 Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today, both here and online. A reminder that hashtag is tech for the people. If you want to tweet, we will take questions from all of the above. My name is Georgia Bullen. I'm a senior data analyst here at the Open Technology Institute. The idea for today's event came when Ali Rahman and Ali Rahman from Code for Progress in Iowa were debriefing about the community projects that OTI did with Code for Progress's first group of cohorts, first year of fellows. We hosted a few conversations here over the last year around diversity and technology issues, but our hope and intention was to gather a group of people who are making change happen through the work that they do every day to talk about the larger issues as well as share some actionable advice that all of us can learn from and start using now. The topic of why women and minorities leave STEM fields, or truthfully why we never get there in the first place, is a large topic area that has many people engaged in research and writing, and even starting organizations and programs to address it. According to the census, women and people of color represent fewer than 30% of STEM professionals, and that number has declined since 1990. When I was a student at Carnegie Mellon, we had a campus joke that we used to characterize the situation in computer science. The Dave to Girl ratio is greater than one. As in there are more men named Dave than women in computer science every year. Looking at tech specifically, the beauty and challenge is that there are resources that make it possible to learn to be a technologist outside of traditional education paths. Programs like Code for Progress, Hear Me Code, Yes We Code, Black Girls Code, Hacker School, General Assembly, Outreachy, People of Color Techies, and even OTI's own digital stewards program provide pathways to learn about technology. These programs cover everything from the technology development process to systems of responsible recycling of technology, and most importantly, problem solving and understanding what people actually need. In parallel, an increasing number of services have transitioned over to digital platforms. As many cities are starting to implement data-driven decision making, ensuring that we have a workforce who can connect with the needs of everyone is increasingly important. However, our education system, our hiring process, the structures and environments of STEM organizations need to evolve to support a diverse workforce as well. I don't think I'm out of line to say that this isn't something we at New America or even just within OTI have figured out ourselves. We do have our digital stewards model that I mentioned and that we've been researching and working with in many communities around the world. We choose to partner with organizations like Code for Progress and Outreachy because we want to support the change that they are helping making in the community broadly. And we are working with other programs at New America and some of the policy issues that lead to the problems limiting opportunities for women and people of color. But there's still more we can all do every day. So we're going to have two panels today. The first will focus on what leadership can do to address the diversity gap, which I'll introduce everyone on in a moment. And the second, later today, will be more of a nuts and bolts conversation about the day-to-day challenges and practices we can all adopt. That panel will feature Mariela Polino, a Code for Progress fellow, Tom Conner from Motley Fool, Brooke Hunter from Engine, and Mona Abdel Halim, who's the founder of Resonate.com. I hope all of you will stick around for the second panel. But first, I'll introduce our first panel. We're honored to host such a rockstar group of women. Alan's going to try to hold his own. It's going to be tough. It's going to be tough. But he's going to try. So I'll go through down the line in order. Starting with Anne Marie. Anne Marie Slaughter is currently the President and CEO of New America, where we are right now. She's the Bert G. Kerstetter, University Professor of Merida of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where she served as the policy planning, oh, sorry. From 2009 to 2011, she served as the Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. In 2012, she published the article Why Women Still Can't Have It All in the Atlantic, which quickly became the most read article in the history of the magazine and helped spawn a renewed national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine, full male-female equity, which she is building into a book that will come out sometime. Anytime. Next, Anne Marie is Megan Smith, who was named in September 24, the United States Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, she serves as an assistant to the President, focusing on how technology policy and innovation can advance the future of our nation. Megan Smith is an award-winning entrepreneur, engineer, and tech evangelist, most recently serving as Vice President at Google X, where she worked on a range of projects and co-created the company's Sol4X Innovation Community Project, as well as its Women Techmakers Tech Diversity Initiative. Next to Megan, we have Commissioner Jessica Rosenwurzel. Jessica Rosenwurzel was nominated and confirmed in May 2012 to the Federal Communications Commission. Commissioner Rosenwurzel brings a decade and a half of public sector and private sector communications law experience to her position at the FCC. This experience has shaped her belief that in the 21st century, strong communications markets can foster economic growth and security, enhance digital age opportunity, and enrich our civic life. Next to Jessica, we have Alia Rahman, the Program Director for Code for Progress. As Program Director, Alia Rahman leads the recruitment in residence training and job placement of the Code for Progress fellows into full-time developer positions. Her work is informed by a background in legislative, electoral, and community organizing for racial and economic justice campaigns and by a former life in public higher education conducting curriculum research and teaching computer programming and educational foundations and policy. And our moderator is Alan Davidson, who is the New America Vice President for Technology, Policy, and Strategy and Director of the Open Technology Institute. He's also a research affiliate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he is co-founder of the new MIT Information Policy Project. With that, I'm going to hand it over to Alan. Excellent. Thank you, Georgia. And thank you all for being here and thank you to our panelists. This is really a it's a dream team of leaders thinking about this problem of diversity in STEM, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Thank you all for being here. This is terrific. And our goal today is really to have a conversation. I'll ask a few questions to try and steer it. And then to save some time at the end for all of you in the audience to ask some questions too. So think about your questions. We want to hear them. Why don't I just start with a simple general question. Maybe it's not so simple, but we've sort of we've framed this this way which is to say the problem that we're looking at is that the people who are building the technology that so many of us use today, so many people use, they do not look like the people who are using the technology. They do not come from the same backgrounds of the people who are using that technology. And there's lots of data, Georgia talked about, you know, the 50% of women in the workforce but less than 30% of them are actually represented in the STEM fields. Census did a study about there probably, I think it's 11% of the workforce is black, 6% of the STEM workforce is black. Lots of statistics about this. Tell, maybe we'll just go down the line is, how do you see the problem? Is this a problem? Why is this a problem? How would you frame it? Why don't we start with Ann Marie? So it is a problem. It's a very big problem and it will, so let me say why I think of it as a problem from my perch as first dean of a public policy school, then a government official and now had of an organization that is dedicated to solving public problems. So in all those areas tech is the new indispensable language for solving public problems. So if you think about, so solving public problems is generally what we call policy, but policy is just one way of solving public problems. Policy is law or regulation. That's how you solve public problems. Today, that is still very important, but tech is equally important. If you are thinking about how to solve problems from the environment to poverty reduction to supporting women to health to the environment, whatever it is, if you are thinking only about law and policy, you're not serious. You're really not serious. But if you're thinking only, so you have to be thinking about tech. Now I would say if you're thinking about tech and you're not also thinking about law and policy and politics, you're also not serious. So you have to have them both. And solving public problems, that's what government does. That's what the ecosystem of civic organizations does. That's increasingly what private companies have to help do as well. So it's absolutely central to how we govern ourselves and how we thrive. And yet only a very small portion of the population speaks tech. And so if I think about