Inclusive Content—Full-Stack Toronto 2017

Inclusive and accessible products and teams

B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist

(These slides ☛ cordeliayu.com/s/8v)

Content note

Technologists for Antifa

B Cordelia Yu — @thebestsophist

What is within the scope of design?

…and what is the technologist’s role in creating social justice?

What are accessibility and inclusion?

What is design?

Define justice in less than 10 minutes? nbd 👍🏽

Also define design? lol glhf 😂😭

Fossil-Free Banking & Divestment

“Define your mission in 10 words.”

Normally, during discovery we’ll record a company’s mission, their value proposition, business case, and all that stuff. And if we’re trying to speed through things we’ll probably use the half a loaf bit of copy is on the about page, right?

And we do this because about pages are hard, they’re political, people have so much to say they don’t know what to say. Or if you’re in an org with huge personalities so you let them fight over the about page to give yourself freedom to get work done elsewhere—which is an evil sort of genius and I’d never condone.

Anyway…sussing out the mission has become core to my inclusive content audits. When you limit people to 10 words, it forces folks to metacognize and generalize outside their areas of focus. I tell people to do this independently, think about and sleep on it and then get back to me a few days later. Then I take everyone’s 10-word mission statements and synthesize.

this is what we wrote for green america

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

They do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.

A screenshot of Green America’s Fossil Free Divestment guide

To decide what to build I go through my normal process: gather requirements, wrangle writers &c, this had previously been a print and pdf only publication, so as the first regular publication that was going to be published digital-only, I had to help guide the storytelling process and teach folks about creating interactive content.

The guide had fantastic content on telling people why they should move their money to socially responsible ones. And while other organizations have done great work helping guide major investors (such as universities) away from fossil fuels, Green America is basically the only organization that concentrates on helping individuals.

So disclaimer: I’m speaking here as myself and my views are not representative of Green America, but if you have investments or a retirement fund, I really do suggest looking at it. The feedback we received most is from financial advisors saying that it’s helping them help their clients navigate the world of socially-responsible investing. In all, it’s touted as a success within the org and the industry.

But here’s the problem: “the industry”.

Divesting & Reinvesting

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

We do it by promoting structural change to our economic system through individual, community, and societal action.

As commonly practiced, the language of sustainability is in the language of affluence.

The racist history of the NA environmental movement, abridged

When you think about a cop shooting you, it’s an immediate death.…But climate change—with [related] pollution that’s mostly in our backyard—is still killing us. Respiratory diseases, asthma, and various cancers are slower killers, but connecting them to Black Lives Matter is really important.

Sarra Tekola

Sustainability must care for every community.

…not just the communities that can afford it.

Low income people, communities of color…own smartphones at a greater rate than the population in general but they lack a banking relationship.

Bill Bynum, CEO of Hope Credit Union

What are accessibility and inclusion?

Design is inseparable from social justice.

Building an Inclusive Content Strategy

Content audit
Building your content team
Creating new processes
Building inclusive organizations

Discovery

Organization: “Who are we?”
Market: “What does the world look like?”
Audience: “Who are our constituents?”

Organization Research

What is the mission?
Who does this effect? Who has a stake?

Green America promotes social and environmental justice through economic action.

Organization Research

What is the mission?
Who does this effect? Who has a stake?
What are the products? Who are they made for?

Who should we be serving?

Market Research

User Constituent Research

>50% were middle-class white women +50 years old.
Geographically diverse, evenly distributed across population urban/rural.

I won’t say too much about the details of our particular user research methods. i was lucky, with almost no budget, we collected several hundred to several thousand responses to email surveys, dozens of phone and in-person interviews across the country.

High level results ☟

And this is how we started making a set of archetypal user personas.

So a thing…archetypal personas are growing out of favor in our work, and for good reason. they’re often not useful. if we’re testing UI elements or workflows, behavior personas are much more useful.

