am a white, US-born, small town Iowa, heterosexual or straight cis female whose first language is English. A few limiting injuries aside, I have no physical injuries or impediments that would be noticeable in my day-to-day life or my work. I grew up within the Presbyterian or PCUSA Christian Denomination that focused heavily on economic opportunities for low income individuals. I have two parents that are teachers and at a very young age, I am a household run by a single mother where we experienced significant economic barriers. These social and political contexts that I grew up in created my identity either through acceptance, modification or rejection of these ideas and the situations I have experienced. So due to this positionality, my experiences, I have a certain epistemology or view of the world. Because not a single person in this world has the same positionality, all have varying epistemologies. This makes our interactions tricky, exciting, and at times exciting. So before I go any farther, I do want to make crystal clear that simply being born white and in the United States gives me a certain level of privilege. Any topic that I discuss here that is not part of my positionality or my actual experiences comes from the ability to access literature on the topic or from very generous friends who are of a different positionality and have taken the time and had the patience to share their experiences with me. Forewarning, I do get very passionate at times and if I feel like a word is above like the PG-14, I will randomly use the word bunnies. So if you hear references to bunnies, there's probably another word in my head, just forewarned. So going forward, designing the internet, is the internet the great hope or is the great divide? How many people in the 90s and early 2000s remember reading information about the internet as being the great hope for challenging poverty? Does anyone remember that? Okay. During that time, all these articles were released about how the internet could be the great equalizer especially in low income areas in developing countries. The idea was with the ability to disperse information throughout the world, disadvantaged communities would be able to access information and even jobs like never before. However, around 2006, 2010, people realized that those glorious hopes were not being realized. Those able to afford technology watched their opportunities flourish while poor communities, in particular communities of color, were kept from the tools necessary to access the web and therefore to access the opportunities that the web provides. So not only is access to the internet creating a divide, those who have been designing the internet or the web, I guess is probably the more accurate way to say it, so all of us in the room, we're not always closely linked to each other because we span across the globe with hugely different positionalities and barriers and experiences that are invisible and less divulged. In other words, even if we do not necessarily connect to people who are in poverty, do we even connect to people that we think we are connecting to? The first group of individuals, oh, hey, there's my positionality slide, quick lance there. So the very first group I want to discuss is those who have a unique yet invisible trait, those of you who are in the neurodivergent community. So those who are neurodivergent have a special brain chemistry that imbues them with unique abilities but can also make it very difficult to follow cultural norms. So there is both biological neurodivergence and acquired neurodivergence. So many are more familiar with biological neurodivergence, predominantly ADHD and if you are on the spectrum. Our work in creating the web, a world within a world, often attracts those who are neurodivergent. The thrill of problem solving, creativity can be especially fascinating to the neurodivergent community. At the same time, the neurodivergent community is not well understood by neurotypical brains. Neurodivergence often requires very clear answers, sometimes even a yes or no, and certain social cues might get lost, especially over the written word. Acquired neurodivergence is a little less known, so it occurs in two main ways. A medical situation or an emotional experience that alters the pathways of the brain. Acquired neurodivergence can be permanent or it can heal partially or fully over time. A great medical example would be a brain injury. I want to focus however on emotional acquired neurodivergence, especially around the topic of trauma. I will go into general trauma later and why it's so important to understand trauma in our communication during this time of the COVID recovery, but I want to touch first on post-traumatic stress disorder, which is more commonly known as PTSD. It is estimated that six out of a hundred people in the United States have PTSD based on reports alone, meaning that only those who have come forth and been diagnosed are counted in this number. Many people who have PTSD are never able to seek assistance. An estimated 3.6 percent of adults in the United States have acquired PTSD in the last year alone. It affects women more often than men, with an estimated 5.2 percent versus 1.8 percent. The effects of PTSD vary greatly from individual to individual, but in general, having PTSD means experiencing moments that seemingly hijack your brain. Being unable to process memories, difficulties in focus, and trusting others. It's not uncommon to be scared most if not all the time, and it's very easy to doubt every interaction that you have. PTSD is invisible and certainly makes communication difficult. So what can neurodivergence look like in an everyday interaction? So I'm going to draw on my personal experiences