Per Axbom
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Computer voice
UX podcast episode 247.

[Music]

Per Axbom
Hello, I’m Per.

James Royal-Lawson
And I’m James Royal-Lawson.

Per Axbom
And this is UX podcast. We are in Stockholm, Sweden and you’re listening in 195 countries all over the world from Andorra to India.

James Royal-Lawson
Cyd Harrell is a UX Researcher and Product Manager who got hooked on civic tech at early 2010s hackathons. Cyd has helped US city, county, federal and state agencies unlock the power of technology to serve constituents. She’s worked with organisations like the Centre for Civic Design, Code for America, and 18F.

Per Axbom
Plus, she’s been a guest with us before, two years ago. She talked to us in Episode 194, and shared some great tips on how to carry out successful user research. And I’ve actually pointed people to that episode quite often.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s actually part of our “Introduction to UX” playlist. Oh, yeah. Which is actually not called that, it’s called something else. It is called, “Getting Started in UX”, we have as a playlist on Spotify, with a nice 20-odd selected episodes that we think are good, if you’re just getting into all this stuff we talk about. And that will be in the show notes. Now, Cyd though, she has recently released a book, “A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide”, a friendly guide for technology people who work or want to work in the public sector.

Per Axbom
And also, remember to stay with us, because after our chat with Cyd, we have our post interview reflections.

James Royal-Lawson
You know, when you said “remember”, I thought you were going to end the show?

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
So did you actually write the entire book during lockdown?

Cyd Harrell
No. I started it in January.

James Royal-Lawson
Still. January!?

Cyd Harrell
Yes. So there’s a bit of a story there. I I actually had a cocktail with Erika Hall right before the holidays last year. And I was sort of raving to her that people kept asking me to write a book. And I couldn’t imagine actually doing it. What would I be able to write about that people would want? And she told me about this book that she’s writing, to kind of try and shift something in the design world. And all of a sudden, the pieces fell into place that I could potentially write a sort of a grounding document for civic tech. And I thought, Oh, that’s something I could do, you know, rather than a really, you know, “one more take on UX research”, when she and Dana and others have done such a good job or, um, a sort of critique book about civic tech, I could write an onboarding guide. And I was so excited that I actually got out my phone in the taxi going home, and got out Google Docs mobile, and typed up an outline with my thumbs.

Per Axbom
Oh, wow.

Cyd Harrell
And I got home and I told my husband, I said, “You know what, I think I figured it out. I think I figured out a book I want to write.” And he looked at it, and he said, “Well, this is a really good idea. And you know what? You’d better get that done before the election.” And I said, “Oh, you’re absolutely right. Because if the Democrats win, we’re going to see a rush into civic tech in America, I think. Because there’s going to be an awful lot of restoration and rebuilding and excitement about the public sector again. If the Democrats lose at the national level, my guess is there’s going to be a bit of a rush into state-level tech. And you know, it’ll be quite interesting to see what states like California where I live, do in that situation.”

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, so I guess also the degree of the kind of defense of the tech in certain scenarios.

Cyd Harrell
Yes. Yes. And so I had a deadline. So yeah, I started writing January 8th. And the pandemic in San Francisco started, you know, circling around in February: there was a ship off the coast that had a group of people who had been exposed and some were infected. So we started hearing pretty early from our mayor, that lockdown was likely. And we went in, I think, on March 16, and I was not quite halfway done with the first draft, I think.

Per Axbom
Wow, I mean that, to me, that’s amazing and a testament to what an expert you are in this field really.

James Royal-Lawson
I just want to say though, that’s a wonderful example though; having clear vision, and a strong deadline. Yeah. And then, and then combined with that you had an unfortunate/fortunate opportunity in maybe lockdown that actually gave you the space to do it. So kind of the serendipity, the three things combining there is really, really interesting.

Cyd Harrell
I mean, you’re right. I didn’t have a lot of weekend plans in March and April, because I had contracted with my editor to start on May 1st. So that was really, the draft had to be finished. And the chapters had to be through their first reviews, by May 1st.