it from the point of view of a public policy school, we teach everybody to do a certain amount of cost benefit analysis. You have to understand the basics of economics. You have to understand the basics of politics. You have to understand a lot about organizational behavior. You have to understand a good bit about law. You have to understand at least how the legal process works and writes and duties. What you don't have to understand, which you ought to be understanding, is at least enough tech to speak it the way I speak it. Better still, you need the people who are actually doing tech. Talking to, sitting side by side with the people who are focusing on public problems coming from any other areas. And right now that conversation would look like all of you on one side and a few white guys on the other. And that's a problem. So I will say that's why I think it's a problem. I'm going to offer one reason why I think from my own perspective why there are not enough women in it. And this is highly personal. So I'm a superstar high school student who was told not to take calculus because I was a girl. Now I'm telling you how old I am. But I'm not that old and in Virginia in the early 70s I was told not to take calculus. So I've never taken calculus, which immediately says to me if you tell me that tech is math, I'm terrified of it. If you tell me tech's a language, I've got no problem. I'm great at languages. I speak French. I speak German. I'm learning Italian. I have no problem. So if you tell me that tech is a language, which it is, so coding is a language, I have no problem at all. And yet in my world, it was always described as math. Now I believe women are just as good at math. I believe all of that. I believe we should be pushing that. But I'll just say in terms of the perception and the stereotypes that we still labor under for many, many, many girls. Fewer than it used to be. I think part of the problem is that we're not describing coding fully enough. And that if you tell people it's a way of speaking another language, it is much more female friendly to many women than it is today. So I will end with that, except I have to just say I love having Megan sitting next to me. When I was in the State Department, Hillary Clinton invited a whole group of women to come and talk about tech and other things. And Megan got up there and she starts talking and within about five seconds, I went to the woman next to me and said who is that woman? So it's lovely to have you here. She's technology. Just to pick up on what you were just saying, I have an analogy I sometimes talk about us being a governmentist. We haven't had technical people at the table when we're policy making for a long time. We do it very well when we're at war. If you look at World War II or other things, we're like bam, we need all Americans, we pull all Americans. But during times of peace, we're not thinking that way. And it's almost like we're driving down the road with this awesome car full of talent and one or two wheels are flat. And so we just can't go because the tools of the 21st century include all of the things you said and that includes technology actually in two forms. One is the more sort of clear end technology, using the technology as a way to do something. The other is the network itself which kind of the digital natives are doing this all day. Texting and tweeting and talking to each other and sort of federating and solving problems in a very lightweight networked way where the talent is integrated and so not everybody's using those tools and both are really important for how we think as an ecosystem for solving problems. Because there's way more resource available everywhere if we just could find the person who has the solution, connect them to us, etc. On this specific topic I often divide the problem into three sections. One is sort of kids so that sort of pre-K to 12 group of which there's different things at those levels but really what are we doing in school to make sure that everyone knows they should have numeracy and literacy. And as a grown up you would never say that unless there was a specific disability issue you wouldn't be talking about how reading was so hard I just didn't really get it. But you say that all the time culturally about math and science which is a crazy thing if you think about it I think we are failing to teach in the way that people would enjoy learning it and we're making people terrified. So those who can do active things that matters a lot. Active learning, why are we doing this historic context. Young people don't know that for example you talk about computer languages, Grace Hopper invented the idea of having a language in English like a compiler, a translator that would go to the machine code. She is like an Edison level American. Everyone needs to know that Grace Hopper is amazing American. And in fact just in history there's so many people, women and people of color who've been fundamental parts of inventing things and because we haven't written that history the other day I found out a woman invented the dishwasher. I'm like these things and her company got merged with what is now KitchenAid like why do I know Westinghouse and I don't know about Josephine. So she won the Chicago World's Fair top prize built a business that she sold to all these hotels and we just don't know about her. This is crazy. So that's the K-12 stuff. With the college students there's a lot of work being done because sometimes especially in tech you can come with a lot of experience and so Harvey Mudd's been doing best practice dividing the entry class so that someone who's been coding for 8 or 10 years and made an app and sold the company whatever they've done is not in the same class as someone who's starting and just being smart about not only applied all the things in K-12 and then this big one which I think we're really focused on is how do you keep people at the table, how do you bring them in sort of advancement hiring, paying attention and maybe just to be provocative a friend of mine Natalie Jeremy Janka said that she actually felt like it might be a mass protest. That actually the lack of women and people of color in tech might be a mass protest on the culture. That it's actually an inversion of what we're thinking oh the poor people and women who need to help them actually maybe they're protesting a culture that's incredibly unwelcoming and not helpful. So I just thought it was to me that I've been thinking a lot about that she said that recently that that's independent of all that we need to debug it and fix it and not only has it historically been much more balanced in terms of gender and it was not fair in terms of race but there have been people of color at elite levels the whole time. Catherine Johnson calculated the trajectories of Alan Shepard, John Glenn and the Apollo mission African American women who didn't seem to be in the Apollo movie not sure where she was but so getting that right I think matters a lot and figuring it out because all of the math shows that products are better, companies are better for financial performance everything's better for a diverse team and I think especially for our most pressing problems whether it's poverty or cyber security or the more diverse the team the better we are going to be to kind of protect ourselves and advance society in the ways that we need to do by getting this figured out. Jessica. Alright well I think about this on a substantive level and also on a personal and visceral level and on the substantive level I mean just look around the ones and zeros that are the vocabulary of modern computing have become the language of our digital age it's just that the people who speak that language and work with that language do not look like the rest of the population and you can look just like with statistics with women they hold about half the jobs in the economy but only a quarter of the STEM jobs and there are similar statistics for Latinos and African Americans and I look at that gap and I'm troubled by it, I'm troubled by it as a simple matter of equity but I'm also troubled by it because I think it's a lost economic opportunity and I think that we can do a lot if we start sizing this problem and talking about it and developing solutions but on a more personal and visceral level I came to this job about two and a half years ago and I come from a long line of science and math nerds and the most rebellious thing I could do was go to law school but you go out on the circuit once you come to these jobs you start getting mic'd up and you start talking and I would go to big engineering conferences and they're engineering conferences so there's no mood light and you can look out and know who's in the audience and you'd see hundreds of men and I could count the women on my fingers and then I'd spend some time with investors in New York in California and most of the time I was the only woman at the table but it really all came home to me when I was abroad ironically enough I was at a big spectrum conference and I spoke there on the stage and it's European so it was dark I couldn't even tell you who I was speaking before but when it was over I decided I needed to use the facilities so I de-miked myself and ran off into the hallway looked around for the bathrooms and there was this long line snaking out of the men's bathroom and I went in and I used the women's bathroom and there wasn't a soul in there and now you don't choose where you have