 Thanks for joining me today so that I can share with you a little bit about myself and my experience tackling the remnants of systematic discrimination in and around the tech industry. My name is Maurice Turner and my talk is titled The Big Cleanup. I call myself a public interest technologist. Currently I am the Cybersecurity Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. I help develop comprehensive policy strategies to deter, defend against, and raise the cost on autocratic efforts to undermine and interfere in democratic institutions. My focus is securing critical infrastructure and deterring cyber operation escalation. I have also held positions in the United States Election Assistance Commission, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the United States Senate, and in other public sector and private sector organizations in Washington, D.C. and California. I hold degrees in public administration and political science, as well as a certificate in cybersecurity strategy. I got my start in tech probably the same way that some of you did. I broke things around my house and then I tried to put them back together. Sometimes it worked, other times not so much. In high school and throughout college, I built computers and worked at a small medical product development firm where I grew my skillset from doing basic repairs to becoming a CIS admin and even helping out with product design. It was my first experience being part of a product lifecycle and seeing how decisions made by a small group of people could literally mean the difference between thousands of patients going home weeks earlier or dying in the hospital. That lesson has stuck with me throughout my career. But tech was always an interest, not a career goal. I've always wanted to work in government because I believe in the power of people working together to solve the big problems for everyone, not just for customers. That could really only happen when there is representation at all levels of government. So what I try to do when shifting between private sector, public sector, and civil society organizations is to draw from my diverse perspectives, my tactical understanding, and working within policy constraints to address issues like economic development, IT modernization, broadband access, and election security. It's easy to just accept the status quo even when it's harmful because that's just how it's always been done. Discrimination in the tech industry is no different. The reuse and amplification of discriminatory language can have damaging effects on those within the industry as well as in other physical spaces. It adds to the barriers that prevent folks from even trying to participate because they think that they just don't belong. Each step along the way in my career, I've been acutely aware of my blackness and understand that it may make some people uncomfortable, but it can also inspire people too. Regardless of the organization that I am in or the issue that I am tackling, my process always includes looking around the table of decision makers to see who is missing and how those missing perspectives can be included and considered in the decision-making process. Part of my role is to show that those missing perspectives are valuable because it wasn't that long ago when I myself would have been excluded too. The tech industry is full of overt examples of discrimination based on ethnicity, gender, and countless other factors that make a person a person. Examples that I find personally offensive are white lists and black lists and master and slave, because they most closely exemplify the experience of myself, my family, and my community living in America. I'm certainly not the only person to see the inherent discrimination in these terms and to make an effort to try to extract them from the tech industry. Folks at organizations like Apple, Microsoft, NIST, and the IETF saw that they too could make a difference by replacing discriminatory language in products that are used by billions of people. Some might question what difference a few words actually make in people's lives. To that I say, it adds up. Sometimes the signs that you don't belong are obvious. Other times, it's more subtle. But the message is the same. There is something wrong with being non-white. Emoji are a positive example of bringing diversity into the tech industry because it represents the growing diversity of users. I'm not just talking about adding new foods or activities. It's gender expression, diverse relationships, and accessibility needs that are now more fairly represented and communicated. That all came about because someone saw the problem and convinced enough people to support making a small change that would ultimately have a big impact. I would like to share my experience of that process and why it was important for me to make the extra effort to overcome over-discrimination so that someone else didn't have to feel like they didn't belong. Renaming Negro Run In November 2015, I was hiking in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia just a couple hours away from my home in Washington, D.C. As usual, I was taking a lot of photos. After reviewing the location metadata in my photos when I came home, something jumped out at me. The nearby river was called Negro Run. I was shocked and pretty sure that it was a typo. Unfortunately, it wasn't. This led me to learn more about the history of segregation in the Shenandoah National Park and the overwhelming amount of racist place names throughout the country. I knew