 Welcome to our session at the Linguistics Career Launch of Summer 21, a session called Civic Tech. I'm the moderator and I'm going to host, my name is Nancy Frischberg, sorry. I'm an organizer of the LCL and I'm also being, I wanna recognize Marcus Robinson as our Zoom producer today. And he's gonna keep track of what's going on in chat and provide any kind of technical support that we might need. And without further ado, I'm excited to introduce all of you to Sid Harrell, who's going to tell us a little bit about her career from linguistics into Civic Tech and how they might be related and how you might be able to join her. Go for it, Sid. All right, hi everyone. It is so exciting every time I run across someone who is a linguist in the field or a linguist aspiring to the field and they're not so scarce on the ground. Hopefully I did the double thing where I talked and shared my screen. I am a user researcher by core profession, but here in industry, things are awfully fluid. So sometimes I'm also a product manager, but I've worked in the tech industry since depending on when you count it around 1993 and around 2010 I made a shift into this field called Civic Tech. So what are we talking about? Civic Tech is a branch of tech that aspires to make our public digital goods as good as the ones, but different because the values and goals are different that are made by commercial entities that are really good at this. So if you feel that booking an Airbnb or getting a stream of a movie from Amazon when you're quarantined and can't go anywhere is a good digital experience. We'd like more public spirited, good digital experiences at that level and we want public digital infrastructure to be better as well. Put another way, we want to access services we need and exercise our rights and build our communities with ease that the best digital technology can offer us. And there's an explicit goal to build modern digital capacity within government which doesn't always have it. If you have in the past year and a half tried to get unemployment benefits or know someone who has tried to get a COVID test, tried to register for a COVID vaccine, tried to figure out what the heck is going on with COVID vaccine proof. The work of doing those things well is a big part of civic tech but civic tech characterizes itself a little bit as an outside field trying to work inside. And that's a big part of why linguistics has been important in my practice. So government tech tends to be running what you might call an IT model where there are people who do program and there are people who do IT. And IT does things like fix the printers and copiers and for a long time, government and institutional folks have thought of that as a subordinate function that is kind of done over in a corner and that program folks shouldn't have to deal with. There's a very separate culture which calls itself tech as opposed to IT that is kind of what tech product companies practice. It's got its own problems for sure but it is good at producing technology that actually serves a goal. These two cultures have overlaps and clashes and so a lot of the work of civic tech is all about shifting practice and shifting the conversation inside of institutions. It's a ton of bridging. So I'm gonna say we end up negotiating vocabularies all the time between practice communities that think of what they do as very different and in some ways do things that are very different. One of the biggest uses of the sociolinguistics classes I took has been learning how to facilitate across major power dynamics. The ability to pull together a meeting that has maybe a departmental secretary of government agency and someone who works five levels below her in the IT department and a vendor and a bunch of mid-level career bureaucrats and an outside technologist, I believe would be much harder to do if I didn't have that educational background. The other interesting thing that's coming up more and more is being a smart and capable judge of what a computational version of a process can do. So in the work that I do with the California courts right now, there's a lot of people who would really like to sell machine learning chatbots to courts to answer people's legal questions because courts don't have a lot of resources for service staff to help people get through the process. And I know from my background or from my work in tech that this is incredibly hard to do well and there are a lot of important prerequisites to having a corpus of language that you can actually make an effective machine learning chatbot out of. Furthermore, the reality that if you ask three lawyers a question, you'll usually get three answers, means that it's not really suited to being able to tell a chatbot, yes, that's the right answer to a question phrased this way. You inferred the intent and now we're good to go. So it's been incredibly useful to have a linguistics background in doing this. If you think about the scope of this work just in the United States, we don't just have a federal government. We have another 25,000 or so government organizations once you start thinking about every government, including some of the tribal governments that have done the best work in COVID vaccination and in fact in COVID websites without close connections to these technology industry practice communities, including the water boards and regional transit bodies and all of this, every single one of them has some online interface to the public that probably could be better than it is now. One of the sticky things is just figuring out where to work to affect the thing that you want to affect. So a lot of us don't think about government in layers but this is from a table in my book where you can educate yourself on which levels of government from city to county to state to federal actually do