your epiphanies but walking out of the bathroom that day thinking that you should start talking about this because what you know intellectually you are now experiencing at a visceral level and I think we need to do something about it I also think about this in three ways but different kind of access a little bit and so for me it's kind of coming out of what I call a grassroots policy background meaning simultaneously doing community work and also thinking about some of these policy things so for me the first bucket is actually definitely around our public education system and it's very apparent to me and after many years of doctoral research and so on that there's a problem there so we have systemic inequity in how schools are funded and where you're born really determines a lot about your access to computers and those kinds of things and also the curriculum that you are going to be receiving so I think definitely with Megan on that there is really stuff happening in the classroom that is devaluing the inherent worth of people of color and women as innovators and I actually went to school at Purdue to be an astronautical engineer and did not learn about her until years later I was one of four women in that class and I also came from a family of people who didn't go to college looking around at people who did not look like me who could not have a conversation about what it was like to have an incarcerated parent for example those kinds of things and the stuff that happens in those educational settings that is difficult for students and we often say things like yeah but you know what are we going to do about that that's just kind of people's behavior we actually legislate in the opposite direction all the time in terms of what history is taught in schools how funding happens so part of that is about curriculum stuff and I've been teaching programming for 15 years so usually I get assigned to the non-traditional students the first generation college students and people of color and I'm with you because when you say actually program is like giving instructions to a really dumb robot or perhaps a toddler that means moms are very good at it right that means all of this kind of stuff right and so actually it makes a really big difference right and when we talk about just all kinds of social examples and how we teach things like model view control or people get it right folks did a skit on Kim Kardashian I think for the last fellowship and maybe Mariela will talk to you about that so there is the kind of curricular cultural curricular nature of what's going on and there's a research that tells us we can do better about that but the other is that there's other stuff around that public education bucket so I did my doctoral research in Ohio which is a state where the school funding formula has been found unconstitutional three times because of its capacity to recycle the income level of parents and the income level of students right it ties school funding very very closely to property taxes right so if you're in a wealthy neighborhood there's like ten thousand dollars difference per people you're spending in Ohio within the same city sometimes just by neighborhood right so when that's going on like y'all we can't have that right that we can solve it's wrong right but the problem is there's nothing that says when you find a funding system unconstitutional you are supposed to do X that doesn't exist right so we have to handle that stuff so the second bucket is that yeah ideal situation we would have a good public education system that gave everyone equal opportunities and that people were coming out as interested in this and that kind of field depending on their demographics in general like that stuff wasn't convoluted right but that's not what we have and so while we're trying to repair that stuff in the long run we're also seeing this popping up of all of these dev boot camps other programs that are trying to kind of plug that gap in the short run and I actually see very concrete issues going on there where there's this program this program this program attempting to form a pipeline but water be springing up in the leaks between those those little joints right one we either don't know each other in the ecosystem so I kind of make it my professional business to know everybody in the country who is working in one of those programs and I'm getting there you know and number two we actually don't have a standardized competency not certification not certification but competency that essentially handles risk mitigation so both for the job seeker and the employer meaning if one of our fellows so we train people with a background in community organizing racial and economic and gender justice to be coders right folks who don't have coding experience but who are really good at talking about these issues once they're in a workplace for them to join our program they have to know that something's going to come out the end of that that that's really going to get them a job that it's really going to prepare them a lot of dev boot camps don't have that stuff right they're relying on other things and similarly employers when they're saying I want to hire a junior developer who is a python ninja actually that means nothing to be honest right and it is actually possible I think for us to develop some workforce competencies or some form of you know what you're going to get out of those programs before we expect employers to take on some of the either risk or educational lift and so I'm actually really excited to work on that in 2015 with a bunch of folks since I went to school for one of the world's most boring things which is writing education policy and competencies right it's also that's also really important because this is an industry that values show me what you built not just your degree or you know I've taken I've watched this one video on code school right so we actually have to tie those competencies to look at my github account or whatever right so I think we can do that and then the third thing that I think is the problem quite honestly is that we are still in a situation of very very strong inequity gender and race wise everywhere in this country we can see it in legislation we can see it in our daily lives I see it every day when I'm teaching so when I'm teaching white guys who are second generation college folks in Indiana and they get an error in their program the first thing they'll do is be like I wonder if it's my semicolons right when you're teaching people from a background where the story is we don't do this stuff you can watch this happen in the classroom right and a couple of fellows in a room can probably attest to this that when you get an error you're going everything is broken I can't do this and people like me because you're fighting so much other stuff right so when someone is electing out of these industries the process idea is interesting right but I might also pair that with the idea that people aren't dumb right they're actually operating based on real feedback that's happening all the time and making rational decisions in a lot of situations right because for every moment that we go and say you can do this you can do this they have had like 200 messages by the time they get to us that month or that week that are telling them the contrary and pressing on their chest and saying that this is not right so I honestly think and I will say this without always having allies on this statement but that if we believe that one of the most pressing issues in tech right now is the racial and gender composition of our workforce then we can't define tech policy as things that are about wires computers whatever only right we actually have to make it our job to handle racial and gender inequity because kids are listening to us saying you can do this and waking up and watching this country go to war over the statement that lives matter which is ridiculous right that is not a debatable sentence to me but if that is happening what does that mean to that kid right so all of this is to say that I think that tech people actually have a very significant role in becoming involved in other things too if we don't fix some of those systemic things that are real policy issues and get on the side of justice on that stuff we're going to be stuck a data point I love what you're saying about media you know what messages are weighing on people's chests Gina Davis did this amazing work on that on gender and TV and in children's television it's they measured what jobs you know in addition to princess what jobs people hold in children's television and it's five to one just in general if there's four characters on TV only one of them is a girl in children's and family TV so it's not balanced generally but in the jobs out of every five characters only in STEM only one is a girl or a woman and in computer science on TV for our children it's 15 to one so every day you watch TV and you the boys are learning oh boys do this and the girls are learning girls don't do this and you know and in this place well look at Big Bang Theory I mean Big Bang Theory is a classic example both my sons watch it all the time there's like there are no women there's like one you know and they're always they're never at the core well it's interesting because Megan and Elia you both started with what I would say the pipeline issue here this public education issue and I'll share my focus group my 13 year old daughter who calls herself a math and