But these aren’t for designing interactions, they’re for designing product and communication strategies. After creating constituent personas, I look at the gaps in the venn diagrams. the folks weren’t being reached or were barely being reached by others in the industry. I created personas for people from communities who should know about this work but aren’t having their needs addressed either by our work or by the industry as a whole.

I then gave these personas to all the staff who were involved in creating content or managing projects. In workshops, I teach everyone the basics of how to read and think about a persona. more on this in a bit.

Editorial and Programatic Process Audit

aka “strategic assessment lite”

Reading a report is not enough, turn it into embodied and experiential knowledge.

What yer looking for

Who is involved in the process?
Who is in on the product decisions?
What does the RACI chart look like?

As an example: for processing a check, I would pretend to be the mail carrier, and put an envelope in the inbox, and whoever opens the mail would hand it to a customer service rep who might hand it the data entry and so on until it goes to accounting and is saved or destroyed. While people are acting this out, I would diagram it with sticky notes on the wall. So at the end we would both have the experience of walking around the room seeing how many people touched one check, how many times it got passed back and forth, have that visualized out on the wall, and realize how long it took.

For product processes, say a new campaign targeting Apple, work backwards to find critical decision points to put in checks— we might go back through a constituent mapping process similar to what we did in the org research, to understand what communities we should be talking to, or if it includes building a coalition of other orgs, and research organizations from marginalized communities we should bring into the coalition.

Now, I said that this was the least successful part of the process for me, the reason was that the teams were skeptical, I didn’t properly prepare staff for what would happen. They had a hard time seeing how it would be valuable. So that’s what I had to really look at and understand next.

Audit yer silos verticals.

Here’s what mine looks like…

people on the left
milestones and decision points on the top
Each cell shows what level of engagement and responsibilities someone has at each stage

I created a chart for every project and team in the organization. GA had about 30 staff. We officially had 10 departments, but about 14 teams, across about 40 projects—and I never finished an assessment of all the processes—which is what happens when you have an organization with a lot of legacy projects.

But I do all this for a point. Together with mapping your major processes, you know where the major decision points are and who is shaping those decisions. once you have that, you can start finding answers to these questions:

What marginalized communities are represented in decision making processes?
How much say do they have?
Really? Have you asked them while in a safe space?
What happens to feedback? What is the process for acting on it?
Do your staff know about the processes?

More importantly: What communities aren’t represented? I map the folks in the teams to the venn diagrams of communities i made during discovery. which segments or circles aren’t represented? Which ones have decision authority?
For those that don’t have decision authority, do they feel like they are able to voice dissent? do they fear reprisal? being ostracized? have they grown tired of banging their head into the wall with no progress?
The whisper network is real, do you know what we’re saying about you and your org?
what get said behind closed doors?
Are there processes for complaints? Are you sure they work?

And this all breaks down into one question:

Are marginalized voices empowered to make change in your organization?

This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.

John Relman, civil rights lawyer

Design is inseparable from social justice.

I want to come back to this thought.

Tech’s mantra is “build fast and break things” we do it because experimenting and failing is supposed to get us to the good idea faster.

But once we’ve built it and things break, and people demand that it gets fixed, we say “well that’s too hard” it’s too hard to fix harassment, it’s too hard to deal with fake news, it’s too hard to defend democracy from propaganda.

“build now and fix it after there is too much public outcry to ignore” causes irreparable hurt to those who can least afford it. It means queer kids who are not out to their family are ostracized and tossed on the street.

We must always think about how the things we build can be abused. And we must do it from the beginning. We can’t wait until we are wildly successful because by then, we’ll have already forgotten, we’ll be too busy keeping up, too busy scaling, too busy building new features rather than fixing old bugs.

Users don’t care about how hard it was to build.

Design is asking hard questions.

Yer Content Inventory & Audit

I spun up a CMS and set up content models for every channel and content type just to handle all the diversity of records—and for those of you who are about to embark on a huge inventory and would like to know what that looked like, I can show you afterward. Luckily, making the inventory an inclusivity audit of all the content was one of the easier parts of the whole process.