what functions and figure out the way to work with the organizations and agencies that do that. And a lot of what we do, there's service delivery which you probably think of. So that's the unemployment applications. It's also much less fraught things like you need to sign up for swimming lessons with your city. There's a lot of infrastructure work in getting data opened and named and classified and published as appropriate, creating APIs and so forth. There are specific products that would only be used by government organizations like things for first responders. There's a lot of mutual aid work for things that don't need to involve the government but that can strengthen a community in disaster response or just connection. And then there's quite a bit in the citizen engagement either planning or election tech area. And you can join a volunteer project anytime you want. There are a number of government digital groups at different levels. So you've probably, maybe if you're in the US heard of US Digital Service or 18F, there are similar groups in six states and growing and many or most large cities have a team that does this kind of work too. There's an ecosystem of product companies and there are also consultancies, many of which were started by people who worked on the healthcare.gov rescue and decided to try and put forward a better model of government consulting. And then there are just mutual aid groups that could use all kinds of help. These are just a few of the really strong practice groups in the field and there are a lot more out there. I could edit this slide very often if somebody comes in the waiting room, it takes away my arrow control. We're getting some books, that's exciting. We are a new field where maybe 12 or 13 years old depending on when you count. I wrote one of them, yay me. It's available everywhere and the ebook versions are pretty inexpensive. And it's an onboarding guide if you're interested in the field. So what the heck do I actually do as a civic technologist? I thought I would talk a little bit about project that I've been working on for three years with the court system of the state of California. It's a big court system, seven plus million cases a year and about 80% of the non-criminal cases have at least one side that doesn't have an attorney involved. This very quickly becomes a mess because the court system while intended to be equitable and impartial and to protect everyone's rights is designed as if everyone has a knowledgeable advocate who can speak for them and act for them. And when people arrive in the court system without that knowledgeable advocate, they have a very hard time pursuing processes that are designed for experts with many years of graduate education and so forth. And that then slows down the operation of the courts as well. And it often means that the outcome isn't the fairest outcome that you could have because somebody misses a technicality because they don't have a lawyer and then they lose something that really if they had had a lawyer, they would have one. The court system has this kinda 2003 era website on the left and our work starting to move it along for its 2010s era practice on the right is part of what we're doing. But a really interesting thing that they have every county court and we have 58 counties in California already has a center where anybody can get basic legal help and they can often get it in multiple languages. Some really impressive language practice. The San Francisco Self-Help Center will help you on demand in English, Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian and Filipino. And they do most of it before the pandemic with clipboards and ballpoint pens. And have a sort of like come down with a line, get a clipboard, eventually meet with one of our folks in the language of your choice and we will help you fill out court forms. That's not great for everybody. San Francisco is small. A lot of people can get to the courthouse where the center is. It takes something like four hours to drive across Fresno or San Bernardino County further south in the state. And there's not a lot of public transit options. So the in-person model becomes inequitable and during the pandemic it became unsustainable for almost every court. I wanna point out that a constant feature of civic tech is getting told that you don't know anything. After my first seven years or so in the field I had my first day with the courts after I had been at Code for America and 18F and I proudly told them that I had some experience in a way to sort of, I thought say that they could trust me. And they said why do we care if you have government experience? We're not the government. And sitting in this state government building talking to a bunch of people whose email addresses ended in .gov, I thought that was really strange. But I knew how to take feedback and ask a question in return. And this will come up in a minute but one thing that's really important to the courts is the value of impartiality. And the government is very often a party to a court case. So they managed to identify themselves as not the government and it's really important. And everybody refers to what the judiciary is as the branch. Well, here in the branch, we do X. It's a branch-wide standard that we don't give legal advice via the self-help centers. We only give legal information, which is another bit of language torture that I have some issues with. But if you want to always feel like an expert it is not the field for you. Luckily I did have some practice to fall back on. So in the fall of 2018, our team went out to 20 of the 58 courts to spend a full day shadowing the clerks who received court filings and intercepting people in waiting rooms, waiting for assistance and having semi-structured interviews with them enticing court staff to show