science girl maybe just to please her dad but it's okay and I told her I was going to do this panel she was horrified slightly but she also like when I asked her like what's going on here her first answer was like duh like when the girls were really young the boys were a little bit better a lot of the boys were better at math and they all kind of learned that they could be really good at math and we all learned that we would be better at other stuff and now she's in middle school and 80% of the advanced math class is boys and it's just this reinforcing cycle right how do we start to address that I mean do we think that's a real data point but it's backed up by some other a lot of data out there how do we begin to touch that is it about these roll these messages that are coming from media is it about something we need to do in the classroom all the above I think it's both that point right what's interesting about that is at the same time girls are wildly outstripping guys across the board in high school and college and professional school right so my sons would just say well yeah girls are smarter than boys because the girls are way ahead of the guys except in this very small area right so and I should say by the way my daughter wasn't saying that they should the girls catch up like there's no there's no doubt about it they're all they're all as good maybe even better but the question of sort of very early on how do these messages get sent right and what can we do about it so there's gotta be a way of taking what is overall so Liza Mundy's book on the richer sex or Hannah Rosen's on the end of men and the statistics are very clear that if you have kids who are you're trying to get them into college these days there's affirmative action for boys because the girls are doing better overall so there's sort of a big trend and yet in these particular areas going into tech so if you're looking at I bet if you're looking at well I don't know about Harvey Mudd but if you're looking certainly at Caltech or MIT or the places that the top computer scientists are coming out of you're not seeing this overall trend but you're seeing it everywhere else so there's gotta be some way to what's interesting there was a study when I was at Google there was a study that they did some colleagues did and interestingly they studied you know why are kids opting out it was matching to all the research that about kids needing to you know have hands on active experiences so they understood not just the facts but why this is fun getting their confidence with it they needed to understand why people were doing that they needed to you know sort of know a little bit of some context about people but there was a whole set of boys who also were opting out so it's in service of all of our kids including the boys and girls to opt all of our children into STEM topics as well as you know history and writing and make them sort of fluent in all of these pieces the boys in that study were especially the boys who opted out were especially focused on impact they didn't they did the same issue the girls didn't see no one had said in the classroom why we were doing this so the math was in service to the math you know just like we're doing this this equation not because Catherine needs to send Alan Shepard out and bring him back you know like there's no context but we were doing it really important stuff in the pipeline there so I think just and also this hands on active learning it doesn't cost more it's just a better way of learning and we should we need to move to that and figure out how to let our master teachers lead us there I also think we need to be a lot more aggressive about talking about role models every child in school should know the way to love laces and grace hopper and when they turn on the television they should see better statistics when it comes to women and their representation then what we're learning from the Gina Davis Institute but one source for optimism is I think that the administrations connect at initiative and the FCC's efforts to reboot the e-rate program are in time going to really make a difference when we start to promote really high speed broadband to all of our schools eventually a gigabit to all of our K through 12 schools we are going to create a market for teaching tools devices and STEM education that is more project based and different from the sad and tired universe probably everyone in this room grew up with and I think if we can reinvent our schools at the earliest ages with that kind of thing we can produce a different pipeline a more equal pipeline and one that engages more kids and more different kids in STEM education a lot earlier for me there's two sort of radical ideas what would it be like if computer science education was required what would happen then? from elementary school right? countries like Estonia are doing that right now this is goofy right? I had some interesting really insightful conversations with some city of DC decision makers and then just other law makers and stuff so every Thursday night we have this thing called community hack night here in DC which is the premise is just upholding the inherent worst of women and people of color as innovators and you are guaranteed to get the word hello when you walk in which is different than many tech events right? and someone will say hi what you here to do and if you say coding what's that now what? then we won't assume you're stupid and we'll get you started right? so we have people visit us every now and then who are like wow there's this women and people mostly people of color like group that meets to talk about social justice tech and to do this stuff like I really want to talk to them and we always get decision makers saying I know I know I know your kids don't have computers in their schools because we hold these in word 8 and more recently some more in northwest DC and they're saying that yeah I can't require computer science education if math and reading competencies aren't even there yet which cognitively actually doesn't make tons of sense because if you have I have a focus group too so that's my nephews and my niece who are 7, 8 and 6 and like this is a robot piece that we actually use in making robots with them right? they can think algorithmically and they can make computer programs they don't read all that great and they hate math right? those are separate right so I think that we have to listen to cognitive science and the fact and actually if you in the computer maybe you're going to read better because it's fun right? so there's definitely that assumption that I hadn't realized was in place around people's decisions about whether they introduce funding for certain kinds of programs so and we can all think of classes we wouldn't have taken had they not been required right? education has always been a battle ground in this country for separate but equal conversations and we have that happening right now right? around class and race and gender with respect to tech ed so I think that's a really really interesting question and I think you look at countries who admitted that they had a poverty problem and an equity problem handled it and made those things required and now we have India like things like that right? the second thing is that technologists seem to get talked about only in math and science classes and computer classes which is weird to me so we had a DC FemTech event which is the DC like community of women attack organizations and Code for Progress's game was you had to identify these three women technologists who were all women of color right? and everyone was like is that Ada Lovelace? and I was like she white? they're not you know no you know and they were like well who is that? and I always and I didn't say coders I said technologists right? so every time I do panels I ask people to please put your hand up if you're a tech person and I'm asking you now there's some serious gender disparity in what just happened I will say it again in which okay so notice I did not say are you a coder right? I said are you a tech person and I think I have a personal kind of war on the dichotomy between tech person not tech person because in the age of smartphones I don't make no sense right? so I also think it's important because we get used to saying tech oh I'm not in tech what does that mean? just like you were saying that's strange right? you know when I was young it manifested in terms of like you can fix the VCR right? now it manifests in terms of yeah I mean I think that these like a woman who was advising one of our fellows who works at the sunlight foundation was like well I'm not a tech person but I do know that there's something weird going on when these two APIs mash up right here and I think that this one call that's being made to I was like what in the hell is going on? why are you saying that right? and so for me I always say IDB Wells is my favorite data scientist and everyone's like what you know no she did not have express database right? but that is the woman who walked around and took down data of every lynching in the United States that she could have access to and did amazing analysis of it because to me we have to reinvent and innovate about what innovation really is right? she to me is one of the most innovative data people ever because she found a way to look at data science and she actually did data science right? she calculated means and everything around why they were you know and make