 Welcome to all our panelists and attendees, I am Hila Levy and I am delighted to be hosting this event today on behalf of New America's digital impact and governance initiative, where I am a program fellow working to identify best practices for open equitable technology use across linguistic ability and cultural boundaries. Over the next hour, we will learn more about how society can benefit from digital public infrastructure that is both more accessible and inclusive of all citizens and users. Governments, corporations, organizations and their audiences customers and citizens, all hope to communicate connect and engage with each other effectively. However, not all platforms and tools are made equally, and thinking through inclusive and accessible design from the outset can reap large scale benefits for all. Today, we hope to help governments contracting specialists, international organizations technologists programmers developers and designers, consider some best practices to achieve inclusive and equitable digital infrastructure that can have wider reach and benefit. Considering these issues early in the funding design and development processes will save time, money and effort during any future scaling and bolster participation reach and utility. As part of this event, I will first introduce everyone, and then kick off with some discussion questions around the room, trying to get to the heart of the important issues. For our audience, we will be recording this event and following it up with a written blog that will include additional resources. If you are watching live, please feel free to follow our conversation on social media using the hashtag digital inclusion and follow us at digi gi underscore new America on Twitter. It is now my great pleasure and to introduce our accomplished panelists here from New America is our senior advisor Cecilia Munoz, a long time public policy leader who has steered our organization and other boards and nonprofits towards more inclusive evidence based policies. Among among her many roles and experiences, Cecilia has had the distinction of serving as the director of intergovernmental affairs, and director of the domestic policy Council under President Obama. She was a MacArthur fellow and spent 20 years at the National Council of La Raza. Now, you need us us, the nation's largest Hispanic policy and advocacy organization. Welcome Cecilia. I'm also thankful to have Jenny lay flurry Microsoft's chief accessibility officer featured today for over 16 years. Jenny has been pioneering the way tech companies and vision accessibility, not only for their own employees, but for their users worldwide. It's an amazing story of resilience and representation that has now been shared with hundreds of thousands of viewers through massive open online courses on diversity and inclusion in the workplace hackathons and industry conferences, including the annual Microsoft Ability Summit. Her work has been recognized by the White House as a disability employment champion of change, among other honors. Thank you so much Jenny. We have Dionne Woods Bell, currently the senior advisor for global policy and financial services for the poor at the bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She is a highly experienced international attorney who has also worked in the private sector for the Federal Trade Commission in civil society and the nonprofits base. Dionne's efforts are helping to build coalitions and lift up marginalized communities, including women work that often requires technological platforms and solutions. Dionne, thank you so much for joining us. I'm also honored to introduce Samantha Mack calling in from Alaska today. Samantha has done a wealth of work in her short years across government, civil society and academia, particularly ensuring indigenous representation. Samantha currently serves as the state of Alaska elections language assistance compliance manager, ensuring citizens can more fully participate in our democracy in their own languages. Samantha also teaches Alaska native literature at her alma mater, the University of Alaska Anchorage, after being the university's first, and the first Alaska native Rhodes scholar. It's a pleasure to have you here, Samantha, as we celebrate the UN International Day of indigenous peoples. Finally, I would like to introduce Dr. Tomica Tillman, the executive director of the digital impact and governance initiative at New America, where he works with governments and corporations worldwide to develop technology solutions to public problems. At New America, he served as a senior advisor to Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry senior at the State Department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Thank you again to all of our panelists and all of our audience members. I am really looking forward to our discussion. First, I would like to very briefly come back to you to Micah to set the stage. New America has been focused on the concept of digital public goods and infrastructure, which is a new approach to solving problems. Can you explain what a digital public good is, and some examples of how these might provide and improve public administration and government services. Why are they so critical worldwide as they move into the future to Micah. Well, thank you very much. He lets wonderful to be with you and this amazing crew of panelists and congratulations on pulling this marvelous discussion together. Digital public goods and digital infrastructure are a relatively new idea in terms of the way we're putting them into practice, but they have deep roots if you go back to the earliest days of the internet, many of the individuals who were involved in creating the modern internet envisioned that we would have public goods and public infrastructure available in the same way that we have roads and parks in the real world that everyone can take for that everyone takes for granted, and everyone can access. And the assumption was which I think has proven out that access to public infrastructure in the digital space would make it easier for everyone across society to gain access to the goods and services and opportunities available in the digital realm. Now, we did not build that infrastructure in the United States, and we have ended up with a situation where in many instances, in order to do even the most basic activities online, whether it's sending a message, or sending resources or payment, or identifying yourself, you need to work through a third party intermediary and many times those intermediaries use the information we provide to try and manipulate our behavior and convince us to do things that we wouldn't otherwise do. It's