here. In terms of biological neurodivergence, I am going to share an experience with a coworker and friend who I spoke to and got permission to share this experience with you all. I'm a project manager. I work with the most wonderful diverse group of developers. I'm a better person for knowing each and every one of them. They are very patient with me about my lack of technical knowledge. They teach me and sometimes they even call me down when stressed. So shout out to Chris, my colleague, who is always just like, breathe Cassandra, breathe. Their steadiness and clarity balances my passion and straight up giddiness. And while I truly love them as friends and colleagues, and I'm sure they care for me as well, we annoy the absolute bunnies out of each other sometimes. Some of them might be neurodivergent. I don't know. And it really isn't important that I know. I know that we communicate differently and that sometimes it gets messy. So my department is pretty consistently 150% over capacity. One time we had an employee from another team assist us project managers part time. She was on a particularly difficult task of mine. And I saw a comment from my developer teammate from whom I got permission to share this. I am good friends with him. He is the uncle to my kittens, right? So very truly one of the kindest guys I have ever known. I was not thrilled at his comment though. And I sent him a message that was like, hey, why are you being so rude here? She's helping out. And he said, I'm just laying out facts. How would you have said this? And I was like, okay, well, in my nice indirect, I want nice language. This is how I would say it. And he completely shocked me with his answer. He said, I honestly do not see the difference. I cannot tell in the written word. I cannot understand emotion most time in the written word. And so this is likely neurodivergence talking is at the very least indirect, first direct communication, which in itself leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding messy, right? By the way, if you have this struggle, my friend has continued to deliver information the same way, but he just adds an emoji at the end, like a little smiley face to soften the delivery, to change the tone of the text. Acquired neurodivergence is pretty hard to identify at times. So that was an example of more biological. Acquired neurodivergence is the PTSD that I mentioned earlier. You can know someone for years and not know that they are navigating life while experiencing emotional trauma that has resulted in acquired neurodivergence. So two and a half years ago, I left a domestically violent relationship at the height of COVID. It involved leaving two small children for whom I had been full time mom for several years. And while the strongest thing I have ever done and will ever do in my life was leave that situation, it broke my brain. My brain just broke. It stopped working. I could not stop thinking about these incidents. I could not recall memories. I slept all the time and I was looping. So I would say the same thing over and over and over again. And while it certainly has gotten much better, almost two and a half years later, it's still not the same. I don't know if it will ever get completely better. I do know that having that glimpse into a world that others experience every day has made me a better person. And I'm grateful for that. So collective grief and trauma and why this matters. So why PTSD matters, why neurodivergence matters, and why understanding grief and trauma matters. This is my favorite meme from Twitter, probably ever. If you are listening and unable to see the slide, I will read it to you. It says, friend, while over the phone, do you think the quarantine has changed you? Me, while knitting a dress for the raccoons in my backyard? No. Right? This is a hilarious example, but it is amazing how much our life experiences change us and how difficult it is to detect these changes in ourselves even when asked a direct question. So types of trauma, this is just a very quick overview of trauma. So you have what's called acute trauma, which is one example. This could be being robbed, being in a car accident, for example. You could have chronic trauma, which is more like childhood abuse or domestic violence. You could have complex trauma, which are different traumas that map on to each other and begin to remind you. So for example, say that you were in a situation where you experienced childhood abuse. And then you're in interactions where you experienced workplace abuse, and they will remind each other. And the situations will become interlinked, and you will not be able to separate them. That is an example of complex trauma. And do remember that complex trauma can result in neurodivergence. So can result in your brain not feeling like your brain. If you've not had the opportunity to learn about trauma more than this, I want to suggest that you take time diving into TED Talks and literature on the topic. I really suggest that you go and take what's called the ACEs test, which stands for Adversed Childhood Experiences, because especially if you underwent trauma as a child, you might be surprised at some of the information that is provided, and it might perhaps provide you with much-needed grace for yourself. If you did not have significant trauma as a child, it can help you understand another layer of these invisible barriers with those whom you interact. So we are in a situation right now, all of us in this room, where we are experiencing a form of historical trauma. We all have gone through COVID. Everyone in the world has been undergoing COVID. This is absolutely one of the largest shared experiences I hope that we will ever have. Besides world peace, world peace