social impact with it right? I mean Lappy Bird is cool right? but like to me that's not the kind of innovation that I'm really excited about and the reason that we again recruit activists and community organizers is because they've demonstrated innovation in looking at a system and cutting through it and hacking in other ways right? so it would be great to see those kinds of people talked about as technologists as innovators in other fields too because innovation has now become like synonymous if you see the Hulu ads about innovators while you're watching your show about innovators of the new blah blah blah yeah some people down their head they're all like tech people or startup folks but really the ability to think about technologies is a really it spans right coding and all of that kind of stuff and so I think being able to lift up some of those first of all brings more women and people of color into the field and into the picture and into the history and second of all like gives us permission to say we're tech people which really helps us learn right? right now we're all like well I don't know like I find myself being like I'm not really a back end coder you know because when I test this devops thing for 100,000 users load testing I'm not even my scripts aren't that great like I do stuff like that right so if I'm doing that I can only imagine elsewhere you know it's also the future like name a job or aspect of your civic life that is not going to include some part of technology there's nothing right so if we know that to be true we should be doing technology in so many more ways than these traditional categories of coders or computer people and you should watch people come into those hack nights with app ideas it's amazing right amazing because you know we feel like it takes less time to teach coding syntax than to teach a racial consciousness or to teach like power analysis and like they'll be like we should make an app that does this this this and the reason that I do this job now is because I hired some of the smartest innovators ever to doorknock our jobs for years and over again in Ohio right and they'd come back and be like we could do this better by blah blah blah didn't have access to coding right so yeah I didn't bring I used to take an Arduino or Raspberry Pi around it's just basically the board from inside your cell phone so imagine that the UK just announced a new Raspberry Pi it's $35 so the current one is $7 they are distributing that across all of their kids in elementary school so think of like Steve Jobs and Wasniac with the homebrew kind of board and then like get me a monitor I gotta get a keyboard plug in a speaker and sort of made the first kind of Apple computers same thing only you know with the super cheap thing so the kids in the UK are starting to have that so they can understand what physically is inside their cell phone and starting to make it do things you know just simple stuff in second and third but to your point like a kid who my friend Dr. Sue Black was on the curriculum there she's like children learn to cook they can understand an instruction set they can understand coding you don't need some advanced math and it's one of the mistakes we make in teaching we want to fill them with all these facts so then they'll be capable of doing the thing rather than have them do things and then just in time wanting to know chemistry there was a really fun hackathon in the fall that one of my colleagues made around games and so the Angry Birds team came and they had this idea called billion dollar school and so their idea was you would come into school and you wouldn't be separated by we're going to biology class or these classes instead you'd work on a billion dollar problem like dirty water and by working on that problem together you of course had to learn some chemistry and some history and geography and other things but just thinking about things in this more active way and that actually goes to your point about certifying competency I mean actually having competency not just a certification but competency so Kevin Kerry who runs our education program has a book coming out called The End of College and what he's really describing is the revolution in on-demand learning so it's exactly as you describe it where you're working on a problem and you learn as many of the great inventors and innovators and autodidacts of history have you don't think oh gosh now I have to take a chemistry course you think I need to learn how these bonds work or I need to understand the structure of this and here's the course that will let me do that and it's online or it's online and physical it can be a mix and I will then be my competency will be certified not that I took a three credit course right and so that revolution is coming it's already here in some places and that then makes then you can re-engineer learning right because then you can absolutely start with the problem and pull in what you need to know to solve it rather than the idea that we train people with all this stuff and then we let them loose on problems where often there's a mismatch anyway. We're in Washington so I have to ask the Washington question is there a role for government or what can government be doing what can policy do here I mean we've talked about a couple of like what I think of is almost like terrific ideas that happen a little bit in isolation right you know the billion dollar school or the tech meetup how do we scale these things and is there a role is there a role for policy here so we should talk a little bit you got you know sort of the whole connect ad and the FCC's strategy there is incredibly interesting one of the things you know ideas come from everywhere so it's not like government has to have the ideas you just want to find the best idea it's sort of like the angel investors venture capitalists find the person with the great idea get them scaled so one of the things that we can do a lot of government is convening the president brought together amazing for a league of the innovative schools sort of the superintendents are really getting this done as a precursor to learning and seeing learning from each other and hearing what they were doing so that we could create the right policy and environments for things like connect ad so getting those cohorts together and hearing from each other is really critical and that's definitely something whether it's federal government and you're doing it across the states or whether it's city government pulling together key stakeholders the solutions are there and people have them and just getting them interconnected is key I also think government's really good if we start setting some goals we watched over this past summer a lot of the nation's largest technology companies come out with data about how diverse or less than diverse their workforces are and I don't think you can manage problems you don't measure so that's a good start but I think the next step is let's have a goal you know we hear over and over again that in the next decade there's going to be 1.4 million new STEM job openings and right now we only have 400,000 people in the pipeline to fill them what if we just decided that next million is going to be a million for diversity and if we went back to all of those companies right now and public institutions that profess to care about this and say what are you going to do to make that next million more diverse because I think that we've started to measure this problem now we've got to get into the mode of goal setting and I think government with its convening can help that. We started doing a little bit of work with St. Louis and Louisville and a bunch of cities who are interestingly doing a terrific job with coding boot camps and reaching into diverse communities pulling people through those and then working with the local hiring folks who typically are saying I need some of the four year degree I need and instead are open to hiring somebody with a different background, a three month background, etc. in training and maybe apprenticing them and so getting that those good ideas that are happening they're happening in New York, a little bit in Delaware, getting those moving into all the cities. That's a good example where our convenient power is pushing. Also Code.org has been an extraordinary public-private partnership teammate on really lobbying and working to helping regional leadership in the schools move through. We got 60 school districts to commit to teaching coding to middle and high school students. You know $25,000 of money raised for teacher training. Top 7 school districts actually in that 60. Largest school districts in so yeah of the biggest students. So just really to your point like setting some goals and pushing and finding collaborative teammates so that each person can kind of move the ecosystem forward like this. It does also though mean and this is more controversial it means attacking traditional credentials or at least making very clear they're not necessary. Which is something people... They're not the only path. They're not the only path. You can choose other paths. There's a mix of how you get there. Right. But that's harder because you know everybody does hire themselves so we're okay with dropping out of college as long as you're dropping out of Harvard. I mean there's no question right the idea that fine Silicon Valley's full of people who dropped out of college you know Peter Teal's paying people to drop out of