not a great situation. What we are seeing fortunately is that in a number of countries around the world, there is a new approach and it is grounded in this concept of digital public goods and digital infrastructure. The idea is that if you can build out open platforms that address critical challenges, such as the need to identify oneself, the ability to send resources back and forth, the ability to move data across society, then you can unlock enormous opportunity and enormous functionality for a whole lot of people in a way that's very efficient and very affordable. The early results on this are pretty breathtaking. In Kenya, we've seen 2% of the population lifted out of poverty as a result of access to a nationwide payment system. In Bangladesh, they've saved about 2 billion days of time that were previously being wasted. And in Estonia, 2% of GDP each year is recouped by access to these systems, by virtue of access to these systems. So there's some really extraordinary benefits associated with this approach. Increasingly, there is interest in pursuing this strategy, not only in the United States, but in open societies more broadly as a mechanism for building out an alternative to what has become a pretty broken digital status quo. And so that is the impetus for the work that our team has been involved in at New America. We've been fortunate to have you and other incredible partners in that effort. And as a matter of personal privilege, since this is my last event with New America, and I'll be moving to a new role very soon, I just want to thank all of the members of our team and Cecilia and the leadership of New America for doing just extraordinary, extraordinary work over the last few years to build out this vision to a point where it is now gaining much broader adoption and acceptance. And folks like Allison Price and Jordan Sandman and Anne-Marie Slaughter have been instrumental in helping us to get to the point where we are. So with that as backdrop, I'm really looking forward to our discussion today. Thank you so much, Jamaica, and you will certainly be missed. The work that you've done is really been influential in building alliances across the world and helping to assemble this team that we have here today. I'm going to turn it over to Cecilia now. Cecilia, across your career, you have seen how important it is for government, civic society and nonprofits to interface effectively with their citizens and audiences. What is your present reliance on that digital technology shape how we plan for engagement with each and every citizen? Thank you, Hila, for the question and for pulling together the event. I'm really honored to be here with this amazing group of panelists and just I'll just echo my thanks to Tamika for your work at New America and our though we will miss you are excited for the work that's still ahead of you. This is an incredibly important topic because the government's ability to effectively reach the people that it serves is fundamental to really the strength of the democracy. I mean it really boils down to that. And I think we've had a lot of lessons in the United States and that's this is not unique to the United States in recent years about what it means when the government fails to effectively reach everyone. And I think sometimes one of the mistakes that we make is we assume that the existence of the technology means that everyone can access it. And that's of course not always the case. Right, we make assumptions for and we've made assumptions, for example, in this really difficult year that we are all, you know, hopefully coming out of by knock on wood as I say that. Right that everybody has has similar access to broadband, for example, in order for you know children to receive an education in the kind of year that we've come out of and we know that that's not the case so access to the technology is an issue. And then the design of technology is absolutely essential to making sure that we reach the people who need to be reached so the child tax credit which the current administration for example is administering has the potential to reduce child poverty by half. That prediction assumes 100% take up of the child tax credit as well as another policy, and those policies have never had 100% participation so we can't assume that the technology itself will mean access we have to design it in such a way that it is informed by the people we are trying to reach so and make sure that government is designing with and not for just for in order to make sure that we're able to reach every person every corner of this country. I think those are all great points Cecilia and you've done a lot of this work yourself at the grassroots level advocating for those parts of the population that might not otherwise have easy access to the rights and benefits and information to which they were entitled. So what are some of the barriers to connecting with underserved communities. At least then when you were doing that work and how has technology created new opportunities to overcome these what would you suggest people do to overcome those barriers. So it's a great question. I mean there are obvious barriers like language for example there are hundreds of languages spoken in the United States in addition to English and for some communities it's easier to access information in other languages. There are challenges associated with geographic isolation so there's some kind of obvious obstacles, and then there are obstacles that are more subtle and that differ from community to community. For example, when in communities where people are more likely to live in multi generational households, they may miss out based on the way that policies are constructed assuming a certain kind of family architecture and a certain assuming a certain kind of household architecture. So that's why it is really it's essential for policymakers to reflect and be drawn from the communities that we're trying to serve, but it's also important that policymakers are spending as much time listening and engaging and being delivered that actually reach them and frankly I this with all humility as a maker myself that policymakers have to have the humility to both measure their results and recognize when they're getting it wrong. I think these are all great points and I'm, I'm really looking forward to hearing some of Samantha's comments as we move into her portion of the discussion, especially on integrating different languages into platforms and I just want to point out for our audience that we'll be highlighting some of these resources specific to designers and to developers in our in our right up in our blog. So we can all share and reference those. But