would be great, I'd be so for that shared experience. It is not the same as other types of historical trauma, which are usually within a certain group. For example, the Holocaust was a shared trauma, a historical trauma, for the Jewish community. We of course have slavery in the United States that was a historical trauma whose effects still continue today, genocides, et cetera. So historical trauma will look different as we're experiencing this, but we still have trauma in a way each and every one of us. I was speaking to someone last night and they were like, oh yeah, COVID was great for me. And I was like, how did you feel about not getting to see your friends and family? Oh, that wasn't so great. I am personally very nervous standing here. I have not been in a group of people for a very long time. I certainly haven't done any presentations in a very long time. So I'm experiencing a type of trauma, just simply trying to reemerge into a world that I used to be very comfortable in. So why does this matter? Has anyone heard of trauma responses? Is that something that people are familiar with? Okay. So if you've experienced trauma, you sometimes respond to situations in a way that comes from your trauma rather than from your original thinking brain. So it might be that some people describe it as the knee-jerk reaction, like, oh, I can't believe I said that, right? I just reacted. It is more common for us in this historical trauma moment to have those knee-jerk reactions. And you know, I am watching it happen over the internet every day, oh, Twitter, Twitter with the doom scrolling, right? Just people really getting at each other, feeling criticized and reacting. And maybe people were sensitive before, but you are certainly more sensitive once you have experienced trauma. So throughout the internet, when you interact with people, when you interact with people that you're working with or clients, those trauma responses are real and they exist. So all right, this is my midpoint. You're freaking us out. What do we do? Slide. I grew up watching The Simpsons. I love The Simpsons. So this was just mostly for me, honestly, right here. It's really overwhelming when you think about all of this. When you think about poverty and racism and structural inequities, it is very, very hard to think about practical steps you can take. So I wanted to give some very, very practical steps that we can take in our community and outside of our community. And so the very first one is to literally check yourself. And something is happening, reflect back, am I being a jerk? Could I be nicer? Are they being a jerk? Do I just think they're being a jerk? Just take a deep breath, reflect, check yourself. So I don't know if this was common before I was at my work. We have some kind of explosive clients right now. They are very scared. I am sure that if you are sitting in the audience and you have business sense that's greater than my own, you are wondering what the economy is about to do. So we have some people who are like, I could die any minute. Let's go all in. Let's do it all. And they are full in. And then we have other people who are like, I experienced real hardship during COVID. I am terrified. I do not want to lose my home. I want to make sure there is food on my table and I need to step back. So if you are experiencing clients changing their minds back and forth, keep that in mind that this might be a type of trauma that they are working through. So colleagues, your interpersonal relationships with your colleagues and those trauma responses I mentioned, I certainly do have trauma responses. And I fully admit that sometimes I have knee jerk reactions. And I am very, very lucky that I have a group of individuals who are supportive and can walk me through those. I'm not saying I flip out on people. I'm just saying that it is not hard to misinterpret. It is very, has anyone in here ever been misunderstood? If you all don't raise your hands, then you are just tired. We have all been misunderstood. We have all misunderstood others. So just give yourself that second to just pause and think. I know we're a highly efficient community. We want to go, go, go, go, go. It is okay to pause. Embrace your ignorance. You are ignorant. I am ignorant. We are all ignorant because you absolutely cannot possibly have the same experience as everyone else. You are going to be ignorant in something. That is okay. That does not mean you're a bad person. I really want to stress, and I apologize, I did not figure out how to say her name ahead of time. Pecha, Pecha maybe is having a talk, was that close? Okay, thank you, of developing cultural intelligence. And if you're interested in that, I want to highly encourage you and tend. She looks amazing, and she will probably go into a lot more detail about this. But please remember, as you interact with people across the globe, that they have different cultural practices at work within their family, within their friends. Even if you are interacting with someone who looks very similar to you and grew up in the same area and has the same religion, they are still different. You still do not know what they have been through. So you also don't know what's happening. You don't know if their cat just died or they're going through a divorce. You just don't know these things, right? We actually don't walk around with hashtags over our heads like hashtag neurodivergent, hashtag survivor, right? You don't know these things. So don't assume. You can be best friends with someone, for example, of another race or culture, all your life, and hear hours about their experiences, and you will never get it. You will just never understand. I have a very patient, wonderful friend who is a black woman who lives