At a glance
To ensure the Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Expansive (TNBGE) community has an ongoing voice in UW-IT decision-making, we… Read full summary
- Funding received
- 2024-2025
- Small
- Awarded
- $1,204
- Funding partners
-
- Services and Activities Fee (SAF)
- UW Resilience Lab (UWRL)
To ensure the Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Expansive (TNBGE) community has an ongoing voice in UW-IT decision-making, we propose creating the TNBGE Technology Advisory Committee (TAC). This committee will meet quarterly to address UW-IT initiatives, raise community concerns, and explore new ways for constructive engagement between UW-IT and the TNBGE community.
The committee will include 8 members: 6 compensated representatives from the UW community (faculty, staff, and students from all three campuses) alongside two non-compensated members whose participation aligns with their regular duties. Representatives will be compensated at $20/hour for 2 hours per quarter, spanning five academic quarters (Spring 2024–Summer 2025).
Seed Grant funding will support this initial phase, allowing the committee to demonstrate its value and establish a track record for securing future funding. This initiative ensures equitable engagement while fostering meaningful collaboration between UW-IT and the TNBGE community.
In the Summer of 2023, UW-IT was on the brink of releasing a solution to centralized pronoun support at the UW. This had been a project that had gone on for years. Announcements to campus were made and UW-IT was starting their victory lap. On the day before the release was going to happen, UW-IT received the following in an email from Dr. Lauren Lichty, Associate Professor for the School of IAS, Bothell: “I am confident in the good intentions of the group working to integrate pronouns in UW systems... However, this approach to pushing pronouns across systems where the most vulnerable people only have the option of including pronouns universally or removing them completely does not serve marginalized genders, particularly our most vulnerable community members, students. The... pronoun tool in identity.uw [is] not trauma-informed and will only be universally accessible to cis people. In this way, it is not a tool for promoting gender equity.”
To UW-IT’s credit, they put the brakes on the release and asked me, the Program Manager for Academic Workflows, to get the project back on track. The first thing I noticed was that the assumptions about the users, their goals, and the major risks of the project were not aligned with the audiences, goals and risks that Dr. Lichty brought up.
I contacted Dr. Lichty to talk about their concerns and understand how we can get the right voices together to inform the work. We ended up pulling together a group with tri-campus student/staff/faculty representation who could speak to the UW Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Expansive experience.
This group did amazing work to inform UW-IT’s work and direction to help ensure a successful implementation that protected the autonomy, safety, and well being of all. UW-IT confidently and successfully released centralized pronoun support to the UW for Fall 2023.
In looking across UW-IT’s services, there are many decisions being made that affect the feelings of safety, support, identity, and well-being of individuals across campus. We have relationships with many campus units that serve as voices to champion traditionally marginalized or underrepresented voices on campus (OMAD, DRS, Accessible Technology, Q Center, ...). However, there really isn’t any representation for one of the most at-risk and vulnerable populations that UW-IT supports, the TNBGE community.
I met with Dr. Lichty, Brennan Ham of the Q Center, and other TNBGE community members that supported UW-IT’s pronoun effort to discuss how we might ensure that the TNBGE community has an ongoing voice in UW-IT decision-making that might affect and concern this community.
We came up with the idea to create a UW Trans, Non-Binary, and Gender Expansive Technology Advisory Committee (TNBGE TAC) that would meet quarterly to discuss and work on items that UW-IT brings to the committee, as well as providing a forum in which this community can raise their questions and concerns to UW-IT representatives. Another role of this committee would be to look for new and better ways for UW-IT to constructively engage with the TNBGE community.
In addition to myself and Brennon Ham, who would not be eligible for this compensation since this work is clearly in-scope of our regular duties, we would like to invite 6 additional community representatives from the three UW campuses that would include faculty, staff, and students.
With any committee, it is important that we aren’t exploiting the people who want to engage in the work but whose role on the committee is above and beyond the scope of their regular faculty/staff duties. With this in mind, we are asking for the Seed Grant to fund compensation for these 6 committee members. We would like to provide them with $20/hr with the basic expectation of them spending 2hrs/academic quarter on TNBGE TAC work (one hour meeting and one hour of between-meeting work). This work would last for 5 academic quarters, Spring 2024 - Summer 2025.
This funding would allow us to set up the committee, validate that this committee can provide real value to the TNBGE community and UW-IT services, and –if successful– provide documented history of success that we can use to secure dedicated funding for subsequent years.
Jason Civjan
Project lead
- jcivjan@uw.edu
- Affiliation
- Staff
- Affiliated groups
- UWIT
Request amount and budget
n/a
Measure the impacts
At the end of the pilot, we will measure the impact and success of this project in two specific ways:
- Survey participating TNBGE TAC members about their feelings of engagement, importance, and effectiveness of this committee.
- Collect a list of specific engagements and impact the committee has with UW-IT services and UW-IT decision making.
If we determine this effort successful, we will compile this information in a report narrating the impact of this committee. This report will be circulated to UW-IT leadership and any other potential funding sources for continuation of the committee.