 I'm Nancy Frischberg. I'm one of the organizers of the Linguistics Career Launch, and I'm delighted to introduce all of you in our audience to a good friend, Dana Chisnell, who is also a career linguist. And we're going to try this as a conversation. We know each other well, so we hope other people will jump in and say where we're assuming things between one another that you don't have secret knowledge of yet, but soon. Dana, happy to have you here today. Thanks for inviting me. So you completed what kind of undergraduate degree? I have an English degree from a state school bachelor's degree with a minor in linguistics. All right. And did you ever do any graduate work? Never. Never, see? And you've made a living every year, most of those years. I have somehow managed to not have to move back in with my parents. Okay, good. So how did you do that? What kinds of work have you found? I will start by thanking Robin Baddison, who is in the room, who gave me my first job out of school. I was a technical writer then, and had done a couple of internships. Technical writing was new to the private sector. It was mostly a kind of governmenty thing, standard operating procedures, but suddenly we had computers and people needed to be able to use them who were not computer scientists. And so my first job was actually writing user manuals for IBM systems. And then, you know, things just cascaded from there. Good. So this audience already got to hear from Jenny Reddish, who was part of that organization that you joined as a technical writer. How did you even find your way to technical writing, though? That's an interesting question. There was a career day in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University, where some brilliant woman realized that she had a bunch of English majors who were like, never going to be academics. And if I were going to go to graduate school, it would have been for something like poetry and, you know, literature writing, and that was just like, not going to pay the rent. You weren't going to open a poetry store? No, no, that was not going to be my thing. So she pulled together a bunch of people. It just happened that they were all women who were using their liberal arts degrees in various places in industry. One worked in advertising, writing advertising copy. Another, I forget who else was there now, except for the person who gave me my first internship, who had a PhD in African studies, but was running what we would now call user research and UX design for a computer company. Okay. And she gave me my first internship, so. Excellent. So that by the time you found and applied for this job that Robin was offering, you already actually had some pretty good practical experience. I had some pretty good practical experience, but I learned a lot in my first job. I bet. I really learned a lot right there, so. Right. And the question we're getting from the audience is, is this meeting about language access in government? We're going to get there. We're going to get there. We're trying to let Dana describe herself in her career linguist self, that she was ready to enter into this new role in government, which didn't necessarily exist before. So you were at the American Institutes for Research Document Design Center, and then your next step was IBM. I went for IBM in Sweden for a software lab, where I was still writing a lot of user manuals, but one of the things I got to do was run usability test sessions there. And this was really fun. It was also very hard. But I got to learn how to put a thing, a design artifact in front of its intended and observe what was working and not working, what might be frustrating or confusing to them, and use that qualitative data to inform changes to that content and that design. Yeah. That's a big change in my life. Like adopting that set of skills really launched me in a totally different direction from my earlier writing trajectory. Right. And you were very active during that period and then the next period, I believe, in the Society for Technical Communication. That is true. Yes. I don't think these people have ever heard of that organization. Why would you? So the SDC has been around for 70 years or something like that, like a really long time. And it was the preeminent professional association for people to belong to who did any kind of technical communication. There were also a lot of people who did instructional design who were part of that and a group of us who ultimately ended up being user experience design practitioners kind of bubbled up there and crossed over the chasm. But yeah, I was very active for a long time there. Yeah. My whole thing, and this was an indoctrination that I got at the Document Design Center really, was that we were really thinking about what is the experience the user is having and how are we getting them to a place where they're productive and comfortable and efficient, effective and satisfied with their interaction with this thing so that it is incidental to what they are doing rather than the object of their attention. And this is all happening, by the way, at the same time that computing generally is evolving as more of a mainstream individualized thing. So like, I got my first job at the Document Design Center in 1983, which is the same year that the IBM PC came out. Right, right. So the evolution of technology is important here as a kind of frame around which all these activities are happening. So I want to underscore something you just said, because you and I and probably Robin and several other people here already know this, but I think that many of the participants in the linguistics career launch haven't necessarily thought about as often as we have this notion of letting the interface disappear and just get your work done. That's what our goal is, is that this should be so intuitive where you click next or whatever you do or how to put the right information in a particular form box or and that the computer will accept it the way I put it in because I like to write July 21st, 2021, but somebody else from Europe probably likes the 21st of July. And the computer shouldn't care what dialect of... It shouldn't, but it does. Computers are racist and they're really not aware. And so that is a lot of what I deal with these days to fast forward. Okay. All right, say more about what you deal with today. Well, so to give a