in Florida. And she has explained to me some of her experiences, and while I am horrified, I will never understand what it is like to be her. She can talk to me all day, every day, and I will never get it, because I still get to walk around with my white skin and my white privilege. So speaking last night, it was very interesting with Alan, right Carol, whose technical skills are far beyond my own. He's a software, he was talking about software, and he brought up the importance of learning different software languages, because if you only learn one, then it's difficult to identify what other specific languages, what is very specific to that language, versus what is kind of universal to different software languages. And I think that's a great example of cultures and languages. The more you learn, right, the more you understand the beauty of uniqueness and diversity, and also how things are different. If you are listening to this, and I just have to make this comment, if you are listening to this and you are white, especially if you are a white male, and you have felt the defensiveness flick up, send it to the back seat. You did not create this unjust, racist, unfair world. You do get to challenge it. You do get to look every day at others as equals and try to rip down this unfair system and rebuild it. And especially those of you creating the web, you get to do this for others all around the world, and that is super important. So I could not leave this talk without talking about assessments. So some people are very data-driven. They connect better with data, and that's great. As an anthropologist, I have to tell you, I hate personality assessments with like every inch of my being, right? I feel like personality assessments are more reflective of those who create them than those who are taking them. If you ever have a consultant that wants to start with a personality assessment, maybe reconsider that consultant for the record. There are great things to pull from certain assessments, though. So the two assessments that I want to suggest if you're interested in assessments and taking is the Strengths Finder Assessment and the Disk Communication Assessment. When I say take, I mean it's great when you take the Strengths Finders, because you're like, oh, hey, I can put this on my resume, someone said what I can do really easily right here, talking points, woohoo, that's awesome. More important is looking at your strength and realizing how it ostracizes other people. So how your strength makes it difficult to connect to others. And I will give you an example from my own Strength Finder. So input is one of my strengths, and I, sorry, I have to read this because it's not from my own brain. You are likely to archive, that is preserve, your discoveries so you can use them later. Because of your strengths, you see yourself as highly qualified to perform specialized tasks. Undoubtedly, your uncommon vocabulary distinguishes you from the ordinary person. Normal language, by the way, ordinary person, thumbs down. Adding words to your professional vocabulary indicates that your knowledge base is expanding. As a result, you can converse more easily with experts about a subject. Furthermore, you can understand what they are saying to one another. So I'm a smarty pants, that's awesome. I'm cool with that. I'm not cool with speaking in a way that ostracizes other people. And makes them feel like just because they don't know my specific vocabulary, that they somehow don't understand what I'm talking about. I have to be very intentional to use language that is not set only in my field. It is so easy to bring the ivory tower into your real life and wrap yourself around with people that only speak your language. Don't do that. You're missing out on so many wonderful things when you cannot communicate across the board. That's a big problem of mine. I really have had to work on that. I have other areas that I also need to work on, and you can look through my Strengths Finder and you can easily find them. So if you decide to take the Strengths Finder, you know, thumbs up, you got some help on your resume there, right? Also look at what you might be doing to others based on your own strengths. The other assessment I like, which is a great one, is the Disk Assessment. So Disk is just more or less how you communicate. If you're a dominant communicator, if you're an inspiring communicator, if you're supportive, or if you're cautious. I will tell you absolutely your life experiences change your communication style. I took this Disk Assessment several years ago, probably like five or six years ago, and I was a strong D. So I was dominant speaker with an S, supportive. After going through domestic violence, I am much more on that CS. Black people frequently are within the C category because they are taught to make space for white people to talk. And physically, step back so that white people have space. So if you're white and you're speaking with a person of color, please shut up and let them talk. Give them space. It is not a person of color's responsibility to push themselves into a conversation. So building a diverse community to reflect a diverse world. Is anyone in here into ADA? Does ADA work? No? Maybe? Sort of. Oh, hands. Thank you. Thank you for raising your hand. So I have just recently learned about ADA. I have a developer on my team who is very kind and has even shown me things like the Wave tool. And he actually has spoken to me about his desire to, from the onset, as you are even speaking with clients to design products, websites, et cetera, from the very beginning, make it about ADA. The clients are trusting you. So present the information as if it's absolutely vital. Very important. Very, very, I