us the best taco place nearby so that we could get some unfiltered information from them while they were out of the building and collecting packets of sort of folkloric homegrown form instructions that have been created in every court. And it's going to court without a lawyer feels overwhelming and prohibitive and like you are not allowed to do much and you might not be in the right place and if you do something wrong it's gonna be a big deal. Court behind the scenes is way more organized and less chaotic but extremely 20th century. People are using Xerox machines and physical stamps to enact work that actually directly affects people in the real world. So it's a rich, fascinating environment for kind of language actions and when something actually changes from a speech act to a real world act. We are in the end working on a website. That sounds always boring to tech people. They're like, oh God, a website, old technology, why? Well, there's a lot more to a website than it seems. So we are taking legal language and turning it into plain language and at the same time trying to establish a plain language practice at the courts. We are moving online, the best in class of these form-filling instructions. We're helping people find, not just the courthouse, but the right courthouse for the kind of case they might be involved in that can help them and when it's open. We're helping find the right one among 1200 standard court forms for what they're doing. And then we actually just got approval and budget in the governor's new budget for our fine reduction app that helps people who can't pay traffic fines. What it helps them do is easily provide information about their income to the court so a judge can make a decision about reducing their fine. And it's already reduced to millions of dollars, which is cool. And it's done that through plain language and good information design. The new website we're building looks a lot more like this. These are actually slightly old screenshots. So we've even reduced some of the copy more. And you can see that it doesn't just use copy. It uses more visual affordances to help people with what they're doing. As it turned out, one of the big upshots of that research tour was that people who are representing themselves get lost in their court case. They don't know where they are. They don't know how to take the next step. And wayfinding in between physical courthouses and these online sites and the paper forms is really, really difficult for anybody who hasn't had there three years to get a JD and clerkship and all the things that you've got to become a legal practitioner. So I wanna talk a little bit about accuracy. I said at the beginning that one of the ways linguistics is useful is negotiating vocabulary. In UX, we have things called design values, which are kind of goals that a particular design needs to serve and ideally they're testable goals. And one of the really obvious ones for legal information that nobody questioned much is accuracy. And it kept coming up. And frankly, for me as a design practitioner it's kind of a boring value. I like pointed ones. I like to say like, okay, the goal is victory. The goal is something really salient and important. And like accuracy just seems like a table stakes. Okay, yeah, it has to be accurate. It turns out though that attorneys are trained in a specific connotation of accuracy. They are trained to be both comprehensive and precise. And that often means adding a lot of words and using terms of art that are really specific to that community of practice. And what happens is that a member of the public, a regular person doesn't get an accurate understanding from a text that is written by people that are members of that community of practice. So we had this conflict over a core value that is sort of summarized in this one word that nobody thought was questionable. And so an attorney would write something and it would be judged by other attorneys. And the way that this happens by the way is people poke holes in it. And they insist that, you know, you missed something or this could possibly be interpreted slightly wrong by somebody who knows. And so in the review process, typically, copy would get more opaque to the actual eventual reader. And so we had to reorient this core value of accuracy to mean something different, at least in the context of web services for the public and get it reoriented to mean a regular Californian takes an accurate impression from the copy, not a judge can't poke any holes in your legal argument in the copy. And that's a lot of the day-to-day work in doing this, especially in an early stage civic tech practice. So there's more to what we're doing. Technically, one of the more interesting things that has ended up getting into reality is a web content attorney position, which is a mashup of a content position from the tech industry and an attorney analyst from the judicial branch into one person who has both of those capabilities and can therefore exercise authority in both realms. That, I think, is maybe the longest term, most solid impact of a lot of our work. The idea is if we do this well, if we make it easily accessible via your phone to at least figure out the process, if you want to get a divorce or you need to get a domestic violence restraining order, more people will be able to get through the process of a case. Assistors will be able to help people with some of the trickier parts like writing your declaration for the judge of why you need to ask the court for a particular relief and it'll be easier access to civil justice over the long term. So a quick recap of how I got here and then I would love to take questions. I made a GIF at one point of my career and it probably goes too fast, but I had ambitions in the 70s of becoming a ballerina and that did not work