college or not go but that's still assuming you know you've got this very high set of potential credentials maybe even if you didn't get the degree. We actually need to be I think to push harder on the idea that wait a minute you know you really can get to the same place with certifications with three months at least you can get to the start and that means being willing I think not just to sort of say this is a way but to really push back on the idea that the traditional way people have gotten to these jobs is just not necessary. We've only got about a little over five minutes left I want to make sure we get some time for questions from the audience so are there questions from the audience? We've got one right here and I know I think there will be a mic but why don't we start and I'll repeat it. Oh here comes the mic. Excellent. Oh good. You see they've they've gamed it for us here. How about right here. Hi my name is Judy Ayala and I am a small company in Services for Higher Ed. It's very interesting conversation especially in my field and going back to school to the subject about school and I would like to ask the panel how much you think our organization and our education policy feels that they own the issue of personalized learning and how quickly we give up in that student that maybe is not brilliant or is not getting it the way is explained one way and then we from there keep building down the path instead of trying to look for personalized learning and the other question is talking about badges and certifications. How much also the system immediately trying to get a student into the system kills that passion especially students might have because they have to go through this system that we have put a young person in. Thank you. I was in an incredibly modern school we were just in California for the difference in the summit on consumer protection and cyber and so was at Pally High School with Esther Wajiski who is the journalism teacher there and one of my favorite things and she's able to have run three or four classrooms as one teacher because she's got the kids, she flipped her classroom 20 years ago and she has the kids doing their projects and she's in the first couple weeks when they come in they can't figure out like they're waiting for being instructed and then eventually they figure it out but they have they found some chairs that are on wheels and they pull a little desk in front and they can put stuff around and so the classroom just reconfigures based on how they feel you know like we need to work together and now I got to go over oh we need to face so it's a totally modern way of being in a classroom and the kids are driving together with them coaching and it's much better individualized learning without technology per se. I mean they're using technology for sort of word processing actually more in journalism and blog posting etc. and graphics but not as what we expect from ed tech which will come so that was really interesting to watch Suzuki who was the violin professor he actually he did violins because his father had a violin factory but his actual thesis was that anyone could learn anything to a very elite level and his proof point was how we learn language that all people learn their own mother tongue to such a perfection level and it's because the people teaching them don't require them to learn a certain way. Your parents don't say okay here's the list for this week to the toddler right and here's the list next week. They just adapt with you and so he decided to do an experiment on math and so one year he taught fourth grade math and he said every child in my class could get 100% on every test and he did it because he just adapted to them so I think that I'm very excited about where we're going and I don't think it's all ed tech I think it's like this kind of teacher like Wajiski and these other Yeah I think so How do politicians are repeating for folks on the web What role does policy have here? What can we do to try to We're learning that. I'm close to connect to Ed because I feel like connecting the master teacher. I feel like so many of our classrooms are stuck in this industrial age where you've got some numbers of children sitting there and a teacher who could be very talented speaking at the front assigning them reading from textbooks that are purchased every 7 to 10 years by their school district. That strikes me today as completely crazy. That might have been my educational experience that might have been my educational experience but it's not the one I want for my kids in this digital age and I think the kind of personalization and customization you're talking about is going to go part and parcel with digitizing our classrooms because when we bring so much more bandwidth into our classrooms we are going to have a level of data analysis about our students that can be so productive in teaching teachers about what's getting across what's not getting across. We're going to have new nationwide markets for digital teaching tools that don't exist today that can be so much more creative and so much more project based rather than lecture based and I think that kind of education is thoroughly modern and something we should figure out how to start pushing into our schools and with the reboot of the e-rate program which brings broadband capability to schools in every state in this country I think we are on course to do that in the next 5 years and I think that's really really exciting and is going to be almost revolutionary. Yeah so the individualized personalized education question is really interesting to me because of basically you know when I was trained as a curriculum researcher that we think about learning styles as kind of like two axes of things right. One is around that whole like kinesthetic visual hearing right but then there's this other axis that's about like social context community and those kinds of things right values based stuff right and so sometimes I like to agitate people to think about the need for individualized education may actually be about the need for culturally competent education or rather education that does not negate the the kind of the knowledge right that is part of communities of women and people of color etc right so for example so in curriculum theory there's a concept called the null curriculum what that means is when you don't say something you're actually saying something right the things you leave out of your curriculum are speaking volumes to those students right and so I think about this concept of code switching if you've ever heard that it's the idea of like you know when I go into different professional cultural environments my language changes a little bit if I was giving an academic talk I don't really sound like I do right now and then when I'm in the classroom I sound even wilder than I do right now those kinds of things but that feminist standpoint theory says that if you are part of the minoritized group it means you have to learn your way of doing things and the majority way of doing things in order to get by and survive if you're in a majority group there isn't a survival necessity to learn that other mode right so by extension women and people of color people in minorities communities are very good at code switching they've practiced it a lot right and if you begin every coding lesson with to your students of color and say like y'all know how you switch environments all the time we about to do a whole bunch of that you got this right it really changes things right that and women and communities of color in this country have so much to be proud of you know some there are some folks who founded this country but I feel like we built it you know and when you're not bringing up the social context of coding and stuff like that in the education you're not valuing those things that some people are coming into the classroom with right you're mostly valuing like the syntax stuff and some of what you were talking about like some folks come into college I can launch an app right but where are we lifting up the things that other folks are good at that are going to make them good project managers that are going to make them come up with great ideas and then at the point of the workforce do y'all ever interview for those things because when we say we hire for diversity we pretty much are just like okay is there a black person in the movement but reality is you have to ask questions that are about skills related to gender and race and ask them to the white people and men as well right so when we ask a question like which languages do you speak like python how much coding and HTML have you done we ask a question too right tell me about a time you have done work with a community of color right tell me about a situation you were in in which you had to advocate for women right because I need those skills like those are hard skills to take forever to develop and I want those skills coming in right and it's going to save you from lawsuits problems and it's going to make generally better coworkers and that should be part of what we're looking for in both training students and techies and when we hire as well right so we want to look for those things and that means our policy has to think about how do we value those things within tech and science as well right they are part of creating a good techie so you're allowed to clap I'm Jeff Landau with the new America here there's a lot of focus I think on the pipeline problem of getting