Elena Blogs for a Change

There are many ways in which I can relate to Heejae Lim. I, too, am the daughter of immigrants as were many of my classmates in the public schools I attended through eighth grade. Like Heejae, I benefited from having parents who spoke English and could advocate on my behalf (and on behalf of my classmates) with teachers and administrators. But Heejae took that experience and used it to create TalkingPoints, a multilingual platform that helps teachers communicate with immigrant parents in multiple languages. She understood that parent engagement was critical to education, even if she had no way of predicting just how important it would be during a pandemic that caused schools to shut down in-person learning. Below is my interview with Heejae, who earned recognition as one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30” leaders and entrepreneurs in 2016. What motivated you to start TalkingPoints? I didn’t know how to speak English when I first started school in the UK, but my mother did, and she was a wonderfu...

Cyd Harrell is a Yale-educated researcher, analyst, and leader focused on helping governments design technology for their staff and constituents that actually works. She is also the author of the definitive book on the subject, A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide . As a Humanities person myself, I was eager to learn how this published poet, Yale linguistics grad, and non-coder ended up devoting her career to helping design technology that makes governments more responsive. On your website you describe yourself as a user researcher and as a civic technologist. How would you define those terms? A user researcher is someone who works to improve technology (or sometimes services) by observing real people trying to use it and understanding their needs. That one's easy. Part of why I wrote the book was to help define civic technologist - it's someone who works in tech in the public sector, but more specifically it's someone who participates with a particular goal of bringing th...