Cecilia we talked about you mentioned some apps and you mentioned multi general multi multi generational households, and it wasn't uncommon to see media reports of these cross cultural or intergenerational gaps. When we're looking at fiscal benefits this past year and vaccination access, it's so difficult to access services when you don't know how to use a smartphone well, or you can understand the language of an app. So what can we do to improve the rollouts of information campaigns, or public benefits to avoid those issues in the future is, is there anything that you could suggest in terms of those culturally relevant campaigns are designing for multi lingual communities. Yeah, that and I feel like I have a lot of scars on this particular topic because we learned so much frankly from the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and the Obama administration, both from the things that went wrong as well as from the things that went right. But you cannot assume that an informational rollout that that that outreach alone is sufficient, although your outreach has to be well informed by the ways in which communities gather information. I'll refer for example to the work of an organization called ecce run by a friend of mine named Stephanie Valencia, that's been doing very important research into the Latino community and found for example, that a lot of us that got our political information in general from YouTube, which is brand new information, something that wasn't known to the government it wasn't necessarily known to the folks who were campaigning in the community. That is, if you are somebody who's trying to get shots in people's arms, or vital information about how to access the child tax credit for example, that piece of information is essential because you could be paying a lot of money to put ads on television advertising for example that is going to completely miss the target audience because you haven't gone deep enough to understand how that audience is actually getting its information. The same is true for whatever the technological interfaces that we are assuming people will be able to access. It's not enough to build the thing you have to design the thing in a way which is which that in which you have tested can reach the people that you intend to reach. Thank you Cecilia I know we're going to come back to these topics across the discussion so thank you for kicking us off on that. I want to turn it over to Jenny now Jenny from Microsoft. You've spent your life finding ways to adapt to a world that wasn't always built with you in mind. And in your current work as the chief accessibility officer of one of the world's largest companies, you're leading significant changes to the status quo when it comes to how diverse users with differing abilities engage with technology. But most firms don't have such a position. So what type of practices can you share with us that any team or organization can adopt to increase accessibility when designing the user experience. So thank you for having me and thank you for this incredible panel I know I'm taking notes as people are talking. You know I think I'm going to lean a little bit on some of the comments that have already been said. A chief accessibility officer I'm actually the second for Microsoft I came out of the tech industry. And I'm thrilled to say that there are far more of them now than there were 10 years ago but there's still a massive opportunity. It came out of the tech industry because we really recognized well a couple of really key and important things. The area of disability is a massive demographic is just huge it's over a billion people in the world and the CDC just said it's around 26% of the US population. That's big. And with an aging population and then you add on to that things like a gorgeous pandemic with long COVID just being recognized by the US government as a disability, it's a growing demographic. And then from a technical perspective, we are using digital products every day all day. But do you know if they're accessible. If you don't know that your email with an image in it is accessible. It's not. There's no in between. And so you then have a decision to make do you consciously include, or do you unconsciously exclude inclusion is a far better path. And that's really where people in my kind of role leadership positions in companies really take a point of being proactive about how to include an infused accessibility into the design of products whether that's Microsoft Office, or an Xbox controller. And I don't think it's a tech industry thing anymore it's incumbent on us all because we are all far more digital and we're going to be that way around the world and it's continuing to evolve and grow. So it's really that cool principle of you are designed with and designed for don't think you know what a person with a disability needs, build the community and build that base of talent and expertise around you. So you are building with people with disabilities you're building with the experts. And then you're quite simply going to get a better product. That's where most of accessibility has come from captioning came from the deaf talking books came from designing for the blind. And now look at where that's gone. So, you're not just going to solve the inclusion gap. You could also create something really cool in the process. So it's I think it's incumbent on us all. You're absolutely right Jenny and this is something that maybe not all of our audience is familiar with people know that accessibility is the law in many countries and of course it's the right thing to do but sometimes it's it's really easy to get hung up on costs. So what is your advice during the design process and then leave out those accessible features. So what is your advice for our audience worldwide on thinking about inclusive or universal design in a new way. People are always talking about return on investment but it's more than that could you elaborate a little bit. So the conversation is about why should I do it for the 4% to a death for the for this metric and where's the ROI that is quite bluntly a trap. And I would really purposefully move that conversation on. And that's a very reactive mentality. It's missing the opportunity that there is to design with and through and for disability. And that's humanity. If we don't design with the spectrum of all of that we are we're not we're going to miss out on the opportunity to create good things. And we're also not going to provide an equal playing field for people to be productive in education and employment in participation in civic activities. These things are crucially crucially important. So the conversation we have