would hope simple thing to do. But something that we need to become part of our cultural norms is to build things from the onset in the framework of ADA. An equitable world means implementing equitable practices within our whole system. So it's not only about hiring to check a box, like the diversity box, like, hey, we did some diversity. What's up? What's up? That's great. But you actually have to design a world of equality by providing tools that are meant to increase equality. And this is when I am going to slightly get on a soapbox. So the whole adage of, like, well, I wanted to hire a woman. I had a binder full of women. Sorry, Mitt Romney. You're never going to get away with that. None were qualified. I wanted to hire a person of color. None were qualified. There are whole workshops that break down the preconceived notions based on prejudices. And I am not qualified to give that talk. I encourage you to go to one of those talks. But if you're insistent that this is the case, that there are not qualified people of color to be hired, then you need to make a pathway. So I used to be in the nonprofit world. And I was doing economic impact programming, which is a fancy way of saying using volunteers to help kids read was a big thing. And there is a company. I was in Manatee County, Florida. There's a company called ITWGSE. They are aerospace engineers for the government. And they have been donating to the organization with whom I worked for years. And they wanted to be more involved. So we created a system for them to have people rotating to volunteer to read with children. And they weren't exactly sure if they were making a difference, I think. At first, they really got into it, and that was great. But over time, they built these relationships with the school. They got to know the populations. By the way, I believe, I did not look it up, I believe Palm View, the school is about 80% children of color, mostly the Latinx and Latinx and Black children, high second language learners in that area. So over time, they created these relationships with the school. They started helping the school apply for technology grants. And now they have this little known funding called the WASNIAC grants, which I'm hoping I said correctly. And people are hopefully understanding a little bit maybe what that means. So this school that was so horrifically underfunded has now been provided technology for children who are hoping that they have meals when they leave school. And their parents are being provided with support to not only teach their children but learn themselves. And that came from a company deciding to read with children. I think it's about seven years later, but you can build pathways. You can choose to build pathways. If you're not sure how to do it, if there's not a non-profit or an agency in your area that can help you do it, you have my information. I would be happy to help you do it. I cannot imagine the number of lives those five volunteers who started out will change over the course of time. So we want to drive people toward equity through education, support, and being so creative that you come up with something that people just they want, they desire to have. Put effort into equity, put heart into equity, and let creativity drive equity. Try to understand each other. Try to understand that you can't understand each other. I think it's easiest to understand people when I'm like, I have no idea what you've experienced. I like you. You're a human. You matter. If you're uncomfortable with this, good. I'm uncomfortable with this. I have placed myself in communities that I used to work with migrant workers. I worked with a group of migrant workers from Guatemala who had fled to the United States. They had put their youngest children and older adults into a city in Guatemala City because the village next to them had been slaughtered. So they moved everyone in, came to the United States. Some of them had tuberculosis, I think. No access to healthcare, food, and they would send all the money they could back to Guatemala. I don't really care what your politics are. You can't understand that. You can never understand what it's like to flee your hometown into a world that probably is going to hate you. You can't get it. So I was with them, and I'm still terrified to step in it when I talk to other people. I am so afraid I'm going to be insensitive, and you know what, that's okay. It's okay because the alternative is to isolate myself and not try to understand, and that is unacceptable. Everyone in this community is so kind. I told people this was like my first word camp, and I was like scared out of my socks about speaking. Don't worry. Everyone wants you to do well. You're going to be great. It's totally fine. Awesome. More people should get to experience this. We are not diverse until we have 51% people of color in these rooms. We are not diverse until we are openly ensuring accessibility. We are welcoming. I have to say I did not work this into my talk. The trans community, we see you. We're here for you. We need to be more vocal about it. This community is beautiful. Please don't keep it siloed. Please try to understand each other. My boyfriend has ADHD. I have learned a lot. I am certainly, he also has a podcast about it if you're interested. Talk to me about that later. If you want to make the world a more equitable place, you can. It's hard. It's a long road. We have a long way to go. If you want to make people feel accepted and loved, you can. You can. So use your voice. Use your power of designing the web to create as beautiful, diverse, and maybe even terrifying a world as the one we live in. Thank you so much for coming. And please feel free to, you know, at me or email me or whatnot.