Per Axbom
And also the conversation that instigated it all I mean, just knowing and realising that you need your allies to find your, your path. Yes, so much. Your structure. Yeah, yeah. I just want to just clear out this word. That because I mean, UX Podcast is an international podcast. And I mean, I don’t think I use this word too much, even before we interviewed you and Dana Chisnell: civic. What does civic tech mean?

Cyd Harrell
Civic tech means, in the US in particular, I think it is a bit American-centric. Although many people in the UK and Australia would recognise it too. It’s the idea that we should bring the best of tech from the private sector. And you can think of that a number of ways, whether it’s people or practices or actual technologies to the public sector, and that we should have public digital goods that are as good as the goods we can purchase. So your government website where maybe register to vote or register your car, or you know, pay your tax should be just as good as what you experience when you go on a social network or an e-commerce site.

And all of the mechanisms to do that.

James Royal-Lawson
So you differentiate then, between like public sector tech, and civic tech?

Cyd Harrell
Civic tech, I think, has an explicit connotation of improvement. I think government tech is more inclusive. And I chose civic tech, specifically, because I was trying, in the book, to speak to the people who want to improve the situation of government tech. In the US, definitely, in the UK, in a lot of larger countries, you have these heavy procurement infrastructures and a lot of bureaucracy and a national level government, certainly. And then sometimes in local government, you have low capacity. So the existing government tech may not be everything that people hope, from public digital goods. And civic tech explicitly takes a perspective that people from the private sector, or people who have private sector expertise and experience in tech have a role to play in improving that alongside the public servants who have chosen government tech as a career from the beginning.

Per Axbom
So it’s almost like the activists word for public sectors, like the person who wants to make real change?

Cyd Harrell
The person wants to make real change. And one thing that that many people claim for it is, it’s not just government tech. So it can be technology for mutual aid, or for people – right? – without the participation of a government, who want to have a better interaction as a community or something like that.

James Royal-Lawson
It’s like a community tech, I guess. There’s all these ways of slicing it.

Cyd Harrell
Although public interest tech is another one that tends to get used by academics who have switched over from a government to public interest tech, I think? They may not be the same thing. But…

Per Axbom
And now, for for any listeners thinking that it’s sort of specific to the US, I can say, having worked almost 10 years now with the National Health Services in Sweden, this book really made me feel seen and made me feel heard. Yeah, I really understood stuff and was able to now find the vocabulary for explaining stuff to other people. Because what usually happens when you get into the space after having worked with the commercial sectors for so long, is that you go in and you think, “I’m gonna change everything. I mean, now I have so much experience.” And then you hit a wall and you realise, “Oh, it’s so different. It’s so very, very different.”

Cyd Harrell
Things are the way they are for reasons actually. Yes, we still want to change them.

But, yeah…

If we don’t know the reasons, we can’t just come in and say, “Alright, we’re gonna do agile.”

Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly.

James Royal-Lawson
Well, interesting, though, what that paradigm is. You know, when I’m reading through it, I was reflecting on the fact that in, you know, I’ve worked with public sector organisations, but also large and small Swedish organisations, international organisations, private sector. And, in many ways, I recognise lots of these aspects from these, especially big internationals that I’ve worked with that they’re they’re very close to public sector in many ways in which the, the the systems work, especially if you’re working with the enterprise UX, I think cuz I’ve done a lot of work with intranets and enterprise UX over the years. And when you’re dealing with internal systems, you can meet a lot of similar issues, I think.