few examples of a few projects that have been involved in like, let's just say the last year. Right now I am working on a project to relocate interpreters from Afghanistan who worked with the U.S. government and the U.S. military there. Over the past 20-something years, right? Yes, for the last 20 years. This is surprisingly hard. I'm not... I don't speak Pashto or Dari, so fortunately these people do speak English, but their families don't. And the next people who we relocate will not be interpreters. They will be people who did the laundry and cooked the food at army bases who drove people around who did tasks at the U.S. Embassy. And there are about 100,000 people all together. And so while we are... We have the advantage of interacting with people who have excellent English in this first tranche of folks who were relocating, the next ones will not. And so we'll have to do a lot of language access work to get ready to help them relocate and resettle. So that's one. So are these speakers of Pashto or Dari literate in Pashto and Dari? No, mostly they are not because they don't need to be. Right. So Robin, jump in. Hi, excuse me. I just want to note that earlier in the transcript Pashto and Dari came out as Pesto and Dari, but that's okay. People will figure that out. But I had a question about this particular program you're working on right now. I'm wondering if you would characterize the problems. I imagine there are large problems in this large-scale project to be one of the forms and communication and information flow between these people and government. Or is it a matter of some of the policies that are in place for handling this information? Or is it something about the people in the government and how they're applying their rules for doing things? If you can separate those things out. All of those things make this difficult. So this is a process that was designed by policymakers in the early 2000s after the Iraq war actually to specifically take care of people who were our comrades-in-arms in combat situations directly translating. So this is a super trusted kind of a relationship. And we wanted to make sure that those folks were taken care of. But it was designed to be slow and deliberative and make sure that the security issues were all cleared. And there weren't any sort of counterintelligence issues. And on average people take about four years to get through this process, which is insane. So a bunch of policy decisions made a lot of different government agencies involved. So you go from working for the Department of Defense to applying for this benefit from the Department of State. They do a bunch of silly things and some important things. And they pass you off to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services because immigration, where you fill out more forms, I think there are five forms that you fill out throughout this process. Then you come back to the State Department only now you're interacting with the U.S. Embassy. They interview you. They put you through a deep security check. And then you get a medical exam. And if everything goes okay through all of those things, you finally get a special immigrant visa. And that gives you green card status right away. It makes you a lawful permanent resident of the United States as soon as you arrive at a port of entry. And so there are all kinds of language and linguistics things involved here. For example, none of the forms that you have to fill out in this process actually take into account cultural differences. Lots of Afghans don't know what their birth dates are. But we use name and birth date to identify people in our systems in the United States all the time. Lots of people just go by one name. Or depending on the tribe you're in, lots of names. So are those aliases or are those legal names? Like the concept of legal name is just not a thing. So there's the challenge of having all of the forms in English because by law in the United States the federal government operates in English, even immigration. So you must submit the forms in English. And all of the things that you send as supporting documentation must be translated into English. They're also, we're just completely lacking in any sort of cultural awareness about what could possibly be different in other countries about how people identify themselves and what's important to them in terms of relationships. Another sort of cultural thing is that in North America we have a very specifically culturally defined version of family. And that is not the same in other places. And so it's heartbreaking to have to limit who you can bring with you from a dangerous situation. Or just like a completely different set of considerations. Leaving a young woman behind in a country like Afghanistan as a single person is just incredibly dangerous for her. And so where all this circles back to is there were a lot of design decisions that were made in this process and having folks who are linguistically and culturally aware involved in the teams who are making those decisions could make an enormous difference in the outcomes both for those individuals and for the government. So it even comes down to crazy episodes like how we are communicating with people is through email because they manage their entire case through email. That was also how this process was designed. And so we sent out emails to around 700 people to invite them to relocate in the first batch of people last night. Wow. And the email was written by a task force that involved about 50 people. I'm sure it was lovely. Well it is because we got to do usability testing yesterday. So we got a copy of the email and we found all the people who had ever been refugees in the digital service family. The United States digital service is where I work now in the White House. And it turns out that there were enough for us to show this to and say, okay, sorry to do this, but we're going to put you back at the point where you were a refugee and had to flee. You had to make some decisions. Can you tell us, you know, have a read of this and tell us what this is telling you and what you're going to do next based on that. And that was incredibly helpful to actually sending out a very good message to folks and for getting replies already. So it's great. So I'm going to unpack what you just said because I know what the steps are, but I don't think the rest