people into tech but I think what's been missing from this panel is the problem of retention you see a recent study I think last year showed that half of the women surveyed who were in computer science had left within a year because of harassment because of being underpaid because of being underappreciated so my question is what would a panel of former women and people of color in tech look like and how do you think that their analysis of the problem and presentations of solutions might differ we kind of ran out of time so yeah but I'm glad you're raising it now so thoughts on that retention? Donnelly retention about advancement I remember talking to some of the team from Coca-Cola and this wasn't in tech but they were having an analysis of when they're looking at executives or folks are promoting ready in two years ready in one year and they notice the women are just staying ready at one year and so they went in and really worked on what's going on in our culture that we're doing this and worked to adapt it we face so much unconscious bias it's systemically in it's how we make decisions with important information and we really have to become conscious of what we're doing I think a lot of tech women would talk about the idea of death by a thousand cuts so just a little bit of not only the blatant things that do happen and we hear about some of those but just the constant cultural stuff coming at them whether it's unfriendliness to family if women are still there's a great paper that was done around professors so if you're a young professor the amount of housework and childcare you're doing for young women and young men in those positions and trying to get tenure and eventually by the time you're tenured faculty that balances out a lot better because you have more money and you're a little better positioned but you know on the way there therefore one group knocks out but it's sort of death by a thousand cuts in that all these little things and so you can explain away any individual person oh she did this she did this she did this but when you look at it in aggregate it's just astonishing to see how bad it is I don't know if other people have specific things I mentioned before a lot of technology companies now trying to understand what their ethnic and gender makeup is I think a next target for some of that data would be to understand retention over several years and I would just say you really have to be willing to have very very honest conversations because if I just think in my own setting even a place like New America where we're trying very hard if the men leave the room the women have a different conversation we'll have a different conversation and we will say things we will not say in front of you things that bother us things that are we will and I know that the people of color would say the same and they would say it about me there are others so we have to create space to have really honest conversation because otherwise people leave right in other words you leave rather than saying what's really on your mind because it's very hard to say you know I really felt excluded when you did that or this culture really makes me feel uncomfortable because everything in you is a you may be imperiling your job or your chances of advancement or how other people will see you so I think talking about how you can have really honest conversations is one thing we all have to do and then we have to put in place things to happen like when stuff is not right so do you have a grievance procedure do you have non-discrimination policy when something goes wrong is your HR director on your side or are they a gatekeeper to make sure that you don't actually bring it up right does your really really really problematic boss stay in place and you get fired and you have shuffling teams like we see this happen and it's really hard in the progressive movement where we all believe that we're great about stuff right so like those things no for real like so I think honestly the writing is on the wall around some best practices on some of those things right like what happens when someone violates what we believe are the norms right and what are our norms what do we believe is okay and that right and help people see that looks like this that helps that looks like this right and the other thing is our fellowship is a year long five months are in the classroom the other seven are when they're at their job there's a reason for that and every week we are organizing conversations about like oh my god I'm the only person of color here I can't believe what's happening like all I can think about is Ferguson all they can think about is the server I don't know what to do like and then they say just funny stuff it's not funny and like honestly that hack night exists mostly for those people that's where that happened right and so when I say I was talking to an AT&T hiring manager and say like hey if you knew that in every city that you have employees of color or women or both that they could go once a week to a space that was just for them and people in their situation do you think that would make things better and they're like yes we'll buy all the pizza right and so we only have it in one city now but honestly some things kind of have to be communities of support outside the organization but you can help right like by moving it outside the space but supporting it either you know through donation stuff or like encouraging people to go do that because we have to be like with ourselves sometimes just to be like all right but I think that there's real stuff in practice that helps and retention is a huge issue we actually draw the pipeline like this because this is where and honestly this is where companies really freak out because if you leave after you got in guess who messed up right that's how they feel about it so we have to work on that Hi Dan Henry so as a member of the white male patriarchy it really bugs me to think that when I walk into a room that I can silence certain things and that I can change the tone of the room merely by my presence and that I can make these moves and that there's well I'll just ask you guys what is there that white men in leadership positions can do in these situations to help foster these conversations is there a way that we can code switch without coming off as disingenuous I think there's a lot of things you can do it's just being conscious of things educating yourself around unconscious bias like one of the data points that's really useful for managers to know if there's ten qualifications for a job that on average men will apply if they have at least three and women will apply if they have at least seven so it's just in our culture it's there's nothing right or wrong about it just exists so as a manager you should be watching and noticing that a set of people qualified for their job have their hand up and a set of people qualified for their job don't have their hand up and just be in conversation with people and encouraging them to do that because maybe part of the Coca-Cola ready in a year is also that the women's not saying that she's ready or feeling that as well as the people evaluating that way so kind of helping people have those conversations I think is critically important in getting educated doing the numbers and having plans I always love to think about during World War II we had to let everyone in and so we did we opened 33 something day care centers in like three months we rebuilt the Pacific fleet I mean in out of the Marin shipyards they built 30 in 33 days they would build every 33 days or so as the fastest they built those huge tankers and if you look at the photographs from the Marin shipyards which is at the bay model up in Cecilita you can see just diverse America you know is building all those things in the park which is the movie imitation game that was I think there were 10,000 people on the site 8,000 women the movie is inaccurate actually the movie is accurate that Joan Clark did exist she's real so deterring he's real but actually the women in the rest of the film look like they're all clerks and that's untrue there were a lot of elite mathematicians in fact I met a woman who was 5 years old on the park and she told me that they used to be next door to Dilley Knox's elite math team and her mom was always saying to her 3 year old brother her twin sister and her 7 year old brother shhh the girls are working shhh right so clearly there were some girls working on saving 11 million lives and shortening world war 2 by 2 years so there's amazing elite people out there so just knowing that that's there and helping people out I think it's critically important I would also say going through bias training can be really helpful Danny Kahneman's thinking fast and slow which is just a wonderful wonderful book and my husband is hyper rational and so I'm reading this stuff to him about how we all jump to conclusions how we look at somebody immediately and he's like no no no and of course that's the point of unconscious bias you don't believe you do it so I just recently had some surgery and the surgeon walks in we see him across the room and my husband looks at him he's tall white and male and says he looks like a good surgeon and I said QED right it can be funny because we all do it right it's not we all do it and we all make assumptions so doing that in ways that force people to recognize that we don't mean to but we all have these biases and we at least can learn how to check