Cyd Harrell
I absolutely agree. I think there’s a, there’s an institutional sector that we don’t quite know entirely what to call; some of it is government, some of it is traditional public sector, NGOs, sometimes you can even think about health care or finance or education in some of the same ways. But the thing that defines an institution for me is that it acts on people not just at scale, but over time. And that requires a different strategy for improving it, then, you know, some of these apps may last months or years. But if we’re talking about making a change in a government or a really significant institution, it’s usually decades and often centuries that we’re talking about in terms of history. And, you know that type of technological change it’s been through in the past. And so, it has a natural and appropriate resistance to sort of the ups and downs and fads of commercial technology. And yet, sometimes a failure, which is often connected to more broad failures of institutional inclusion, right? Along class or racial or citizenship status lines, but often a failure to meet people where they are in terms of the ability to interact with it. And so as we’re starting to connect with these, you know, these centuries old institutions using these latest technologies that may have been in place for months or years, like our smartphones, we’re really out of sync in terms of the timescale. And figuring out how to harmonise technologies, software that we can change, you know, if we mess something up, we can change it in a day, we can put out a new application in a matter of months. But, the values and the kind of deep design values and characteristics of an institution may have been evolving over a really long time. And if we don’t think about that, we aren’t going to be successful, the change is just going to bounce off. And if we do succeed, it may not really stick and it may not do what we want.

Per Axbom
Exactly. You have to think long-term in a whole different way.

Cyd Harrell
Yeah.

James Royal-Lawson
I think when I when I was reading again, once again, reflecting on how how my career has been, the things I’ve worked with, and some of the some of the lists you have, dotted through the book… I was thinking, “my word, these are these are really not just lists that you need to preach to civic people.” I mean, I think the first one you had was, was about axes of privilege that impact the way you experience the world of things, the phrase you used, and of course me and Per we took off, it gave us something to think about.

Per Axbom
I was really thinking that, “Oh, that’s me. That’s me. Okay.”

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I mean, you know, we’re, we’re men, we’re whites, we’re heterosexual we don’t have any disabilities. And I do actually speak Swedish. So I speak the majority language in my my area, too. So it was a full house there. But it’s something we, I mean me and Per, talk about a fair bit, where we’re quite aware about how white, male and privileged we are, which doesn’t always make it easier. I’ve been aware of it actually, sometimes it makes it even worse. But, coming back to these lists, they’re really, really useful general lists that anyone could use in their work and should.

Cyd Harrell
Thank you. I mean, you know, I won’t hide from you that a side motivation was that after spending the last eight years exclusively in civic tech, I start to think that maybe the way that you can be successful in civic tech is a way that we all ought to think about tech more generally, in terms of what we’re contributing to, and how we go about the work of making new things or better things. And my contention is, it is more important that they be better than that they’d be new.

James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. Yeah. The focus on actually improving something,

Cyd Harrell
Right, rather than just innovating it.

Per Axbom
Exactly. I’m thinking you always can come in with the tools that you will have always used. I love the examples you have of using Slack, you’re using Google Docs, and you come in and you expect to be able to use all those tools that you usually do. Yes. And again, you hit that wall and you realise, okay, I’m not allowed to. But then for me, that’s sort of what UX is about. I have to adapt because that is my role. That is what I do. Because I am the mediator. I’m supposed to be able to adapt. So unless I’m able to do that I won’t be able to work in this space.

Cyd Harrell
I think that’s right. And I think it’s often easier for designers to see themselves that way. You know, to say, “Oh, I need to meet my government, you know, career staff partners where they are”; that is something that feels very aligned to somebody who practices UX in that way. Not always true in every other discipline, and it depends on the person. But it can be tricky if you are really invested in a toolset that you’ve curated and you’ve put together and it really feels right to you, and it gives you your maximum efficiency, to say, “Okay, I can’t have any of this. And I can’t get it from my partners inside of a year and a half or something. So how do I shift my practice over to these tools that are maybe, maybe third-or-fourth-best, maybe, and see if I can identify the things that are really important, rather than the tools?” So, you know, it’s not so much Google Docs, it’s the fact that we can easily in real-time, co-edit a document. Can I use the less good Microsoft? Word? And, yeah, so you know, can I choose to use that? Can I figure out, you know, how to communicate, if I don’t have Slack? Can I create some email groups, and make that kind of flowing communication accessible? It forces you to identify what’s really important about it, which, of course, as a UX person, I also think, is fascinating. So it’s not really the emojis and Slack, although those are fun.