here all the time is how can we open the doors. And that is presuming one very important thing. Most doors are closed. As someone who's deaf and has grown up deaf and I speak beautifully for myself I've still retained my British accent despite being over here now for 17 years in the States. Everything that I go to, particularly with a masked world, those doors are close to me I have to self identify and say I'm sorry I cannot understand you wearing a mask. I'm deaf. You know, please help me to be a part of this and then you see different reactions. You see the people who turn to whoever's next to me and say I'll work through that person. Or the person who says hang on a minute let me stand back pull the mask down does this help. That's the way we should be as a society. So the question shouldn't be, should I do this, it should be how do I do this. It's far simpler than you think, in order to check a website simple tools you can just chuck on the toolbar, and it will magically go through that website and give you a thumbs up. It can also be that you look at, you know you look at captioning and auto track inscriptions, the quality is going up and up and up that's some of what we're seeing in all these communications tool. Make sure that your videos are captioned, make sure that you correct those videos and they're saying the words that you want. These things are not hard, they become part of how you do things and not additional cost. They just become a really important part of building and sharing anything that you want to. Thank you so much Jenny and I know you've just done so much work in opening this world up for those 1 billion people that really need this access to contribute to society just like anybody else, whether their disability is visible or hidden as many are. Are there any resources that you might recommend for our audience you've mentioned a toolbar you've mentioned a few different Microsoft products maybe what, what would you recommend people just think about in their daily lives as they're going through the technology options available to them. I'd be very quick first to point out that I'm one of thankfully a growing community of accessibility leaders. I'm not just in the states but around the world. There needs to be more. So I will put a plea out there to any company if again if you don't know if it's accessible it's not so invest in that leadership. Every company does now have a pretty robust site that details magical features and apps and widgets that you can download. But for the nerds amongst us yes there's definitely a few things that I would say are intended purposefully to make life easier. Now's are on our website, Microsoft comm slash accessibility, but just to mention a couple. One, I mentioned accessibility insights which is that magical tool to check the accessibility of your website, or your app, but I would also mention accessibility checker. This lives in office. It's right next to spell check. We put it there for a reason. So you can hit the button and it will check your document PowerPoint Excel word, and it will tell you how accessible that is and guide you on how best to fix it. Simple things really matter. We're now getting to the point where we're turning that on by default in the background, and that if you're sending out a large email which let's be honest we all do. Prompt you, gorgeously and politely. This is not accessible. You really do want to fix this right before you click send. So there are some really simple things in there, and then if you're a gamer, again play is just as important as work. We know this. They know that we've done an enormous amount to expand the world of gaming for everyone. And that includes a dedicated controller for people with mobility disabilities called the adaptive control. So just know that we're one company of many, but there's a lot of information and we have a dedicated support team for our customers with disabilities that takes about 1213,000 calls a month. There's a big market out there, and we want to see more people engage and use the tools because they, and then tell us what else you need. Thank you so much any I know you have opened a lot of people's minds and a lot of people's toolbars today to help us think through what we can do better, all of us. I'm going to turn it to Dion now, because Dion, as we've just seen today, not everyone consumes and interacts with technology in the same way. And in the developing world access to digital tools can be limited in some cases. Now in your work at the Gates Foundation, you are at the forefront of propelling the world towards the UN sustainable development goals. In the context nowadays in development have a digital or an informational component. So how can thinking about inclusion at the outset during planning or pilot phases help philanthropists technologists aid organizations and governments have greater effectiveness. Thank you very much thanks for having me here today, especially on this important occasion and such a very good company. I want to lean on just like Jenny, the remarks that were made earlier and also double down on the issues that to Micah put on the table. At the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we first got interested in digital financial inclusion, when we're exploring new ways to address systemic causes of poverty, in particular in low and middle income countries. And we realized that there was a huge opportunity to make a difference by investing in innovations like mobile money, digital payment systems which are safe, cheap, and easy for low income users to adopt, or so we hope. With the COVID-19 pandemic and his aftershocks, we've been given additional perspective and insights into why inclusion at the outset of procuring technology is so important. And I'll call it inclusion by design. Many of my privacy geeks go along with me because we know privacy by design security by design, and we're going to say, let's go with inclusion by design. So economies around the world have experienced a dramatic slowdown due to the pandemic we've all lived, and even countries with limited initial incidents of the virus face severe economic aftershocks, especially as a renewed outbreaks pose threat to recovery. By making sure that emergency financial support could reach people quickly. That becoming a priority for so many countries and so many governments, given lockdowns and social distancing. This became an opportunity to have inclusion by design. So countries which had more invested in their financial systems and making them inclusive before the pandemic, or more easily able to mitigate the aftershocks or the shocks of the pandemic. And the ability of these countries