And that’s a wrap! NTC is over. I had a really great time. As is always the case, I met some great people, saw a staggering number of old NTC friends, and of course, did some good deep thinking at the sessions and meetups.
These are informal and rough, taken during the sessions. My goal is to capture the spirit of the presentation and the best quotes and bits of wisdom. If you see something and you want me to share more, leave a comment!
Important Typo Correction from Yesterday
In Day 2’s notes, it now correctly says the following:
The purpose of the session was to get the NTEN BIPOC community “more free”. And importantly, that community is not monolithic.
I’m extremely grateful to the person who flagged to me that I had accidentally published “that community is monolithic” which is the total opposite and a dangerous stereotype. I did not proofread my notes closely enough, and made a mistake which I wanted to explicitly call out for anyone who read it. It’s corrected, and I am observing that I need to proofread posts more carefully when they’re on sensitive subjects.
Keynote: Calm Tech
Amber Case, Calm Tech Institute
“It’s important to not autocomplete [what people need from tech].” We must listen to needs and build technology that can work alongside us.
Amber is an anthropologist and suggests that instead of studying foreign cultures like the white, colonialist 20th century anthropologists, we turn the lens on all the strange things we ourselves do with technology:
- We look at our tech in the morning before our partners.
- We “feed” our phones before we feed ourselves.
- We judge physical hoarders but not tech hoarders (files, data).
- Phones manage run our lives more than we do at times.
Amber talked about “interruptive technologies” and asked Can we make tools invisible where they quietly help us but don’t constantly invade our consciousness? These technologies “focus on task, not the tool. More glasses and pedals. Less disembodied voices.”
Things that rely on 3rd-party servers can brick devices—make them turn into an inoperable dumb brick, rather than their operate with intended purpose—when the internet goes down or the company closes. (See the automated pet feeder company that closed in 2020.) Compare that to elevators that are “temporarily stairs” when broken.
How do we change the incentives of people who build tech? One of the key ways is standards and seals of approval. These are slow to get started and build up, but then can be very stable and effective once in place and sought after by consumers.
Language justice with multilingual websites
Clayton Dewey from DevCollaborative and Suphain Htaung, Nghia Tran, and Joanne Lau from Diversity in Health Training Institute
Collaborative Notes for Language Justice
The world is multilingual, yet most of the web is not.
The internet is about 54% English, which is a drastic over-representation of the world where 74% of the world’s population is a non-native English speaker.
“Language justice” is the right to communicate in the language we feel most comfortable. It’s also a way to sustain multilingual spaces to make everyone able to participate and feel included. Restricting access through exclusive language use restricts access to people’s full potential.
Steps toward language justice
- Collect data on what languages people speak. Know your audience. Collect data as you interact with folks through any form of outreach.
- Use plain language. Everyone benefits. Plainer language is much easier to translate.
- Develop terminology and glossaries. So many orgs cannot avoid some technical language. Developing a glossary with definitions and standard translations can help translators can be consistent. These glossaries can even be built into websites.
- Include multimedia formats. We are word-dominant society and so is the internet. Using pictures, videos, symbols, audio, etc. helps with access for folks who speak multiple languages, ages, etc.
- Work with trained translators
When working with translators: Costs can be different per language! Be careful when budgeting. The English word “telephone” is two words in Chinese. Maybe ask for people translating per page or per section. Glossaries can also help manage costs over time.
The spectrum of making multilingual websites
It can feel overwhelming. Work one step at a time.
- One page of translated content. This can be a good approach when having limited language capacity on staff. Focus on steering visitors to the basics and a place to talk to someone in their language. Easier to maintain and ensure accuracy. But it doesn’t scale, it’s harder for search engines to find, etc.
- Automated translations (e.g. Google Translate). This can brings lots of risks and lack of trust for technical, legal, health information, etc. This can be a better option for organizations that work in less high-stakes fields. The quality of translation will vary quite a bit by language. This can be hard to track usage of, which can actually be very important to know.
- Human translated content. Give you full control, cultural-relevance, etc. But obviously takes more time to maintain.
- Machine and human translated content. Full control over translations and can speed up the initial translation, but does require maintenance. In this method, you use automated translation when first publishing content (or updating), but the translation is saved and can be edited.
Google Translate is most accurate when the text is well structured, formal, simple, and the subject matter has a lot of training data available. It’s improved quite a bit since 2016 when it switched to a neural machine translation and AI is bringing some improvements to this.
Drupal has multilingual features built in. Two popular WordPress plugins are Weglot and WPML. (I also like to use Polylang.) Squarespace 7.1+ includes a Weglot plugin. Joomla has multilingual support.
Managing Translations
Be careful when working with multilingual staff. They have limited time and capacity. You may also be able to find volunteers to help, but please compensate people. You can consider offering a feedback form for each translation.