James Royal-Lawson
You mentioned at one point in the book about to do with service delivery, service delivery and interfaces that adoption is really important. And that the the key there is that the thing your new thing you’re doing has to be better than the current interface. Yeah. To succeed, which, yeah, absolutely. But it started to make me want to thinking about other mechanisms, like the procurement and understanding the organisation and getting the buy-in, all these kind of stuff that take time and effort and energy. Yeah, how do you, how do you measure? Because like, you know, if you’ve got to that point of having it in place, that’s when you’re going to know whether it’s succeeded. So how do you go about measuring that the future thing you’re trying to lobby for and to put into place is going to be better than the current interface or current thing?

Cyd Harrell
So I think we lean a lot on prototypes in civic tech, partly because often, folks who have worked in big institutions that tend to do big procurements don’t have a lot of experience of even seeing something, a throwaway thing, built fast. And so we made it, oh, we tested it in one session, and people just couldn’t work with this part, we changed it and we came back tomorrow with something else. That reality can sort of transform someone’s understanding of what technology can do, and how empowered they can be to work with technology, if they have access to the right tools. So it’s very much a show, you know, let’s do a small pilot, and then figuring out how to do the pilot in an inclusive way. So once again, it’s not, “we embed our privileges”, me, as a white abled woman, saying like, “Oh, we’re not gonna worry about Spanish for, you know, a while, we’ll leave that for later, in California.” That’s not really okay. But if we can do a quick, small prototype in English and Spanish and test it with people, then we have a really good look at how we’re doing it in a majority language. The Canadian Federal Government actually has such an advanced and beautiful bilingual practice. They’re one of my favourite groups out there. And, I’m going to forget the guy’s name, I might be able to find the thread later, but somebody posted on Twitter last year, that, one of their web groups had decided that they were going to have a norm that you could speak whichever language you felt most comfortable in. And if your colleagues who felt more comfortable in the other language, couldn’t quite get it, then they could ask questions in their own language. But, there is a strong enough pressure on bilingual competency in Canada that it really works. And I wish we had that in California. I don’t, um, I’m not actually a Spanish speaker, and I feel that deficit a lot.

James Royal-Lawson
So, the use of prototypes. I mean, that’s very, it’s like, it’s a very, I suppose agile way of working in that sense. But do you risk, then, that you get stuck on an iteration?

Cyd Harrell
Yes, absolutely. And you can get stuck at a low maturity stage where something isn’t, hasn’t been made robust, but has been pushed out for a big test. Budget cycle happens, administration change happens, something happens and nothing further gets funded, but it’s kind of useful to people already so it stays in place. And so, I love the use of prototypes, but I also like to think about them as a promise in a way; that, a prototype is a promise and it’s kind of okay in a high-resource private sector environment, say, okay, we’re gonna make this and then we’re just going to throw it away, people have another option, you know, everything will be okay. It’s more complicated in a lower-resource public sector environment, because you’re saying, hey, look at this better world we could all have. But, actually, if we haven’t figured out all that work to, you know, to improve the backend systems to make sure that this nice web front end actually has something driving it, to change the policies if they need to be changed, to, you know, procure a more modern hosting solution, perhaps, to help people set up a release cycle, all that stuff, if you haven’t done it, then this better rotation kind of loses its promise.

James Royal-Lawson
So, I mean, that must take some managing or training to… how would you deal with the situation that you’re, you’re someone who, being involved in civics, that you’re going to have that drive, you’ve, you’ve realised, a thing that you want to really push for, you’ve got as far as funding and prototype, and it’s now going to get put on a shelf, or you’re going to throw it away? I mean, how, how do you manage that aspect of it? It must be tough.

Cyd Harrell
Yeah, it sucks. I think everyone who’s been in this a while has some scars. And, one of the things I think is really important is community, and taking care of each other and taking care of ourselves. I think I say somewhere in the book that you will lose, and not just little battles, but you will have significant losses and things that don’t work out. And I’ve got a couple of projects I could talk about, that would still raise my heart rate. But, the way to turn those to good, I think, is to talk about them and write about them, and figure out what happened, retrospective work that then gets shared with the larger community and lets us all build a little further. In some ways, that was a big motive for the book… was to, well, let me back up. I went to an informal conference a couple of years ago called, “The Union of Concerned Government Technologists”. It was an American conference, it was a kind of secret, invitational thing. And there was a session that I attended called, “Let’s Make New Mistakes”.