to act wasn't built on a radical reinvention, but rather on the use of effective and established solutions to drive digital growth and inclusion. And kind of like Jenny talked about putting it there upfront up top front and center, making sure that everybody could have access became a great opportunity for success. Of course, there's a limit to how much countries can expand financial access a minute, amid a crisis. So the time to upgrade financial policies regulations infrastructure and technology to drive inclusion is prior to a crisis, or if you're like us right now in the middle of the crisis, the time is now. We don't need to reinvent the wheel like I said before but to rebuild economies to rebuild economies we need to focus on digital financial inclusion. And so we need to do that with keeping in mind the other potential opportunities. Jenny talked a little bit about universal design so that when you have something for the benefit of one community, how that can become available to the entire population. So think climate change, think natural disasters and think about the next pandemic and think about inclusion by design. So first countries should craft financial services policies and regulations that provide space for companies and industries to innovate, while safeguarding consumers risks, consumers against risks, including data privacy and cybersecurity and when countries get their financial sector policies right, the benefits of financial inclusion are accrued rapidly. There are a few examples. Ghana's one, they made changes and that benefited the entire population. I can give you more details as he'll appointed out in our blog post so stay tuned for that. By upgrading financial services policies that's only part of the solution to build more pandemic resilient economies that requires being able to identify people including and especially women to transact and give them information and payments quickly. And we heard a little bit about social safety net payments earlier on. During the COVID-19 pandemic countries that have high levels of payment and ID connectivity could quickly identify households. I'll flag for you Thailand and India and again I'll be happy to come back with more concrete examples. By contrast, countries with limited payment connectivity and identity systems had less effective options to fit and had to physically deliver cash not such a good idea in the manner of a pandemic. Fortunately, governments seeking to upgrade their digital financial systems need not start from scratch. They can take advantage of open source payment and identity platforms such as moja loop and most of built on best in class privacy and data protections. Those innovations are already accelerating digital financial inclusion approaches in several countries, including in Tanzania, Morocco, the Philippines, Ethiopia and Guinea are also getting up exploring pilots using the most of platform. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. Those are some really good examples I think of how financial inclusion is really important and you started to touch a bit on some of your work that's interested in gender equity. So are there any specific examples that you could point to that would help our audience think about how digital design, including those payment systems that you mentioned, could reduce biases or advanced development goals. Yeah, thank you definitely. So let me go back to the pandemic or we're in the middle of it so let me, let me just reflect a little bit on that. We should think about in over the last year something that was coined and I'll try to see if I can get it right. She session instead of recession. That phrase was coined to describe what was happening in the global economy, and women were nearly twice as likely as men to lose their jobs. Now there's new data from the international labor organization that shows that based on the current recovery trends recovery trends are also sexist. Men as a group have already regained jobs faster than women, and in fact 2 million more women are expected to lead the workforce this year. So an essential gateway to more equal and inclusive economy is digital financial inclusion and investments in digital public goods. In a way, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that getting money into the hands of women and this is what you're pointing at, and allowing them to connect to different forms of the financial system can lead to long term benefits including decision making power in their households and targeted emergency payment systems enabled by a strong inclusive digital financial financial systems governments have bolstered economic activity and supporting women. An example that I alluded to earlier was in India, India coupled its existing payments and identity technology to deliver cash transfer payments to the accounts of 205 million of the country's poorest women. The United States of Pakistan expanded its emergency cash transfer program, deploying a whole of government approach that put women at the center of its response and delivering emergency funds. Gender disaggregated data plays another important role, and the fact that certain accounts were segregated at geography and gender level allow many governments to transfer funds quickly into targeted accounts. Until after the fact let's design before inclusion by design. A full understanding of the outcomes of the ways that we respond is something that we should keep in mind. And I'd be remissed if I did not mention the generation equality forum, which took place recently from June 30 to July 2 in Paris. What an honor to be on the team that supported this foundation wide initiative. So the Jeff's mission is to focus on fixing the promises related to gender disparities and delivering on the promises made in the famous Beijing conference. The goal is to get experts grassroots activists government officials and business leaders to work together to move from words about gender equality to concrete actions that make a real difference. To help accelerate progress towards gender equality, our foundation will donate $2.1 billion over the next five years to promote women's economic empowerment, strengthen women and girls health and family planning planning to support women's leadership. When we think about economic empowerment in terms of these priorities we're thinking about cash, we're thinking about care as in care for children, and we're thinking. Thank you so much, John. Thank you very much. Thanks, Dan. I'm sorry, our connection is, is getting delayed in any way. I really appreciate both the contributions that you and the foundation are making for development but also these these initiatives that really