of the listening audience does. That means you went individually to each one of these people that you found, there may have been six or ten of them, and showed them a draft of the email. They said, if I were still a refugee, I would not understand this line. And that means I would stop reading the rest. And then you would say to them, what did you, what did you not understand about that when you were a refugee? And they would tell you, and then you and your team would go ahead and make some revisions based on that and show it to the next person. That's exactly right. Our other consideration in writing this email was that we knew that later versions will be translated. And so we wanted to get it as plain as possible to set it up and put it ready for translators who could give us other versions. You quickly threw in there this notion that you're working for the U.S. digital service as part of the way out. We are ignorant more. Right. So I am a digital services expert. This is a generic government title. Everybody who works for the digital service is a digital services expert. That gets around a lot of bureaucracy. But the United States digital service is a team of designers and technologists who are working to bring modern practices to the federal government. You can look us up at usds.gov. This is my second tour of duty at the U.S. digital service. I did a first one starting in 2014 through most of 2016 and worked mostly in immigration then and am back mostly at the Department of Homeland Security again this time with pockets of other things. So what that means in real life is that we have cross functional teams. So I'm on a team with a couple of software engineers, data scientists, product manager, a content strategist who else is on this team, policy analysts who partner with leadership in government agencies to solve really difficult problems. This is the hardest one I've ever done. I will say that. But we have teams right now working on implementing new programs from the American rescue plan, for example. So if you have heard about the child tax credit, that was a brand new program that was created by this law passing. We have a big U.S.S. team there helping the program leadership get that going. And so the reason that checks were able to go out from the IRS on July 14th and hit people's bank accounts was because there was a digital service team there helping to design that user experience, including language access. Okay. Let's see. Okay. We're doing well. Now you mentioned your first stint. And I will just say to people, as I've been talking about my civic design experiences, many of them happened because Dana went to the federal government. And so there was an open spot in the organization that she had helped to found. And we overlap enough in our skills that they were willing to take me while they were waiting for her to come back. Yeah, thanks for filling in. Okay. You want to talk about these little booklets? I've talked about them once and I can demo, but... Yeah, these are the field guides to ensuring voter intent. So what got me to the White House was specifically a study that we did at the Center for Civic Design. Actually, it would predate CCD a little bit about websites, county election websites. And this is leading up to the 2012 presidential election. Most people at the time didn't even know that their county had a website, let alone an election website. And so we basically catalogued all of the county election websites that we could find. And then we went out and reviewed 150 of them and made a bunch of observations about what kind of information was on those sites, which we used as a proxy for what local election officials might believe was the most important information for voters to get. As you might expect, Dominant was how to register to vote, which was great. But there were a lot of things that were left off of those sites at the time. So we also did a usability test where we had 40 people individually tell us what their questions were leading up to the election and then go to try to find those answers on their local election website. So I had created a presentation where I was, I'd given this presentation to election officials a lot. They were stunned, of course, at the outcomes because they thought they were doing a good job. They were. They just could do better. But I had the opportunity to give this presentation, not expecting anybody to actually care about it at all, because I was the opener for another super famous UX guy. And they were all there to see him. And it turned out that there were people who worked for the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House who were in the room for some weird reason who got to see this talk. And a year later, I got a call inviting me to the first ever roundtable that led to the launching of the United States Digital Service. But leading up to that point, I had been working in civic design for about 20 years and that was largely in design in election administration. So the government side of running elections, not the campaign side of running elections, which everybody heard a lot more about in the 2020 election than probably they ever had. Yeah. Yeah. And the wonderful differences among counties and the wonderful differences among states and the way that they run elections. Anyway, the one thing I wanted to say to the audience about these little booklets is there are 10 of them. Each of them has 10 hints. And if you went up to your local government official who runs elections and you say, I have 100 great hints for you about how to make everything run more smoothly. And people not ask you those same four questions all the time. They would say 100. Oh my God, I can't even think about it. But when you deliver 10 little hints in one little book, it makes it seem so much more consumable. And so each of the hints is on a facing page. So in big letters, here's a hint. And here's an illustration of the hint. And so for 10 pages of this guide, not the intro and not the outro, but the content pages in each one of these little booklets, there's a description of a, you know, a plain language description of something that would be helpful to your audience. That is voters or election poll workers who are infrequent but very necessary or whoever your contingent help that you hire on. And none of the people who I would not know none, but I think