And I was really heavily…

… struck by that session, the idea that we keep bringing new people into the field, we keep having new people start with a different government and running up against the same problems. And what can we do as a field to consolidate the learnings from all those stories and figure out a few things so that we can get on to making the next set of mistakes that are hopefully a little more advanced? And a little less, you know, brutally harmful?

Per Axbom
Well, I can attest to that, because I’ve killed a lot of prototypes over the past years. Yeah. And I think… but I continue to stay on, I think, because it’s important to me to keep telling the stories of those, yes, killed prototypes, because that helps people understand, going forward. So, what things have we learned and what can we do differently? But, that also dovetails with the things you wrote about, about risk, because that’s also something we hear a lot in the tech space, that it’s good to take risks, it’s good to fail even, because that means you’re learning something. Whereas in the civic space, then it’s problematic because it’s taxpayer money.

Cyd Harrell
The starting point, is, sometimes it’s really important things about people’s lives.

Per Axbom
Yes, it’s life-critical. It’s… it’s especially in health care. But I mean, most of most civic tech is life-critical in some way.

James Royal-Lawson
It could be even democracy.

Cyd Harrell
Democracy. Yes.

Yes.

Yes. So failure has a different cast. And you know, little tests failing? Prototype failing? Not that big a deal. But, something significant failing, can cause serious harm. And, on a smaller scale can wreck careers. That doesn’t usually happen to Silicon Valley technologists, right? You have a big failure, you write a good blog post about it, everybody loves you, you get hired again. That doesn’t happen with Agency heads and CIOs necessarily in the same way. So, there is a career risk that is very different from private sector tech. When I was Chief of Staff of 18F, I actually had to buy professional liability insurance, in case the agency was investigated, or sued, because I could be personally named.

James Royal-Lawson
You were exposed to a personal risk. Yes. Through that employment.

Cyd Harrell
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
I’m just always learning new things about America in interviews.

Cyd Harrell
[laughs] You know.

So many of our founding stories actually have to do with litigation. For all the Americans out there, that Stamp Act that we talked about is one of the triggers for the revolution. It was about seals stamped on lawsuits, because the colonists were suing the heck out of each other. Oh, wow. And that was one of the taxations from King George, that they really objected to, was, paying extra for lawsuits. But, yes. So, there’s that, you know, there’s that kind of personal risk, and then there’s risk of doing real harm. We’ve seen with the pandemic and our crummy systems for unemployment support. I worked with Dana, actually, in June, on a study that was intended to just hear the stories of Americans who were trying to access benefits during the pandemic. And they were horrible, difficult, you know, stories that people were good enough to share with us, of dealing not just with interfaces, but with systems that had not been necessarily designed with people in mind and where they were, where there were those intentions on the part of the officials who designed them, maybe hadn’t been implemented in such a way to actually carry out their good intent. And, behind that, in some states, is a policy of not wanting people to access benefits. And that’s actually one of the things I talked about in the book, is that you can’t fix a policy problem with technology.

James Royal-Lawson
So, what you’re seeing then, basically, is like there are dark patterns, being deployed in public service sector services, digital services, you’re effectively in a position that, because it’s policy, your arms, your hands are tied, you’ve got to implement effectively, or you can’t do anything about them.

Cyd Harrell
Right. The example I talk about in the book is Marijuana Policy, right? It’s a patchwork of legality. Here, it’s by state, you have some states where it’s completely illegal, you have many states where it’s legal for medical purposes, and the requirements for getting a card vary. And then, you have some states where it’s legal for all purposes. And then in the states, where it’s legal for all purposes, you have questions about whether we expunge old convictions…

…people who were put on trial and convicted under old marijuana laws.

