Last week was the NZ Tech Rally conference. It was so good!
Everything about the event was high quality. Also, I gave a talk about design systems and accessibility.
A few top takeaways for me:
- Don’t mistake speed for alignment
- Design for disagreement in meetings and workshops
- Don’t mistake intelligent discussion for moving forward (or making a decision)
- Clarity is important (but that doesn’t always mean certainty)
- Culture is the accepted, repeated, behaviour
Below are my sketchnotes from some of the talks I attended.
Morning keynotes
Cognitive diversity in the age of AI: building teams that out-innovate with a Pasifika lens - Norie Ape
- How do we make the data that AI uses truly diverse?
- Innovation is about making space for different ways
- Cultural intellligence
- Thinking together
- styles
- culture
- perspective
- Thinking together
- AI risk: accelerating bias
- Don’t mistake speed for alignment
- Talanoa
- respect, care, integrity
- understanding, not winning
- Design for disagreement in workshops and meetings
Building with AI without losing our values - Lauren Peate
- Systems around us make us complicit in bad things
- (Only) use AI when it’s a good solution
- e.g. measuring feedback quality - tone, specificity
- Diversity improves AI accuracy
- LLMs need evals → evals need humans → quality needs diverse humans
- Use holistic metrics
- LLMs are non-deterministic, use more deterministic tools to check the output
- Sometimes money and values will be in conflict
- Build to easily swap LLMs
Community, Culture & Wellbeing track talks
The Dungeon Master’s guide to feedback - Tamara Buckland
- Even with best intentions, feedback comes out judgey
- So we tend to avoid it!
- Centre the hero
- Narration, not judgement
- narration opens and adds context
- judgement closes
- Point forward
- So we tend to avoid it!
Your code is fine. Your leadership… - Rachael Fitzjohn
- Leader’s responsibility
- Clear confusion
- Reduce uncertainty
- Make hard decisions
- Without enough information
- Clear confusion
- Intelligent discussion ≠ Moving Forward (or making a decision)
- Clarity is underrated
- Clarity is not necessarily certainty
- We avoid discomfort, difficult decisions
- Ambiguity creates anxiety
- Indirectness, avoidance, destroys trust
- Culture is accepted, repeated, behaviour
Locknote
The accessibility features of today are the breakthroughs of tomorrow - Maia Miller
- When we ask “is is worth it?” late, it makes it easier to say no
- time, money, customers
- it’s okay to ask
- time, money, customers
- Much tech that was made to meet the needs of disabled people become the preferred version
- An inaccessible solution is an incomplete solution
- An accessible solution is a better solution
- More flexible and adaptable, to our lives