Because through the discovery training the team already knew what they were looking for to make content inclusive. I added fields to capture whether a persona was part of the audience, how relevant and inclusive the content was for them.

This let me capture a detailed information on how good a specific piece of content was. Now, one difficulty here is that it doesn’t capture how inclusive the content within a particular program. To do that would have required an amount of meta analysis that I didn’t have time for. But a lot of content was going to be rewritten or archived, and folks were making plans to make sure programs as a whole were inclusive as they were rewriting, the analysis wasn’t as critical.

In trying to be reassuring, it became patronizing.

Inquisitive ignorance allows for fresh perspective.

Does your content satisfy the needs of marginalized audiences?
What changes when you’re talking to voices outside the primary audience?
Do you use language that is only meaningful to subject matter experts?

Skills & Experience > Documentation

Documenting reasons > documenting rules.

Every “how” should include the “why”.

Audit Yer Products

Look at the whole constellation of products.
Who is part of product decisions? When do they give input?
Whose input shapes decisions the most?

29:10

💦💨

At an organization like Green America, the content is the product…sort of. If you’re also a not-for-profit, your product not just the website or campaigns, but also the change you are trying to make in the world. ☟

It is okay for certain products to be aimed at a particular demographic, but it’s not okay if all of your products miss entire groups—especially if the whole industry is doing the same thing. It was totally okay to have a guide dedicated to investors but as one of very few voices whose focus was on individuals wanting to participate in fossil-free and ethical banking, not also having programs and accessible content for non-investors was a problem. but that means it’s also an opportunity to expand to new demographics and audiences. But this means talking to and understanding folks you haven’t been talking to before, and that’s hard work ☟

Go back to your raci chart. Who has life experiences from communities you’re not reaching properly? And not just the stuff that goes onto the CV. Do they have substantive input to what decisions are being made? Are their concerns being overridden? ☟

Finally, whoever has final say has the most power. Do they have a habit of saying “i hear you” and then overriding people’s decisions? Be real about institutional politics. The unsaid things need to be acknowledged somewhere—even if it’s in a document that gets shared with everyone but the C-Levels. Because if you don’t, your audit will only provide a gilded picture of the truth.

Building Yer Inclusivity Team

Yer gonna need allies co-conspirators.

How to find co-conspirators

Empower/amplify those who are already doing it.

Train people who care.

Flatten yer team structure.

Content strategy is mentorship

You are the safe space.

Empowers less-experienced folks to ask the inquisitive ignorant questions that bring new understanding. This is how folks from marginalized communities coming through the pipeline don’t give up and leave for less toxic spaces. This is how we train them to get into management. All of us together are the ladder that creates the next generation of leaders.

And this touches on something that is core to the sort of content strategist and manager i’ve become. My job is not to tell people what to do. My job is to making sure those who work with me have tools for the job and make space for them to do it. If they’re under-resourced, I have to fight for more resources. If I can’t do that, I help them prioritize. If they don’t have the right training, I help them learn. I put people first. and that’s because when it comes to inclusivity work…

Life experience matters more than work experience.

Creating & Implementing the Strategy

Teach the process.

Content Strategy is making space

I used to say that the way I practice content strategy is by making myself redundant—I teach everyone to do my job. But as I think about it, I realize it’s more than teaching people the skills to ask the right questions, follow the process. If I’ve done my job right, folks have a community of peers they can go to for a gut-check when they’re working on something sticky. They have the knowledge to give meaningful critique and the confidence to receive it.

When we do this right, we’ll have created space where a Black employee can safely say “hey, this is racist” or a bipolar employee can say “hey, this is ableist”, have their words taken seriously. In other words, the most important role of the content strategist is making space for content strategy to thrive.

Restructuring yer staff

Hiring for inclusion

Yer JD

Are you using male pronouns?
Is your language full of jargon?
Are you making references to insular communities that are often dominated by a specific type of person
Are you demanding physical ability for a desk job?
College degree? Really?

At a minimum ☛ joblint.org

How are you reviewing applications?