them is I think important right and we're in the middle of it and we're going to debug this I believe we'll get there and I actually am hopeful about the tech industry because of all the industries it's an industry that is data driven and it is sort of innovative and it moves fast once it sees what the problem is and I think there's a waking up going on because women are responsible for a huge portion of the consumer purchases in this country I mean there's data out there that say that women are responsible for 85% of consumer purchases which is definitely not true in my household it's true and you think that most of our commerce is moving to software and digitized platforms there's an enormous opportunity if more women participate in the creation of those products an enormous economic opportunity which we should all rush to embrace even if we're not compelled to by issues of gender equity so I used to be the field director at Equality Ohio right and they brought me in to build up basically a lot of our volunteers are like rich white gay men do something about it and so they're like you know all of the queer women of color communities do stuff right and so I was doing that but honestly the thing that made the biggest difference in passing employment non-discrimination in that state was when we had a real allies program and so in campaign work I think we think about that a lot and I feel like your question and other things I see around me really agitate me to think about like actually thinking about allyship in the tech movement as not an attitude but an act of practice right like what is allyship the idea so in the queer movement one of the most awesome organizations is PFLAG which is like parents, friends of lesbian and gays right they're showing up because people they love are impacted by these things right and so that is an ally organization I mean depending on where like Lime Ohio it's nothing but gay people but you know they also have friends who are so the chapters look different in different places but you can tell them to show up right because they have been around for a long time thinking about what does it mean for me to do things that practice put my values into practice around that and so they have such concrete list of things right it means do this this this it means when you hear like nonsense happening like you need to say something about it and don't wait for a queer person to do it for the tech space yo when people come to hack night and white man wash the dishes with me at the end of the night I'm like thank you sometimes it actually is not about your thought leadership but rather your other kind of leadership right that is not possible seriously seriously and like if you and and when I tell people that they're like oh peace I'll do that I'll come and move chairs right and the question of can we learn to coach with yes absolutely right a lot of times we talk about how do people act as better colleagues I think it really begins in your personal life to be honest right like if you don't surround yourself with people of color or women that you really care about like how are you gonna know our language right and how are we gonna know that when stuff goes down you got our back right and and when someone says yo we need to hire more diverse candidates anybody no one it's gonna sound like crickets if y'all don't have a social network you know basically right and and so I think what how do we do that that means things like are there you know are there issues of race and gender stuff that really matter to you those organizations have meetings all the time right many of them are like this is a closed space but you can find out the answer to that right and you can go to stuff and like think about what it's like to help show up and help move chairs and listen you know and so you feel like your understanding language a little bit better like that you know but I so I think in the tech movement um we have some active work to do about really the role of allies and like the tech lady mafia has a man's auxiliary which is awesome and bought a pizza a couple months ago for you know but but we can do organizing work around that too so I appreciate your question time for one more do we have time for one more yes I'm getting a guess how about back there hi I'm Jenna Ben-Yehuda just a question about this pipeline concept I'm thinking about you're talking about getting kids through K through 12 getting them ready to move through university and graduate programs they enter the job market what about the pipelines for companies because you have a lot of this the startup world right a lot of these startups really just want to be bought by bigger companies right so you have this company this corporate kind of pipeline and if those small companies are fewer than 50 people or whatever the FMLA standards are for small companies depending on your state and they're not subject to a lot of these requirements for protections for human resources and they're not they don't have enough time or money or maturity on a number of levels to care about retention but then those are the companies that are getting eaten by bigger companies that ostensibly do have those resources I guess I'm wondering is there kind of a pipeline problem on that startup smaller company level where a lot of maybe women and people of color and both start out a lot of people start in those spaces but then there's just no movement and that kind of kills it which needs a little help right I mean the truth we actually I tell you what we did when I was at Google we their writer's room wanted to come visit to talk about open source compression and one or two other things anyway so he set up a whole meeting for them for two or three hours and they met top engineers on open source compression and these other topics and at the end they were laughing they're like are there any people who are going to Google so we just made sure that they met people of color and women who were elite members that just to try to show them because these are the writers and they're writing these characters and wanted to show them that lots of different people do these jobs but at the point you know the the point is you know how do we do that but at the point you know the the point is you know how how do you help like I remember early on talking to folks about this issue and getting them to think about how to go get people like to your point like get it breaking in our country is very racially divided our country the talent networks aren't interconnected so you have to almost break into them and find incredible people and if you get some people they'll get other people so having a practice of really reaching out to different communities to pull them into your company you're going to have a better company really the better startups set their culture from the very beginning and interestingly a lot of the startup teams are more diverse than one thinks than is portrayed on television there's always like the original Macintosh team Steve Jobs' team was four women and seven men in the Rolling Stone photographs even though the movies today write them all out but they were there so that exists but having a being deliberate about that is very important for founders I went to an event at the FBT last month that was a small business fair that was focused on people of color and I judged at the pitches all startups of color awesome like so I think that what you said earlier about this role of convening is really really important right because sometimes when people think government they're saying oh well I don't know if there can be a policy on that that's not the only role of government right the convening spaces are really really useful and just being able to be there with folks who are part of that community as a place that has validation in you know sort of mainstream culture right it's FCC we were like yo we had the FCC you know and like doing these pitches and stuff I'm making us much cooler than most people I mean you know you're in that M&M lyric I'll take it, we'll take it but we're not doing the work to invite people and reaching out I have a thing that I do you know you often get names wonderful incredible talent names so and so should come work for you or they're applying so I just catch that name I'm like okay what's the name I write it down and I say usually it's a majority person majority man and so I'm usually like okay and do you know any people of color or women who are as good as that person and you get a second name so just developing some fluency practices for collecting other folks and just making sure reaching across networks because as soon as you get the people together it starts to move so I'm hopeful about that yeah my goal is that we reach a point where we don't have to say reaching out to communities of color anymore like getting into their networks because they would already be part of our organizations right like that's the goal right and you can't do that without actively like starting now instead of being like whoa that's a really bad situation we have to do it yeah that inspirational goal in mind we're out of time this was a terrific panel I mean obviously like massive challenges but also some really practical ideas about things that we could do things that government can do cultural changes that we need to and ways of thinking about the problem and a little bit of a note of optimism maybe even so please join me in thanking this all-star lineup