it's pretty easy to say none of the people who are running the county level elections in the US has a design degree. It's extremely rare. I know one. Oh, okay, good. But there are thousands of election officials. So if you go to civicdesign.org and you go to the field guides page and you scroll down, I could share the screen and we can do this, but there's a thing that we call a workbook on language access. We developed this specifically for language access planning and operations for election offices. This was really important for us because we knew we did a whole bunch of field research leading up to developing this workbook, including understanding what more rural counties were doing around language access to support their voters. So in the voter story, in the Voting Rights Act, there is a provision that requires election jurisdictions to provide voting information and ballots in language where languages have tripped 5% of the voting of the population, not just the voting age population. In California, it's 3%. And so we saw this trend of people moving out of large urban areas to more suburban and rural areas where counties have less support and fewer resources for doing this kind of work. And so we wanted to get ahead of that to understand what it would take to help local election officials deliver on real language access. And so we sort of took the model of what's the least you could do from the field guides and created this workbook on language access as well. So you'll see if you go there. And this is an approach that I've ended up using in lots of other language access situations since then. It turns out that it's a good design practice generally. That is like, what can you do now? Once you have that going, what can you do next? And then what can you do later sort of strategically? And that all makes it feel much more doable. The thing that we don't see in larger government agencies, and my experience in the federal government has been like this, is that there's more of an emphasis on meeting the requirements of the law than there is on the experience of the people who you are trying to support and engage in a given process or service. And so they're more reactive. So for example, another project that I worked on in my boomerang back to the U.S. digital service right at the beginning, I came back in the middle of February, was to work with the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Justice, Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Trade Commission, I forget, there was somebody else in there, on a declaration, this is what the government calls this form. It is a piece of documentation that basically says, I can't pay my rent, but I will try, and you can't really kick me out during a pandemic. So the CDC had implemented the eviction moratorium, and there was this piece of documentation that a bunch of lawyers had written to that renters, tenants should be able to sign and give to their landlords to say, look, we have a deal, I will try to pay it back as soon as I can. But of course, when we, I don't like grade level scores on looking at what the level of language is in a thing, how close or how far away it is to plain language. But this thing came in at grade 16, so it was easy to say to the lawyers at the Department of Justice, you know what, we got to work on making this a bit more plain. So we spent two weeks iterating design and plain language on this thing with folks who were tenants, many of them on the break of eviction. And I think we did 14 sessions over two weeks. We tested around 20 different versions of this thing with the lawyers observing the sessions. And then when we got it to a good, usable, tractable form that regular people could read and understand and act on, the CDC translated it into eight more languages. And so those are all available on the CDC website. The really impressive thing is that the CDC has language access operations set up so well, like they're probably best in class in the federal government on this, that they turned around the first five translations overnight. We posted this thing at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, eastern time. And by 8 a.m., the next day, the first five translations were up. And then by the end of that day, the rest of them were up on the website, too. And how they did this, they actually contract with the service that they work closely with all the time. This is not a thing that I would necessarily recommend linguists go do because most of those jobs are really shitty and they don't pay very well. But to be the person on the government side coordinating that activity, making the decision about which languages we're going to translate to, finding folks who can review to make sure that the translation is clear and accurate and that nothing has got mucked up in the meantime, developing controlled vocabularies, both in English and the languages that you are translating to, so that especially for the CDC, when you're talking about health and disease, you can create controlled vocabularies so that you know that if you're only going to do one version of Spanish, that everybody who speaks Mexican or Puerto Rican or Cuban or Colombian versions of Spanish is that they're all going to comprehend it and be able to take the kind of action that you want them to make. And so that was one of the quickest, but maybe, I don't know, the most rewarding projects that I have been able to work on over the last few months. So there's a lot of that kind of work that happens in the federal government. It certainly is not exclusive to that program. Virtually every federal program has some materials available in other languages. The thing that we kind of suck at, actually, is access for people who are hearing impaired. Websites are accessible for people who have low vision or use screen readers. That's not too bad, but if there's audio happening, it is rare that... It's not bad at captioning. It's not good at having sign language interpreters and certainly not having sign language interpreters in languages that are not English. Sign language interpreters for language other than American sign language. Yeah, exactly. Okay, because British sign language is a completely different language. There we go. Okay, we're getting some questions, pragmatic questions here in the chat. And so one person says, if we're interested in getting