If you are on a hiring committee, and you are looking at applicants and you see a stellar white male applicant, think long and hard about whether your department needs another white man.…When you hire a non-marginalized person, you are not just supporting this one applicant whom you like, you are rewarding a person who has been rewarded his whole life. You are justifying the system that makes his application look so good. You are not innocent. You are perpetuating a system that requires your participation if not your consent.

Piper Harron—Get out of the way

Now the hard part

Inclusion has a price. And it is not small.

Inclusion is a team effort

“Everyone genuinely seems to care. Collectively, not much changes.”

Paul Delaney

We are all guilty and victims under late capitalism.

Diversity numbers and and quotas are not enough.

Several veteran reporters refused to assist us and act as teachers and mentors to young minority hires and trainees.

Paul Delaney

Even though the Times was hiring more Black and women journalists, they couldn’t find mentors because white editors refused to work with them.
Few ever rose into editorial or leadership positions because they never were give the chance
Even through the last few years, NYTimes was becoming more White and with fewer women because they were looking around and seeing that if they wanted to grow, they needed to leave.

Quotas can kickstart the effort, but unless you have people in the organization who are willing to change their own behaviors to shift the culture, very little real progress will happen.

Metrics are a quantitative measure, doing well is qualitative. Metrics can only tell us if we’re doing poorly. The only way to know if you’re doing well is by listening.

And the only way to really hear that is by making space to acknowledge that we might be failing. I’ve heard too many stories where people—especially women of color—will look around their companies, and realize that if we want to grow, we have to leave.

Realtalk: Chatham House Rule.

Change is inevitable, but design is change management.

Design is about creating spaces to communicate listen.

Where were their designers?

I gave a previous version of this talk at a conference where Facebook was the biggest sponsor. came to tell me about how I was being unfair, how they were doing good work to fight discrimination within the system. And they are. But months later, we’re learning that their system is being used for covert propaganda by authoritarian states and not just in the US, but across the world.

So my title is content strategist, but am also a researcher and consultant on the intersection of participatory democracy and civictech. and this is all stuff my peers in media studies and political science have been warning about for years.

So if folks have been talking about the possibility of this being a problem for years, why wasn’t anyone at facebook empowered to say “wait, truth is a whole lot harder to measure than a trending algorithm would allow”?

This is an anti-pattern for inclusive design.

What is within the scope of design?

Communications is at core of everything we do.

技術者不會，也該只有技術。

Behind every technologist,
there is and should be
much more than mere technology

技術背後有其追求，持守的價值

Behind every technology,
there is a set of values informing its pursuit.

Lu Chia Hua

Tech as nurturing community

“I hear you” is not enough if nothing comes of it.

Design is empowerment

Social change will not come to us like an avalanche down the mountain. Social change will come to us through seeds in well prepared soil—and it is we, like the earthworms, who prepare the soil.…

…We realize there are no guarantees as to what will come up. Yet we do know that without the seeds and the prepared soil nothing will grow at all.

Ursula Franklin—The Real World of Technology

This is emotional labor.

That means our normal deliverables aren’t enough. To change culture we need to change the hearts and minds. Make your office a safe space, even if you’re not in a management role, try to keep a couch or a comfortable chair in your office so someone can come in, shut the door, escape for a moment and vent.

It’s about being human with one another. It’s confronting our own biases. It’s about making space to be vulnerable and listen.

And that means lot of the things you recommend will take years to implement, because unlikes sprints and deploy schedules—culture change is a long game. You might not even be there to see them through. But this is social justice work just like those marching on the streets, so also take time to take care of yourself.

We can’t change the whole system overnight. But we need to know what we would put in its place.

Grace Lee-Boggs

Design is no longer about designing the thing, you design the conditions for the thing to emerge–the conversation.

Indy Johar—Democratizing Cities

Thank you ✨💞

These slides ☛ cordeliayu.com/s/8u

Say hi ☛ @thebestsophist[@scholar.social] | [email protected]

More words ☛ tinyletter.com/thebestsophist