will enhance the way that people can be involved in identity and payments and in the economy worldwide it's really going to help everyone around the planet when you have more people involved. I might come back to you for another question later Dionne but I'm going to turn quickly to Samantha. Samantha, we are so proud to have you here today with us representing Alaska and your community on the UN's International Day of Indigenous Peoples. Many countries and states and cities have large and diverse populations that require engagement for service provision. Now, in your case, you have been working with the state of Alaska to help make voting services and election materials available in about 17 languages, I think. Did you share with us some of the challenges of disseminating information via digital tools across remote and rural parts of our country I'm sure that's relevant to some of Dionne's work and to some of our other panelists who are working across the globe. Yeah, thank you, Heela. Definitely will be reiterating some of what the panelists have said but first I want to say thank you for having me here as a part of this panel I'm honored to be among such accomplished and remarkable panelists doing this kind of work. Another question broadband access outside metropolitan areas in Alaska is frankly atrocious. It's slow it's unreliable and it is expensive and so when you are talking about communities with, you know, two times as many folks living below the poverty line compared to the rest of the United States. So if you create a situation where they have to rely on that internet access for participating in basic democratic processes. It's unacceptable. And so all of the English language and translated resources we create here in this program at the division are presently accessible online, or will be in the coming weeks, but most importantly we also send all of our content and our resources to bilingual outreach in those communities, living in those communities for each election. We do outreach to tribal organizations to native corporations community organizations city clerks offices. You know we air informal PSAs are excuse me informational PSAs on community radio stations around the state and multiple languages. The only of the situation is that you know the language access program is a part of the division of the of a state government and so as such is limited by a budgetary constraints. And so in these situations background best practices, state that if you can't do, you know, everything for everyone you have to do something for everyone. So that's where this kind of extensive informed outreach, well in advance of elections, it becomes so important. The earlier you get started the better chance you have of disseminating these, you know, really critical pieces of information to the folks who actually need it, who may otherwise, you know miss out on on access to that kind of content. And so that being said, in areas where folks do have access to inexpensive, or at least more affordable and reliable broadband. Still that starting early with informed proactive outreach is still the way to go and so is, you know, leveraging the pop the popularity of social media websites across rural Alaska to share our digital tools and resources, you know, utilizing related caption videos in addition to our audio PSAs in addition to written PSAs, you know translated posters with color and culturally relevant references and photos kind of having this multimodal approach to information dissemination is really crucial. I mean there's so many things to dissect and what you've just told us and the important work that you're doing. And that there is a lot of federal government websites that are available and widely spoken languages I'm really grateful for some of the work that the government services administration GSA has done with digital.gov to make USA.gov in Espanol. And specific agencies like the State Department and the IRS produce materials and additional languages, but all of those tend to be written and as you've mentioned, and you need to use other mechanisms. As we think about true inclusion worldwide, what practices have you work to develop for unwritten or endangered languages right I know that you must struggle with some of the nuances of working with different dialects and different languages that might not always have a lot of interpreter so how do you work through that is an excellent question and is something that our translation panels and engage with. I'm not joking when I say on a daily basis. So firstly, we do employ translation panels for all of our Alaska native languages for our unwritten and or endangered languages and so the translation panel model ensures that there are two or more speakers of a language engaging in the translation process and this allows them to, you know, cross check their translations to back translate to English for accuracy to certify the accuracy of their translations in the indigenous language. And so this is really necessary and is something that we found to be very successful across all of our languages in which we employ this method. For example, our you pick translation panel currently has nine panel members, and we're about to have a 10th soon. And this really helps to account for again those dialectical differences that that you mentioned. But as well as differences across generations or primary audience for a lot of our Alaska native translated content is elders and so it's really crucial that we have, you know, culturally appropriate translations that our elders are going to be able to translate to not just our young new language speakers. And so, you know, with this I sort of cannot really emphasize enough having both written and audio translations available and that multimodal access to information has been really key for us. But on the other hand, you know my background before joining the language assistance program is really an activism and particularly as it does concern indigenous sovereignty as you mentioned earlier. I think about a lot in this program is the fundamental role that language preservation plays and the sustainability of our native cultures and so a lot of what I see this program doing is, is, you know, not just providing the necessary and legally mandated equitable access to the democratic process to our Alaska native peoples. But it also serves to sort of capture this, like snapshot of time in our native languages to you know, to preserve them exactly exactly as they are now, but also as they continue to develop and evolve because it isn't really just about the languages it's about the communities that use these languages. You know we're talking about living