out. I ended up in publishing and on the side in the web. I ended up in financial services web, being a poet on the side. I ended up in UX consulting and then I ended up at Code for America doing civic stuff. Better summary. BA in linguistics, 92, I don't have a graduate degree. I got a crummy recession job right out of the gate answering phones. I learned a fair bit from that in the end and I'm glad I did it, but it was terrifying at the time that that would be my entire career. I went back to the University of Denver Publishing Institute to try and escape from that and ended up in a technical publisher called Morgan Kaufman, some of you might know it. Big, big things I learned there how to use and build the web. In 1997, I launched my first website. Nobody else really seemed to want to do it even though it was a technical publisher. So I did it. Moved on from there to what was sort of big tech at the time when stock trading was going online, believe it or not, people would have cost you on Muny in San Francisco if you were wearing a Schwab electronic brokerage shirt, kind of the way they do if you're wearing a Google or Facebook shirt now. Learned a lot about usability. They had a formal lab, they had PhD human factors folks. I got to learn and observe those and also see how that heaviness didn't fit every industry use and understand some of the lighter ways. I also learned management, which has been very useful. 2006, few years after the crash, I was laid off and discovered that UX was now an industry. Joined a tiny UX consultancy which I think is where I met Nancy. I think that's true. I was living in the city, I could walk to your offices. Our groovy warehouse offices South America. I was living in a warehouse, yep. Yep, and I ran somewhere between 250, oversaw, because I was the head of practice, I oversaw somewhere between 250 and 300 user research studies of various kinds in six years there. And that really amplified my practice and all of that kind of sociolinguistic underpinning is extraordinarily useful in user research where it's all about first talking to humans and understanding them and then talking with other humans who've done the observations with you and making meaning out of what you've learned. That got bought by Facebook in 2012 and I didn't go. Ooh, wrong button. So overlappingly, I'd heard about some of this civic tech stuff that engineers were doing with hackathons circa 2010, showed up at a hackathon, afraid that they would throw me out because I don't really code, I do a little HTML, but whatever, they didn't, turned out to be cool. I wrote my first article about how maybe UX folks should go do civic things in 2011 and then when the company was bought, I could have gone over to Facebook and made a bunch of money but been really unhappy or I could try to invest in the civic tech thing. So Dana Chisnell, who I think the group heard from yesterday if you attended, invited me to join a research project she was doing called Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, which is a great thing to look up if you're interested in Civic UX that's actually in the Cooper-Hailuit now as a design project that has impacted the world. Anyway, I led research on one of them and we did a country-wide survey of election department websites and made recommendations for them in a tiny booklet. Then I finally got Code for America to hire me because that was really the first thing I wanted to do when I left and they said, no, why would we have a UX person on staff? But I got in in 2013 and Code for America mostly helped American city governments with a couple of small states in there or rather one state in one county improved their tech practice and do work to try to solve specific problems. After that, I decided to try federal in 2016 thinking it'll be interesting. I'll see a presidential transition. And I got a lot more than I bargained for on that front. I also eventually got the opportunity to serve as chief of staff there. I did one two-year term and didn't renew for another round with the Trump administration, came back to California and started this work with the courts and some other side projects. And then I had the book come out last year. And if you're interested in getting started in this area, even now, if you're still working on degrees or in academia, there's probably a local Code for America brigade near you. They are amazing. They have onboarding materials and kind of shovel ready projects you can work on and you can start to meet the sort of people who do this kind of work. There's also an org called US Digital Response that spun up during the pandemic to help governments do what they needed to do when they couldn't operate in person. Serving as a poll worker in an election near where you are is an incredible education in how technology fits into that core process and how service designs for the public work. And consider also just writing an industry resume, which is somewhat different from an academic CV and applying for content or UX or computational, some of you probably work on deep NLP stuff or something that was not part of linguistics when I was getting a BA in the late 80s. So all of those things are pretty transferable if you can represent them on a more industry style document. And that is enough of me presenting. Let's talk. All right. I see one clapping. Thank you, Andrea and Nina. And I'm ready for questions. Thank you, Samantha and Christine and Janice. And whoever else I'm not viewing right this minute. So I appreciated very much. I think that last bit about getting in with Code for America, I think you can be more explicit about that because that's probably not familiar. And the other part is I think talk about citizenship or green card holders with respect to all these different roles because we have a number of students