LCL2021 Career Panel: Civic Tech
Channel: Linguistics Career Launch
Date: 2023-06-09

Cyd Harrell introduces us to a newish field called Civic Tech that works at all levels of government (federal, state, county, city, and agencies at each level). She shares many routes into civic tech, and draws attention to skills that sociolinguists are likely to have, such as listening to people, translating vocabularies and jargon from one specialty to another, asking questions to clarify the nature of a problem and what constitutes an answer — skills that will be useful in many UX roles, some of which are in government orgs, or agencies who work with them. She goes deeper on the notion of “accuracy” to show how lawyers and their colleagues have one expectation of each other, and how she works to expand their views to include citizens, residents and other non-specialists for whom a common sense notion of “accuracy” is generally sufficient.

Presenter: Cyd Harrell

Moderator: Nancy Frishberg

Resources: A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide, by Cyd Harrell (https://cydharrell.com/book/)
Jess McMullin, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessmcmullin

This event was recorded on July 22, 2021, as part of the Linguistics Career Launch https://www.linguisticscareerlaunch.com/

Video editing by Gregory Gray 

Closed captioning by Megan Rouch

Music by Setuniman Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License https://freesound.org/people/Setuniman/sounds/274787/

©Linguistics Career Launch 2021