languages which I think a lot of people discount when they think about these historically unwritten, or these endangered languages. It's not at all to say that these efforts to translate documents and resources from English into these historically unwritten and endangered languages to emphasize again, should not be happening within an extractive framework. You know, we really need to think about not just paying these translators these community members these elders to do our work for us and then moving on. And that we really need to be thinking critically about transformative work about embracing a framework of reciprocity in this kind of a project and so, you know thinking more critically about what we are doing to give back to those communities. And that is sort of how I see the resources that we create functioning. You know, though it is their primary purpose obviously they are not just for elections they are for everyone for massive amounts of utility and especially when we think about, you know the settler colonial relationship that many of our organizations have had with these marginalized communities. And embracing a framework of reciprocity is really an essential step and essential first step towards unraveling some of the harms that have been done and you know moving towards rebuilding equitable and and more ethical relations. Thank you very much, Samantha not only for the work but for those comments. I really want to maybe open this one up a little bit more to everybody, but we have had this variety of speakers representing a diversity of live and professional experiences with global communities. From your standpoint, Samantha, what advice would you like to provide to anyone seeking to appropriately use symbols and terminology and engage with communities that might still be healing from legacies of mistrust. And I will open that aspect of legacies of mistrust to any of the speakers on this panel if you would like to comment after Samantha. Thank you again a really wonderful question. Ultimately and frankly I think the most important way that we can be showing up for these communities to engage with them and in an appropriate way is to, you know work harder to hire people from within those communities and pay them a competitive wage. Nobody's going to be able to tell you exactly what that community needs quite like somebody who has lived through the experience of having those needs, especially within the sort of context of mistrust that many of us have perhaps experienced. And so you know as Cecilia said first and I think everybody sort of reiterated at one point or another, we need to be designing this infrastructure with these communities and not just for them. Even then though we do still need to think about the sort of proactive informed outreach approach we need to think about asking what these communities need, asking them what will be helpful. Each of these communities is different, and as such their needs will vary and so when you exist within a settler colonial paradigm it can be challenging, you know for for these marginalized people's to ask for help to ask the government or organization you know in charge of their help. And sometimes folks don't even have a full grasp of what kind of help it is that they need or even what kind of help they are legally entitled to. And so being proactive about outreach is excuse me proactive about outreach is just one of those facets and the other facet is that when they tell us what are what their needs are we need to be showing up and fulfilling those needs you know not just paying lip service. Not just bringing on somebody to do DEI work without actually making any structural changes. It's been said a lot in these last several months you know over and over again by a lot of different people but to put it plainly we need to do the work. You're so right. Thank you so much for that. Does anybody else on the panel wish to add on to that that issue of how we can advance and incorporate marginalized communities. I definitely absolutely love the example you gave and I think there's so much resonance across so many different areas of inclusion, particularly when you talk about garnering the insights of people and validating it with multiple voices multiple layers of expertise. I think the disability realm has in some ways, you know a different set of challenges but it makes two things I think very important when I think about sign language as a language that ASL is every country has its own languages. Not everyone knows that about sign they think that there's one universal know every country has its own and every region has its own dialect. And really it's the deaf community that really owns that as opposed to the hearing community and how do you best engage and make sure that there is that recipe or whatever that word is recipe. I'm not even going to try. That's my deaf voice. I'm not going to. That's what I'm saying though. I think that's incredibly important. But I think the one core element, at least for me, which your last point is in order to be inclusive and design inclusively, you need to hire talent, and you need to hire the experts. You need to hire people with disabilities. You must hire people with the language expertise. You've got to hire diverse talent. I've not just for some artificial goal, because you want to create a safe and inclusive environment where their expertise can be used shared and then reward that. And let me be clear about one issue in the in the disability world sub minimum wage. It is still legal to pay people with disabilities sub minimum wage which means sense on the dollar. No, people deserve I think the word minimum wage is there for a reason. We've eliminated it from our from Microsoft environment we've completely eliminated it a couple of years ago. Bringing people in safety, equity, equality. Leads to inclusion. And so those processes I think we can all learn a lot. I look forward to learning more from you so much. I have a few thoughts to contribute as well. I mean it's hard to go after Samantha and Jenny have outlined such a vibrant and truthful description of what's needed I'll just try to go back to what Cecilia mentioned and mentioned that the vision for a world where you can think of a poor woman living in the United States, Latin America, South Asia, Africa, wherever, and who can have access to an ID and secure financial payments to pay her schools, child fee school fees to get the groceries in the door to support a small business and to build a personal credit history that will empower further empower women and the entire family to survive is something that worth giving great thought to and putting resources behind and working