from other places. Great, yeah, great question. So Code for America has run for a number of years in network of volunteer groups in cities and it's quite extensive. They are called the brigades. And usually right now, most of them run a weekly or monthly hack night and they have been doing them virtually during the pandemic and they're very, very open. And they were not necessarily at first in 2012 to 2014 but they have worked really hard to be more inclusive and open. And so if you show up, you'll be welcomed and people will help you and they're usually nice evenings. Right, so you don't have to actually do the coding. You get to do other things. If you don't want to, right, you can do all kinds of other things like create the comments, describe what's being built and test what's being built. Do, yes, help show it, help design the information. They end up sometimes helping their cities redesign forms and doing like real information design kind of things like that too. And we did, you may not be aware Sid, but I'm hoping that everybody on the call is aware that Rosenfeld Media is a sponsor for this. And so we're getting good discount rates on all their books and materials and Carolyn Jarrett's book about forms just came out from Rosenfeld. I haven't read it, but I already know it's a very good book. Exactly, I've read a lot of things and I haven't read this particular book. Rosenfeld has a civic design conference that is happening for the first time later this year if you're interested in that. I just saw that notice. Yeah. As far as citizenship, many, many of these opportunities are available to anybody with a work permit. Obviously the volunteer ones, I think even 18F did not require citizenship as long as you were qualified to work in the US, you were fine. The word citizen is highly fraught in the field. It's appealing in that it has this participatory aspect that many of the other descriptors we use for constituents or residents don't, but much of the field has a justice oriented political bent. A justice oriented political bent. And so the word, I used to use the word citizen experience following Jess McMullen, who was the first one to put up a citizen experience site and practice up in Alberta. I don't talk about it that way as a default anymore. And I sort of bracket it every time I say, we're talking about the citizen as a participatory member of these institutions. We need to use some word like that. But we always want to work for all residents or all participants where that is possible. Good, okay. More questions for Sid. So we had a question. And I know that we have. Yes, yes, go for it. So we had a question in the chat asking if Sid could share an example of an industry resume format. You wanna see mine? Why not? If you're willing. Okay, let's see if I can haul up Google Drive real fast here and reshare my screen. I hope also without mentioning the person who put the question up, you realize that you can Google that as resume, the default resume is one that's probably aimed at industry. Yeah, although they often say a lot of old stuff like must be one page. And if you are mid-level, it doesn't have to be one page. Here, let me share again. I am pretty senior. So mine is actually three pages as an industry resume. So some characteristics. Like here is a chatty statement at the top about who I did it share. It's shared, but it's very tiny. Ah, let's do this. And let's... Yeah, one of those accessibility things, right? Yeah. Is that better? Okay. Much better. So it has a chatty statement at the top about who I am and what I do. And then the vast bulk of it is very action-oriented experience stuff. And it brags on purpose. Like I led this. I proposed, specified and implemented this. And I have a lot of experience. So that's what takes up the bulk of it. But even for some place that I was for six years, if it's this long ago, it's at a summary level. So this is my 26 to 2012 running user research practice where I met Nancy. And we're down to this part on my resume now because mostly what's relevant is I did this at Code for America. I was chief of staff at 18F. And so both, I think, I would comment that both because they're older and because they're not in the civic tech space, you can make those extremely concise. Yeah. Right. And then as we get farther back, even I don't do bullets anymore. I'm just kind of like, yeah, I did this. I was there for eight years. I got promoted to director. And then my talks and publications this isn't all of them. And you'll notice it's not really in citation format. It's a lot of conference talks. If there's a link, I absolutely put a link. This is doing a job of signaling that I'm respected by other people in the field more than a job of listing everything that I've done. And then, you know, if I have been on boards and stuff and then like my education is just here at the end as a sort of, if you are more than five years into an industry career, education goes at the end even if you have a fresh master's or a PhD to share. One of the things I'll start sharing. So I would say two things about the length of your thing. One is you are working as a consultant now. And so for you, you need to put things on there that show your credibility and your reputation like the talks and your service and so on and so forth. So that is, that gives you a pass for having a three page resume. It's also the length of my career overall. So I'm coming up on 30 years. And I only within the last five or seven years somebody said to me, I need a one page resume from you. And I've got, I came to out of academia and I teach. So I don't include everything. And I can, I can do the one page resume. And it means I leave off that little paragraph at the top and I squeeze it and I don't include those other things. But yeah. So I have it on my website