Drupal module called the “onomasticon” can show glossary tooltips over specific words
(PSA: And remember, don’t use flags to represent languages!!!)
Language Justice Q&As
What does it mean to put multilingual content on a website when you don’t have programmatic staff who don’t speak a language?
Consider partnering with other organizations that do have the competency who might be motivated to help. You could also consider hiring a virtual assistant to help with intake and translation. You can find some translators with Fiverr, but be sure to learn more about their qualifications and certifications if that’s important to you.
The cost of manual translation can be a big barrier for organizations. What do we do?
Maybe start with a single page. Dig into why you need to translate. Who is in your community who will be served by translation?
What about Arabic and other Right-to-Left languages?
Modern CSS is making it more and more possible to build websites that quickly adapt to right-to-left layout modes. (Bottom-to-top languages too!)
Birds of a Feather: White Colleagues talking about “Things we want to tell our white colleagues”
This was a lunch table conversation so I didn’t take many notes, and, following yesterday’s session, it’s important to “take the lessons, and not the stories.”
Here’s what came up:
- Us white folks have a responsibility to act. “Anti-racism is an action.” Remember?
- There is a major hump all-white organizations have to get over to increase their racial diversity. How do you do that without tokenizing the first few employees of color? How do you make the organization a safe (enough) space for those employees?
- What can we, the white folks at NTC, be doing to make our conference and community more welcoming? We must share in the workload and emotional labor of that work. We have the privilege to ignore racism, and we must not take the easy path.
I closed our lunch by asking everyone to commit to a specific action. My action is to connect with the attendees at lunch and start a conversation with NTEN about more visible actions by white folks working to make NTC an anti-racist conference.
Finally, I shared this organization, recommended to me by my amazing partner, Emily. (I am hosting this PDF right now because the original source is causing a security error when attempting to download. I’d much rather link to the original.)
The article opens with a quote that I challenged everyone to think about:
In [spaces] committed to racial equity, [people] who resist anti-racist measures should feel uneasy, isolated on the outskirts of their [organization’s] institutional cultures. I mean this literally.
Paul Gorski, “Avoiding Racial Equity Detours”
Chew on that.
Fundamentals of user research for successful tech and program design
Eve Bills Lacivita
Collaborative notes for Fundamentals of user research
User Experience research is all about learning what end users need in order to make good decisions about products, services, and software. This means learning what users actually need, not what we think they need.
If you don’t know what people actually experience, you can’t make it better for them.
User research can be quantitative or qualitative to answer the “what” and “why”, respectively. Quantitative is “broad and shallow” while qualitative is “narrow and deep”.
Not sure about user research? Consider about the wasted time and effort you could spend building the wrong thing.
Conducting observational user research
- Observe
- “What would you do if…”
- “What did you do when…”
- “Show me what you do…”
- Ask
- Get under the surface
- “The 5 Whys” – Common technique to ask why at least 5 different times (in different ways) to get to the “real answer”
- Avoid yes/no questions. They stop the conversation and can also be very leading [to “yes”]. “Tell me more about that.” “What’s your first impression?”
This is about watching what people actually do, not what they say they would do (the hypothetical). We almost always imagine idealized versions of ourselves who do a perfect thing. “If I get a 5% raise, I’ll save it all for retirement.”
Compensate the people who do your testing. Even if it’s just a coffee card.
When recruiting testers, be clear about what they will be doing, get their full consent, be clear about how the data will be used, and be extra sure that there is no confusion about testing being tied to receiving services. “Start small and have a conversation!” Just 5 people can tell you a ton.
NTC is for mission-aligned nonprofit staff and consultants
All of my NTCs have honestly been my “favorite” for one reason or another, but this one really did feel like the “best yet” on many fronts. The NTEN community is not perfect but it is trying hard and always open to feedback. The friends I have made through NTC are amazing people doing really interesting working. This is a community where you meet people in nonprofit leadership, communication, fundraising, and, of course, technology who mostly tend to “get it”, in the way they are thinking about mission and values as they do their work. I’m looking forward to 25NTC in Baltimore!
Bonus: Weekend in Portland
My partner and kids came down Friday afternoon and we had a great time. Obviously, a significant portion of our trip was devoted to eating our way around Portland. Tamale Boy (Dekum), Broder Söder, Kulfi, Zaap, and Smaaken were all highlights.
As my partner looked around the incredible permanent food truck pod we went to for lunch on Sunday, “What part of this does Seattle not want?” The ability to find delicious food from small independent places anywhere in town is really fabulous in Portland.
We spent an absolutely lovely morning down by the river surrounded by the blooming cherry trees and went to possibly the coolest play structure I’ve ever seen in Hillsboro (worth the drive!). And we also go to our 4th of the six northwest trolls! Our goal is to see them all by June and we’re well on track.
