I want to share two really nice things that just happened. I'm part of a small 10-person group working on a #wkdev tool.

Folks who created the initial "user profile" for the tool decided to imagine a very marginalized jobseeker.

1/n

Most of us working on this tool are *not* very marginalized, at least by the traditional categories of race, economic class, language, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.

But one thing that happened when we created this imaginary jobseeker is that we immediately started surfacing assumptions that were built into the tool. 3/n

That TINY shift -- having a "use case" that was a marginalized jobseeker rather than a "mainstream" one -- immediately revealed ways that the tool could potentially fail that person. 4/n

But of course -- as advocates for #OwnVoices have many millions of times reminded us all -- when you fix a system for marginalized people, everybody else benefits too. 5/n

Obviously it's still not ideal those of us working on this tool don't fully represent all of the directly affected communities.

But I'm genuinely impressed at how much our own conversation shifted JUST from re-centering that one assumption about who the tool was "for." 6/n

Imagining how a marginalized jobseeker would use the tool pushed us to think about internet access, childcare, disability accessibility, language skills...so many factors that need to be built into the tool from the beginning. 7/n

If this seems simple and obvious and "Well, duh" to you -- it is. But it's also something I've been in many other rooms full of privileged people and NOT seen.

So many times I've been shot down or asked, "Well, how often would that come up, really?" about a common barrier. 8/n

So if you too are in privileged spaces, I'm encouraging you to do all that you can to get other voices at the table -- AND also to take the baby interim steps of shifting the "who" as we did in our user example. You might surprise yourself in how it shifts your thinking. 9/n

And the other nice thing? Folks had decided that the imaginary user would use a "they" pronoun.

So we (AFAIK no one in the group uses a they pronoun themselves) are getting practice using it fluidly and comfortably, w/out othering trans allies or putting them on the spot. /fin