together with other others to make happen. I just want to mention that if we think about inclusion by design, we can make this happen and I just wanted to say, I'm so happy to be here with all of you to think about how to do this in a collective and inclusive way. Thank you very much. I'm going to just quickly turn we had one audience question that I'd like to try and get into some Elizabeth Goodman asks, I'd love to hear more about the intersection between web accessibility and broadband access. That is how can we make sure that government services for people are available who have trouble getting to offices in person, or have to be home on dial up. This is a question for Cecilia or for to make or Samantha, whoever would like to necessarily would like to go first. Yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll attempt it. It's a great, great question. I mean, in some ways these issues show up in different buckets like broadband is a matter of kind of equity policy, and it's the, it's the underlying infrastructure and it's as important as roads bridges, you know, like a name your basic fundamental infrastructure boy did we get a lesson in that in the course of the last year right broadband was an equity issue in education and it has been for a long time. But it kind of, we all got it at some level on the course of the last year it was true before the last year, but we could see it in a different way. So broadband is just straight up if you're interested in educational equity in the United States you that's it's something that we have to address and which I'm grateful to see that the current administration recognizes and is has proposals that is putting forward as part of its infrastructure ideas. But having said that again I you know to reiterate what I said before you can assume like let's assume we're living in a world where everybody has access to technology and everybody's got a device we don't actually live in that world. But I worry that too often the policymakers assume that one that we're in that world and two then it's just a matter of make of creating the technology and then people will access the thing. I know that that's not true with respect to for example the cares act that to my again I have colleagues who demonstrated that when Congress passed the cares act and and made decisions about the pipes through which they were going to be sending dollars into people's pockets that as many as 10 million people got missed because they chose pipes that never reached those people. So again this the assumption that kind of technology is the way only works if you're starting with people and working your way back towards the policy rather than being a policymaker making assumptions about what's going to work to reach people. And he left I can just build on what Cecilia said there, we are, you know, hopefully hours days away from passage of an infrastructure bill that is going to go further than we've ever gone before and trying to solve the broadband access issue. But that on its own is necessary it's not sufficient to ensure that people can actually access government services and do so in an accessible way. The countries that are doing this well have cracked the code so we know this has been done and Estonia, the only public service that you need to show up for in person is getting married, everything else can be done online. That's a pretty good benchmark you know if we get to that point in the United States will be doing a few things right. So we need to think through what are the systems that need to be in place what type of infrastructure needs to be in place in order to ensure that every single American regardless of who they are regardless of where they are regardless of what language they speak is going to be able to access the services that provide the raw material for building a successful life. And that is a mission that all of us in this community need to be taking to heart every single day. And there's one last thing that I was thinking about as all of you were speaking and and you might have some expertise in this because we think about people using a feature an accessibility feature or a translation feature or a multimodal tool, or connecting via dialogue connection how do we make sure that governments and developers incorporate those features that also integrate privacy and cybersecurity protection so that we're not the people don't feel that they can't use those features without sacrificing something. Thank you. I think, you know, I'll go circle back to the to the good old adage of inclusion by design this works with privacy, cybersecurity and consumer protection as well. They're all vital, and the basic rules of transparency, fair treatment, effective recourse and service delivery are all essential tools that we need to have in place in order to effectively make sure everybody's everybody's receiving the services that we want them to receive including those which to Michael just outlined. And I think if we work together to develop those tools in the ecosystem will make sure that we're doing the best we can we'll do a good job. Thank you. Well our hour has certainly moved along with Lee and it has been such an informative and enlightening session I have learned so much from the five of you. And I know our audience will have picked up new knowledge in this past hour. While many parts of the developed world rely heavily on technology and on access to digital infrastructure the reality is there's still a digital divide that exists between the numerous individuals and household and communities that lack internet access and those that are even able to capitalize on connectivity and technology. As it advances, and even among those with connectivity and digital access the gap still exists. As you all mentioned it's just assuming that someone has internet doesn't mean that they actually have access to the information or that they know how to use it. So today we've explored how organizations can consider their own digital infrastructure and platform design in new ways. We've talked about disabilities, those from marginalized communities, women and gender minorities and groups and rural and remote areas. I invite everyone to check back on new America's digital impact and governance initiative website for the recording of this session, and a write up, including some other resources our speakers have referenced today. I want to thank Jennifer Austin for her ASL interpretation today, and I want to thank our panelists for all of your participation and all of our audience members driving to make the world a better place. Thanks, and we hope to see you all at a future new America event. Have a wonderful day.