After Steve Irwin, this might be the best Australian Export.
“Tech for Non-Tech” T4NT by Code for Australia, helps leaders working with technology build their digital fluency and understand how to work well with technical teams (read developers, data scientists, designers, and product managers).
Open Up hosted Code for Australia and Code for Japan for a Code for All T4NT curriculum exchange. Code for All is an international network of organizations supporting each other to empower citizens to meaningfully engage in the public sphere and have a positive impact on their communities. Code for Japan joined us at Open Up to learn how to facilitate this curriculum.
3 Lessons I learnt from attending Tech for Non-Tech at Open Up:
1. People with technical expertise want to help others learn and increase their understanding.
2. Tech can be understood by “non-tech” people. The image above is from a session we did on demystifying jargon, which can act as a barrier to understanding what technical teams talk about. By working through the jargon and translating technical definitions into everyday analogies or by building representations of them in legos, we can begin to understand this jargon that seems so baffling to us.
3. Perhaps it is the ubiquity of technology that makes us feel as if we should understand it. Most people at T4NT prefaced their questions with apologies for not knowing or asking to be excused for their “stupid questions”. However, the simple truth is many of us do not know, at no fault of our own. T4NT is providing a platform for us to override our shame and step up as learners.
Why Tech for Non- Tech Matters?
In the Moment of Lift: How empowering Women changes the world, Melinda Gates introduces us to Joy Buolamwini. Joy is an African-American computer scientist.
“I learned about Joy when her research exposing racial and gender bias in tech began to get coverage in the media. She was working with a social robot some years ago as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech when — in the course of playing a game of peek-a-boo- she noticed the robot couldn’t recognize her face in certain lighting. “
“When Joy became a researcher at MIT Media lab she tested facial recognition software from IBM, Microsoft and the Chinese company Megvii and found that the error rate for recognising the light-skinned males was below 1%, while the error rate for recognising darker-skinned females was as high as 35%. Joy shared her results with the companies. Microsoft and IBM said that they were already working to improve their facial analysis software. Megvii did not respond.”
Gates continues to ponder the impact of Joy’s findings. She notes that all you have to do is pause and reflect on the various meanings of the word “recognise” to shudder at the idea that the software is slow to recognise people who don’t look like the programmers. She cited numerous concerns, including “will software programmed by white people disproportionately tell the police to arrest black people?” A poignant question in 2019.
Gates continues that “the prospect of this bias is horrifying, but this is just the bias we can predict. What about the program bias that we didn’t predict? What about the program bias that we can’t predict?
“You can’t have an ethical AI that’s not inclusive,” Joy said.
Diversity speaks to the range of differences within a group, such as race, educational background, gender, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs. Inclusion, however, describes whether and how individual people within this diverse range are included in a work environment (OfferZen Tech Inclusion Report, 2019).
African American women are only 3% of the entire tech workforce, Hispanic women, 1%. Women comprise about a quarter of the Tech workforce and hold just 15% of technical jobs.
Currently, the majority of people in the South African tech industry are white and middle class. Only 23% of tech jobs are held by women in South Africa. Of that 23 %, a smaller percentage represents women of colour.
Gates writes that this is why she is passionate about women in tech and women of colour in tech.
‘It’s not just the world’s largest industry or that the economy is going to add half a million computing jobs in the next decade and that diverse teams lead to more creativity and productivity. It’s that the people in these jobs will shape the way we live and we all need to decide that together.’
I see T4NT playing an important role in diversity and inclusion in Tech in South Africa. The demographics of our T4NT event included 87.5% of women of colour and 12.5% men of colour. (There are many variables that can contribute to who attended an event). T4NT can work in this context to inform and equip people of colour and women of colour, those who disproportionately make up “non-tech” with the digital fluency and know how so they can collaborate with technical teams. This is crucial in making technology that is accessible, sustainable, and useful to all.
I also see T4NT playing an important role in familiarising us with jargon and equipping us with the knowledge that will make it easier to transition from non-tech to tech. At the event, 25% of the women of colour spoke openly about their goals of becoming programmers and another 12,5% worked as data scientists. T4NT can be a key gateway to a program like WeThinkCode. WeThinkCode sources and trains world-class African digital talent.
In South Africa there is a 92% penetration of cell phones, however, most users can be described by Author Noah Yuval Harari’s statement “What I see today in the world is that people are overwhelmed by information, misinformation, by distraction and they don’t realise often what the most important challenges are.” T4NT is introducing users to digital language and knowledge, which makes them more informed consumers of technology and enables them to use technology to improve their lives and the lives of others in more meaningful ways.
When Joy Buolamwini was 9 years old, she saw a TV documentary about Kismet, (the MIT-built social robot that could interact face-to-face) she was mesmerised by the technology resolved to understand it. Her contribution to the human family and making facial recognition software more inclusive cannot be understated. When Melinda Gates was in an all-girls Covenant High School she would take typing lessons at the all-boys school, until one nun resolved to buy computers, taught herself to code and later taught her students. The road to diversity and inclusion in tech can start in multiple places, perhaps while watching a documentary, perhaps at school or at a T4NT event. Which is why we must continue to create these learning opportunities. Tech is too important to all of us to let only a few people learn about it, shape it and make decisions about it.
If you want to know more about diversity and inclusion in Tech here are some other articles you could look at:
[1] Diversity in Tech: We’ve Got a Long Way to Go
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/startupnationcentral/2019/02/27/diversity-and-inclusion-a-tech-story/#475150404822
[3] https://diversity.google/annual-report/
Keep learning!
