Civic Tech and DEI&B: Exploring Parallels
This post represents the personal views of the author and not their current or former employers.
My career path has certainly been more of the jungle gym variety than a ladder. After more than a decade in the private sector working in UX, product, digital strategy, and even as a futurist, my current LinkedIn headline identifies me as a Chief Inclusion Officer and Civic Technologist.
As a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEI&B) practitioner, I work with organizations to navigate their DEI&B journeys in a non-performative, data-driven, and sustainable way. As a civic technologist, my tour of service as a founding member of the Colorado Digital Service (CDS) deeply cemented for me the imperative to improve our public digital services at every level.
When I first made the transition from the private sector to public, I felt like I’d been dropped onto a different planet. There were systems in play in government that I had nothing to map to from my prior experience, like how incredibly complex the procurement process is. I spent more time explaining the difference between project vs. product management and almost no time on actual product management as I knew it. It was months before I finally found my footing on how to adapt my skillset effectively for government, thanks to my digital service teammates.
In contrast, when I eventually shifted from civic tech to DEI&B work, the transition felt — much to my surprise — nearly seamless. The more I engage with both bodies of work, the more strongly I feel the similarities and parallels between them.
As much as my private sector experience built my skill set, it’s many of the insights, learnings, and unlearnings from civic tech that are helping me thrive with DEI&B work (and vice versa). I have a few ideas on why that might be.
The curb-cut effect
In much of my private sector work, I worked on innovative apps and ambitious campaigns with like-minded colleagues, building features for people with the latest smartphones. We worked quickly on agile teams, everyone speaking the same tech jargon.
By contrast, in one of my first CDS projects with the state, we spent time making sure text messages sent from the public health department succinctly stayed under a character limit in order to minimize the cost of messages incurred by recipients. My product roadmaps were Google Sheets so that stakeholders across the state could access it. We saw firsthand how painful it was to use some of our existing digital services using a screen reader. When a few of us presented our work at the Gov UX summit in 2021, we were required to describe graphics and read all copy aloud for attendees with vision impairments or who are illiterate. I was horrified to realize being truly inclusive went against many of the “best practices” (e.g., don’t read the slide at your audience) I had been taught.
The contrasts were stark. I realized time and again just how much of my private sector work had left entire populations behind. The charge in the public sector to design for EVERYONE, to have this firmly baked into your strategy and roadmap and DNA, to operate with the core belief that when we actively work to remove barriers, everyone benefits — that was liberating to me.
DEI&B practitioner Lily Zheng shared on LinkedIn that they often ask clients to imagine a fictional person — call her Maria:
Maria uses she and they pronouns. She’s a mixed Black and Indigenous person in her late fifties, a single mother with one child, disabled, queer, transgender, and Muslim. She’s a soft-spoken ESL speaker, working-class, and immigrated for better opportunities for herself and her child.
I give leaders the simple task: design a workplace where Maria can thrive.
At first, they splutter. “There’s no way a person like that exists,” they protest. But eventually, they start thinking about how to ensure Maria won’t face discrimination for any of her many identities. How to ensure access and opportunity, from access to workplace facilities to inclusion within team environments to resources to support her wellbeing. How to ensure workplace communities that are safe for Maria’s authenticity. How to ensure that policies and practices meet her needs.
At some point, we stop and they ask about the exercise. If it was so hard to design for one, isn’t designing for all impossible?
Not at all. This is the curb-cut effect: when we design for the most marginalized, we remove barriers that affect everyone.
The curb-cut effect asserts that “an investment in one group can cascade out and up and be a substantial investment in the broader well-being of a nation — one whose policies and practices create an equitable economy, a healthy community of opportunity, and just society.” (PolicyLink).
Curb cuts don’t just benefit individuals who are wheelchair users. The same is true with closed captioning. When we design and build with an equity lens, it’s never a zero sum game. Committing to serving everyone is a completely different way of working that I wish everyone could try at least once.
To help operationalize what it means to work this way, check out these fantastic resources my former CDS colleagues developed to embed equity into their team agreements and design exercises. (The one that I use most often these days, in both bodies of work, is the equity pause.)
Where we place burden
In 2021, when hate crimes against the AAPI community spiked during the pandemic, I experienced severe depression and anxiety. There were days when I couldn’t leave home because I was scared the way I wore my hair in a bun made me look “too Asian.” Every time I got my nervous system to calm down a bit, something else terrible happened in the world.
At the same time, I was consulting in the DEI&B space and teaching white leaders why they should be checking in on their AAPI employees. Some leaders had no idea these hate crimes were even happening. Others didn’t know if it was legal to offer someone a mental health day. The majority were silent because they didn’t know what to say (“are you okay?” or “how are you doing?” are great ways to start).
It’s often marginalized populations that carry disproportionate burden. The Atlantic’s article “The Time Tax” highlights the staggering amount of “paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort” it takes to navigate the perplexing government systems that are supposed to help us in times of need. The time tax is exponentially worse for those who are struggling, for Black families, for people who are sick.
In DEI&B work, where we often see women and people of color leading internal efforts, often for free on top of their other jobs, practitioners and champions are burning out left and right.
The burden — emotional, mental, physical — disproportionately falls on those most impacted by the systems at play. In order to truly move the needle, I think we have yet to unlock the true magnitude of allyship (to be clear, every single one of us can be an ally in different contexts). Whether we’re talking about the design of government services or the design of equitable workplaces, we must constantly ask whose voices aren’t being heard or experiences unaccounted for. I love Daniel Pink’s adaptation of “the empty chair” (originally attributed to Jeff Bezos) for this purpose. True practice of human-centered design means operating with a mentality of doing with, not for.
Don’t send anyone in alone
In both civic tech and DEI&B work, I often joke that this work is for optimists. Because change happens slowly, and because we’re often facing overwhelming systems of inertia or resistance, optimism requires support and balance and making peace with the fact that it’s very much a long game.
The CDS team has a mantra to never send someone in alone. I’ve discovered the power of working in pairs on DEI&B work as well. There are practical benefits, like the client having access to multiple perspectives and greater flexibility in scheduling. For practitioners, having a partner is the key to team resilience. No one benefits if we burn out and drop out altogether. Find your partner(s); you’ll need the kinship and sanity checks, to share the burden, to stay optimistic that change is unfolding.
We need you
Digital service teams and DEI&B consultants are not meant to stay indefinitely. As a digital service team, when we introduced ourselves to a new agency partner, we often said we were there to work ourselves out of a job. I say the same thing every time I onboard a new DEI&B client. We’re not here to stay, we say. This work must not live and die with us. To make these changes genuine and sustainable, we must make them invisible.
Civic tech and DEI&B both need many, many more good people to get involved. Technologists, allies, user experience researchers and designers, changemakers, data scientists, change management specialists, anyone with plenty of empathy, humility, and a track record of creating positive change. Good communicators and generalists (I love the term “hybrid professionals”) with multiple skill sets are especially well suited for this type of work.
Cross-functional humans are as important as cross-functional teams. (Thanks, Waldo)
Lastly, it’s all wide open for invention. There is a chance that nobody really knows what they’re doing here, and that’s the opportunity space. To do this kind of work genuinely during these unprecedented times, there are no templates, no copy/pastes, no clear or easy ways forward — so let’s try things. Every barrier we remove and every approach we take to build resilience makes a difference. Let’s get to work.
Have you had similar insights with your work as it relates to another field of work? My former CDS colleagues and I are gathering stories to include in a collection of learnings for new digital service teams. We’d love to hear from you! Email us at digital-service-start-ups@googlegroups.com or leave a comment below if you have a similar story to share.
