Diaries from Kampala: Unglorified Tech Talk

Let’s play a game. I’ll give you two definitions of the same word, and you fill in the blank: “A______ is an item which entitles the holder to a fixed dividend, whose payment takes priority over that of ordinary dividends”. Now, here’s the second definition: “A ______ is a piece of a company which you can buy to get partial ownership of that company". If you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t get through the first definition before losing patience trying to piece together any meaning (and by the way, the answer is “stock” or “share”, more or less interchangeable). This example demonstrates the difference in communication about technology between my experiences at home and at Women in Technology Uganda (WiTU for short). Spending the past 4 years in an atmosphere of engineers in Boston, I have grown to expect every idea to be communicated in the way that Apple maps suggests a 45-minute route for a 10-mile drive to avoid tolls, highways, and every other convenient path: inefficiently and frankly too complicated for me to bother paying attention. Even worse, I have developed the assumption that if I do not communicate my ideas in this way, I will sound less intelligent than my counterparts because I don’t choose the most “technical” vocabulary. While this is obviously a generalization, generalizations build when that is the common experience, and for me it had been. Coming to Kampala and collaborating with the members of WiTU, I was astounded by how simple things can be when the honest objective is to educate and learn, not to sound smart or smear over an idea that no one actually understands (which I’m guilty of doing too, of course).

The first example of this arose on one of the feedback calls with the WiTU staff for the Digital Job Centre (a job board website for young Ugandan women developed by my team). Before each meeting and throughout the duration of the project, I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to think of what “correct” technical terms I needed to use before asking questions or making comments (Is this considered back or front end? How do I refer to this piece of text with background color, an element? Does the work I’m doing constitute as web development? All I’ve done is drag-drop-click! until things look good… If I want to ask about the appearance of the website on a mobile device, that has to do with the word “responsive” or something like that, right??). Until I had answers to all of my questions, I would never ask them. Productive, I know. If you can’t relate, congratulations – you’ve dodged the cursed habit of overthinking. Yet, when the call began, not once did I hear those terms even though we discussed each and every one of them. For the first time, I had been a part of a truly unglorified tech talk.

Although this is only a simple example, many more similar moments arose throughout the progress of the project. The inclusive language chosen by not only WiTU but the Team4Tech and other Cadence partners on site demonstrated their selfless allegiance to spread  education in an accessible way. By sharing knowledge in simple terms,  communication and collaboration was scaffolded to be adaptable to everyone with different backgrounds, baseline knowledge, and experience. I finally felt like my only objective when speaking with others was to be understood – in this team of men and women devoted to education in earnest, it was no longer of my conscience how the words I chose would change the way that my intelligence was perceived.  

Cadence Design Systems Team4Tech Women In Technology Uganda