But, it doesn’t make any sense to proceed with a, you know, a great system for requesting to have your record cleared if the policy in your area isn’t to clear records. It’s sort of like, “that’s an interesting thought experiment.” But, you won’t be able to get anywhere unless the State Attorney or District Attorney in your area has a policy that they wish to remove those criminal records from people’s past in these cases.

Per Axbom
So, as I’m playing back our conversation in my head now, and realising that we’re making it sound as if it’s a huge struggle, it’s a real pain to get into civic tech, there are so many things to think about. So, I want to give you, I wanted to give you a minute to tell us why you should still get into it. Why is it so rewarding?

Cyd Harrell
Because you do actually get to work on things and improve things that are life critical. So, you know, making it easier for people to get public benefits, making it easier for people to communicate with our elected representatives, making it easier for communities to work together after a disaster, making it easier for people to do participatory planning. There’s a really cool civic tech project that actually started at a hackathon many years ago. It’s called streetmix.net. And I think you can access it anywhere, it’s totally free. And it’s a drag and drop street design tool. And what people can do with it, is design a street they like and bring it to a public meeting, they could print it out. And, it sort of puts them on a footing with professionals who have all these tools to draw, to say, “Well, this is this is how I would like the streets of my community to be designed.” So, that’s without ever having a paid staff member, has I believe had something like 100,000 plans, made and printed on the system and really started to change some of the power dynamics and community meetings around that. That’s really cool. I geek out about changes like that. And, even though it’s not always easy, you know, I’m working now with the California Courts, working on digital services for people who go to court without a lawyer. It’s tough. But on the other hand, if you sit in a few courtrooms and see the kinds of reasons that people are in court and what they’re facing and and how important that judicial branch of government is to democracy, it’s very, very motivating to work on. You do need the posse that we have. For sure, you need your friends.

Per Axbom
Yes.

James Royal-Lawson
Reflecting what you’re saying. So that, all this gives you the chance to work with, I guess, the building blocks of a good society.

Cyd Harrell
Yes, yes. You put it better than I did. I like that.

James Royal-Lawson
Sorry. I’m the host of this, I’m not meant to do that. Sorry. [laughs}

Cyd Harrell
Oh no. We’re just having a conversation. [laughs]

Per Axbom
That was a summary.

James Royal-Lawson
Summary. Yeah.

Because, in Sweden, like, we elect governments, governments can be crap. governments can be good. You know, we’ve got policies we hate or don’t like and stuff, we’ve got, maybe, neighbours we don’t get on with at times and stuff. But, at the end of the day, we all want to live as part of a society. Yes, my community. That makes us feel happy and safe.

Cyd Harrell
Yes, I hope so. That’s not a given in the US in October 2020. But, I hope there are enough of us that do that it starts to be a given again, kind of, in time.

James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, I hope so too.

Per Axbom
Yeah. So everyone, read the book, get inspired and get into civic tech, because you won’t regret it. Really?

Cyd Harrell
Yes, please do. We need more of us. We need lots more of us. And it’s a friendly field. And so much fun.

Per Axbom
Thanks for being with us, Cyd.

Cyd Harrell
My pleasure.

Per Axbom
So for me, I actually see how Cyd’s book is useful, both from a therapeutic perspective in that if you do work in civic tech, you recognise so much and you feel you’re not alone. And, and, you remember that, yes, it sometimes is a struggle, but there are reasons for this, and there’s also a reason why you’re doing it. And, there’s so many things that she gives you to think about to actually reflect on, why you’re doing it and why it’s important and what you should focus on as well. That’s really fantastic. And of course, the other aspect is, if you haven’t worked in civic tech before, having all this knowledge wealth that Cyd is sharin, is so useful. I mean, you’ll shave years of learning off, get it going into civic tech, just by reading the book, I think.