that I couldn't just let it go. I used my background of working in community issues and in government to track down the agency responsible for changing place names. It turned out to be a long and frustrating process, but after about 14 months, the name was changed to Thames River. That wasn't enough because to me, most people go to Google it the answer, so I decided that's where I needed to go to make the change. In early 2017, I shared my story with a friend who worked at Google. She passed it along to members of the maps team who escalated the approval process to get that name changed. That was my victory. Millions of Google map users would see Thames River, not Negro Run. The problem is that this one-off effort doesn't scale to address the thousands of racist place names across the country. Names like Chinaman Hat and Squatit are in every state. So how can I make a bigger impact? Well, in a pretty incredible coincidence, I had recently started as a technology fellow in the United States Senate in the very committee that had oversight of the agency responsible for place names. That was my opportunity to make a change at the source. The committee sent a bipartisan letter to the Department of the Interior asking why this racist place name policy hadn't been changed in decades. Unfortunately, there's no happy ending to the rest of the story. I did my best to use my skills and to leverage my access to try to make a bigger change and it didn't work. But that's okay. I was able to make an impact outside of government. Later, I was invited to give a fireside chat at Google and that video is posted up on YouTube. And I was also a guest on a podcast discussing my process of going through and changing this racist place name. Just a few years later, I was successful at making a different kind of change from within government, removing Blacklist from VVSG. After I left the Senate at the end of 2017, I began working on election security at a civil society organization. One of my major goals was advocating for an updated version of the voting system guidelines to help secure our aging voting infrastructure. Just a couple of years later, I found myself in a position to directly influence changes to the VVSG when I joined the United States Election Assistance Commission. I leaned heavily on my ability to understand both the technical and policy aspects of the standards-making process. I also knew that voting has long been a contentious issue in America because of the well-documented efforts to keep non-white, non-male citizens from exercising their rights. It became apparent that updating the standards was an opportunity to chip away at some of those barriers of discrimination. Removing discriminatory language from technology standards is not something new. Companies like Apple and Microsoft and standards bodies like NIST and the IETF have been leading the way. Thanks to the internal efforts of their staff getting buy-in from their organizations, I was able to show the EAC how making changes to terms like master-slave should be part of the VVSG modernization process. I'm very proud to say that you won't find discriminatory language in the latest version of the VVSG. More importantly, the solution scales. Most states adopt the federal standards, so the reality is these discriminatory remnants are also being removed from standards across the country. It shows that the federal government is in sync with the private sector modeling a best practice that state and local governments should also follow. You can do it too. You can make a difference. Is there a code project that you help maintain or documentation that you're responsible for? Are you active in a community in your neighborhood or online that may be interested in taking on similar changes for social good? That's your chance to make a difference at scale. That's your chance to tear down some of those signs, big or small, that discourages participation by folks from underrepresented communities. Building support for these kinds of changes can be tough. It's a lot easier when you can point to a government standard or industry best practice to justify the time it takes to make those changes. Another idea is to leverage diversity, equity and inclusion movements that are popular in organizations right now. You can build allies in the Human Resources Department and in other areas of your organization to drive changes to internal documentation and style guides. You've heard me share how my personal experiences in technology and in government have given me the cross sector tools to create and take advantage of opportunities to dig out of some of those remnants of systematic discrimination. Those small remnants that are overlooked and build over time can turn into major issues that are difficult or even impossible to remove from systems. I'm not saying that someone is going to stay away from a career in IT because blacklist and whitelist is used as commonplace, but I will argue that it certainly adds to the cultural biases and derogatory stereotypes in society as a whole. The way I look at it is that all these terms are like small pieces of trash on the sidewalk. Individually it's not a big deal, but collectively it makes the environment a little more difficult to navigate and certainly unpleasant to be in. Some people are fine because the trash doesn't get in the way. That's because they're probably the ones that are throwing it on the ground. For others, the trash is unavoidable. So the question is, if you don't clean up the trash, then who will?