too. Good. In this format, like here's a short summary. Right. I've worked at these kinds of places. And if you want more, you can just go to LinkedIn or download the PDF. Right. I'm sure I could make a one page version. I'd leave off the talks and really, really shorten a whole bunch of those early to mid career experiences and focus on recent. But that's not useful to you at this point. And it's not useful to the potential clients who need to know about you. However, Same if I was getting hired at this level, honestly. Yes. But if you, if you are new, you do want closer to a one page or going on to a second page a little bit is okay. Because a lot of these things are are now electronic. So it's also fine not to fill out two pages and to have something goes onto a quarter of a second page if you need it. Isn't like it has to fit on a page that you hand somebody now. So we had another question in the chat asking if civic tech was considered nonprofit. Sometimes. So very often it is actual government employment. There are some nonprofits that you can be part of in the field. There are ones that actually have paid staff and ones that organize volunteers. And then there are for-profit companies. Some of them are organized as public benefit corporations, which is a special class of for-profit companies. So they are not a nonprofit. They don't accept charitable donations, but they are not trying to maximize their profit and they follow certain additional practice and ethical reporting requirements. And then there are just product companies that are organized for profit and are mainly selling to government and are trying to do good and do well as a motivation. So it's a, what is public sector is a great and not clear cut question. And I think this very much relates to the panel that was on immediately previous to you where people were talking about, mostly it was focused on federal, but they say you can work for the federal government or you can work for some of these a for-profit contractor or a federal lab or some of these university agencies that are funded by the federal government and doing work for the federal government but housed inside a nonprofit. So I think civic tech can span several of those different kinds of categories. Yes, I'd like to hear, absolutely. Whether things like training employees in the courts and budgeting, yeah. All of that affects civic tech work along with things like union job classes and one of the things that happened during the kind of anti-government and government cut era over the last three decades is government didn't build new job classes for modern tech work. So when I was at 18F formally, my title was IT specialist. Even though I was a very senior UX and product person, that's just the class into which they could shoehorn everybody and then my title was originally a strategy lead, but then I became chief of staff. So there is very often this kind of, things don't quite fit and we make them work and we try to formalize them more and that's part of the field being kind of a teenage field. It's still growing. I just joined the board of an organization called technologists for the public good that is aiming to be a professional association to formalize some of this and help people practice in this field. Very cool. Procurement, if you wanna look up rants about bureaucracy and civic tech, procurement is the term. No, these jobs are not all contractor jobs. Some of them are. When I worked at 18F, I was a federal employee. I am now a contractor through an agency on a weird little authority for the state of California, but state of California has several innovation focused specific places to hire technologists into these kinds of roles as well as employees. So I guess the answer is it's complicated. All of the above, I think we love all of the above. And I know for example, that in various big cities I have seen over the past two years, a lot of openings for innovation offices in connected with large cities. And then that would be a city employee. Yes, and very often you kind of progress from an innovation lab to a digital service team. And it was really interesting when the pandemic got rolling that cities that had digital service teams established basically like made 10 people work a weekend and had informative coronavirus sites for the public. And cities that didn't have that established yet, scrambled for a couple of months to get stuff up and we're trying to, I mean, overworking 10 people over a weekend in the hot phase of a pandemic, I think is okay. Like you don't want it to happen every weekend but that is an actual emergency. This is one of the interesting things, right? That government needs to have access capacity for true emergencies to be able to step things up when there's a hurricane or a pandemic or et cetera. So yeah, look for those. They're often called ex-digital service or innovation lab or digital team. And they are really interested in a lot of things around language that linguists can help with. Most large cities, many states are pretty multilingual and nobody has figured out multilingual practice yet. If you work in a, if you study bilingualism or multilingual language communities, there's a huck of a lot to do there as well. We have more and more multilingual communities in the United States, despite the fact that people think we only speak English but that's not true. All right. I am going to say thank you to Sid for squeezing us into her schedule today and thanks for this rapid trip through the first decade or two of civic tech. And I wanna underscore one more thing and that is you started out in technical writing. And so we're gonna have several sessions about technical writing next week and also about storytelling and content. So all of those are wonderful preparation for any kind of role in civic tech.