James Royal-Lawson
Or, perhaps feel less, alone, feel less uncomfortable. You feel like someone’s supporting you, even if they’re not directly supporting you, at the moment, perhaps. When I yeah… it’s a really good read and what I do like as well, I mentioned this briefly in the interview, is that, this is applicable to more than just civic tech. I’m not completely sure how much Cyd realises that in what she’s written, but the, the, there’s aspects of it, and especially I think some of the lists, she’s got dotted through the book, giving like a summary of things you can do in various situations, or like a, you know, checklist. These are, okay, maybe sometimes, with just a little bit of a rewrite or a tweak here and there. But, they’re completely applicable to almost every type of context and work I’ve been involved with, possibly, you know, Listeners to. So with the one we said in the show was about the privilege of checking your axes of privilege and checking how privileged you are. And that list was, “Are you cisgender? Male? Are you white? Heterosexual? Do you have any disabilities? Do you speak the majority language in your region? Great list to start off with. But there are other ones too, the one you can follow on from that, and checking, basically, if you have got substantial privilege, what can you do in order to support underrepresented or people who are not as privileged as you, in the work you’re doing? And partners, and so on. And that’s a really good list.

Per Axbom
And a further privilege that most of us have just just by knowing tech, is that we know about tools, we know how the web works, probably a lot more than the people around us, the stakeholders around us, which means that we can also spend time helping people learn more. So she actually gives some tips at the end of the book that I think are just wonderful around this; she calls them, “techniques of professional inclusion”, and just holding office hours for people who need to make design decisions, bringing in speakers for Lunch-and-Learns. I mean, I know we do these things within consultancies, and usually at agencies, you’d have Lunch-and-Learns. But, of course, it’s hugely useful in these contexts as well. And just starting clubs for learning new techniques like web writing, and CSS, and, even sending a weekly – this is something I’ve done actually – sending a weekly email newsletter to a broad set of project stakeholders, just helping them see what’s happening within the space that they are actually working, within the tech space.

James Royal-Lawson
We just talked about kind of like clubs and things about various things. We’ve got the example of Spotify and their guilds, which – oh yeah – I know quite a few companies have picked up on over the years, which are effectively internal clubs to help spread knowledge to highlight various issues and to maybe take action on certain things that people find passion in. That people are passionate about, which is another one of Cyd’s lists, is the whole thing that when you found an area that excites you, and being a member of these guilds, is possibly a sign that you are excited about something, even if it’s not a civic project, tech project you’re getting involved with. But, that little list of questions was an excellent way of reflecting on what you are passionate about and want to work with or are working with, well, where would I act in order to relieve the most pain for users? Where would I act in order to relieve pain and free up capacity for maintainers? Or the stewards of projects? Where would I act to make my changes last? Where can I get access and support in order to act? I mean, if you can, if you just, you know, just tweak them a little bit, you can see their usefulness in any kind of organisation.

Per Axbom
Oh, definitely.

And it’s funny, she didn’t mention it on the show. But, she actually refers to it several times with the book, she calls this space, “a teenager”, in the sense that, it’s not that old. And I think that’s important to understand the space as well and be sort of reflective on, “this is why some things may feel like a struggle”, because, of course, we’re all learning together. And, this book is allowing us to learn a lot faster about what’s been going on for the last 15 years.

James Royal-Lawson
Yep. And that aspect of being a teenager is something that Lisa Welchman used in her book, well, Digital Governance. So, it’s a very similar thing that she’s been picked up on, and Cyd’s picking up on in that is a very, very young branch. And, a lot of the things that we suffer from are a consequence of as, you know, being in those teenage years, I guess.

Per Axbom
Right, we could, I mean, we could do a full episode just on some of the lists, actually, and some wonderful stuff to reflect on here. But, there are, if you want to go further now, I mean, check out the show notes, the transcript of course, as well. It will be found on uxpodcast.com and click, follow, subscribe or add if you aren’t already doing so and join us again for our next episode. Remember to keep moving.

James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.

[Music]

James Royal-Lawson
What’s the biggest drawback to voting by mail?

Per Axbom
I don’t know James, what is the biggest drawback to voting by mail?

James Royal-Lawson
Postage from Russia costs a fortune.

[laughter]