involved in language access, any advice on where to start? Yeah, it turns out that counties and cities are really good at this. So cities like Boston and Seattle and New York all have language access plans for all of the programs that they deliver to their residents, and they are always looking for folks. So I live north of Boston, and there isn't a department called Language Access, but there is one called Neighborhood Services. And to me, this warms my heart because this shows that there's this awareness that there are pockets of folks who cluster together in communities, and that's where a lot of the language access works happens in Boston. But if you just like Google Language Access, New York, you will end up in places where there are plans and strategies and tools and templates and those. So cities and counties work really hard at this to make sure that everybody who lives there can get to information that will help them live full and rich lives. So that's what I would recommend is get started there. I'm going to recommend that people ask the same question again when Sid Harrell talks tomorrow. Right, because she's very, very active in city and county stuff as well as federal. Okay, here's another one for you. How about opportunities for civic design and digital services expert to learn languages that are gaining enough population to be added to translation services? So, Jordan, go for it. I can clarify if you want. Thank you. I was thinking along the lines of some of the FBI programs that I've heard about where they'll recruit people as agents or analysts and they get an opportunity to take language classes to learn the languages that are of concern to those operations. And I was wondering if the civic design and digital services might also have opportunities like that. So you wouldn't necessarily always be reliant on outside translators or contract translators or whoever they might be that could or could be added to your team as a more substantial role. That's a really great question. Right now we are not working in that direction. Instead, what we are doing is we are specifically recruiting folks who have language skills already and bringing them in. And if we need to cross-training them on things. So for example, a woman I work with is a native Spanish speaker. She came in to work with what we call the talent team, which is basically hiring and human resources. Turns out she's an amazing user researcher. So I am training her on doing user research and ethnographic research to inform design decisions that we are making. But I love your idea and I'm going to take it back to the team and say, let's do this. Wow. Thank you. Full credit to Jordan Lloyd, please. For sure. Okay. Here's another question. Can you clarify this term tour of duty with the immigration service and then with the digital service? Is this like a consulting or a contract position that ends? Right. So for federal government employment, there are a few options. Most people are career, what we call career feds. So they've signed up and they just stay. So there are various grade levels for that. But it is easy to move around laterally also when you finally get inside the federal government. So you can change agencies or departments. And so lots of people do. It gives you lots of options. If you want to do government work, you can also work for a government contractor. Government would not be delivered in any way, shape or form without the private sector doing a lot of the work. But there are also a few agencies within the federal government that operate on term appointments. That's the technical term for a tour of duty. DARPA, which invented the internet, for example, operates on two-year term appointments that are, I think they're renewable once, maybe twice. But the idea is that you're bringing in new ideas to that organization all the time. When we designed the digital service, because I happened to be there right at the beginning, we didn't know whether anybody was going to come to work for this group and we didn't know whether it was going to last. This was originally a pilot program created by the Obama administration in response to the problems with healthcare.gov when it launched in 2013. Turns out there are a lot of other systems that are just like that in the federal government about 30. To appeal to people who worked in tech in the private sector, we thought, well, we'll call it a tour of duty and appeal to their civic mindedness and say, come do public service for a short time. We coordinated with a lot of corporations like Microsoft and Amazon and Google to allow people to take sabbaticals from their jobs, come work for the digital service, and then return to those companies. That's what I mean by tour of duty. Two years was the max then, I think the max now is four. You can move from being a digital services expert at the U.S. digital service on a tour of duty to being a career or a political appointee. So lots of options. Good. Okay. So our time is short because we have another session coming up in a few minutes, but let me just ask a clarifying question here. Do you need to be a U.S. citizen in order to take these positions that you've been describing at the federal level? Right now at the U.S. digital service, you do have to have at least a green card to work in it. Otherwise, the rules are different in different agencies. So check the rules in the agency that you want to go work. Got it. And are you open to being contacted by this lovely audience that we have? Oh, yes, please. Please, please, please do. I assume that my contact information is out there somewhere, but you can always email me at my personal email address at Dana.Gisnell at gmail.com. Right. So if you can spell it, you can write it. And what all of us who have Gmail addresses also know is that dot in the middle is really for the human reader and not for the machine. You can leave it off and it'll still get to Dana only on Gmail, not on other services. Okay. I'm going to say thank you. We could go on for another hour, but I'm going to let you go back and have the rest of your day. And I thank all of you folks in the audience. Stay tuned for another great session coming up. Thank you again for inviting me and enjoy the rest of your day and the rest of the program. And again, really happy to answer questions or have a conversation with anybody who wants to.